Mcmath to William H. Seward, November 5, 1863

Mr. McMath to Mr. Seward.

Sir:Herewith I beg to enclose a copy and translation of a communication received from the governing committee of the Hebrew congregation of this city, (enclosure No. 1.)

I believe it unnecessary to enter into a lengthy detail of the cause of complaint, for I beg to presume you are already in possession of a communication from the same committee through the agency of the Jewish committee of New York. However, I feel it to be my duty to say that the representations made to the board of deputies in London and the Israelitish alliance in Paris, instead of mitigating, (if not from some other cause,) have certainly aggravated the condition of the Jews of this country.

I have expressed no opinion, but in the strictest sense have observed the rule of non-interference throughout. I await your instructions. Enclosed you will please find extracts from the Jewish Chronicle and Morning Advertiser, both London papers.

I have the honor to remain, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

[Enclosure No. 1.]

Sir: The governing committee of the Hebrew community of Tangier solicit, in the name of humanity, your good offices in behalf of our persecuted brethren in Morocco.

You will not ignore the Barbary cruelties, which, without any reference being had to the usual forms of justice, have lately befallen some of our brethren, and in consequence of which we have had recourse to the Board of Deputies of British Jews in London, as well as to the Central Consistory, and the “Alliance Universal Israelit at Paris,” which (corporations) have given effect to their customary zeal, and addressed themselves to their respective governments with a view to put a stop to the said act of persecutions.

It appears, however, that their action has had the effect of aggravating rather than mitigating the cruelties which are daily committed upon our co-religionists, and that this state of things is owing to the determination to show how little regard is paid to the representations made in England and France, and to the disapprobation expressed by the government and press of said nations.

Owing to the intervention of the representatives of foreign powers, many years have passed since the punishment by torture and unjust and barbarous proceedings have ceased in this country, as is proved by the fact that up to the time when these unfortunate Jews who had been accused at Saffi were subjected to a cruel death, and the recent bastinado infliction took place, without even a light cause, the penalty of death has not been for many years past carried into effect by the Moorish government on the persons of Jews, nor at Tangier, even, that of the bastinado; but unfortunately we see with much pain that this description of punishment has been re-established, and, what is more to be regretted, that this is done under the inspiration of the representative of a civilized nation. We cannot believe that this is done with the consent of the government of her Catholic Majesty, since in addition to the kindness, benevolence, and kind reception which our brethren who took refuge in their country received from her Majesty the Queen of Spain, her ministers, generals, officers and subjects, during the war, and the occupation of Zetnow, as well as from the unctionaries who have before now represented that government in Morocco, who (the latter) have always shown themselves to be the friends of the Jews, and favored our brethren whenever they had the occasion to apply for their good offices.

You are informed of the act of barbarity and tyranny committed two days ago upon two of our co-religionists, without sufficient cause. The same has been originated in a trifling dispute they had had with a groom of the Spanish minister, Señor Merry, which proceeding, according to the statement of the local authorities, took place at the instigation of her Catholic Majesty’s minister, and surprises us very much, as we cannot understand what the intentions may be of that legation and consulate, operating against a race so weak and defenceless as that of the Jews in Morocco.

Under these circumstances we implore you to take our case under consideration, to lend to us your well-known aid and protection, and adopt whatever measures may be necessary to do away with these acts of barbarity.

The object which we hope to attain we do not think we shall accomplish un less all the civilized powers interest themselves in our favor, and assist us to ward of the calamitous events with which our poor co-religionists, who are subjects to the jurisdiction of the Moorish government, are threatened. We therefore hope you will have the goodness to submit to your government this our bumble representation, and employ all your influence in order that the justice of our cause may be taken into consideration.

I avail myself of this opportunity to assure you, in the name of this committee, of our high and most sincere consideration.

I have the honor to be, sir, respectfully, your obedient servant,

[Seal of Hebrew Congregation, &c.]

MOSES PARIENTE, President pro tem.

Cruelties by Spanish officials.

An act of horrible and heathen atrocity has just been perpetrated only a narrow lattitude beyond the borders of Europe at the instigation of a Christian power. It will be the less astonishing, however, when we record the fact that this atrocious outrage against all human nature was committed by an agent of the country of the inquisition—Spain. We call attention to it in order that, if possible, the Spanish government may be brought to disavow the crime of its representative, a crime worthy of the most savage and gloomy tyrant that ever occupied the throne of Constantinople, or wallowed through a sullen career of slaughter in the blood-stained capital of the Persian Shahs. The Spanish receiver general of customs at Saffi, on the coast of Morocco, recently died, and upon a mere whisper of scandalous suspicion his servant, a Jewish youth, only fourteen years of age, named Jacob Benionda, was accused of having poisoned him. There was no post-mortem examination; there were no medical authorities called in; there was no judicial investigation whatever. The Spanish consul, in a fit of Popish fury, instantly, summarily, and peremptorily demanded that the poor Hebrew boy, with three of his co-religionists should be arrested and condemned. Accordingly, submissive to the fiat of this execrable little despot, the child was seized and tortured, until amid the shrieks and groans of his agony some vague and in all likelihood involuntary expressions escaped him, which the gloating consul of Spain at once distorted into a confession of guilt, and he forthwith demanded that the miserable mangled victim should be prepared for death. It was done at his behest; this functionary of a Christian nation stood by while the unhappy boy, protesting to the last breath of life his innocence, underwent the appalling doom prescribed for him by the consul of her Most Catholic Majesty to the cities on the shores of Morocco.

