"Ritual Murder" in the Modern Era: The Damascus Affair of 1840

Author(s): Jonathan Frankel

Source: Jewish Social Studies, New Series, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Winter, 1997), pp. 1-16
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4467492
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 "Ritual Murder" in the
Modern Era: The
Damascus Affair of 1840

Jonathan Frankel

his article centers on two related subjects: first, a very specific

affair-the "ritual-murder"case that took place in Damascus
in 1840-and second, the long-term significance of that affair
and of the "ritual-murder"charge, or "blood libel," generally in mod-
ern Jewish history.
Apart from the Beilis case that took place in Kiev during 1911-
1913-which formed the basis of Bernard Malamud's novel, TheFixer-
the Damascus affair of 1840 is probably the best known example of a
"blood libel" or Jewish "ritual murder" affair in modern times. In
outline, the story is very simple.
On February 5, 1840, an elderly monk-priest of Italian origin, Padre
Tommaso, who had been living in Damascus for over 30 years, disap-
peared off the face of the earth-as did his Arab servant. On the day of
his disappearance, Tommaso had visited the Jewish quarter of the city,
and rumors began to spread in the Christian quarter that he had been
murdered by the Jews in accord with their ritual commandments. Over
the next three weeks, the Egyptian authorities (Syriawas then ruled by
Muhammed Ali of Egypt) arrested over a dozen leading members of
the Jewish community and subjected them to intensive interrogation
and torture. Four people were tortured to death in the process, and
most were eventually coerced into making confessions of guilt- spuri-
ous, it goes without saying. That orders for their execution would soon
arrive from Alexandria was regarded as a foregone conclusion.
Under normal circumstances, a process of this kind involving an
oriental (and hence, in the eyes of nineteenth-century Europe, a
"barbaric") regime would have lacked credibility in the West. But
Tommaso, as a Roman Catholic priest, enjoyed something close to
 extra-territorial privileges under the treaty guarantee of France, and
the French consul in Damascus from the first considered himself
[2] duty-bound to associate himself with the prosecution of the case. It
was this fact that lent the proceedings their credibility and legitimacy.
Jewish Muhammed Ali, the Egyptian viceroy, a cautious, canny politician,
Social delayed the execution week after week, and during the spring of 1840
Studies news of the affair spread across Europe and the entire Western world,
causing a major sensation. Faced by this crisis, the Jewish leaderships in
France and England-both countries where theJews possessed equal or
nearly equal political rights-decided to send out a high-leveldelegation
to the Middle East. Sir Moses Montefiore (the president of the Board of
Deputies of BritishJews, a man of wealth and standing in London) and
Adolphe Cr6mieux (vice president of the French Jewish Consistoire
Centraland a famous courtroom lawyer)arrivedin Alexandriaon August
4. They met with Muhammed Ali many times, and a month later the
survivingJewish prisoners in Damascus were released. On their return
journeys across Europe, Montefiore and Cremieux were feted as con-
quering heroes by one Jewish community after another. Everythingwas
done to demonstrate that here was one crisis that had a "happyending."
This story has been told many times. In its most dramatic form, it
was told by the great German-Jewishhistorian Heinrich Graetz, who
over a century ago devoted a long chapter to the Damascus affair in
his 11-volume History of theJews. What originally attracted me to the
subject, though, was not the ritual-murder affair and its eventual out-
come per se-all that seemed too familiar, too routine, to be of real
interest. After all, the accusation thatJews killed Christiansas an essen-
tial part of their religion, using Christian blood in the Passover matzot
and for other (sacerdotal or magical purposes), had first emerged in
the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and had been a major
factor in the expulsion of the Jews from most of Europe during the
high Middle Ages, but it had apparently lost much of its persuasiveness
in the modern era. The belief that had become entrenched in the
period from the Crusades to the Wars of Religion-that Judaism in-
volved ritual murder-was clearly associated in the medieval Christian
mind with the crucifixion and the Eucharist. The crucifixion of Christ
as the supreme case of human sacrifice (albeit a form of self-sacri-
fice) -prefigured by Abraham's readiness to kill his own son, Isaac-
and the Eucharist as the consumption of bread actually become flesh,
and wine actually become blood, were images-and articles of faith-
that had then lent the accusation a real and immediate plausibility.But
the successful prosecution of Jewish ritual-murderers, like that of
witches (and the two phenomena were, of course, closely linked histor-
ically), had become virtually impossible since the age of the European
Enlightenment. And if it now, in the mid-nineteenth century, reap-
peared in the Middle East, did that not simply reinforce the assumption [3]
that, in European terms, the accusation was essentially medieval?
What drew me to the Damascus case was a different aspect of the Jonathan
Frankel
affair. My particular interest has for a long time now been the study
of Jewish politics in the modern era, and in that context the
"Ritual
Montefiore-Cremieux mission to the East was surely an event worthy
Murder"
of closer examination. After all, was there not here a major political in the
enterprise, one that stood in glaring opposition to the dominant view Modern Era
ofJewish historians since Simon Dubnow that the West EuropeanJews
in the mid-nineteenth century were single-mindedly focused on assim-
ilation and, therefore, eager at all costs to blend quietly into the
majority societies (French, English, German, or Dutch)? The apparent
contradiction between the prevailing historiographical paradigm and
