Rabbi Solomon ibn Gabirol, a Spanish Jew (born 1021 CE), was a person of enormous intellect fluent in Latin, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew, as well as different dialects of what now is Spanish. He is considered one of the primary philosopher-poets in Jewish history.

Rabbi Solomon ibn Gabirol was a Spanish Jew (he lived in the city ofSaragosa) born in approximately 1021 CE. He was orphaned at a very early age and died at an early age, perhaps 27 or 35.

He was a person of enormous intellect who combined within himself many different facets, including fluency in many languages: Latin, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew, as well as different dialects of what now is Spanish. He is considered one of the primary poets in Jewish history, and wrote them both in Arabic and Hebrew. His hundreds of poems cover all sorts of topics: weddings, nature, life, relationships, marriage, etc.

As reflected in his poetry, he had a very strong interest in philosophy, in particular Plato. This set him apart from the other Jewish philosophers of the times. In the medieval world philosophy held a very central role in the thought processes of civilization and religion – and Aristotle was not only held in the highest esteem, but his ideas were viewed as infallible. Although the non-Jews made Aristotle their measuring rod, among the Jews he was not quite as popular. Rabbi Saadiah Gaon, for instance, ignored Aristotelian philosophy. Rabbi Judah Halevi’s Kuzari was also non-Aristotelian. Likewise, Rabbi Solomon ibn Gabirol was non-Aristotelian.

He wrote a famous book in Hebrew called, “The Source of Life” (Mekor Chaim), which was translated into Latin (Fons Vitae) and Arabic. It was tremendously popular among the non-Jews, whereas the Jews largely ignored it.

The Crown of Sovereignty

What he is remembered for among the Jews is his religious poetry. There is one particular poem that stands out above the others, “The Crown of Sovereignty” (Keter Malchut). It is recited till today on Yom Kippurnight by Sephardic Jews.

The Crown of Sovereignty” (Keter Malchut), recited today on Yom Kippur night by Sephardic Jews, the masterpiece of Rabbi Solomon ibn Gabirol, is the poem of Jewish literature. It expresses as no other poem the essence of the soul of the Jewish people and humanity.

The poem, a few hundred stanzas long, is a magnificent description of God, man, the people of Israeland the Torah. Besides the imagery, rhyme and meter it is also a restatement of his philosophic viewpoint of the world and the Jewish people. It is the poem of Jewish literature. It expresses as no other poem the essence of the soul of the Jewish people and humanity.

In “The Crown of Sovereignty” ibn Gabirol describes how he prepares to appear before God for judgment. Metaphorically, he describes how he sets up his army, his defense: “I have established my battlefront and arranged my soldiers.” Then he describes how when he comes closer to the Day of Judgment he realizes that he cannot rely on his soldiers and his strategy may not work. In other words, he realizes the weaknesses of man.

The end is that he comes before God without anything. His army is dispersed. His weapons have fallen. His courage is gone. The true essence of a man is that as long as things go well we are very confident, but when they do not and we have to view the raw person of who we are it is not always a pretty picture. Psychologically, it is not easy to take a hard look at oneself in the mirror. One who is stripped of all defenses and illusions sees a different picture of himself.

“The Crown of Sovereignty” is a masterpiece of poetry without comparison. His remarkable breadth of knowledge, from the Talmud and philosophy is, is on display. How he describes the things that happen to us in life; the frustration and futility of death; the questions of Job, etc. It is a towering accomplishment. Unfortunately, it does not have the wide popularity that it should have.

Nevertheless, all later Jewish poets borrowed from ibn Gabirol – both his style and ideas.

In 1948 the Jordanian Legion captured the entire Old City of Jerusalem and leveled the Churva synagogue together with all of the other Jewish houses of worship in the Old City. The Jordanian commander boasted that he had permanently ended a millennium of Jewish presence in the Old City with the destruction of the Churva synagogue. However, as all of the enemies of Israel have been prone to do over the ages, he spoke too soon.

In 1701 a number of Eastern European Jews risked all to return to Jerusalem and join the small Jewish community then living in the Holy City in humiliating and dire circumstances.

They were led by the great sage and saint Rabbi Yehuda Hachasid. He died almost immediately upon his arrival in Jerusalem, but his followers persisted and built a modest synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem. That synagogue was later destroyed and was reestablished modestly. It was known as the Churva (the ruins) named after Rabbi Yehuda Hachasid.

