the libel that Jews ritually murdered Christian children to mix their blood in the unleavened bread baked at Passover appears to have originated in twelfth-century England. By the fifteenth century it had reached German-speaking Central Europe; by the sixteenth, Poland, and by the eighteenth century it was firmly established all over Eastern Europe, from Lithuania to Romania. In 1840 there was an international outcry over a 'blood libel' case in Damascus. But such allegations did not manifest themselves in Russia until the later nineteenth century. Nor was outright violence against Jewish communities a Russian tradition. What became known in Russia as 'pogroms' - literally 'after thunder' - had been a recurrent feature of life in Western and Central Europe from medieval times onwards.