the actual historical event was intriguing. Of still greater interest from
my point of view was the chance to examine closely an episode-the
Montefiore-Cremieux mission-that had clearly done much to foster
the myth ofJewish power, in general, and of the WesternJewish elites
as omnipotent, in particular. This myth would become of enormous
importance in the development both of modern Jewish politics (spe-
cifically of Jewish nationalism and early Zionism), on the one hand,
and of modern antisemitism in its most virulent forms, on the other.
Even though the politics of the "Missionto the East" thus appeared
to me to be certainly worthy of a short monograph, I soon discovered
that this view was not shared by many of my colleagues and acquaint-
ances. The skeptical question thrown at me in one form or another
over the years was "Is there any new material left to be found? Surely,
it's already all been published?"
In reality, though, my problem turned out to be just the opposite.
The more I progressed, the more I found myself being surprised time
and again by what I was discovering. What had been planned as an
extended essay on a specific political campaign grew into a far more
ramified study. In a nutshell, what happened was this: almost against
my will, I found myself drawn into a full-scale study of the irrational
as a key element in the Jewish history of the mid-nineteenth century.
This is by no means to say that my work on the Montefiore-Cremieux
mission-a strictlyrationalist theme much cherished by the nineteenth-
century liberal school of Jewish historiography-was unrewarding. The
more familiar I became with the history of the mission, the more my
estimation of its significance inclined toward the viewpoint of the liberal
school of historians (with Graetz in the lead) and against that of the
 later Jewish-nationalistschool (founded by Dubnow). Far from seeking
a low profile in order to prove that they were totally free of dual
[4] loyalties-and hence were worthy of emancipation in their respective
countries-the Jewish leaderships in England and the English-speaking
Jewish world (and to a lesser extent also in France) loudly proclaimed their
Social solidarity with the Damascus Jews. All the methods of rousing public
Studies opinion so beloved of Victorian England were now brought into play in
the name of the Board of Deputies of the BritishJews: letters to the
editor; articles and paid advertisements in the press; the distribution of
leaflets; raising questions in Parliament;lobbying government ministers;
and public meetings, some Jewish, some for the general public. The
meeting of July 3 called together in the Mansion House by the Lord
Mayor of London was the most important of such gatherings, and the
minutes were reproduced over many columns in The Timesand other
papers. (This was a significant precedent; another such meeting held
some 40 years later would play a key role in the response to the pogroms
in Russia-a response that made 1881-82 a major turning point in
Jewish history.) In many parts of the world, meetings were held to raise
money to underwrite the mission to the East:in Manchester,Liverpool,
Dublin, Portsea, Falmouth (in Britain); Hamburg (in Germany); Altona
(in Denmark); Bridgetown, Barbados; Kingston and Spanish Town,Ja-
maica; Curapao;Charleston, South Carolina;Richmond, Virginia;New
York;and Philadelphia. All in all, about $50,000 were raised, a large sum
the equivalent today of probably $5-10 million.
Of course, there is no reason to jump from one extreme to another.
There were obvious limits to solidarity. As was only to be expected,
the brunt of the campaign-both public and behind the scenes-was
carried by relatively few individuals: in France by Cremieux and by
James (Jacob) de Rothschild. (In general, the Rothschild family, with
its branches in Vienna, Paris, Naples, Frankfurt, and London, was at
the hub of the crisis.) Many, probably most, Jews were uninformed or
apathetic (the Berlin community was thus characterized, for exam-
ple), and some were opposed in principle to the very idea of a public
campaign. One Italian-Jewish leader, for example, warned that to
enter into open debate was to expose oneself to violent rebuttals from
the majority population; he stated dryly that the constitutional re-
gimes of Europe "knowhow to command their artillery but not their
own public opinion."'
For his part, Heinrich Heine (the great German-Jewishpoet, albeit
long baptized, then living in Paris) was a keen supporter of the pub-
licity campaign, but he insisted that it was totally unrepresentative of
the French Jews en masse. He wrote in May:
 They are Frenchmenjust like the othersand so haveoutburstsof enthu-
siasmthat last for twenty-fourhours or, if the sun is hot, even.for three
days!And that goes for the best of them. Manyof them still practice [5]
Jewishceremonialobservance... but theydo so mechanically.... There
is no trace of inner faith because Voltaire'scriticism,his acid wit, has Jonathan
Frankel
wroughtits destructivework.2
"Ritual
But there is much evidence to demonstrate that Heine was exagger-
Murder"
ating. Another observer of the French-Jewishcommunity was probably in the
closer to the truth. Certainly, wrote Gerson Ben Levi, the Jews had Modern Era
integrated quickly into French society since the Revolution of 1789:
"The grandfather believes; the father doubts; the son negates. The
grandfather prays in Hebrew; the father reads the prayers in French;
the son does not pray at all. The grandfather observes all the festivals;
the father only Yom Kippur; the son observes none." But, he went on,
"if in the most forgotten corner of the East, memories are stirred by a
persecution of the Jews, you can be sure that our young people will rise
as one man ... and produce a united roar of condemnation strong
enough to inspire shame and fear in those who abet such ... crimes."3
Unable to explain the Jewish solidarity displayed in 1840 in terms of
an "assimilationist"context, the Dubnow school saw it either as a
holdover, a remnant, from the traditionalJewish politics of supplication
