The Board of Deputies of British Jews was last night reconsidering its decision to sell one of the most notorious anti-semitic documents in English literature after the manuscript failed to reach its reserve price of £150,000 at auction.

It had been feared that the document - partly in the handwriting of its author, the Victorian adventurer Sir Richard Burton - might be bought by far right extremists to exploit the explorer's wildly virulent attack on Jews and his acceptance of the so-called blood libel whereby Christians were supposedly sacrificed so that their blood could be used in Passover festivities.

The board bought the manuscript and associated documents 90 years ago to prevent publication. Previously, the board had allowed the manuscript to be seen only by a few scholars.

The Jewish community has been split over the executive's decision last month to sell the work to raise a deposit on premises for new London headquarters. The document was put up for auction at Christie's in London.

Geoffrey Alderman, professor of Jewish history at Touro College, New York, and author of the standard work Modern British Jewry, said: "I am delighted the book failed to sell because this will force the board to reconsider. They have divided the community with a decision which ought never to have been taken.

"I have seen the manuscript and I think it should be made available only to bona fide scholars. I was shocked that a man of Burton's intelligence should believe the blood libel, but I think his allegations still have resonance for far right groups today." He added that the auction had been advertised on US Nazi websites.

Burton, one of the best-known mid-19th century explorers, was famous for translating the Kamasutra, and for visiting Mecca in disguise at a time when Christians were executed for trying to do so.

He appears to have written the manuscript out of pique at being removed as British consul in Damascus, apparently blaming his departure on Jewish complaints about his behaviour. But he had been sacked on the advice of the British ambassador to Constantinople after complaints from the wali of Syria that he was stirring up trouble among local Muslims.

His book, The Jew, the Gypsy and El Islam, was never published in full, but the manuscript gives a wildly partisan account of the disappearance of Padre Tomaso, a Capuchin friar, and his servant from Damascus in 1840, and of the trial and acquittal of a dozen Jews for his alleged murder.

The incident led to riots and caused the sultan, Abdul Mecid, to order the protection of the city's Jewish community.

The language of the manuscript, written in the 1870s, has a vehemence similar to that used by the Nazis 60 years later. Burton described the inquiry over Tomaso as "the preposterous preference of fiction to fact" and endorsed a belief in Jewish ritual sacrifice.

Burton was advised that to publish would harm his career; even in an age of anti-semitism - the period of the Dreyfus case, eastern Europe pogroms, and the forging of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - it would have been incendiary.

Burton's wife, Isabel, ordered in her will -among the documents for sale yesterday - that the manuscript be burned, but her editor saved it, later publishing a version with the worst passages removed.

The manuscript was bought by David Lindo Alexander, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which has possessed it since 1911.

A spokesman for the board said: " We do need the money."