by Alon Hilu
At such times, when I discuss all of this with Jesus and with God, our shrewish old friend the innards dweller chimes in to remind me of reports we hear from time to time from itinerant priests who inform us of the tempest that broke loose among the Jews of the world in the wake of this affair, for news of it reached Vienna, London, Paris and Amsterdam and it was discussed by all, and they bellowed about the impotence of the Jews, how they had no land and no army, how they were made to bend to the tyrannical whims of those who ruled over them, and lo, a new idea began slowly to take root in the hearts of the Jews, and it was as that English Major Churchill had stated at the festive gathering in my father’s home: why should the Jews not set themselves up in the home of their forefathers and become a nation like all the nations of the world? And several wealthy Jews had already pricked up their ears at this strange suggestion and established a handful of settlements for Jews in the Holy Land, where they could leave behind their contemptible professions as tanners and dyers and coppersmiths and the never-ending study of the Torah, and go out into the scorching sun to till the good earth and take up arms to defend their bodies from ill-willed enemies, and I would laugh at the words of the one-eyed shrew, for what could my coupling with Tomaso possibly have to do with the history of the Jews?
Now nothing more remains, my happy friend, but to thank you for the long days during which you have sat beside this aged, wizened priest and listened to all his stories and written down with silent diligence his every utterance and filled many long pages, and never once did you complain of weary bones after endless hours of sitting, nor of my long-windedness, nor of these frequent interruptions during which I was obliged to pass water and then pass water again only several minutes later.
On your face, my happy friend Moussa, the face of a fifteen-year-old youth of intelligence, I see for a brief moment the face of young Aslan, whose Hebrew name is Yehuda, and his face is smooth and glowing, free of wrinkle or wrath, and possessing a purity of youthfulness that is so beauteous to me, and my soul mourns the withering of my youthful visage and the death of the roses that kept me company at the outset, for with my own hands I choked their natural goodness and turned my back on those who loved me, and lo, my wickedness has spread, infecting even you.
Yet even in these final days of my life I have believed that the beds of roses on your cheeks might infect me with their blossoms, and I have been on the verge of soliciting an embrace and a kiss for this old man full of experience and suffering, for you are a soft-hearted lad who has taken not the path of love and who knows not the bed of a woman; you are wholly pristine and virginal, and I wished to whisper in your ear that God has no wrath for the love that exists between His creatures, for this love which Jesus commanded us to celebrate does not differentiate between believers of one religion or another, between one lover and another, between one man and another.
And lo, during these many days you have sat beside me and seen to my every need without so much as taking the respite I ordered you to take, my soul has bonded with yours and I have discovered a great deal of love welling inside me, the beautiful kind of love I felt for Umm-Jihan and Mahmoud Altali, and now, my happy child, that I have laid myself bare before you and exposed the ancient blackness of my soul and presented to you the one-eyed shrew who threatened to bring me to insanity and confessed to you my lies and offences, now I must complete the very last paragraph of this story of the Damascus Blood Libel and entreat you to finish the writing of this story, then take your leave of me for ever and depart from that door and this monastery upon this hill never to return, with only my love locked in your heart.
How salty are the tears sprinkled upon your cheeks, dear boy, for it is the time for us to part, the time to gather our bones and descend to the bitter clumps of earth, and how lovely are the kisses you plant on my lips, and your breath is soft and fresh and your muscles tender and pliant, ready, my foundling, for my embraces like a babe in its parent’s bosom, but I must plead with you again and again to leave me here lest I die before your very eyes, before I breathe my last in your arms, for I have vowed to die alone atop this arid mountain visited by none save the doctor-priest who will come in several months’ time, and when he does he will cross the threshold and lower my eyelids and cover me with a blanket and chime the church bells to summon the gravediggers from a nearby village.
My happy friend, in your graciousness you submit to my request and agree to leave me alone with my prayers and supplications for forgiveness, and now, with these last kisses, perform please this one final deed which I entreat you to take upon yourself, namely, to carry with you this story of the black-tempered, baptised betrayer still bathed in bad blood and bring it to my brethren, the Jews of Damascus, or what descendants among them remain alive, and tell it to them from beginning to end and beg of them their sincerest, overflowing forgiveness, time and again, so that they will know that Aslan has repented for his terrible wickedness.
And now with these parting kisses, my happy friend, with our bodies pressed to one another for a short moment – one aged and putrid and decayed, one flowering, budding, splendid – with this final act of intimacy, my dearly beloved, happy Moussa, we have reached the end and the conclusion of the Damascus Blood Libel and its telling.