and intercessionism-shtadlanut-or as a premature anticipation of a
still entirely embryonic nationalism. In fact, though, it was a dramatic
example of "emancipationist"politics: the appeal to what were assumed
to be the shared humanist or universalist values of the "civilization."
However significant the story of the Montefiore-Cremieux mission,
most of it was not unexpected. The elements of surprise, of shock
even, came from elsewhere. Very often, in fact, I found myself in an
empathetic bond with the Jews of 1840 who so frequently just could
not believe how the Damascus affair was developing.
The causes for surprise were many and frequent. First, for example,
I gradually came to the conclusion that the Damascus affair should not
be seen primarily as a Western intervention to rescue the victims of
Eastern tyranny. On the contrary, it was specifically the impact of the
West that contributed decisively to the eruption of the "ritual-murder"
case in the first place. That the Jews practiced human sacrifice was, it
turns out, a belief endemic among many, perhaps most, of the huge
indigenous Christian populations in the Ottoman empire. So when a
Christian disappeared or was murdered by an unknown assailant,
blame therefore fell naturally on the Jews. But the Turkish (Ottoman)
authorities had nearly always refused to prosecute such cases-the
 Ottoman empire, after all, had provided the Jews expelled from Spain
and Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with refuge, and
[6] traditionally it had no reason to take up a specifically Christian cause
against theJewish minority. But none of this applied to the government
Jewish of Muhammed Ali, which was in rebellion against the Ottoman regime,
Social was pro-Western in outlook, and actively sought the support of its
Studies Christian subjects (particularlyof the Maronites and other Catholics in
greater Syria). It was the Egyptian eagerness to cement close relations
with France that explained the extremely vigorous prosecution of the
case. And the Western diplomats in Damascus were for many weeks
unanimous in their support of the charge.
As the U.S. vice-consul in Beirut wrote in March, "Amost 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 ... a secret which these 1840 years
must have made many unfortunate victims."4And the English consul
wrote in May that "anyimpartial... person will decide on reading the
investigation that the Jews are guilty.... The same arguments ... are
employed . . . by the Jews to get whitewashed as were produced by
them centuries back when they were expelled from .. . Great Britain,
France, Italy, and Spain for the very same alleged crime."5
If the Western (specifically the French) connection was largely re-
sponsible for the prosecution of the case, just the opposite was true of
the rescue of the Jewish prisoners charged with the crimes. (Here again
was a reality that I had not anticipated.) One tends to think of 1840 as
part of the modern age, but to exchange letters between Damascus and
London, for example, normally took over two months; between Damas-
cus and New York,four months or more. The outcome of events could
not be quickly decided simply by instructions from Europe, and the fact
that the Jewish prisoners in Damascus were not executed was due ini-
tially to developments within the region. Despite the image-favored in
Europe-of the OrientalJews as helpless victims of arbitrarydespotism,
in fact they (or more exactly, their financial elites) had enjoyed consid-
erable influence in the Ottoman territories over many centuries. The
Damascus case slowed down dramaticallyin Marchwhen a Picciotto was
arrested as one of the alleged murderers (the Picciottos were a famous
Jewish merchant family centered in Aleppo). The traditional story of
the rescue efforts thus turns out to have been excessively Eurocentric.
Among the extraordinary aspects of the affair, one of the most
intriguing is the role played respectively by France and Austria. Of
course, every account of the case highlights the role of the French
consul in Damascus, the Count de Ratti-Menton, whose enormous
energy drove the wheels of the prosecution relentlessly forward; for
the Jewish historians he was the arch-villain of the case-a veritable
Haman, as it was often written. But this was, in fact, a gross oversim- [7]
plification, for his passionate commitment to the idea that Judaism
prescribes human sacrifice was never repudiated by the French gov- Jonathan
Frankel
ernment. His immediate superior, the consul-general in Alexandria,
0
argued that the interrogation of the prisoners (as reported in the
"Ritual
official protocols) had provided conclusive proof of their guilt: "I do
Murder"
not believe it my duty to set myself up as the defendant of the mur- in the
derers of a Franciscan monk under French protection .... Fanatical Modern Era
rabbis have placed criminal interpretations on the Scriptures."6
The man ultimately responsible for French policy was Adolphe
Thiers, who combined the posts of premier and foreign minister. A
liberal and a famous historian of the French Revolution and the Napo-
leonic era, Thiers was confidently expected by the FrenchJews to stand
up for the cause of Reason and Enlightenment and to denounce the
entire ritual-murdercharge as medieval nonsense. In fact, he did noth-
ing of the sort. True, in his secret despatches to Damascus he wrote that
no reliance could be placed on confessions made under torture. But in
parliamentary debates he refused adamantly to express an opinion
about the innocence or the guilt of... the accused." "Havingread the
protocols of the case" he said, "I have found no sign of anything with
which our consul can be reproached."7 Ratti-Menton (continued
Thiers) had been fully supported by his immediate superior, the con-
sul-general in Alexandria, and "Ihave to put more trust in him than in
a class [the Jews] . . . to which I give credit for its zeal in seeking to
demonstrate its innocence. But I cannot abandon to [theJews] an agent
who, I am convinced, did his duty.... Gentlemen,... the Jews are more
