The Damascus Affair
An Unlikely Ally in the Fight Against a Blood Libel
In 1840, an elderly Italian monk, Padre Tommaso, and his servant disappeared in Damascus. The monk apparently had something of a shady reputation and after he disappeared a story began to circulate that he had quarrelled with a Turkish mule-driver who had sworn to kill him. The story may have been true but it was soon overtaken by a more engaging conspiracy theory. When it was discovered that the monk had visited the Jewish quarter of the city on the day he vanished, the rumour spread that he had been ritually murdered by the Jews.
The accusation of ritual murder is one of the most enduring antisemitic calumnies of all time. The earliest documented case was in England on Easter Saturday in 1144, when a boy was found murdered in the woods near Norwich. Shortly afterwards the small Jewish community in Norwich found themselves accused of killing the child to use his blood in the baking of Passover matzot. (I wrote about it, here, last year.)
The accusation that Jews killed Christian children to bake matzah became known as the Blood Libel. Hundreds of cases have been reported over the centuries; the most famous of modern times (on which Bernard Malamud’s novel The Fixer is based) was the arrest of Menachem Mendel Beilis in Kyiv in 1911. The blood libel rarely occurred in Muslim countries, it was very much a Christian phenomenon, based on the myth that Jews had killed Christ.1 On the few occasions when Christians in the Muslim, Ottoman Empire managed to stir up a blood libel charge against the Jews, the authorities refused to pursue it. But Syria was no longer an Ottoman country. It was now governed by Muhammed Ali of Egypt. He had rebelled against the Ottomans and was manoeuvring to win European allies, particularly France, by pandering to the instincts of Syria’s Christian subjects.
As the rumours of ritual murder spread, the authorities in Damascus arrested twelve Jews and tortured them to obtain a confession. Four suspects died as a result of the torture, one converted to Islam and the remainder were incarcerated, awaiting execution. The events soon came to the attention of the European newspapers, dominating the headlines for weeks and becoming a cause célèbre. Muhammed Ali, the Egyptian ruler exploited the situation for his own political ends; week after week he delayed the date of the prisoners’ execution, knowing that the longer the story ran in Europe, the greater the damage to the reputation of Syria and of his Ottoman enemies.
The French consul, Count de Ratti-Menton, was more than happy to side with those who were accusing the Jews. He believed the medieval nonsense that Jews committed ritual murder, as did his superior, the consul-general in Alexandria. It is possible that the Prime Minister of France, Adolphe Thiers, shared the same view, or at least he found it convenient to give that impression. He told the French Parliament that the Jews were too powerful and that they were already lobbying all the European governments about the affair. The French attitude gave carte blanche to the Syrian authorities to violently terrorise the Jewish quarter as they conducted their fruitless search for the vanished monk.
The representatives of other countries joined the condemnation of Jews. The American consul in Beirut wrote: "A most barbarous secret for a long time suspected in the Jewish nation ... at last came to light in the city of Damascus, that of serving themselves of Christian blood in their unleavened bread.” The English consul joined in too, writing that “any impartial... person will decide on reading the investigation that the Jews are guilty.”
All this led to an outpouring of anti-Jewish feeling in the European media. In Germany, the influential Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung dramatically announced that three rabbis had been imprisoned with orders to translate the Talmud so that the secrets of the Jewish religion could be discovered. The Times in London devoted large amounts of space to discussions of whether the Talmud prescribed ritual murder. In an editorial, the newspaper swaggered that, if the accusations were true, “the Jewish religion must at once disappear from the face of the earth.” A further pernicious but unsigned piece in the paper, purporting to be written by a convert from Judaism, repeated the old charges of ritual murder and laid the blame squarely at the feet of the Talmud. It was not tolerant, post-enlightenment Europe’s finest hour.
Matters became even worse for the Jews in Damascus when a similar incident surfaced in Rhodes. A ten year old Christian boy was found hanged and the Christian majority on the island blamed the Jews. The news soon reached Damascus, leading to more riots, attacks on Jews and synagogues.
