The Merchants of Oran: A Jewish Port at the Dawn of Empire

By Joshua Schreier

The Merchants of Oran weaves together the history of a Mediterranean port city with the lives of Oran's Jewish mercantile elite during the transition to French colonial rule. Through the life of Jacob Lasry and other influential Jewish merchants, Joshua Schreier tells the story of how this diverse and fiercely divided group both responded to, and in turn influenced, French colonialism in Algeria.

Jacob Lasry and his cohort established themselves in Oran in the decades after the Regency of Algiers dislodged the Spanish in 1792, during a period of relative tolerance and economic prosperity. In newly Muslim Oran, Jewish merchants found opportunities to ply their trades, dealing in both imports and exports. On the eve of France's long and brutal invasion of Algeria, Oran owed much of its commercial vitality to the success of these Jewish merchants.

Under French occupation, the merchants of Oran maintained their commercial, political, and social clout. Yet by the 1840s, French policies began collapsing Oran's diverse Jewish inhabitants into a single social category, legally separating Jews from their Muslim neighbors and creating a racial hierarchy. Schreier argues that France's exclusionary policy of "emancipation," far more than older antipathies, planted the seeds of twentieth-century ruptures between Muslims and Jews.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781503602168

Book preview

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schreier, Joshua, 1969- author.

Title: The merchants of Oran : a Jewish port at the dawn of empire / Joshua Schreier.

Other titles: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017. | Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016040093 (print) | LCCN 2016041831 (ebook) | ISBN 9780804799140 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503602168 (ebook) |

Subjects: LCSH: Lasry, Jacob, 1793-1869. | Jewish merchants—Algeria—Oran—Biography. | Jews—Algeria—Oran—History—19th century. | Oran (Algeria)—Commerce—History—19th century. | Algeria—Ethnic relations—History—19th century. | France—Colonies—Administration—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC DS135.A3 A3576 2017 (print) | LCC DS135.A3 (ebook) | DDC 965/.1004924—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040093

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion Pro

THE MERCHANTS OF ORAN

A Jewish Port at the Dawn of Empire

JOSHUA SCHREIER

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

Edited by David Biale and Sarah Abrevaya Stein

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Notes on Language and Terminology

Introduction

1. Mediterranean Oran

2. Rebuilding Oran: Jews, Beys, and Commerce, 1792–1830

3. Making Money in a Time of Conquest

4. Struggles For and Between the Merchants of Oran

5. Jacob Lasry and the Business of Conquest

6. From Juifs de Gibraltar and Algerine Jews to Israélites Indigènes

Conclusion: Moralities and Mythologies

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was such a collaborative effort that it feels odd putting only one name on the cover. It also could not have been done without significant material assistance. My research was made possible by Vassar College’s Research Committee, and through the Elinor Nims Brink fund, the Tatlock Endowed Fund for Strategic Faculty Support, and the Suzanne Schrier Heimerdinger endowment. The Jewish Studies Program at Vassar College, as well as the Berman Center for Jewish Studies at Lehigh University both helped significantly. Jonathan Chenette and the Office of the Dean of Faculty at Vassar College consistently provided support when it was necessary. As for critical insights over the course of writing, my debts are great. Sarah Abrevaya Stein has not only been a great friend, but a keen and tireless reader. Aomar Boum, Benjamin Brower, Susan Hiner, Daniel Lee, Jessica Marglin, Jeff Schneider, Daniel Schroeter, and Eva Woods have all read various incarnations of this research as it appeared over the years. They provided invaluable encouragement, constructive criticism, and thoughtful advice.

Joshua Marrache sat with me for hours in Gibraltar explaining the territory’s Jewish history and culture. Mesod Belilo, the registrar of Gibraltar’s Jewish community, was similarly generous with his time and kindly guided me through the registries of Jewish marriages. Anthony Pitaluga of Gibraltar’s National Archives helped me find valuable documents, even coming into work on a vacation day to do it. A sincere word of thanks to Dave Liston and Nicky Guerrero for their help, warmth, and good cheer before and during my stay in Gibraltar. In Oran, Robert Parks and Karim Oaras at the Centre d’Études Maghrebines en Algérie were of incommensurable help during our stay. Great and sincere thanks are due as well to Jacques Maroni, Jacob Lasry’s great grandson, who graciously shared knowledge of his family’s history with me. His advice significantly strengthened this project.

