Damascus affair
The Damascus affair was a ritual murder charge against Jews living in Damascus in 1840. It moved the international public for months, led to complex diplomatic conflicts between major European powers, the Ottoman Empire and its representatives in the Middle East, and had far-reaching consequences for the situation and self-image and the organizations of Jewish communities there and in Europe.
occasion
On February 5, 1840 from were Sardinia originating Guardian of the Capuchin monastery in Damascus, Father Tomaso, and his servant - a Muslim reported by their monks as missing -. They assumed a murder and asked the French consul Ratti-Menton , who is responsible for the Catholics of Syria , to look for the murderers. They suspected this to be among the city's Jews , as some residents of the Jewish quarter had testified that Tomaso had been seen there on the eve of his disappearance.
The priest was well known to both Jews and Muslims in the city as an occasional doctor and seller of medicines. A Turkish merchant had observed an argument between him and a Turkish mule dealer days before, in which the priest had cursed Islam . The Muslim spoke up in a rage and said: This dog of a Christian will die at my hand. The witness was found hanged shortly afterwards.
Above all, the friar Father Tusti, a fanatical enemy of Jews, accused the Jews of the city of murdering both men because they would need the blood of the missing for the Passover festival , which is due in six weeks .
Procedure
The French consul found the allegation well founded and turned the investigation into the case to the local governor Sherif Pasha . The latter had a Jewish barber named Solomon Negrin tortured until he testified that he had seen the father and his servant go into a Jewish house on the day they disappeared. As a result, eight of the most respected Jews in the neighborhood were arrested. With torture , extortion and bribery attempts were made to get them to confess to the alleged crime. One of the prisoners, an 80-year-old, died under the strain. Another converted to Islam. The rest did not make the desired admission. Thereupon, at the behest of the French consul Benoît Ulysse de Ratti-Menton , Sherif Pasha had 63 Jewish children arrested as hostages in order to persuade their parents to give in. He asked his superior Governor General of Egypt , Muhammad Ali Pasha , for permission to execute their fathers.
Extensions
Rioting against Jewish communities has now broken out across the Middle East. In Damascus itself, an incited crowd stormed the synagogue and burned the Torah scrolls . The Jewish communities in Europe and North America became active to help their threatened fellow believers. Public meetings and demonstrations took place in London , Paris , New York and Philadelphia .
The Frenchman Adolphe Crémieux in particular finally succeeded in getting the British government under Lord Palmerston to intervene. Apart from the British, only the Austrian consul of Damascus, Merlatto , stood up for the imprisoned Jews. He made serious accusations against Benoît Ulysse de Ratti-Menton , which Heinrich Heine commented in his Paris column Lutezia on May 7, 1840 as follows:
“Today's Paris newspapers bring a report from the kk Austrian consul in Damascus to the kk Austrian consul general in Alexandria, regarding the Damascus Jews, whose martyrdom is reminiscent of the darkest times of the Middle Ages. [...] The French consul in Damascus, Count Ratti Menton, was guilty of things that caused a general cry of horror here. It is he who inoculated the occidental superstition in the Orient and distributed a pamphlet among the mob of Damascus in which the Jews are accused of murdering Christians. This hate-snorting script, which Count Menton received from his spiritual friends for the purpose of dissemination, was originally borrowed from the Bibliotheca prompta a Lucio Ferrario, and it is quite definitely asserted in it that the Jews needed the blood of Christians to celebrate their Passover. "
The US consul in Egypt filed a formal protest on behalf of US President Martin Van Buren . After meeting the Mayor of London on July 3, 1840, Cremieux and two other mediators, Orientalist Solomon Munk from France and Sir Moses Montefiore from England, were sent to Alexandria on August 4 to conduct an independent investigation into the case. After weeks of talks with the Egyptian governor, they received his promise on August 28th to unconditionally release the prisoners and to publicly acknowledge their innocence. They then traveled to Constantinople and received an official declaration from the Sultan that the charge of ritual murder was unfounded. However, four of the 13 main defendants had since died in prison. The bodies of Father Tomaso and his servant were never found.
Effects
The affair showed the Jewish communities their endangerment and isolation in the great powers and their conflicting interests, which were carried out on foreign terrain. This brought about a closer movement and a large wave of international solidarity: 15,000 American Jews protested in six major cities in the United States for the release of their Syrian fellow believers. During the affair, some international Jewish newspapers, some of which still exist today, were founded in order to create a counter-public. In 1860, under the influence of the Damascus affair and the Mortara case , French Jews founded the Alliance Israélite Universelle .
The affair was the prelude to the ritual murder accusations against Jews, which were previously unknown in Islamic societies, but are now also more common here. However, these were almost always brought up there by Christian minorities.
The Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass published a book The Matzah of Zion in 1984 in which he reiterated the ritual murder allegation against Jews in relation to the Damascus affair. In an interview with TeleLiban TV on January 3, 2007, the Lebanese writer Marwan Chamoun revisited the legend of the ritual murder of the time:
“A priest was slaughtered in the presence of two rabbis in the center of Damascus in the apartment of a close friend of the priest, the head of the city's Jewish community - Daud Al-Harari. After he was slaughtered, his blood was collected and two rabbis took it. Why? So that they could worship their God, because by drinking human blood they could get closer to God. "
See also
literature
- Markus Kirchhoff: Damascus. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 2: Co-Ha. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02502-9 , pp. 52-60.
- Jonathan Frankel: The Damascus Affair. "Ritual Murder," Politics, and the Jews in 1840. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1997, ISBN 0-521-48246-1 .
- Ronald Florence: Blood Libel. The Damascus Affair of 1840. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 2004, ISBN 0-299-20280-1 .
- Paul Gensler: The Damascus Affair. Judeophobia in an anonymous Damascus Chronicle . Grin Verlag, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-656-02610-5 .
- Heinrich Heine (Author), Ernst Elster (Ed.): Lutetia. Reports on politics, art and popular life. Volume 1. In: Ders .: Complete Works. Volume 6: Mixed writings (= Meyer's classic editions). Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1925, pp. 129–300 (online see web links)
Web links
- Heinrich Graetz: The Blood Accusation of Damascus 1840. (Excerpt from the history of Judaism )
- Arnold Fine: The Infamous Damascus Blood Libel. In: Jewish Press. January 18, 2002. (English)
- Heinrich Heine , in: Lutetia, May 7, 1840, at Zeno.org
Individual evidence
- ↑ Peter Haber : Between Jewish Tradition and Science. Dissertation . University of Basel 2005. Böhlau-Verlag, Cologne 2006, ISBN 3-412-32505-8 , p. 280.
- ↑ Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums. IV., No. 18, Leipzig, May 2, 1840, p. 253.
- ↑ UN report of February 10, 2004 ( Memento of March 9, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
- ↑ Jonathan Frankel: The Damascus Affair, "Ritual Murder," Politics and the Jews in 1840. Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 418 and 421.
- ^ An Anti-Jewish Book Linked to Syrian Aide. In: New York Times. November 18, 2009.
- ^ Original English quoted by Lebanese Poet Marwan Chamoun: Jews Slaughtered Christian Priest in Damascus in 1840 and Used His Blood for Matzos (MEMRI Special Dispatch Series - No. 1453, February 6, 2007)