Sunday, July 21, 2:00 pm 2024, Monthly Program via Zoom.
A presentation by Esther Mordant
Shortly before Easter, 1144, a year at which Easter and Passover coincided, a 12-year-old boy, William, a tanner’s apprentice, was found brutally murdered and partially undressed in a woodland near Norwich, England. A few days later the monks at the monastery belonging to the newly-built Norwich Cathedral announced to the grieving town that the local community of Jews were responsible for the murder: they had murdered William for his blood, to use it in preparing matzo, the unleavened bread for their feast of Passover.
This is the first known instance in a thousand years of the charge of Blood Libel, the charge that Jews needed to murder a Christian child in order to use its blood to make matzoh. The Blood Libel would become an excuse to persecute Jews down to the present day. Esther Mordant presents the history of William and the trail of Blood Libel that followed him down the centuries.
Esther is a psychologist, philosopher and psychotherapist. She graduated with a PhD in philosophy of religion from Oxford Brookes University in Oxford, UK, in 2015. She is now working as a psychotherapist in the South East of England, not far from Norwich.
