60 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
(and, to a certain extent, Mantel) therefore threatens to arrest what
Phillips perceives to be the vital mixing and circulation of human
experiences, ideas, and perspectives—the circulatory “nature” of
blood that is crucial to our collective health.
Viewed as a whole, the disparate narrative threads that comprise
the novel challenge the reader to overcome a variety of empathic
and intellectual barriers to reach toward a cosmopolitan vision of
human subjectivity. They encourage us to “synthesize the past,” as
Phillips terms it, into the stream of the ever-circulating, multifari-
ous present.^79 Phillips shows us that this task is in itself something
that demands a critical vision—one that is able to look beyond the
received cultural and epistemological frameworks of seeing and (to
refer to Macherey once more) cut through or disrupt the fabric of
history. Again, this is a challenge that resonates with Levinas’s con-
ception of self-ref lexive empathy, but it simultaneously speaks to the
priorities of cosmopolitan thought, particularly the need for “ironic”
and “critical” distance, as called for by Turner and Walkowitz.
The necessity of this challenge was confirmed only recently when
the real-life Portobuffole blood libel records were presented as his-
torical truth by a European historian. In a book on the subject, the
Jewish Italian scholar Ariel Toaff examines some of the most egre-
gious of the Italian blood libel cases, focusing a portion of the study
on the Portobuffole trial. Although highly critical of the “slanderous
stereotype” of Jewish culture that pervades the trial’s records, Toaff ’s
work nonetheless generated fierce controversy for appearing at times
to regurgitate and thereby validate their prejudicial content.^80 T o a f f ’ s
response to the criticism did not help matters, when he argued that
“certain criminal acts, disguised as crude rituals, were indeed com-
mitted by extremist [Jewish] groups or by individuals demented
by religious mania and blinded by desire for revenge against those
considered responsible for their people’s sorrows and tragedies.”^81
Although Toaff may well not have set out to offend, and may have
been earnest in his pursuit of “historical truth,” he nonetheless com-
mitted an error in failing to distinguish more explicitly the com-
peting narratives of history, which are, as Phillips’s novel illustrates,
often eclipsed by the voices of authority. His apparent willingness to
accept, through faith, the historical records that presume to relate the