ARIEL TOAFF AND THE NEWLY INVENTED FAIRY TALE OF THE "VOLUNTARY DONORS"

Prof. Toaff has since partially recanted, and now maintains that:

- yes, Jews are a corrupting and disruptive element in society;
- yes, Jews lend money at 40% and seem to do little else;
- yes, Jews buy and sell justice with huge bribes;
- yes, Jews pull off all sorts of fraudulent bankruptcies and swindles;
- yes, Jews resort to poisoning and assassination when thwarted;
- yes, Jews are obsessed with hatred for Christians and the Christian religion;
- yes, Jews kidnapped and castrated Christian boys on a large scale and sold them into slavery in Islamic Spain for centuries;
- yes, Jews used [and still use?] human blood in all sorts of quack remedies, despite the Biblical prohibition, even for minor complaints;
- yes, Jews used [and still use?] Christian human blood in their matzoh balls at Passover;
- yes, Jews used [and still use?] Christian human blood in their wine at Passover;
- yes, the blood had to be from Christian boys no more than 7 years of age;
- yes, the blood had [has?] to be certified kosher by a rabbi;
- yes, there was [is?] a large and profitable trade in fake blood products and animal blood, which were [are?] unsuitable to the purpose;
- yes, Christians tried to sell the blood of Christian boys to Jews, but were rejected because the Jews feared it was animal blood; but no, no Christian boys were ever killed to obtain the blood. Never, never! Or hardly ever. It all came from “voluntary donors”!

Toaff's whole newly-invented fairy tale of the "voluntary donors" is based upon a single sentence, misquoted, mistranslated, and taken out of context, from p. 92 of Ronnie Po-chia Hsia's Myth of Ritual Murder.
The claim of the "voluntary donors" is made four times:

1). Page 111, new edition,  Pasque di Sangue:

"Apart from a few unpleasant and involuntary working accidents, this blood belonged to live “donors” whose families, due to their indigence, intended to supplement their meager income by means of a trade considered legitimate, certainly not out of the ordinary, and in no way embarrassing."

Original Italian:

["A meno di spiacevoli e involuntari incidenti sul lavoro, questo sangue apparenteneva a ‘donatori’ vivi, le cui famiglie, a causa della loro indigenza, intendevono impinguare le loro magre entrate con un commercio ritenuto legittimo e certamente non fuori dell’ordinario, senza sentirsi in alcun modo in imbarazzo.”]

(No source reference);

2). Page 365, new edition,  Pasque di Sangue:

"Between this dried blood, utilised in the rite – obtained from unknown but self-interested “donors”, who remained alive and well, but came from indigent families, and the alleged 'ritual murders', there was no connection at all, except in the minds of the judges (and not just those at Trent), interested in bringing the Jews into association with the accusation."

Original Italian:

[“Tra questo sangue essicato, utilizzato nel rito, che provveniva da ignoti e interessati ‘donatori’, vivi e vegeti e per lo più appartenenti a famiglie indigenti, e i presunti omicidi rituali non esisteva rapporto alcuno se non nella mente dei giudici (e non solo quelli di Trento), interessati a collegare gli ebrei a quell’accusa.“]

(No source reference);

3). Page 388, new edition,  Pasque di Sangue:

"The 'donors' of this blood, always for payment, were alive and well, and came from indigent families in search of easy money. As stressed by Ronnie Po-chia Hsia (Myth of Ritual Murder. Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany, new Haven, Conn., 1988), 'for a parent reduced to misery, for anyone finding himself in need of money, blood, even that of one’s own son, was a product to sell, like any other'.

"Rare was the eventuality in which a father, in the clumsy attempt to extract the blood from the carotid artery, accidentally caused the death of the son. In that case the tragic accident was followed by the exemplary punishment of the guilty party, despite the involuntary nature of his act.".....
(reference: Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, Myth of Ritual Murder, p. 92-94);

Original Italian:

["“I ‘Donatori’ di quel sangue, sempre a pagamento, erano vivi e vegeti e apparententi a famiglie indigent all ricerca di denaro facile. Come sottolinea Ronnie Po-chia Hsia (The Myth of Ritual Murder. Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany, New Haven, Conn., 1988), ‘per un genitore ridotto alla miseria, per chi come lui si trovava in bisogno di denaro, anche quello del proprio figlio, era un prodotto come un altro da vendere”. Rara era l’eventualità in cui un padre, nel maldestro tentative di estrarne il sangue del carotide, provocasse accidentalmente la morte del figlio. In quel caso al tragico incidente seguiva la punizione esemplare del colpevole, a dispetto dell’involontarietà della sua azione.”]

4). Page 109, Ebraismo Virtuale, November 2008

“This blood, always paid for very generously, originated from indigent families, with many dependent children, in search of easy money. Ronnie Po-chia Hsia is in fact correct in stressing that ‘for a parent reduced to poverty, or anyone like him, in need of money, blood, even that of his own son, was a product to sell like any other’".
(reference: Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, Myth of Ritual Murder, p. 92-94).