Michal Birnbaum was an excellent tutor who patiently helped me with a difficult text to which Isaac Levy was kind enough to introduce me. Mr. Levy merits additional thanks for his insights and explanations. Luciana Corti graciously helped with the Italian-language sources. Marc Michael Epstein has been a tremendously consistent friend, adviser, and teacher, and this work is stronger for his hand in it.

My colleagues in Vassar College’s Department of History have provided an excellent and supportive environment in which to write, teach, and speak my mind. Tremendous thanks to Nancy Bisaha, Bob Brigham, Mita Choudhury, Miriam Cohen, Rebecca Edwards, Maria Höhn, Julie Hughes, James Merrell, Quincy Mills, Lydia Murdoch, Leslie Offutt, Miki Pohl, Ismail Rashid, and Nianshen Song. Particular thanks are owed to Michelle Whalen for her effective and consistent help, support, encouragement, warmth, and remarkable good humor.

Stanford University Press has been an absolute pleasure to work with. Thank you to David Biale, Sarah Stein, and Kate Wahl for taking an interest early on and for asking key questions about framing this book. Thanks also to Margo Irvin, whose recent arrival at the press did nothing to delay her advice and support. Thanks so much also to Nora Spiegel for all her help as editorial assistant, and Mimi Braverman for tremendous copyediting of a manuscript that desperately needed it. Great thanks are due Anne Fuzellier Jain for her invaluable guidance (and patience) as production editor.

A brilliant cast of friends and colleagues has provided company, laughter, ideas, and stimulating conversation on research trips, at workshops, conferences, dinners, and concerts, and in cafés and pubs. Many of the ideas that inform this book can be traced to my fortunate interactions with these all-stars. Thanks to Cécile Balavoine, Naor ben Yehoyada, Lia Brozgal, Oliver Burkeman, Heather Chaplin, Joshua Cole, Jessica Cooperman, Catharine Crawford, Naomi Davidson, David Deutsch, Nathaniel Deutsch, Sammi Everett, Johnny Farraj, John Fellas, Michael Gasper, Maria Hantzopoulos, Daniel Hershenzon, Susan Hiner, Jonathon Kahn, Carey Kasden, Julie Kleinman, Hartley Lachter, Daniel Lee, Jared Manasek, Liz Marcus, Maria Matthiessen, James McDougall, Mac Montandon, Joe Nevins, Emanuelle Saada, Rachel Schley, Tyrone Simpson, Susan Slyomovics, Mira Sucharov, Agi Vetò, Michael Walsh, and Fred Zimmerman.

I owe tremendous and heartfelt gratitude to my family. My daughter Malka is brilliant, driven, accomplished, loving, and fierce. She became a bat mitzvah over the course of this book’s writing and reminded me to keep my eyes on the prize. My son Noam’s intelligence, kindness, talent, and outlandish sense of humor have been a source of music, sustenance, joy, and inspiration, even if he does get me in trouble for laughing at inappropriate jokes. Limitless thanks to my parents, Arlene Richman and Ethan Schreier, for their love, support, understanding, and contrarian perspectives. Janet Levine and Geoff Taylor have taken excellent care of them (I know, it ain’t easy). My parents-in-law, Monique Nathan and Paul Merle, have been warm, welcoming, helpful, patient, and supportive during the long process of writing this book. Love and gratitude are due to my inspirational, hilarious, and brilliant sister-in-law, Sarah Koenig; my excellent niece, Ava (whose recent bat mitzvah was a source of enormous encouragement and joy); and my dear, turbo-charged nephew, Reuben. Benjamin Schreier, the original impossible Jew, my faithful, merciless, and side-splittingly funny brother, is a great scholar of Jewish studies and my best friend. A part of me still believes we could have been one of the more popular recording acts of the mid- to late 1990s. But it is clear to me now that things happened the way they did for a reason. Most of all, thanks are due to my wife, Lise Schreier, ayshes hayil intergalactique, who has provided love, support, humor, patience, and one or two well-merited talking-tos, all of which were essential to this project.

NOTES ON LANGUAGE AND TERMINOLOGY

Arabic and Hebrew words are transliterated according to the systems of the Library of Congress, but with most diacritical marks removed. For clarity and simplicity, Moroccan and Algerian cities and place names are generally rendered in their common English forms rather than in French or Arabic (i.e., Annaba rather than Ānābah or Bône). When accents frequently appear in cities’ English names, they are maintained (e.g., Tétouan, Médéa).

