"Reminds us that what seems inconceivable is nonetheless possible."— Judith Shulevitz New York Times Book Review
"As frightening in its own way as prime Stephen King....A warning from the past that can’t be ignored."— Lewis Beale The Daily Beast
"Gripping....In describing the events of Massena in 1928, Berenson reminds the reader how vulnerable the minority can be and how quickly a community can turn against one of its very own....Jews and non-Jews must read this book and take the messages from the past to heart, ensuring that old wives’ tales remain just that."— Menachem Shlomo Jerusalem Post
"This model of micro-history illuminates both the persistence and inconsistency of antisemitism in Western culture through the unlikely prism of an almost forgotten event in a backwater American town during the presidential election of 1928. Berenson’s research ranges widely over time and space, and his narrative deftly blends scholarly generalizations with nitty-gritty historical reconstruction. The highly readable result is a tour de force of insight and synthesis."— Peter Hayes, author of Why? Explaining the Holocaust
"An extraordinary—and timely—story expertly told. Edward Berenson, a distinguished historian of modern Europe, opens up a side of early twentieth-century American history that feels both startling and eerily familiar in its mix of ethnocentrism and political toxicity. A lucid, deeply intelligent, and important book."— Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History
"The Accusation starts with what amounted to an obscure footnote in regional narratives and a minor curiosity in studies of American Jewish history, and builds upon it a very large, important story. In a richly woven tapestry, Edward Berenson examines the many strands that link early twentieth-century Massena, New York, to the Middle Ages, when Jews found themselves accused of using the blood of young Christians to bake matzo, their ritual Passover bread. Deftly connects the very local to the national and to the global."— Hasia R. Diner, Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History, New York University
"A blood libel in twentieth-century America? In an ordinary American town? In his astonishing study of this tainted fable, Edward Berenson, a distinguished historian with family roots in Massena, New York, uncovers the reason we ought not to be astonished: the blood libel is the lie that never dies. In its multiple mercurial guises, and in the latest headlines, it lives on. The Accusation is not mere history. It is news."— Cynthia Ozick, author of Foreign Bodies
"In an improbable age when chants from Charlottesville, ‘Jews will not replace us!,’ and synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh and San Diego evoke darker times of antisemitic violence, The Accusation is a frightful reminder that even in the United States, when the conditions are right, it can happen here. A wonderful and important book that, given current events, leaves its final chapter still unwritten."— Thane Rosenbaum, author of The Myth of Moral Justice: Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What's Right
"Edward Berenson’s meticulous, intricate history of the European roots of ‘blood libel’ anti-Semitism—and the single time a small American town fell into its thrall—is a stellar example of the universal importance of historical research. The Accusation isn’t just the story of Barbara Griffiths’ disappearance, and the unfounded claim that shook the small Jewish community in Massena, New York—more importantly, it’s the story of how it happened, and how it could happen again."— Rebecca Schuman, author of Schadenfreude, A Love Story
"The Accusation is a gripping and disturbing account, told in calm and measured prose, of how one of history’s most persistent slurs—the Blood Libel against Jewish communities across Europe and the Near East—resurfaced in small-town America in the 1920s. Its focus may be specific, but its relevance is boundless and important: our understanding of immigration, the complexities of xenophobia, and the dangerous tenacity against all reason of racial myths are all enhanced in this fascinating marriage of scholarship and storytelling."— Jim Crace, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, Being Dead
★ 2019-08-19
A native of a village in upstate New York turns in a strange and riveting story of anti-Semitism in an era not far removed from our own.
On Sept. 22, 1928, a 4-year-old girl disappeared into the woods outside Massena, New York. Within hours, writes Berenson (History/New York Univ.; Europe in the Modern World: A New Narrative History Since 1500, 2016, etc.), hundreds of people had assembled to search for her. "Several hours into the search," he writes, "someone—it's unclear who—floated the idea that Barbara had been kidnapped and killed by the Jews." That accusation quickly took root even if Jews were well known as residents in "an ethnically and religiously diverse population" that had once been almost all white and Protestant in the agricultural era but, once industry arrived, introduced an immigrant population, most from neighboring Canada but many from Eastern Europe and Italy. Berenson's grandfather, a chemical engineer from Boston, was a newcomer as well to a town with 20 Jewish families who "suddenly found themselves transported back to the Old World of anti-Jewish hostility from which they fled." When it developed that the "blood libel," the charge that Jews killed Christian children for blood to use in religious rituals, had not been fulfilled and the girl was safe, things slowly returned to something approaching normality—save that there are now only 10 Jews in Massena, and its small synagogue closed in 2012 even as the town has sunk into poverty. In this fluent account, Berenson explores the effect of the incident, the blood libel charge having been common in Europe but altogether rare in the U.S. even in those days of rising fascism. Moreover, he examines the history of blood libel, tracing it to medieval England, which was long used to excuse pogroms and other persecution in an ugly history that culminated in the Holocaust.
An excellent work of scholarly detection, especially timely in an age when the immigrant "other" is under constant suspicion.
