Still Running Off at the Keyboard

BLOODY PASSOVER by Ariel Toaff

The book is online here.

At approximately mid-point in the book Toaff takes up a discussion of rituals accompanying the feast of Purim which leads into the feast of Pesach.

...the celebration of Purim is said to constitute the Hebraic ritual of death and resurrection. ...

There is no shortage of testimonies of the celebration of rituals, within the framework of the carnival of Purim, intended to vilify and outrage the image of Haman, reconstituted in the semblance of Christ hanging from the cross. First, the emperor Honorius (384-423) and, in his footsteps, Theodosius (401-450), prohibited the Jews from the provinces of the Empire from setting fire to effigies of Haman crucified in contempt of the Christian religion. ...

Before 1027, at Byzantium [Constantinople, now Istanbul], baptized Jews were required to curse their ex-fellow-Jews "who celebrated the festival of Mordechai, crucifying Haman on a beam of wood, in the form of a cross, and then setting fire to it, accompanying the vile rite with a torrent of imprecations directed at those faithful to Christ". Again, in the very early 13th century, Arnol, prior of the monastery at Lubeck, censured the wickedness of the Jews in bitter terms "in crucifying the figure of the Redeemer every year, making him the object of shameless ridicule".

Even the Hebrew texts do not seem to be sparing on information in this regard. The Talmudic dictionary Arukh, consisting of the rabbi Natan b. Yehiel of Rome in the second half of the 11th century, contains reports that the Jews of Babylon were accustomed to celebrate the festival of Purim in a particular way. "It is the custom among the Jews of Babylon and the rest of the entire world for the boys to make effigies shaped like Haman and hang them on the roofs of their houses for four or five days (before the festival). ...

Turning back centuries...we must note...that the ritual of Purim did not always conclude with the bloodless hanging of a mere effigy of Haman. Sometimes, the "effigy" was a flesh-and-blood Christian, crucified for real, during the wild revelry of the Jewish carnival...The local Hebrews, in their debaucheries and intemperate revelry to celebrate Purim, after getting suitably drunk, according to the prescriptions of the ritual, which provided that they must drink so much wine that they can no longer distinguish Haman from Mordechai: "...took to deriding the Christians and Christ Himself in their boasting; they ridiculed the cross and anyone trusting in the crucifix, putting the following joke in practice.

"they took a Christian child, tied it to a cross and hanged him. Initially they made him the object of jokes and drollery; then, after a while, they lost control of themselves and mistreated him to such a degree that they killed him."

The report, which makes no mention of miracles occurring at the site of the relics of the martyred child, seems to possess all the indications of truthfulness. Moreover, as we have seen above, there are people who have viewed the immoderate celebrations of Purim, accompanied by anti-Christian insults and violence, as the core from which the belief in Jewish ritual homicide of Christian children is thought to have developed during the Middle Ages, as an integral part of a ritual centered around on [sic] the festival of Pesach, considered the ideal culmination of Purim. (pp. 132-135)

In the early modern age, the carnival-like festivities of Purim finally lost those qualities of aggressiveness and violence which had been characteristic since the early Middle Ages, but never renounced the clearly anti-Christian meaning it possessed according to tradition. ...covertly spreading poison against Christians, under the name of Idolaters...they therefore cry out in a loud voice Be Cursed all the Idolaters. But at an even earlier time, the illustrious jurist Marquardo Susanni, protected by Paolo IV Carafa, the fervent and impassioned founder of the Ghetto of Rome, mentioned the wild hostility of the Jews towards Christianity as well as the peculiar carnival-like characteristics of Purim. According to him, "during the feast of Mordechai", the Jews did not hesitate to greet each other by saying, in contemptuous tones: 'May the King of the Christians go down to ruin immediately, the way Haman went down to ruin". (p. 136)

According to Toaff, Christians engaged in persecution as well:

