Jewish Middlemen, Archival Myopia

“The Mediterranean speaks with many voices,” wrote Fernand Braudel in his monumental and most influential work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949). “It is a sum of individual histories.” But given that these histories “assume in the course of research different values [and] different meanings,” the sum will also change, depending on which stories are included. Braudel drew attention to the connection between the land and the sea—“the sea of vineyards and olive trees just as much as the sea of the long-oared galleys and the roundships of merchants.” The sea’s history “can no more be separated from that of the lands surrounding it than the clay can be separated from the hands of the potter who shapes it.” This history is slow and repetitive, seasonal, “almost timeless,” shared by everyone living in the Mediterranean. Yet it is also a more traditional history of events—“l’histoire événementielle”—full of “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.”

Julie Kalman’s book The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World During the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond tells the story of the Bacris and the Busnachs and their involvement in the trade and politics of the Regency of Algiers, an autonomous tributary state on the westernmost flank of the Ottoman Empire, during the final half-century of the regency’s existence, before it was invaded by France in 1830. Algiers was, as Kalman says, “a major trading and corsairing port in the Mediterranean.” Ships brought in luxury goods and captives and took away local produce, like its prized wheat, to be borne across the sea to Europe and even as far as the Americas. Thanks to the export of wheat the regency, as the historian James McDougall wrote, “enjoyed unprecedented general prosperity and stability,” especially during what Lemnouar Meroche termed the “century of wheat,” lasting from the late seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century. Algeria, with its fertile river valleys of the Kabylia region, was a major supplier of grain to Europe, particularly France during the revolutionary era.

In the seventeenth century the autonomy of the regency, far from the center of imperial power in Istanbul, increased, and its governors, known as deys, were gradually able to conduct their own foreign and fiscal policy. But the Regency of Algiers never lost its nominal connection to the Ottoman Empire, and the dey’s election by local elites had to be confirmed by authorities in the capital. According to McDougall, for over three centuries, until the French invaded in 1830, coins minted in Algiers bore the name and title of the Ottoman sultan. Even as late as the twentieth century, McDougall claimed, “Friday sermons in mosques in rural districts of eastern Algeria were still being said in the name of the last reigning Ottoman sultan.”¹

The Kings of Algiers looks at the last decades of the regency and highlights the ties between the land and the sea and between the sea and the history of events, money, and power. It shows how the sea was attached to the produce and the people of the lands surrounding it: local farmers growing wheat, which was then sold overseas to profit the dey and the intermediaries facilitating the transactions and transport; European powers vying for control of trade routes; people being captured and sold as slaves or kept in order to extort ransom. In the midst of it all were two Jewish families, the Bacris and their related rivals the Busnachs, with connections on the European and African shores of the Mediterranean. Their business dealings and political influence were the subject of discussions among representatives of Christian powers that had stakes in the region, and they negotiated some of the most important international treaties of the time. Naphtali Busnach was apparently the dey’s “advisor and a middleman in diplomacy.” Jacob Bacri, his uncle, “was invited to dinner with Napoleon.” Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe necessarily discussed the Bacris in their strategic plans since they were “at the center” of US negotiations to secure peace with Algiers following the War of Independence, when American ships lost the protection that had been afforded to British ships.

To underscore this point Kalman starts with an anecdote that puts the Bacris in the middle of the “easy, linear” narrative explaining the French invasion of Algiers. In this telling, when the consul of France in Algiers visited the dey in 1827, he was confronted with the demand that France pay a debt that had been accruing since 1794 for wheat purchased on credit. When the consul did not respond, the dey became infuriated and struck him in the face with “a huge fan…[used] to keep flies away.” Insulted, the French insisted on an apology and sent other demands. When the dey pressed for payment, France sent its warships, and “the spat simply escalated from there.” And that decades-old wheat debt, which Kalman claims was owed to the Bacris, was how this Jewish family “came to occupy such a central place in international relations.” The incident, known in France as the coup d’éventail, the “blow with the fly whisk,” became, as noted by McDougall, “legendary in French imagery and schoolbook narratives.”

According to Kalman, however, the story of the two families and their part in major historical events in the Mediterranean has been “lost in a space between historiographical fields and absolute dates”; “history writing, siloed into subdisciplines, has not been able to accommodate them.” Jews have generally not been integrated into modern histories of the states and lands in which they had been a marginalized minority. Jewish historiography of the Mediterranean, which tends to focus on the early modern period, has also left the Bacris and the Busnachs out of the story because, she says, it “comes to a halt with the eighteenth century”—though it resumes, one might add, to cover the colonial and postcolonial era, which for Algiers began in 1830.