With the advent of a larger immigration of Eastern European Ashkenazic Jews to Jerusalem in the nineteenth century it was rebuilt again, this time in a much larger and more imposing fashion. Its imposing dome and soaring window arches became the landmark of the time for Jewish Jerusalem.

Much of the funds necessary to build such an imposing structure were donated by Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris, the premier Jewish philanthropist of that time. The Churva synagogue became the official home of all Jewish functions in Jerusalem in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Chief Rabbis of the then Palestinian Jewish yishuv were installed there as well as the welcoming Sabbath ceremony for the first British High Commissioner for Palestine, the Jew, Sir Herbert Samuel. Theodor Herzl and Baron Rothschild visited the synagogue as did numerous other dignitaries, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Its towering dome became the symbol of Jewish presence in Jerusalem for over eighty years.

In 1948 the Jordanian Legion captured the entire Old City of Jerusalem and leveled the Churva synagogue together with all of the other Jewish houses of worship in the Old City. The Jordanian commander boasted that he had permanently ended a millennium of Jewish presence in the Old City with the destruction of the Churva synagogue.

However, as all of the enemies of Israel have been prone to do over the ages, he spoke too soon.

Nineteen years later the Jordanians were driven out of the Old City in the Six-Day War that they initiated into Jerusalem and a new bustling and vibrant Jewish quarter was rebuilt in toto – except for the Churva synagogue. A window arch of the building was restored and rose above the city as a reminder of the great synagogue that once stood there.

After over forty years of neglect, world Jewry, especially from Ukraine and Eastern Europe, rallied to the cause of rebuilding the Churva synagogue. The project was successfully completed and on March 15, 2010, the grand rededicated synagogue was opened for prayer and meeting.

The building is more magnificent than ever, though it is a closely accurate reconstruction of the building that was erected in 1864. It glistens with majesty and is suffused with Jewish nostalgia and pride. Its rededication ceremonies were emotional and inspiring. Just as the Jewish people has risen from the ashes of the last century so has the Churva synagogue.

Naturally, the reconstruction and rededication of the Churva synagogue does not sit well with our Palestinian Arab cousins. All sorts of hysterical pronouncements that we were about to destroy the al-Aqasa mosque were publicized throughout the Moslem world. The king of Jordan, who certainly knows better and whose grandfather’s army destroyed the Churva, described its rededication as a provocation. And his country is officially at peace with Israel! It is the presence of Jews in Jerusalem that so disturbs the Arabs.

The rededication of the Churva synagogue serves as a reminder to the eternal Jewish connection to Jerusalem. It declares the Jewish steadfastness to remain and build and thrive in its eternal capital city no matter what.

“The Tribunal of the Inquisition” by Francisco de Goya

The current three-week period on the Jewish calendar carries with it many sad and bitter memories for the Jewish people. The destruction of both the first and second Temples occurred on the 9^th of the Jewish month of Av, so we are in a mourning period that will culminate with a fast on that date.  However, over the long centuries of Jewish exile other tragic events occurred during this season, and their importance and effect on Jewish history should not be overlooked. One of those events was the final expulsion of the Jews from Christian Spain in 1492.

Faced with the choice of converting to Christianity or leaving Spain, the Jewish community divided. About half left Spain searching for new homes in the Mediterranean basin, Asia Minor, the Middle East and Europe. The remainder accepted Christianity as their faith, mostly in a pro forma manner, attempting to retain their Jewish identity and faith in the secrecy of their cellars. Eventually, most of these crypto-Jews became Christians and were thus lost to the Jewish story and people. Even today a significant number of Christian Spaniards are descendants of Jews whose Jewishness was lost after the trauma of the decree of 1492.

The Al Hambra Decree that expelled the Jews from Spain

There was a significant and vital Jewish community for almost nine hundred years in Spain before the decree of expulsion. Under Moslem rule, the Jews enjoyed a “golden age.” There were Jewish courtiers and even prime ministers, financiers and army generals. Jews excelled in medicine, philosophy, poetry, astronomy, diplomacy, finance, and naturally in Torah study and creativity. The advent of the rise to power of the fanatical Almohad sect of Islam in much of Spain in the twelfth century signaled the end of the “golden age.” The gradual Christian reconquest of Spain by the Christian armies of the north culminated in total victory in the fifteenth century, putting even greater pressure on Spanish Jewish life. Yet Jews were still better off than their Ashkenazic brethren in the rest of Europe who were expelled from England and France and faced continuing and unrelenting pogroms and persecution in Germany and Central Europe, eventually driving them eastwards to Poland and Lithuania. The Christian rulers of Spain exploited the skills of their Jewish subjects and a thin layer of upper class Jews remained wealthy and influential. The Jewish population of Spain generally still felt comfortable there. After all, they had lived as Spaniards for many centuries. Why should the situation change now?

