Damascus affair


The Damascus affair of 1840 refers to the arrest of thirteen notable members of the Jewish community of Damascus who were accused of murdering a Christian monk for ritual purposes. The anti-semitic blood libel resulted in the accused being imprisoned and tortured by the Ottoman authorities and the populace attacking and pillaging a local synagogue. The affair drew widespread international attention which resulted in negotiations conducted in Alexandria from August 4 till August 28. The aftermath secured the unconditional release and recognition of innocence for the nine prisoners remaining alive and the issuing of a firman intended to halt the spread of blood libel accusations in the Ottoman Empire.

Background

Under Ottoman Islamic 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, or jizya, 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. 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 February 5, 1840, Father Thomas, a French citizen and a Franciscan Capuchin friar from the Island of Sardinia, and his Greek servant, Ibrahim Amarah, disappeared, never to be seen again.
Upon Thomas' disappearance the French consul at Damascus, Ulysse de 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 Egyptian governor of Syria, 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. Four members of the Jewish community died under torture. Sherif Pasha and Ratti-Menton agreed to the 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.
Also, 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 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 outrage in particular due to the efforts of the Austrian Consul in Aleppo Eliahu Picciotto who made representations to Ibrahim Pasha, Muhammad Ali's son in Egypt, who then ordered an investigation. In 1840, G. W. Pieritz also exposed the matter in The Times to public indignation, after personal representations to the Pasha on 15 May. British politician and leader of the British Jewish community, Sir Moses Montefiore, backed by other influential westerners including Britain's Lord Palmerston and Damascus consul Charles Henry Churchill, the French lawyer Adolphe Crémieux, Austrian consul Giovanni Gasparo Merlato, Danish missionary John Nicolayson, and Solomon Munk, led a delegation to the ruler of Syria, Muhammad Ali.
Negotiations in Alexandria continued from 4 to 28 August and secured the unconditional release and recognition of innocence of the nine prisoners still remaining alive. Montefiore persuaded Sultan Abdulmecid I in Constantinople, to issue a firman on 6 November 1840 intended to halt the spread of blood libel accusations in the Ottoman Empire. The edict declared that blood libel accusations is a slander against Jews and to be prohibited throughout the Ottoman Empire, and read in part:

"... 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 the remainder of the 19th century and into the 20th century, there were many instances of the blood libel in Ottoman lands. However the libel almost always came from the Christian community, sometimes with the connivance of Greek or French diplomats. The Jews could usually count on the goodwill of the Ottoman authorities and increasingly on the support of British, Prussian and Austrian representatives.

Influence of the incident and reactions to it

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.
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 Johannes Valentin Schwarz, the events also encouraged the growth of a 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 in Paris or The Jewish Chronicle in London."

Later references

Accusations of the affair were published in the Egyptian daily Al Akhbar in 2000 and again in 2001 in an article titled The Last Scene in the Life of Father Toma. In 2002, the Middle East Media Research Institute reported that some of the 1840 accusations emerged in a 1983 book The Damascus Blood Libel by the Syrian Minister of Defense, Mustafa Tlass. The book was described as being influential in international antisemitic circles as a reliable source of information on "ritual murder by the Jews." In 1983, Tlass wrote and published The Matzah of Zion, which is a treatment of the Damascus affair of 1840 and repeats the ancient "blood libel", that Jews use the blood of murdered non-Jews in religious rituals such as baking Matza bread. In this book, he argues that the true religious beliefs of Jews are "black hatred against all humans and religions", and that no Arab country should ever sign a peace treaty with Israel. Tlass re-printed the book several times, and he stands by its conclusions. Following the book's publication, Tlass told Der Spiegel that this accusation against Jews was valid and that his book is "an historical study... based on documents from France, Vienna and the American University in Beirut."
In 2007, Lebanese poet Marwan Chamoun, in an interview aired on Télé Liban, referred to the "... 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 novel, Death of a Monk, based on the affair, was published in 2004.
The blood libel was featured in a scene in the Syrian TV series Ash-Shatat, shown in 2003, while in 2013 the Israeli website Arutz Sheva reported cases of Israeli Arabs asking "where Jews find the Christian blood they need to bake matza".