In an essay written by Ahad Ha'am in 1893, over 100 years ago, the author reflects on accusations made against the Jews. How can a people continue to proclaim its righteousness when confronted with such a barrage of criticism concerning its flaws and defects, he asks. "Knowing that the whole world hates the Jews, can we still say that the world is wrong and the Jews are right? Certainly we can, and blood libels prove it. In this respect, the Jews are pure and innocent as angels in heaven. A Jew and blood - can there be anything more contradictory?"

When the Jews are accused of using Christian blood for ritual purposes, Ahad Ha'am explained, the idea is so absurd that it only reflects back on the warped mind of the accuser. Hence there is no reason to take such accusations seriously. There was a time when many Jews began to believe the terrible charges flung at them by anti-Semites for so many years. Suspicion crept into their hearts that maybe they themselves were responsible for creating the "Jewish problem."

Israeli history professor Ariel Toaff does not subscribe, apparently, to the same brand of logic as Ahad Ha'am. Otherwise it is hard to understand how he could believe that the Jews used Christian blood for rituals connected to baking Passover matza. His new book "Pasque di Sangue" ("Bloody Passovers") ostensibly confirms what the Jewish world has been fiercely denying since the 12th century. He claims there is something to the appalling blood libels that continue to this day. Toaff gives credence in his book to confessions extracted under cruel torture from 16 Jewish residents of Trento, who were accused of murdering a boy named Simon in 1475 and using his blood to bake Passover matza. They were burned at the stake.

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It is hard to imagine any serious historian today, Jew or Christian, believing that there is any substance to these blood libels. The Italian media asked a number of eminent historians to fact-check Toaff's book, and all of them refused. There is no Jewish ritual that would justify or require the use of Christian blood. Toaff writes about the centrality of blood in the Passover holiday tradition, but the Torah strictly forbids eating the blood of animals and - it goes without saying - human blood. The only ritual connected to human blood in Judaism is the circumcision ceremony, which again applies only to Jews.

In ancient times, a Jew walking down the road passed the Roman emperor Adrian and called out a greeting. The emperor was furious. "How dare you address the emperor?" he said, and ordered his execution. Later, another Jew passed by and said nothing, having learned his lesson. "How dare you pass by the emperor without greeting him?" said Adrian, and had him executed, too.

Der Sturmer, the anti-Semitic organ of the Nazi Party, published a special issue of the paper on May 1, 1934. An illustration on the front page showed a German boy lying on a table surrounded by Jews with long beards and earlocks. They are sucking the blood out of his body through long tubes - another link in the long chain of blood libels that started off in Norwich, England in the 12th century, where Jews there were accused of buying a Christian boy before Easter, draining his blood, torturing and crucifying him. Similar accusations cropped up all over Christian Europe - from Trento, Italy and La Guardia, Spain in the 15th century; to Poland, Hungary, Greece, France, Russia and Germany in the 17th and 18th centuries; to the famous Beilis blood libel in 1911, in Kiev, Ukraine. There were also blood libels in Muslim countries: in Damascus in 1840, in Beirut in 1887 and in Egypt in 1892.

In all these incidents, Jews were portrayed as repulsive, satanic creatures who deserved to be burned at the stake, as they were in the Middle Ages - or shot or gassed, as they were in more "enlightened" times. Blood libels were the trigger for the terrible pogroms in Eastern and Central Europe. They led to the incitement and the calls to destroy the entire "Jewish race," in Auschwitz and other death camps.

The blood libel is alive and well. The images that flash across television screens throughout the world, and appear in the electronic and print media in both Arab countries and the progressive West, are even scarier than the picture in Der Sturmer and the anti- Semitic caricatures of the Middle Ages. With all their graphic differences, the goal of these images is no different from that of the Catholics in Christian Spain or the Nazis in Germany: "Wipe these despicable beings, these subhuman creatures, off the face of the earth!"

This incitement, depicting Jews as monkeys, pigs and bloodsucking vampires, has been going on for years, mainly in Arab countries, in their newspapers and their mosques. The only difference between this and the rants on television and Internet is in the medium, which spreads the message even more widely and efficiently.

We are treated this way not because of anything we have done, but it is hardly surprising that some researcher, who happens to be Israeli, has climbed up on the stage of history and threatens to take us back to the dark days of the Middle Ages with the first blood libel of the 21st century.

Uri Paz is an educator and a researcher of Judaism.