However, the pressures of the Spanish Catholic Church against the Jews mounted. Frustrated by the Christian inability to defeat the Moslems in the Crusader wars, the Spanish Jews were to serve as a convenient outlet for Christian fanaticism. Radical priests, some of them apostate Jews, preached against the Jewish presence in Spain and demanded the forcible conversion of Spanish Jews to Christianity. A furious demagogic preacher by the name of Ferrer instigated a countrywide pogrom against the Jews in 1391. Thousands of Jews were slain, maimed and/or forcibly dragged to the baptismal fount. Don Isaac Abarbanel’s grandfather was forced to convert to Christianity, though he managed to send the rest of his family out of Spain to then safer haven of Portugal. The Catholic Church created the Inquisition to make certain that the newly converted former Jews behaved like true Christian believers and not as secret crypto-Jews. In fact, most of the Inquisition’s attention was directed towards the New Christians, as the former Jews were called, and not directly against openly practicing Jews who had never converted even under duress. But the last century of Spanish Jewry, from 1391 to 1492, was hardly a happy time for the Spanish Jews.

Approximately fifty years before the expulsion, the Church forced the rabbis of Spain to debate theological issues with it before a less than impartial tribunal. The Jews were led by the great Rabbi Yosef Albo, but all arguments and evasions advanced by him were to be of no avail. When King Ferdinand married Queen Isabella, thus uniting Aragon and Castille, the Christian reconquest of Spain was complete, with the last Moslem territories in the south of Spain overrun by the Christians. The Jews were next on the list. By midsummer 1492 (on the 9^th of Av) all Jews who refused to convert to Christianity had to leave Spain. So many Jews left port that day that the explorer Columbus was delayed a day before embarking on his historic journey. Meanwhile, thousands of Jews died trying to make their way to new homes and climes. The glory of Spanish Jewry came to a sad end. For this reason, the story of Spain and its Jews should be part of our 9^th of Av remembrances.

Jewish history works in strange and surprising ways. A perfect example is how the Diaspora spread from Babylonia to North Africa and Spain. Oddly enough, it began with a kidnapping.

For centuries, the yeshivas of Babylonia, the birthplace of the Talmud, were the center of Jewish life. At the end of the 8th century, however, they faced a serious economic crisis, as yeshivas are wont to do. They therefore adopted the time-honored formula of sending fundraisers overseas. And because the situation was so desperate, they did not just send out any collectors. They sent the heads of the yeshivas themselves, along with their wives and families. The names of three of them are known to us: Rabbi Shmaryahu, Rabbi Chushiel, and Rabbi Moshe. The fourth man has remained anonymous.

The four great rabbis set out together, but in those times, the Mediterranean was a dangerous place. Aside from the storms and the uncertain fate of ships, pirates abounded. And not only did these pirates look for booty, they looked for people whom they could kidnap and sell on the slave market.

The pirates knew that if they could capture Jews, especially prominent Jews, they could collect a great ransom. Redeeming the kidnapped is one of the primary mitzvos of the Torah. We’re even allowed to sell a Torah scroll to raise money to save a Jew. Jewish law always had its priorities straight. Jews are not museums, not artifacts, and not a culture – we’re people. People have to be saved from kidnappers. A Torah scroll won’t do anyone any good if there are no Jews to learn from it.

Aware of this, the pirates were always on the lookout. They had spies, informers who told them, “This-and-this ship is sailing from this-and-this port with these-and-these people.” The pirates got wind of the fact that there were four great rabbis on this ship, and two or three days out of port, the rabbis were captured.

The rabbis were brought to the slave markets in Alexandria, where Rabbi Shmaryahu was ransomed. But the pirates were unable to get a high enough price for all four rabbis, so the remaining captives were brought west to the slave markets of Tunis and Fez.

Back then, Tunis and Fez were like the Western frontier. There were Jews there, but they were never able to attract great rabbinic leadership. So now they saw a golden opportunity, and they struck a deal. They told the pirates, “Before we bid on the rabbis, we’d like to talk to them.”

Then they made the rabbis an offer. They would ransom them, but they wanted them to stay and build up a thriving Jewish community.

Rabbi Chushiel and his son Rabbi Chananel agreed. Rabbi Moshe was ransomed in Spain, though according to the legend, his wife, unfortunately, threw herself into the Mediterranean and drowned rather than submit to the advances of the pirate leader. The fourth rabbi was sold off in Sicily.

