The Christian belief that Jewish men menstruated, first arising around 1500, was part of the overall antisemitic concept that all Jews were of feminine gender. Jews do suffer from hemorrhoids at a higher rate than non-Jews. This is not a recent problem. In the 15th century, Rabbi Isaac Abarbanel wrote: “It is always found that Jews suffer from acute fever, pestilence, and hemorrhoids more than any other nation.” Several reasons have been given for this phenomenon. In the 14th century Bernard de Gordon suggested the following reasons: “They are generally sedentary, they are usually in fear and anxiety and therefore the melancholy blood becomes increased”. They were believed to have a flux of blood due to hemorrhoids that was thought to more abound in Jews because they consumed salty foods and gross undigested blood, and were melancholic. While most men were generally able to reduce their heat naturally, there was a perception that womanish Jewish males were unable to do so, and thereby required “menstruation” (i.e. a literal discharge of blood) in order to achieve bodily equilibrium.
The earliest explicit source asserting that Jewish men menstruate appears in 1219. Jacques de Vitry (1160–1240) was a French canon regular who preached between 1211 and 1213 at the Albigensian Crusade and the Fifth Crusade in the East. In 1214 he was elected Bishop of Acre, in the Holy Land. In 1219 he began to write Historia Orientalis, a history of the Holy Land from the advent of Islam until the crusades of his own day. He wrote about the Jews: “… His blood be upon us ... have become unwarlike and weak as women, and it is said that they have a flux of blood every month ...”; de Vitry notes that his report was based on what others before him had already said. This description led to two of the important elements in the Christian iconography of Jewish males: firstly they were depicted as being womanish, and secondly that they had a monthly flux of blood from their hinder parts as divine punishment. De Vitry also wrote that “The Jews had a trembling head, a quaking heart and perpetual anxiety and fearfulness —all signs of melancholia.”
The Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach suggested in 1240 that Jewish males menstruated on a regular basis. He wrote that the Jews are “obstinate men, unwarlike even more than women, everywhere serfs, suffering from a flow every month.” In a thirteenth-century manuscript from the Cistercian abbey of Heiligenkreuz, in the Rhineland, the Jews were said to labor under some frailty, which is called a “flow of blood.” Scholars claimed that Jewish males menstruated to rid the body of unclean blood. Albertus Magnus (also known as Albert the Great [1193–1280] one of the 36 Doctors of the Church) wrote of Jewish melancholia and stated that Jews were naturally disposed to envy, extreme hairiness, and 'luxuria' (wantonness). “Hemorrhoids are caused as a purging of melancholic blood from the veins around the anus... this happened, mostly to those who lives of gross food and salted food, such as the Jews, and this happened according to nature.”
Around 1300, in a debate in the Paris University, Henry of Brussels and Henry the German concluded that the Jews have a flux of blood due to hemorrhoids caused by gross indigested blood which nature purges, and that this abounds more in Jews because they, for the most part, are melancholic. They added that Jews naturally withdraw themselves from society and from being connected to others, that they are more likely to be cut off or live in solitary places, and that they are pallid and timid. Bernard de Gordon (1270–1330) was a medical professor from the Montpellier University. In his medical book, Lilium Medicinae, he explained why Jews suffered from hemorrhoids: The Jews suffer an immoderate flow of blood from hemorrhoids, for three reasons: generally, because they are in idleness, and for that reason the melancholic superfluities are gathered. Second, they are generally in fear and anxiety, and for this reason melancholic blood is increased, according to this [saying] of Hippocrates: “Fear and timidity, if they have a lot of time [to work], generate the melancholic humor.” Third, this occurs as a divine punishment, according to [the text], “And he struck them in their posteriors and gave them over to perpetual opprobrium.”
The Fourth Lateran Council confined Jews to their homes during Holy Week in order to protect Christian children from bloodthirsty Jews. In 1235, Christian religious leaders cited the Jewish need for Christian blood as proof for the blood libel at Fulda. Jews were expelled from Thuringia in 1400 because of “their need for human blood to heal a wound that flowed in them perpetually.” In Tyrnau in 1494, twelve Jewish men and two women were accused of killing a Christian child: they were forced to confess that “men and women among them suffer equally from menstruation... The blood of a Christian is the specific medicine for it, when drunk.” References to Jewish male menstruation have been found in Germany in 1614 and England in 1649. One sixteenth-century English author writes that “Jews, men, as well as females, are punished cursu menstruo sanguinis, with a very frequent blood-fluxe.” In 1632 Juan de Quiniones and Juan de la Huerta, both royal Spanish physicians, asserted that Jews suffered from a permanent menstruation, a blood flow from their lower regions, the substance itself being impure blood. Pedro Aznar Cardona wrote in 1612: “many of them [Jews] are born with lizard tails and suffer ignominious and uncomfortable hemorrhoids.”
The Jewish Torah says: "But it will be that if you do not listen to the voice of Hashem, your G-d, to observe faithfully all His commandments and laws which I command you this day, all these curses shall come upon you and take effect: Hashem will strike you with the boils of Egypt, with hemorrhoids, with wet boils and dry boils, of which you cannot be cured." (Devarim 28:1-27) "The hand of Hashem then became heavy upon the Ashdodites, and He devastated them; He struck them with hemorrhoids, Ashdod and its borders... And it was, after they had brought it around, that the hand of Hashem was upon the city (with) a great panic, and He smote the people of the city, both young and old, and hemorrhoids broke out in their hidden parts... And the people who did not die, were smitten with hemorrhoids, and the cry of the city ascended to heaven. (Shmuel 1 5:1-12)" The torah then states that the Plishti governors sent five golden images of hemorrhoids and five golden mice as homage to the G-d of Israel (Shmuel 1, 6:4-5). The Plishtim believed that the mice would bite the bleeding hemorrhoids and relieve the discomfort.