Ritual murder in Damascus? How Muslim antisemitism really emerged

The 1840 Damascus affair turned a disappearance into a charge that reverberated across Europe. An Italian Capuchin monk and his servant vanished, and monks accused Damascus’s Jewish community of ritual murder. Historian Omar Kamil argues that the episode helped bring a form of antisemitism from Europe into the Middle East, but that its local spread cannot be understood without the political contest between Christian and Jewish elites.

European involvement was reshaping the region. Competing school and protection networks backed by European powers altered the balance of influence. Christian networks gained ground while Jewish communities retained important roles in trade and administration. Ottoman rulers and their officials depended on both groups. In that competition, Kamil says, the European blood-libel accusation became a political weapon.

The affair also coincided with a major transfer of power. Muhammad Ali Pasha’s Egyptian administration was ending, and Damascus was returning to Ottoman rule. Kamil says the Egyptian administration relied more heavily on local Christian elites, while the Ottoman administration relied more on Jewish ones. The change intensified rivalry between the two communities.

Kamil’s research points to the accusation as a European import. He says no evidence records the ritual-murder charge in the region before 1840, while a contemporary account explicitly stated that the idea had previously been unfamiliar to Syrian Christians. He also rejects a simple division in which France represented the main culprit and Austria the force of tolerance. “That would be too simple,” he says.

Austrian diplomats strongly defended the accused Jews, and Klemens von Metternich supported their efforts. Rivalry with France played a role, Kamil says, but Austria’s position also reflected the Habsburg Empire’s political experience of organizing religious and linguistic diversity. He cautions that this was not general tolerance. It was a different political response to managing a plural society.

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That would be too simple.