Opinion: The Blood Libel Never Went Away. Recently in Washington, D.C., It Went Viral.

Once again the medieval lie that Jews consume human blood has landed, this time at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station. In an outrageous piece of guerrilla art, masked “actors” portraying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently toasted a Friendsgiving Dinner with “Gaza’s Spilled Blood” on the menu.

The performers may think that this display of anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, but their performance was classic antisemitism.

Since medieval England, where, in 1144, the first blood libel surfaced with the accusation that Jews murdered a child in Norwich, the blood libel has spread around the world. The charge has spurred horrific violence against Jewish communities.

In Poland in 1946, a child, fearing punishment for wandering off, knew enough about the canard to lie, saying Jews had kidnapped and held him. That lie led, just a year after the end of the Holocaust, to a pogrom against the tiny remnant of Polish Jews. Forty-two Jews were murdered; at least another 40 were injured.

Blood libel accusations surfaced across the centuries in Europe and also reached the Middle East. But the United States has its own history of the blood libel, in a tradition that continued in Washington.

The Puritan clergyman and Harvard University president Increase Mather reminded his parishioners of the blood libel in his sermons. In “The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation” (1669), he wrote that not only had the Jews borne the guilt for Christ’s murder, they also “have been wont once a year to steal Christian children, and to put them to death by crucifying out of scorn and hatred against Christians.”

Even as he tempered his words, recognizing that this accusation came from darker times when Catholicism was the only form of the true faith, he did not dispute the canard.

In 1840, when a Capuchin friar and his Muslim servant disappeared in Damascus, Syria, rumors started: The Jews murdered them because they needed Christian blood to make matzoh, the unleavened bread of Passover. More than a dozen Jewish men were arrested and horrifically tortured.

“These accusations are not true, cannot be true,” American Jews proclaimed during protest meetings they convened to demand that their government intervene. U.S. Secretary of State John Forsyth agreed.

Writing American officials overseas, he expressed shock that this outlandish lie had once again been raised and horror at the torture used to extract confessions. He instructed his ministers to do all they could for this “persecuted race.”

Sept. 22, 1928 brought the most significant blood libel accusation on American soil. In Massena, a town in northern New York State, the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses on lawns.

That afternoon 4-year-old Barbara Griffiths was sent into its woods to fetch her brother Bobby. Bobby, but not Barbara, returned before nightfall. As townsmen mounted search parties, rumors flew: An animal had eaten the child. The Indians had snatched her. Maybe the Jews needed a child’s blood.

Yom Kippur would begin at sundown the next day. The mayor summoned the town’s rabbi to ask if Jews in the old country offered human sacrifices on their holidays.

Fortunately for the Jews, a few hours before the holiday began, the child emerged from the woods. Barbara had gotten lost, fallen asleep, and ultimately made her way out. Yet as Massena’s Jews headed to services that evening, an angry mob outside the synagogue menaced them. They even accused the rabbi of having been scared into giving up the child.

The historian Edward Berenson grew up in Massena. He remembered his parents telling him the story of the blood libel when he was a young child. Massena’s Jews never forgot what happened nor their fear that a pogrom might break out. But when he interviewed residents of the town for his book “The Accusation,” he learned that the town’s gentiles did not remember the incident.

Performing the old blood libel lie, the anti-Israel protestors proved that they are antisemites of the first rank. Jews do not eat children’s limbs. They do not drink blood.

They do not use it for religious purposes. But propelled by social media, a new generation has witnessed the lie.

Perhaps one day most Americans won’t remember this shocking performance. But I expect that, like Massena’s Jews, most American Jews who saw it will not forget it.

Pamela S. Nadell is an author who holds the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History and directs the Jewish Studies Program at American University.