Ariel Toaff

Ariel Toaff
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Born	1942
Died
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Occupation	Historian
Known for	Pasque di sangue (Blood Passover)
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Ariel Toaff (born 1942) is an Israeli-Italian historian and professor emeritus of medieval and Renaissance history at Bar-Ilan University. He is the son of Elio Toaff, former Chief Rabbi of Rome.

Blood Passover (first edition, 2007)

In February 2007 Ariel Toaff published Pasque di sangue: Ebrei d'Europa e omicidi rituali (Blood Passover: The Jews of Europe and Ritual Murders). In the first edition he argued that a small number of Ashkenazi Jewish extremists in northern Italy may have engaged in ritual murder of Christian children and used their blood in Passover rituals. Precise lengthy quotations from the first edition include:

“The use of the blood of Christian children in the celebration of Passover was apparently framed by precise rules, or at least this is what the depositions in the Trent trial indicate.” “The blood was used for magic and therapeutic practices.” “In some cases, the blood was mixed with dough to make the unleavened bread for Passover.” “The hostility evinced by ‘extremist’ Jews toward Christians at the time may have fueled the blood libels.” “Certain criminal acts, disguised as crude rituals, were indeed committed by extremist groups or by individuals demented by religious mania and blinded by desire for revenge against those considered responsible for their people’s sorrows and tragedies.”

Criticisms

The first edition was immediately condemned.

• Abraham Foxman (National Director, Anti-Defamation League): “It is incredible that anyone, much less an Israeli historian, would give legitimacy to the baseless blood libel accusation that has been the source of much suffering and attacks against Jews historically.” (February 2007)
• Robert Bonfil (historian): “Toaff’s book is an insult to the intelligence, an outrageous distortion of historical method… It repeats the blood libel insults scholarship.”

Toaff’s concessions and revised edition

Ariel Toaff withdrew the first edition within days. In a public statement and the afterword to the revised second edition (2008) he made the following explicit concessions:

• To forestall all possible misinterpretations, I shall summarize

the subject and the scope of my research. First I shall clarify that I have no doubts that the so-called "ritual homicides or infanticides" pertain to the realm of myth; they were not rites practised by the Jewish communities living and working in the German-speaking lands or in the North of Italy, and of which they were accused in the Middle Ages and the periods thereaf- ter. That of ritual murder is and always has been a slanderous stereotype. Nevertheless, one cannot exclude the possibility that certain criminal acts, disguised as crude rituals, were indeed committed by extremist groups or by individuals demented by religious mania and blinded by desire for revenge against those considered responsible for their people's sorrows and tragedies. However, the sole and problematic support for this hypothesis are confessions extracted with the violence of torture and tor- ment, and whose truthfulness is entirely to be demonstrated.

• The ampie body of documentation on the trial held in Trent on

the infanticide of the child Simon (1475) enabled me to conduct detailed examination of the confessions made by the accused Jews. I considered whether these confessions - also hearing in mind that they had been extracted under torture - comprised elements referable to the mentality, traditions and rites of those Jews, as regards both their daily lives and their celebration of festivals, in particular Passover. On the basis of significant comparisons and cross-checks with the Jewish sources, I reached the conclusion that there was solid evidence to suggest that a magical and symbolic use of blood, dried and reduced to powder, had with time, and despite the opposition of the rabbis, become an integrai part of particular rites and liturgies performed to celebrate Passover.

• The image that emerges from an important body of Jewish documentation, recently published by Israel Yuval, is confirmed by the account provided by the accused of Trent, which clearly indicates that this image

characterized groups of Ashkenazi extremists, whose numbers, however, are not easy to quantify. These groups, which belonged to the German Judaism ravaged by the traumas of the crusades, massacres and forced baptisms, expressed their hatred of Christian- ity in the so-called "ritual of curses" enacted during the Passover feast. According to my hypothesis, which I believe is borne out by significant evidence, these ritualized anathemas were thought to acquire terrible magical force when grains of powdered Christian blood were symbolically dissolved in the wine, turning it into the blood of Edom, or Christianity, the relentless persecutor against which the curses were directed. On conclusion of the anathematiz- ing liturgy, the poUuted wine was thrown away, without passing the lips of the celebrants. But between this dried blood used in the rite - blood which originated from unknown 'donors', alive and well, and mostly belonging to indigent families - and alleged ritual murders there was no relationship whatsoever save in the minds of judges (and not only those of Trent) as they endeavoured to prove the blood accusation against the Jews. Through their tendentious interpretations, the magical, therapeutic, alchemic, propitious or maleficent use of blood served to give plausible support to the deadly blood libel.

• As well known, Murray, a disciple of Frazer, an English

anthropologist and an egyptologist, argued that the descriptions of the sabbath contained in the witchcraft trial records were not introjections of hostile stereotypes suggested by the judges; rather, they were precise accounts of rites which had actually occurred. In other words, just as application of Murray's method gave cre- dence to the witches' nocturnal flights and diabolic couplings, so I have allegedly given credence to the myth of ritual murder, presenting it as a rite that was actually practised". As far as I am concerned, however, this is not how matters stand. I must specify once again that I too believe that so-called 'ritual murder' must be regarded as a myth and a calumny, not as a rite which pertained to the religious practices of the Jewish communities - not even in circumscribed historical contexts. This is regard- less of the fact that the rite may sometimes have had some sort of counterpart in the wretched reality of crimes committed by individuai demented by religious fanaticism [Pasque di sangue, p. 121 [117]). But it is wrong to believe that other specific prac- tices of the groups examined in my book, and which emerged from testimonies obtained under torture, can also be considered entirely equivalent to myths.

In the revised edition Toaff removed all claims of actual ritual murder or blood use, stating that his research had been into the social psychology of fear, superstition and the dynamics of medieval persecutions, not into proving the blood libel.

Resources

• First Edition of the book in English Blood Passover (August 2007)
• Revised version: Blood Passover (2016)
• Trials and Historical Methodology: In defence of Pasque di Sangue 2008 (PDF version)