Original Italian:

 [“Quel sangue, pagato sempre profumatament, proveniva da famiglie indigenti, con molti figli a carico e in cerca di denaro facile. Ronnie Po-chia Hsia ha infatti ragione nel sottolineare che ‘per un genitore ridotto in miseria, per chi come lui si trovava in bisogno di denaro, il sangue, anche quello del proprio figlio, era un prodotto da vendere come un altro.'"]

Quoted correctly and in context, the actual quote, however, is somewhat different:

It all began in the village of Benzhausen in the Lordship of Buchheim, located to the northwest of Freiburg [footnote deleted] [in 1504]. On Good Friday [1504], the cowherd boy Andreas was tending his herd in the fields when his cattle’s moos alerted him to the corpse of a little boy, who turned out to be one of his playmates, Matthew Bader [illustration]. The cries of the cowherd boy drew the villagers to the spot; judging from the pale corpse, they surmised that it had been lying there for at least three days. The body was removed and buried in the churchyard. Six days later, the father of the dead boy Philip Bader, was arrested for theft. After he had confessed to stealing, the bailiff confronted Bader about the death of his child [...] At first, Bader denied knowledge of the circumstances of the murder, but when he was brought to the churchyard and presented with the corpse of his child, which the authorities had dug up, he was ready to ‘confess’. As a contemporary poem commemorating the event tells it, and in the words of Philip Bader, the mad Jews went to him and offered him money for a Christian child to celebrate Passover. Out of a throng of boys playing nearby, the Jews supposedly picked Bader’s own son. They assured him, Bader told the bailiff, that the child would not be killed; all they wanted was a little Christian blood, and they intended to draw this from the Bader boy, who was barely seven year old. A bargain was concluded. Bader took his boy to the Jews of Waldkirch in exchange for a handsome sum. After this initial confession, the bailiff applied torture and Bader changed his story. Now he admitted that he was acting entirely on his own accord: he had heard that Jews pay good money for Christian blood and had drawn blood from his own son’s neck to sell to the Jews. But when he approached the Jews, they turned from him and scolded him for trying to sell them animal blood. Rebuffed, Bader threw away the blood. Since his two testimonies contradicted each other, Bader was tortured further, and the village bailiff referred the case to his master, the Lord of Buchheim [...]

[footnote 26]: [...] "Although [sic] the poem represents a contemporary report of the trial, the facts seem highly reliable. The poet narrates both sets of confessions even though he strongly rejects Bader’s second confession, attributing it to the ‘devil’s work’, to make the poor man confess in order to exculpate the Jews [...] [?] [NOTE: the” second confession” was the one that EXONERATED the Jews, the only one given under torture. The original records appear to have more less disappeared. ]

[...] "Under interrogation, the arrested Jews protested their innocence and said that the father Bader must in fact have killed his own child for blood money [Is this a confession that the Jews bought blood? Or does it mean that Bader must have killed the child in the BELIEF that he could sell the blood? In view of the fact that they refused to buy it, the latter interpretation seems far more likely.]. [...] Once more, Bader changed his story, insisting now that the Jew Lameth of Waldkirch had purchased and killed his son. [...] On 30 May, Bader was executed in Buchen. Just before his execution, he again protested his innocence: the Jews and not he had killed the boy [...]

Without evidence, the Jews had to be released [footnote referring to the same poem].

"So far, the case seemed straightforward.Family violence was endemic in rural society; and killing one’s own child was but one step removed from child abandonment. It was possible that Bader had not intended to kill his boy and that he had merely wanted to sell blood to the Jews. In any event, once the boy had died from the wound inflicted by his father, and once the corpse was discovered, the initial fantasy of Jewish blood magic that had motivated the gruesome act in the first place also supplied the father with the ideal scenario for self-defence. The crucial point is that, to certain segments of village society, at least to its marginal elements, the discourse of Jewish ritual magic and ritual murder was in itself neutral: what concerned these rural folks was not the intrinsic evil of Jewish magic, as formulated by the intellectuals, but the practical implication of magic, Jewish or otherwise. For Philip Bader, who was obviously in dire need of money, blood, even that of his own child, was just another commodity for sale; Jewish magic only turned evil when the practical consequences of the unsuccessful transaction became a threat to himself” [blah, blah, blah, etc. etc].(Is Ronnie Po a “post-modernist”? He seems addicted to speculating about what what was in people’s minds all the time, using strange words like “discourse” and “narrative”.)

