The CODOH Revisionist Forum

This topic has been mentioned here and there on the forum, but I don't think we have a dedicated thread for it yet. Recently I was reading up on it a bit as part of my October/Halloween reading, so I figured I would start a thread for it while some of it was still fresh in mind.

One thing that interests me very much about this topic (aside from it being inherently lurid and sensational) is that it creates some curious conflicts for both Jews and revisionists. If you read the Jewish apologetics on this topic, they argue that the Jews who confessed and were convicted of ritual murder were victims of coercion and that the trials were akin to witch trials. This is noticeably similar to argument revisionists make against Nuremberg and against the Holocaust. It is amusing that in this context (where they have an interesting in debunking rather than defending a disputed legend) they argue in revisionist fashion for the exact sort of widespread conspiracy/mass delusion (show trials, false testimonies) that they claim is impossible in the context of the Holocaust. Similarly, for revisionists, our rationalist impulses should incline us toward skepticism of these child sacrifice stories. However, Holocaust revisionists also tend to be rightfully wary of Jewish historiography, and this "anti-Semitic" impulse in this case will push many in the opposite direction. While it may be tempting to accept the ritual murder stories essentially as a troll or just because it makes Jews mad, I think it's a very bad idea to fall into the trap of simply assuming anything damaging or embarrassing to Jews must be true, at least if you want to maintain your credibility.

If you go back a few decades (before Ariel Toaff in 2007), it seems there was near universal agreement that the "blood libel" was mythical. In the 80s and 90s, it seems that revisionists and "scholarly anti-Semites" were not attempting to rehabilitate the story and were happy to let sleeping dogs lie. From what I can tell, you have to go back to pre-WWII where you see the idea promoted by personalities like Julius Streicher. Toaff has single-handedly revived the controversy however, and now it seems a number smart people such as Thomas Dalton and Ron Unz have been convinced to varying degrees of confidence.

Perry and Schweitzer (2002)

P&S have a book called Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present. They dedicate a 30 page chapter to ritual murder allegation. I wanted to get an idea of the state of the debate pre-Toaff, and this 2002 book seemed like a good option. The chapter is heavily footnoted although P&S have done no primary research and are merely summarizing (pro-Jewish) secondary sources. But that is the sort of survey I was looking for. Below are what I've noted as their primary arguments.

1) In many of the blood libel cases, it indeed seems that the Jews were accused falsely. In some instances, it does seem that Jews probably were scapegoated. (It would take a long time to check up on the many individual cases they discuss.)

2) They highlight the magical and superstitious tendencies of Christians in Medieval Europe. Many of the accounts indeed seem fantastic and unbelievable to modern readers.

3) They argue all the Jewish confessions ("100% of the witnesses are wrong!" as Nessie would say, lol) are invalid because of coercion and torture.

4) They argue (and this is a very old argument) that the Torah prohibits use of blood etc (Lev 17:12) and that it is therefore unthinkable and self-contradictory to use unclean blood in a religious rite.

5) They produce quotes (some from the Middle Ages) from popes etc who have made various pro-Jewish statements dismissing the blood libel charge. (There have been Catholic authorities who believed it as well. The church formally repudiated as part of the Vatican II reforms).

I think the above is a fair recapitulation of the Jewish arguments on the matter as of the early 2000s. (I don't think there have been much if any updates to their talking points).

Something that stuck out to me as I read was that they leaned heavily on flattering the reader's presumed enlightened modern sensibilities as a contrast to the primitive superstitions of those dastardly medieval Christian bumpkins. Those goofy Christians actually believed that teh jooos broke into their churches and stabbed the communion wafers and that these wafers bled like Jesus. What a bunch of rubes! They love to pile on with this sort of thing yet they conspicuously avoid any discussion of what Jews at the time believed (the implication being that Jews were immune from such irrationalism). This omission is deliberate because once you realize that Jews also had a highly magical and superstitious worldview, the charge of bizarre Jewish rituals becomes more not less believable. In other words, this argument about magic and superstition is a double-edged sword. It may limit Christian credibility but it also increases the overall likelihood of weird beliefs and rituals among both Christians and Jews.

