Story

The Damascus Affair

1840 CE

Biblical Narrative

In the city of Damascus, beneath the minarets and the bells of the old quarters, there lived in the year five thousand six hundred a Capuchin friar named Tommaso, and he disappeared, he and his Muslim servant Ibrahim Amara, and a cry rose: the Jews have killed them for their blood, to bake their unleavened bread on Passover. The blood libel, that ancient slander born in medieval England and carried like a sickness from country to country, had now reached the Levant, where it had not been heard before — and the consul of France, Ratti-Menton, lent it the dignity of a state.

They seized the barber Solomon Negrin and tortured him on the rack until he named the elders of the Jewish community as the killers. They seized seven leading rabbis and merchants — Rabbi Yaakov Antebi, the brothers Farhi, the brothers Harari — and they tortured them too, beat the soles of their feet, denied them sleep, threw cold water on them through the nights of the Damascus winter. Sixty-three Jewish children were taken from their mothers as hostages. Two of the prisoners died under the torture; one converted to Islam to escape it. The community of Damascus stood at the edge of annihilation, and the world was silent.

Then there came up out of the west a man with the bearing of a king, Sir Moses Montefiore of London, with his wife Judith at his side, and from Paris there came forth Adolphe Cremieux, the Jewish lawyer of the Republic, and Salomon Munk the orientalist scholar, and they sailed to Alexandria and to Constantinople. They knelt before Muhammad Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, who held Damascus in his rule, and they pleaded the cause of their brethren. They wrote to The Times of London. They petitioned Lord Palmerston. The civilized world began to listen.

And in the eighth month of the year, Muhammad Ali ordered the prisoners released. Sultan Abdulmejid in Constantinople issued a firman declaring the blood libel a calumny, forbidden henceforth in all his dominions. The first international Jewish advocacy campaign had won, but the wound did not close. The Catholic press in France continued to defend Father Thomas as a martyr; a memorial was erected to him in the Capuchin convent of Damascus, with the inscription Killed by the Jews. The libel had been beaten back from the throne but not erased from the heart of Europe.

Are we still living in those dark ages of fanaticism, when the Jew was held responsible for the death of every Christian found dead in a ditch?Adolphe Cremieux, address to the Consistoire central, 1840

Archaeology · History · Genetics

The Damascus Affair of February-September 1840 is the subject of Jonathan Frankel's monumental The Damascus Affair: 'Ritual Murder', Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge, 1997), which integrates the diplomatic, communal, and intellectual dimensions of the case from French, Ottoman, British, and Hebrew sources. The disappearance on 5 February 1840 of the Sardinian-protected Capuchin Father Thomas of Calangianus and his servant Ibrahim Amara triggered an investigation directed by the French consul Benoit-Louis-Francois de Ratti-Menton, supported by the Egyptian governor Sherif Pasha.

Ratti-Menton's investigation employed the bastinado and other forms of judicial torture against members of the Jewish community to extract confessions consistent with the medieval blood libel — the accusation, originating in twelfth-century England, that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood in the Passover matzah. The barber Solomon Halek (Negrin in some sources) confessed under duress; the Damascus Pinkas (community register) and contemporary letters preserved in the Montefiore archives at Hartley Library, Southampton, document the names of the seven principal accused, the deaths in custody of David Harari and Yosef Laniado, and the forced conversion of Moshe Abulafia.

International intervention coalesced around three figures. Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885), president of the London Board of Deputies of British Jews, organized petitions to Lord Palmerston and led a delegation to Egypt and Constantinople. Adolphe Cremieux (1796–1880), vice-president of the Consistoire central in Paris, mobilized French liberal opinion despite the hostility of the July Monarchy government. Salomon Munk (1803–1867), Hebrew scholar at the Bibliotheque Royale, served as interpreter and conducted interviews with the released prisoners. The delegation reached Alexandria on 4 August 1840.

Muhammad Ali's order of release was signed on 28 August 1840. Sultan Abdulmejid's firman of 6 November 1840, issued in Constantinople after Montefiore's audience and quoted in full by Frankel, declared 'these accusations made against [the Jews] and their religion are nothing but pure calumny' and prohibited all Ottoman officials from prosecuting Jews on the basis of blood-libel allegations. The episode marked a turning point: it demonstrated that organized international Jewish action could sway great-power diplomacy, and it accelerated the political consciousness that would eventually produce the Alliance Israelite Universelle (1860) and, in changed form, modern Zionism.

Damascus was the moment when the Jews of western Europe discovered that they could speak as a single people on the world stage — and the moment when European Christendom discovered that they could.Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair (1997)