The Kings of Algiers How Two Jjewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World During the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond- November 14, 2023 by Julie Kalman

 Here are the essential works on Jewish Banking and Merchant Families 

The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family by Ron Chernow

Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and The Making of an Empire by Joseph Sassoon

The House of Rothchild: Volume 1and 2: Money's Prophets 1798 to 1848 by Niall Ferguson

To these essential histories of Jewish banking families I am very glad to be able to let my readers know of a new book, The Kings of Algiers How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World During the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond by Julie Kalman, that is a very important edition to Jewish banking and merchant families scholarship.

"At the height of the Napoleonic Wars, the Bacri brothers and their nephew, Naphtali Busnach, were perhaps the most notorious Jews in the Mediterranean. Based in the strategic port of Algiers, their interconnected families traded in raw goods and luxury items, brokered diplomatic relations with the Ottomans, and lent vital capital to warring nations. For the French, British, and Americans, who competed fiercely for access to trade and influence in the region, there was no getting around the Bacris and the Busnachs. The Kings of Algiers traces the rise and fall of these two trading families over four tumultuous decades in the nineteenth century.

In this panoramic book, Julie Kalman restores their story—and Jewish history more broadly—to the histories of trade, corsairing, and high-stakes diplomacy in the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath. Jacob Bacri dined with Napoleon himself. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Horatio Nelson considered strategies to circumvent the Bacris’ influence. As the families’ ambitions grew, so did the perils, from imprisonment and assassination to fraud and collapse.

The Kings of Algiers brings vividly to life an age of competitive imperialism and nascent nationalism and demonstrates how people and events on the periphery shaped perceptions and decisions in the distant metropoles of the world’s great nations." From the publisher, Princeton University Press

Unlike the Rothchilds and the Warburgs, the Bacris family was more at the mercy of the rulers they served, the deys of Algeria.

The book focuses on the first four decades of the 19th century. The Algerian rulers were in the practice of taking European and American ships captive and enslaving their crews. Kalman details the first rise of America to international power as the newly independent country fought back.

Algerian Royal politics were fraught with harsh rivalries for succession. Numerous rules were often killed by rivals.

The Bacris family members were often at odds with one another, borrowing among themselves without always repaying. 

Unlike the Rothchilds, Warburgs and Sassoons, the Bacris family did not have as strong an intelligence network and were not as unified. In one very telling way, as Kalman details, all of these families benefited from their status as "outsiders". It was not embarrassing to borrow from them and they were not normally perceived as having non-commercial ties to competing players. 

The Kings of Algiers How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World During the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond by Julie Kalman is extremely well documented and written in very elegant prose. I highly recommend it to any one interested in early 19th century history and especially to those into Jewish history.

"I completed my B.A. (Hons) at Monash University in 1992, and I have an M.A. (1998) and a PhD (2002) from the University of Melbourne. I am interested in the effects of Jewish emancipation on the non-Jewish world, ranging across French, British, and Mediterranean settings. I have other interests, too, and I have published on the history of migration to Australia, and the Eurovision Song Contest." From Julie Kalman 

Mel Ulm

 

The Dictator's Last Night by Yasmina Khadra (2015, translated by Julian Bell, 192 pages, published by Gallic Books)

The Dictator's Last Night by Yasmina Khadra is an amazing, simultaneously terrifying and hilarious, developing a powerful depiction of the stream of consciousness of Muamar Gaddafi.  Gaddafi, born in 1942 and killed October 21, 2011, was the dictator of Libya from 1969 to 2011.  He emerges from the pages of The Dictator's Last Night, as an ego maniacal paranoid, addicted to heroin, a life long rapist, who kept his people and country in near slavery.  He was quite willing to see Lybya destroyed before he would give up power.  As his last night on earth begins,Lybya is being attacked by Western war planes while his personal enemies begin to see his end coming.  Gaddafi has retreated to his city of birth, thinking he will be protected by his tribesmen.  Everyone who comes into contact with him, being in fear of his capricious and murderous temperament, conducts themselves in a totally subservient fashion.  He is called "Guiding Brother".  

Gaddafi never forgot anyone who angered or disrespected him.  There is a chilling account of how he took revenge on a woman, her husband and father, of a married woman who declined his sexual advances.  He trusts no one, not even his sons or his generals.  He does not seem to have a coherent ideology or a strong faith, he is driven by the pure lust for power, everyone is subhuman but him.

As I read on in The Last Night of the Dictator I was reminded of the work of Roberto Balano.

Much of the history of the world, and the 21th century is far from an exception, is driven by the fantasies and delusions of maniacs in positions of power.  There is a valuable lesson about the nature of power in The Last Night of the Dictator.  It is also a compelling narrative, very funny in places. I greatly enjoyed reading it and endorse it with out any reservations to all lovers of quality literature. 

About this author

- From Goodreads

Yasmina Khadra (Arabic: ياسمينة خضراء, literally "green jasmine") is the pen name of the Algerian author Mohammed Moulessehoul.
Moulessehoul, an officer in the Algerian army, adopted a woman's pseudonym to avoid military censorship. Despite the publication of many successful novels in Algeria, Moulessehoul only revealed his true identity in 2001 after leaving the army and going into exile and seclusion in France. Anonymity was the only way for him to survive and avoid censorship during the Algerian Civil War.
In 2004, Newsweek acclaimed him as "one of the rare writers capable of giving a meaning to the violence in Algeria today."
His novel The Swallows of Kabul, set in Afghanistan under the Taliban, was shortlisted for the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. L'Attentat won the Prix des libraires in 2006, a prize chosen by about five thousand bookstores in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Canada. 

I first became familiar with the work of Gallic Books when I received a review copy of a wonderful biography they recently published, Helena Rubenstein The Woman Who Invented Beauty by Michelle Fitoussi.  I urge anyone into quality French literature in translation visit their very well done webpage.  

Gallicbooks.com

Here is their mission statement

 Gallic Books was founded by francophiles and former Random House colleagues Jane Aitken and Pilar Webb, with the aim of making the best French writing available to English-speaking readers. Having published its first titles in 2007, Gallic now has a catalogue of more than 50 works of fiction and non-fiction, including historical crime series, contemporary noir, commercial and literary fiction, recently adding classics to the list.

If the world of the reading life has a capital city it is Paris.  Ambrosia Boussweau 

I look forward to reading the full and future oeuvre of Yasmine Khadra

Mel u