Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

DANIEL JÜTTE
office and honour in the Levant stressed their distinction from local
Jews and had little connection with local communities. This group of
Jewish consuls felt themselves to be ‘protected guests’ enjoying a special
status. 132
With the advent of nationalism at the latest, the tradition of the
economic–political consul founded by Rodriga and Maggino finally
came to an end. Under changed conditions, it made increasingly less
sense for a people without a state to have its own ‘ambassadors’, as
the English government had called a Jewish consul such as Rodriga
in 1600. Yet as the dawning age of nationalism put an end once and
for all to the economic–political consulship of early modern Jewry
based on a Christian–Venetian model, it was only at the end of this
period, around 1900, that a Viennese journalist named Theodor Herzl
could dream of a Jewish state, with a Doge borrowed from the Serene
Republic at its head.
132 Milano, Storia degli ebrei italiani, 170–4.
186