Damascus affair
The Damascus affair of February 1840 was the disappearance of an Italian monk and his servant, for which a large number of Jews were summarily tortured until they "confessed" to murder.
Ratti-Menton ordered that an investigation be carried out in the Jewish quarter where both men had last been seen and encouraged the Egyptian governor of Damascus to act upon the matter, which resulted in the accused being imprisoned and interrogated under torture after which they confessed to the murder.
In return, the Christians and the Jews had to pay jizya (a special tax imposed on non-Muslim subjects), and they possessed a lower legal and social status than their fellow Muslim citizens.
Under the pressure of European powers, who sought to establish a better status for the Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire, sultan Abdülmecid decreed in 1839 that all subjects, regardless of their religion, were equal before the law.
Muhammad Ali was said to have been influenced by European powers, particularly by France, which often attempted to safeguard and ameliorate the position of members of Catholic orders in the region.
[6][10][11] On February 5, 1840, Father Thomas, an Italian monk belonging to a Franciscan Capuchin friar from the Island of Sardinia, and his Muslim servant, Ibrahim Amrah, disappeared in Damascus.
[3][12] Soon after their disappearance the Jewish community was accused by the Christians of murdering Father Thomas and his servant, and to have extracted their blood in order to bake matzo.
[17][18] When bones were discovered in a Jewish quarter, Ratti-Menton and Sharif Pasha considered this discovery as a confirmation of the confession extracted from the imprisoned Jews.
The Austrian Consul in Aleppo Eliahu Picciotto reported the incident to the Jewish communities in Europe,[20] and made representations to Ibrahim Pasha, Muhammad Ali's son in Egypt, who then ordered an investigation into the matter.
[3] Only in November 1840, when Syria fell under Ottoman rule again, Sultan Abdülmecid I issued a firmān (edict) denouncing the blood libel of Damascus.
A part of the edict reads: "... and for the love we bear to our subjects, we cannot permit the Jewish nation, whose innocence for the crime alleged against them is evident, to be worried and tormented as a consequence of accusations which have not the least foundation in truth...".
Among the new ethnic immigrant populations to the United States, the Jews were the first to attempt to sway the government to act on behalf of their kin and co-religionists abroad; with this incident, they became involved in the politics of foreign policy, persuading but not pressuring President Van Buren to protest officially.
"[26] Accusations of the affair were published in the Egyptian daily Al Akhbar in 2000 and again in 2001 in an article titled "The Last Scene in the Life of Father Toma".
[27] In 2002, the Middle East Media Research Institute reported that some of the 1840 accusations emerged in a 1983 book The Damascus Blood Libel (1840) by the Syrian Minister of Defense, Mustafa Tlass.
[29] In this book, he argues that the true religious beliefs of Jews are "black hatred against all humans and religions", and that no Arab country should ever sign a peace treaty with Israel.
