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The Controversies over the Publication of Ariel Toaff's “Bloody Passovers”*

2008; Wiley; Volume: 8; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1540-5923.2008.00257.x

1540-5923

Sabina Loriga,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

Historiographical debates do not always stay put in the academic world. It may well be that they escape from the academy more often these days. Since the 1980s, this has been happening repeatedly and in different ways in connection with a number of more or less public cases that captured the attention of a larger public on such topics as the memory of slavery, Nazi gold, the war in Algeria, or anticommunist purges. The controversy set in motion by Ariel Toaff's recent book, Pasque di sangue,1 published in 2007, is such a case. The book became the source of lengthy and tense debates as soon as it came out, in Italy at first, and soon internationally. In the first two months alone, more than 150 articles appeared in the most important Italian, Israeli, American, and even French newspapers. In view of this extraordinary public debate, Toaff's work and the public reaction to it should be of interest to historians everywhere. What is at the heart of the questions raised by the continuing debate is historical method itself as well as the context within which historians do their work and the uses of the past. With this book, the medievalist Ariel Toaff stepped out of the confines of academic history to bring public attention to bear on the old accusation of ritual murder leveled against Jews. He did this by revisiting a famous trial conducted five centuries ago. His motive is to remove Jewish history from its exploitation by modern Jewish fringe groups. In the wake of Toaff's surprising book, others have spoken out: among them many historians, and also newspapers, publishers, spokesmen for various religious faiths (Jewish, Catholic, Muslim), political groups as well, various pressure groups, broad sectors of public opinion (by means of petitions and blogs)—in sum, this book quickly set in motion all the elements of a strident political and cultural battle—think of the Dreyfus “Affaire”—although in Toaff's case we have a historian intervening publicly, not to proclaim the innocence of a condemned person, but to argue that he was in fact guilty.2 I would like to show that this debate has been carried on along a series of unconnected and discordant settings. We ought to clarify the configurations and the conflicting logical positions at work in these debates so that we can try to understand what is at stake here. Before I tackle the issues at the heart of the debates, it may be useful to go back briefly to the history of the ritual murder accusations. This accusation, the Blood Libel, as it is known, refers to atrocious crimes, infanticides, and to religious hatred, but more than that is involved: the notion that such crimes have a ritual meaning. The accusation of ritual murder is inseparable from the belief that Jews have used Christian blood as an ingredient of foods and beverages needed in the course of Passover celebrations.3 For centuries, this accusation has served to justify lynchings, trials in which the accused have no chance to defend themselves, torture, executions, or expulsions. Even when no physical harm resulted from these accusations, they have poisoned relations between Jews and Gentiles, leaving indelible marks in the memory of Jewish communities. The accusation of ritual murder has origins in the ancient past, but it has surfaced and diminished in intensity at various times. Periods of dramatic violence alternated with calmer times when the call for retribution against Jewish communities remained latent, one might say, even while it continued to be anchored in the collective imagination. Historians usually speak of three distinct phases of particular intensity. The first coincided with the time of the Crusades, when accusations of ritual murder were made in Norwich (1144), Blois (1171), Pontoise (1179), and Saragossa (1182). The second phase, driven by the fear of plague and heresy, led to accusations in Innsbruck (1462), Trent (1475), and La Guardia (1490). In the course of those dramatic events a canonical narrative was gradually defined. The child martyr sacrificed by the Jews (puer a Iudaeis necatus) is identified with the crucified body of Christ. Ritual murder becomes “a way of reiterating the accusation of deicide. The victim is a child, that is to say he is innocent. He dies as a martyr, which is the supreme form of imitatio Christi. The fact that the children die at a particularly significant time of the year—at Easter—shows the cyclical—therefore ritual—character of those events.”4 A third phase, a very late one, began with the disappearance of Tomasso di Calangiano, a Capuchin missionary, in Damascus, in 1840. This phase was to last for several decades.5 This last phase, a late development at the time when Jewish emancipation was in full swing, was