Damascus affair

The Damascus affair was an 1840 incident in which the accusation of ritual murder was brought against members of the Jewish community of Damascus. The prevailing contemporary interpretation of this event is that of being a part of a long history of false blood libel charges against Jews.

Background

Under Ottoman rule, Christians and Jews were considered dhimmis -- a class of non-Muslims possessing some limited rights under Muslim rule -- and were allowed to practice their religious precepts. In return, they had to pay a tax and recognize a lower legal and social status than that of Muslims. In 1831-32, Syria came under the rule of the Egyptians under Muhammad Ali of Egypt. Muhammad Ali was said to have ruled at the sufferance of the European powers, led by France, and under his rule, the rights afforded Christians increased. This aroused a grudge among the Muslim majority toward its non-Muslim population. In the economic struggle between the Jews and the Christians, each side needed the backing and support of the Muslim majority, and tried to incite the Muslims against the opposite group. The Christians in Damascus complained about their cruel treatment by the Muslim judges. Fearing an additional wave of Muslim violence, following the return of Ottoman rule in Syria in 1840, they enlisted assistance of priests from Catholic orders, including the Franciscans and the Capuchins. These priests reportedly brought the previously European blood libel myth with them.

Incident and arrests

On Feb. 5, 1840, Father Thomas, a French citizen originally from Sardinia, and the superior of a Franciscan convent at Damascus, disappeared along with his servant. This monk, who practised medicine, was well known in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim quarters. Some days previous he had had a dispute with a Turkish muleteer, who allegedly had heard him blaspheme Muhammad, whereupon the Turk is reported to have said: "That dog of a Christian shall die by my hand."

Upon Thomas' disappearance the French consul at Damascus, Ratti Menton, who supported Christian merchants and advisers over Jewish ones, and Christian families seeking economic ascendancy over the formerly empowered Farhi family, instituted investigations in the Jewish quarter giving rise to the suspicion that Jews were behind the priest's disappearance. The governor, Sherif Pasha, wishing to court French sympathies engendered by relations between the French government and the Egyptian pasha, Muhammad Ali, allowed the accusations to take root. A confession was extorted by torture from a Jewish barber named Negrin, and eight of the most notable Jews, among them Joseph Lañado, Moses Abulafia, Rabi Jacob Antebi, and a member of the Farḥi family, were imprisoned and tortured. Their teeth and beards were pulled out, they were burned, and finally tempted with gold, to persuade them to confess an imaginary crime. Lañado, a feeble old man, died under this treatment. Moses Abulafia became a Muslim in order to escape the torture.

In spite of the stoic courage displayed by the sufferers, Sherif Pasha and Ratti Menton agreed to the trumped up charges. While Ratti Menton published libels against the Jews in French and in Arabic, Sherif Pasha wrote to his master, Muhammad Ali, demanding authorization to execute the murderers of Father Thomas.

In the meantime the populace fell upon the synagogue in the suburb of Jobar, pillaged it, and destroyed the scrolls of the Law.

This incident, which illustrates the tensions that existed between the Jewish and Christian populations of Syria, was notable for being an exception to the rule of Jewish-Muslim relations which during the Tanzimat era in the Ottoman Empire (1839-1920) were generally much better than Christian-Muslim relations due particularly to the economic ascendancy afforded to the Christian community with the relaxation and eventual elimination of the dhimmi status rules in the 1850s. While occasional outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence erupted during this time, far more serious outbreaks of violence occurred between Muslims and Christians and Christians and Druze.

Protests and negotiations

The affair drew wide international attention in particular due to the efforts of the Austrian Consul in Aleppo Eliahu Picotto who made representations to Ibrahim Pasha, Muhammad Ali's son in Egypt, who then ordered an investigation. Sir Moses Haim Montefiore, backed by other influential westerners including Britain's Lord Palmerston, the French lawyer Adolphe Crémieux, Austrian consul Merlatto, missionary John Nicolayson, and Solomon Munk, led a delegation to the ruler of Syria, Mehemet Ali.