powerful in the world than they have pretensions to be and at this very
moment are in all the chancellories [of Europe] about this affair."8In
private, Thiers was often more blunt, saying (as Rothschild reported)
that "the case is based on the truth; and that we [the Jews] had better
let the matter rest; that the Jews in the Middle Ages were fanatical
enough to have required nothing if not Christian blood for their Pass-
over; that the Jews in the East still maintain such superstitions etc."9
Thiers hoped that, if the Damascus affair dragged on long enough,
public interest would decline and the French diplomats in the Middle
East would emerge from the case with their standing greatly enhanced.
The Catholic (primarilyMaronite) population in Lebanon was expected
to play a crucial role in the war then about to break out between Turkey
and Egypt. Thiers' shaky premiership depended on the success of his
high-risk Middle East policy, and the actual truth of the ritual-murder
 accusations was for him a total irrelevancy in the face of raison d'etat
and Realpolitik. This logic even survived Thiers' fall from power in
[8] October 1840; his successor, Francois Guizot (another famous histo-
rian), rewarded Ratti-Menton for what he termed his "firm probity at
Jewish Damascus."As Cremieux put it simply: "LaFrance est contre nous."
Social Nothing had led me to expect anything like this unanimous sup-
Studies port from all levels of the French government, and from one prime
minister to the next, for the prosecution in the Damascus affair.
Similarly, nothing had prepared me to find the stance adopted by
Austria to be what it was. The Habsburg empire in the post-Napole-
onic period (1815-48), as seen through liberal eyes, was the bulwark
of everything reactionary, obscurantist, and counter-revolutionary,
and it could therefore hardly be the object of much sympathetic
attention from the Jewish historians, who (whether integrationist or
nationalist) counted themselves almost to a man as in the progressive
camp. But of all the European powers it was Austria-its diplomats
and its chancellor, Richard Klemens von Metternich-that from the
second month of the affair sought to throw a protective shield over
the surviving DamascusJews.
A number of reasons were involved. Among them was the fact that
one of the prisoners was Isaac Picciotto and that since the 1780s the
Austrian government had been selecting its consuls-general in Aleppo
from the Picciotto family; Isaac's uncle held that post in 1840. The
Austrian regime (in marked contrast to the French) saw its consular
service more as an instrument of economics (trading and finance)
than of politics; hence, the Picciottos in the Middle East and the
Rothschilds in the West were among their consuls-general. Besides,
even though Metternich and his diplomats might have been reaction-
aries, they were not in reality obscurantists; they saw themselves as
heirs to the rationalist attitudes of eighteenth-century enlightened
absolutism. Very early in the case, the Austrian consul-general in
Alexandria demanded that Paris intervene to stop Ratti-Menton from
"urging on the Muslim authorities . . . to inhuman abuse of the ac-
cused, and that he cease to incite the population of Damascus against
the Jews."'?Quite independently, Metternich reacted in the same way:
"The accusation that Christians are deliberately murdered for some
blood-thirsty Passover festival is by its nature absurd."" Metternich's
policy in the affair caused extreme irritation in Rome at the Papal
curia where (by all accounts) the crime in Damascus was universally
considered to be, indeed, a case of Jewish ritual murder.
Jewish historians, with Graetz in the lead, tended to downplay the
role of the French and Austrian regimes, preferring to dwell on the
support received from the friendly government in London. But from
our present-day vantage point it can be argued that the contrasting
positions adopted by liberal France and reactionary Austria in the [9]
affair were of profound significance. Can we not see in this apparent
paradox the fundamental dilemma facing the Jews in Europe in the Jonathan
Frankel
modern era? The reactionary regimes-Austria, Prussia, Russia-
0
firmly denied the Jews equal rights, and banned them from the most
"Ritual
desirable regions (including Vienna and St. Petersburg). At the same
Murder"
time, though, in those strictly hierarchical, feudal, and serf-owning in the
societies, the Jews did occupy their own niche and had their own Modern Era
legitimate functions. There was thus no logical reason to support a
ritual-murder charge against the Jews--and all three of these (Holy
Alliance) powers threw their support to the side of the defense in the
Damascus affair.
The situation in France was, of course, just the opposite. In what was
politically perhaps the most modern (certainly the most revolutionary)
country in Europe, the Jews enjoyed full civil rights and equality of
opportunity. Cr6mieux himself would twice hold the post of minister
ofjustice in French cabinets. But the modernization of Europe brought
with it great dangers as well as great benefits for the Jewish minority. A
competitive society is a society in which resentment flourishes, and a
society without fixed hierarchy has no place for "noblesse oblige."
Thiers' unbridled ambition, his grasp for greatness, fitted perfectly into
the world described by Balzac where the Napoleonic cult held sway;
where worship of genius and success, romanticism and cynicism were
inextricably intertwined; and where everything was permitted.
And, of course, free speech meant freedom for the demagogue and
the sensationalist. Thiers played the chauvinist card in defense of his
diplomats. The newspaper editors picked up the murder story to
increase their circulation. Where censorship held sway (the Papal
states, the Austrian and Russian empires), the Damascus affair was
deliberately played down, but in the free and semi-free press, it was a
very different matter.
On 2 April an article headed "The Discovery of the Murderers!"
appeared in a leading Marseilles paper; it read:

