Louis: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
Object 8. The Damascus Affair - Diary of Louis Loewe
Damascus, 1840
Description:
Loewe accompanied Montefiore on eleven of his philanthropic and humanitarian missions: five times to the Holy Land; twice to St. Petersburg; twice to Constantinople (where he acquired many rare books and manuscripts of the Karaite community); once to Romania, and finally, to Rome. Upon the outbreak of the Damascus Affair in 1840, when the Jews of Damascus were accused of ritually murdering a Capuchin Monk, Father Thomas, Montefiore travelled to Syria, and Loewe accompanied him as his secretary and interpreter of Oriental languages. The intervention of the wider international Jewish community, of Montefiore and Loewe, resulted in Mehemet Ali's (the Pasha of Egypt) recognition of the Jews' innocence and their unconditional release.
The exhibited object is a handwritten Diary of Louis Loewe (open on its first entry dated 7 July 1840), which, in Paul Goodman's words "adds to the available documentary material on the Damascus Affair. It throws particularly a hitherto unknown, even though suspected, sidelight, on the relations between the component parts of the Mission".
Louis Loewe's Diary was printed in 1940, on the intiative of Herbert Loewe, Louis' grandson; below a link to Paul Goodman's preface to the printed version of the Diary.
Credits: Leopold Muller Memorial Library, Raphael Loewe Archive, shelfmark: ALouis 2,16