not simply a survival of medieval patterns of behavior or a belated extension of earlier phases. This modern version of the ritual murder accusation actually involved a remarkable innovation by combining two distinct myths: ritual murder as reiteration of deicide was now coupled with a newer myth, that of an international Jewish plot, this being the basic ingredient of modern antisemitism. In the years following the Damascus accusation, the Jesuit publication, Civilta cattolica, launched an incessant propaganda campaign against Jews, relying precisely on those two myths.6 The last trial of this kind took place in Kiev in 1913. The accused was Mendel Beilis, who was immortalized in Bernard Malamud's novel.7 The fact remains that the accusation of ritual murder continued to surface throughout the twentieth century, and not only in Nazi Germany. In 1946, an enraged mob, 15,000 strong, killed forty survivors from the Auschwitz and Treblinka camps in the small Polish town of Kielce in the name of the old accusations8 that continue to circulate among neo-Nazi groups and in the Islamic world, where it is kept alive by the Hezbollah television station, Al-Manar, and by Syrian and Iranian newspapers.9 In sum, what we have here is a persistent myth that relied, over almost a thousand years, from Norwich to Kielce, on the repetition of the same narrative elements. A key moment in the hardening of the blood libel was the trial held in Trent, in 1475. Trent was exposed both to Italian and German cultures. At the time it was the scene of intense campaigns of preaching against Jews and witches, led by Franciscans under the leadership of Bernardino da Feltre. On the Thursday before Easter that year, a little boy, twenty-eight months old, Simonino, the son of a tanner, disappeared. His body was found three days later in a ditch near the house of Samuele de Norimberga, a leading figure of the small local Jewish community (some thirty persons in all). Even though there was evidence against a certain Johannes Schweitzer, the court accused the Jewish residents of Trent of having murdered the child for ritual purposes. The trial, under the guidance, at first, of the podesta, Giovanni da Salis, and then reopened by the bishop, Johannes Hinderbach, led to the sentencing of six Jewish men to die by fire on the piazza of the Duomo—and to the beheading of two others (who had, in the meantime, converted; a third victim died in prison a few days earlier). Four months later, more death sentences were carried out. There was widespread skepticism among leading political and religious figures. The Habsburg emperor, Sigismund, called for the trial's suspension and the Dominican Battista de Guidici, bishop of Vintimiglia, sent on a fact-finding mission by the Pope, described the accusations as nothing but “commenta et fabulae” (rumors and fables). Even the Venitian podesta of Rovereto and Pope Sixtus IV remained unconvinced. On the other hand, the trial and the convictions launched a tidal wave of popular piety in the form of virulent Jew hatred. While the accused were being tortured, Simonino's corpse began to produce miracles, to the great satisfaction of bishop Hinderbach's propaganda machine, which led to Simonino's progress toward sainthood.10 Even though the Vatican never showed much enthusiasm for this cult, Simonino would be venerated as a martyr over the course of more than three centuries.11 The trial at Trent is important for two reasons. In legal terms, the trial was held before the court of the podesta (that is to say in a secular court). The court proceeded as an inquisition, without the need to wait for an accusation or denunciation. This was a summary procedure, in which torture was largely relied upon. The accused had no right to any sort of defense. Even the papal inspector could not obtain permission for lawyers to attend.12 A significant innovation, where religious devotion is concerned, was the fact that Simonino was, in Italy, the first of a long series of martyrs a Iudaeis necati. Beginning with this trial, the propaganda devoted to Jew hatred would serve the needs of local religious devotion: “the transformation of the ritual murder story into a hagiographic legend—and where possible of the victim's body into a relic, together with the production of miracles—led to the creation of sacred spaces dedicated to the martyr. The victim's name and the story of his passion were exploited in printed calendars and collections of legends.”13 The figure of the “little Simonino” was to become, in time, an essential cultural reference in the world of German and Italian public opinion, a reference that would come up spontaneously in the course of ordinary conversations, as shown in a citation in Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life.14 The well-publicized adoration of the “little Simonino” lost some of its attraction only after the Second World War, when the Church decided to move away from its centuries-long campaign against the Jews. On 28 October 1965, on the day when