Italian (and more controversially, Jewish) historian Ariel Toaff has generated an enormous amount of controversy with his new book "Pasque di sangue (Bloody Passovers: The Jews of Europe and Ritual Murders)" (2007). In it, he claims that the confessions of Jews in 1475 to the alleged ritual murder of a Northern Italian Christian boy named Simone de Trent are evidence of ritual killings made by Ashkenazi Jews in revenge for Jewish massacres throughout the Middle Ages.

Toaff's motivations remain unclear, and probably will continue to do so since he has withdrawn the book from publication. Toaff's general thesis regarding the likelihood of Jews engaging in such a revenge, even in the highly stressed and abused communities of Northern Europe in the 15th century, has been amply deconstructed (historian-speak for "trashed and taken to the dump") already. However, Toaff's use of torture-derived evidence requires another look. Those who want to believe that the outcry over Toaff's book publication (and subsequent withdrawal) hides actual medieval truths will undoubtedly respond with deliberate obtuseness to protests that these charges are fundamentally unbelievable. In fact, if you look at the responses to Kenneth Stow's sharp and impeccable review of Toaff's book, "Blood Libel: Ariel Toaff's Perplexing Book", they already are.

But such obtuseness has been addressed and historians have come down quite firmly on the side that accepting testimony under torture without question just doesn't work. And they don't mean just because it's morally wrong. In this day and age, where we have Jack Bauer on '24' torturing alleged terrorists (and even innocent people) for the good of the nation, and many viewers see no problem with that, it shouldn't be a surprise that blood libel and uncritically using medieval confessions under torture in historical research would raise their ugly heads. They all come from the same cloth.

Back in the 1970s, Norman Cohn in "Europe's Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch Hunt" (1975) and Malcolm Barber in "The Trial of the Templars" (1978) laid down exactly why you can't use torture testimony uncritically. Any historian knows that you can't just use any documentation or other types of evidence (like archaeological finds) uncritically, but confessions made under torture are especially problematical for three major reasons:

First, most people will say anything you want them to when you hold their feet over a fire. This is the opposite to how medieval law saw things. Medieval legal codes asserted that the only reliable testimony was that made under torture, since the truth would out in fear of the fire.

However, the 20th century has shown that people will say anything to get out of being tortured (hence current restrictions on police coercion during suspect confessions in western countries). Barber gives several medieval examples of this psychological phenomenon in the Templar Trial. This particular trial is an excellent example of medieval legal proceedings gone horribly wrong. Once the Pope got involved, many Templars recanted their initial confessions, stating that the Order was innocent and that previously, they would have said whatever their torturers wanted just to make the pain stop. Several of the accused complained that the torturers were drunk during the questioning and that torture-aided questioning went on in the official inquisitors' absence (both legal no-nos). One Templar brother even appeared before the papal commission with bones that had been burned out of his feet.

Second, medieval confessions under torture tended to follow a script. Stow briefly discusses this in his review, but Cohn goes into it in great detail in Europe's Inner Demons. In such great detail, in fact, that his position has become the de facto position on torture-obtained evidence for academic medieval historians. Cohn's thesis was that European fears of occult (literally "hidden") groups dated back to Roman persecution of early Christians in the second century C.E. and as far forward as the witchcrazes of the 16th and 17th centuries, with persecutions of accused heretics (like the Templars), Jews and Muslims in between. One can also see elements of his concerns in law enforcement obsessions in North America during the 1980s and early '90s with alleged Satanic cults that were supposedly engaging in ritual child abuse and baby sacrifice. No more reliable evidence was found of these cults than were found of early Christian cannibals or early modern witches.

You could argue with Cohn's assertion that this is a motif in European culture that has recurred for the past two thousand years, and he does have trouble explaining why the motif appears to have gone underground from the seventh to the eleventh centuries. However, Cohn does uncover some things that kept cropping up later in the Middle Ages and therefore make one question whether they were true or just convenient stereotypes made against medieval out-groups. Second-century Christians were accused of ritual cannibalism in secret meetings and orgies, as were Renaissance and Reformation-era witches. Cohn has attributed the accusations against the Christians to a misunderstanding of the Christian Mass and Roman suspicions about Eastern mystery cults. These accusations may or may not have resulted a millennium and a half later in the accusations made during the witchcrazes, but they certainly look similar, and aside from confessions elicited under torture, there is no reliable evidence for them in either period.

Thus, if we are to believe in the medieval-era confessions of Jews and the Templars (and many do), we have to first ask ourselves why we don't believe very similar accusations made against early Christians and early modern witches, ones supposedly (and solely) supported by confessions made under torture.

We also have to ask ourselves why we should believe, say, the confessions of the Templars, when they follow exactly the same script of charges that their accusers drew up a month before the arrest of Templar brethren on October 13, 1307--and made against other groups during the same period. And then there's the problem that while most Templars confessed to one or two of the lesser charges (like trampling or spitting on a crucifix), most vociferously denied more serious charges (like ritual sodomy). And those who did confess to the serious charges only did so after severe torture.


Which leads us to reason three: if blood libel was a Jewish revenge plot over the centuries, why was the same accusation also leveled against a wide variety of groups throughout the medieval period? Jeffrey Richards' "Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages" (1990), for example, shows how similar charges of murderous underground plots to poison and attack the main Christian body in Europe were leveled against not just Jews, witches and Templars, but also heretics, homosexuals, prostitutes and lepers. And while we're at it, let's add Gypsies to the list of groups accused of these types of charges. While you can argue that Richards overstates his case that accusations against these groups stemmed from medieval fears about unnatural, "deviant" sex, you can also see why the sheer variety of groups charged makes these charges appear so ludicrous today.

It takes a big stretch of the imagination, for example, to believe that the French monarchy really was undergoing sorcerous attacks in the first twenty years of the 14th century from: a demon-worshipping pope; gay, orgy-loving Templars; rapacious Italian bankers; uppity Beguines; and well-poisoning Jews, Muslims, lepers and shepherds (some of whom were attacking each other more than they attacked the monarchy).

The problem with accusations of blood libel against Jews (and the real reason why historians have shelved them on the imaginary side of medieval history since the 1970s) is not just that, to believe them, you have to believe that people always speak the truth when they are screaming in pain or confused by drugs or lack of sleep. It's also that you would have to believe that for the past nineteen hundred years, underground, occult groups have actively been trying to undermine European society. And that the first of these groups was early Christians.

What's really scary is that some people continue to believe these accusations, no matter how much evidence you throw at them. They are convinced that where there's smoke, there's always fire. But in this case, smoke is just smoke.