The Damascus Affair

While not strictly speaking, a discussion of Tôrā, these are my "cliff notes" collated from quite a while back regarding various sources discussing the tragedy of the Damascus Affair; relevant today because negotiations to release these Jews commenced on the 4th of August in Alexandria all those years ago. One of the references is particularly interesting as it discusses the blood libel in the ancient world being directed at Christians, specifically Pagans were suspicious of their rituals to do with drinking wine and symbolically relating to it as the blood of Jesus; what to me this clearly indicates is that when prejudice is hurled at one ethnic, religious, racial or really any type of social grouping, if it is not countered, eventually can morph and go on to harm other groups as well.


Wiki intro:
"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[1] 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." [1]

The Damascus Affair: Rabbi preparing his defence from the Talmud, a Capuchin distant in the doorway.


Reform Jewry's reaction to the event:
"However, there was one exception in European Jewry in protesting the Damascus Blood Libel.
This exception was Abraham Geiger, the rabbi who led Reform Judaism in the Germanic states in the mid-nineteenth century, a great scholar in his own right. In a letter written at the time of this persecution, Geiger expressed sympathy for the Jewish community in Damascus but was more concerned that “Jews in Prussia may have the chance to become pharmacists or lawyers.” He continued that Jewish integration into German society “is much more important to me than the rescue of all Jews in Asia and Africa.” He sympathized with his brethren in the East solely as “a human being.”"

The New York Times, founded and published by American Jews of German descent, also trapped itself in an attitude toward Jewish suffering that runs parallel to Geiger’s indifference. In Professor Laurel Leff’s important 2005 study Buried by the Times, she describes how publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger failed to highlight the news of the Nazi mass murder of the Jews and buried that news in the back pages of one the world’s most respected newspapers. Sulzberger buried the news of the genocide because he feared the Times would be identified as a “Jewish newspaper.” He was an American first and a Jew second. His loyalty to our great nation blinded him to the realities that Jews are a people and a tribe and will always remain so, despite the granting to Jews of civic equality anywhere in the world. Yes, Emancipation demands loyalty to the state in which Jews live.
[2]


In an article dealing with Ariel Toaff's controversial book, we see this paragraph, showing Syria as the ancient origin of the blood libel :
"During the first centuries, Christians were quite concerned of being accused themselves of drinking human blood by pagans, who misunderstood the meaning of the doctrine of drinking Christ's blood in the Eucharist. They did not pay much attention to the first recorded instance of blood libel, denounced nevertheless by Josephus (37-103 CE) in the first century CE, and part of the anti-Jewish propaganda of [Syrian Hellenist] King Antiochus IV (215-164 BCE). Antiochus claimed that Jews kept regularly a Greek prisoner in Jerusalem's Temple in order to slaughter him, eat his flesh and drink his blood in a feast secretly celebrated every seven years. Others regard as the first instance of blood libel an incident at Inmestar, Syria in 415 CE, where in the course of riots between Jews and Christians at Purim a young Christian was allegedly crucified."
...
Also, most interestingly this article points which future ideologue, used this event as a platform to advance himself:
"The accused Jews were eventually freed thanks to the efforts of Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885) and Adolphe Crémieux (1796-1880), although one had died in jail. One young Jew turned atheist, soon to become famous, who did believe in the Damascus story and insisted that both the Jews and the early Christians drank the blood of ritually slaughtered children was Karl Marx (1818-1883), who argued just this in an anti-religious speech of 1847 (Marx 1923, V)."
[3]


The artistic psychoanalytic analysis in this article is useful with regards to the French attitudes of the time with regards to Oriental Jews:
"Imagining the Jew’s possession of the Jewess, Didier could not avoid feeling “repulsion and disgust at the thought of the hands that pluck the flower of this rapid beauty.”
...
"the Jew was a projection of their fears and anxieties, and on his body could be read all his misery and degradation"
...
"In Didier’s eyes, the greed of the Oriental Jew was the “perfect personification of material society,” and money was both god and religion to the Jews. Didier created an Oriental Jew who lived indifferent to the catastrophes and prosperities of nations and to the pains and joys of men. His only attachment to them was by way of the stock exchange; his only interest in the world around him was in the prospects it offered for speculation. Without feeling, “without grace or greatness,” he had no need for exchanges of knowledge or affection."
...
"the Oriental Jew was a projection, a conglomerate of the criticisms commonly leveled at Jews in France. But if the Jewess was an easy object of desire because she could be controlled and dominated, the Jewish male inspired fear and outrage because he represented a system that ordinary French could not control: wealth as power. The Orient was arguably so attractive because its exoticism inspired not only fascination but also fear. What better figures in France to personify the duality of fear and desire than the Jewess and the Jew? From the liberal bourgeoisie, fascinated with exoticism, who hung Delacroix’s paintings on the walls of their homes, to the bourgeoise who would read tales of exotic lands in her women’s magazine, to conservative Catholics steeped in centuries of Church teachings about the evils of Judaism, Jews in the Orient became images and clichés."
...
"In Honoré de Balzac’s series of novels documenting society, published in the 1830s and 1840s and known collectively as La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), the author invariably cast his Jews as men of business...Ultimately, Balzac’s portrayals of the Jewish man of business could, to a greater or lesser degree, be traced back to Shylock, Shakespeare’s usurer, with all his malicious cleverness and with much more power"
...
"Indulging in her own poetic imagery, Luce Klein notes that Balzac’s Jewesses were “all from the family of flowers that, be they lilies, grow on manure.” Although Balzac’s“flowers” were imaginary creatures, depictions of Jews in France that were echoes of the Oriental Jew were not limited to the realm of the imagination. Coinciding with the Damascus Affair, echoes of the carnal Jew and the sensual Jewess of the Orient can be found in descriptions of members of the French Jewish community, all the way up to its highest elite. For example, Betty de Rothschild, the wife of Baron James, was depicted as having all the physicality—suitably muted for a woman of her rank—of her Oriental sisters."
...
"With the news of the blood libel accusations, prominent Jews in France sought to come to the aid of their coreligionists in Damascus, undertaking a prominent letter-writing campaign in the press and lobbying those in power. These actions made them targets of criticism. To the many who ranged themselves against the notion of liberal materialism, the Jews were using their wealth and influence in an attempt to wield power, and this was an example of the evils of the new regime. For other critics, it was a crime simply that French Jews should publicly show sympathy for the accused Jews of Damascus.The identification by French Jews with other Jews in a foreign country was seen to be a public statement of affiliation: France’s Jews were choosing publicly to be Jews before they were Frenchmen.
...
"During the war scare of late 1840, “Furiously” blaming Rothschild’s pacifism for the ultimate capitulation to England, Prime Minister Thiers inspired this attack against the baron in his mouth-piece, Le Constitutionnel (The Constitutional)..."By what right and on what grounds does this king of finance meddle in our affairs? Are the resolutions that France makes any of his business.

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Sources
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_affair
[2]http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Abraham-Geiger-and-the-Damascus-blood-libel-450030
[3]http://www.covenant.idc.ac.il/en/vol1/issue2/introvigne.html
[4]https://www.academia.edu/896248/_Sensuality_Depravity_and_Ritual_Murder_The_Damascus_Blood_Libel_and_Jews_in_France._Jewish_Social_Studies_13_no._3_Spring_Summer_2007_35-58