In February of 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 and produced an explosion of polemics, fantastic theories, and strange projects. This book, the first since 1840, assesses the affair as a factor in European and Jewish politics of the time, a chapter in Jewish history and historiography, and the stuff of radically conflicting myths that eventually led to the Holocaust and the establishment of the Israeli state.