Source: Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, Myth of Ritual Murder  , pp. 90-94

Pages 128-29 of the same book provide another contemporary account of the same case:

"In the year 1503 [sic] [correct year: 1504] [...] a child was missing on one of the farms near Dentzlingen. A neighbour found him in the woods, having been alerted by the bellowing of an ox. Shortly thereafter, the child’s father was apprehended in Buchen on suspicion of theft. At first he feigned ignorance regarding his child, but when he was shown the body he began to sweat. Without torture he confessed that he had sold his four-[correct age: seven] year-old child to two Jews in Waldkirch for five guldens [the price of a horse ]; they told him the child would not die, that they only wanted to draw some blood from him; but alas, things turned out differently, and the child died because of this. I saw the child with my own eyes, about four weeks after the murder; and with my fingers I held and touched the prick wounds. I also saw the execution of the father in Buchen; he died confessing that the Jews had stabbed his child to death […]"

In other words, Toaff is falsifying his quotation to imply that Ronnie Po what’s-his-name is generalizing about medieval society as a whole; in fact, Ronnie etc. what’s-his-name is speculating as to one person's motives, in a single case, that of the peasant, Philip Bader, assuming that Bader’s second confession – the only one given under torture -- is the truth.

This is the sort of thing that ruins the reputation of an historian.

How does one person's failure to do something -- sell blood to the Jews -- prove that millions of other people did so successfully, over centuries?

How did the one person convicted in this case, the peasant, Philip Bader, ever get the idea that the Jews would pay him for his child's blood?

Note that in actual fact, according to the same confession, the second out of three, the only one obtained by torture, they REFUSED to pay him.
Since there were three confessions, and the original records (which are simply depositions, not physical or forensic evidence in the modern sense) have more or less disappeared and no Jew was convicted, nobody even knows what really happened in this case.

Toaff cites this one sentence out of context, mistranslates it, falsifies it, and then generalizes about medieval society as a whole, in the absurd attempt to fob us off with his fairy tale of the “voluntary donors”, in which Toaff obviously does not believe, and for which there is no more evidence, according to Toaff's own source material, than for the existence of unicorns or the miracles of Mohammed. It should not be forgotten that one of John Demianiuk's defence attorneys in Israel was nearly blinded by an acid thrower while attending a funeral, while another "committed suicide" by "falling" from a 15th story window.

These "voluntary donor" claims were obviously made under duress, and Toaff obviously does not believe them, but let's examine them for a moment:

The hypothesis now advanced by Toaff, entirely without proof, is as follows: that Medieval Ashkenazi Jews, allegedly living in constant terror of expulsions, massacres, forced baptism -- well aware of the fact that they have been accused of ritual child murder since antiquity – went about openly soliciting the purchase of the blood of male Christian children from indigent “voluntary donors”?

Question: How does one solicit “voluntary donors” of this sort?

By taking out an ad in the paper?

"HIGHEST PRICES PAID FOR BLOOD
MALE CHRISTIAN CHILDREN ONLY
MAXIMUM AGE SEVEN YEARS"

Wouldn’t that be a little risky?

It is obvious that the Jews could not publicize this sort of thing.They couldn’t even do this today.

How would you react, even today, if you saw an ad like this? Would you think, “Whew, oh, well, at least, that way, the Jews are buying the blood of male Christian children. Boy, is that a load off my mind! At least that way, they’re not going to kill any children to get it, and put it in their shimmurim or matzoh bread” (which Toaff admits they did in both editions of the book, incredibly, even including his essay, In Defence of  Pasque di Sangue, since expanded into a short book, Virtual Judaism [Ebraismo Virtuale]), despite the fact that, deceptively but very cleverly, he attempts to narrow the discussion to one of whether or not they drank the Passover wine containing the blood (which they did not), but the admission is still there if you read between the lines a bit.

How would you react? I think the reaction -- even today -- would be one of intense astonishment, suspicion and hostility. The inference that Jews need the blood of male Christian children to use in their Passover matzoh bread, and are only purchasing it because buying it is less dangerous than obtaining it by murder, is very obvious. The very solicitation to purchase the blood of children would be taken – in itself -- as circumstantial proof of the ritual murder accusation, leading to increased pogroms and expulsions.

Ronnie Po-chia Hsia himself notes that the mere possession of blood by a Jew could be incriminating. How could medieval Jews possibly solicit blood?

The third case took place in 1593. In that year, Abraham of Lublin came to Frankfurt from Poland and asked for charity from the most prosperous and numerous Jewish community in the Holy Roman Empire. Having received the token sum of one a half dalers and being openly scorned by the Frankfurt Jews for his foreign appearance, Abraham plotted vengeance to make the Frankfurt Jews pay for their snobbery. He bought oxen blood from a butcher, hid the bottle of blood in the synagogue, and tipped off the authorities. The truth came out during the official inquest; imprisoned for a time by the magistrates, Abraham was eventually released.“
Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, Myth of Ritual Murder, p. 208.