Today the truth is known; of the nine accused .. . seven . . . admit

everything.The servantsat firmlyon [Tommaso's]stomach;the barber
held him by his beard; two hakhams pinned him to the ground, the one
by the arms, the other by the legs. David Harari, armed with a large knife,
cut deep into his throat; and then David's brother . . . finished him off.
Around these leaders responsible for the sacrifice [grands sacrificateurs]
 ranged 3 others.The bodywassuspendedhead down;one held a tub to
collect the blood while the other two applied pressureto facilitatethe
[10] flow, then, once the source of blood had dried up, all of them, mad-
dened, threwthemselveson the corpse, cutting it to bits.12
Jewish
Social This and similar reports were reproduced in most French papers, in
Studies leading German papers, and in Belgium, Hungary, and Italy (Turin) -
in liberal as much as in conservative papers (but not, be it noted, in
Britain, the United States, or Holland). No attempt was made to
subject these extraordinary reports to any kind of critical analysis, and,
as can be imagined, the vast publicity given to such graphic descrip-
tions of the murder simply stunned the Jews of Western Europe.
For many months the press continued to shock. True, in France
the pro-government papers, following official policy, and after the
initial orgy of sensationalism, threw a blanket of complete silence over
the affair, but the ultra-Catholic press ensured that the ritual-murder
accusation remained very much in the public eye. The following is a
passage, for example, from a long article published in a number of
influential papers in southern France:

Driven from their fatherland . . . the Jews swore an implacable hatred

for all the nations which gave them asylum .... They... consider those
nationsto be impure;infidelsand enemies,whom they... should cheat
... until they can enslaveor murderthem. ... In Francethey dominate
the stock exchange;they are entering the bench, the civil service, and
are set to become ministers.... Thisdeicidalpeople is the irreconcilable
enemy of the Christiansand Muslims.13

