Ebrei d’Europa e omicidi rituali. 366pp. Bologna: Il Mulino
Blood libels are back
First, an outline:-
...The Israeli historian Ariel Toaff argues, in Pasque di sangue, that the story of Simon, and, pari passu, other stories of ritual murder around the time of Passover, reflect practices in what he calls an extreme, “fundamentalist”, group within medieval German Judaism.
His sensationalist title, “Passovers of Blood”, is not calculated to comfort those who reject these stories as fantasies, calumnies, or tragic misunderstandings. For Professor Toaff, the Jews of Trent were typical of a new and alien Judaism which was laying down roots in northern Italy...In fact, Toaff’s profoundly negative image of Ashkenazi Jews who lived in an almost sealed world is belied by the evidence that there were Christians, even priests, on good terms with these Jews and anxious, as far as possible, to help them in their time of trial. For Toaff, rulers who befriended the Jews were mainly interested in the profitability of the Jewish loan banks.
...Therapeutic use of various types of blood was, Toaff argues, matched by magical uses: during circumcisions small quantities of blood might be gathered from the wound, mixed with wine, and even consumed; while barren women in some areas competed to seize and swallow the foreskin. Perhaps there is an analogy in the modern fashion for consuming placentas. Toaff is anxious to prove that Ashkenazi Jews did occasionally consume blood; still, there is a great gap between its therapeutic use and the killing of Christian children for their blood.
Toaff wants to take all this much further. Blood, not liberation, was, he asserts, the great theme of the Passover festival, particularly the night-time meal at the start of the festival: “a true and proper river of blood ran at Passover across the Seder table and through the pages of the Haggadah”, the order of service telling the story of the Exodus from Egypt. Here the author exploits the controversial research of Israel Yuval, who has presented many themes in the Jewish liturgy as a response to the challenge of Christianity; and there is no doubt that certain elements in the Passover ritual, such as the invocation, “Pour out your wrath upon the nations . . .”, were directed at Christian persecutors. But Toaff is carried away by his theme. Everything in the Passover Seder becomes infused with blood: the blood of the first plague, when the River Nile turned red; the blood of the Paschal lamb (even if represented by a charred bone); the haroset, a paste made to represent the mortar used by the Israelites as slaves in the land of Egypt; the wine which came to life, as it were, during the listing of the ten plagues in Egypt, when (in the German custom) a drop of wine was spilled for each plague.
Toaff wants us to believe that a small group of fanatics took these ideas about the salvific nature of blood and the necessity of vengeance so far that they conspired secretly to kill Christian children, whose murder was supposedly a re-enactment of the killing of Christ; that their leaders secretly took small quantities of powdered blood and mixed it with the special flour used for baking the three slabs of unleavened bread used at the Passover meal (despite extremely strict laws about their ingredients – exclusively flour and water); moreover, that they sprinkled powdered human blood on the wine which they spilled (but did not drink) as they enumerated the ten plagues of Egypt. Toaff uses the statements gathered from witnesses under torture in 1475 to argue this case. This is the sort of evidence he is using (drawn here from Ronald Po-Chia Hsia’s authoritative Trent 1475, 1992): “He was asked whether he saw the murdered boy. Joaff: ‘In the ditch.’ Podestà : ‘Think again.’ Joaff: ‘In the antechamber of the synagogue’”. This was under threat of torture. Then, during torture: “‘Let me down because I will say the truth.’ He was let down and asked where he saw the child in the synagogue. He said, ‘On a bench”’. According to most of these witnesses the child was killed in the synagogue antechamber, and then laid on the reading-desk, before the ark containing the scrolls of the Law (thus flouting the laws concerning ritual purity). The Jews in Trent were supposed to have cawed over the body of Simon: “Go and say to Jesus, your God, and Mary, that he will help you, pray that he will free you and take you from our hands”. Though one would expect the draining of blood to be a very messy business, no forensic evidence was provided from the synagogue; after all, Umberto Eco’s Baskerville was long dead and Sherlock Holmes unborn.
and now, the criticism:-
Ariel Toaff’s handling of the evidence is deeply flawed; he takes extorted statements at face value, and he assumes that his disparate pieces of “evidence” from Jewish sources fit together. Evidence that Jews committed acts of violence against one another or against Christians, the trade in blood, rituals of circumcision, the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, images of Pharaoh’s massacre of the innocents, early medieval parodies of Christianity, rowdy celebrations of Esther’s victory over Haman at the festival of Purim, are all woven loosely together; meanwhile, highly relevant Christian material, notably the surge in accusations of host desecration, and the friars’ campaigns against the Jews, is hardly addressed. It is there that we can identify the reasons for the repeated accusation of ritual murder, there that we see the assumption that Jews constantly recrucify Christ in countless ways, of which this is the most horrible. It was taken as proof that all Jews, ancient and contemporary, were indeed Christ-killers.
The biggest mystery about Pasque di sangue is what Toaff is trying to say about accusations of ritual murder before 1475. He takes us back to the first clear accusation of child crucifixion, in Norwich in 1144. What is disconcerting is how here and elsewhere he tells these stories in the past-indicative mood without the usual qualifications one would expect from a historian writing in Italian – a liberal use of the conditional mood, a good sprinkling of subjunctives, some sign of suspension of belief. Children did turn up dead in medieval towns; fingers were pointed at those who were seen as outsiders. Jews were terrified of the accusation of child murder, and were perfectly aware that any rumour of violence against Christians could bring destruction upon the entire community. Nor was it just Jews who were accused of child murder: heretics and witches who made bread out of the ashes of sacrificial children were an equally familiar trope. So we have to conclude that Toaff sees the Christian accusation as in some sense the source of a Jewish practice, in the following sequence: Jews are accused of doing this; some Jews begin to believe that they do this; some Jews do this. And yet at other times he is clearly arguing that these ideas emerged within the Jewish community, and that they had a life of their own there. Meanwhile the significance of blood in Christian culture, and in particular the significance of the Eucharistic sacrifice, is largely ignored as an explanation of the fantasies, for such they were, about Passover rituals, fantasies in which the unleavened bread and wine became explicit negations of the body and blood of Christ.
The blood libel has played a particularly nefarious role in the history of anti-Semitism. Similar accusations resurfaced in Damascus in 1840, and a century later in Hitler’s Germany; the persistence of the blood libel makes it all the more important that it is examined responsibly and not credulously. Ariel Toaff’s book has caused a predictable outcry in Italy, and the publishers, in Bologna, have now withdrawn this edition of Pasque di sangue – though a new one is promised. A historian who finds it so difficult to distinguish truth from fiction, however, is best advised to lay down his pen.
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