{"id":3737,"date":"2025-09-10T15:21:46","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T13:21:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/trame.cdec.it\/?post_type=focus&p=3737"},"modified":"2026-08-17T15:16:24","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T13:16:24","slug":"european-citizenship-and-influences-among-jews-in-the-ottoman-empire","status":"publish","type":"focus","link":"https:\/\/trame.cdec.it\/en\/focus\/european-citizenship-and-influences-among-jews-in-the-ottoman-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"European citizenship and influences among Jews in the Ottoman Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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The links between Livorno and the Levant in the early modern era<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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To understand Italy\u2019s role\u2014as a final destination or temporary transit point\u2014in the emigration movements that affected Middle Eastern and North African Jewish communities during the twentieth century, it is necessary to bear in mind certain long-term dynamics that have their roots in the early modern period. It was between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, in fact, that some Italian ports, particularly but not exclusively Livorno, became an intermediate stop in the Sephardic diaspora from Spain and Portugal to the Middle East, the Balkans, and North Africa. As a result, many Jews who settled in communities in the Ottoman Empire or North African regencies had and claimed family, linguistic, and cultural ties with Italy.<\/p>\n

Contacts and relations of this kind were reactivated from the eighteenth century onward: during that century, and in the first decades of the nineteenth century, numerous Italian Jews, mainly from Livorno, settled in Ottoman territories, offering themselves as commercial intermediaries between the declining Ottoman Empire and Europe. Thessaloniki, Constantinople, Smyrna, Alexandria, Tunis, and, to a lesser extent, Aleppo and Cairo became the main destinations of this migratory movement. It was a numerically small yet qualitatively significant flow. Fundamental to the success of this migration were both the resourcefulness of Livorno\u2019s merchants and the breadth of their transnational\u00a0networks, very often structured on the basis of family networks, as well as the privileged\u00a0status\u00a0<\/i>that the capitulations in force in the Ottoman Empire, progressively extended and strengthened during the nineteenth century, guaranteed to European residents.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Transit permit for the Italian Islands of the Aegean, issued by the Italian Consulate in Alexandria, Egypt, to Irma Arbib Acobas and her son Roger Acobas, 1930s. CDEC Foundation Archive.<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Transit permit for the Italian Islands of the Aegean, issued by the Italian Consulate in Alexandria, Egypt, to Irma Arbib Acobas and her son Roger Acobas, 1930s. CDEC Foundation Archive.<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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European power politics and the question of citizenship<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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It was precisely because of this situation of protection and privilege enjoyed by European citizens in the Empire that the issue of the nationality of these groups of Jewish merchants, and, more generally, of the Jewish minorities present in the Ottoman territories, had been a pressing one since the eighteenth century. The various European powers competed for the protection of Jewish minorities (and, of course, Christian minorities) subject to Constantinople in order to increase their influence in the area. To this end, many European states readily granted certificates of citizenship or protection even when the real ties between the various communities and families and their supposed home country were weak or even non-existent. It was thanks to these practices that numerous Ottoman Jewish families obtained European citizenship, which they often enjoyed for generations: in particular, French, British, Austrian, and, after 1861, Italian citizenship were widely distributed, while before Italian unification, it was mainly the Grand Duchy of Tuscany that resorted to such practices, thanks to the fact that many of these communities had remote Livornese origins.<\/p>\n

What is certain is that in the aftermath of Italian unification, while the North African coasts\u2014Egyptian, Tunisian, and Algerian\u2014began to welcome a new and profoundly different wave of Italian emigration, initially consisting mainly of political exiles and professionals and then, increasingly, of manual laborers, the ties between Italy and the nominally Italian Jewish communities of the Mediterranean began to be undermined by growing French political and cultural influence. Thanks to the educational and philanthropic work of the Alliance Isra\u00e9lite Universelle, which made the teaching of French one of its strengths, and to French economic and commercial power and political expansionism, Paris succeeded in becoming the natural point of reference for much of Mediterranean Jewry. This led to the spread of French as the main spoken language, both at home and in public, replacing Italian.<\/p>\n

