Blood, betrayal, torture, and surrender are interwoven in the story of an Italian Jew, Dr Ariel Toaff, as if penned by his compatriot Umberto Eco. Dr Toaff was following a mystery, and then chanced upon a frightful discovery. Horrified, he bravely soldiered on, until he announced what he had learned. Suddenly he found himself a hated, hunted man. After a short time under the full pressure of his community he repented and recanted, a broken man.
Dr Toaff is the son of the Rabbi of Rome and a professor of Judaic studies in the Jewish University of Bar Ilan, not far from Tel Aviv. He made a name for himself by his deep study of medieval Jewry. His three-volume Love, Work, and Death (subtitled Jewish Life in Medieval Umbria) is an encyclopaedia for those who explore this type of arcana. While studying his subject he discovered that the medieval Ashkenazi Jewish communities of North Italy practiced a particularly horrible form of human sacrifice. Their wizards and adepts stole and crucified Christian babies, obtained their blood and used it for magical rituals evoking the Spirit of Vengeance against the hated goyim.
In particular, he dwelt on the case of St Simon of Trent. This two-year old child from the Italian town of Trent was kidnapped from his home by a few Ashkenazi Jews on the eve of Passover, 1475 AD. That night, the kidnappers murdered the child, drew his blood, pierced his flesh with needles, and then crucified him head down, calling “So may all Christians by land and sea perish.” Thus did they celebrate their Passover, an archaic ritual of blood and death in its most literal form, without any metaphoric “blood to wine” shift.
The killers were apprehended, confessed, and were found guilty by the Bishop of Trent. Immediately, the Jews took their protest to the Pope and he sent out the bishop of Ventimiglia to investigate. He allegedly accepted a hefty bribe from the Jews and concluded that the child was murdered by Hamas in order to besmirch Israel, as there were no Tsahal shell casings found at the scene of the crime. “Simon had been killed by Christians with the intention of ruining the Jews,” said the pre-war Jewish Encyclopedia, in a clear case of premonition: the same argument was used by Jews in 2006 while explaining away the mass murder of children in Kafr Qana.1However, in the 15th century the Jews were influential, yes, but all-powerful, no. They could not deal with the world like they did in 2002 after their massacre of Jenin by ordering everybody to buzz off. They had no American veto in the Security Council. They could not bomb Rome, and the word “anti-Semitism” was not invented until some 400 years later. Yet still they were given a fair deal, which is not as good as the preferential treatment they demand today, but is as much as the rest of us can hope for. Pope Sixtus IV assembled a commission of six cardinals, chaired by the best legal mind of that time, and after testimony and due deliberation this Supreme Court found the murderers guilty as charged. Compare for yourself the Catholic version2 and Jewish version3 of the events. The records of the trial have survived centuries and are still available in Vatican.
In 1965, the Roman Catholic Church began its own process of Perestroika. Those were the halcyon days of Vatican II, when modernizers re-examined the foundations of their traditions, hoping to update the faith and to fit it into the new Jewish-friendly narrative of modernity. In short, the bishops wanted to be loved by the liberal press.
The ever-watchful Jews used the opportunity to push the bishops into decommissioning St Simon of Trent, and they were happy to oblige. They had already set the groundwork by declaring, in a bizarre ritual, that the biblical Hebrews had nothing to do with the Crucifixion of Christ. They also formally declared that the Church was guilty of persecuting Jews. The crucifixion of an Italian baby was a small matter compared with these theological reversals. In a hasty decision, the bishops ruled that the confessions of the killers were unacceptable because they were obtained under torture, and thus the accused were innocent, while the young martyr was anything but. His cult was discontinued and forbidden, and the remains of the martyred child were removed and dumped into a secret place to avoid resumption of pilgrimage.11 www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/007667.php
2 www.stsimonoftrent.com/
3 www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=803&letter=S
And now we come back to Dr Ariel Toaff. While going through the papers of the trial, he made a staggering discovery: the confessions of the killers, instead of being dictated by zealous Church investigators, contained material totally unknown to the Italian churchmen or police. The killers had belonged to a small and withdrawn Ashkenazi community, and they had practiced their own unique rites
– rites quite different from those used by the native Italian Jews. These Ashkenazi rituals were faithfully reproduced in their confessions, though they were not known to the Crime Squad of the day. “These liturgical formulas in Hebrew with a strong anti-Christian tone cannot be projections of the judges who could not know these prayers, which didn’t even belong to Italian rites but to the Ashkenazi tradition,” Toaff wrote. A confession is of value only if it contains some true and verifiable details of the crime the police did not know of. This iron rule of criminal investigation was observed in the Trent trials.