The Christians were not too subtle about it, since they certainly didn't need excuses or pretexts to perpetrate indiscriminate massacres of Jews or to plunge Jewish children into the beneficial waters of baptism by force. The spiral of violence, having due regard to the discrepancies between the relative power and size of the two conflicting societies, could not be extinguished. The serpent bit its own tail, leaving its imprint of blood on the sand. Each society was, in a sense, its own victim, but neither noticed. (p. 135)

Moving on to other examples of anti-Christianity, Toaff writes:

In the Sefer Nizzachon Yashan, a harsh annonymous anti-Christian polemical publication compiled in Germany at the end of the 13th century, the themes of which are repeated in the liturgical invocations of Rabbi Shelomoh of Worms, the exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt is taken as a pretext to outline a dispute intended to contrast the saving blood of the Passover blood and of circumcision to the powers of the cross. (p. 138)

The cover of the book shows a picture of a child on an altar with a man standing over him, knife raised. Toaff explains this symbolism:

...the German Jews, who, during the first crusade in 1096, sacrificed their sons to avoid forced baptism, intending to imitate the sacrifice of Isdaac by the hand of Abraham, his father. Deliberately ignoring the Biblical conclusion of the episode, which stressed God's aversion to human sacrifice, they preferred to refer to those texts of the Midrash in which Isaac actually met a cruel death on the altar. The German Jews thus conferred new life upon these new texts in search of moral support for the their [sic] actions, which appeared unjustifiable and might easily be condemned under the terms of ritual law (halakhah). (p. 140)

He provides some horrendous tales of Jews killing their whole family to escape Christian baptism.

More examples from the book of anti-Christianity associated with the Seder:

...in the traditional reading of the Haggadah, according to the custom of the Ashkenazi Jews, the curses against the Egyptians were transformed into an invective against all the nations and enemies hated by Israel, with explicit reference to the Christians. (p. 166)

A famous contemporary of Maharil, Rabbi Shabom of Wiener Neustadt, has also confirmed the anti-Christian significance of the sprinkling of the wine during the reading of the plagues of Egypt. (p. 167)

The Seder thus became a scandalous display of anti-Christian sentiment, exalted by symbolic acts and significances and burning imprecations, which was now using the stupendous events of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt simply as a pretext. In Jewish Venice during the 17th century, the ritual characteristics related to the reading of this part of the Haggadah were still alive and present, as shown by the testimony of Giulio Morosini, which is to be considered quite reliable. "When the head of the family refers to these ten blows, he is brought a bowl or basin, and at the name of each one, dipping the finger into his glass, and drips it inside the cup and continues, gradually emptying the glass of wine as a sign of the curses against the Christians". (p. 168)

There are more incidents of anti-Christianity cited by Toaff, but these will give you an idea of what is contained in the book. Some of the claims come out of testimony given at the Trent trial, which I assume was gathered under torture, and so not reliable. If you want to go to the book and read it, turn to Chapter Twelve which contains the worst of it. Given the tendency of the Jews to claim anti-Semitism whenever something negative is stated, I don't know how Professor Toaff had the courage to publish this book. It is certainly easy to see why he withdrew it a week after publication.

He was convinced that the Trent trial testimony had a ring of truth. I am not as convinced. While it is possible that there is truth in some of it despite the circumstances, it is also possible that the Jews who testified under torture invented all of it. The torture makes the evidence inadmissible, and it does appear that most of it was derived in this manner.

In any case, I have seen nothing to indicate that the book will be republished any time soon. Perhaps Professor Toaff decided it would be best to close the controversy by consigning the book to a box in a dusty attic. Or perhaps his university put pressure on him to abandon it. We may never know. On the other hand, the fact that the book is now on the web in more than one place may influence his decision to republish it with corrections.

In any case, this story proves that it is possible to uncanonize a saint. If it can be done in the name of avoiding anti-Semitism, certainly it can be done for other reasons as well.