Ariel Toaff, a professor of medieval and renaissance history at Bar-Ilan University, is the son of Rabbi Elio Toaff, one of the most eminent figures of post-war Italian Judaism. In 2007, he published a book in Italian titled Pasque di Sangue(“Blood Easter”), arguing that some Ashkenazi Jews were responsible for the ritual murder of Christian children.
With this, Toaff revived the medieval blood libel against Jews—the accusation that they killed Christian children to use their blood for therapeutic or cosmetic purposes. He focused on one of the most notorious cases: that of Simonino of Trento, an Italian infant who died in 1475. Blood Easter sparked fierce controversy within the Jewish world, with the author accused of legitimizing an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
If Toaff’s critics portrayed Blood Easter as a novel disguised as history, he has now published an actual historical novel, Il Rinnegato (“The Renegade”), newly translated into English. Set in 19th-century Ottoman Palestine, it follows a young shepherd who, while taking his goats to pasture, discovers the body of Rabbi David Ajash beneath a tree on the slopes of Mount Ebal overlooking Nablus. A gun lying beside the corpse suggests suicide … but who can say for certain? Ajash’s troubled and dissolute life raises many questions.
The novel has three narrators. First comes Abram Crespo, an old Jerusalem Jew and friend of the deceased. Next comes Ajash’s estranged son Moshe, summoned by Crespo, who gives him a memorial, which he took from the deceased’s home, addressed to Moshe. Finally, Ajash himself serves as the third narrator, telling his own story through the memorial.
The memorial gives shape to Ajash as a man with a strong appetite for life who gambles with his soul. It offers Toaff the opportunity to weave Judaism, Kabbalah, and esotericism into his plot, though the story never manages to escape a tone that is both quaint and bombastic.
From beginning to end, The Renegade screams falsehood. The reader might suspect Toaff of deliberately exaggerating to create a parody – but this is not the case. Everything suggests that he genuinely believes the story he is narrating. If Blood Easter is fiction in the guise of history, The Renegade is fiction that pretends to carry historical weight.
A novel set in a remote time and place carries great risks when the author lacks the skills of a novelist, as is the case with Toaff. Worse still, it digs him yet deeper into the hole he began with Blood Easter.
