The books in the Harry Potter series have sold more than 450 million copies. They are among the most influential and widely read — and maniacally adored — children’s books ever published. When my eldest daughter, Geneviève, was ten years old, I took her to see J. K. Rowling read at the SkyDome sports arena in Toronto. Thousands of children were in attendance. It was the biggest literary reading I have ever attended. Every child I looked at in the audience seemed not only enthralled but also thoroughly acquainted with every single word the author read aloud. It still astounds me to think that one of the most famous, bestselling books in the history of human civilization speaks at great length to children about blood and identity.
THE OBSESSION WITH BLOOD PURITY is imaginary in the Harry Potter series, but it underpins murderous tendencies and genocidal behaviour that have repeated themselves all too many times in real life. Over and over, in the course of history, humans have invoked notions of blood purity to justify atrocities.
Perched in her seventeenth-century convent in Mexico City, Sor Juana expressed a fear of writing a spiritual analysis that might offend the Holy Office, the Catholic body responsible at the time for carrying out persecutions against Jews and other people deemed heretics in Europe as well as in New Spain. “I want no trouble with the Holy Office,” she wrote, “for I am but ignorant and tremble lest I utter some ill-sounding proposition or twist the true meaning of some passage.”
The Spanish Inquisition, which began in the 1400s on the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal), crossed over the Atlantic and continued in the New World in the seventeenth century. Sor Juana would have been well informed about the thousands of Jews, Moors, and others who two centuries earlier had been persecuted, tortured, and — if they hadn’t already been burned at the stake or murdered in other ways — expelled from Spain.
Centuries before the Spanish Inquisition, early persecutors often justified the murder of Jews by falsely claiming that they had killed innocent Christians — generally young boys — and mixed their blood with unleavened bread during Passover rituals. This allegation against Jews came to be known as “blood libel.” Judaism explicitly forbids the consumption of blood. In Leviticus 17:10, God plainly instructs Moses to this effect: “And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people.” In addition to barring the direct consumption of blood, Leviticus clearly spells out that blood is to be removed from meat before it is eaten. Jewish dietary laws are replete with rules about blood and food, including the stipulation that one must kill an animal humanely by slitting its throat with a sharp knife and draining the blood quickly. Despite these clear prohibitions, blood libel arises in early medieval times as a pretext to attack Jews.
The first documented case of blood libel involved the accusation that Jews in Norwich, England, had killed, by means of crucifixion, a twelve-year-old apprentice tanner named William. The accusations were never proven, but they grew and multiplied and led to additional accusations that Jews were preying on Christian boys to carry out ritualized murder. This led to the slaughter of many Jews in England, and to their eventual expulsion in 1290. (Many resettled in Spain, from which their descendants in turn were expelled, two centuries later.)
Muslims invaded the Iberian peninsula in the year 711, controlling diminishing portions of the region for some seven centuries, until the Catholics finally drove them out at the end of the Reconquista in 1492. In the years between, as the Catholic royalty, church, and followers fought to reclaim the land they believed to be theirs, Jews — who had been accepted to varying degrees for centuries by the Muslims — began to be vilified, restricted in their civil rights, attacked, and murdered. Priests and their followers began murdering Jews in Seville and elsewhere in 1391. Some Jews were enslaved, others fled, and still others converted to Christianity in a bid to escape persecution and death. These converted Jews became known as the conversos. There were more Jews in Spain than anywhere else in the world at the time, and it is estimated that more than one hundred thousand became conversos — many of them making sincere conversions that passed down through the generations. Being a converso gave a former Jew (or a person descended from former Jews) full rights of citizenship, and many of them thrived in business, government, church, moneylending, and other disciplines. They also married into Christian families, nobility included.
In 1449, however, Spanish citizens began to riot against converso tax collectors in Toledo. Authorities issued laws requiring the conversos to demonstrate the purity of their blood (limpieza de sangre, as it is known in Spanish). In the first step toward openly suggesting that Jews were biologically distinct from Christians, authorities issued a law requiring that the conversos demonstrate their own blood purity. As Erna Paris writes in The End of Days: A Story of Tolerance, Tyranny, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, “Once conversos had been effectively reidentified as Jews by the statute of exclusion, all the ancient anti-Jewish accusations could be revived with impunity . . . ‘Purity of blood,’ or limpieza (cleanliness), exploded into a national obsession.”
Within half a century, thousands of Jews and conversos were deprived of their rights, attacked, tortured, burned at the stake, and killed by other means. By 1490, some 2,000 conversos had been burned to death during or immediately after popular public events known as autos-da-fé (Portuguese for “acts of faith”). Finally, at the end of the Reconquista, in 1492, the Catholic monarchs — King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella — drove the Muslims and an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Jews from Spain. Tens of thousands of Jews died trying to flee the country, according to the Jewish Virtual Library (JVL). Many of the most unlucky refugees ended up in Portugal, from which they were expelled again a few years later. Some of the more fortunate migrants ended up in Turkey. As for their fate, the JVL says: “Sultan Bajazet welcomed them warmly. ‘How can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king,’ he was fond of asking, ‘the same Ferdinand who impoverished his own land and enriched ours?’”
