עלילת הדם ההלניסטית - תוכנה, מקורותיה וגלגוליה

The Hellenistic 'blood' libel is known to us from an extract in Josephus' Contra Apionem (II, 89-96), quoted from Apion. The libel is also summarized in the Suda entry on Damocritus, an unknown Hellenistic author who wrote a book about the Jews. The paper tries to reconstruct the contents of the libel, trace its origin and follow its development. It becomes apparent that the original versions of the libel were much more vicious than the extant version recorded by Josephus, and even more vicious than the medieval blood libel. A comparison with the parallel versions of Damocritus, philological analysis of both texts, and references to Jewish sacrificial practices in early Hellenistic literature, suggest that one version of the libel related how the Jews annually kidnapped a foreigner and sacrificed him at the appointed time: he would be burned alive on the altar in the Jerusalem Temple, and the assembly would swear an oath of hatred towards all nations. Another version changed the scene to a grove where the kidnapped foreigner would be executed by being chopped up into little bits, and the crowd would 'taste' of his flesh. The two versions were conflated by a Seleucid court historian, who added some Greek features (e.g. the fattening of the victim and adding the Greeks as the object of the oath of hatred) and omitted the vivid description of the burning alive of the victim, simply because the victim in his account died according to the first version. The combined version was integrated into the story of Antiochus IV Epiphanes and his traumatic visit to the Temple, where he was said to have encountered the victim, and consequently to have decided to persecute the Jews and their religion. An analysis of ancient ethnographical material from Europe and the East on human sacrifice and cannibalistic feasts indicates that the two versions were both invented by the Egyptians, and were inspired by the Typhon-Seth legends. Their appearance has to be explained against the special circumstances prevailing in Persian Egypt which gave rise to extreme animosity between Egyptians and Jews living there.