– Signed and sealed by Moussa Abd-Elazziz in the presence of the Elders of Kharet Elyahud and their descendants, Damascus, 1899
POSTSCRIPT
The writing of this book is based on research carried out on the Damascus Blood Libel – or the Damascus Affair as it is sometimes called – an historical event that took place in Damascus, Syria, in 1840 in which Christians falsely accused the Jews of Damascus of having murdered a monk and his manservant for ritual purposes. All the central characters in this book – Aslan Farhi and his family, Yaacov Antebi, Suleiman Negrin, the monk Tomaso, Mahmoud Altali, Sharif Pasha, the French consul Count de Ratti-Menton – were real people.
The Damascus Blood Libel commenced on 5 February 1840 with the disappearance of the Capuchin monk Tomaso, a resident of Damascus, and his Muslim manservant Ibrahim Amara. This is how Yaacov Antebi described it subsequently in a letter to Sir Moses Montefiore:
And on Thursday morning a shout went up in the city: Padre Toma and his manservant had left their abode at the onset of evening but did not return there, and the place was opened and a pot was found cooking on a flame and the food was burnt, and no man was present. At once the gentiles commenced with a cry that surely the Jews had murdered him in order to take his blood for baking matzah.1
With regards to the central issues of the plot of this book, I tried to remain true to historical events by basing my descriptions on those of Antebi (e.g., the above quote) and on the many historical essays written since then about the affair. The following is a partial list of events that appear in the book by virtue of the fact that they played an actual role in the Blood Libel: the break-in to the monastery – at the instigation of the French consul Ratti-Menton – on the day following the monk’s disappearance (albeit without the participation of Aslan Farhi); the rumours that spread through Damascus that the Jews were connected to the disappearance of the monk and his manservant; the search of the Jewish Quarter on the following Sabbath; the exhuming of bodies from graves in the Jewish cemetery; the remand of Suleiman alkhalaq as the first suspect in the affair; the recruiting of Mahmoud Altali to investigate the matter; the arrest of Aslan Farhi; the ultimatum handed down by Sharif Pasha to Yaacov Antebi and the two Jewish elders, and the subsequent urgent rally held at Khush Elpasha Synagogue; the falsified confession of the barber under extreme torture that the monk had been slaughtered for the purpose of using his blood in the baking of unleavened bread for Passover; the Sabbath Eve arrest of the men of the Farhi family.
The historical chain of events also includes facts that in hindsight would appear to be fictional, even phantasmagoric, but they are in fact part and parcel of the factual historical record. Thus, the report of the ninety-year-old witch who accused the Jews of
carrying out a ritual murder; the colourful character of Mahmoud Altali, known for his songs full of sexual innuendo and his prankish nature, who was placed in detention for having ‘made off with a few thousand’, in the words of Antebi; the mass incarceration of the Jewish children and the copper basins fastened to their heads; the burial of the bones (suspected to be those of an animal) and the funeral performed on them; the conversion to Islam of Rabbi Moses Abulafia, who co-operated with the libellers; the terrible plague that broke out in Damascus in the middle of the affair; the sweeping clemency – nearly miraculous – attained by the intervention of Moses Montefiore and Adolphe Crémieux; all these were not made up for the purposes of this book but are part of the historical record.
The description of Aslan Farhi in the book is also based on true historical testimonies. A priest by the name of Pieritz, one of the first to report on the Blood Libel, wrote about ‘[Aslan’s] notorious childhood timidity, which he carries so far as actually to refuse to be alone with his wife, and some of the household are required to sleep in the same room.’ Muhammad Ali, conquering sovereign of Egypt, noted that Aslan ‘is yet young … he has not imbibed the Jewish tricks.’ Professor Jonathan Frankel, an historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has not researched the Damascus Blood Libel, writes that ‘Aslan was around twenty, already married – to the daughter of the chief rabbi, Yaacov Antebi – and clearly did not see himself as made in the same unflinching mould as his father-in-law.’2
At the same time, while adhering to the general outline of the Damascus Affair, even to the point of including small anecdotal details – such as the number of children imprisoned (sixty-three), and the speech made by Major Churchill at the close of the affair, and the Nur Aladdin baths, which were an active hammam in the city – I have intentionally inserted changes and exceptions into the historical truth.
The subtext of homosexuality in the book is the result of my own decision, in spite of the lack of any concrete evidence in the historical record, the ‘source’ being the description of Aslan’s character as cited above; neither is the conjecture that Father Tomaso met his death while engaging in homoerotic intercourse supported by any historical evidence, even though the accepted explanations for his disappearance are no more plausible. On occasion, rumours of Tomaso’s assassination by Jews for ritual purposes still surface in the Arab world, and on anti-Semitic websites it is still possible to find ‘proof’ of the truth of the affair. Others have hypothesised that he was murdered by Muslims for having insulted their prophet during a brawl that erupted in the Khan Assad Pasha. In fact, nothing is known about the true fate of the monk and his manservant to this very day.
