America’s First and Only Blood Libel Accusation and What It Means for Jews 

Sarah Gorbatov 
 
On September 22, 1928, a four-year-old girl named Barbara Griffiths wandered into the 
woods surrounding Massena, a village in upstate New York, and disappeared. Hundreds of 
locals, organized by Massena’s police, searched frantically throughout the night and into 
the next day.  
 
Within only a few hours of Barbara’s vanishing, a rumor began to spread throughout the 
village: the Jews in Massena had kidnapped the young girl and slaughtered her in a ritual 
murder. The theory quickly caught fire, finding belief not merely in the townspeople, but 
also powerful, authoritative figures, such as state police officials and even Massena’s mayor, 
W. Gilbert Hawes, and soon the accusation was pushed forward. Rabbi Berel Brennglass of 
the Congregation Adath Israel, the only synagogue in Massena, was promptly interrogated. 
Do your people ever use human blood?” and “can you inform me if you offer human 
sacrifices on holidays?” were the sorts of inquiries posed by the investigators.  
 
Barbara ultimately returned home a day after she’d gone missing, having innocently become 
lost in the dense woods. Yet, the accusation persisted in local and national papers for weeks.  
 
The blood libel, the belief that Jews use the blood of Christian children for rituals, has a 
long, dark history in Central and Eastern Europe, dating back to the Middle Ages. The 
incident in Massena was the first, and to this day, the only case of blood libel in United 
States history, and took place during a time of mass immigration of both European Jews and 
Catholics to the country. During the 1920s, Massena was transitioning from a very rural, 
quaint village into one very industrial and prosperous. The Alcoa Aluminum Smelting Plant 
had just opened, and it completely changed the character of the town. An influx of 
immigrants into Ellis Island and therefore the fraught political atmosphere of the time may 
have fueled the escalation of anti-Semitism.  
 
Jews in Massena, many of whom fled from Europe to escape anti-Semitism, were afraid 
there would be a pogrom. They were terrified they would be facing violence from their 
neighbors. Although there was always anti-Semitism, it was the slight, tolerable sort. It was 
typical that Jews and non-Jews just avoided each other and lived their lives separately. 
Although this wasn’t ideal, it perpetuated a general harmony amongst everyone. The idea of 
a blood libel had never arisen in America before. Such things didn’t exist here. 
 
In 1150, the first ritual murder accusation was made against the Jews of Norwich, England, 
after the body of a twelve-year-old boy named William was found on Holy Saturday. The 
Christians in Norwich hastily blamed local Jews for the boy’s death and hostility against 
them escalated. People began to trust the notion that Jews needed to kill Christian children 
and harvest their organs for rituals. The argument was that Christians had 
transubstantiation, meaning they used wine that transforms into blood at consecration, 
while Jews needed to use blood directly. This was all “confirmed” in Thomas of 
Monmouth’s T ​ he Life and Passion of William of Norwich​. The hagiography examining the 
death of the boy and supporting the allegation of a blood libel is a Penguin Classic and on 
Amazon for $16.  
 
Then there’s the famous case of Simon of Trent in 1475. Jews were, with of course no 
credible evidence, held accountable for the disappearance and murder of a young Italian boy 
named Simon, as they “sank their weapons into the holy body of the child.” The entire local 
Jewish community, both men and women, were arrested and forced to confess, under 
torture, to crimes predetermined by the court. As such, n ​ ot only were they coerced into 
admitting murdering the child, but also to b ​ lood libe​l at large. Fifteen Jews were sentenced 
to death and burnt at the stake. Karola de Prevot’s painting depicting Simon’s blood being 
drained was later borrowed by Nazis preceding World War II.  
 
From the 1600s to the 1800s, the actual incrimination of Jews died down, but the gruesome 
stories and mythology continued. They were displayed in literature and art, and people 
started to feed into the myths.  
 
People need something to pay attention to and gossip about. In times of stress, they look for 
explanations and reasons for their suffering. Jews were always an easy scapegoat, a 
convenient target. And so despite there never having been any genuine evidence, we were 
still convicted for crimes we didn’t commit. It was still on us that everything disquieting 
was blamed.  
 
Why the revival of the medieval legend in the United States? It has to do with the shift from 
ruralism to industrialism that was materializing across the entire country. N ​ ewspapers 
dedicated to anti-Semitism were the most commercial,​ ​and political parties strongly 
opposing Jews were the most admired. We, less than 1 percent of the population at the time, 
were portrayed as traitors and drinkers of blood with horns and hooked noses striving to 
subjugate everything and everyone.   
 
Immigrants from Europe brought with them the legend of the blood libel and those from 
Canada, specifically Quebec, had just witnessed a powerful anti-Semitic movement in the 
early 1900s. They came with gifts - strong accusations against Jews.​ “​ Thieves of our 
property, murderers of our children, and threateners of the purity of our way of life,” they 
would protest.  
 
In the meantime, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan didn’t help. By the mid-1920s, they had 
accumulated 4,000,000 members and cross burnings were held all throughout New York, 
including Massena. This sort of climate could comfortably produce accusations against 
Jews, and when the 1928 presidential election between Al Smith and Herbert Hoover came 
around, any lingering hope Jewish immigrants had to be left alone was ravaged. It was an 
extremely contentious election between two candidates who seemed to symbolize polar 
understandings of what America was all about. Al Smith represented industrial, urban 
America, while Herbert Hoover represented small-town, Protestant America. Hoover 
rendered to his supporters this kind of traditional judgment of who Americans were. Smith 
was the first Catholic candidate ever to run for the presidency, and some of his chief 
advisors were Jews, and everybody knew that they were Jewish. The election was drained in 
religious venom and brought together all of the themes that were percolating in the 1920s. 
Eventually, Smith was overpowered by Hoover and New York became a fully Republican 
state.  
 
The International Jew: The World’s Problem​ by Henry Ford was being rapidly sold and 
distributed, Jewish shops were being boycotted and vandalized, a pogrom killed 44 
Holocaust survivors in Poland, and people back in Massena were saying that Barbara was 
probably let go out of fear of being caught. Jewish immigrants came to America to avoid 
hate and oppression only to be massacred as a result of anti-Semitism.  
 
What if Barbara Griffiths had disappeared permanently or her body was found?  
 
What the Massena blood libel case reveals is that there was and still is an undercurrent of 
extreme hostility toward Jews, and the willingness to believe that Jews are inherently evil. 
We have to be vigilant. As much as I doubt what happened in Massena will reoccur, the 
notion that Jews are evil is still out there and could be revived in the context of populism. In 
the 1900s, everything was covered through the radio, and nowadays, with the Internet and 
social media manipulating our lives, lies and propaganda can be dispersed at the press of a 
button. We have a means of communication and circulation that can disseminate, foster, 
and magnify malicious ideas that manifest violence. We can be reckless unconsciously or 
without meaning to be and put someone else in a perilous position. Although sharing our 
beliefs is imperative to stimulating a discussion or casting light on something that isn’t 
discussed enough, we have to recognize that our words have more power than we may 
realize. We must be certain that our opinions are grounded in fact, history, and reality, and 
that they will influence positively.