Toaff (2007)

Toaff's commentary is distinguished by the fact that he's done serious primary source research. He knows Latin and Hebrew and all that and he relies on original medieval sources rather than the sanitized history that is produced by modern Jewish scholars. I have not yet read Toaff's entire book. I read the preface (which I would very much recommend as a quick introduction) and chapter 6, "Magical and Therapeutic Uses of Blood." That chapter caught my eye because of its relevance to the very common it's-against-the-Torah argument.

Use of Blood and the Torah

Toaff demonstrates, I think rather conclusively, that Jews (or at least some Jews) did in fact use blood (usually in powdered form) for a variety of medicinal and ritualistic purposes. A famous example that is amazingly still practiced to some extent today is that the mohel during the circumcision ceremony will suck off the blood and foreskin from the baby. This contact with blood is apparently not considered unkosher or unclean. Even worse, apparently there is a documented variation of it where the mohel would spit out the blood into a glass of wine which is then given to the baby. Toaff even notes a documented custom (keep in mind many of these things were not universal among Jews) where women would fight over the bloody foreskin, based on the superstition that eating the male flesh would bless the woman with a male child (reminiscent of our tradition of the bride throwing out the wedding bouquet). In many cases, the sources for these sorts of things are Jewish converts to Christianity (whistleblowers, if you will), and Jewish academics as a rule dismiss these sources out of hand as automatic lies. But Toaff's citations include Jewish rabbis and other Jewish sources which seem more difficult to disregard. Toaff cites examples of books with recipes and potions involving blood, e.g. mixing powdered menstrual blood in wine and drinking it to treat heavy menstruation or using powdered menstrual blood of virgins mixed in wine to treat epilepsy. It seems there was a "market" for blood and some evidence that Jews would pay good prices for this blood. (In one of the blood libel trials, it seems the father killed his son, perhaps accidentally, while trying to extract blood from the neck. His story was that he intended to sell it to the Jews.) There is even some evidence that there were "kosher retailers" of this blood since fraud was common (trying to pass of animal blood as blood of a child).

Ah, but how do we square all of this with the supposed prohibition in the Torah? I didn't find the Torah argument convincing to begin with since legal rules are not much of a barrier to a people who are famous for creative and flexible legal interpretations (e.g.). Toaff helpfully confirms my suspicions by supplying direct examples of some of the many rationalizations (talmudry) that have been offered over the centuries.

-There are exceptions for cases of life and death (could justify some of the health usages, although this is only a partial defense as some of the potions were for sexual performance and other less serious purposes)

-Cites one opinion that the Torah only prohibits animal blood but does not say anything about human blood.

-The Jew v Gentile distinction: Can't use blood from Jews but can use blood of Christian. Similar to how usury was prohibited among Jews but not between Jews and Christians. (Toaff does not mention it but you could take this a step further and argue whether the goyim count as human on par with Jews or whether goyim are some inferior species. This could also be a workaround against the prohibition against murder).

-One medieval Jewish commentator opined that because it was firmly established custom among Jews it was therefore okay.

-Various arguments about the form of the blood. It's okay as long as it's dry and/or diluted.

I think these points by Toaff blow the Torah argument out of the water.

Torture

Toaff makes a quite ingenious argument against dismissing the confessions out of hand due to torture. First, he notes that torture was standard legal practice at the time and that it was actually regulated by statute. That is to say there was a procedure to it and they were aware to some extent of the risk of extracting false confessions. While their procedures would be acceptable to us today, it is not correct to say that all confessions back then were necessarily false.

Another very strong point he makes is that, unlike most of the scholarly writing about this, Toaff has actually read the original testimonies and analyzed them in detail. Rather than dismiss them in toto as pure fantasies, Toaff notes that the details of the statements reflect the mind of the Jews, not the Christian interrogators. "In many cases, everything the defendants said was incomprehensible to the judges -- often, because their speech was full of Hebraic ritual and liturgical formulae pronounced with a heavy German accent, unique to the German Jewish community, which not even Italian Jews could understand; in other cases, because their speech referred to mental concepts of an ideological nature totally alien to everything Christian." His point here is that the details of the testimonies are very Jewish and could not have be coming from the Gentile interrogators.