Kalman covers the Bacri and Busnach families’ rise to prominence later in the eighteenth century and their closeness to those in power, primarily the dey, for whom they seem to have served as intermediaries in negotiations with representatives of European powers over grain exports, captives, ships that had been seized by North African pirates, and peace treaties.

In 1798, when Napoleon invaded Egypt, a major province of the Ottoman Empire, the dey of Algiers was trying to avoid getting dragged into the conflict, especially since France was so indebted to Algiers. Joseph Bacri and Naphtali Busnach, Kalman writes, “focused all their efforts on ensuring” that Dey Mustapha continued to resist Ottoman orders to join the war. When he could not hold out any longer—the sultan’s bailiff arrived demanding action—and arrested French subjects in Algiers, including the French consul with his family and entourage, Joseph and Naphtali (so reported the consul in his letters to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the French minister of foreign affairs at the time) appealed to Mustapha through “repeated entreaties and gifts” to treat the prisoners leniently.

Nevertheless, in retaliation for these arrests France seized Jacob Bacri’s home and warehouses in Marseille, and “an embargo was placed over seven of Jacob’s boats that were sitting in the harbor, loaded, ironically, to take supplies to French troops in Malta,” which they now occupied. The dey intervened on the Bacris’ behalf via the Spanish king, reportedly claiming they “had done the [French] Republic some very precious favors.” The Bacris had fed Malta, for example, “by means of Algerian ships…with a generosity whose merit the republic should fully appreciate. And it is thanks to the Bacris that the Spanish obtained highly important services several times in Algiers.” The Spanish ambassador in Paris pleaded with Talleyrand, asking “that the sequesters on the Bacris’ goods be lifted, and that they be treated as friends.” On August 19, 1799, after a long campaign, the sequester was finally lifted.

In the eighteenth century, as the European powers began to assert their dominance not only across the Atlantic but beyond, they sought also to control Mediterranean trade routes and access to produce, especially wheat, on which they were dependent. The Regency of Algiers became caught in the middle. Over the centuries, as McDougall showed, the regency relied for income on “tribute payments, guaranteeing treaties of peace, from other seafaring states, customs and taxation,” and exports of wheat and other agricultural products. It saw itself as a power to be respected, and in this traditional structure members of the Bacri and Busnach families began to flourish as the dey’s intermediaries. But during the postrevolutionary era, which brought a new “global distribution of power,” the rules of engagement between the Europeans and the Ottoman Empire and its Mediterranean tributary regencies also changed. The new rules relied less on personal gifts and tributes and more on official state bureaucracies and lines of command, and on the exercise of state and military power.

Previously both rulers and diplomats needed agents to represent their interests in negotiations, enabling merchants like the Jewish Bacris and Busnachs to rise to prominence and wealth. Aside from short stays, Muslim traders and ship captains were generally not allowed to remain in Christian Europe (though they are recorded as visiting the ports of Marseille, Livorno, Genoa, and others) and were sometimes subjected to violence. The traders coming from the Ottoman Empire were typically Jews and Christians—Greeks or Armenians. But in the Maghreb there were very few Christians, and so Jews were able to fill the economic void.

While such Jews could become prosperous and powerful, they were not fully independent actors. In the Islamic lands, Jews and other non-Muslims living there were dhimmis. Kalman describes “the principle of dhimmitude”² as the status of “non-Muslim minorities,” including “Jews, and the many branches of Christianity in the Middle East,” who “were seen as People of the Book.” In Kalman’s explanation, the dhimmis “occupied a middle ground between savagery and full enlightenment” and were “subject to certain measures geared toward ensuring separation and subordination, but at the same time, they enjoyed communal autonomy” and “proximity to power that was not the case in Western Europe.”

This is a problematic and somewhat inaccurate way to describe what the dhimmi position entailed or what the position of Jews was in Europe, where some rose to distinction and influence (in German lands they were known as Hofjuden, or “court Jews”). Dhimmi literally means “the protected,” but “in exchange for this protection,” as the historian Jessica Marglin noted, “dhimmis agreed to certain restrictions designed to ensure their lower place on the social hierarchy.” While conditions varied across different Islamic lands, all dhimmis had to pay a special poll tax, or jizya, and submit to stigmatizing and at times humiliating conditions meant to mark them out. In Tunisia, for instance, Jews were prohibited from wearing red, which was “reserved” for Muslims, and had to wear black shoes and a black or blue turban. They also could not own real estate. In some places, such as sixteenth-century Jerusalem, they had to wear special bells when entering public bathhouses.