Was Philip Bader Innocent?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, what is the meaning of the following exceedingly strange remark by Toaff? (p. 386, 2nd edition,  Pasque di Sangue):

Rare was the eventuality in which a father, in the clumsy attempt to extract the blood from the carotid artery, accidentally caused the death of the son... “ (p. 388, 2nd edition,  Pasque di Sangue)?

What is this supposed to mean? That thousands of people in the Middle Ages quite normally drew blood from the carotid arteries of their own children in order to sell blood to the Jews? Does anyone believe this?

Philip Bader was a peasant, a person in constant contact with the basic realities of life, inevitably including the slaughter of animals.Any adult knows that if you puncture the veins or arteries in a person’s neck, that person is going to die. Blood leaves the neck under tremendous pressure. It can spurt a foot or more. Bader must have seen this in animals dozens of times, perhaps hundreds.

If you were going to take blood from a child without modern equipment, but without any intention of killing him, how would you do it? Wouldn’t you take the blood from the wrist or inner elbow, most likely the wrist? I think you would place the child on a stool, make an incision in the wrist, and force him to hold the arm downwards (you’d have to tie him up), where it could drain into a container, after which the arm could be raised and bandaged easily and safely.

The only reason to puncture the carotid artery would be if you intended to suspend the child by his heels -- again, to drain the blood downward – but with the obvious intention of killing him. This is the kosher slaughter position, a position commonly depicted in standard ritual murder literature.

Ronnie Po-chia Hsia does not describe the wounds inflicted on the victim, Matthew Bader, but does seem to imply multiple wounds: they are referred to in the plural (in a somewhat dubious contemporary quotation) on pp 128-29 of the book.

It seems obvious to me that if there were multiple wounds, and/or a puncture wound in the carotid artery, then Bader was probably innocent of the crime of murder and his first and third confessions represent the truth. (This does not, of course, mean that he was not guilty of criminal or contributory negligence and so on.)

Another question:

Since the small towns and middle towns in Germany were anxious to expel the Jews, who had been forced on them by the monarchy and nobility (Myth of Ritual Murder, pp. 88-89, 162), since the Jews were protected by the Holy Roman monarchy and nobles because they had the money required to live in luxury and fight all their wars (ibid, p. 229), Bader’s first confession must have suited the town of Benzhausen right down to a “T”. The ideal excuse for another mass expulsion!

So why did the bailiff apply torture to obtain the second confession -- the one in which he claimed to have killed the child himself, accidentally, in an attempt to sell blood to the Jews -- blood which the Jews refused to buy, thus clearing them of all direct and indirect guilt?

Well, the whole point of much of it is that Jews purchase justice with huge bribes and resort to assassination attempts whenever they are thwarted. Toaff provides many examples of bribes offered by Jews to escape justice (pp. 36, 49, 52, 53, 134 of  Pasque di Sangue, first edition; p. 235 of new, “revised” edition with Toaff’s “recantation”), as well as of attempts to eliminate their enemies by poisoning (pp. 84, 88, 215, 216,  Pasque di Sangue, first edition).Even Toaff’s useless new chapter, The Embarrassing Trial of the Priest Paolo da Novara (Trent, 1476) concerns a Jewish conspiracy to assassinate the Prince Bishop of Trent, Hinderbach, a topic already adequately discussed in the first edition.

Perhaps they made the bailiff an “offer he could not refuse”? “Here’s a hundred gulden. He vill say it vuss an accident. Ze Jews had nuttink to do vid it, see? Uzzervize....” [motion of hand drawn slowly across the throat]…
To me, this is the only explanation of the Bader case that makes sense.

Human blood amounts to about 7 or 8% of total body weight. Since the weight of liquid blood is approximately the same as that of water, the body of a 7-year old child weighing 50 pounds would therefore contain about 4 pints, half a gallon. Coagulated blood contains considerable moisture. There are 185 grams of totally dry material in a litre of blood -- about 175 dry grams per liquid quart – approximately 6 and a half ounces, or about 3 tablespoonfuls per pint.

You cannot take a pint of blood from a young child, because he will go into shock and probably die. Remember, we are speaking of children from "indigent families", suffering from malnutrition and probably a variety of diseases. OK, let’s say you take half a pint of a child’s blood, at some fantastic price, in the presence of a rabbi. All you are going to get – when perfectly dried -- is a tablespoon and a half of solid material; not much. Kill one kid, and you get about 8 times as much, about 12 tablespoonfuls, weighing about three quarters of a pound, maybe more. Not bad. Probably enough to fill one of those "waxed and tin-bottomed bags" repeatedly mentioned by Toaff.

OK. Which is easier to conceal, a whole series of cash commercial transactions, or a small number of murders? Well, sometimes one, sometimes the other.

The difference is that a series of cash transactions of this kind would attract a great deal of attention, probably creating a huge sensation.