I omitted a large number of factual historical details in order to make the story told here cohere. For example, both the monk and his manservant were known to have disappeared, but for the sake of simplicity and brevity I have left out the investigation into the disappearance of the manservant, Ibrahim Amara.
According to the facts it was actually members of the Harari family (Joseph, Aharon, David and Yitzhak) who were charged with the murder of Father Tomaso, supposedly aided and abetted by Joseph Laniado, Moshe Bechor-Yehuda Saloniki and Moshe Abulafia, while another seven men (the Farhis – Aslan, Murad, Meir and Joseph – along with Yaacov Abulafia, Yitzhak Fijuto and Aharon Stambouli) were accused of having slain the manservant. For the purposes of this book I omitted the accusations against the first group and made the Farhi family the defendants in the monk’s murder trial. To them I added Rafael Farhi, Aslan’s father, who was not among the direct defendants though he was still considered a suspect, as all the Jews of Damascus were considered to be involved in the affair, as well as Yaacov Antebi, who was deemed responsible in the eyes of the libellers in his position as chief rabbi of the Jewish community.
Aslan Farhi’s false affidavit that appears in this book is based on the language of the affidavit that appears in The Matzah of Zion, by Mustafa Talas.3 Talas presents the affidavit and the affair without mentioning that this was a blood libel; thus, I would question his motives. However, it seems that his book is based on authentic documentation, including original protocols of the interrogations carried out on the defendants. That notwithstanding, I altered the contents of the affidavit to make it suit other changes to the plot, as mentioned above.
Supplementary reading on the Damascus Blood Libel (numerous books and essays have been published on the topic) provides additional information, especially about the Great-Power politics of the era, the international aspect of the affair, and its influence on Jewish solidarity and the rise of Zionism.4 Further, there is no lack of anti-Semitic essays questioning the validity of the libel against the Jews, citing as evidence the fact that the affair ended in a general pardon and not with a comprehensive clarification of the facts.
Those interested in the Damascus Blood Libel and that period are advised to read the detailed letter penned by Yaacov Antebi to Moses Montefiore in which he summarises the affair, as well as two books recently published: that of Jonathan Frankel (The Damascus Affair: Ritual Murder, Politics and the Jews in 1840) and that of Yaron Harel (By Ships of Fire to the West: Changes in Syrian Jewry during the Period of the Ottoman Reform, 1840–1880).5 The latter two offer detailed references to numerous other essays and perspectives on the affair.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who helped in the writing, research and editing of this book. Thanks to Prof. Jonathan Frankel of the Hebrew University and Dr Yaron Harel of Bar Ilan University for their useful advice; to Dr Yaron Ben-Na’eh of the Hebrew University for his instructive suggestions with regards to the background of the period; to Elioz Hefer for his comprehensive research on the topic, which provided me with enormous assistance; to playwright Yehoshua Sobol for helping me set my path; and to Alain Farhi, scion of the Farhi family, for providing useful information. The responsibility for any errors of historical accuracy rests solely with me.
Above all, my deepest gratitude goes to Eli Hirsch for being an editor par excellence – wise, encouraging, sensitive; to my English translator Evan Fallenberg and my agent Deborah Harris for their vital input; to my wife Shari for her encouragement and support; and to my Damascus-born parents, Rachel and Nathan, for sharing pithy Damascene aphorisms with me, as well as the stories and memories of their childhoods in Kharet Elyahud, which was once part of Damascus and is no longer.
Alon Hilu
Tel Aviv, February 2004
1 This and other quotes from the letter written by Rabbi Yaacov Antebi were taken from A. Elkhalil, ‘An Important Original Document Regarding the Damascus Blood Libel’, in East and West, No.3 (Spring 1929), pages 34–49 (Hebrew).
2 Frankel, Jonathan, The Damascus Affair: Ritual Murder, Politics and the Jews in 1840, London: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
3 Talas, Mustafa, Fatir Zahyon, Damascus, 1986, page 91 (Arabic).
4 For an example of the effect of the Damascus Blood Libel on the rise of Zionism, see The Revival of Israel: Rome and Jerusalem, the Last National Question by Moses Hess. Translated by Meyer Waxman. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
5 Harel, Yaron, By Ships of Fire to the West: Changes in Syrian Jewry during the Period of the Ottoman Reform (1840–1880). Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2003.
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This ebook is entirely a work of fiction. Though some of the historical events retold did take place, the author’s use of any names of actual persons (living or dead), places or characters is not intended to and does not alter the entirely fictional nature of the book
First published with the title Mot Ha-Nazir by Xargol Books, Israel
First published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker in 2006
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