the participants in the Vatican II Council approved the declaration Nostra Aetate (which removed the ancient accusation of deicide against the Jews and condemned all forms of antisemitic persecution), the bishop of Trent, Alessandro Maria Gottardi, put an end to “all forms of public devotion” intended for Simonino, whose remains were removed from the church of San Pietro and taken to an unknown destination (perhaps Bolivia?).15 Since then there have been occasional attempts to revive the cult. In 1992, the Christian Alternative movement came to the defense of “saints suppressed by the racist Jewish mafia.”16 Four years later, another Catholic group led by Francesco Ricossa deplored “an overzealous ecumenism that causes doubt among loyal Catholics and creates contradictions.” Ricossa's followers demanded the restoration of Simonino's cult. “Give us back San Simonino!” was their rallying cry.17 Ten years later, a politician of the extreme right-wing National Alliance party called for an autopsy of Simonino's body. On the other hand, in Trent the local population accepted the suppression of the cult without much fuss, while elsewhere similar suppressions led to public agitation.18 In Trent, the chapel that had been dedicated to San Simonino became a center of Interfaith meetings. In 1992, a plaque was put up in front of the house that once belonged to Samuel de Norimberga. The inscription reads: “On this site, where intolerance inscribed a dark page in human history, instituting a long lasting rift between Jews and Christians through the cult of Simonino, the city of Trent wanted to make amends with this plaque intended for future generations as a witness to an active engagement in the building of peace and toleration.”19 In the course of the twentieth century, historians have taken for granted that the accusations of ritual murder were full of inconsistencies, as they were based on confessions extracted under torture. They have also pointed to the strategic character of these accusations.20 Hermann Strack, in 1891, “could still find it necessary to affirm the innocence of the Jews in no uncertain terms, but from that point on historians have felt no need to belabor the point, which they considered a proven fact. Instead, their researches focused on the creation of the myth throughout history.”21 And yet, early in the year 2007, the Italian-Israeli medievalist Ariel Toaff, on the faculty of Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, who is also an editor of the most influential Italian journal of Jewish history (Zakhor), published Pasque di sangue. Ebrei d’Europa e omicidi rituali.22 The book's thesis seems simple: relying essentially on documents that are well known (at least those concerning the case of Simonino), Toaff argues that the hostility toward Christians among Ashkenazi Jews was so strong that the accusations made at the trials in Trent are credible, in spite of the biblical and Talmudic strictures against the spilling of blood. Toaff's argument is not just that there were Jewish murderers in the course of the Middle Ages: he maintains that in some Ashkenazi communities the blood of Christian children was used in the course of Passover celebrations and that this was a ritual performed according to minutely established rules. “The blood, in powdered form was added to the dough prepared for the special or ‘solemn’matzot, the shimmurin, but not to the ordinary ones. The shimmurin were considered among the principal symbolic foods of the Passover celebrations.”23 Toaff's analysis, which is focused on the Trent trials, depends on two main theses. The first concerns the value of the confessions made under torture. In Toaff's view, the statements made by the accused can be believed when they concern details of ritual practices that the judges could not possibly be familiar with. Toaff's second argument relies on the concordance of the confessions. The fact that a number of confessions are identical is proof, according to Toaff, of their undoubted veracity. Beyond the issue of ritual murder, the entire tenor of Toaff's book is unsettling, its pages filled with Jewish adventurers, unscrupulous men dealing in counterfeit coins, always ready to corrupt judges and to hire assassins. Above all, Toaff presents his Jews as vengeful creatures, perjurers, prepared to go with the highest bidder and invent calumnies and plots. In sum, they seem to have been perfect prototypes of the perfidious Barabas, Christopher Marlowe's Jew of Malta. The Jews of Crete, for instance, having taken refuge in Venice, are said to have been “insolent braggards who spent most of their time mumbling their incomprehensible prayers from morning till nightfall, with loud and vulgar singing, all this in a Hebrew accented in the unpleasant Ashkenazi manner.” In his earlier publications, Toaff insisted on the need to leave behind a monolithic vision of medieval Jewry. Now he presents the Ashkenazi community in Italy as a group “closed, fearful and aggressive vis-à-vis outsiders, and often incapable