Concluding Remarks

Doing a deep dive on this would be a lot of work. For any individual case (Simon of Trent, Beilis which is a fairly modern case), you could probably spend months doing research. It certainly seems like the traditional Jewish apologetics on this have not held up very well in light of Toaff's work.

Most of Toaff's work seems to deal with the broader question of ceremonial blood use among Jews rather than the question of whether people were murdered for the blood in ritual crucifixion. Toaff seems to have tried to distance himself a bit from that more explosive point, but inevitably if his work is taken at all seriously those graver charges obviously become harder to dismiss out of hand, as has been done for about a century.

He came to international prominence with the 2007 publication of the first edition of his controversial book Pasque Di Sangue (Passovers of Blood), in which he claimed historical basis[1] for ritual use of human blood, obtained by murder. The claim was criticized as lending support to blood libel, an allegation that modern historians have described as unsupported by facts and which the Catholic Church has similarly repudiated since the 13th century.[2][3] Toaff wrote that these critics had misunderstood his book, which argued that the ritual use of small quantities of dried blood in magical curses had been a real practice among medieval "Ashkenazi extremists", but that this was unrelated to the accusation of ritual murder which was the central claim of blood libel.[4]

It seems that after the controversy over his book (the first edition was pulped), Toaff has decided to hold back a bit and stick to very narrow claims.

I think this is still very much an open topic. The debate is far less developed than the debate on the Holocaust issue.

I didn't even know 'historicity' was an actual word so my Sunday has been enriched...

I've read a few works on this issue and I still don't know what to think. From what I remember, Toaff focused mostly on one case, Simon of Trent, but also generalizes a bit to Ashkenazi Jewry.

JR Books has published a few books on the ritual murder issue, which mostly contain shorter works by various authors, many of them not available in English anywhere else.

But most of the sources seem to come from eastern Europe or Russia.

Catholic Investigations

Cardinal Lorenzo Ganganelli, later Pope Clement XIV, also wrote an official report on ritual murder accusations against Jews in Poland in 1758. He believed they were mostly not credible and unsubstantiated. Some accusers had ulterior motives, some accusers recanted, sometimes there was just a lack of any evidence. He also says the Jews wouldn't just leave dead bodies of murdered Christian children out in the open to be found by the Christians, especially in Poland, which was harshly anti-Jewish at the time.

However, he did accept two cases as genuine ritual murders by Jews: Simon of Trent (1475) and Andreas Oxner of Rinn (1462).

In his book Isabella of Spain: The Last Crusader, William Thomas Walsh has a long chapter on an Inquisition investigation of a case of suspected ritual murder by Jews, explaining in great detail how the investigators were very careful with the accused.

The First Holocaust, Ritual Murder, the Protocols

One interesting through-line with the Holocaust is that the first holocaust (Kishinev pogrom) was likely started from accusations of a ritual murder.

An anti-semitic daily paper Bessarabets was printed in Kishinev by Pavel Krushevan, who moved to St. Petersburg a while before the pogrom. But Krushevan's new paper Znamia (or Znamya) published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion a little later in 1903. This was the earliest known publication of a version of the Protocols.

So we have an interesting chain of events that are all integrally related coming out of Kishinev in 1903:

• Krushevan's anti-semitic paper
• Ritual murder accusations against Jews
• Kishinev pogrom/holocaust ("We say it is steeped to the eye in the guilt of this holocaust")
• Local influential Jew spreads news of the pogrom worldwide, false atrocity stories, forged document incriminating Tsarist Russia, global pressure on Russia
• Protocols published (and written?) by Krushevan

The Protocols could be their own topic, but I think the evidence points to them being pseudepigrapha with various origin myths grafted onto them.

But back to ritual murder, it's likely it happened in various times/places over centuries in Europe. I'm more inclined to conclude it was occasional religiously-motivated criminality by small groups, rather than any widespread or widely-condoned practice.

.
I also looked into this topic a few years ago just to expand my knowledge of how genuine anti-semitic hate tropes have manifested over time.
I.e. I came to it the same way I initially came to ’holocaust’ studies: viz. as someone unquestionably believing the consensus narrative.