The situation began to resolve when the Jewish communities of Britain and France became involved. These were the two European nations where Jews lived the freest lives. In a show of solidarity with the captives, the two communities dispatched Sir Moses Montefiore from London and Adolphe Crémieux from Paris, on a mission to save Damascus Jewry. Both men were high-profile, well-connected, community leaders, both sufficiently influential to be listened to even in places as far off as Damascus. Montefiore, possibly at the time the most famous Jew in the world, was the wealthy President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and a personal friend of Queen Victoria. Adolphe Crémieux a lawyer and statesman, was President of the Consistoire, the central Jewish body; in 1848 he would become Minister of Justice in the French government.
The English gave Montefiore an imperial send-off. Queen Victoria received him the day before he left and the Lord Mayor of London called a meeting, declaring that “the Jews of Damascus are as honourable as those who live among us in England.” They offered a reward of 1,000 pounds either for the safe return of Father Tommaso, or for the discovery of his murderers. Daniel O’Connell, the Lord Mayor of Dublin, who recognised that the Jews of Britain were engaged in the same fight for emancipation as the Irish Catholics, asked whether there can be anyone “so depraved as to believe that the Jews use blood in their religious ceremonies.” Montefiore set off for Damascus with the cheers of England ringing in his ears. In contrast the French, bless ’em, sent Crémieux off with barely a shrug and a whimper.
Montefiore and Crémieux’s arrival in Damascus set off a flurry of diplomatic activity in the city. Meetings were held, investigations conducted and within a month all the Jewish prisoners were acquitted and released.
And that is where the story has traditionally ended, with the successful mission of two great European Jewish leaders. More recently however research has indicated that, although Montefiore and Crémieux certainly helped in securing the release of the prisoners, theirs was not the decisive contribution.2 Much as they may have wished it to be so, the liberal, enlightened elites of Britain and France (apart from the French government) did not force the hand of a backward Syrian regime. Rather it was the reactionary government of Austria, a government who excluded all but a handful of Jews from their capital city, who had the biggest impact. They involved themselves, not because they thought it was the right thing to do, but because it was in their economic interests to do so.
The reason was simple. One of the Jews arrested for the alleged murder of Father Tommaso was Isaac Picciotto. He was a member of a wealthy family with close links to the Austrian government; one of his uncles had been the Austrian consul in Aleppo. The Austrian Chancellor, Richard Klemens von Metternich, was a realist. In a situation where Austrian diplomatic and economic interests were being threatened he had no interest in listening to nonsensical, medieval accusations against the Jews. He made it very clear that he considered the charges against the Jews to be absurd and irrational. Almost from the outset of the affair he instructed the Austrian consul in Alexandria to demand that the French rein in their man, Ratti-Menton, stopping him from inciting the Damascus population against the Jews.
It was economic and diplomatic pressure from Austria, no friend of the Jews, which caused the Damascus authorities to release Isaac Picciotto and the other Jewish prisoners. No doubt the Montefiore – Crémieux mission played a part but its real significance lay elsewhere. The 19th century was a time when Jews across the world were still fighting for emancipation. Many, like the German poet Heinrich Heine and the fathers of Felix Mendelssohn and Benjamin Disraeli could not wait. They converted themselves or their children to Christianity in order to advance professionally and secure their families’ futures. Hundreds of other Jews did the same. To many people it looked as if Jews were gradually forsaking their faith and assimilating.
The real achievement of Adolphe Crémieux and Moses Montefiore was to show that, in the face of such assimilatory pressures, Jewish identity remained strong, that Jews were capable of acting politically in their own interests. The Montefiore – Crémieux mission gave those Jews who were not interested in converting a far stronger sense of why it was important to remain Jewish. It gave them a sense of identity, one that would strengthen over the coming decades with the concerted opposition to Russian pogroms and the emergence of Zionism.
The Cremieux – Montefiore mission lay at the beginning of a process that led to Jewish political nationalism. Nevertheless, ultimately it was not as successful as they had hoped. Neither Padre Tommaso, his servant, nor their abductors were ever found. And the historic charge of ritual murder against the Jews did not abate. It can still be found, not only in the dark places of the internet, but in the whispers of conspiracy theorists everywhere.
J. Christopher Edwards’ recent book Crucified: The Christian Invention of the Jewish Executioners of Jesus is a detailed analysis of how the early Christians changed the story of the Crucifixion, to pin the blame on the Jews instead of the Romans.
Jonathan Frankel. “‘Ritual Murder’ in the Modern Era: The Damascus Affair of 1840.” Jewish Social Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, 1997, pp. 1–16.