Now. Think. Would you engage in hundreds of cash transactions that would implicate you in dozens of murders? Or would you simply commit another murder? To a murder, ideally, there are no witnesses. Of course, the body will probably be found, but if they can’t trace it to you… Bury it till it decomposes a bit (obliterating the puncture wound) and there’s no proof.

Toaff is correct in asserting that both Christians and Jews practiced black magic during the Middle Ages. It is also true that anyone could be accused of being in league with the Devil at any time, leading to the possibility of torture, trial, and execution. It was not an avocation without its particle of risk. It is also true that Jews were probably particularly vulnerable in this regard. Only black magicians and heretics were burnt. Jews were both:

"Only heretics and black magicians were burnt [footnote reference to the Carolina code of justice applicable throughout the Holy Roman Empire]. To Christians of the late fifteenth century, the Jews of Endingen embodied a despicable cross of both"(Ronnie-Po-chia Hsia, p. 26).

In effect, regardless of his “recantation”, what Toaff has done is to shift the burden of proof away from what one might call the “ritual murder affirmers” -- those who believe that Jewish ritual murder is and was a reality – onto the “ritual murder deniers” – the Jews. He has created an irrefutable presumption of the inevitability of ritual child murder, as a matter of course.

What do you think will happen if you take a powerful car, a case of beer, and a quart of whisky and give them to a group of 16-year old boys? You know perfectly well what’s going to happen: they’re going to wreck the car.

If small sects of Ashkenazi Jews really hate Christianity -- and Christians, as people -- so much; if they are that obsessed with the magical powers of human blood generally and that of male Christian children in particular -- then it is inevitable that children will be killed, somewhere, sooner or later. It is inherent in the reality of the situation. One cannot assert a negative in a situation like this. All you can say is that it has never been proven in any particular case -- not that it has never happened or never will.

To prove the contrary, Toaff must assert a negative: that NO blood was EVER obtained from ANY Christian child through the simple and very obvious expedient of murder: that ALL blood was obtained in ALL CASES from “voluntary donors” – something he makes no effort to prove, and which he obviously does not believe.

“Ritual murder affirmers” do not have to prove that NO blood EVER came from voluntary donors. There is no need for us to assert a negative at any time.

Assimilated Jews could obtain virtually any amount of gentile blood (of adults, almost never of children) under the cover of a suitable profession: particularly, physician or barber-surgeon. Blood letting has been practiced in all cultures for thousands of years and is mentioned in the Talmud. But this contradicts the scenario insisted upon by Toaff. What child from an “indigent” family ever consulted a Jewish physician? Or any physician? We are talking about the Middle Ages.

And we are not talking about assimilated Jews.

To be certain the blood was authentic – kosher -- it would have to be taken in the presence of a rabbi. What assimilated Jewish physician or barber surgeon has a rabbi standing around in his office?

[Note: Further complicating this scenario is the fact that Jewish physicians were strictly prohibited from treating Christian patients without a specific personal exemption signed by the Pope, a prohibition which remained in effect for hundreds of years [Toaff, Il Vino e la Carne, pp. 269-70, 277-78; Love, Work and Death, pp. 220-221, 228-229; The Jews in Medieval Assisi, 1305-1487, pp. 67, 91].

Millions of people lived in extreme poverty in medieval Europe. This was the age of mass famines, the Black Death. Knowledge that Jews paid high prices for blood would have spread like wildfire, attracting millions of people. Every time there was a crop failure, a plague, a war, millions of orphans, widows, beggars, cripples, would have besieged the synagogues in desperate crowds, causing a riot. Medieval literature would be full of references to this phenomenon, which would have been an everyday occurrence.

Toaff is the expert. Toaff asserts, Toaff must prove. If anyone could prove the existence of these fantastic “voluntary donors”, it would be Toaff. He offers no proof. He makes no such attempt to do so.
If he could prove it, he would – partly because he is a great lover of arcane and bizarre detail, no matter how obscure. He makes no such attempt.

The Jews are a fossil people. Why do they insist upon sucking the bloody penis of the circumcised child, spitting the blood into a glass of wine, smearing the child’s lips with his own blood -- mixed with the wine -- then drinking the mixture of blood and wine, together with the closest relatives of the child -- particularly, the child’s mother -- in front of crowds of swooning, hysterical relatives?

They do this TODAY. No matter how many children they infect with genital herpes -- an incurable sexually transmitted disease -- they’ve GOT to suck it. They promise to suck it through a glass tube once in a while (which is probably impossible, if you care to think about it, and would in no way diminish the risk of infection, because some of the blood, infected by the mohel's saliva, would inevitably run back down the tube onto the penis, thus infecting the child; children can also be born with STDs, thus infecting the mohel, assuming he has not already become infected by going on to suck bigger and better things; there are dozens of different STDs, the commonest, or most dangerous, of which, in this situation, would probably be genital herpes and gonorrhea of the throat, followed by hepatitis B, syphillis and AIDS), but they’ve absolutely GOT to suck it!

