The 1st-century-CE Alexandrian scholar and rhetorician Apion may be known today not for his commentaries on Homer—all of which were lost—but for his slanderous writings on the Jews, as Eli Kavon writes:
Apion’s attacks on Jews presage charges of ritual murder leveled against Jews in medieval Christendom. . . . While none of his writings are extant, we know of Apion’s anti-Semitism from the great ancient Jewish historian Josephus. In Against Apion, written by Josephus decades after Apion’s death, the Jewish historian . . . defends Judaism against the attacks of Apion and his [sometime co-author] Chaeremon.
The lies leveled at Jews in their work include deriving the word “Sabbath” from an ancient Egyptian word for a disease of the groin and claiming that Jews worshiped an ass’s head in the Jerusalem Temple. The worst libel to come from Apion, however, was the accusation that Jews would kidnap a Greek child, fatten him up, [sacrifice him], and ritually consume him in Jerusalem. This charge would come back to haunt the Jews 1,000 years later, and variations persist to this day.
Read more on Jerusalem Post: http://www.jpost.com/Blogs/Past-Imperfect-Confronting-Jewish-History/Apion-Intellectual-and-Anti-Semite-440996