Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

Jewish Consuls in the Mediterranean
national identification of the consulate. 127 In the late eighteenth century
the convergence of the office of the consul and that of the staterecognized
diplomat had progressed so far that one could speak
mutatis mutandis of the professional image today associated with the
office. 128
It is not difficult to see what this development must have meant
for a people without a state such as the Jews. In the epoch of dawning
nationalism, the office of consul of the Jewish nation was
undoubtedly more difficult to legitimize than ever before. This does
not mean, it should be noted, that the activity of Jews as consuls
stopped with the rise of nationalism, but it continued under changed
conditions. Where Jews henceforth held the office, they did so above
all in the service of Christian states. For instance, the governments of
those European nations that had negotiated capitulations with the
Ottoman Empire appointed successful Jewish merchants from Italy
as consuls in the Levant.
Jews who assumed this office under these auspices naturally no
longer acted as representatives of the interests of their co-religionists,
or even as their political representatives. Particularly in the aftermath
of the capitulations negotiated by France under Louis XIV (1673) and
by the Hapsburgs (1718), Jewish merchants, especially from Livorno
but also from Genoa and Ancona, increasingly settled in the Levant
under European protection. 129 Aleppo was a concentration of settlement.
The year 1784 marks an important stage in this development,
when the Jewish merchant Rafael Picciotto rose to the position of
vice-consul of the Hapsburgs in the Levant. 130 Russia evidently also
appointed Picciotto in a similar function. 131
This process in turn led to the formation of Jewish consular families,
though it should be made clear that local Jews were often not the
beneficiaries of this development. The European Jews who gained
127 Maria Grazia Biagi, ‘I Consoli delle Nazioni a Livorno’, in Atti del convegno
‘Livorno e il mediterraneo nell’età medicea’ (Livorno, 1978), 361–8, esp. 363;
also Tucci, ‘Le colonie mercantili’, 21.
128 Biagi, ‘I Consoli delle Nazioni’, 365; Ulbert, ‘La fonction consulaire’, 15.
129 Attilio Milano, Storia degli ebrei italiani nel Levante (Florence, 1949), 170–4.
130 Yaron Harel, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Consuls in Aleppo’, Turcica,
38 (2006), 233–50.
131 See also Simon Schwarzfuchs, ‘La “Nazione ebrea” livournaise au Levant’,
Rassegna mensile di Israel, 50 (1984), 706–24, at 717.
185