Julie Kalman
The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World during the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023: ISBN: 9780691230153
Reviewed by Michal Ben Ya'akov1
In The Kings of Algiers, Julie Kalman masterfully draws us into one short time period at the turn of the nineteenth century; into one city, Algiers on the western edge of the Ottoman Empire; and into one extraordinary Jewish family of the commercial elite, the Bacris, to reveal a myriad of complex and multi-faceted relationships. While focusing on the specific, she skillfully weaves together the wider political, economic, and social context of the regime's elite, the imperial aspirations of foreign powers, primarily Britain and France, and the varied positions and perceptions of Jews at the time. Her stated purpose is to add a view from the periphery, Algiers, and thus challenge current historiography by cutting through Western national narratives and integrating European and American diplomatic and economic history. Likewise, Kalman aims to firmly situate Jews, and the perceptions of Jews, within the historiography of the period.
The book opens in present day Algiers, then with a broad sweep of time and place, takes us back some two hundred and fifty years to set the stage of the complex world of the internationally influential Bacri brothers and their nephew, Naphtali Busnach, whom Kalman refers to collectively as the Bacris throughout the book. Sharing the stage with the Bacris are the deys, the Algerian sovereigns and their ministers loosely under the authority of the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul, and the foreign consuls in the city, each with his own national and personal ambitions and attitudes. We are introduced to the intricacies of Mediterranean trade during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, including the corsairs, popularly known as the Barbary pirates,and their sanctioned raids capturing ships, cargo and slaves. The latter were taken not so much for their labor as for their ransom price. Algeria's export of much needed raw products, primarily wheat to Europe, and imports of luxury items and foreign currency, oiled the cogs of the regime and international diplomacy and rivalries. The Bacris and Busnachs were the necessary middlemen, the advisors and facilitators for all sides simultaneously. Together and individually, they cultivated personal relationships in order to manipulate trade agreements, debts, diplomacy, and imperial rivalries to their own advantage. They were renowned and often despised for their influence and reputation, as well as their notoriety in the capitals of Europe and the United States in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
This book is not a family biography. In fact, most personal details on the origins of the family and the five brothers and their children, particularly the women, are vague at best, concentrating only on those men entwined in international trade, diplomacy, and the financial entanglements of family. It is a social biography of Algiers through the prism of competition, turmoil, and intrigue of the city's elite, principally the dey, the consuls of France, Britain and the emerging United States, and, of course, the five Bacri brothers and their nephew, and later, the second generation.
The six chapters of the book proceed chronologically and thematically, each building on the former. Chapter 1, "The Rise of the Bacris," begins with the French Revolution and continues through the Napoleonic Wars, revealing how the family based in the strategic port of Algiers, occupied multiple spaces. They were much sought after advisors for the foreign consuls in the port, who competed fiercely for access to trade and influence in the region. They expertly created and developed personal relations simultaneously with rival parties in both commercial and diplomatic affairs and exploited them to their financial advantage. Trade was intricately connected to loans and credit for vital capital which they offered nations often in crisis and at war and simultaneously tied to complex diplomatic relations with the dey. Two decades later, and at the end of Chapter 5, the Bacris' high profile became notorious when this web ultimately led to the infamous "Bacri-Busnach Affair," also known as the "fly-whisk incident" on April 29,1827, when Hussein Dey, the ruler of the Regency of Algiers, was enraged by what he saw as an insult by Pierre Deval, the French consul in Algiers, during a ceremonial visit on Eid al-Fitr, marking the end of Ramadan. The French government regarded the confrontation of the commercial-political conflict surrounding a debt in which the Bacris were deeply implicated as a public insult. It ultimately led to the French invasion of Algeria in 1830.
Leading up to this incident, we follow the Bacris when opportunities abound for their indispensable services in "War Comes to the Regency," Chapter 2. International intrigues and complex maneuverings meshed the personal, political, and economic dealings and the Bacris had no loyalty other than to themselves and their accounts. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul forced the Algerian Dey to declare war on France, implicating the Bacri brothers, in Algiers, Paris, Marseilles, and in other ports of the Mediterranean. "The fortunes of the Bacris were … closely linked to the state of international diplomacy. But their good fortune depended, also, on the stability of the regime they had managed to establish in Algiers itself" (p. 87).
However, these ambitions had their dangers, as becomes even more evident in Chapter 3, "'Assassination of the ‘King of the Jews' (Long Live the King)." In such freewheeling dealings, intrigue, suspicion, and accusations abound, and not only kings and deys were imprisoned and assassinated, but also Naphtali Busnach, assassinated in 1805, and David Bacri in 1811. Family members were exiled and dispersed, some to European trade capitals such as Marseilles and Paris, others to the bustling commercial port city of Livorno. There they settled and prospered and became integrated in the thriving Jewish community. For the Jewish community in Algiers, of which the Bacris had filled the position of muqaddam, the official head of the community, severe implications followed. All in all, this period is a narrative of ambition and disappointment, successes and failures.