I was therefore deeply shocked to find that the evidence supports what I now believe has falsely been called the ‘blood libel’. I.e. it isn’t a ’libel’ at all.

I now conclude that the vast majority of opinion has believed it is a libel BECAUSE of jewish control of the narrative in popular print and control of easy access to publications that refute the controlled understanding.
That changed for us all around 1999 with the availability of personal computers and the internet.
The research I did would have been almost impossible before the internet for someone like me with only a casual interest out of only minimal curiosity.

I recommend reading the research of Arnold Leese in his book ‘Jewish Ritual Murder’ published in 1938.

Also there is a compendium of some of the published research on this subject which I also highly recommend. It can be read here:
https://archive.org/details/jewishritua ... n/mode/2up

It contains these writings:
• "Jewish occult murders" by Matt Hale (2002) 64 pages;
• "Jewish ritual murder: a historical investigation" by Helmut Shramm (1941) 383 pages;
• "My irrelevent defence" by Arnold Leese (1938) 141 pages;
• "The Jew and human sacrifice: human blood and Jewish ritual" by Herman.L.Strack,D.D, Phd. (1909) 290 pages

The last publication by Herman Strack can also be read online here:
https://theserapeum.com/wp-content/uplo ... rifice.pdf

Ritualised ‘jewish’ murder or a recurring ‘blood libel’ in Damascus in 1840?
One of the most convincing cases of there being some wierd sect of jews since ancient times, ritually murdering non-jewish virgins to drain their blood, is the research into a recent case by the 19th century explorer and linguist Sir Richard Francis Burton.
He wrote a manuscript called ‘Human Sacrifice among the Sephardim or Eastern Jews’.

The fact that when his manuscript was ready for publication he was accused of anti-semitism and his book was never published but was obtained by a jewish collective and hidden away I consider very revealing!
What is also telling is the fact that when it came up for sale, another collective of Jews bought his manuscript in an auction for a high price and it is now held under lock-and-key by the Jewish Board of Deputies in England. I find that compelling evidence supporting the view his research was accurate, credible and convincing. That would explain why collectives of jews have for over a century been collectively intent on making sure no-one can read it.

Which strikes me as similar to the unpublished autobiography of Dr. Mengele written in anonymous exile in Argentina being auctioned and bought by a Jew and then hidden away.
As is also similar to the case of the autobiography of Adolf Eichmann written in Jewish captivity during his show trial.

The natural question is: ‘why don’t collectives of Jews want these historical writings accessed by historians and us the public?’

Apparently, part of Burton’s manuscript was published as the book The Jew, the Gypsy, and al-Islam. But as no-one can check I personally doubt this. I think that claim has been put out by jews who want the world to believe the actual contents have not been suppressed by them.
It can be read here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/57208/5 ... 7208-h.htm

In that published book, Burton apparently did list some of the many cases of jews accused of a jewish, ‘blood-letting’ ritual murder.
E.g.

1825 - The Jews of Beirut made away with Fatallah Sayegh, an Aleppine Muhammadan.
1829 -The Jews of Hamah murdered a Moslem girl and were expelled from the city.
1839 - [A Jewish-owned] flask of blood passed through the Customhouse of [Beirut].

The reason why Burton’s book ‘Human Sacrifice among the Sephardim or Eastern Jews’ is STILL suppressed by certain jewish collectives appears to be because it gives unwelcome, credible detail to an extremely notorious and recent case of ritual murder in modem times!
When a Catholic Priest by the name of Father Thomas was subjected to the exact same ‘ritual murder’ as was alleged in the 13th century onwards, only recently, in Damascus in 1840, it can no longer be dismissed as some superstitious medieval mythology!
The fact that this recent case was investigated and described in depth by a well-known, respected, knighted person — Sir Richard Francis Burton — is presumably what made it a revelation that jews found profoundly unwelcome.