From these rabbis grew strong Jewish communities, and that is how the scene began to shift. As we know from the history of American Jewry, it only takes a few great people to make a difference. The four rabbis built yeshivas, and eventually students emigrated to come and learn with them. They set a standard that changed the entire complexion of Jewish life so that within 50 to 80 years, North African Jewry no longer felt subservient to Babylonian rule. And that is how the west opened up. Jewish history develops through unexpected twists and turns.

Plaque at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel. Photo by David Shay. Published under the GNU Free Documentation License.

There are many ways I could describe the great Maimonides. He was an unparalleled genius: a Torah scholar, a philosopher, a physician. His prolific work raised terrible controversy; his books were banned and burned. But if there is one document that gives the flavor of his personal life, it is this letter. Dated September 30, 1199, he wrote it to his friend, supporter and translator,  Rabbi Samuel ibn Tibbon of Provence.

First, a little background. After his escape from the Almohads, Maimonides lived out his life in Egypt. Until middle age, he was supported by his brother David, who was a world-famous merchant. That allowed him the freedom to compose his great works. But when his brother was suddenly lost at sea, he supported himself, his family, and his brother’s family by practicing medicine. Eventually, his reputation reached the palace of Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt who is famous for his defeat of Richard the Lionheart in the Third Crusade. At the time the letter was written, Maimonides was court physician to Saladin. He was 64 years old and would die four years later.

The Lord God Himself knows how I am able to write you this letter. I have had to run away from people, isolating myself in a hidden place. Sometimes, I have had to lean against the wall, and at others, I’ve had to write lying down because I am so ill and weak. I am already coming to old age. But with respect to your wish to come visit me here, I rejoice that you would like to come, and I long for your companionship. More than you would be happy to see me, I would be happy to see you, though it worries me that you would have to make the dangerous sea trip. [Remember: his brother died at sea.]

My advice is that you should not risk it. What advantage would you have in coming here, except that you would see me for a few minutes? If you want to have a private audience with me and discuss matters of wisdom, don’t even hope for one hour during the day or the night. I will write you my daily schedule:

I live in Fostat, and the Sultan lives Cairo. The distance between them is 4000 cubits [a mile and a half]. My duties to the Sultan are very heavy. I must see him every morning to check on his health. If one day he doesn’t feel well, or one of the princes or the women of his harem doesn’t feel well, I cannot leave Cairo that day.

It often happens that there is an officer or two who needs me, and I have to attend to healing them all day. Therefore, as a rule, I am in Cairo early each day, and even if nothing unusual happens, by the time I come back to Fostat, half the day is gone. Under no circumstances do I come earlier. And I am ravenously hungry by then. When I come home, my foyer is always full of people – Jews and non-Jews, important people and not, judges and policemen, people who love me and people who hate me, a mixture of people, all of whom have been waiting for me to come home.

I get off of my donkey, wash my hands, and go out into the hall to see them. I apologize and ask that they should be kind enough to give me a few minutes to eat. That is the only meal I take in twenty-four hours. Then I go out to heal them, write them prescriptions and instructions for treating their problems.

Patients go in and out until nightfall, and sometimes – I swear to you by the Torah – it is two hours into the night before they are all gone. I talk to them and prescribe for them even while lying down on my back from exhaustion. And when night begins, I am so weak, I cannot even talk anymore.

Because of all this, no Jew can come and speak with me in wisdom or have a private audience with me because I have no time, except on Shabbat. On Shabbat, the whole congregation, or at least the majority of it, comes to my house after morning services, and I instruct the members of the community as to what they should do during the entire week. We learn together in a weak fashion until the afternoon. Then they all go home. Some of them come back and I teach more deeply between the afternoon and evening prayers.

That is my daily schedule. And I’ve only told you a little of what you would see if you would come.

Copy over the teshuva [written Torah response] I wrote to you and discuss it with all the scholars in your town. If, after that, you still want to come, I would happy to see you, but you should know you will not be able to learn with me here. My time is so compressed.

May your happiness, my dear pupil, increase and grow great, and may salvation be granted to our afflicted people.[1]

For more about Maimonides, please check out our film Rambam: The Story of Maimonides.

[1] This translation was mine, based on the original Hebrew, but you can also read an English version of the letter in The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book 315-1791 by Jacob Rader Marcus.

