In western europe during the post-reformation period, catholic and Protestant scholars engaged in a scholarly, often ethnographic study of the Jewish religion, and produced competent, if still polemical, works grounded in Jewish sources. But in Poland in the eighteenth century, despite its brief Renaissance of the early sixteenth century, some Catholic clergy were still writing of Jewish thirst for Christian blood in a manner reminiscent of medieval works. In religious rhetoric, as in the ideas of Church hierocracy, Poland froze in time while the outside world moved on. The Polish Catholic Church's reaction to the new religious ideas of the Reformation, including its control of the dissemination of knowledge through restrictions on printing and education, contributed to the cultural insularity of Poland and the Polish Catholic Church, and prevented its clergy, and others, from benefiting from, and participating in, western European Christian scholarship.

Polish clergy's writings continued to raise ritual murder accusations and blood libels against Jews as late as the eighteenth century. Whereas the early ritual murder accusations against Jews in twelfth-and thirteenth-century Western Europe were associated with Passover, when Jews were accused of reenacting the crucifixion of Jesus on a small boy, the blood motif was later added to the charges, according to which Jews were said to seek Christian blood in order to make matzah, the unleavened bread eaten during the Passover holiday.