If the enormity had ended here, all Europe might have been justified in protesting against a deed of vengeance and injustice so utterly inconsistent with the decency, humanity, and civilization of the age. But the Spanish consul was not yet satiated with blood. Much more torture and much more death were necessary to appease and glut his indignant spirit. There was a man named Benelous whom it was his pleasure to charge as an accomplice of the child whose body lay mutilated in a pool of blood at the place of execution. This unhappy man was first submitted to a tremendous infliction of the bastinado as it has been inflicted from time immemorial in the most barbarous regions of Asia. The effect of this torture on the fla yed and bleeding soles of the feet is an anguish indescribable; and, as we shall reiterate again and again, a Christian official was standing by to witness and aggravate its administration. But that did not suffice. Poor Benelous, over whose writhings the Roman Catholic functionary of Spain so unctuously presided, remained inflexible. The bloody rod would not abate his protestations of guiltlessness in the matter of the Spanish collector general’s death. They next hung him up by the feet naked, and continued scourging him until, under the force of the blows, his body swayed to and fro like a pendulum. Still the miserable Jew persisted in declaring his innocence, with that of the youth and the two other men who had been impeached as his accomplices in a crime which had probably never been perpetrated at all. Then the bigotry of the Mohammedan reconciling itself with delight to the exulting and congenial fanaticism of the Roman Catholic, a third species of agony was invented for the deplorable victim. They thrust him, like Regulus, naked as he was, into a cask through the staves of which a thousand small and sharp nails inverted their lancet-like points, and, the barrel being violently rolled upon the ground, he endured a suffering which the human imagination fails to realize. At last, exhausted and maddened, delirious with pain, broken in spirit, and utterly reckless of results, he, to escape the terrible torture, shrieked out to his butchers something which they eagerly interpreted as a confession. The fate of the poor Jew was sealed. They dragged him to where the carcass of the young Benionda still lay shamelessly exposed, with a hundred traces of brutal cruelty upon it, and there a long, double-edged dagger was plunged, mercifully it may be said, from behind the left clavicle bone right through his heart, and the man was dead. [This is a mistake.]

Fancy, however, a Spanish gentleman, a Christian officer, a countryman of Cervantes, not only beholding, but urging on and insisting upon atrocities like these! Fancy him outdoing even the natural and hereditary barbarisms of Morocco, and that in the presence of a Spanish ship-of-war from whose mizzen flew a pennon which pretends to be the emblem of civilization! These acts ought not to pass without protest and execration. That boy and man were accused upon no evidence whatever, were literally tried upon the rack, were condemned by no legal tribunal, and were executed without having been judicially condemned. Suppose an English consul, upon a fanciful suspicion of some wrong done to a countryman, were to insist, in China, that a man should be buried up to his neck in the earth and bowled at, might he plead that such was the custom of the country, and that he was only exacting justice after the aboriginal fashion? We rather think that, if not hanged or condemned to chains for life, he would be permanently expelled from society; although we remember, with humiliation, that Cabrera has danced and been popular in English drawing-rooms. We may be reminded that there was an immense outcry, right or wrong, when Sir James Brooke began his crusade against the pirates of Borneo; but here we have the fiendish apathy of the savage executioner imported into Europe; for the Spanish consulate at Saffi, in Morocco, is virtually no less a part of Europe and beneath the jurisdiction of European and Christian law than Madrid itself. Both these laws, however—that of Europe, excepting Russia, and that of Christianity, with the same exception—have been flagrantly broken. And although the victims were two unfortunate and friendless Jews, belonging to a race which has not lately attracted very strongly the sympathies of the world, the flagitious conduct of the Spanish official was not mitigated by that fact. Spain, indeed, appears determined in isolating herself from among the progressing civilizations of the earth. The old gloomy rancor against religious liberty which once haunted the Escurial, and breathed itself forth in pitiful mutterings beneath those gorgeous cathedral roofs which an ignorant eye might deem dedicated to holier and nobler purposes, still haunts the stucco palaces in which Queen Isabella flaunts, despised and derided by the world. It was long ago said that she was the only continental monarch who would not dare to propose a visit to the pure Court of St. James. The teachings of her nefarious mother have made her the scorn of humanity; but if the agents of her ministers are permitted to wreak abroad cruelties copied from the Red Indian school, a still deeper degeneracy will become the characteristic of Spain. Is it not enough that the Bible is persecuted and prohibited as though it were an emanation from the spirit of evil, that free worship is denied to Christians, and that an illiterate, intolerant, and merciless priesthood, drugged with the refuse of middle-age legends, tyrannize over a peasantry whose condition, under the sway of a woman and a mother, is exemplified by the fact that they share the acorns of the Valencian hills with the swine that are happier than they? Is it not enough that Spain is the barbarous paradox of Europe, and that in her present state her population might almost yearn backwards towards the day of Cid? The Spanish kingdom is a vast, solemn, and mournful ruin, whose very monuments of ancient splendor contrast with the squalid intrigues, the degraded morals, the lost place in Europe, and the famished industry of Spain, in the nineteenth century; but are we to witness, as a climax of this melancholy decay, the breeding of another Spanish race, which shall go forth, as of old, in partibus infidelibus, to play the parts of hangmen and torturers, and even improve upon the cruelty which at all times has characterized the tyrants of Morocco?—Morning Advertiser.