This discovery has the potential to shake, shock, and reshape the Church. The noble and learned rabbi Dr Toaff has brought back St Simon, the double victim of 15th century vengeance and 20th century Perestroika. This discovery requires humble repentance from the Vatican doctors who dismissed ancient Church traditions, forgot the murdered child, with an airy wave of their hands, for friendship of important American Jews. They still do not admit their grave error. Monsignor Iginio Rogger, a church historian who in the 1960’s [mis]led the investigation into St Simon’s case, would only say that the confessions were unreliable because “the judges used horrible tortures.” 1 This sounds anti-Zionist (and hence anti-Semitic) to me! Calling for the rejection of confessions obtained under torture would let all the Palestinian prisoners out of Jewish jails; it was also anti-American, for the US recognizes the value of torture and practices it in Guantanamo and elsewhere. It was a holocaust-denier remark, for thus they invalidate the Nürnberg trials. Renowned Jewish American lawyer and torture fan Alan Dershowitz might have tell it to Rogger, but somehow he resisted the temptation.
1 www.trentinocultura.net/orizzonti/notizie/Anno-2006/rogger.doc_cvt.asp
Moreover, the Italian state and church authorities of 15th c acted humanely by applying torture to Jews, for this was application of Jewish law to Jews, as the Jewish law approves of torture. So we were told not only by Alain Dershowitz, but by a Jewish expert on ethics, Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir, Business Ethics Center of Jerusalem, in an article with alluring title The Jewish Ethicist – The Ethics of Torture.2 He was asked: “What does Judaism say about torturing suspects in order to obtain life-saving information?” and he replies:
“Any person with life-saving information is obligated to reveal it (duty of rescue), and that the right of selfdefense would justify aggressive actions to compel the knower to disclose his information... By failing to act the potential informant makes it possible for a calamity to occur. . . It is thus clear that the law of pursuit sanctions any form of bodily force, including mayhem, when necessary to preserve the life of the victim… In Jewish law, the hinge of the argument is the obligation of the informant himself to help others. In this surprising fashion, the sanction for torture becomes an expression of his humanity, rather than of his inhumanity. We are allowed to cause him pain precisely because we insist, despite his enmity, on viewing him as someone who has his own ethical obligations to his fellow human beings. “
1 www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-02-10-italy_x.htm
2 www.aish.com/societyWork/work/The_Jewish_Ethicist__-_The_Ethics_ of_Torture.asp
Thus, the church investigators were “allowed to cause [the Jews] pain precisely because we insist, despite their enmity, on viewing them as someone who has his own ethical obligations to help his fellow human beings”. In short, “the sanction for torture becomes an expression of his humanity”; and Jews applied this norm in many Israeli jails, in jail of al-Khiayam in the occupied South Lebanon, and as advisers to Abu Ghraib. So what’s wrong with applying this Jewish norm to Jews?
“I wouldn’t want to be in Toaff’s shoes, answering for this to historians who have seriously documented this case,” boasted Rogger on USA Today. As a believer, I think Toaff’s shoes are vastly preferable to those of Rogger, who will have to answer for slighting the saint in Heaven.
Moreover, this Trento crime was no rare event. Toaff discovered many cases of bloody sacrifices connected with the mutilation of children, outpouring of blood, and its baking in Matzo (unleavened bread) spanning five hundred years of European history.1Blood, this magic drink, was a popular medicine in ancient times. Herod tried to keep young by bathing in the blood of babies, alchemists used blood to turn lead into gold. Jewish wizards were no exception, meddling in magic as much as anybody else. There was a thriving market in such delicacies as blood, powder made of blood, and bloody matzo. Jewish vendors sold it accompanied with rabbinic letters of authorization; the highest value was put on the blood of a goy katan, a gentile child, but typically vendors had to do with circumcision blood. Child sacrifices were “instinctive, visceral, virulent actions and reactions, in which innocent and unknowing children became victims of the love of God and of vengeance,” Toaff wrote in the book’s preface. “Their blood bathed the altars of a God who, it was believed, needed to be guided, sometimes impatiently pushed to protect and to punish.”