Despite the progress of French influence, however, there were many Levantine, Egyptian, and Tunisian Jews who continued to look to Italy as their natural national and cultural reference point. On this point, the case of the Jewish community of Livornese origin in Tunis, the so-called Grana, is of interest. This community had always remained proudly separate from the Jewish community of Tunisian origin and highly valued its cultural and family ties with Italy. In this situation, during the liberal era, Italian governments showed a certain interest, albeit intermittently, in these communities of distant Italian origin or more recent Italian citizenship. The diplomatic and consular reports from Thessaloniki, Constantinople, Smyrna, Aleppo, Alexandria, and Tunis described these communities, which were hard-working and modest in positive terms, judging them to be elements that contributed to Italian prestige in the eastern Mediterranean.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Italy\u2019s \u201cSephardic policy\u201d and the beginning of Middle Eastern and Balkan Jewish immigration<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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The attention paid by the governments in Rome to these communities increased in the early twentieth century, and even more so in the aftermath of the conquest of Libya and the First World War. In the new geopolitical situation, Italian diplomacy, strengthened by its control of the important Jewish community of Rhodes, sought to develop its own \u201cSephardic policy.\u201d The aim was to counter French hegemony over the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean Sea and, at the same time, to offer an alternative to the Zionist projects supported by the British, which were rather unpopular among Mediterranean Jews at the time. Several political initiatives launched by Italian governments in those years were an expression of this attempt at political projection: the mission entrusted to Captain Angelo Levi-Bianchini among the Sephardic communities of the eastern Mediterranean immediately after the end of the war, which tragically ended with his assassination in Syria in August 1920; the appointment of David Prato as chief rabbi of Alexandria, Egypt, in 1927, a choice that, while part of a tradition that had seen other Italian rabbis leading the community of Alexandria in previous years, gave rise to a fruitful synergy with Italian foreign policy, leading to repeated meetings between Prato and Mussolini himself during the 1930s; finally, the attempt to establish a rabbinical college in Rhodes that could serve as a reference point for the entire Mediterranean Jewish community, promoting cultural ties with Italy, which took shape between 1928 and 1938.<\/p>\n

The results of these disparate initiatives promoted in relation to Sephardic Judaism were not particularly significant. This was also because, especially after the advent of fascism, \u201cSephardic policy\u201d was only one of the many contradictory aspects of Italy\u2019s Middle Eastern policy. It alternated between openness to the Zionists, more constant support for Arab nationalism, demands to defend Catholic positions in the region, and ambitions to make Italy an \u201cIslamic power\u201d: a heterogeneous and fluctuating policy whose only real unifying aspect was the attempt to undermine British hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean. Certainly, at the time of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and in the years immediately following, the Italian consuls in the region, like those of the other European powers, were authorized to generously distribute certificates of citizenship and protection to numerous groups of local Jews, who very often had no previous connection to Italy. In this way, they further extended a practice that, as we have seen, had been in place for a long time.<\/p>\n