Names of people have proven particularly tricky. Biblically derived French Jewish names common in English have generally been rendered in their most common English versions (Salomon is rendered as Solomon, Mardochée as Mordecai). Names that appear as French transliterations from the Hebrew, however, are generally rendered in their English equivalents (e.g., Shimon rather than Chimoun or Simon). If the version appears to reflect a particular, local pronunciation, I have kept it as it appears in the original sources. The name Ben Ichou, therefore, is rendered as such and not transformed to Ben Yehoshua. Similarly, Sarfati remains as such rather than Tsarfati, and Semha is not transformed to the more familiar Simcha. When names that have different forms in different languages or formats appear, I use the most frequently appearing version with the assumption that it was the form most commonly used locally. Thus Estelle rather than Esther, Rica rather than Rivka, and Lasry rather than Asri, Azry, or al-‘Asry.

MAP. Oran and the western Mediterranean.

INTRODUCTION

ON OCTOBER 22, 1855, the minister of public instruction in Paris, in approving the proposal of the prefect of the Province of Oran, named Jacob Lasry, a wealthy businessman, president of the consistoire israélite de la province d’Oran (Jewish Consistory for the Province of Oran). Lasry’s selection for the post, which he assumed on November 23, was a statement of great confidence in both his moral character and his patriotism. The first Jewish consistories, which Napoleon had established in France several decades earlier, in 1808, were intended to supervise the moral, social, and cultural regeneration of France’s Jews, a group in which the emperor had little trust.¹ As president, Lasry was now at the helm of the first colonial consistories, agencies charged with organizing the Jewish religion, uplifting its practitioners, and assimilating the supposedly uncivilized Jews of France’s new North African territories to France’s Jewish community. French Jewish journalists who took interest in the affair lauded the choice of Lasry. One writer extolled Lasry’s gentle but firm character, which was distinguished by a spirit of charity and great knowledge.² The same report noted that the friends of progress particularly celebrated his ascent to the presidency of the consistory. Another journal, lamenting the sorry moral state of most of Oran’s Jews, offered hope that under Lasry their errors of civilization would not go unchecked and that the new president’s efforts to attach them to France and its putatively superior civilization would be rewarded with success.³

The fact that Jacob Lasry was chosen to lead the consistory, a moralizing institution specifically intended to attach Oran’s putatively uncivilized Jews to France, could be seen as a paradox. When the French began the conquest in 1830, the Moroccan-born Lasry was already installed in the Ottoman-controlled port of Oran, in the west of what is now Algeria. He might be described as a Mediterranean merchant, a speaker of Arabic and Spanish (and perhaps French and English as well), or as a British protégé and a close associate of the United Kingdom’s vice-consulate in Oran. French generals used a range of terms to describe Lasry, including English subject, Moroccan, and Juif de Gibraltar, but they never called him French or even European. Lasry’s religious and commercial networks were no more French than his background. They tied him closest to Gibraltar but extended to Morocco and Spain and possibly to Livorno, Genoa, and Tunis. Furthermore, military officers often held Lasry in decidedly lower esteem than the journalists cited earlier. In a number of letters to Paris, they spoke contemptuously of the Jew Lasry, whom they described as immoral and duplicitous. One officer accused him of unlimited avarice.⁴ His patriotism was also suspect; his usurious loans plunged a celebrated (and vilified) Tunisian commander who had become a French officer into debt, and for two and a half decades into the conquest Lasry made no visible effort to obtain French nationality. In fact, he took French citizenship only in 1854, barely one year before becoming president of the consistory. All in all, Lasry was a seemingly odd choice for a position putatively bound to the mission to spread French civilization across North Africa.

Yet the fact that a Moroccan Jew of unlimited avarice with a history of incensing the French military was chosen to represent French civilization is only a paradox when one takes France’s civilizing ideology at its word. When we do, Lasry’s appointment to the consistory sheds doubt on it and many of the consistory’s other lofty moralizing claims. Clearly, other concerns were more important. Perhaps the occupying forces, still in a rather precarious position, actually depended on the knowledge, skills, and financial resources of North African notables such as Lasry and hoped to bring them into the administration. Their familiarity with or ability to promote abstractions such as French civilization, then, was actually secondary to their material and militaristic goals. In such a framing, Lasry’s appointment to the consistory adds to the many existing stories that expose the cracks and contradictions in French colonial policy and ideology.⁵ It also suggests that local Jews, whom many French observers reduced to an oppressed unity, may have been more diverse, influential, and worldly than previously imagined.

