The Damascus Affair: 'Ritual Murder', Politics, and the Jews in 1840 [Paperback]

Jonathan Frankel (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0521483964 | ISBN-13: 978-0521483964 | Publication Date: January 13, 1997

In February of 1840, an Italian monk and his servant disappeared in Damascus. Many Jews in that city were charged with ritual murder and tortured until they confessed. The case turned into a cause célèbre across much of the Western world and produced an explosion of polemics, fantastic theories, and strange projects. This book, the first since 1840, assesses the affair as a factor in European and Jewish politics of the time, a chapter in Jewish history and historiography, and the stuff of radically conflicting myths that eventually led to the Holocaust and the establishment of the Israeli state.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...the book can be read with profit by anyone interested in the intellectual and historical vicissitudes of the middle third of the 19th century and their ramifications to the present." S. Bowman, Choice

"If any work of history might be termed 'definitive' this one is." Albert S. Lindemann, H-Net Reviews

"The Damascus Affair is impressive in many ways. As a riveting story of murder and of some of the most terrifying extremes of human conduct, it also provides a penetrating scrutiny of both Jewish and European politics at the dawn of the modern era. This is a study as worthy for its balance and comprehensiveness as for its liveliness." Donna Robinson Divine, Domes

"...a very impressive and well-written account.... Frankel provides a particularly impressive review of the reactions to the far-away and long-ago events of his study." Middle East Quarterly

"...this rich, detailed, capacious book plunges deeply into what used to be called `the Eastern Question' from the standpoint of the Damascus Affair of 1840, a clash of local, international, religious, ethnic, and political interests over a charge that dated back to the twelfth century in Europe.... This is a learned, thorough, demanding, wide-ranging, and carefully considered work." Michael R. Marrus, Journal of Modern History

Book Description

Many Jews in Damascus were charged with ritual murder and tortured after the disappearance of an Italian monk and his servant in 1840. This book assesses the "Damascus affair" as a factor in the European and Jewish politics of the time as well as a chapter in Jewish history and historiography.

Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (January 13, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521483964
• ISBN-13: 978-0521483964
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,413,411 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Damascus Affair: 'Ritual Murder,'..., July 28, 2001

By 

Daniel Pipes, Middle East Forum, Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Damascus Affair: 'Ritual Murder', Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Paperback)

Frankel, professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has rescued a small but key event of modern history from ill-deserved obscurity. In a very impressive and well-written account, he tells what happened in Damascus after an Italian monk and his servant disappeared in February 1840. The newly-arrived but powerful French consul, Ratti-Menton, developed an entirely manufactured thesis of Jewish ritual murder that the local government in large part accepted, leading to the imprisonment, torture, and death of many Damascene Jews, followed by similar tribulations throughout the eastern Mediterranean.

But the real impact of the Damascus Affair, Frankel shows, 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 it came the first stirrings of modern Jewish solidarity, the basis of the formidable institutions that followed. Frankel provides a particularly impressive review of the reactions to the far-away and long-ago events of his study, showing just how the to-and-froing between the Middle East and Europe on the matter of Jews became a major issue for all concerned. In many ways, he shows, the grounds for the Wests involvement today in the Middle East were set in the terrible events of 1840.

Middle East Quarterly, September 1998

5.0 out of 5 stars A thrilling piece of scholarship, December 12, 2011

By 

reader 451 - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Damascus Affair: 'Ritual Murder', Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Paperback)

On 5 February 1840, a capuchin monk named Father Tommaso disappeared together with his servant Ibrahim Amara in Damascus, where they lived. Because they had last been seen on a visit to the Jewish quarter, where they were out to post a notice, suspicion fell on a Jewish household. And because Thomas had been a clergyman in a French, Catholic monastery, he stood under French protection as per Franco-Turkish treaties, and inquiries into his disappearance were initiated by the new French consul, the Count of Ratti-Menton. The case soon turned into a ritual-murder story, blood libels being unknown to the Muslim world but somehow still likely to germinate in the imagination of an outsider such as the Count. Ratti-Menton then enlisted the local authorities which, according to established procedure, used torture as their prime investigatory method. Two men died heroically under interrogation, but others supplied the accusations that were requested of them and denounced more of their fellow Jews. One ex-rabbi even converted to Islam and went on to manufacture translations of the Talmud to fit his persecutors' theories. Soon, more innocents were imprisoned, and the large Jewish community of Damascus found itself on the edge of a full-scale pogrom.

Meanwhile, the affair acquired major international dimensions. The French consul's involvement guaranteed reporting in the European press. The consular bodies in Damascus itself and in Alexandria were split. Moreover, Syria was at the time the bone of contention in a full-scale military conflict between the Ottoman Sultan and his nominal vassal, the Egyptian pasha Mehemet Ali, and this conflict had dragged the European powers: Britain, France, Prussia, the Habsburg Empire, and Russia, into the fray. Palmerston, Metternich, the French premier Adolphe Thiers were all called upon to take sides. The Damascus Affair rumbled on into 1840 to a background of war and diplomatic crisis, it was the subject of a major Jewish international rescue-mission, and it kept erupting in multifarious and often astonishing debates in the European public and private spaces.

The Damascus Affair has been the subject of abundant historical commentary, some originating as early as 1840 itself. Yet Jonathan Frankel's volume is the first and the sole academic history dedicated to it. Frankel apparently spent eleven years working on it, and it shows. He dissected for its purpose a multiplicity of private and consular archives in several languages, and searched through the contemporary press in Britain, France, various German states, and a number of smaller countries. The result is an extremely impressive fresco both of a micro-historical event and of contemporary socio-religious attitudes and beliefs.

For the Damascus Affair is primarily a book about European attitudes to the blood libel, and by extension to Judaism and the Jews in general, in the early nineteenth century. It is a story of conflict between a narrative of progress, advancing enlightenment, and receding obscurantism, and a very mixed reality in which bigotry, superstition, and anti-Semitism remained rife. It shows a society, indeed a continent: Europe, torn by the realization that so many, and sometimes the most unexpected people were prepared to believe in what one would have thought was outdated, medieval nonsense. That this had to do with the Jews but also with the Orient was not without significance, as Frankel comments. But most interesting is how the chips fell. Thiers, the prime minister of France, the country where Jews enjoyed the greatest degree of civic equality, found himself on the side of the blood libel. Supposedly reactionary Austria became a Jewish champion: not for geopolitical reasons, but because of the private stances taken by its Alexandrian consul Laurin and its leader Metternich. Britain was on the Jewish side, but much of that was through the influence of such group as the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, whose philo-Semitism was of an ambiguous nature. Rome banned all reporting rather than committing either way. But in each country the press was divided, sometimes according to predictable political lines, sometimes not. One of the author's paradoxical conclusions is, indeed, that emancipation (e.g. in France) exposed the Jews to mass prejudice, whereas restrictive but paternalistic regimes (e.g. Austria) were better prepared to afford them protection.

Frankel devotes due space to the affair's long-range implications for Zionism, a question that belongs to the broader history of emerging, nineteenth-century Jewish nationalism. But his book also has fascinating sections on the theological debates the affair generated, often verging on the unreal, on the political responses among the various governments involved, and on the affair's memory throughout the rest of the century and beyond. It is everywhere erudite and entertaining, and it reads at times like a thriller. My only regret, indeed, is that the inquest was not reopened and we will never know who actually murdered father Thomas.