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The Damascus affair was an accusation of ritual murder and a blood libel against Jews in Damascus in 1840.

The incident and arrests

On February 5, 1840, Franciscan Capuchin friar Father Thomas and his Greek servant were reported missing, never to be seen again. The Turkish governor and the French consul Ratti-Menton believed accusations of ritual murder and blood libel, as the alleged murder occurred before Jewish Passover. An investigation was staged, and Solomon Negrin, a Jewish barber, confessed under torture and accused other Jews. Two other Jews died under torture, and one (Moses Abulafia) converted to Islam to escape the torture. More arrests and atrocities followed, culminating in sixty-three Jewish children being held hostage and mob attacks on Jewish communities throughout the Middle East.

The Christian funeral procession for Father Thomas (without body) through the streets of Damascus was widely attended. A tombstone was inscribed "... assassinated by the Jews the 5th of February of the year 1840." The Arabic translation of the tombstone still stands at the Franciscan church in Damascus.

Protests and negotiations

The affair drew wide international attention. In a groundbreaking effort, fifteen thousand American Jews protested in six American cities on behalf of their Syrian brethren. The United States consul in Egypt expressed an official protest by the order of President Martin Van Buren. Sir Moses Haim Montefiore, backed by influential westerns including Britan'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 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...".

Influence

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.

The events 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.

The Damascus affair prompted French Jews to establish the Alliance Israélite Universelle in 1860.

Modern time

The 1840 accusations re-emerged in a recent book by a Syrian official, The Damascus Blood Libel (1840) as Told by Syria's Minister of Defense, Mustafa Tlass.

Fiction

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 recently in Hebrew under the title Death of a Monk.

References

1. Book Reviews by Daniel Pipes. Middle East Quarterly. September 1998
2. The Origins and the Development of German-Jewish Press in Germany till 1850 by Johannes Valentin Schwarz. (66th International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Council and General Conference. Jerusalem, Israel, 13-18 August 2000. Code Number: 106-144-E
3. The Damascus Blood Libel (1840) as Told by Syria's Minister of Defense, Mustafa Tlass (MEMRI Inquiry and Analysis Series - No. 99) June 27, 2002

See also

• Syrian Jews
• History of the Jews in Muslim lands
• Anti-Semitism and History of anti-Semitism

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)

• Blood libel
• History of Syria
• Jews and Judaism in Syria