In light of these aspects and the long-standing and complex ties between Italy and part of the Jewish population of the Near East, it is not surprising that during the twentieth century, Italian cities, primarily Milan and Rome, became destinations for permanent or temporary migration by groups of Jews from the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa. As early as 1911, following the Italian conquest of Libya and the Italo-Turkish War, a number of Jews from Tripoli arrived in Milan along with a small group of Jews from Istanbul, fleeing the anti-Italian and anti-European sentiment that had spread throughout the capital of the Empire. During the troubled interwar period, this phenomenon resumed on a larger scale. At the beginning of the 1930s, there were about two thousand Eastern Jews in Italy, mainly from cities in Asia Minor, such as Smyrna, which had been devastated by the Greco-Turkish War, and Thessaloniki. Faced with the disintegration of the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional Ottoman society, some of them had identified Italy as a natural landing place to escape the political turmoil in the region and to relaunch their commercial activities. Of course, these were still very limited numbers compared to those who would arrive after World War II, faced with the rapid disappearance of Judaism in Arab countries, and even more so when compared to those who went to France, Great Britain, Latin America, or Israel. Many of the dynamics that determined their arrival in Italy, starting with cultural and linguistic ties and, above all, the issue of Italian citizenship enjoyed by some of these Jewish families, however, were largely overlapping.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Group photograph of the Trionfo family, Tunis, 1925. CDEC Foundation Archives<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Wedding procession in the Jewish quarter of Rhodes, first half of the 1940s. CDEC Foundation Archive.<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Students and teachers of the Rabbinical College of Rhodes, ca. 1932\u20131935. CDEC Foundation Archive.<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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Bibliography<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Minerbi, Sergio I. \u201cL\u2019azione diplomatica italiana nei confronti degli ebrei sefarditi durante e dopo la I guerra mondiale (1915\u20131929).\u201d\u00a0La Rassegna mensile di Israel<\/i>\u00a047 (1981): 86\u2013119.<\/p>\n

Molho, Anthony. \u201cEbrei e marrani fra Italia e Levante ottomano.\u201d In\u00a0Gli ebrei in Italia II: Dall\u2019emancipazione a oggi<\/i>, edited by Corrado Vivanti, 1011\u201343.\u00a0Storia d\u2019Italia. Annali 11. Turin: Einaudi, 1997.<\/p>\n

Papo, Isacco.\u00a0\u201cL\u2019immigrazione ebraica in Italia dalla Turchia, dai Balcani e dal Mediterraneo orientale nella prima met\u00e0 del XX secolo.\u201d\u00a0In \u201cSaggi sull\u2019ebraismo italiano del Novecento in onore di Luisa Mortara Ottolenghi,\u201d\u00a0edited by Liliana Picciotto,\u00a0special issue,\u00a0La Rassegna mensile di Israel<\/i>\u00a069 (2003): 93\u2013126.<\/p>\n

Piattelli, Angelo M., and Mario Toscano, eds.\u00a0Memorie di un rabbino italiano. Le agende di\u00a0David Prato\u00a0(1922\u20131943)<\/i>. Rome: Viella, 2022.<\/p>\n

Stein, Sarah Abrevaya.\u00a0Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century<\/i>. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016.<\/p>\n

Trivellato, Francesca.\u00a0The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period<\/i>. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2009.<\/p>\n

Zanini, Paolo. \u201cTra due diaspore: Ebrei levantini ed egiziani in Italia (1948\u20131957).\u201d\u00a0Mediterranea<\/i>\u00a019 (2022): 41\u201368.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For centuries, Italy has served as a point of reference\u2014cultural, political, and often even legal\u2014for Jewish communities across the Mediterranean. From Livornese merchants in Ottoman ports to the spread of European citizenships, and up to the \u201cSephardic policy\u201d of the early twentieth century, there emerges a web of affiliations and influences in which Italy engaged with the growing French hegemony and British strategies. These ties, layered over time, prepared the ground for the migratory movements of the twentieth century, which brought Jewish groups to Italy from the Balkans, the Levant, and North Africa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":3761,"template":"","tags":[41],"autore":[35],"class_list":["post-3737","focus","type-focus","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-in-evidenza","autore-paolo-zanini"],"yoast_head":"\nEuropean citizenship and influences among Jews in the Ottoman Empire - TRAME<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/trame.cdec.it\/en\/focus\/european-citizenship-and-influences-among-jews-in-the-ottoman-empire\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"European citizenship and influences among Jews in the Ottoman Empire - TRAME\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For centuries, Italy has served as a point of reference\u2014cultural, political, and often even legal\u2014for Jewish communities across the Mediterranean. 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