Negotiations in Alexandria continued from August 4 to August 28 and secured the unconditional release and recognition of innocence of the nine prisoners still remaining alive (out of thirteen). Later in Constantinople, Montefiore persuaded Sultan Abdülmecid I to issue a firman (edict) intended to halt the spread of blood libel accusations in the Ottoman Empire:

"... and for the love we bear to our subjects, we cannot permit the Jewish nation, whose innocence for the crime alleged against them is evident, to be worried and tormented as a consequence of accusations which have not the least foundation in truth...".

In a new and groundbreaking effort, the American Jewish community of 15,000 protested in six American cities on behalf of their Syrian brethren. "For the first time in American Jewish life, Jews... organized themselves politically to help Diaspora Jewry in distress." Among the new ethnic immigrant populations to the United States, the Jews were the first to attempt to sway the government to act on behalf of their kin and co-religionists abroad; with this incident, they became involved in the politics of foreign policy, persuading but not pressuring President Van Buren to protest officially. The United States consul in Egypt expressed the protest.

Influence of the incident and reactions to it

The incident and its repercussions were considerable. According to Hasia R. Diner, in The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000, "For the Jews, the Damascus affair launched modern Jewish politics on an international scale, and for American Jews it represented their first effort at creating a distinctive political agenda. Just as the United States had used this affair to proclaim its presence on the global scale, so too did American Jews, in their newspapers and at mass meetings, announce to their coreligionists in France and England that they too ought to be thought of players in global Jewish diplomacy."

According to Daniel Pipes, "...the real impact of the Damascus affair ... lay in Europe, where it led to a formidable backlash against Jews, the greatest in years. Jews found themselves completely unprepared for the tribulations they suffered but learned from this tragedy to organize and lobby, and from that came the first stirrings of modern Jewish solidarity, the basis of the formidable institutions that followed."

According to Johannes Valentin Schwarz, the events also encouraged the growth of the modern Jewish press. "As a result, a sense of solidarity was evoked among the Jewish communities of Europe they had never experienced before. Thus, the Damascus Affair gave birth to modern Jewish press especially in Western Europe, such as to the long-lived papers Les Archives Israélites de France (1840-1935) in Paris or The Jewish Chronicle (1841 ff.) in London."

Later references

Mahmoud Al-Said Al-Kurdi wrote two articles in the Egyptian daily Al Akhbar repeating accusations of the affair. The first article appeared on October 20, 2000. The second, titled The Last Scene in the Life of Father Toma appeared in the March 25, 2001 issue.

In 2002 the Middle East Media Research Institute reported that some of the 1840 accusations emerged in a 1983 book The Damascus Blood Libel (1840) by the Syriaian Minister of Defense, Mustafa Tlass. It further says that Tlass's book is known to be influential in international antisemitic circles as a reliable source of information on "ritual murder by the Jews."

Lebanese poet Marwan Chamoun alleged, in an interview aired on Télé Liban on January 30, 2007, "... slaughter of the priest Tomaso de Camangiano ... in 1840... in the presence of two rabbis in the heart of Damascus, in the home of a close friend of this priest, Daud Al-Harari, the head of the Jewish community of Damascus. After he was slaughtered, his blood was collected, and the two rabbis took it."

A fictional gay retelling of the Damascus Affair by the Israeli novelist Alon Hilu, emphasizing the contribution of Jews themselves to the false accusations, and claiming that Father Thomas died from a heart attack during intercourse with a Jewish young man, was published in 2004 in Hebrew and English under the title Death of a Monk.

See also

• History of the Jews in Syria
• Syrian Jews
• History of the Jews under Muslim rule
• Blood libel against Jews
• Antisemitic canard

Further reading

• Frankel, Jonathan: The Damascus Affair: 'Ritual Murder', Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge University Press, 1997) ISBN 0-521-48396-4 (Review)
• Florence, Ronald: Blood Libel. The Damascus Affair of 1840 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) ISBN 0-299-20280-1 (Review)
• Damascus affair article by Gotthard Deutsch and M. Franco in the Jewish Encyclopedia (1911 ed.)
• The Infamous Damascus Affair (jewishgates.com)