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A new book by an Italo-Israeli scholar of Jewish history that revisits violent controversies involving medieval and Renaissance Christians and Jews has been withdrawn from circulation at the author's request.
The scholar, Ariel Toaff, is a professor of medieval and Renaissance history at Israel's Bar-Ilan University. His book, Pasque di sangue: Ebrei d'Europa e omicidi rituali (Passovers of Blood: European Jews and Ritual Homicides), drew strong criticism from Jewish leaders and academic critics when it was published this month, in Italian, by Il Mulino, a publishing house in Bologna, Italy.
The book is a study of "blood libel": the infamous claim, made repeatedly during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, that Jews murdered Christian children and consumed their blood as part of Passover celebrations. It is now the consensus of historians that such accusations were false and fueled by anti-Semitism.
In the book, Mr. Toaff defied the historical consensus by suggesting that not all "blood libel" accusations were necessarily false, and that small numbers of fanatical Jews might actually have committed acts of ritual murder against Christians.
A group of prominent Italian Jews, including the chief rabbi of Rome and the president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, condemned the book even before its publication. Noting that Jewish law has never condoned the ritual use of human blood, the group's statement affirmed that the "only blood spilled in these stories is that of the many innocent Jews massacred for unjust and defamatory accusations."
Mr. Toaff's father, Elio Toaff, a former chief rabbi of Rome, did not sign the statement, but Italian newspapers quoted him saying of his son's book: "I do not agree with him at all; on the contrary, I absolutely disagree."
In an interview with The Chronicle, the...