These are the same people who lecture the goyim about the "health benefits" of circumcision (!) and claim that ritual murder is absurd, because Jews are disgusted by the ingestion of blood!
Toaff admits the "sucking" 6 times (twice, pp. 95-96, 1st edition; twice, p. 143, 1st edition; once, p. 186-87, 2nd edition; and once, footnote 35 to pp. 186-87, 2nd edition), and the "drinking" twice (p. 147, 1st edition; p. 387, 2nd edition).

Why do Jews insist on this? Because they are walking fossils, a Stone Age People.

Roll, Jordon, roll. And the Jews suck on as they sucked five thousand years ago. What is this but a form of atavistic, tribal, sadistic homosexual paedophile vampirism disguised as religion?

The custom of tossing the bloody foreskin into surrounding crowds of hysterical females, to be fought over and gulped down, raw (or perhaps flavoured with flour, powdered sugar, and nuts and honey, like a home-made sweet), by recently married young Jewesses wishing to become pregnant with "male issue", has apparently fallen into desuetude (p. 99-100,  Pasque di Sangue, 1st edition).

Jews are always talking about the profound spiritual values of their religion, but when you look for anything specific you get stuff like this. If you read the Talmud, you get thousands of pages of stuff about how if a woman has had sex with a dog, is she is still eligible to marry a high priest? Answer: yes [Mas. Yevamoth 59b, p. 3201 of pdf Talmud: This is their logic: A woman who has had illicit relations with men is a harlot. A dog is not a man; therefore... ].

What kind of religion is this?

Let's get one thing straight. There is no longer ANY presumption of ANY need on the part of “anti-Semites” to prove the reality of ritual murder as a general possibility or rare reality. Proof is still required in any particular case, but if Jews killed children thousands of years ago, they will kill them today. Just read your Bible. It’s all there.

It is unfortunate that Toaff felt compelled to cave in and lie dozens of times, but the book is still damaging. In fact, it contains even more disgusting anecdotes of the use of human blood for various purposes than the first edition.

In particular, Toaff totally destroys the lie that Jews could not possibly use the blood of children in their matzohs (or shimmurim, as Toaff prefers to call the Passover unleavened bread) because they are prohibited from ingesting blood.

They love blood: they are obsessed with blood. They are like vampires. It is obvious that some of them are going to kill a few Christian children once in a while.

Asserting the contrary is to assert a negative in a situation in which the positive is not only quite possible, but is inherent in the very nature of the situation. Not only that, but in relation to millions of people over a period of at least one thousand years: a logical absurdity.

Since Toaff's whole newly-invented fairy tale of the "voluntary donors" is based upon a single sentence, misquoted, mistranslated, and taken out of context, from p. 92 of Ronnie po-chia Hsia's Myth of Ritual Murder, one question remains:

What is the point of telling a lie so obvious that it will be immediately discovered?

Let's face it: if Toaff wanted to lie, he could fake a list of medieval references in Hebrew and Yiddish a yard long, and nobody would ever know the difference (although the absence of references in Italian, German and other medieval languages would be very suspicious). He did not do so.

To me, this is like a message found in a bottle, thrown in the sea.

The message is: "Look, I don't believe any of this codswallop any more than you do, but those goons at the ADL made me stick all this stuff in here, and there wasn't anything I could do about it".

The fairy tale of the "voluntary donors" is particularly stupid of Toaff (assuming it was not done deliberately, since he is extraordinarily intelligent), when you consider that if he really wanted to get all those cry-baby heebie goons off his neck for hinting at the reality of ritual murder, all he had to do is say something along the lines of the following (suitably dressed up, of course, in evasive, pretentious language):

OK, look, their liturgy called for the use of human blood -- specifically, the blood of a male Christian child, maximum age seven years -- for use in their shimmurim or unleavened bread, at Passover. That's what they thought they were using. But they purchased it from traders. It had to be certified kosher by a rabbi. OK, too bad, but their rabbis cheated them.

Why is this so difficult to believe? Every time you open a newspaper, some rabbi has been indicted for fraud someplace; Jews are always cheating each other. You have some of the biggest banks in Israel, some of the richest Jewish law firms in Europe, America and Israel, cheating Holocaust survivors out of their compensation money, while the survivors die in poverty.

There is nothing new in this. Jews have been cheating each other, and everyone around them, for 3,000 years. Look at Bernie Madoff. Read your Bible. It's all there, from the first few books of Genesis: swindling, pimping, usury, loan default, mortgage foreclosure, commodity cornering, slaving and the slave trade, selling children to sodomites, etc. etc., anything for money.

