A Pesach Blood Libel: The Rabbi Who Fought to Save Benghazi’s Jews

During Chol Hamoed Pesach in 1867, four young Jewish men from Benghazi went outside the city to recite the blessing over blossoming fruit trees. Among them was David Lavi, the son of the city’s chief rabbinical judge, Rabbi Eliyahu Lavi.

They brought food and wine with them, and when they finished their meal, wine stains remained on the cloth they had spread out. On the way home, they wrapped the cloth around one of the young men like a cloak, dancing and celebrating in honor of the holiday.

Two passersby witnessed the scene. Within hours, an innocent celebration had been transformed into a blood libel that threatened Benghazi’s entire Jewish community.

According to the account Rabbi Eliyahu Lavi later recorded at the beginning of his book Geulat Hashem, the red stain on the cloth was alleged to be blood, and the young men were accused of deliberately mocking the faith of their neighbors.

A Pesach Celebration Turns Into a Blood Libel

The four young men were arrested. David Lavi and Nissim Boaron were British subjects, while Ephraim Guetta and Yosef Tzur were Ottoman subjects. Around 30 community leaders who came to defend them were also arrested.

The prisoners were marched through the streets on Shabbat during Chol Hamoed, while a mob cursed them and threw stones. The British consul in Benghazi announced that the accused would be executed within days.

Rabbi Eliyahu Lavi rushed to the consul’s home to plead their case, but his appeal was rejected. Fear spread throughout the community. Many Jews fled Benghazi, while those who remained shut themselves inside their homes.

On the night of the eighth day of Pesach, a small minyan gathered for the evening prayer. A mob surrounded the synagogue and threatened the worshippers and the Torah scrolls. This time, the local Ottoman governor intervened, sending soldiers to protect the Jewish quarter.

At the same time, a diplomatic effort was taking shape between Benghazi, Tripoli, and British representatives. Rabbi Eliyahu’s brother, Shaul Lavi, who served as Austro-Hungarian consul in Tripoli and was involved with the Alliance Israélite Universelle, appealed to the British consul general.

Eventually, an order arrived to release the prisoners, and the local consuls implicated in the affair were removed from their posts.

Rabbi Eliyahu later recorded the chain of events in a book intended for the Seder night, transforming his Haggadah into a historical record of a moment when Benghazi’s Jewish community faced grave danger.

Rabbi Eliyahu Lavi and the Jews of Benghazi

Rabbi Eliyahu Lavi was born in Benghazi in 1820 to Rabbi Mordechai Lavi. His family traced its lineage to Rabbi Shimon Lavi, a kabbalist descended from Jews expelled from Spain and the author of the kabbalistic commentary Ketem Paz on the Zohar, as well as the famous liturgical poem Bar Yochai.

Rabbi Shimon Lavi arrived in Tripoli in the 16th century and is remembered in Libyan Jewish tradition for strengthening Torah learning and communal life in the city. For generations, the Lavi family maintained its connection to the study of Kabbalah and to Jewish communal leadership.

The year Rabbi Eliyahu was born, Libya was ruled by the Karamanli dynasty under Ottoman patronage. In 1835, when he was about 15, the region returned to direct Ottoman rule.

Benghazi was a port city far from Tripoli and the center of the Cyrenaica region. Its connections with Egypt, Malta, Tunisia, and Italy were maintained largely by sea. Its distance from the political center in Tripoli also meant that local Jewish leaders carried significant responsibilities. The city’s dayan was not only an authority on Jewish law but also a representative of the community in dealings with governors, merchants, and European officials.

Rabbi Eliyahu’s work eventually took him far beyond Benghazi. The city had no Hebrew printing press, so publishing a rabbinic work was a complicated undertaking. An author had to gather endorsements, find benefactors, obtain paper, locate a printer, and supervise the proofreading process.

Rabbi Eliyahu traveled through Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt for this purpose. In 1857, he reached Malta and later traveled to Livorno, Italy.

Such journeys were common among North African Jewish sages seeking to publish their works. They traveled by sea from cities such as Benghazi and Tripoli to Tunis, Alexandria, Malta, and the ports of Italy. At each stop, an author might present his manuscripts to rabbis and wealthy patrons, seek financial support, and find subscribers willing to pay in advance for copies.

The journey could last months or even years, and the risks were considerable. An author often traveled with his only handwritten manuscripts. A shipwreck or a lost piece of luggage could mean the disappearance of years of Torah scholarship.

Livorno became an important center for this work. During the 19th century, its Hebrew printing houses published hundreds of books written by rabbis from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, which were then shipped back across the Mediterranean to Jewish communities in North Africa.

Rabbi Eliyahu worked with the printing house of Israel Kushta and his associates, successors to the press of Moshe Yeshua Tuviana, where his central work, Geulat Hashem, was printed.

In 1862, about five years before the blood libel, Rabbi Eliyahu was appointed chief rabbinical judge and leader of Benghazi’s Jewish community. He was approximately 42 years old. His responsibilities included ruling on halacha, resolving disputes, overseeing ritual slaughter and marriages, leading the synagogues, and representing the Jewish community before the authorities.

The Diplomatic Battle to Save the Prisoners

The events of Pesach 1867 unfolded within a complicated legal system. The Ottoman Empire had granted European powers consular privileges known as capitulations. British, French, and Austrian citizens living in Ottoman port cities could receive the protection of their respective consuls and, in some circumstances, separate legal jurisdiction. Over time, forms of European protection were also extended to some local residents.

This created an unusual situation in the Benghazi case. Two of the four accused young men were under British protection, while the other two were Ottoman subjects. Yet rather than protecting the accused, the involvement of the local consul became part of the threat against them. On the other side stood the Ottoman governor, who ultimately sent soldiers to protect the synagogue and the Jewish community.

Rabbi Eliyahu remained in Benghazi, attempting to intervene with the consul and staying alongside his frightened community. His brother Shaul worked from Tripoli, using his diplomatic position and connections with the Alliance Israélite Universelle.

Shaul Lavi, born in 1829, later became one of the leaders of Tripoli’s Jewish community and served as consul for several European countries. He understood how to work within diplomatic channels and the consular hierarchy. Ultimately, the battle for the prisoners’ lives was resolved not in a local courtroom but through appeals to higher levels of the British system.

Rabbi Eliyahu’s decision to preserve the story in print was significant. He did not limit himself to privately thanking Hashem for his son’s rescue. He wanted other Jewish communities to know what had happened, and he wanted the events to remain connected to Pesach, the holiday during which they had occurred.

He therefore placed the account at the beginning of his book. Every year, when readers opened it around the time of the Seder, they encountered the story of the blood libel that had endangered Benghazi’s Jews and the remarkable rescue that followed.

His commentary on the Pesach Haggadah, Petach Tov, became especially popular among Benghazi’s Jews. Through its pages, generations could encounter not only the ancient story of the Exodus, but also the memory of a much more recent deliverance experienced by their own community.

For the Jews of Benghazi, the story of Pesach 1867 became another chapter in the long Jewish memory of danger, prayer, and redemption.