The obsession with blood purity robbed the Iberian peninsula of many of its most talented, productive, educated citizens. The Inquisition, or persecution of heretics, plunged Spain into the Dark Ages and raged on for centuries. Erna Paris notes that after the Reconquista, pure blood became a condition for every post of merit: “By 1673, a ‘Jew’ was being described as someone with as little as twenty-one degrees of blood relationship, or . . . (as) an Old Christian who had been suckled by a wet nurse of ‘infected blood.’ The word Jew was stripped of all content; like ‘pure’ and ‘impure,’ it was a multipurpose, abstract trigger for class hatred, rejection and otherness.”
In Spain, to this day, the city of Santiago de Compostela — site of one of the most significant religious meccas in the world — is named after the Apostle James, whose remains are said to be buried under the cathedral in the old town. Catholic legend has it that Santiago rose from the dead to inspire Catholic warriors to victory over the Muslims in Clavijo in the year 844, when the Spaniards had embarked on their centuries-long Reconquista to recapture the Iberian peninsula. Henceforth, Santiago was much more than the simple name of an Apostle. It hollered out the notion of drawing blood from the infidel. Since the battle at Clavijo, the saint has been known throughout Spain and celebrated prominently in Spain’s most famous cathedral as Santiago Matamoros, which means “Saint James the Moorslayer.”
OBSESSIONS WITH BLOOD — as demonstrated by the persecution and murder of Jews in medieval Europe — have spilled into countless acts of ethnic or racial hatred over the centuries. I have examined the Spanish Inquisition not because it is the only major example of human monstrosity — we all know that it isn’t — but because the same blood-based obsessions found in medieval Spain spread into other countries and continents as new forms of genocide took root in the world.
Perpetrators of gen
ocide — who massacred indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey), the Jews during the Holocaust, ethnic minorities in Cambodia, the Tutsi in Rwanda, the people of Darfur, the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and so many others — all demonized their victims by alluding, directly or indirectly, to the impurity of their blood. In the case of the Rwandan genocide, which took the lives of an estimated eight hundred thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994, radio broadcasts and newspaper reports repeatedly referred to the Tutsis as “cockroaches” and urged listeners to kill them. Years earlier, the Belgian colonizers of Rwanda had helped drive a wedge between the two peoples by issuing identity cards to each group, and by artificially attributing to the Tutsis a role of economic and social privilege. Over the decades, it became possible for one group to demonize the other, and for the perpetrators of the genocide to successfully categorize the Tutsis as members of an inferior and threatening race, who deserved to be exterminated. Even the genocide in Rwanda rode on a racist wave, and was kept afloat by the implicit assertion that the Tutsis had tainted blood.
It has become common to hear genocidal massacres depicted as “ethnic cleansing,” but I find the term repugnant. However unintentional, the language we use to describe abhorrent behaviour tends to reinforce the behaviour itself. How can there be such a thing as “ethnic cleansing”? How does murder, or genocidal massacre, relate to cleansing? The term is worse than a euphemism because it makes it sound as if it is actually possible to “clean” a society by ridding it of people of a certain ethnicity. I am aware that “ethnic cleansing” became a quick, shorthand, widely recognizable way for people to refer, for example, to the horrors of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. I don’t think that users of the term mean any harm by it. But the language that we use does affect the way we think about things and frame them. “Cleansing” sounds like a positive act. For me, there can be no cleansing in the context of deliberate bloodshed. There can only be murder.
The term genocide was coined in 1944 by the Polish-American lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who based it on the root words genos (Greek for “family” or “race”) and cide (Latin for “killing”). Its catalysts are well known, although they still mystify us. The plague in medieval times led to pogroms against Jews, who were blamed for causing mass death by poisoning the wells of Christians. Genocide — the mass murder or extermination of targeted groups of people — has been taking place for as long as humans have existed. In his book Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, Ben Kiernan notes that only recently have we come to roundly condemn genocidal practices. He notes archeological evidence of mass murder carried out against men, women, and children as many as seven thousand years ago in present-day Germany, and two thousand years ago in present-day France.
Kiernan reminds us that the Old Testament is replete with examples of genocidal enmity. Deuteronomy 20:17, for example, says: “But thou shalt utterly destroy them — the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites — as the Lord has commanded you.” The Qur’an enjoins believers to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them.” Christians, Hindus, and others have perpetrated every manner of genocide.
No one group holds a monopoly on this form of ultimate evil, and few groups have completely avoided capitulating to it. But we abase ourselves each time we stand by passively and allow one group of humans to target another for destruction.
One of the most barbaric and effective ways to undermine an entire group of people has been to attack its women sexually, leaving them either dead or else “tainted” and socially isolated in the wake of the assaults. Rape has been a constant companion to genocide — during the Holocaust, over the course of the transatlantic slave trade, and in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and the Congo, to name a few places. When it does not lead to their immediate death, it has been used to kill women slowly by means of infecting them with sexually transmitted infections and diseases such as HIV/AIDS. Failing literal death, it can bring about women’s cultural death. Abandoned by husbands, shunned by those who consider the rape victims to be polluted, people who have been raped have often been marginalized in the very societies to which they belong.