Now. Why murder a kid when you can simply grind up a quarter pound of old paint pigment or something similar, and sell that at fantastic prices? After all, they're only going to use a pinch of the stuff, you're not going to poison anybody. What's the harm in that?

Plus the certificates could probably be forged by almost any clever Jew. The problem of fake blood products is mentioned on page 108 of the first edition of the book, right after the discussion of the Philip Bader case on page 107; according to the same hypothesis, this is why the Jews refused to pay him.

The Rarity of Ritual Murder Accusations

Serious ritual murder accusations are rare, occurring perhaps 3 or 4 times a century.No one has ever claimed that dozens or hundreds of children began to disappear every year as soon as any Jews appeared in the area. Medieval Jews were very conspicuous. Every time they set foot outside the ghetto, their every step was watched with great suspicion. They could not travel around the countryside kidnapping children and then disposing of the bodies afterwards. Buying children from beggars or mercenary soldiers, etc., seems quite plausible to me, but cannot have happened hundreds of times a year.

Logically, a moment's thought will show that the Jews could not possibly have killed thousands of children per year in the Middle Ages. There was no mobility. A lost child could not get far on his own; the maximum distance which could be travelled in a day, by horse and cart, was probably about 30 miles (perhaps further by water, but with other, perhaps greater, risks. The Jews are not a race of bargemen, raftsmen, fishermen, small boatmen or gondoliers; they are a race of old clothes dealers and money lenders. A body disposed of in water will be discovered far more quickly than if you bury it, because it will wash up on shore). Travel by night was difficult, dangerous, and often impossible. If your cart breaks down (or your boat sinks), there you are, stuck with the evidence.

This means that a kidnapped child had to be killed, and the body disposed of, very close by. One child's dried blood would probably fill one of those waxed bags. There must have been thousands of these traders, crossing the Alps, travelling all over northern Italy and southern Germany. The idea that each bag could be traced back to a murder is really rather far-fetched.

It is difficult to believe that the police authorities of several European countries could remain unaware of this simple fact for several centuries if it were true; logically, they should have arrested all the traders and tortured them to trace the blood back to its source.

[That is logic. The reality of the situation, as distinguished from a mere logical model, may, however, have been very different; see comment on the Jewish trade in kidnapped Christian children to be sold into slavery as eunuchs in Islamic Spain, below. The Jews are a race possessing great organizational and subversive ability, a quality which the trade in eunuchs required in great abundance -- not to mention an almost unbelievable capacity for cruelty, cynicism, hypocrisy and greed, on the part of an entire race masquerading as a "religion" for 3000 years; if they could do that, they could do anything.

With that in mind, I now believe that the above two paragraphs are probably incorrect and that I was mistaken. It also occurs to me that the body of a Christian child buried in a Jewish cemetery would not be disturbed and would never be found. This was actually said to have been done in one case (Pasque di Sangue, p. 77, 1st edition). ]

Ritual murder accusations still require proof in any individual case. Otherwise any criminal could murder a child, inflict wounds of a certain nature, and get off scot-free in every case, because the Jews would be considered automatically guilty, resulting in the murder of more Christian children than ever (see Ronnie Po what's his name, pp. 96 and 158).

"In the same year [as the Philip Bader case], 1504, the shoemaker Bryhenn came under suspicion of the magistrates due to the sudden death of his stepson [...] Arrested in nearby Hanau, he confessed to having struck and killed his stepson in anger. But, when threatened with judicial torture, Bryhenn said he stabbed his stepson with awls, collected the blood, and sold it to the Jew Gumprecht. The latter was interrogated under torture but maintained his innocence. When Bryhenn was condemned to death, he retracted his accusation and Gumprecht was released", p. 96;

"[...] in 1543, two women found [a] five-year old boy in a field outside Volkerode [...] The bailiff summoned all men and women over ten years of age from the village to the scene of the crime. Upon examining the corpse, he found that the foreskin of the penis had been cut off and saw prick marks on both arms. Returning to the village the next morning for further questioning, the bailiff saw a shepherd running away into the woods. With the help of four hundred villagers, he caught the fugitive, Heinrich, the shepherd, who immediately blamed Jacob the Jew of putting him up to the murder [...] the shepherd claimed that he would recognize Jacob on sight. Wisely, the bailiff presented Heinrich with the gatekeeper of the castle, whom the suspect mistook as Jacob [...] After the murder, Heinrich returned to the corpse, cut off the boy’s foreskin and drew some blood from the corpse. He was planning to sell the blood to the Jews and to frame them for murder. Sentenced to death, Heinrich publicly confessed to the innocence of the Jews before his execution [...]", p. 158.

Of course, by the same token, and by the very nature of the situation -- particularly, due to the huge trade in fake blood products -- it is simply bashert that some meshugener will kill a kid once in a while to save a shekel or two and make zweiendik zicher he gets the richtiker chaifetz -- not to mention sheer hatred for "Edom", the implacable, wicked goyim.

