Passovers of Blood

Passovers of Blood: The Jews of Europe and Ritual Murders (orig. lang. Pasque di sangue. Ebrei d'Europa e omicidi rituali) is a book by Ariel Toaff published in February 2007. The book analyses a notorious medieval trial regarding accusations of the ritual murder of a child by Jews for the purposes of Passover, accusations which the consensus of scholarship has, of course, dismissed as a blood libel against Jews. The book 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.

Toaff opens his book with a detailed vignette of the arrival in Venice from Rome of the philosemiticHoly 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.

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