Nothing in the historical accounts of the affair had prepared me,

either, to discover that some of the most influential newspapers in the
world-most conspicuously the Timesof London (then already at the
height of its prestige) and the LeipzigerAllgemeineZeitung-would now
put aside vast amounts of space to examine the question whether the
Talmud prescribed or legitimated ritual murder. Here, again, was a
phenomenon that had its origins in the Europe of the high Middle
Ages. It was exactly seven hundred years since the famous public
debate in Paris that had been followed by the confiscation and burning
of all copies of the Talmud in France. The modern Jewish historians
(including Graetz) no doubt saw the renewed attack of 1840 on the
rabbinic sources as an anachronistic throwback to be best passed over
in virtual silence. But that is not the way in which the Jews of Germany,
France, and England appraised the issue at the time.
 Their reaction tended to be one of the profoundest anxiety.It turned
out that the Enlightenment had eroded but had by no means eliminated
the hold of this deeply rooted and erudite strand of theological polem- [11]
ics. Indeed, in some waysjust the contrary was true. The modern world
had witnessed the rise of new branches of scholarship, most notably Jonathan
Frankel
anthropology and biblical criticism, which were now brought into play
in the attempt to prove that the ritual-murdercharge had an eminently
"Ritual
plausible and, more important, a scientific basis. Murder"
After all, was not more and more becoming known about various in the
religious sects in different parts of the world that, according to the Modern Era
most reliable reports, really did practice human sacrifice: the so-called
Thugs, worshippers of the god Kali in India, for example? Why should
not Jews, or at least certain Jewish sects (the Hasidim in Eastern
Europe, for example, or groups in the benighted Middle East), have
preserved similar customs? How could the Jews in Europe presume
to know about the obscure traditions of communities living thousands
of miles away and deep within the fanatical world of Islam?
To these anthropological arguments were now added the voices of
the radical-that is, atheist-school of biblical criticism. Influenced
variouslyby Voltaire and Hegel, such theologians (or ex-theologians) as
Georg Friedrich Daumer and Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany insisted that
an unbroken chain linked the Moloch worship and accompanying
human sacrifice, frequently mentioned in the Bible, to the very same
practices allegedly maintained by contemporary Jews. It was their basic
contention that the biblicalJehovah and Moloch were one and the same
god of vengeance. Or as it was put it in a letter to the Times(Aug. 17,
1840): "The religion of the Jews was essentially a bloody one ... and the
sanguine stream of human victims ... flowed in propitiation to Jehovah.
... If aJew really ... believes in every word of the Old Testament, how
could he in his secret mind believe human sacrifice a crime?"
Just how seriously all this was taken even in England was made
amply clear in many such letters and in the Timeseditorials. One
letter-writer stated bluntly, for example, that "I-and I firmly believe
nine-tenths of my fellow countrymen-share the perception of the
enormous guilt of the Jews of Damascus" (July 6). And a Times
editorial in late June stated the affair to be "one of the most import-
ant cases ever submitted to the notice of the civilized world, and upon
which the very existence of the Jewish religion and of the Jews as a
separate clan of the community may be said to depend. [If true] ...
the Jewish religion must at once disappear from the face of the earth.
.. We shall await the issue, as the whole of Europe and the civilized
world will do, with intense interest."
 It has become a truism over recent years that the mid-nineteenth
century was not only the age of the advancing industrial revolution, of
[12] resurgent liberalism, and of the ever-widening faith in progress, but
also the age of other-often contradictory-trends: religious revivalism
Jewish (both Evangelical and Catholic); millenialism; romanticism (including
Social the idealization of the Middle Ages); and exclusivist nationalism. Set
Studies against this thickly interwoven background, the widespread readiness
to accept the plausibility, or even the certainty, of the ritual-murder
charge becomes in some way explicable. What I had not expected to
find, though, was that those championing theJewish cause in 1840 were
also in many cases motivated not by rationalist but by a variety of
eschatological beliefs. Probably the most cogent and powerful rebuttals
of the blood accusation were written by Anglican missionaries commit-
ted to the proposition that the Second Coming or Advent of Christwas
dependent on the conversion of the Jewish people to Christianity.A
crucial role was played in the ritual-murder affair,for example, by one
such missionary, a British (originally German) Jew converted to Chris-
tianity,who in March hastened fromJerusalem to Damascus in an effort
to save the condemned men. His subsequent report, detailing the
forms of torture used, received world-wide publicity and proved to be
a devastatingly effective defense of the Jews.
It is well known that many of the millenialistEvangelicalsin Britain-
the most famous being Lord Ashley Cooper, later the 7th Earl of
Shaftesbury-saw in the Middle East crisis and war of 1840 a chance to
set in motion "the restoration of the Jews" to their ancient homeland in
Palestine. For them, the Damascus ritual-murderaffairwas a "signof the
times,"a providential opportunity to champion and win over the Jewish
people to Christianity.But here, again, I was by no means prepared for
what I found: the size of this political lobby,its fund-raisingability,its flow
of letters to the press and petitions to the foreign secretary.
This millenialist pressure was undoubtedly a major factor-together
with a good measure of Realpolitik-in the decision of Lord Palmer-
ston, the foreign secretary, to send out a stream of despatches that can
only be described as proto-Zionist to the Middle East. Or, as Lady
Palmerston told her friend, the Princess Lieven: "Wehave on our side
the fanatical and religious [Christian] elements, and you know what a
following they have in this country. They are absolutely determined
that Jerusalem and the whole of Palestine be reserved for the Jews to
return to; this is their only longing."14
Given the intensity of the shock produced among theJews of Western
Europe by the Damascus affair, it was understandable enough that a
proto-Zionist movement-if only in embryo, and if only in Central
Europe-should have emerged amongJewish youth. Here, too, though,
the "assimilationist"paradigm has led to a significant underestimation
of a phenomenon that contemporaries took very seriously. In this con- [13]
text it is worth quoting a strongly committed opponent ofJewish nation-
alism. "'Recent times,"wrote Ludwig Philippson in Germany, Jonathan
Frankel

