by Julie Kalman
Princeton University Press, 259 pp., $32.00
The story of two Jewish trading families during the last decades of the Regency of Algiers is skewed by being told through the perspectives of only European and American actors.
December 5, 2024 issue (New York Review of Books)
View of Algiers from the Sea; aquatint by J. Clark after Henry Parke, 1818
by Julie Kalman
Princeton University Press, 259 pp., $32.00
“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.”
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.”
