1839

March: Trail of Tears – Last group headed by Ross, reaches Oklahoma. More than 3000 Cherokee die on Trail of Tears, 1600 in stockades and about the same number en route. 800 more die in Oklahoma in 1839. (92) March 27, FORCED CONVERSION AT MESHED (Persia) - Influenced by other anti-Jewish riots under the Kajar Dynasty in Persia, the local community attacked the Jewish quarter. The synagogue was destroyed, over 30 Jews were killed and the rest of the community was threatened with annihilation. Moslem leaders offered to prevent further riots on condition that the Jews convert, which they did. The Jews became known as Jadid al-Islam or New Moslems, thus ending the presence of a Jewish community in Meshed. In secret they continued to practices Judaism, taking whatever opportunities presented themselves to flee the city with their families. [103] (93)

1840

February 5, DAMASCUS AFFAIR (Syria) - A blood libel was started with the disappearance of Father Thomas, a Franciscan superior. After a "confession" was extracted from a Jewish barber, seven others were arrested, two of whom died under torture. The French consul Ratti Menton, accused the Jews of ritual murder and requested permission from Mahomet Ali to kill the rest of his suspects. Other Jews were arrested, including sixty three children who were starved to convince their parents to confess. Sir Moses Montefiore, Adolphe Cremieux, and Solomon Munk intervened on behalf of the Jews and in August the charges were dropped. This affair spurred early Zionist writers like Hess to promote the Zionist cause. The United States, England, Russia, Austria, and Prussia also lined up against France, although this had as much to do with international politics as their desire to defend human rights. [104] (94)

1859

April 14, GALATZ (Romania) - Jews were accused of taking blood from a Christian child (for the baking of matzos), though not of killing him. Fifteen "culprits" were arrested. The next day a mob broke into the synagogue. Tney killed some of the worshippers, destroyed some fifty scrolls, and demolished the synagogue. The fifteen were soon released with no convictions, yet the government refused to allow the synagogue to be rebuilt for nearly twenty years. [105] (95))

1860

By the 1860s, "in Hawai'i the Reverend Rufus Anderson surveyed the carnage that by then had reduced those islands' native population by 90 percent or more, and he declined to see it as tragedy; the expected total die-off of the Hawaiian population was only natural, this missionary said, somewhat equivalent to 'the amputation of diseased members of the body'." [SH244] (45 p. 244)

1864

Massacre of Sand Creek, Colorado 11/29/1864. Colonel John Chivington, a former Methodist minister and still elder in the church ("I long to be wading in gore") had a Cheyenne village of about 600, mostly women and children, gunned down despite the chiefs'waving with a white flag 400-500 killed. (8) From an eye-witness account "There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed ..." [SH131] (45 p. 131)