1 http://archivio.corriere.it/archiveDocumentServlet.jsp?url=/documenti_ globnet/corsera/2007/02/co_9_070206066.xml
Punish? This somewhat cryptic remark can be understood by reading Israeli professor Israel Yuval’s book Two Nations in Thy Womb. Yuval explained that blood libations were necessary (in the eyes of Jewish magicians) to bring forth Divine Vengeance upon the goyim. Toaff improved upon Yuval by giving some background on how blood was used by Jewish and non-Jewish magicians in the Middle Ages, and by including a discussion of the anti-Christian elements in Jewish magic, such as the crucifixion of victims and the cursing of Christ and the Virgin. In this Toaff is supported by (admittedly, more timid) Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence by Elliott Horowitz. Horowitz explores strange Jewish rituals: flagellating the Virgin, destroying crucifixes, beating up and killing Christians.1
But that’s all over now. We can look at the past and say: yes, some Jewish wizards and mystics practiced human sacrifice. They murdered children, mutilated their bodies, and used their blood in order to outpour Divine Wrath on their non-Jewish neighbors. They mocked Christian rites by using Christian blood instead of the blood of Christ. The Church and people all over Europe were right. The accusing Europeans (and Arabs, and Russians) were not bigoted, they were angry – and they fully understood what they saw. In the end, they punished the culprits and they left the innocent in peace. We, Christians, should look back on this dreadful page of history with pride that the Church was just and humane. And let us shed a tear or two for the poor children destroyed by these wrath-seeking monsters. Jews may be more modest and cease carrying their historical wounds on the sleeve: their forefathers thrived among the goyim despite these terrible doings by some of their coreligionists; yet in the Jewish state, the sin of one Palestinian is visited upon every man, woman, and child. We can also dismiss with a shudder the whining of Israel’s friends who dismissively label the Jenin Massacre and the Qana Massacre as a ‘blood libel’, now that we know how truly bloody the original crimes were, and that it is not a baseless libel at all.
1 www.iupress.indiana.edu/journals/jss/jss4-2.html
Let us hope that this great, daring act of Professor Toaff will become a turning point in the life of the Church. The pandering Perestroika swing of Vatican II went too far. Remember that the Russian Perestroika ended with a collapse of the whole enchilada. While anti-papists fear the antichrist sitting on the See of St Peter, the real danger lies in a Gorbachev.
In the Italian town of Orvieto on the Adriatic shore, the Jews demanded the removal of an exhibition of great artistic value and the cessation of processions commemorating the miracle of Trani.1 There, a millennium ago, a consecrated host was stolen from the church by a Jewess. The thief tried to fry the body of Christ in oil, but miraculously the host turned to flesh and started bleeding profusely – so much so that holy blood poured throughout the house. Indeed such cases of host desecration are well attended all over Europe; they were well described by Yuval, Horowitz, and Toaff; they indeed occurred, and only the infamous Jewish chutzpah could possibly have induced The Roman Association of Friends of Israel into writing a letter to the Pope demanding an end to this one-thousand-year-old observance. And they got their wish. The Church bent over, the panels were dismantled, the procession cancelled, and profound apologies to Jews were issued – to the vast satisfaction of Israeli ambassadors Gideon Meir (to Rome) and Oded Ben Hur (to the Vatican) who dictated the capitulation.
1 www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/815206.html
“Strange world indeed ours,” wrote Domenico Savino in the excellent web-magazine Effedieffe. “The offense is brought to the Christian Faith and forgiveness is asked of those who had perpetrated it.” 1 Savino wonders why it was out of the question to politely ignore the Jewish demands, and he quotes at length the words of Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican representative at this capitulation. Kasper held nothing back. He denies that the Church is the True and Only Chosen Israel, asserts the equal position of the Jews as “elder brothers”, denies the necessity of Christ, and asks forgiveness from the Jews while promising “a new spring for the Church and the world.”