But something just as valuable is learned when we put aside the moralizing ideology that adorned the colonial consistories’ installation. Removing Lasry’s story, at least for a moment, from the French imperial context brings equally compelling but less frequently told stories into view. Western Algeria, long linked into western Mediterranean networks of commerce, was hardly static when the French showed up in 1831. Lasry and other Maghrebi Jewish merchants, searching for opportunities, were by then already on their way to remaking a town that had been more or less devastated several decades before. They did so by extending the town’s trade with Italian, English, and Spanish ports, shaping local institutions, making profitable deals with Christian and Muslim agents, and competing fiercely with each other. By the time the French entered the scene (and the archival record expanded considerably), Jews were, unsurprisingly, some of the town’s most important landlords and merchants. Lasry’s dynamic history therefore offers a glimpse into a Muslim and Jewish city before France’s conquest began transforming the societies of the Mediterranean. Beyond illustrating colonial paradoxes, Lasry’s example illuminates how precolonial Oran was growing and increasingly linked with other Mediterranean locales. Lasry’s history, seen within the context of regional and transregional affairs, tells a story of Algerian Jews that is decidedly not a purely French imperial story.⁶

In this book I use the experiences of Lasry and those of several others in his milieu of the city of Oran to gain a new perspective on a number of larger processes. These people and their city are relatively unknown figures. Although Oran was a small town at the time of Lasry’s arrival, by the time of his death Oran was well on its way to becoming Algeria’s second largest city. Focusing on Oran helps shed light on underexplored sides of late Ottoman Algeria, its commercial life, its robust and influential Jewish presence, and the idiosyncrasies of early French colonial rule. The fact that one of my primary subjects is a Jew—an aspect of his identity that shaped his public persona—is also central to this discussion. Following Lasry and the circle of Jewish merchants and property owners among whom he traveled focuses attention on the deeply rooted and dynamic Jewish current in modern North African history, a current that can easily be forgotten in the wake of the upheavals, including the mass Jewish departure, that have intervened during and since the Algerian War of Independence.

Jews as wealthy and prominent as Lasry were not typical denizens of early-nineteenth-century North African ports, but they constituted an important fixture in the social and economic landscape. As such, these men did not simply form part of a minority community tolerated or accepted amid a national majority, which the state ostensibly represented. After all, such national majorities had yet to be conceived. Rather, Lasry came of age in an Arab-Islamic and Mediterranean world that would not have asked or required him to shed or subsume his religious identity to participate in high echelons of local society. Nor is there evidence that this precolonial Islamic world would have seen as odd a port where Jews such as Lasry conducted most commercial activities. Moreover, when the French arrived in the 1830s, they saw little contradiction in recognizing and officially sanctioning such a man’s already-prominent public position, even as they did so through an organization that assumed Jews’ need to be moralized. Granting Lasry a title that bestowed on him the responsibility to represent French civilization was as much a recognition of the preexisting status of Jews in North Africa as a strategy for changing it.

By revisiting the life of Lasry and his colleagues, this book offers fresh perspectives on North Africa, the place of Jews in it, and the early French conquest of Algeria. First, by placing Lasry in his wider context, I illustrate that some of the more powerful, dynamic, and indeed worldly figures in the urban society of late Ottoman/early colonial Oran were North African Jews. This contrasts with the common French narrative that described Jews in Algeria collectively as indigenous. This extremely problematic popular and social-scientific term was a creation of colonialism. It reduced a diverse array of people, some of whom had long family histories in western Algeria and others who were recent arrivals, to a single social group rooted in Algeria’s putatively static precolonial history. It also defined them as a group apart from and in opposition to Muslims, which was another category radically remade under colonial rule. As in other parts of the Middle East and North Africa, colonial Algeria’s population of indigenous Jews must be seen as the result of a process of minoritization, to which French colonial rule and its social and legal categories were crucial.⁷ This is ironic, because French laws generally privileged Jews with respect to their Muslim neighbors. The concept of indigenous Jews also functioned to cast Algeria’s Jewish inhabitants as the social parallel to the unemancipated and putatively isolated Jews of prerevolutionary France.⁸

This parallel served an important political function in the creation of the colonial order. French intellectuals of the revolutionary era cast French Jews as living examples of corruption and immorality, the epitome of the anti-citizen that rhetorically served their purposes by exemplifying the power of the republic to transform and uplift the debased.⁹ Several decades later, with the conquest of Algeria, colonial reformers, many of whom were Jews themselves, painted Algerian Jews similarly: as oppressed, ignorant, impoverished, and, as a result, isolated and superstitious.¹⁰ Liberal colonial reformers took these ills to be remediable, just as the faults of prerevolutionary French Jews had been argued to be. But the disease demanded a cure. The newly conceived pathologies of North African Jews justified an official effort to bring to Algeria a policy of Jewish regeneration, which had originally been conceived to uplift metropolitan France’s supposedly degenerate Jews. This official effort, inspired by the metropolitan regeneration movement but eventually understood as civilizing in the colonial context, began with the establishment of Jewish consistories in Algeria in the late 1840s. It reached an apex of sorts with the 1870 Crémieux Decree that naturalized the vast majority of Algeria’s Jews en masse. For years, French historical memory reflected this triumphalist framing, by which the conquest set the gears in motion for Algerian Jews’ regeneration, assimilation, and naturalization as French citizens.¹¹

