Page - 356 - in Glaubenskämpfe - Katholiken und Gewalt im 19. Jahrhundert

356 English Abstracts Julie Kalman From Violent Acts to Violent Hatred: French Catholic Responses to the Damascus Affair In February 1840, a Capuchin monk, along with his servant, disappeared in the city of Damascus. The French consul, who took charge of the inves- tigation, soon became convinced that the two men had been murdered by members of the local Jewish community in a ritual that is also known as blood-libel killing. The incident was soon dubbed the »Damascus Affair« and it was redolent with violence: in the imagined brutal killing itself but also in the torture of suspects and in the reactions of French Catholic news- papers. This chapter focuses on the Catholic press response to the Damas- cus Affair within the French hexagon. It analyses not only media attacks on Damascus Jewry but also on Jews in France, who were trying to help their coreligionists abroad. It furthermore examines Catholic convictions that the incident in Damascus illustrated the violent and dangerous nature of Jews more broadly and argues that the extraordinary violence of press attacks revealed powerful anti-Semitic tropes that would become murderous later in the century. Sara Mehlmer »In Order to Prevent Disputes, […] Said Mosque Shall be Destroyed«: Religion and Violence in the Melilla Border Conflict, 1860–1863 In November 1863, a Berber mosque in the border region near Melilla in Spanish-occupied North Africa was destroyed by Spanish Catholics. This chapter uses that event and its prehistory to examine whether and to what extent it is possible to speak of »religious violence« in the Spanish-Moroccan border region at the beginning of modern colonialism in North Africa. To put it another way, it probes the degree to which religious divisions between local Spaniards and Moroccans encouraged acts of physical and symbolic violence, including the destruction of a mosque. Setting the frontier situation around Melilla in its historic context reveals how territorial interests might potentially become intertwined with religious considerations. The analy- sis of the events around 1863 encompasses both individual and collective memories of violence and its religious interpretation, though it also reveals economic, territorial, colonial and personal interests. The resulting picture offers an account of events that accords a place to religion in the border con- flict surrounding the Spanish exclave, particularly with regard to its sym- bolic, social and economic functions.