Ariel Toaff
Blood
Passover
Book
BLOOD PASSOVER By Ariel Toaff
Articles
The Bloody Passovers of Dr Toaff By
Israel Shamir 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.' .........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.
Quotes
Moreover, 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."
During this period, Jewish merchants, from the cities in the valley of the
Rhône, Verdun, Lione, Arles and Narbonne, in addition
to Aquisgrana, the capital of the empire in the times
of Louis the Pious (Louis I); and in Germany from the centres
of the valley of the Rhine, from Worms, Magonza and Magdeburg; in Bavaria
and Bohemia, from Regensburg and Prague - were active
in the principal markets in which slaves (women, men,
eunuchs) were offered for sale, by Jews, sometimes
after abducting them from their houses. From Christian Europe the human
merchandise was exported to the Islamic lands of Spain, in which there
was a lively market. The castration of these slaves,
particularly children, raised their prices, and was no
doubt a lucrative and profitable practice.
The first testimony relating to the
abduction of children by Jewish merchants active in
the trade flowing into Arab Spain, comes down to us in a letter from
Agobard, archbishop of Lyon in the years 816-840. The French prelate
describes the appearance at Lyons of a Christian
slave, having escaped from Córdoba, who had been
abducted from Leonese Jewish merchant twenty four years before, when
he was a child, to be sold to the Moslems of Spain. His companion in
flight was another Christian slave having suffered a
similar fate after being abducted six years before by
Jewish merchants at Arles. The inhabitants of Lyons confirmed
these claims, adding that yet another Christian boy had been abducted by
Jews to be sold into slavery that same year. Agobard
concludes his report with a comment of a general
nature; that these were not considered isolated cases, because, in
every day practice, the Jews continued to procure Christian slaves for
themselves and furthermore subjecting them to
“infamies such that it would be vile in itself to
describe them.”
Precisely what kind of abominable “infamies” Agobard
is referring to is not clear; but it is possible that
he was referring to castration more than to circumcision.743
Liutprando, bishop of Cremona, in his Antapodosis, said to have been
written in approximately 958-962, referred to the city
of Verdun as the principal market in which Jews
castrated young slaves intended for sale to the Moslems of Spain.
During this same period, two Arab sources, Ibn Haukal and Ibrahim al
Qarawi, also stressed that the majority of their
eunuchs originated from France and were sold to the
Iberian peninsula by Jewish merchants. Other Arabic writers
mentioned Lucerna, a city with a Jewish majority, halfway between Córdoba and
Málaga in southern Spain, as another major market, in which the
castration of Christian children after reducing them
to slavery was practiced on a large scale by the very
same people.
Contemporary rabbinical responses provide further
confirmation of the role played by Jews in the trade
in children and young people as well as in the
profitable transformation of boys into eunuchs. These texts reveal that anyone
who engaged in such trade was aware of the risks involved, because any
person caught and arrested in possession of castrated
slaves in Christian territories was decapitated by
order of the local authorities.744 (744.Ariel Toaff
provides the following authority in an endnote: “On the rabbinical responses
relating to the trade in castrated young slaves and on
the role of Lucena (outside Córdoba) as a center for
the castrations, see A. Assaf, Slavery and the Slave-Trade among the Jews during
the Middle Ages (from the Jewish Sources), in "Zion",
IV (1939), pp. 91-125 (in Hebrew); E. Ashtor, A
History of the Jews in Moslem Spain, Jerusalem, 1977, vol. I, pp. 186-189 (in
Hebrew).”) Even the famous Natronai, Gaon of the
rabbinical college of Sura in the mid-9th century was
aware of the problems linked to the dangerous trade in young
eunuchs. “Jewish (merchants) entered (into a port or a city), bringing
with them slaves and castrated children [Hebrew:
serisim ketannim]. When the local authorities
confiscated them, the Jews corrupted them with money, reducing them
to more harmless advisors, and the merchandise was returned, at least in
part.”745 But if one wishes to interpret the
significance and scope of the Jewish presence in the
slave trade and practice of castration, it is a fact that the fear that
Christian children might be abducted and sold was
rather widespread and deeply rooted in all Western
European countries, particularly, France and Germany, from which
these Jews originated and where the greater part of the slave merchants
operated.
Personalities in the clergy
nourished that fear, conferring religious connotations
upon it with an anti-Jewish slant, failing to account for the fact that slavery
as a trade had not yet gone out of fashion morally
and, as such, was broadly tolerated in the economic
reality of the period. On the other hand, the abduction and
castration of children, often inevitably confused with circumcision,
which was no less feared and abhorred, could not fail
to insinuate themselves in the collective unconscious
mind of Christian Europe, especially the French and German
territories, inciting anxiety and fear, which probably solidified over
time, and, as a result, are believed to have
concretized themselves in a variety of ways and in
more or less in the same places, as ritual murder.746 [2011] Solving the Mystery of Babylon the
Great by Edward Hendrie