The Jewish paedophile and holocaust promoter British Lord Greville Janner claimed it shouldn’t be accessible to anyone because “it revives a cruel Mediaeval lie”. Hmmm? Well… If Lord Janner said so, then we can be certain it actually DOES reveal truths that for some reason jews do not want more widely known. And he displayed his ignorance there as it is not just a medieval accusation. “In 168 BC, an intended victim, not a child, was discovered at the Jewish Temple, which Apion reported. Jewish historian Flavius Josephus reiterated Apion's research…”
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lei ... e-58932593

Someone called Dr.Geoff Alderman said Burton’s book was “voyeuristic and lurid and should be made available only to selected historians, under controlled viewing”. So does that mean he has read it?
Anyway… what does this show? = I suggest it shows jews collectively practicing mind control and censorship.

Fortunately, newspaper articles and other books reported this case in grisly detail. The New York Herald of April 6, 1850, reported the case on its front page:

Mysteries of the Talmud — terrible murder in the East.
"[W]ho would have dreamt of beholding the bloody mysteries of the Talmud exposed in their turn, and of having the trial of one of the most savage and ferocious murders ever yet recorded in the annals of criminality, once more brought before the public? Who would have imagined that certain fanatics use human blood to moisten their holy unleavened bread?
"Our readers will undoubtedly recollect the universal sensation created throughout the world, by the discovery of Father Tommaso, a Christian missionary from Sardinia, and his servant, Abrahim Amara, had been bled to death, their limbs chopped off joint by joint, their bones pounded in the mortar, and their mutilated remains thrown into a drain in the city of Damascus. The manuscripts of the original trial, as sealed by the French and Austrian consuls of that city, are now in this city, and we can thereby defy the ’Great Nation’ to contradict the truth of our statements."
Mustafa Tlass, who has a doctorate in history and is an attorney, went to the difficult task of obtaining the original transcripts of the investigation and records from France, where Father Thomas was a citizen, and translating all these into English.

This case in Damascus created a world-wide sensation at the time.
It has recently been written about and published from a jew-centric perspective treating it as a re-emergence of the old hate-trope by a Jew called Jonathan Frankel.
• The Damascus affair: ritual murder, politics, and the Jews in 1840 publ. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
I haven’t read more than the introduction.

Another recent book is this one which I haven’t read, so don’t know anything about its content:



Ritualised ‘jewish’ murder or a recurring ‘blood libel’ in Kiev in 1911?
The other case that convinced me that these recurring accusations over centuries of a long list of ritual murders for collecting blood is true and not a libel, was that which occurred in 1911 in Kiev then a part of Russia.
It is the most recent and notorious of the numerous Jewish ritual murder cases. It was the ritual murder of a child called Andrei Youchinsky and the resultant trial of a Jew called Beilis.
It’s a fascinating example of the re-occurrence of the exact same accussation over five centuries of jews conspiring togther to kidnap and cruelly murder childrens /virgins to drain them of their blood for use in wierd jewish rituals.

Prosecuting attorney in that trial G.G. Zamyslovsky wrote a 520-page book about this, which was called ‘The murder of Andrei Youschinsky’.


Ritualised ‘jewish’ murder or an early ‘blood libel’ in Norwich, England in Easter 1144?

The earliest written account of an investigation of a case of jewish ritual murder has to be this:
• The life and passion of William of Norwich by Thomas, of Monmouth.
It was written in the 12th century, by a monk.



It has been translated from Latin and can be read by anyone interested in the earliest account.


FINALLY
A historian called Ronnie Po-chia Hsia has written numerous books attempting to support the idea its a false narrative and the cases of accused Jews were false and they were in every case innocent. He was a Professor of History at New York University from 1990 to 2001. Po-chia Hsia “received numerous international grants” to do his research and make his publications. As an amateur published historian I suggest that last explains how consensus historical narratives are perpetuated. I.e. it has always been influenced by planning a career trajectory and earning a living. Writer/historians like Reese, Solzhenitsyn, Piper, Richard Burton, etc., appear to me to have more credible as they don’t appear to be motivated by quite the same self-interest and financial considerations. Also no University Press would dare publish such material.

Here are Hsia’s two books on the subject:
• The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany. (Yale University Press, 1988)
• Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (Yale University Press, 1992).