Litigants and Neighbors: The Communal Topography of Ottoman Damascus

In July of 1860 the intra-mural Christian quarter of Damascus was looted and burned and thousands of its inhabitants were massacred. This horrific event, which arrived on the heels of sectarian bloodshed in Ottoman Mount Lebanon a month earlier, was all the more significant in light of the massacre of Christians in the northern city of Aleppo in 1850 and the blood-libel accusations against the Damascene Jewish community in 1840.The events of July 1860 lasted a week during which the largely Greek Catholic (Uniate) inner-city Christian quarter of Bab Tuma was attacked. Although historians disagree over the number of Christians killed by the mob, up to ten thousand men, women, and children may have perished. The attackers also targeted Christian businesses, churches, and foreign consulates, and what could not be carried away was set ablaze. In the wake of those events, and in order to forestall European intervention on behalf of its minorities, the Ottoman government quickly moved to re-establish order and to punish the perpetrators. The 1840 blood-libel accusations—the first of their kind in Damascus—were leveled against several Jews when a Capuchin monk and his Muslim servant disappeared and their bodies were allegedly found in the Jewish quarter. The shocks of the 1860 “event” (or al-haditha as the local court records refer to it) and the 1840 Damascus Affair were heightened not only by their suddenness, and indeed, novelty, but also because their targets—the Christian and Jewish communities of this Ottoman provincial city—were small in number and appeared to have led a life of relative historic obscurity.The Christians comprised Greek (Syrian) Orthodox, Armenian, Maronite, and Catholic communities. Among the Jews there was a Karaite community. For an informative discussion of the Christians of the Arab East, see Robert M. Haddad, Syrian Christians in Muslim Society: An Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). In the absence of reliable (official) figures, a rough average based on population estimates provided by European observers will have to suffice: in 1787 Volney estimated the Damascus population at eighty thousand people, twelve thousand of whom were Christian (M. C-F. Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte pendant les annee's 1783, 1784, 1785 [Paris: Mouton, 1787; repr. 1959], vol. 2, p. 250). Half a century later, Porter reported that the population of the city totaled around 108,000 among whom 14,000 were Christians and 4,600 were Jews (J. L. Porter, Five Years in Damascus Including an Account of the History, Topography, and Antiquities of that City with Travels and Researches in Palmyra, Lebanon, and the Hawran [London: John Murray, 1855], vol. 1, p. 139). These figures closely approximate the estimates of the Bowring Report of a decade earlier (John Bowring, Report on the Commercial Statistics of Syria [London: William Clowes and Sons, 1840; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1973], p. 8). In 1890 Cuinet put the total population at 165,000 and estimated the Christians at 54,000 and the Jews at 5,000 (Vital Cuinet, Syrie, Liban et Palestine: Ge'ographie administrative statistique, descriptive et raisonne'e [Paris: E. Leroux, 1896], p. 386). Despite their comparative importance in the socio-economic life of Damascus (and for reasons that relate to that city's interior location, among other factors) neither community had risen to particular regional or empire-wide prominence along the lines of, say, the Maronites in Mount Lebanon or the Greek Orthodox and Armenian communities of Istanbul. Historians have in general considered the two communities noteworthy, if they considered them at all, on account of the two events mentioned above, events that have since come to define much of their nineteenth-century history. As a result, narratives of these events are plentiful, found alongside accounts that focus on the wealth and fortune of a handful of Jewish and Christian men.There is a large number of published Arabic-language accounts of the 1860 riots. See, for example, Hasr al-litham ‘an nakabat al-Sham (Cairo, 1895); Iskander ibn Ya‘qub Abkarius, The Lebanon in Turmoil: Syria and the Powers in 1860, trans. J. F. Scheltema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920); Muhammad Abu'l Su‘ud al- Hasibi, “Lamhat min tarkikh Dimashq fi ‘ahd al-Tanzimat,” ed. Kamal S. Salibi in al-Abhath, 21 (1968) and 22 (1969); Mikhayil Mishaqa, Murder, Mayhem, Pillage, and Plunder: The History of Lebanon in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston, Jr. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 244–68. For a list of unpublished manuscripts dealing with these events, see Fritz Steppat, “Some Arabic Manuscript Sources of the Syrian Crisis of 1860,” in Les Arabes par leurs archives, eds. Jacques Berque and Dominique Chevallier (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1976). For more recent scholarly analyses of the 1860 riots, see Linda Schatkowski Schilcher, Families in Politics: Damascene Factions and Estates of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985), pp. 87–106; Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 78–100; Kamal Salibi, “The 1860 Upheaval in Damascus as seen by al-Sayyid Muhammad Abu'l-Su‘ud al-Hasibi, Notable and Later Naqib al-Ashraf of the City,” in Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, eds. William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1860–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Abdul-Karim Rafeq, “New Light on the 1860 Riots in Ottoman Damascus,” Die Welt des Islams 28 (1988): 412–30. On the blood-libel, see A. M. Hyamson, “The Damascus Affair—1840,” Transactions: Jewish Historical Society of England 16 (1945–1951); L. Loewe, ed., Diaries of Sir Moses Montefiore, 2 vols. (Chicago: Belford-Clarke Co., 1890); Salo Baron, “The Jews and the Syrian Massacres of 1860,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 4 (1932-1933); Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). On the Jewish community in general, see Moshe Ma'oz, “Changes in the Position of the Jewish Communities of Palestine and Syria in the mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Studies on Palestine During the Ottoman Period, ed. Moshe Ma'oz (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1975); Thomas Philipp, “The Farhi Family and the Changing Position of the Jews in Syria, 1750–1860,” Middle Eastern Studies 20 (Oct. 1984); 37–52. See also al-Maghribi, “Yahud Dimashq mundhu mi'at ‘am,” al-Majma‘ al-‘Ilmi al-‘Arabi 9 (1929): 641–43; and Yusuf Nu‘aisa, Yahud Dimashq (Damascus: Dar al-Ma‘rifa, 1988); both of which are hostile to their subject matter. Although those two facets of non-Muslim (dhimmi)The status of non-Muslims is inscribed in Islamic law in the form of a contract (dhimma). The contract is historically anchored in the so-called Pact of ‘Omar, which spells out the rights and obligations of non-Muslims, including the right to the free practice of religion. life are important (and no doubt partly correlated), they hardly tell the whole story. If anything, they punctuated the course of a relatively undramatic everyday life at a time when the history of the city and the province of which it was the capital were undergoing socio-economic and political transformation.