Changes

Blood symbolizes life, and the giver of all life is God. That's why blood is sacred and, in a way, reserved for God alone. Back when the Temple in Jerusalem still stood (ultimately demolished by the Romans in 70 CE), the Temple's altar was regularly sprinkled with calf or lamb blood as a sacrifice of atonement. And since the blood was meant as a gift for God, it was off-limits to humans. Hence, the strict and oft-repeated Biblical ban on drinking blood. When broken, it was punishable by God himself setting his face against the perpetrator: I see you, see what you did, and won't forget it.

Considering how strong the taboo against blood consumption in Judaism is, it's hard to understand how it was possible for Christians throughout Europe and over many centuries to believe an absolutely dumb and vicious gossip about Jews using Christian children's blood for making matzah. In Poland, some monarchs attempted to suppress it. As early as in 1264, Duke Boleslav the Pious of Greater Poland issued a famous charter of Jewish privileges, known as the Statute of Calisia (Kalisz), whose article 30 explicitly forbade anyone from spreading the spiteful rumour. Seventy years later, King Casimir the Great extended the law from the province of Greater Poland to the entire Kingdom of Poland. But despite these efforts, the canard continued to serve as an excuse for anti-Jewish pogroms for centuries, including the particularly shameful post-Holocaust Kielce Pogrom of 1946.