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In the modern imagination, the history of antisemitism often focuses on the horrors of the 20th century or the pogroms of Tsarist Russia. But to understand the birth of modern Jewish politics, we must look to the year 1840 and the city of Damascus. In this week’s podcast, I explored the “Damascus Affair,” a crisis that Jonathan Frankel argues was a landmark moment for the Jewish world. When a Capuchin friar and his servant vanished in Damascus, the local Christian community and the French consul revived the medieval blood libel—the false accusation that Jews murder Christians to use their blood…