Bible and Sword by Barbara W. Tuchman

Author:Barbara W. Tuchman [Tuchman, Barbara W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79799-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

Mehemet, smoking his diamond-studded pipe, promised him “any portion of land open for sale in Syria” and agreed to “do everything that lies in my power” to support his project. But within little more than a year Mehemet’s power too was broken; Syria reverted to the sultans, and not until their miserable dynasty was at last extinguished was the opportunity to come again.

Meanwhile the Damascus Incident had erupted, growing out of a charge of ritual murder against the Jews in the death of a Capuchin friar. All the ferocious hallmarks of the pogrom followed—riots, sacking, imprisonment, and torture to extract confessions, instigated and kept going by French agents and the local Catholic orders. It was part of the boiling over of the Eastern Question, which now, in the years 1839–40, reached its crisis, with France set against the other powers. Though the Damascus Incident was historically important in the development of nineteenth-century Jewish nationalism, arousing Jews the world over to the need of united action, it is relevant here only so far as it provided opportunity and motive for British intervention on behalf of the Jews in the Turkish Empire and awakened public opinion to their situation.

A memorial addressed to the Protestant Monarchs of Europe appealing for the restoration of the Jews was published in full in the Times of March 9, 1840. It drew attention to the Eastern crisis and “other striking signs of the times” as providing an opportune moment for “what may be the probable line of duty” of Protestant Christianity to the Jewish people. Shortly afterwards the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland published a report by two of its missionaries on the condition of the Jews of Palestine that attracted much attention and followed it with a memorial addressed to Palmerston, also carried by the Times (December 3, 1840). It commended him for appointing a consul to Jerusalem and extending British protection to the Jews and expressed the hope that the current crisis in Syria “will result in the more firm and more extensive establishment of British influence in that interesting land.”

Meanwhile Montefiore, hardly back in England, hurriedly set out again for the East, resolved to obtain release of the Jewish prisoners in Damascus dungeons, not with a pardon, which he scorned, but with acquittal on the blood accusation as well as reparation and a general order from the Sultan protecting Jewish life and property. Montefiore was not a man to be stopped, whether by French intrigue, Mohammedan red tape, or war. To the astonishment of the world he obtained not only full acquittal, but also a firman, granted grudgingly by the Sultan, assuring to the Jews equality of treatment with all Turkish subjects. “The Magna Charta for the Jews in Turkish dominions,” Montefiore proudly, if too hopefully, acclaimed it, and he took particular pleasure in stopping off at Paris on the way home for the purpose of personally presenting to Louis Philippe a copy of the firman obtained at the cost of that discomfited monarch’s ambitions in the East.

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