Jacob Lasry and other wealthy and sophisticated North African Jews who had reached their lofty positions well before the conquest present a starkly different picture of the French conquest of Algeria. In fact, Lasry also complicates the traditional assumption, even among critics of colonial ideologies, that France was the motor that brought change to an otherwise traditional Jewish society in North Africa.¹² In Oran this class did not (as many continue to assume) trace its wealth exclusively to Livorno, the origin of North Africa’s better-known Jewish commercial elite.¹³ Nor can these wealthy people, who established synagogues and schools, underwrote civic improvements, and backed certain rabbinic authorities against others, be seen as isolated from lower echelons of Jewish society. Instead, the dynamism and influence of the merchants of Oran before and during the early colonial period defy the inherited teleological tales in which North African Jewish change or progress always came from Europe.

Hardly marginal or isolated, Jews such as Lasry served as agents to the beys or in other official positions; they made high-stakes deals with leaders, invested in property, and drew on British consular support to back their export ventures. They functioned within commercial networks—in which France did not always feature prominently—that existed before and endured beyond the onset of colonialism.¹⁴ Far from awaiting European deliverance from a circumscribed existence, Jacob Lasry actually helped to underwrite what the French understood as the civilizing mission by contributing financially to the underfunded civic institutions ostensibly established to uplift Oran’s Jews. In all this, Lasry’s story is a window into the process by which a Jewish elite, very much a product of their North African Islamic milieu and of their embeddedness in wider Mediterranean networks that included European powers, confronted and co-opted new and evolving colonial circumstances. Lasry’s international contacts and British protection paradoxically allowed him to take advantage of France’s civilizing mission and use it to solidify his stature in Oran’s increasingly French colonial society.

The second central argument of this book is that the limits of the term community emerge when one considers the case of Jews in early-nineteenth-century Oran. For scholars of Jewish history, community is an almost inevitable term. It constitutes a justification for undertaking Jewish history by offering a rationale for generalization and simultaneously opens up a line of questioning that interests us. Were Jews saddled with restrictions or subject to persecution? Or, conversely, were they free to pursue commerce, practice their faith, or exercise a measure of communal autonomy? Regardless of the answers to these questions, reified notions of Jewish community also suggest collective power or powerlessness, which is a schema into which Oran’s complicated precolonial and early colonial historical reality does not exactly fit.

So, to what extent did this remarkable class of North African merchants serve as notables of a well-defined Jewish community? As in neighboring Morocco, Jews in Algeria were a diverse group of people.¹⁵ They lived under different circumstances, had different origins, and even more important, had different narratives of their origins. Also, as in Morocco, the notion of a collectivity of Algerian Jews would crystalize only over the course of the colonial period. Even on a local level, such as in the city of Oran, the recent arrival of immigrant Jews to that port, their diverse provenance, their high proportion relative to Oran’s overall population, and the fierce dissonance between different individuals and groups within that community all shed light on the limited utility of the term.¹⁶ Interrogating the value of community as a descriptor of Oran’s Jews is all the more important given that French colonial administrators adopted a blanket use of the term indigenous to describe the city’s Jews as a group. In the interest of avoiding the crude conceptual errors of early colonialism, a more nuanced understanding is necessary.

Oran’s Jews were a diverse lot. They included Moroccan and Gibraltarian merchants of Lasry’s stature but also midlevel purveyors of goods imported or brought in from the interior and intermediaries with nomadic traders who brought their goods to the port. Other Jews purchased goods off the boats to sell in the city’s shops. Among Oran’s artisans, Jews served as tailors, embroiderers, tinsmiths, coppersmiths, watchmakers, and shoemakers. Rabbis may have earned a living by working at an elite Jew’s private synagogue or, if circumstances demanded, giving lessons to local children.¹⁷ As for Oran’s Jewish elite, they may have lived better than other denizens of the city, but they did not live in isolation from them. For example, feuding members of the elite often saw their private synagogues become centers of social life, further dividing the Jewish population. Well into the colonial