have broughtwith them so much that is amazing,peculiar,and unique

thatone has to speakseriouslyof thingsthatuntil a shorttime ago would "Ritual
Murder"
have caused uproarious laughter. ... The accusations against the Jews in the
are mouthedwithan impudencethatcould neverhavebeen anticipated. Modern Era
Those who defend the Jewsare called Philistinesand out-datedegalitar-
ians.... Who can be surprised if the Jewish youth wants to know that
there is some tiny place on earth-yes merely to know-where the Jew
can find the recognition,open and complete, that he too can be a man,
without having to cease to be aJew.... Would notJewish youth be most
superficialand shallowif it were otherwise?'5

Wherever they stopped on their long return journeys home at the

end of 1840, Cremieux and Montefiore insisted that their mission had
been a triumphant success. It was this same view that was taken up by
Graetz and has been perpetuated by historians of the Jewish people
ever since. But I gradually came to realize first that this view was
inaccurate, or at best very incomplete-a myth-and second that in
parallel there had developed a significant alternative, and antagonis-
tic, historiographical tradition-a counter-myth. When the Cr6mieux-
Montefiore mission had been organized, it was hoped that it would
somehow succeed in tracking down the real murderers in Damascus;
in this task the mission failed. To this day the disappearance of Padre
Tommaso remains an unsolved mystery.
For those who supported the ritual-murder charge, the Damascus
affair, far from demonstrating its intrinsic absurdity, had in fact pro-
vided all but irrefutable proof of its terrible truth. The investigation
had produced not only a large number of confessions and much
circumstantial evidence but also declarations by the European consuls
and doctors on the spot that that evidence was reliable.
In 1843, the official minutes of the investigationwere first published
in the Paris Univers(generally described as the leading Catholic paper in
Europe) and then in Germany (Nuremberg) in book form. Three years
later,what can be termed a full-scaleedition of the minutes (or protocols)
came out in Paris:some four hundred pages long, annotated and padded
out with a great arrayof appendixes. The Damascus protocols hencefor-
ward developed an extraordinarypublishing history.In Italiantranslation
 it appeared in 1850, running into at least three printings, and then again
in a new edition in 1896. In Arabic translation from the French it was
[14] published in Cairo in 1899, in Beirut in 1968, and in Damascus in 1986
(this latter edition edited by no less a person than the Syrianminister of
Jewish defense, Mustafa Talas). The original Arabic version, discovered in the
Social Egyptian archives, appeared for the first time in 1940, and a Russian
Studies edition came out in Kharkovat the time of the Beilis case in 1913.
The publication and republication of this written evidence, no mat-
ter how absurd and no matter how suspect its origins, gave the whole
affair an aura of solemn judicial weight. The Damascus affair thus
joined the case of St. Simon of Trent (1475) as a primary source, a
locus classicus, for all those-and they were legion-who wanted to
ground the ritual-murdercharge on a firm base of published evidence.
It was thus only logical that the case be displayed as a prime exhibit in
many of the Judeophobic and antisemitic best-sellers in the latter half
of the century: for example, Rohling's Talmudjude,or Drumont's La
FranceJuive. The Damascus affair was likewise assigned a central part
in the sustained and would-be scholarly campaign, launched in 1881
by the highly influential Jesuit journal Civilta Cattolica,to prove that
human sacrifice was an integral element in the Jewish religion. It
introduced the argument that the murders had actually been linked
not to Passover but to Purim-described as the festival of revenge
against the Gentiles. "It is in vain," the journal stated, "thatJews seek
to slough off the weight of argument against them: the mystery has
become known to all."

