Islamic Anti-Semitism

Modern anti-Semitic ideas made their first appearance in the Middle East among the Arabic-speaking Christians of Syria, who maintained commercial, educational, and cultural ties with the European nations making ever stronger inroads into the region during the nineteenth century. French merchants and missionaries seem to have played a principal role in this process. The classic European notion of the blood libel gained widespread circulation in the Levant after the notorious Damascus Affair of 1840 when the French consul, Count Benoît Ulysse de Ratti-Menton, accused the Damascene Jewish community of having kidnapped and murdered a Capuchin friar for the Passover ritual. The case became an international cause célèbre, and for several months Ratti-Menton received support from the local Muslim authorities. The memory of the Damascus Affair was preserved by local Christians, but for a long time thereafter, anti-Semitic ideas, whether of the medieval or modern, post-Enlightenment varieties, made little or no headway among the vast majority of Arab and non-Arab Muslims. Anti-Semitic articles appeared occasionally in the late-nineteenth-century Syrian and Egyptian Arabic press in which Christians were prominent. Arabic anti-Semitic books and pamphlets also made their appearance at this time. Again, these were mainly by Christian authors and were frequently translations or adaptations of European works such as August Rohling's The Talmudic Jew, which was published in Egypt in 1899 under the title al-Kanz al-Marsud fi Qawàid al-Talmud (The guarded treasure of the principles of the Talmud). These early works laid the foundations for a very extensive literature in the twentieth century when the attitudes of the Muslim majority toward Jews became radically altered. Rohling's The Talmudic Jew has enjoyed enduring popularity in Arabic, has been reprinted a number of times, and has inspired numerous other books, as for example, Muhammad abri's al-Talmud: Shari'at al-Yahud (The Talmud: The religious law of the Jews).