“Spring for the Church?” exclaims Savino. “Ah, but we have heard it already! The Pope said after Vatican II ‘We waited for the spring and the storm has come.’ That spring has been enough for us and after this reconciliation in Orvieto I do not want anymore to hear the word ‘spring’ and see the wide smirk of satisfaction of ‘elder brothers’ Gideon Meir and Oded Ben Hur!”
The Perestroika came not only to Italy, and not only within the Catholic Church. In Germany a new sacrilege is being prepared: a “politically-correct Bible” with the story of the Passion being changed so as not to cause discomfort to Jews.2 The title is misleading. They have as much right to call their bastard product “the new German translation of the Bible free of gender bias and anti-Semitism” as I have to bottle my piss and market it as “wine free of intoxicants.” Changing one letter in the Bible is equivalent to ruining the world, says the Talmud and adduces an example of a Torah scroll where one word is changed, from “meod” (very) to “mavet” (death). Such a death-celebrating Torah would surely cause our world to perish. Sanitized scripture will undoubtedly star Jews and their uniquely Jewish suffering, while the Church will be assigned a minor role as villain. It cannot help but rehabilitate Judas and paint Christ as a pathetic madman. Likewise, removing “gender bias” will do nothing but profane the Annunciation, this great divide between the sterile mono-causality of the Jews and Christian concept of a miraculous union of Heaven and Earth. Indeed the Christian model was so successful that the Jews adopted it into their Cabbala, and apparently decided to dump their stultifying old mono-causality onto the Germans.
1 www.effedieffe.com/interventizeta.php?id=1766¶metro=religione 2 www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2023998,00.html
In England, an old liberal weekly, the Observer, changed its feathers and became a Neocon nest, supporting war and the unholy alliance of Bush-Blair. In a perfectly logical sequitur the paper also renounced Christ and chose the Jews, as evidenced in their book reviews.1 Here Adam Mars-Jones prefers Oscar Schindler over General Adam von Trott (who was executed for his part in the Generals’ Plot of 1944): “That’s what made Schindler’s List such a startling film: it followed Jewish ethics by showing the hero’s outer journey, for once, rather than an inner one. The guy was tainted – so what? That’s his business, as long as he saved Jews. His mitzvahs earned him his place among the Righteous gentiles, and in the absence of an afterlife (not really a feature of Jewish belief) that’s all that can be said. Let’s have more of that tone, and less of a cult of martyrdom. Veneration for sacrifice, for purely symbolic victory, can distort the most well-meaning enterprise, and risks insulting the dead, who had no options.”
1 http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2005283,00.html
The Observer reviewer made clear his choice for Judas and Caiaphas (though tainted, he wanted to save Jews) and against Jesus Christ (who was the Martyr, and the Sacrifice). His call for “less of a cult of martyrdom, less veneration for sacrifice, for purely symbolic victory” would make Golgotha the final last word, with no Resurrection in sight. Who needs Christian virtues? Man’s faults and vices are “his business, as long as he saved Jews”, and the best a goy can hope for is a “place among the Righteous gentiles.” From this point of view, St Simon and other children did not die in vain; they helped the Jews call for God’s Vengeance, and that is the best they could possibly wish. Likewise, British soldiers could not hope for a better fate than to die for Israel on the streets of Basra, or Teheran, or elsewhere.
Thus, in Rome, Berlin, and London the Jews won a round or two in their competition with the Church. By stubbornly hanging on and never looking back, never apologizing, always working against Christianity, they have succeeded in replacing in many simple minds the images of the Via Dolorosa, Golgotha, and the Resurrection with their gross misrepresentation of human history as a long line of innocent Jews suffering blood libels and holocausts, topped off by Zionist redemption in the Holy Land, with the Church as the villain forever guilty of every Jewish death.