It is odd, then, that Kalman ascribes the Bacris’ ability to “be close to the center of power” to their Jewishness and devotes little space to explaining the significance of their lesser rank—and not just theirs—in Algiers. While the rise of the two Jewish families might be tantalizing, it has to be seen within the legal context of this inferior dhimmi standing. That can explain both their relationship with the dey and anti-Jewish attacks—like the one after the assassination of Naphtali Busnach in 1805, during a famine many associated with his role in the grain trade. While the murder may have been motivated by personal revenge, the subsequent violence against Jews sanctioned by the dey is reminiscent of what David Nirenberg discussed in his Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (1996). He argued, regarding Christian Spain, that the strategic and ritualized enactment of violence was intended to stabilize “relations between groups” and “reinstitute differences and emphasize boundaries,” and thus effectively to remind Jews of their precarious inferior position. In Algiers janissaries were given permission to rampage for three hours, during which they “ransacked” synagogues, “ripped the Torah scrolls to shreds,” murdered Jews “on their way home from prayers,” and then pillaged their homes.

Kalman’s book is replete with references to power but focuses on its Jewish expression. The Bacris and Busnachs were “kings of Algiers,” a phrase Kalman takes from the US consul in Algiers Richard O’Brien. True, the families appear to have been everywhere—in negotiations over captives, tributes, and peace and trade agreements. And the different deys of Algiers stood up for them numerous times, including when Dey Hussein struck the French consul with a fly whisk. Kalman presents them almost as gatekeepers, “occupy[ing] the seat at the dey’s right hand.” Naphtali Busnach, she writes,

made himself the first point of contact in the palace for any foreign visitor, representative, or dignitary. Anyone who wished to deal with the dey had to go first to Naphtali. Nothing happened in Algiers without Naphtali’s knowledge.

This access was supposedly related to his position as muqaddam, which Kalman defines as the “head of the Jewish community.” As leaders, muqaddams “were able to gain the trust of the ruling dey and elite, and become their broker.” But in some Islamic lands a muqaddam was simply an official, or a leader of a religious group, or (as in the regency) “a custodian” of a saint’s shrine. In Algeria muqaddams were often among other officials, such as hakims or caids, who might be local governors, or sheikhs, leaders of “a tribal faction.” Muqaddams were part of the social and political fabric of the regency, and they were not uniquely Jewish. Thus a Jewish muqaddam was a representative of Jews before the dey.

With this proximity to power, Kalman writes, the

Bacris thrived in the regency, and in the war, because they were deeply enmeshed in systems and networks that they—for the most part—knew how to manipulate to their advantage. If they lost the occasional cargo…they could have the dey pressure foreign powers to recoup the value, or to insist that the ship be returned.

She repeatedly talks about “the Bacri debt”—the money France owed for the grain bought on credit—at one point even claiming that “this was the genius of Naphtali Busnach and the Bacri brothers: to convince a succession of deys that debts owed to them were a matter of diplomacy.”

There is something unsettling about Kalman’s recurring emphasis on the self-interest of these two Jewish families. “Everything they did,” she writes, “was entirely for their own sakes, or, more accurately, for the sake of their business.” She says the different members of the families brought “the dey and the ruling elite” into their “business ventures so that they might also profit from [them],” reversing the power dynamic and making the deys look prone to being manipulated by “the Jews”—who were rather being used by the deys. The Bacris and Naphtali Busnach emerge as “powerful,” “hostile,” and “traitorous”—at times “firmly in the French camp,” at others on the side of the British or Spanish. Never does Kalman (nor did the French consuls, apparently) consider them loyal servants of the dey.

Seduced by certain of her sources, Kalman seems to lose sight of the real position of Jews—including her chief characters—in a Muslim society. In their official capacity as the muqaddams of the Jewish community, they may have had access to the deys. But they were dhimmis, and the fact—noted early in the book—that the Bacri and Busnach families were the deys’ brokers seems forgotten throughout, displaced by the overemphasis on their supposed “machinations” and autonomy. That they were the deys’ agents, however, is key to understanding the high stakes and international ramifications of the debts owed to them—without it, the deys’ repeated defense of them is inexplicable. Yet their precise situation can be gleaned from some sources.

Kalman claims that “nothing happened in Algiers” without the knowledge of these influential Jews. What she does not discuss is that these same brokers very likely could do nothing of any magnitude without the knowledge of the dey and his officials. But The Kings of Algiers says next to nothing about the dey’s Muslim advisers and officials such as the khaznaji (treasurer) or wakil kharaj (minister of naval and foreign affairs)—who both, in addition to the dey himself, undoubtedly would have been involved in setting the terms for any negotiations with European powers over ransoming captives or ships, or tributes that bought peace at sea. Kalman also neglects the Arab beldi (patrician notables), along with (according to McDougall) “the ra’is (privateer captains),” the deys, and their families, who “amassed spectacular fortunes.” These Muslim political, mercantile, and seafaring elites also acquired political power and influence.

