On 5 February 1840, a Catholic Capuchin friar, Father Thomas, and his Muslim servant, Ibrahim Amara, disappeared in Damascus. While the disappearances of the two men were likely connected to Thomas’ business dealings, a rumor began to circulate among the residents of Damascus, accusing the Damascene Jewish Community of murdering the two men and using their blood to make matzah. The rumor would lead to one of the most famous blood libels in history, the Damascus Blood Libel, better known as the Damascus Affair of 1840.
Details of the affair were widely circulated across European press and many Europeans believed the accusation to be true – or at the very least, plausible. These accusations were notably embraced by the press of the Russian Empire, publishing accounts of the affair from the perspective of Syrian Orthodox Christians that resonated with the Russian Orthodox public. Russian coverage of the Damascus Affair would eventually be a contributing factor to the pogroms of the 1890s that saw the mass exodus of Jews from western Russia.
After a short and inadequate investigation, a barber named Solomon Negrin was tortured until he implicated several other innocent Jews and confessed to the crime. Two of the men who were subsequently implicated died during torture; one converted to Islam in order to be spared, and the others confessed after being tortured.
Two sets of bones were discovered in a sewer in the Jewish quarter and were proclaimed to belong to Thomas and Ibrahim ʿAmara. While a well-known physician in Damascus, Dr. Lograso, refused to certify that they were human bones, instead requesting that a European university examine them, authorities announced the guilt of the Jews and sentenced them to prison.
Following the approval of the sentencing, a local crowd attacked a Damascus synagogue and local authorities arrested over 60 Jewish children in order to force their parents to reveal the location of Tommaso’s blood.
Alarmed by the return of the blood libels, Europeans and Americans lobbied their respective government to intercede on behalf of their brethren in Damascus. Several noteworthy individuals condemned the libel and attempted to intervene on behalf of the prisoners, including Queen Victoria, Lord Henry Palmerston, U.S. Secretary of State John Forsyth, and Klemens von Metternich of Austria. Speaking on behalf of United States President Martin Van Buren, Secretary Forsyth said that President Van Buren “cannot refrain from expressing surprise and pain that in this advanced age such barbarous measures be resorted to in order to compel the confession of imputed guilt.”
A delegation including British philanthropist Moses Montefiore and French lawyer Adolphe, among others, traveled to Egypt to meet with Ottoman governor Muhammad Ali and negotiate for the successful release of the prisoners. They then traveled to Constantinople to obtain a declaration from the Sultan that blood libels were false. The Sultan condemned the blood libel stressing “that the charges made against them and their religion are nothing but pure calumny."
While the Jewish delegation was successful in influencing the release of the prisoners, the charges were never officially repudiated. The blood libel has been repeated in Arab countries, perhaps most notably by the then-Syrian defense minister, Mustafa Tlass in 1983. Today, Thomas’ tomb inscription still claims that he was “murdered by the Jews on February 5, 1840.”
The Damascus Affair became one of the first cases in which the greater Jewish community worked on an international level to end an injustice against a Jewish community. World Jewry realized the importance of uniting to advocate for one another.