The consequences are not only theological. Britain, Italy, and Germany become accomplices in the Jewish strangulation of Christian Palestine, in the blockade of Gaza, in the robbery of Church lands in Bethlehem1 and Jerusalem.2 They support the American Drang Nach Osten. Worse: they lose their connection to God and their empathy to fellow human beings dries up, as if touched by a blind spirit of vengeance conjured up by innocent blood.
1 www.stopthewall.org/downloads/pdf/book/jerusalemandbethlehem.pdf
The publication of Dr Toaff’s book could become a nota-minute-too-early turning point in the Western history, going from an apology of Judas to the adoration of Christ. Yes, his narrative of murdered children has done little more than open a tiny crack in the huge edifice of Jewish exceptionalism built up in Europeans’ mind. But great edifices can fall in a moment, as we learned on 9/11.
Apparently the Jews felt it, and they attacked Toaff like a maddened swarm.1 A renowned Jewish historian, a rabbi and the son of a rabbi, writing about 500-year-old events – why should they bestir themselves? He was not picking on the Jews. As he made clear, in the Middle ages the use of blood, necromancy, and black magic was the big thing. Witches and wizards, gentiles and Jews, everybody did it! So welcome to the human race, warts and all! But this is all too demeaning for the arrogant Chosenites.
“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,” said ADL National Director Abe Foxman. The Anti-Defamation League called the book “baseless and playing into the hands of antiSemites everywhere.” Not much of an historian, not much of a rabbi, Foxman has a priori knowledge, based on faith and conviction, that it is “baseless”. But then, he said the same about the Jenin Massacre.
In a press release, Bar-Ilan University “is expressing great anger and extreme displeasure at Toaff, for his lack of sensitivity in publishing his book about blood libels in Italy. His choice of a private publishing firm in Italy, the book’s provocative title and the interpretations given by the media to its contents have offended the sensitivities of Jews around the world and harmed the delicate fabric of relations between Jews and Christians. Bar-Ilan University strongly condemns and repudiates what is seemingly implied by Toaff’s book and by reports in the media concerning its contents, as if there is a basis for the blood libels that led to the murder of millions of innocent Jews.”
1 www.israelshamir.net/English/Eng9.htm
These are firing words. Toaff came under strong community pressure; he was about to find himself, at 65, out on the street – probably without pension, snubbed by old friends and students alike, ostracized and excommunicated. Probably his life was threatened as well: Jews employ professional killers to deal with such nuisances. In the old days, they were called rodef, now they are called kidon, still as efficient as of old, and they were intercepted less often than bloodthirsty maniacs. His reputation would be annihilated: the Sue Blackwells of the internet would consult with their “Jewish friends” and declare him a Nazi;1 ADL-sponsored rags like Searchlight would discover, invade, or invent his private life; many small Jews in the Web would denigrate him in their blogs and in their flagship, the Wikipedia.2 Who would befriend him? Probably not a single Jew, and not many Christians.
It is true that in the beginning, he did put up a brave fight. “I will not give up my devotion to the truth and academic freedom even if the world crucifies me.”3 Toaff explained to Haaretz that he stood by every contention in his book, and enumerated some of the facts and evidence he discovered that shed new light on the medieval blood accusations against the Jews.
But Toaff was not made of stern stuff. Like Winston Smith, the main character of Orwell’s 1984, he broke down
1 www.sue.be/pal/
2 http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:I0lp1CRavAIJ:en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Blood_libel+wikipedia+toaff&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2
in a mental cellar of Jewish inquisition.1 He published a full apology, stopped distribution of his book, promised to submit it to Jewish censorship, and “also promised to donate all the funds forthcoming from the sale of his book to the Anti-Defamation League” of good Abe Foxman.
Haaretz reported that now “He now wants to make it clear that the Jews of Trent did not murder Simon or any other Christian children for ritual purposes. His conclusion is that Jews could not possibly have murdered Christian children for their blood.” If they would turn the screw a bit more, Toaff would confess he murdered St Simon personally in order to place the blame on blameless Jews.
His last words were as touching as those of Galileo recanting his heresy: “I will never allow any Jew-hater to use me or my research as an instrument for fanning the flames, once again, of the hatred that led to the murder of millions of Jews. I extend my sincerest apologies to all those who were offended by the articles and twisted facts that were attributed to me and to my book.”
