The Bloody Passovers of Dr Toaff
By Israel Shamir
http://www.israelshamir.net/English/Eng11.htm
Dr Toaff is the son of the Rabbi of Rome and a professor 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-volumed Love, Work, and Death (subtitled Jewish Life in Medieval Umbria) is an encyclopaedia of this admittedly narrow area. 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 by a few Ashkenazi Jews from his home on the eve of Passover 1475 AD. At night, the kidnappers murdered the child; drew his blood, pierced his flesh with needles, crucified him head down calling “So may all Christians by land and sea perish”, and thus they celebrated their Passover, an archaic ritual of outpouring blood and killed babies, in the most literal form, without usual metaphoric “blood-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 had sent the bishop of Ventimiglia to investigate. He allegedly accepted a hefty bribe from the Jews and concluded that the child was murdered by a Hamas mine in order to besmirch Israel, as there was no Tsahal ordnance found on the beach of Trent. “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.
However, in 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 “antisemitism” was invented 400 years later. They were given a fair deal which is much worse than preferred treatment: Pope Sixtus IV assembled a commission of six cardinals chaired by the best legal mind of that time, for retrial; and this Supreme Court found the murderers guilty. See more for a Catholic version and a Jewish version of the events. The records of the trial have survived centuries and are still available in Vatican.
In 1965, the Roman Catholic Church entered a perestroika[i]. These were the halcyon days of the Vatican II when the modernizers uprooted the foundations of tradition hoping to update the faith and to fit it into the new Jewish-friendly narrative of modernity; in plain prose, the bishops wanted to be loved by the liberal press.
The ever-watchful Jews used the opportunity and pushed the bishops to decommission St Simon of Trent. They were happy to oblige: already in bizarre ritual, the Church leaders had found the Jews free from guilt for Crucifixion of Christ while admitting the Church’s guilt for persecution of Jews; the crucifixion of an Italian baby was a small matter compared with this reversal. In a hasty decision, the bishops ruled that the confessions of the killers were unacceptable because 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 in a secret place to avoid resumption of pilgrimage.
And now we come back to Dr Ariel Toaff. While going through the papers of the trial, he made a staggering discovery: instead of being dictated by the zealous investigators under torture, the confessions of the killers contained material totally unknown to the Italian churchmen or police. The killers belonged to the small and withdrawn Ashkenazi community, they practiced their own rites, quite different from those used by the native Italian Jews; these rites 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 Trent trials.
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… this Trento crime was not an exception: Toaff discovered many cases of such 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. Blood, this magic drink, was a popular medicine of the time, and of any time: Herod tried to keep young bathing in blood of babies, alchemists used blood to turn lead into gold. Jewish wizards meddled in magic and used it as much as anybody. 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 blood of a goy katan, a gentile child, much more usual was blood of circumcision. Such blood 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."
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Now it is behind us. We can look at the past and say: yes, some Jewish wizards and mystics practiced human sacrifices. They murdered children, mutilated their bodies and used their blood in order to outpour Divine Wrath on their non-Jewish neighbours. They mocked Christian rites by using Christian blood instead of blood of Christ. The Church and the people all over Europe were right. The Europeans (and the Arabs, and the Russians) weren’t crazy bigots, they understood what they saw. They punished the culprits but they left the innocent in peace. We, humans, can look at this dreadful page of history with pride, and 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 despite these terrible doings by some of their coreligionists, while in the Jewish state, sins of some Palestinians are visited upon all of them. We can also dismiss with shudder the whining of Israel’s friends when they want us not to see the Jenin Massacre or Qana Massacre for – yes, exactly, this is like the “blood libel”, i.e. not a libel at all.
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29 Jul 2008, 4:26 pm
