41845358-Antisemitism

60 ANTISEMITISM
Ukraine, the suicide of a Christian servant girl on the eve of Easter was viewed
as another case of ritual murder and helped to ignite the brutal Kishinev
pogrom, which left hundreds of Jews dead or maimed. (The Beilis affair of
1911, the most famous case of ritual murder in Russia, is discussed below.)
A distressing feature of ritual murder cases in Russia and elsewhere was
the willingness of scholars and clergy to provide the prosecution with “evidence”
that religious murder was central to Jewish ritual. Often these authorities
turned out to be frauds. Thus Hippolyte Lutostanski, a defrocked Roman
Catholic priest (embezzlement, rape, and libel were among his crimes) who
had joined the Greek Orthodox church, wrote Concerning the Use of Christian
Blood by the Jews (1876). The book was presented to the tsar and was widely
distributed by the secret police. In 1879 Lutostanski, who knew no Hebrew,
produced another scurrilous work, The Talmud and the Jews. A Jewish scholar
showed that Lutostanski had forged quotations and challenged him to a public
disputation; the Jew-baiter declined.
Belief in Jewish ritual murder also penetrated the eastern Mediterranean:
There were cases in Aleppo (1810), Beirut (1824), Antioch (1826), Hama
(1829), Tripoli (1834), Jerusalem (1838), Rhodes (1840), Damascus (1840),
Marmora (1843), Smyrna (1864), and Corfu (1894). The Damascus case had
international repercussions.
The disappearance in Damascus of a Capuchin friar, Thomas, and his
Muslim servant, prompted Syrian Capuchins to accuse the Jews of murdering
Thomas to use his blood for Passover rituals. (Most likely Father Thomas,
who was involved in shady dealings, was killed by a Muslim who, after a violent
quarrel, was heard to have threatened the friar’s life.) The Muslim authorities,
with the support of the French consul—Syrian Catholics were under
French protection—arrested several Jews. A young Jewish barber, after being
tortured and threatened with death, told the authorities to investigate the
city’s leading Jews, several of whom were arrested. Another young Jew, who
sold tobacco in a market far from the Jewish quarter where Father Thomas
was purported to have been murdered, reported to the police that he had seen
Thomas and his servant leaving the city on the date in question. Since this evidence
contradicted the accusation that Thomas was seized and victimized in
the Jewish quarter, the authorities tried to get the young man to confess that
Jews involved in the crime had invented this story and coached him in how to
tell it. He was flogged unmercifully—some five thousand lashes, said one usually
reliable source—and soon died. As part of their investigation, the police
incarcerated some sixty Jewish boys from five to twelve years of age and
threatened to have them killed if their mothers did not reveal the details of Fa-