Antoine Watteau, back in France in 1720…

The rise of ethnically based nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century gives birth to yet another form of anti-Jewish prejudice.

Before the mid-nineteenth century, European anti-Jewish attitudes had been based mainly on Christian antipathies toward Jews because of their refusal to convert to Christianity.

As a result, an individual Jew could usually avoid persecution by converting, as many did over the centuries.

The emergence of ethnically based nationalism, however, radically changes the status of the Jew in European society.

The majority gentile population sees Jews as a separate people who can never be full participants in the nation's history.

Despite the Haskala, eastern European Jews do not assimilate.

The rising hopes of the maskalim and of Russian Jewry in general are misplaced.

Gradually, the impossibility of establishing an integral, worldwide Hebrew culture becomes evident, and rising anti-Jewish sentiment makes many of the Haskala movement's expectations appear unrealistic.

The canard, “Jews use Christian blood to make Passover matzos” has plagued Jewish communities worldwide for centuries.

The blood libel led to many massacres of Jews throughout the Middle Ages. (The blood libel will also serve as the basis for the late nineteenth century pogroms in Russia; revived by the Nazis, it will be used by anti-Semites into present times).

Following the disappearance in February 1840 of elderly Italian monk Tomaso de Camangiano and his servant in Damascus, Tomaso's fellow monks deliberately ignore the rumor of the monk's violent quarrel with a Turkish mule driver, and prefer to spread the story that their Superior had been murdered by the Jews for ritual purposes.

The French Consul in Syria initiates the accusation.

Many Jews in the city, including the most distinguished leaders of the Jewish community, are charged with ritual murder and subjected to hideous tortures until they confess.

Seven are severely mutilated, four die, and only two escape injury.

The case turns into a cause célèbre across much of the western world, even becoming a factor in the major diplomatic conflicts of the period, and produces an explosion of polemics, fantastic theories, and strange projects.

Sultan Abdülmecid graciously issues a decree proclaiming that ritual murder is a base libel on the Jewish people, and that henceforth he will protect them from such accusations throughout the Ottoman Empire.

Nevertheless, the Damascus Affair emphasizes to Jewry how precarious their situation is, and motivates them to establish a network of international communications and cooperative organizations to protect themselves from anti-Semitism worldwide.

The decisive defeat of Ottoman troops at the Battle of Nizip (1839) and the desertion of the Ottoman fleet to Egypt’s Muhammad 'Ali leads to intervention by the European powers.

In July 1840, Great Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia agree to end Egyptian rule in Syria, shattering Muhammad 'Ali's hopes for greater independence from the Ottoman Empire.

The Egyptians are forced to withdraw and Palestine reverts to the Ottoman Empire.

Increased European interest, however, leads to the establishment of consulates by the powers in Jerusalem and ...

...in the ports.

After 1840, the reforms the sultan promulgates gradually take effect in Palestine.

Rabbi Judah Alkalai has taken to admonishing Jews that the Damascus affair is part of a divine design to awaken Jews to the reality of their condition in exile.

Believing that Jews should migrate nowhere but to Palestine, he will travel in England and about Europe seeking support for such emigration, founding organizations wherever he goes, but these will come to naught.

The Hungarian Diet votes to make Magyar the official language of Hungary and Slavonia on November 13, 1843, and eventually to make it the official language of Hungarian-Croatian relations.

Croats call the law an infringement on their autonomy, saturate Vienna with petitions for separation from Hungary, and return to Budapest all documents sent them in Hungarian.

Jews form the largest single community in Jerusalem by 1845.

Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity is now divided between the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Armenian Orthodox faiths, among whose adherents conflicts have occasionally arisen, often incited by outside interests.

For example, the theft, in 1847, of the silver star marking the exact traditional locus of the Nativity leads to a dispute between Russia and France over the privileges of the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches in the holy places in Palestine.

Benjamin Disraeli, who is a baptized Christian of Italian-Jewish descent, writes a Zionist novel, Tancred, in 1847, in which he describes the Jews' desire for independence in a land of their own.

The most important event in Disraeli's boyhood had been his father's quarrel in 1813 with the synagogue of Bevis Marks, which led to the decision in 1817 to have his children baptized as Christians.

The Jews of the Piedmont region in northern Italy are granted full emancipation with the promulgation of the Piedmontese constitution in 1848.