The Rambam's house in Fez, Morocco

Just as with Rashi, it is impossible for the Jewish people to have existed without the great Rabbi Moses ben Maimon a/k/a Maimonides a/k/a the Rambam. He is called “the great eagle” because he carries us on his shoulders. The epitaph on his grave reads “From Moses to Moses, there arose none like Moses,” and it is no exaggeration. The Rambam’s influence on the Jewish people approached the influence of Moses himself.

It is superfluous to say that the Rambam was blessed with a superior mind. By the time he was 15, he had acquired a complete education. He was, if we can use the term for a person of the 12th century, a renaissance man. The Rambam was not just a Talmudic scholar, but a philosopher, an astronomer, a mathematician, a physician, a linguist, a poet, and a critic. And he was entirely self-taught.

In the year 1150, when the Rambam was only 15, an event occurred that not only had tremendous bearing on his life, but on all of Spanish-Jewish history. The Moslems controlled Spain at that time, and for the first 400 years that the Jews were there, they lived in peace and comfort because the ruling party did not take Islam all that seriously. But as Bernard Lewis points out in his books on the history of Islam, the Moslem religion, like many others, swings like a pendulum between two extremes: the moderates and the fundamentalists. We have seen that swing in our times, and we know how dangerous it is.  Similarly, in the Rambam’s times, a sect of Moslems called the Almohads, “the devotees of Mohammed,” gained control of the Rambam’s home city of Cordova. One of their first acts was to force the Jews of Cordova to convert to Islam. If they refused, they had to leave, which meant leaving behind their homes, their furniture, essentially all their wealth. They could only take whatever possessions they could carry.

Map published under the GNU Free Documentation license.

The Rambam and his family fled, and they were so frightened that the Almohads would sweep all of Spain that they left the Spanish peninsula, crossed the Mediterranean, and settled in Morocco. When they arrived in Fez, an Almohad revolution broke out there, too, so they escaped to the Atlas Mountains where they lived in a cave for seven to nine years. Incredibly, during that time, the Rambam wrote the first of his three great works, which was eventually published when he settled in Cairo at age 24. Any one of the Rambam’s works by itself would be enough to guarantee him immortality, but the three together raised him to the gargantuan stature that he occupies today.

The book, like all of the Rambam’s works, was innovative to the point of being revolutionary. First, he wrote it in Arabic. The Jews of Spain and Morocco spoke, read, and dealt in Arabic, just as we deal in English. The prayers and synagogue rituals were in Hebrew, but it was not the spoken language of the people.

His second innovation was to sum up the basic theology of the Jewish people. This may not sound like an innovation, but Judaism is not big on theology in the way Christianity and Islam are. If you scour the entire Talmud, you will find very little of what can be termed theology. But the Rambam felt that the Jews of the time needed a philosophical basis for understanding Judaism.

His third innovation was to tie this philosophy to the observance of the law, which makes him quite different than Rashi. Rashi explains the text, but he does not tell us what laws we can deduce from it.

As often happens in history, whenever someone comes up with something new, there is a strong reaction. Often, the more innovative and positive, the stronger the reaction. So while the Rambam reigns supreme in our time, during his lifetime and a century after his death, he was considered so controversial that his books were banned and even burned. He likewise had supporters who defended him with tremendous ferocity. But the ultimate testament is that after 800 years, his works remain indispensable in the study and practice of Jewish law.

For more about Maimonides, please check out our film Rambam: The Story of Maimonides.

Two Sephardic Jews with an Ashkenazi in Jerusalem, 1895

The two main pillars on which all of Jewish scholarship rests are Rashi and the Rambam (a/k/a Maimonides). They differed not only on issues of philosophy but in overall style and approach. Part of the reason for this is that Rashi was Ashkenazi and the Rambam was Sephardi. Each was a product of a distinct tradition.

Generally speaking, the Sephardic commentators looked at the broad picture of Judaism, the forest and not the trees. The Ashkenazim, on the other hand, focused more on the trees than the forest. They concentrated on words, nuances, and the nitty-gritty of the Talmudic give-and-take. Therefore, the Rambam’s writings are quintessentially intellectual and philosophical, whereas Rashi’s greatness is his ability to take you through the Torah and Talmud detail by detail, word by word.

These differences did not grow in a vacuum. They developed from specific historical forces. In terms of time, the Sephardic and Ashkenazic communities developed simultaneously, but in terms of experience, they lived in two completely different worlds. In order for us to really get a handle on them, we have to look at each one separately.