of accepting its painful experiences or overcoming its own ideological contradictions. Given the difficult and often tragic reality faced by the Jews, it is not surprising that they looked for an improbable answer to their predicament in the sacred texts,” he writes. “They took refuge in religious rituals and ancient myths … expressed in a confessional language that was alienating, hard and rigorous … . This was a world which continued to experience the trauma of having survived massacres and forced conversions of men, women and children. They were constantly—and vainly—attempting to understand the meaning of these disasters.”24 Toaff's own attempts at understanding his subjects owe a great deal to earlier studies of popular culture and Jewish history.25 In his preface, Toaff explains that he had been reading the documents concerning ritual murder with Carlo Ginzburg's work in mind. Ginzburg, after all, had been trying to understand the truth as perceived by the accused, with only the words of the inquisitors available to him. In books such as I Benandanti and Storia notturna,26 he showed that the accused was not necessarily a passive bystander in the proceedings. To bring to light fragments of cultures that had been marginalized and persecuted, Ginzburg devised an indirect method, using details of apparently marginal significance to recreate the context in which the trials functioned. Needless to say, such a method requires both imagination and prudence.27 To get past the coded language of the Inquisition, Ginzburg looked closely at the distance between the judges' expectations and the declarations of the accused. As he put it, in connection with the reception of Toaff's book, “I maintained that in the course of witchcraft trials, the men and the women who were subjected to torture and psychological pressures, frequently absorbed the hostile stereotypes suggested by the judges. On the other hand, when one encounters statements made by the accused that diverge from the court's expectations, we can say that what we are looking at are fragments that are to some extent free of the deformations due to the courts' attempts to erase a culture.” Toaff claims to follow Ginzburg's method, but he forgets to apply it with caution. He depends on conjecture in his reading of the documents and he relies on the convergences he finds between the accusations and the confessions: “the tortured Jews confessed precisely that which the judges were looking for, that is to say the accounts of ritual murder; between the judges' expectations and the replies of the accused there was not, on this point, any divergence.”28 Toaff's work is in line with a number of fundamental ideas expressed in recent years in the field of Jewish studies. Above all, there is a new attempt at setting aside a homogenous and permanent image of the Jewish people, as if it were in tune with the overall destiny of antisemitism. Instead, research has focused on local conditions and variations over time.29 There has also been an effort at highlighting the potential for violence found in Jewish culture. Ilan Greilsamer notes that “Israeli historians no longer believe in a Jewish society concerned only with divine commandments, a society in which there is no place for brutality. Nineteenth-century accounts are filled with fist fights in the synagogues, and in the streets, with acts such as spitting in the faces of opponents and pulling their beards, even ideologically motivated murders.”30 Following in the path of Cecil Roth's studies begun in the 1930s,31 Israel Yuval brought to light the depth of hostility felt by Ashkenazi Jews toward Christians (ritual curses, calls for vengeance, etc.). Yuval proposed a new hypothesis concerning ritual murder—a hypothesis that met with severe criticism. He suggested that, in the course of the persecutions in the wake of the First Crusade, there were Jews who chose to kill their own children rather than have them forced to convert. This tragic choice would have been the source of the Christian accusations of ritual murder. If, the argument might have been, Jews are prepared to sacrifice their own children—such is their hatred of Christians—then why would they not be capable of killing the children of their hated enemies?32 Elliott Horowitz, having deconstructed the stereotype of Jewish submission that is found notably in Sartre's famous analysis of antisemitism written in the aftermath of the Second World War, turned to the symbolic violence of the Purim celebrations and to the real violence surrounding the participation of Jews in the massacre of thousands of Christian prisoners in Jerusalem, in 614.33 Cristiana Facchini reminds us that both Toaff and Horowitz “wanted to draw attention to some aspects of the history of medieval Jewry that, as they see it, have been marginalized or avoided altogether, implicitly denied, one might say, in Jewish historiography. It is important to stress that the starting point in both cases (Toaff and Horowitz) was the desire to show, to bring to