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The Damascus Blood Libel & the Mortara Affair
When anti-Semitism struck in Damascus and Italy the Jewish community was galvanized and unified.
By Norman H. Finkelstein Email this page Print this page
Reprinted with permission from The JPS Guide to American Jewish History (Jewish Publication Society).
The early 19th-century Jews of the United States were less than cohesive in presenting a uniform national image. Divided by geographic, linguistic, and cultural origins, their lives revolved around family and local community. It took events thousands of miles away to bring the nascent national Jewish community to life.
The Damascus Blood Libel
The mysterious disappearance of a Catholic monk in Syria in 1840 reawakened the medieval anti-Jewish blood libel. A number of Jews were arrested and tortured. People around the world were shocked. In America, Jewish communities organized public meetings and sent petitions of protest to President Van Buren, who issued an official denunciation of the affair. This marked the first time that the Jews of the United States interested themselves and enlisted the interest of the government in the cause of suffering Jews in another part of the world.
When an American Jewish merchant was expelled from Switzerland in 1857, Isaac Leeser and Isaac M. Wise joined forces. Using their respective newspapers, they organized Jewish delegations from around the country to go to Washington and lobby government officials. American Jews discovered that their voices did matter and that a united front gained them access to the national centers of political power.
Edgardo Mortara as an adult and Augustine Order priest (right) and his mother
The Mortara Affair
The next year, another anti-Jewish act, this time in Italy, galvanized the world Jewish community. A young child, Edgar Mortara, secretly baptized by his devout Catholic nurse as an infant, was kidnapped by Vatican agents. His involuntary baptism was enough to make the little boy a Catholic in the eyes of the Church. Vatican officials removed the boy from his home to be raised as a Catholic.
The feelings of Edgar's Jewish parents can scarcely be imagined. Jews and non-Jews everywhere were outraged, but pleas from around the world fell on deaf ears in the Vatican. Edgar was raised as a Catholic and grew up to become a priest.
A positive effect of the Mortara Affair was that it institutionalized American Jewish political action for the first time by leading to the creation of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites in 1859, for securing and maintaining civil and religious rights at home and abroad.
The board, an early attempt to organize the disparate American Jewish community, did not have universal support from all leaders of the time. Rabbis Wise and Einhorn were opposed to its establishment, as were the venerable congregations of Shearith Israel and Emanu-El in New York and Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia. They objected to the creation of a not religiously affiliated organization to represent the entire Jewish community.
Although the board merged in 1878 with the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, at the time of its creation it was the first centralized organization to speak for American Jews. Together with such fraternal organizations as B'nai B'rith, it marked the emergence of a secular leadership in the Jewish community, which had formerly been dominated by the synagogue.
Soon other organizations, social and philanthropic, would arise to represent the diverse needs of a growing Jewish population. Like their Christian neighbors, most Jews continued to identify with their religion. But with traditional dietary and dress customs falling by the wayside, they adapted their lives to fit an American lifestyle
Norman H. Finkelstein is a writer, editor and teacher. A former school librarian in the Brookline, Massachusetts Public Schools, he has been teaching children's literature and history courses at Hebrew College for over twenty-five years. He is the series editor for the JPS Guides series published by the Jewish Publication Society.
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Blood Libels
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/holidays/Jewish_Holidays/Passover/History/Medieval/Blood_Libels.shtml
The accusation that blood was used to make wine or matzah for Passover
By Larry Domnitch Email this page Print this page
Reprinted with permission of the publisher from The Jewish Holidays: A Journey Through History (Jason Aronson, Inc).
When Passover night arrives, the cups of wine are filled and the prayers and songs of the holiday are joyfully chanted. In today's times, Passover has often become synonymous with vacation, as newspapers are filled with advertisements for Passover getaways to places ranging from the Canadian Rockies to Miami Beach to the French Riviera.
But that's not how Passover was celebrated for the Jews of medieval Europe. For them, wine--traditionally a symbol of gladness and holiday celebration--also signaled a time for contemplation on Passover. When Passover arrived, Jews celebrated with extreme caution and fear, unsure of the violence that could be unleashed against them.
That time of the year coincides with the Easter season, a time when Christians commemorate the Crucifixion. Too often, Jews, who were blamed for the Crucifixion and resented for their rejection of Christianity, became targets of hatred and superstitions. Often it was their use of wine on Passover that prompted those attacks.