Chapter 4, "Difficult Relationships," examines the position of the family and its network within the Jewish community during this period as well as other spheres of activity. Their Jewishness is central to their identity in developing and manipulating personal relationships. Unfortunately, little is written about how they perceived their identity, nor about their activities in the Jewish community in Algiers, other than the rivalry between the Bacri and Duran families. A lack of sources available to the author stymies any real analysis for Algiers; the rich sources of the Livorno Jewish community, however, allow for a short but fascinating portrait of brother Salomon who settled there in 1787 and became deeply involved with communal affairs.
"Diplomacy, New and Old," Chapter 5, takes us to the brink of change. In 1815, European nations met at the Congress of Vienna to create a new world order. Corsairing, which had again flourished during twenty-three years of war, became a "barbarous relic of a previous age" (p. 163) with peace and economic protectionism. However, Britain, France, and Spain still needed food and the Bacris, together with the dey, again made their business a diplomatic as well as commercial affair. In the mid-1820s all the male Bacri relatives in Algiers were in serious financial trouble and subsequently arrested. Ultimately, the Bacris in Algiers were unable to rise to the challenges of a changing political and economic environment.
The French invasion of Algeria in 1830, Chapter 6, marks the end of the period, rather than the beginning, as in conventional histories. By 1833 and the colonization of Algeria, the Bacris were no longer center stage. Jacob, as nominal family head, had mounting debts. The family was embroiled in internal disputes and had lost leadership of the Jewish community. Even the details of his death, sometime between 1836 and 1838 in Paris or Algiers, are unclear.
Kalman sets out to tell the story from the periphery of Europe and the Ottoman Empire, adding the local perspective; that aim must be qualified by the sources available to her. In fact, the great majority of the sources letters and reports were written by European and American consuls, trade representatives, and foreign residents to and from Algiers and their home offices. Although they reveal the local perspective, it is with outsider biases. Of particular interest throughout the book is the role of the newly emerging, "self-conscious" United States, which while navigating its path by proclaimed neutrality was seeking to be recognized as a national player on the stage of international diplomacy and trade.
Non-Western sources, including very few from the local Jewish community, are limited. Those cited are from published research, primarily in French. Kalman does not reference the rich research on the community during this period published in Hebrew. I ponder whether primary sources in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic from the greater Mediterranean Basin would enrich the reconstruction of the Bacri story. Her short overview of the family branch in the Italian port of Livorno, for example, reveals rich possibilities to explore the families' position in local society in communal archives. We are left with questions about the Bacris as head of the Algiers Jewish community (muqaddam), the nature of their rivalries with the Duran family, and their activities vis-à-vis the local Jews. Although Kalman emphasizes the importance of their Jewishness, which "enabled their entry into the circle of state power" as "insider-outsiders" (p. 9) in the Empire, we are lacking the Bacris' Jewish voice. Without further elucidation, this only raises more questions regarding their personal and public roles.
Kalman aims to firmly situate Jews within the historiography of the period; however, we learn only of the Bacri men and their extraordinary power, influence, and notoriety in international commerce and diplomacy. She herself notes, "We cannot take the Bacris as typical. Theirs was a unique and extraordinary trajectory. … From their story we can, however, generalize about what it took to trade successfully in their time and place." (p. 224) Initial comments mention briefly only two other elite Jewish brokers in North Africa, Meir Macnin in Morocco and Jacob Lasry in Oran, reinforcing the exceptionality of the Bacris in the width and breadth of their activities. Kalman asks, "What happens when we let their story interact with the histories of the great and the good surrounding it?" (p. 226). I am not convinced that indeed their story, nor that of the Mediterranean Jewish elite, has thus become integrated within general, Western historiographies, rather juxtaposed to them, but it does "open up a world of meaningful interactions" (p. 227), as Kalman concludes. Current research on transnational networks and multiple movements over time and place will indeed be enriched by this study.
In spite of these drawbacks, this volume is extremely readable, with background information affording it accessibility to all. In fact, several of the accounts are real page-turners, and are highly recommended to those interested in Jews in international trade, economic history, the intrigues of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries imperial rivalries, and the complex and many-faceted world of the Mediterranean Basin and, of course, in the extended Bacri family.
1 Dr. Michal Ben Ya'akov has retired as Associate Professor at the Efrata College for Education, Jerusalem. She is currently a Speigel Fellow at The Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research of Bar-Ilan University. Her principle areas of research deal with North African Jews in nineteenth and early twentieth century Palestine/Eretz-Israel and the Jews in North Africa during World War II. She has lectured widely, edited four volumes, and published over fifty articles.