In February 1840, an Italian monk and his servant disappeared in Damascus. Many Jews in that city were charged with ritual murder and tortured until they confessed. The case turned into a cause célèbre across much of the western world, even becoming a factor in the major diplomatic conflicts of the period, and produced an explosion of polemics, fantastic theories, and strange projects. The religious revival and romanticism of the period provided fertile soil for every speculation. This book, the first since 1840 to analyse the affair, assesses the Damascus affair as a factor in European and Jewish politics of the time, as a chapter in Jewish history and historiography, and as the stuff of radically conflicting myths - myths which eventually fed into the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel.