The Blood Libel
The Trial of the Jews in Damascus; Metamorphosis of the Vampire in Germany
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Beschreibung
The Blood Libel explores the archival traces of the 1840 Damascus affair, an anti-Semitic accusation of ritual murder. We follow in detail how the death of a Catholic missionary monk in a foreign country is transformed into a racist myth that depends on the figure of the “savage” – more precisely, on the paranoid projection of the Jew as a masked inner enemy, who, as Jesi writes, “has hypocritically and externally civilized himself – and who has thus been able to continue to satisfy his blood-thirsty instincts within the very fabric of ‘civilized’ societies.” This study is contrasted by a profound analysis of modernity’s fears articulated in the figure of the vampire in its circuits through Germany’s nineteenth century.
Written amidst the criminalization campaigns by the Italian state against anarchists and other “inner enemies,” The Blood Libel deploys Jesi’s conception of the “mythological machine” to anatomize the multiple entanglements of myth with nationalist, fascist, and right-wing culture. A heterodox and uniquely incisive form of theory production, Jesi’s work offers us a powerful insight into some of the deeper determinants of Western political rationality and its stigmatizing, inferiorizing, and racializing dynamics.
Introduced and translated by Alberto Toscano.
Autor*in
Furio Jesi
Furio Jesi (1941–80) war Ägyptologe, Religionshistoriker, Literaturkritiker und wegweisender Denker zur Rolle des Mythos in Literatur, Politik und Kultur. Er ist Autor von "Germania Segreta. Miti nella cultura tedesca del '900" (Geheimes Deutschland. Mythos in der Kultur Deutschlands im 20. Jahrhundert, 1967; in englischer Übersetzung 2023), "Il tempo della festa" (Zeit und Festlichkeit; 2021), Spartakus. Simbologia della rivolta (Spartakus: Die Symbologie einer Revolte, 2000; in deutscher Übersetzung 2025) sowie „Cultura di destra“ (Kultur von Rechts, 1979).
Themen in »The Blood Libel«
Furio Jesi Mythos Diskriminierung, Antisemitismus, Geschichte, Rassismus