Board of deputies.–Atrocities in Morocco.

The board held a special meeting on Thursday, the 8th instant, at the vestry rooms of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, Bevis Marks; the president pro tem., J. M. Montefiore, esq., in the chair.

The minutes of the last meeting having been read and confirmed, and the secretary having reported that £200 had, as a first instalment, been despatched to Turkey for the suffering co-religionists by the fire at Monastir,

The president explained that the meeting had been convened at an unusually short notice (24 hours) in consequence of a most urgent case detailed in the letter lying on the table. The Spanish original had been addressed to Sir Moses Montefiore, although intended for the board. It had reached the worthy baronet at his country seat, Ramsgate, in the course of the latter holidays; and its contents showing that not a moment was to be lost if the further execution of innocent men was to be prevented, he at once communicated with the Foreign Office, requesting Earl Russell to interpose in behalf of the innocent survivors in Morocco, condemned to death by the Spanish consul, and he had now the satisfaction of announcing that, in a prompt reply from the Foreign Office, Sir Moses was assured that telegrams had at once been forwarded to the proper officials in Morocco energetically to interfere in behalf of the prisoners. The meeting had been convened at the earliest day possible in order to ask it to ratify the steps taken by Sir Moses, and to adopt such additional measures as might be deemed expedient.

The secretary then read the translation of the Spanish letter, which was lengthy, and which gave minute details of the atrocities committed and of the fruitless steps taken by the Jewish communities and several consuls in order to induce the Spanish consul to delay the execution of the iniquitous sentence pronounced by him, until his government could be communicated with. The account of the cruelties resorted to by Señor Merry to extract from the prisoners a confession of the crime imputed to them, as well as the terrible and lingering death inflicted on them, extorted from this grave body a cry of horror, and, but for the irrefragable evidence lying before them, they would have been strongly disposed to disbelieve the statements made, as it was scarcely conceivable that the representative of a civilized nation could have indulged in such cruelties.

A vote of thanks was passed to Sir Moses Montefiore for his prompt action. It was further resolved to memorialize the Foreign Office on the barbarities committed on two innocent Jews at Tetuan, at the instigation of the Spanish vice-consul, and which were likewise detailed in the letter alluded to. It having transpired during the meeting that the lives of the two surviving prisoners in Morocco would be spared, in consequence of the representations made by Baron James de Rothschild, of Paris, to the Spanish government, it was resolved, before taking any further steps, to await additional information from Morocco, promised by the writer of the letter referred to. The meeting then separated.

We observe that we have omitted the various details given in the letter on the origin of these proceedings, and the means taken by Señor Merry to obtain his object, as we have, in another column, inserted communications addressed to us which give full particulars.

All accounts of these atrocities hitherto published by us have reached us through Jewish quarters, which may be suspected of partiality. We will, therefore, insert one emanating from a Christian residing at Mogadore, who gives it as he has heard it, evidently from those to whom the guilt or innocence of the prisoners is a matter of indifference. We may consider his version as that of Señor Merry’s partisans. We will not alter one single word in it. Let our readers judge in how far Señor Merry’s own version justifies his deeds. The Mogadore Christian writes: “A very shocking affair has occurred at Saffi, a town about sixty miles distant, which, if proved to be true, is very discreditable to the Jewish community of this country. The Spaniards have a Spanish collector of customs, and each port receives half-duties on account of the Moorish debt to them. In Saffi the collector was a gentleman about fifty years of age, and lately a colonel in the army. He resided by himself, having a couple of Jewish servants, one a lad of fourteen and the other a woman. It appears, so it is affirmed, that they conspired, with three or four others, to murder and rob him. They gave him arsenic, but as he, not liking the food, ate little of it, and it took no effect, they then gave him corrosive sublimate in some milk puddings, which effectually destroyed him: he died in three or four days. They have been taken on suspicion, and beaten. They then acknowledged and confessed to have been guilty. There are seven in prison—five Jews and two Jewesses. I think the authorities acted wrong in beating them till they confessed, as it is very likely the lash would make them confess to almost anything. The body ought to have been analyzed. They await the decision of the Emperor, at Tangiers. I expect they will be decapitated; but I believe there is a great deal of poisoning carried on in this country.”