There are many instances in which the hereditary enemy was credited with human sacrifice or cannibalism. Indeed it was currently believed that cannibalism had universally prevailed at one time, and with advancing civilization was gradually superseded.[[201]] As far as human sacrifice was concerned, many highly civilized states knew of vestiges or actual recurrences of it in their own practice. Rome is a striking example. But in Rome such things were rare exceptions, employed in times of unusual straits to meet a quite unusual emergency.[[202]] In Greece there were many traces frankly admitted to be such—if not actual instances of such sacrifices. But here, as at Rome, the act was admittedly something out of the ordinary, a survival of primitive savagery.[[203]]
Accordingly when Greeks and Romans spoke of human sacrifices, it was not of an inconceivable form of barbarity, which placed those who took part in it quite out of the human pale, but as a relic of a condition from which they had themselves happily grown, and to which they reverted only in extremities. Its presence among other tribes was a demonstration that they were still in the barbarous stage, and especially was it deemed to be so when all strangers who chanced to come upon the foreign shore were the selected victims of the god.
That charge, as we know, was made against many Scythian and Thracian tribes. The story of Iphigenia in Tauris is an example of it. It was made against the Carthaginians, at least in the early stages of their history. The Gauls, according to both Greek and Roman writers, had made of it a very common institution.[[204]] We do not know very much of the evidence in the case of the Thracians, Scythians, and Gauls. It is not impossible that customs like certain symbolic rites found in many places were misinterpreted. Or it is highly likely that, if human sacrifices existed, they were, as among Greeks and Romans, a rare form of expiation. For the Carthaginians the story is almost certainly a by-product of national hatred, and rests upon the same foundations as the “cruelty” and “perfidy” of Hannibal.
Human sacrifices, similar to those of Greece and Rome, existed in Palestine. Children were sacrificed to the nameless god or gods that bore the cult title of melech, i.e. “king.” As in the rest of the Mediterranean world such sacrifices were exceptional and grisly forms of expiation, used when ordinary means had failed. Among the Jews, on the other hand, they seem to have been prohibited from the very beginning of their history as a community. It is a purely gratuitous theory that makes melech, or molech, a cult-title of Yahveh in Israel. There is simply no evidence of any kind that it was so. On the contrary, the oldest traditions of the Jews represent the abolition of human sacrifices as one of the first reforms instituted by the founders of their faith. The Mosaic code made these sacrifices a capital offense (Lev. xviii. 21; xx. 2). The very name molech indicates an intense abhorrence, if, as has been plausibly suggested, it is simply מלך, or “king,” with the vowels of בשת, “the Abomination.”[[205]]
With so old a tradition on the subject, the Jews must have felt, as peculiarly irritating, the transference of this vituperative tag to them. That it might be so applied was of course an inevitable expansion of the belief that the Jews were μισόξενοι, “haters of strangers.” However, it must not be supposed that the statement was widely current. On the contrary, we have only two references to it. Damocritus, who lived perhaps in the first century B.C.E., as quoted by the late Byzantine compiler Suidas,[[206]] asserts that the Jews captured a stranger every seven years, and sacrificed him to their god; and Apion, in the first century C.E., relates the circumstantial story of the captured Greek who was found immured in the temple by Antiochus Epiphanes.
The latter story is an amusing instance of rhetorical method. Of its baselessness of course no proof need be adduced. It is almost certainly the concoction of Apion himself, perhaps based upon some such statement as this just quoted from Damocritus. Its melodramatic features, the fattening of the stranger, the oath sealed by blood, are highly characteristic of Apion’s style.
It cannot be said that this particular charge against the Jews had any real success. The later writers do not mention it. Tacitus and Juvenal, both of whom are very likely to have read Apion, pass by the story in silence. And Juvenal, who in his Fifteenth Satire expresses such detestation of a similar act among the Egyptians he abominated,[[207]] would certainly not have let off the Syrian fortune-tellers, whom he equally disliked, with an allusion to their unsociability.
Non monstrare vias nisi eadem sacra colenti,[[208]] “They are instructed not to point out a road except to those who share their rites.” It might almost seem as though even rhetorical animosity demanded more for its terms of abuse than the authority of Apion.
The tragic importance of the “ritual murder” in the modern history of the Jews since the Crusades has given the account of Apion a significance to which it is by no means entitled. The least analysis will show that the “ritual murder” of modern times is not really like the ancient story at all. The latter is simply an application to the Jews of the frequent charge of ξενοθυσία, “sacrifice of strangers,” such as was made against the Scythians. And Apion’s fable found practically no acceptance. There is of course no literary transmission between Apion and the chroniclers of Hugh of Lincoln, but we cannot even suppose that there was a popular one. In the fearful struggles of the rebellions under Hadrian and Trajan, it is impossible to believe that the mutual hatred, which found such expression as the massacre at Salamis and the reprisals of the Greeks, would have failed to register this charge against the ἀνόσιοι Ἰουδαῖοι, “the wicked Jews,” if it were known.
The early Middle Ages, at any rate from the Crusades on, devised the “ritual murder” without the aid of older authorities. It is one of the many cases in which parallel developments at different times and in different places produce results that are somewhat similar, although only superficially so.[[209]]