The deys had a political and economic interest in what the Bacris and the Busnachs were doing. These Jewish brokers engaged in grain exports because, most probably, the deys wanted and allowed them to. “Much of the best land, on the plains and in permanently farmed estates near major towns,” as McDougall wrote, belonged to the state, thus profiting the deys. The state then “took a set proportion of the harvest,” known as jabri; thus, “in good years, both parties benefitted, but in poor years,” as he notes, “only the state—which was due its fixed amount of produce whatever the weather—gained from the arrangement.” It was then likely the dey’s portion of the grain that the Bacri and Busnach families traded. When they were not paid, the dey was not paid either. The reason for the conflict between the regency and France was, perhaps more accurately, the debt to the dey, not “the Bacri debt.” Read between the lines, the sources and the book reveal—against Kalman’s assertions—that the Bacris were the executors of the deys’ policies; they were not “kings of Algiers.”

The power dynamic at play in the contacts between the Regency of Algiers and the European powers, with Jewish agents in the middle, is intriguing but inadequately explored. For the Muslims, Christians and Jews were inferior. Christians were sometimes labeled as kafir, or “infidel people.” It is not surprising, then, that the dey would delegate Jews to negotiate with them. European Christians, especially in the post-Enlightenment era, looked down upon both Jews and Muslims. They resented having to appeal to the Jewish agents of the dey for access.

The Bacris and the Busnachs appear to have been “everywhere” because they were, after all, the point of contact with the European and American representatives, and Kalman uses only the sources produced by Western diplomats or found in European archives. In 1972, in the preface to the second edition of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Braudel noted that modern “historians of the west” were “in exactly the same position as the contemporaries of Philip II,” able to “glimpse the Turkish world from outside only,” relying on “reports sent by ambassadors and intelligence agents to Christian princes” but not accessing “the vast archives in Istanbul.” He understood that much was missing from such an approach, and in Kalman’s book it’s the Algerian and Ottoman perspectives: no archives in Algeria or Turkey appear to have been consulted. (Contrast this with Jessica Marglin’s 2022 book about a prominent Jewish businessman of the same period who worked for the beys of Tunis, The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship Across the Modern Mediterranean, which demonstrates the complexity of law, status, and political and financial maneuvering across the Mediterranean world—Christian and Islamic.)

As a result, The Kings of Algiers is troublingly Eurocentric. Kalman wants to tell “a history of what it was to be a Jewish trader in this volatile world.” But what she offers instead is a story of the perception of Mediterranean Jewish traders by European and American actors, who projected their sense of superiority over and disdain for both Jews and Muslims. While occasionally Kalman acknowledges that her sources reflect the views of European and American consuls, more often skepticism and analysis are missing. The speeches the consuls claim to have delivered are taken at face value, without considering that they might be, as Natalie Zemon Davis put it, “fiction in the archives.”

In the book’s accessible but at times slick prose, it is difficult to discern what is historically true and what is an expression of the consuls’ views of Jews and Arabs in the Napoleonic era. Kalman does not reflect on how information and misinformation were passed around in these circles and how many of those diplomatic dispatches might have been self-serving and self-congratulatory. Perhaps, when these Westerners placed Jewish agents at the center, blaming them for “machinations” and “intrigues,” they were concealing their own diplomatic failures. This may have been the case with Charles François Dubois-Thainville, the French consul in Algiers, who appears unusually obsessed with the Bacris but who, in the end, was dismissed from his post and replaced by another diplomat. Thainville died soon after returning to Paris; his surviving family was never awarded a pension by the French Republic.

In the end, we do not know what happened; we know only what the various consuls said happened. Given that the debts were “an engagement from government to government,” whom did it serve to center Jews here, casting them as creditors and minimizing the power of the dey? And then why would “the Jews’ account” become such a concern in European diplomatic circles? Kalman does not answer these questions. Her story overlooks crucial elements. We have little to no reckoning from the Jews themselves or from the Regency of Algiers. It is like Rashomon, but with only two out of four interpretations.

The Kings of Algiers is what Braudel called a “history of brief, rapid, nervous fluctuations.” It is dynamic, with some cinematic scenes—like the assassination of Naphtali Busnach or the swatting of the French consul by the dey. Yet while “most exciting,” such history is also, as he warned, “the most dangerous.” “With its still burning passions, as it was felt, described, and lived by contemporaries whose lives were as short and as short-sighted as ours,” it is a history one “must learn to distrust.”

Kalman wanted to tell an engrossing but untold story of two Jewish families who “shaped the Mediterranean world.” But in her quest to tell it—no doubt searching for clues about the families and finding thrilling references to them “everywhere” in the archives—she may have exaggerated their role. The diplomatic dispatches and memoirs need a critical distance and, as Braudel taught us, a wider lens. In totaling more individual histories, we might then get a different sum.