Thus Ariel Toaff surrendered to community pressure, trading his academic integrity for some peace and quiet. His future work is forever compromised by the deal he was forced to make, but who are we to judge the man? We cannot imagine the mental tortures he was subjected to by the Jewish Gestapo of the ADL. We should not blame him for his human weakness, on the contrary, we should be grateful for his discovery. What he gave us is enough. In a way, his contribution is similar to that of Benny Morris and other Israeli New Historians who did little more than verify and repeat information we first learned from Palestinian sources like Abu Lughud and Edward Said. But Palestinian sources are never trusted – only Jewish sources are considered trustworthy in our Jewish-centered universe. Thus Morris et al helped millions to free themselves from the enforced Zionist narrative. This would not be necessary if we were able to believe a goy vs. Jew. Maybe it’s time we asked an Arab about the Expulsion of 1948, an Italian about St Simon, maybe even a German about the postwar deportations.
1 www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1170359860024&pagename= JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Ariel Toaff has freed many captive minds by repeating what we knew from a variety of Italian, English, German, and Russian sources. If ‘blood libel’ turned out to be not a libel but just another criminal case, maybe other Jewish claims should be re-examined? Maybe the Russians were not guilty of pogroms? Maybe Ahmadinejad is not a new Hitler bent on destruction? Maybe Muslims are not evil Jew-haters?
Ariel Toaff also gave us a glimpse of the powerful eddies flowing through organized Jewry, how troop discipline is maintained, how dissidents are punished, how uniformity of mind is achieved, and how the media swarm is directed at targets. Jewry is indeed exceptional in this regard. A Christian (or Muslim) scientist who uncovers an ancient Church scandal is not likely to be terrorized into obedience; he would not be ostracized even if he twists the facts into the most outrageous, vile view possible (a-la Dan Brown); even if excommunicated, the scientist or the writer would enjoy global support, as Salman Rushdee, Voltaire, and Tolstoy discovered. Neither Church nor Ummah command this sort of blind discipline. Neither Pope nor Imam wields the spellbinding powers of Mr Abe Foxman. Foxman does not care about truth, he aims for what is (in his view) good for Jewry. No amount of witnesses, not even a live broadcast of Jewish blood sacrifice would force him to accept any unpleasant truth. He can explain anything away, all he needs is our trust and faith. We saw it in the case of Qana bombardment, when Israeli planes destroyed a building and killed some fifty children (surely far more than the most bloodthirsty wizard of Umbria ever killed). First the Jewish-led media denied it, then they blamed the victims. Do not expect Toaff’s book will convince Jews – nothing can.
Do not envy this unity of Jewish hearts and minds; this unity chains Jews together under one yoke. This unity’s obverse side is that No Jew Is Free. A man is forced to become a Jew by his parents; he has no freedom of mind on any stage; he has to follow orders from birth till death. Until one can answer the question “Is it good for Jews?” with “Who cares?” one will remain prisoner on parole, a puppet dancing to a tune we can’t hear. Sooner or later they will pull the string. Sooner or later you’ll have to lie, to search for weasel words, to deny what you know is right and true.
Like the Kingdom of Heaven, freedom is yours for asking. Freedom is Christ, for a man chooses Christ with his heart, not with his foreskin. You are free when you accept Christ and are able to reply as the Gospel says (Matth 5:37) “Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes, I am a Christian’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No, I am not a Jew.’ Luckily, it is possible. Toaff could have had it; what a pity his courage failed him!
His fate reminds me that of Uriel (almost the same name!) Acosta.1 A noble forerunner of Spinoza, Acosta attacked Rabbinic Judaism and was excommunicated. “A sensitive soul, Acosta found it impossible to bear the isolation of excommunication, and he recanted,” writes Encyclopedia Britannica. “Excommunicated again after he was accused of dissuading Christians from converting to Judaism, he made a public recantation after enduring years of ostracism. This humiliation shattered his self-esteem, and he shot himself.” Acosta and Toaff have this in common – they went far, but not far enough.
1 born c. 1585, Oporto, Portugal - died April 1640, Amsterdam
Masters of Discourse
by Israel Shamir
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