No Jews in Genoa, 1766

"There are no Jews tolerated at Genoa which makes the other Italians say, the Genoese are so cunning, that it would be impossible for a Jew to get bread among them."

Source: John Northall. Travels through Italy. 1766.

Jews of Nice, 1800

The shopkeepers of this place are generally poor, greedy, and over-reaching. Many of them are bankrupts of Marseilles, Genoa, and other countries, who have fled from their creditors to Nice; which being a free port, affords an asylum to foreign cheats and sharpers of every denomination. Here is likewise a pretty considerable number of Jews, who live together in a street appropriated for their use, which is shut up every night. They act as brokers; but are generally poor, and deal in frippery, remnants, old clothes, and old household furniture.

Tobias George Smollett. Miscellaneous works: with memoirs of his life and writings. 1800

Patras and the Albanian trade, 1813

At various points Patras, situated on the northern Peloponnese on the Gulf of Corinth was ruled by the Genoese and Venetians. Apart from 1687–1715, when the Venetians re-established themselves, this area was ruled by the Turks and their vassals. Possibly the Jews arrived during the Venetian rule and remained.

"Patras is governed by a bey, subject to the pasha of the Morea; the town contains a great number of Jews, who are the principal commercial agents; almost all business in this way passes through their hands. France names a commercial agent who receives no salary, but all ships of the country which stop here make him some present; they also pay an anchorage, though it cannot be exacted. The drogmans are all Jews, who eagerly seek after an office which they know very well how to turn to a good account. To judge by one of these good people, by name Solomon, they do no great honour to the languages they pretend to speak: the French, as he called it, which he spoke was a terrible mix of the Provençal and Barbary languages, pronounced with so strange and discordant an accent, that it was no very easy matter to comprehend what he meant to say."

Pouqueville comments that French trade has done very well in Albania over the preceding ten years. The merchants of Ancona and Sinigaglia pass their shoddy products off as French. While the locals still prefer Venetian-supplied muskets from Brescia to the French product, the Jews can’t compete with the French. I suspect the situation changed within the year once formerly embargoed British products entered the market.

François Charles Hugues Laurent Pouqueville. Travels in the Morea, Albania, and other parts of the Ottoman empire. 1813

Livorno

On 10 June 1593 Jews received rights in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. In showing the Jews more respect than their rival states, the Medici attracted Jewish settlement and commerce to the city of Livorno (then called Leghorn in English). Tuscany quickly became a player in the East-West Mediterranean trade that had formerly been dominated by Genoa and Venice. Regardless of who dominated the seas – Dutch, French or English – the trade still flowed.

I used to think that the decline of this trade was a consequence of all the wars. The Mediterranean was no longer safe for shipping. I begin to wonder if the absolute and relative economic decline of the Ottoman Empire was the real cause. Once, spices and other exotic items came from the eastern Mediterranean. By the 18th Century there were trade routes that circumvented the Ottoman Empire. Perhaps the defeat at Vienna in 1683 marked the moment at which the Turks went into decline. Economic growth in Europe and new markets in the Americas and Asia meant that the Turkish trade became a backwater. For Jews, who operated as middlemen in this trade, the options were to accept this change in circumstances or leave. The Jews of Livorno lived by this trade. Certainly a number of Livornese Jews moved to Amsterdam and London in the late 17th and early 18th Centuries. Others seem to have moved to Arab ports such as Alexandria or Tunis, perhaps to use their skills in the local market.

Maybe the last gasp of Livorno as a major port was the Napoleonic Wars. I have seen that Tunis was France’s main market in Africa, and it seems likely that (notwithstanding the British naval blockade) much of this trade passed through Livorno.

The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was overrun by the French revolutionary armies in 1799. It was then abolished. Between 1801 and 1807, Livorno was part of the short-lived Kingdom of Etruria, a French client-state. That state was then abolished, and territory became part of metropolitan France. Livorno was made capital of the new département of Méditerranée which, incidentally, included the island of Elba to which Napoleon was exiled in 1814.

The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was reconstituted after Napoleon’s defeat. The Government was overthrown by a popular revolution in 1859. Livorno was briefly part of the short-lived United Provinces of Central Italy, but voted for annexation by Piedmont-Sardinia in 1860. Italy was unified around Piedmont-Sardinia. With Italian unification, Livorno became just one of many Italian ports.

The image of Livorno above is somewhat romanticised, but note the two men in the right foreground. One merchant is in European dress and the other oriental.