Jews have been persecuted throughout history for many reasons, most of which amount to casting Jewish people as "the other" whenever a scapegoat is needed. Hard as it may be to believe today, the Jewish religion has often been equated with Satanic worship and worse.
One of the persistent beliefs which crops up throughout history is that Jews steal the babies and children of their neighbors, and use their blood in various rites. Interestingly, this is also a belief which has been applied to witches throughout history. In the minds of many unsophisticated, xenophobic cultures, the Jewish religion becomes equated with witchcraft.
These incidents often start with the unexplained death of a child. I think parents of all nationalities can relate to the horror of finding your child mysteriously dead, or simply missing. This fear has stalked humanity for thousands, perhaps millions of years.
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The Crusades, those times of war and atrocity across Europe and the Levant that defined much of the brutality of the Middle Ages, are most famous as conflicts between Christians and Muslims. Indeed, those two religious groups contributed the largest part of the soldiers and suffered the highest casualties of the Crusades, though they were not the only ones to fight. Jews experienced much hardship during that troubled period, such that they wouldn't see the same level of violence and persecution until the rise of fascism in Europe in the early 20th century.