But in this case, we are right back where we started. That ritual murders occur, but very rarely.

Of course, this would never satisfy the cry-baby heebie Mafia, so we get the fairy tale of the "voluntary donors". Der Sach liegt in der Teva!

CONCLUSION:

The purpose of malefic magic is to inflict harm, to do evil, to wreak revenge. What possesses greater magical power: the blood of a murdered enemy, or blood obtained without harming anyone? In Africa, charms are obtained by cutting body parts from living persons. The greater the evil, the greater the power of the charm. The logic of this is obvious. Africans take their magic seriously.

A person who knowingly accepts the proceeds of an act of murder, but fails to inform the authorities, is acting as an accessory-after-the-fact to the crime of murder.

How did the thousands of participants in these Ashkenazi blood rituals, century after century, believe all this blood was obtained? By the very nature of the situation, they had to believe that these products were real, and could have been obtained by murder. They purchased them "no questions asked".

This is like buying a TV that "fell off the back of a truck". Can anyone imagine a family willing to buy stolen goods for centuries, but that would never steal anything?

There is another possibility which Toaff rejects. Authentic dried blood of Christian children could have been obtained from Islamic Turkey, where thousands of Christian children were held in slavery, but at much greater risk and expense, which would, again, simply increase the risk of fraud. Toaff does not make this claim, although he very easily could have (see p. 67, 1st edition), and obviously does not believe it. In other words, he rejects the only alternative explanations which might have made sense, in favour of an obvious fairy tale.

To me, this indicates that he believes in the murders. And why not?

If the Jews of Europe could kidnap Christian children for centuries and CASTRATE them, for the purpose of selling them into SLAVERY -- as EUNUCHS -- in Islamic SPAIN, purely and simply for MONEY -- I repeat, for CENTURIES -- as proven by Toaff himself in Chapter Eight -- an accusation which his critics never even bothered to protest, and in relation to which Toaff does not now claim to have been mistaken -- it is all simply ignored -- then the Jews were (and are) certainly capable of kidnapping and killing them to obtain the blood required for a "sacred ritual"; all this hysteria is simply "protesting too much".

Perhaps we are dealing with some vast, hidden, subterranean truth awaiting discovery, like the paedophile scandals in the Catholic Church or organ trafficking in Israel.

After all, which is easier: smuggling living children halfway across Europe, castrating them in Southern France and then smuggling them into Spain, perhaps hundreds of miles south of the Pyrenees (depending on the progress of the Christian reconquista), or simply killing them nearby?

As Ronnie Po-chia Hsia remarks, "It was on their odious reputation, their mala fama, that Jews came to be imprisoned and judicially tortured and executed in the recent past. The Germanic common law codes and the Carolina all admitted the accusatory principle of mala fama... what mattered was the ill-repute of the Jews..." (ibid, 107).

Sometimes ill-repute is well-deserved.

In my view, the problem may be expressed as follows: any “blood product” purporting to consist of the “dried blood of a Christian child” (preferably male, max. age 7 years), but sold for cash, was almost certainly fake; if it was authentic, it was obtained by murder. The blood was sold as authentic; the purchasers voiced no objection.

This implies that, without the large quantities of fake blood products purchased and sold by Ashkenazi Jews for many centuries, ritual murder accusations (and the actual murders, as well) would have been far more common than they were.

Perhaps this is the only reason these accusations were so rare.

Toaff is not a polemicist who set out to "prove" or "disprove" the reality of ritual murder. He is a medievalist, an artist, a miniaturist on a huge scale, like Canaletto. If Canaletto includes a fish market as a tiny detail in one of his vast paintings of Venice, it is not out of any particular love of fish markets; it is because it is there. If you forced him to paint over the fish market with a billboard reading "Visit Las Vegas!" or "Drink Coke!", he might do it to save his skin, but he wouldn't do a very good job, and that is what happened to Toaff.

Toaff observed that the Trent defendants supplied perfectly correct corroborating details of the crime, in a pronunciation of Hebrew which no one could understand, and which had been mistaken for gibberish or "Satanic language" by scholars for 500 years, i.e., it could not have been interpolated by the interrogators for the mere purpose of incriminating the defendants.

Toaff recognized it for it was -- a perfectly accurate recitation of a "blood liturgy" which actually existed, and is known to have been practiced by medieval German-speaking Ashkenazi Jews -- a liturgy which had, furthermore, already been published and described by other Hebrew scholars.

Toaff simply concluded (it was a mere hint, in actual fact, for the most part implied rather than stated), that the question of the reality of ritual murder therefore remained open, and that the Trent Trials were not entirely without basis in fact.

The situation remains there, suspended at this point.

That was the full extent of Toaff's heresy. The ADL never even read the book!