Passovers of Blood: The Jews of Europe and Ritual Murders (orig. lang. Pasque di sangue. Ebrei d'Europa e omicidi rituali) is a 2007 book by Israeli historian Ariel Toaff. The book analyses a notorious medieval trial regarding accusations of the ritual murder of a child by Jews for the purposes of Passover. Because the book lent credence to one of the ritual murder stories, it sparked intense controversy including calls for him to resign from or be fired from his professorship; the questioning of his research, historical method(s), and motives as they relate to his writing of the book; threats to his life; and demands that he be prosecuted.
Contents
Chapter 1
Toaff opens his book with a detailed vignette of the arrival in Venice from Rome of the philosemitic Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich III. It was his third visit to the city, and his arrival was met by an influx of numerous visitors, merchants, adventurers, clerics and relic-hawkers, all keen to obtain certificates attesting to their merits, services and learning. Among the various groups was a delegation of Ashkenazi Jews, leaders of a community that, over the preceding century, had emigrated in considerable numbers from German lands towards northern Italy where the expanding commercial empire of Venice offered prospects of prosperity and relief from the afflictions they had suffered in northern lands, in waves of antisemitic pogroms from the age of the Crusades to the Black Death.
Venice had in its employ a spy and intriguer, the Cretan adventurer and businessman David Mavrogonato, regarded as a malshin (moser) by the Jews of his native Heraklion, who was engaged in furthering Venetian interests in the Ottoman Empire's dominions in the Aegean. He, and his bodyguard and successor Salomone of Piove, enjoyed considerable privileges for services they rendered to the Council of Ten. Both attempted to employ Jewish physicians in an attempt to assassinate Mehmed II. The cameo role played by these two allows Toaff to touch on the politics of intrigue within the larger Jewish community. As Mavrogonato and Salomon of Piove acted on Venice's behalf to kill a Turkish Sultan, so one of Salomon's henchman, Salomon Fürstunger, connived with Pavia's powerful banker Mendele b.Abraham to get an Italian priest to assassinate by poisoning those responsible for the trial at Trento, over the case of Simon of Trent, which had led to the executions of many Jews in 1475.
In examining the condotte, pacts negotiated between Jewish leaders and the local authorities stipulating the duties and conditions under which the Jewish communities were given the rights of residency, Toaff elicits a significant difference in cultural values between the native Italian Jewish communities, and those hailing from the German-speaking world beyond the Alps. The Ashkenazi retained their deep suspicion of the Christian world which, in Germany, had caused them grievous injury, even within the, at the time, more hospitable world of northern Italy. In various agreements, they asked for and obtained strict guarantees from their hosts against forced conversion by friars and priests, the right to use kosher foods, the right to physical safety, severe punishments to be inflicted on any one who should harm them, and freedom from having their assets seized. Strict conditions were negotiated to govern the reliability of witnesses in the case of criminal charges being laid against them. They obtained the right to be allowed to follow their own religious observances with 'zealous scruple'. In some condotte, the authorities were asked, and consented to, expelling any Jews from the city (Gemona) who converted to Christianity.
Both groups competed as suppliers of credit, but the older Italian Jewish communities quickly lost out to the new Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi, and were forced to close down their banking operations in many northern areas in consequence. Toaff describes entrepreneurs from these Ashkenazi communities as brash with the new power of the financial authority they had expeditiously acquired in a mere five decades after their arrival:-
'(They were) self-confident and often arrogant and insolent in their relationships with rulers, observing laws only when it was strictly necessary or too dangerous to act otherwise.'