“The Damascus Affair” may sound like a John le Carré novel to today’s university students, but it was in fact a 19th-century blood libel with international implications and diplomatic intervention by the president of the United States.
Fortunately, some university students are being taught about the affair today. Unfortunately, they are being taught that it was true—that Jews killed a Syrian monk and sprinkled his blood onto their Passover matzah.
Welcome to University College London.
But it might as well be any major Western institution of higher learning in the year 2025. I’ll explain.
Samar Maqusi is a fanatical anti-Zionist academic who has been rewarded for her fanaticism with a research fellowship at University College. Earlier this week, according to a recording posted by StandWithUs, Maqusi gave a lecture on “the birth of Zionism” that was sponsored by the hate group Students for Justice in Palestine. Here are Maqusi’s comments:
“In 1838… there is a Christian priest called Thomas. He disappears in Damascus during what is called the Feast of the Tabernacles. So this is a Jewish feast. And the story goes—and, you know, again, these are things that you read, and again, as I said, do investigate, draw your own narrative. But the story is that during this feast they make these special pancakes, or bread, and part of the holy ceremony is that drops of blood from someone who is not Jewish, which the term is ‘gentile,’ has to be mixed in that bread. So the story is that a certain investigation was undergoing to try and find where Father Thomas is. He was found murdered, and a group of Jews who lived in Syria said that—admitted to kidnapping and murdering him to get the drops of blood for making the holy bread.”
Now, this is far from the most important point, but it’s worth noting that Maqusi can’t even get the blood libel right. Jews do not eat matzah on Sukkot, which is the holiday referenced by Maqusi. The Damascus Affair took place just before Passover in 1840.
What actually happened was that Jews in Damascus were tortured until they “confessed,” which was followed by general anti-Semitic violence and the kidnapping of Jewish children.
It’s fun, of course, to ridicule Maqusi’s uniquely ignorant attempt to reconstruct the blood libel—claiming Jews eat special pancakes on Sukkot when she means matzah on Passover. And she deserves to be ridiculed, but also to be sent back to the 12th century where she belongs.
It is also tempting for Americans to feel superior at a moment like this. They should not.
In 2016, Jasbir Puar, a Rutgers professor, developed a modern version of this blood libel centered on Jewish theft of Palestinian organs. The details of her accusations were immediately debunked, of course—there was no truth to anything she claimed, lest it even need to be said. But Puar was rewarded by academia with a book contract from Duke University Press. Later, her book-length retelling of this blood libel was required reading in a Princeton University class on Near East history.
So, ha-ha University College of London? Not so fast. America’s Ivy League beat you to it. (University College has reportedly apologized.)
Two lessons from this. One, Western academia is in far worse shape than even its loudest critics allege. This is not about bias or “wokeness” in the classroom; it is about the shattering of intellectual pursuit in America, in Britain, and elsewhere. It is a de-enlightenment.
Two, the Damascus Affair was a major moment in the history of the American Jewish community, which organized multiple protests and turned itself into the shield of the Diaspora. President Martin Van Buren himself intervened, having his secretary of state decry “such barbarous measures” still happening in the world.
Once upon a time Americans believed that the Damascus Affair was more proof of the value of Western Civilization and the rights and norms that came along with it. Western Civilization was the solution, so it was thought, to the persistence of medieval brain rot into the modern era. And now Western educational institutions are the carriers of that brain rot.