light, the level of violence to be found inside Jewish communities. In this way they expected to get past the classic conception of Jewish history as ‘lachrymose history,’ a stereotype rejected by the best specialists in this field. The aim, in sum, was to ‘normalize’ Jewish history—a project, after all, dear to several of the more radical founders of the Wissenschaft des Judentums long before the arrival of Zionism. The point was to stop seeing the Jews only as victims of history, to see them instead as agents in their own right, with their vices and their virtues.”34 Ariel Toaff belongs to that tradition in Jewish studies, as he is rightly worried about reducing Jewish history to the history of antisemitism.35 But the fact remains that no one before him had asked whether “the accusations of ritual murder could have referred to something real…”36 In his book, Pasque di sangue, Toaff offers to reopen “the debate” over the reality of the ritual crimes. Moreover, he does not limit himself to an audience of medievalists or of specialists in Jewish history: he writes for a larger public. His is a delicate position because he is not just a historian, sometimes called the “red rabbi”: he is also the son of Elio Toaff, who had served as the Grand Rabbi of Rome, and, as such, stood at the absolute moral apex of Italian Judaism. The publisher, Il Mulino of Bologna, carried away by enthusiasm for Toaff's book, printed 3,000 copies. Let us look closely at the new book. The title, Pasque di sangue, naturally brings to mind the blood of Christ, especially for Italian readers. But the title also suggests—because “Pasque” is plural, meaning not Passover, but Passovers—a long history, often repeated. The subtitle, “The Jews of Europe and Ritual Killings,” assumes a general perspective: why such a broad subtitle, when the author's research essentially concerns only a single case, that of Simonino of Trent? The book's cover depicts a man dressed in medieval clothes. He has a beard and holds a knife in his hand, as he is getting ready to cut the throat of a child lying on a bed of thorns. Overhead, an angel can be seen in a cloud. The image refers to the passage in Genesis 22, defined in Hebrew as the lemme of Aqedat yishaq—in Christian culture it is known as the sacrifice of Isaac. The book's blurb tells the reader that “this book takes on, courageously, one of the most controversial themes of the history of European Jews … rereading the vast documentation of this trial and of many others without prejudice… the author explains the ritual and therapeutic meaning of blood in Jewish culture and reaches the conclusion that as far as Ashkenazi Judaism is concerned, the ritual murder accusation was not always an invention.”37 Two days before the book's publication, the Corriere della Sera published an advance review in which Sergio Luzzatto writes that Ariel Toaff demonstrates that between the years 1100 and 1500, approximately, “in a large region where German was spoken, between the Rhine, the Danube and the Adige, some Jews really performed human sacrifices several times.” Luzzatto's review describes Toaff's book as magnificent history. Toaff is praised for his scholarship: “he displays an extraordinary mastery in the fields of history, theology and anthropology.” As for Toaff's exemplary independence of mind, “after the tragedy of the Shoah, it is understandable that the blood libel should have become a taboo topic. Further, that it had become the clearest proof, not of the perfidy of the accused, but of the judges' racism. Today only an act of unheard of intellectual courage could have led to the reopening of the case. The starting point of the investigation is a question as precise as it is delicate: when the question of the crucifixion of children on the eve of Passover and the mixing of their blood in the making of matzot comes up, are we talking of myths, of ancient and ideological beliefs, or are we talking about rituals, that is to say, real events, prescribed by the rabbis? Now this question has been courageously answered.”38 The next day, more praise came from the medievalist Franco Cardini, who greeted Toaff's scholarship and courage with enthusiasm. A long excerpt from his review merits being quoted here: “Hats off to Ariel Toaff … he offers the reader not only exemplary historical research based on authentic sources and on an up to date reading of the critical literature, but he also gives us the example of an act of intellectual honesty that will undoubtedly have consequences …. Naturally, he does not provide definitive proof of actions that would be truly upsetting…. He limits himself, with limpid prudence and exemplary courage, to observing that definitive proof is lacking for declaring that this was a calumny; absent such proof … no one is authorized to deny, a priori, the possibility that the investigations carried out by the authorities at the time may be believable. …The history of the people of Israel in our Europe has been an uninterrupted sequence of violence and