Pointing solely to atrocities in other communities allows a person to have a false sense of moral superiority, so we must not flinch from acknowledging, opposing, and righting injustice in our own backyard. The Beothuk people were wiped out from Newfoundland. As a form of cultural genocide, thousands of First Nations children in Canada were forcibly removed from their families and shipped to residential schools, where they were abused and punished for showing any trace of their language or culture. Indigenous peoples were also slaughtered in the United States. In one lesser-known case of North American genocide, for a quarter-century ending in 1873 — with the sanction of law authorities and the cheering of newspapers — individuals, groups, and militiamen chased down and murdered nearly all of the Yana peoples of California. Atrocities have been carried out in most corners of the world, by many peoples of the world, and that they continue to this day. We must be ever vigilant. In our own backyards, and elsewhere.
NATURAL DISASTERS AND ECONOMIC anxieties bring out the worst in human beings. When we are insecure, when we feel that the outside world or the elements of nature threaten us, we look for a scapegoat. Often, that scapegoat has been a “privileged minority” that is seen to be usurping the rights and the dominant role of the majority. To find a scapegoat, the easiest path is to isolate a group of people — often along lines of their blood, or race. We fear that we will be displaced by these people, so we demonize them — right down to the level of judging the purity of their blood — and then we wipe them out. To protect ourselves. Xenophobia seems to be one of the most deeply entrenched human fears, and — aided by antiquated, nonsensical notions of blood — we humans have allowed it to bring out the very worst in us.
To recognize the fundamental equality of all human beings means that we cannot create hierarchies along lines of gender, race, religion, age, sexual orientation, or ability. To identify and shed subconscious beliefs that should be relegated to the Dark Ages, we must agree that blood is no determinant of human difference. In our bodies, and in the red stuff that courses through our veins and arteries, we are one and the same.
Blood has the ability to bring us together, when we share it to save each other’s lives, or draw upon it metaphorically to allude to the most noble elements of the human heart and soul. But, sadly, our fixations on blood have all too often driven human beings apart; given us the most facile, unexamined, and absurd excuses to demonize each other; and fuelled the most atrocious behaviour known to mankind.
Blood. How about if we take it or leave it? Let us take it, when it is offered in the way of help — medical or metaphysical. And let us leave it right where it belongs — circulating in our veins and arteries, nothing more and nothing less — when it comes to dealing with our most base human instincts.
FIVE
OF PRESIDENTIAL MISTRESSES, HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS, AND LONG-LOST ANCESTORS:
SECRETS IN OUR BLOOD
MANY FAMILIES HAVE SECRETS of the blood. Mine certainly does. My paternal grandparents, May Edwards Hill and Daniel Hill, had to elope to get married in 1918, shortly before he went overseas as an American army officer during World War I.
May came from a well-to-do Catholic black family, and there was nothing satisfactory about the Baltimore-raised young man with whom she had fallen in love. May’s mother, Marie Coakley, who could pass for white but was married to a black dentist and was living as a member of the so-called “black bourgeoisie” in Washington, D.C., led the charge against my grandfather. What was so bad about him? In the opinion of my great-grandmother, Daniel Hill had three strikes against him. He was not Catholic. (He was soon to become a lifetime minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and therefore close to being a heathen. Indeed, when May wro
te love letters to her husband while he fought in the trenches of France, she began some of them with “My dear pagan buzzard.”) He was not from money. And he was a dark-skinned African-American — exactly the opposite of what Marie Coakley wanted for her daughter. How would their children slide into white society, or hang on the edges of it, or benefit by means of association, with May married to a visibly black man? I heard many stories about Marie Coakley trying to break up my grandparents. I even dramatized and exaggerated the situation in my novel Any Known Blood. But here, I will stick to the family legend as I have heard it. According to the stories that have been passed down to me, Marie offered to pay for May’s tuition at Radcliffe College only if she would leave that man. Daniel eventually moved his family to Missouri (where my father was born, in 1923), then to Colorado, and then to Oregon, partly to escape the clutches of his mother-in-law.
However, in 1919, before May and Dan moved out west, Jeanne — the first of their four children — was born. The war had just ended. At the time, May and Dan were living in Philadelphia. After giving birth to Jeanne, May was kept for a long time in the hospital. With May still confined to her hospital bed, Marie Coakley made arrangements for Jeanne to be baptized in a Catholic church (with a white congregation, and a white priest) in Philadelphia. The priest, the story goes, did not recognize that Marie Coakley was black, and Marie did not tell him. Not long after May was released from the hospital, she, her mother, her husband, and baby Jeanne travelled to the church on the day of the baptism. When the priest saw that they were black, he refused to baptize Jeanne. “They thought they were showing up for a baptism, and they were all completely insulted,” Doris Cochran, my aunt (and the only surviving member of the family), recalled in a telephone interview in June 2013. “The priest refused because Jeanne was a child of colour.”
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