Jewish Merchants, Ottoman Beys, French Generals, and British Consuls in Oran, 1830–31

On the eve of the French conquest, Oran was a small port city governed by the Ottoman Bey Hassan and still recovering from the devastating 1790 earthquake that hastened its transfer from Spanish rule. When France occupied the town in 1830, its victory was neither immediate nor complete, nor did it result in the elimination of rival forces. It did, however, disrupt the mercantile life of the city, where British interests ran deep and Jews of local, Moroccan, and British-Gibraltarian background occupied a pre-eminent position. If the power of the bey was quickly decimated, the French still faced the task of wresting control of the city from a largely Jewish merchant class deeply invested in pre-existing commercial networks tying the city to Gibraltar and London. Further complicating the picture was the fact that French generals and their proxies found themselves dependent on these important sources of local knowledge and finance, even as the “locals” remained protected by France’s British rivals. This paper portrays Oran’s Jewish merchants as influential figures in a trans-regional context, helping define the culture of Oran as well as Great Britain’s enduring commercial pull on the city. Within several years of the occupation, some Jewish merchants in Oran were taking French citizenship (or happily maintaining their British status), defying both the emerging colonial binary between “French” and “indigenous” Algerians and the powerful post-enlightenment symbolism giving Jews a privileged role in French narratives of “emancipation.” They could negotiate their citizenship status, even as an otherwise stark colonial hierarchy emerged, because of their prominent role locally and in western Mediterranean commerce more broadly. This research constitutes a radical departure from earlier histories of Algerian Jews that are organized around the axis of French colonialism and its encounter with a poor and isolated “indigenous” population.