What meaning and what importance, then, should we attribute to the

ritual-murdercharge (or "blood libel") in the modern period? First, it
can certainly be granted that those historians who have seen the phe-
nomenon as essentially a medieval one, of relatively marginal signifi-
cance in the modern period, had considerable truth on their side. Most
strikingly,it proved almost impossible in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries to have the courts actually find the accused guilty. In this
respect, the Damascus affair was the exception that proved the rule.
There-as, indeed, in medieval Europe-torture was applied to elicit
the confessions that lent the entire affair its aura of plausibility.The ban
on torture and the introduction into the courts of more or less strict
standards of empirical evidence have proved to be some of the most
remarkable achievements of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
That the Jews could count on the broad support of public opin-
ion-if only in certain countries, specifically in the English-speaking
world-was also a strikingly new phenomenon. The "ritual-murder"
charge was now routinely compared there to the witch-hunt as the
paranoid fantasy of a different and barbaric age.
On the other hand, it cannot be denied that the ritual-murderaccu- [15]
sation-in marked contrast to the witch-craze or the charge of Host
desecration-proved well able to survive, even to flourish, in the nine- Jonathan
Frankel
teenth and twentieth centuries (at least up until 1945). It became not
just a medieval but no less a modern phenomenon. Once possessed of
at least surface plausibility, the myth could readily be used by very "Ritual
Murder"
different elite groups eager to broaden their popular appeal. Belief in in the
the reality of the murder charge, after all, was still very much alive over Modern Era
broad swaths of the European continent, particularly in the German-
and Polish-speaking lands and in the Christian communities of the
crumbling Ottoman empire. For militant, Ultramontane, Catholics-
the Univers,the Civilta Cattolica-here was an immensely attractive
weapon with which simultaneously to fight against the forces of liberal-
ism and secularism, on the one hand, and to foster the romantic cult of
the Middle Ages, on the other. With the rise of the modern antisemitic
movement in the late 1870s, the traditional blood accusation merged
easily with the new scientific racial arguments, serving as a lowest com-
mon denominator to unite its secular (and often anti-Christian),Cath-
olic, and Protestant members. And at a later stage, the Nazi Der Stiirmer
periodically brought out special issues devoted to Jewish ritual murder.
Hitler himself gave orders to have a film made about the Damascus case
(although thanks to defeat in the war, it was never actually made).
There is nothing surprising in the fact that the greatest upsurge of
ritual-murder cases in modern Europe (including the Tisa-Eszlar,
Xanten, Polna, and Beilis cases) occurred during the period 1880-
1914-a time of increasing democratization and rising nationalism.
Here, after all, was a flag with which to rallymass support. When Thomas
Masarykcame out against the ritual-murdercharge raised in the Polna
case of 1899, it was-incredible though it may seem to us today-re-
garded as an act of extraordinary civil and even physical courage.
As alwayswhen approaching such complex subjects-multi-layered,
varying radically from one country or region to another, one time to
another, and one class to another-no generalization will be univer-
sally valid. The glass can be seen as half full (the gradual marginaliza-
tion of the ritual-murder charge over the space of 350 years) or as half
empty (the extraordinary vitality of a totally false myth, lacking any
factual foundation whatsoever but flourishing widely until 1945 and
still not totally extinct). But as the weight of historiographical opinion
has tipped for so long toward the former-essentially dismissive-
view, I would argue that the time has come to study the ritual-murder
 charge as a modern phenomenon in much greater depth. How many
cases were there? Where and when did they occur? Who supported
[16] and who opposed them? The time is long since past when rational
men and women can permit themselves to ignore the irrational as an
Jewish essential ingredient of modernization.
Social
Studies

Notes

This article was originallygiven as a lecture at StanfordUniversityon February13,

1996. It is based on my new book, TheDamascusAffair:"RitualMurder,
theJewsin 1840 (Cambridge,Eng., 1997).
1 SalvatoreScala, quoted in Enzo
Sereni, "Ha-kehilahha-yehudit
be-Romava-alilatDamesek,"in
Seferzikharon le-Haim Enzo Sereni
(Jerusalem, 1971), 221.
2 Heinrich Heine, "DieJuden und
die Presse (Paris 27 Mai)," Al-
IgemeineZeitung (Augsburg)
(June 2, 1840): 1229.
3 [G.] Ben Levi, "PremiereLettre
d'une humoriste:Les trois
Generations," Archives Israelites
(1840): 527-28.
4 Jasper ChasseaudtoJohn For-
syth (March24, 1840, no. 12), mi-
crofilm 367, State Department
archives,U.S. National Archives.
5 Nathaniel W. Werryto John
Bidwell (May22, 1840), FO
78/410, pp. 113-14 (Public Re-
cords Office [London]).
6 Adrien-LouisCochelet to Anton
von Laurin (May7, 1840), FO
78/405, pp. 36-37 (Public Re-
cord Office).
7 Moniteur Universel (July 11,
1840): 1663.
"Politicsand
8 Ibid.
9 James de Rothschild to
Salomon Rothschild (May 7,
1840), in Nathan M. Gelber,
Osterreich und dieDamaskusaffaire
inJahre 1840 (Frankfurt-am-
Main, 1927), 25.
10 Anton von Laurin to
Bartolomausvon Stfirmer
(March27, 1840), in ibid., 13.
11 RichardKlemensvon Metternich
to Anton von Laurin (April 10,
1840), in ibid., 18-19.
12 "Egypte:Alexandrie (22 Mars),"
Semaphore deMarseille(April2,
1840).
13 "DesJuifs modernes et de
l'assassinat du Pere Thomas,"
Gazettede Languedoc(June 14,
1840).
14 Quoted in CharlesWebster,The
ForeignPolicyofPalmerston,1830-
1841 (London, 1950), 2: 761.
15 LudwigPhilippson, "Tages-
Kontrolle,"Allgemeine Zeitungdes
Judentums(September 19, 1840):
542-44.