Religion & Beliefs

Today I stopped off to check out the Jew-news at JTA… and I discovered that the Blood Libel book I linked a few weeks back has been PULLED!

An interesting development, and it appears that in an unusual turn of events, this book has been pulled at the author’s request… which leads me to jump to three conclusions:

Either Ariel Toaff (the author) is an extremely sensitive man who doesn’t want to hurt anyone.

OR Toaff’s rabbi-dad asked him to pull the book for the sake of community calm.

OR Toaff had a little moment of “Oh shit! Maybe I fudged a little bit. Maybe I pushed the academic envelope a little too far…”

Which people do, you know… the academic process is so focused on building a convincing argument, it’s totally possible to lose sight of the trees while staring at a forest made of ancient texts. And if that’s the case, I forgive Toaff, especially in light of his quick willingness to pull the book instead of getting all riled up at the early response to his project. Many authors get immediately defensive when attacked.

In any case, I’ll be interested to see if the book is released in a new format.

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