On Passover, the bizarre blood libel accusations were often leveled against the Jews. These accusations usually led to violent attacks against Jewish communities. There were hundreds of blood libels throughout history, resulting in the deaths of thousands. The blood libel theme rarely deviated. A child--almost always a young boy--was lost. Allegations then arose that the Jews murdered him and used his blood for ritual purposes. Usually those leveling the accusations had murdered the child themselves in order to accuse the Jews. Sometimes the child was a victim of an accident or later found unharmed. The cruelest methods of torture were often used to force confessions and the fabricated charges would serve as a pretext to slander and attack Jewish communities.
By the 14th century, ritual murder charges became common at Passover time. The fact that human sacrifice and the use of even animal blood for any purpose are strictly forbidden according to Jewish law did not matter to those perpetrators and believers of lies. Reason is abandoned when hatred and ignorance rule. Repudiations of blood libels by many popes throughout the ages did little or nothing to stop them.
The First Accusation
The first ritual murder accusation in history against the Jews goes back to Egypt at about 40 BCE when a propagandist named Apion, intent upon inciting the masses against the Jews of Alexandria, slandered them with a blood libel accusation. Not until over one thousand years later did the accusation resurface. On Passover 1144, in Norwich, England, a young man named William, a tanner's apprentice, disappeared during the week of Easter, which coincided with Passover that year. Charges immediately arose that the Jews killed him as part of a ritual murder. According to the accusation, the Jews "bought a Christian child before Easter and tortured him and on Long Friday hanged him on a rod. Since no body was found, the Sheriff of Norwich ignored the charges and granted the Jews protection. But the story was not forgotten, and the missing boy, William, became a martyr amongst the town's people. A short time later, the Jews of Norwich were attacked by mobs seeking vengeance and were forced to flee.
Eleven years later, the blood libel resurfaced bringing horrific consequences to Jews attending a wedding in Lincoln, England. A Christian boy named Hugh was found in a cesspool where he apparently had fallen. After subsequent forced, tortured confessions, 19 Jews were hanged. Soon, the anti-Semites of England accused all of England's Jews of participating in ritual murder. The many accusations that followed were often accompanied by violent attacks against Jewish communities.
In 1171, the blood libel reached France. In the city of Blois, rumors spread that Jews committed murder in order to extract blood for Passover matzot. On May 26, 1171, two months after Passover--without the recovery of a corpse--the 33 members of the Blois Jewish community, which included seventeen women, were burned at the stake after they refused the chance to save themselves by accepting Christianity. French Jewry were shocked and horrified by the event. The rabbinical scholar Rabbeinu Jacob Tam proclaimed the day of the massacre, the 20th day of Sivan, a fast day to commemorate the tragedy.
Tragically, many more such horrors would follow. Ten years later, the accusation reached Spain at Saragossa. (Historically, blood libels were not as pervasive in Spain.) The merchants of hate and perpetrators of lies found a new frontier for their poison and more countries lay in their path.
In the 17th century, catastrophe struck Polish Jewry as Cossack troops attacked and massacred entire Jewish communities during the Chmielnicki Revolt. Rabbi David Halevy Siegel, who lived during that era and authored a commentary on the Shulhan Arukh (Code of Jewish Law) entitled the Turei Zahav, issued a ruling intended to protect Jews from the blood libel. He ruled that the traditional red wine used at the Seders be substituted with white wine in lands of persecution in order not to arouse suspicion. "In lands where false accusations are made, we refrain from using red wine. On Passover night, white wine was consumed thereafter. In his own life, Rabbi Siegel managed to flee from the Chmielnicki massacres, but he was not spared great personal suffering when two of his sons were murdered in a pogrom in Lvov, Poland, in 1654.
Slow Decline
Over the next three hundred years, as the modern era approached, there was a slow decline in blood libels, but they did continue. In 1840, the Damascus blood libel drew protests from Jews worldwide and signified the entry of blood libels into the Middle East. The infamous Kishinev pogrom of 1903 began on the last day of Passover as the result of a blood libel.
Although blood libels became less frequent over time, their rhetoric and the power of their accusations helped to set the stage for new conspiracy theories. With the approach of the era of modernization and the Industrial Revolution, accusations arose against the Jews of conspiracy for world domination. Canards of Jewish control and aspirations for global domination became the new theme for the hate propagandists.
As Jews celebrated Passover in bygone eras, they were aware of the risks involved. At the Passover seder, they drank the four cups of wine that symbolized freedom, but not in the traditional color. When they gazed at the white wine that adorned their holiday tables, they were reminded of their own sufferings and of their precarious existence. They lived in hostile environments and they suffered, yet they could celebrate the freedom experienced by their ancestors as they exited Egypt and they could nonetheless sit and recline in the manner of nobility and drink white wine celebrating their legacy as Jews. Today, we who drink red wine at our seders can think about our ancestors of Europe and their trials and triumphs.
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