After the Jews were sent into exile in 70 CE, the main Jewish community in the Diaspora was Babylonia. It was the only place in the world where Christianity did not take over, and therefore, the Jews thrived there. They built their own yeshivas and lived autonomously. Thus, they were free to engage in the centuries of scholarship that produced the Talmud.

In the 9th century, the Jewish community in Babylonia began to decline, so many Jews went to North Africa, which was populated by two Moslem tribes: the Berbers and the Moors. The Berbers were fierce warriors, while the Moors were artisans, mathematicians, and merchants – the cutting edge of civilization. Together, they became a tremendous force in the world.

The Jews saw they had opportunity with them, particularly with the Moors, who were less religious and therefore, more tolerant. In other Moslem countries where the Jews lived, they had to accept the status of dhimmi, second-rate citizen. Their synagogues had to be unobtrusive, and they had to keep a low profile. All that changed with the Moors. Their alliance with the Jews lasted almost 400 years, and by the time the Moors were emigrating from North Africa into Spain, they brought along the Jews not as dhimmis, but as equals.

Thus, the Sephardic Jews lived in an open and intellectually advanced society. The study of philosophy abounded, so Sephardic Jewish scholarship became philosophical. The Jews also rose in public life, becoming government ministers. Maimonides was court physician to the Sultan of Egypt. Individual Jews sometimes suffered assaults from their Moslem neighbors, but there were no Crusades, no pogroms per se, no Holocaust.

Ashkenazi communities in Rashi's times

The Ashkenazic Jew, on the other hand, never had a good day. He lived in a primitive world full of constant danger. Western Europe had sunk into the Dark Ages; less than 1% of the population was literate. Even the great king Charlemagne, the first to invite the Jews to Europe, could not sign his own name.

Charlemagne extended his invitation to the Jews with the offer of land, equal rights, and imperial protection. A small group of Jews left Babylonia and settled in the German Rhineland, mostly in the cities of Worms, Speyers, and Mainz. But because the Church converted the native pagans, Christianity became a religion full of superstition and brutality. This, in part, gave rise to the Crusades and the pogroms of the Black Death. It’s mind-boggling that Ashkenazic Jewry survived those early centuries, but not only did it survive, it grew.

So, while the Sephardim viewed their Moslem neighbors as equals, the Ashkenazim looked at their illiterate Christian neighbors with disdain. They led an insular existence, and their sole intellectual pursuits were Torah and Talmud. And this is what accounts for the different traditions and characteristics of Sephardim and Ashkenazim.

Sir Moses Montefiore

February 15^th is the anniversary of the liberation of the Jews arrested in the Damascus blood libel, so today, I thought I would review that notorious chapter in Jewish history.

In 1840, a monk and his servant went missing, and a number of Jews were accused of murdering them to use their blood for ritual purposes. This kind of accusation is called a ” blood libel,” but until then, they happened strictly to the Ashkenazic Jews of Christian Europe. The fiction that Jews need blood for matzah and wine was a Christian, not an Arab, invention. Therefore, in the Moslem countries, blood libels were unknown, though Jews suffered plenty of other types of persecutions there.

This changed in the early 1800’s when France colonized Syria and what is today Lebanon. As part of the heritage of Western culture, the French brought with them this horrible canard that Jews would take the blood of non-Jews and use it for ritual purposes.

The blood libel in Damascus was an especially heinous crime because the French consul who stirred it up was well aware that the people who disappeared had been bumped off because of a much more mundane scandal that had nothing to do with the Jewish community. But for political reasons, France wanted to pursue the matter in this fashion. Therefore, the Turkish authorities arrested the heads of the Jewish community in Damascus. Under torture, they were able to extract a confession that there was such a ritual murder. Of course, under torture, you can get almost anyone to say anything.

Because of this, a large fine was levied against the Damascus Jewish community. Its rabbis were arrested, and some of them died in prison. The rest of the Jewish world rose up in indignation. The Jewish philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore took the lead to disprove the accusation, traveling from his home in London to Damascus. The Ottoman Turks were none too happy to have him, but because he was traveling under a British diplomatic passport, he and his wife were afforded full honors, and he was able to pressure the Sultan until the remaining prisoners were released. In fact, the Sultan issued an official order that never again in the Turkish empire would such a blood libel be allowed.

But despite the ultimate victory, the blood libel of 1840 represented a shock to the Jewish world. The Jews thought the world had “outgrown” that, especially in the West, where Jews were convinced that Western culture would not accommodate such terrible lies. But the specter of medieval hatred raised its head again, as it does in other forms, even in our times.