injustice, culminating in an attempt at genocide during the Second World War. Well, is it really so unhistorical, so entirely lacking in plausibility, to think that in the midst of the thousands of innocent and silent victims, there may have been someone who—more ferocious, more desperate and less resigned than the others—may have conceived and actually carried out some atrocious plan of vengeance? I have to admit that the issue is not entirely and purely a matter of history. I am certain that the reasonable suspicion raised by Ariel Toaff has more than once been at least briefly considered by a number of other historians. However, between certain distant and somber pages of the past and today, there is the dark wing of history: the sad and deep sea of the Shoah. Only a Jew would dare to raise doubts and formulate hypotheses such as the ones Ariel Toaff proposes now, in prudent and measured words. Whatever happens, expect polemics. I would like to know what other Jewish specialists think. As for us, gentiles, we can only stop at the edge of the abyss, respectfully.”39 The book proved to be a bombshell. Selling out in two days, the book provoked irritable comments in the newspapers. Here are some headlines: “Scandalous book. Human sacrifices, the Jews divided”; “Human sacrifices really happened”; “Yes, there were true bloody Passovers”; “Simonino, case reopened”; “Simonino at the root of a dispute”; and “What if Toaff is the vampire of the Jews?”40 Throughout this media circus, one can find anachronisms galore (“fundamentalism” is hardly an accurate word when applied to happenings in the fifteenth century) and inaccuracies (the secular court frequently confused with the Inquisition's court and one newspaper going so far as to maintain that Simonino may have been Jewish). This was not unexpected, to be sure. Editors obviously went out of their way to provoke a scandal. A few days after the book's publication we find the author in the studios of Canale 5, a network not usually identified with cultural topics—hardly the most appropriate site for breaking ancient taboos. As Carlo Ginzburg put it: “that so serious a topic should be approached with such superficial irresponsibility is disconcerting. And yet, a book of this kind found a publisher (who had been thought respectable) and readers too. … Such an absence of critical discernment is deplorable. How can we explain it? In some ways one can see the attraction for this rumor in the media. For many it proved irresistible.”41 The reaction of most historians was extremely critical.42 Among the criticisms made, three problems were especially important. The first concerns the use made of sources. Inquisitorial proceedings, which depended on confessions extracted by torture, do not allow historians to observe the “voices” of the accused. Further, the fact that dozens, perhaps hundreds of accounts of ritual murder resemble each other does not prove, in and of itself, that such killings actually occurred. This may in fact prove that the confessions were false (the accused told whatever the judges wanted them to say).43 Toaff has taken over, uncritically, the partisan notion formulated by the bishop of Trent (whose views caused a good deal of perplexity in Rome at the time), who ignored all the evidence against the notion of ritual murder, including all the papal bulls and all the imperial and royal decrees that were issued between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries in unequivocal rejection of the blood libel. Toaff relied imprudently on the testimony of Jewish converts and on hagiographical narratives such as those of Bonelli (1747) and Divina (1902), written obviously in support of Simonino's elevation to sainthood. Using hagiographical sources without taking precautions raises a fundamental question: is it possible to study the question of ritual murder accusations narrowly, in isolation, without analyzing the cultural context and, above all, without reconstructing the long development of stereotypes of Jewish difference in Christian theology?44 According to some historians, Toaff did not merely misinterpret but actually manipulated his sources in his effort to distinguish between Ashkenazi Jewry (violent and “fundamentalist”) and Italian Jewry (civilized and tolerant).45 A second problem with Toaff's approach has to do with the mythic dimension of the blood libel. Toaff confuses the myth with the ritual.46 Worse, he is in the grip of the myth. He keeps thinking from within the myth. Is it possible to approach the question of ritual murder or that of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion logically, factually?“Both have been exposed as false again and again. This has not kept millions of people, in Russia and now mostly in the Arab world, from swearing that they are true and that they provide an explanation of the world's history.”47 In the way of myths of power, the blood libel acts almost magically: it depends on realism while at the same time removing itself from the logic of proof.48 This is wh