On February 1840, a dark shadow fell over Damascus. On February 5, Father Thomas, a Capuchin friar who had lived in the city for decades, vanished with his Muslim servant, Ibrahim Amara, after visiting the Jewish quarter. Accusers claimed that Jews had murdered both men for ritual purposes. French consul Ulysse de Ratti-Menton backed the charge, and Sherif Pasha, the Egyptian governor of Damascus, ordered the arrests. Authorities detained a Jewish barber, who named seven prominent men under torture, and then arrested those men too.
Interrogators tortured the prisoners. At least two of them died in custody, and Rabbi Moses Abulafia converted to Islam to escape the torment. Officials also seized 63 Jewish boys and held them as hostages to pressure their parents into confessing. The scandal quickly drew in the European powers, whose attention was occupied by the Oriental Crisis of 1840. Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, had rebelled against his nominal sovereign, the Ottoman Sultan. France backed Muhammad Ali, while Britain and Austria worked to preserve Ottoman power.
News of the Damascus accusations crossed the Atlantic slowly and reached the United States in the summer of 1840. American Jewry then numbered no more than 15,000 people, with no national organization and no recognized leader to speak for it. Yet the reports from Syria sparked the first organized protest by American Jews on behalf of their embattled brethren abroad. Meetings and petitions spread through synagogues in New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Cincinnati, and the organizers lobbied President Martin Van Buren to intervene
The Damascus Affair exposes a brutal reality. Jewish power is not an accident of history but the product of persistent agitation. The gravest error made by the early architects of this Republic was the granting of civic breathing room to an organized minority with a biological predilection for racial solidarity and often working against the interests of the state-building majority. They mistook tolerance for harmony and failed to see that they were nurturing the very hands that would one day tighten around the throat of the nation.
Sadly, Western nations are currently reaping the harvest of that misplaced benevolence.
