The Damascus affair of 1840 refers to the arrest of thirteen notable members of the Jewish community of Damascus who were accused of murdering a Christian monk for ritual purposes.

The Damascus affair of 1840 refers to the arrest of thirteen notable members of the Jewish community of Damascus who were accused of murdering a Christian monk for ritual purposes.

• The Matzah Of Zion was written by the Syrian Defense Minister, Mustafa Tlass in 1986. The book concentrates on two issues: renewed ritual murder accusations against the Jews in the Damascus affair of 1840, and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.^[45] The book was cited at a United Nations conference in 1991 by a Syrian delegate. On 21 October 2002, the London-based Arabic paper Al-Hayat reported that the book The Matzah of Zion was undergoing its eighth reprinting and was being translated into English, French and Italian.^{[citation needed]} Egyptian filmmaker Munir Radhi has announced plans to adapt the book into a film.^[46]

Incident and arrests[edit]

Contemporary drawing of Father Thomas and his servant Ibrahim Amara

On February 5, 1840, Father Thomas, a French citizen originally from Sardinia, and the superior of a Franciscan convent at Damascus, disappeared along with his servant.

Upon Thomas' disappearance the French consul at Damascus, Ulysse de Ratti-Menton, who supported Christian merchants and advisers over Jewish ones, and Christian families seeking economic ascendancy over the formerly empowered Farhi family, instituted investigations in the Jewish quarter giving rise to the suspicion that Jews were behind the priest's disappearance. The Egyptian governor of Syria, Sherif Pasha, wishing to court French sympathies engendered by relations between the French government and the Egyptian pasha, Muhammad Ali, allowed the accusations to take root. A confession was extorted by torture from a Jewish barber named Negrin, and eight of the most notable Jews, among them Joseph Lañado, Moses Abulafia, Rabi Jacob Antebi, and a member of the Farḥi family, were imprisoned and tortured. Their teeth and beards were pulled out, they were burned, and finally tempted with gold, to persuade them to confess an imaginary crime.^{[citation needed]} Lañado, a feeble old man, died under this treatment. Moses Abulafia became a Muslim in order to escape the torture.^{[citation needed]}

In spite of the stoic courage displayed by the sufferers, Sherif Pasha and Ratti-Menton agreed to the trumped up charges. While Ratti-Menton published libels against the Jews in French and in Arabic, Sherif Pasha wrote to his master, Muhammad Ali, demanding authorization to execute the murderers of Father Thomas.^{[citation needed]}

In the meantime the populace fell upon the synagogue in the suburb of Jobar, pillaged it, and destroyed the scrolls of the Law.

This incident, which illustrates the tensions that existed between the Jewish and Christian populations of Syria, was notable for being an exception to the rule of Jewish-Muslim relations which during the Tanzimat era in the Ottoman Empire (1839–1920) were generally much better than Christian-Muslim relations due particularly to the economic ascendancy afforded to the Christian community with the relaxation and eventual elimination of the dhimmi status rules in the 1850s. While occasional outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence erupted during this time, far more serious outbreaks of violence occurred between Muslims and Christians and Christians and Druze.^[3]