Formally established in 1592, the Levant Company was a long-lived enterprise bringing together English merchants trading with the Ottoman Empire, which had a profound impact on English-Ottoman diplomatic relations. The commercial success of the Company was partially based on the ability of its merchants to cooperate with non-Muslim Ottoman subjects, with the latter serving as local financial, commercial, and linguistic intermediaries. Along with Ottoman Greek and Armenian subjects, Jews were essential intermediaries in Ottoman port cities such as Izmir, Istanbul, and Aleppo. Besides occupying key positions as gatekeepers between English merchants and Ottoman markets, Ottoman Jews also engaged in commerce themselves, trading in cotton, diamonds, and corals. The relationship between local Jewish communities and the Company was, therefore, complicated, as the English tried to strike a balance between banning Jewish competitors from employment and making use of their indispensable intermediary services.

The other party that played a role in enabling or frustrating English trade were the Ottoman authorities, who did not appreciate the foreign intervention into the affairs of their subjects. The fact that the English, along with other European diplomats, sold berats (titles of privilege issued by the Sultan) to Ottoman non-Muslim intermediaries and merchants, thereby relieving them from certain taxes and providing them with an additional legal framework outside of Ottoman jurisdiction, remained a major bone of contention until the early nineteenth century. Although, by and large, the Ottoman authorities did not intervene in European trade operations, they still occasionally insisted that Jewish intermediaries continue paying the jizyah (poll tax) levied from all non-Muslim subjects of the empire, even if they held a berat. This meant that the Levant Company could make use of Jewish intermediaries so long as this employment did not interfere with their status as Ottoman tax-paying subjects.

While Jewish Ottoman subjects provided essential brokerage and interpreting services for English merchants, or worked as customs officials and bankers (sarrafs), their coreligionists in England were banned from joining the Levant Company. The main reasoning behind this regulation was that since the Sephardic Jews in England and the Ottoman Empire had strong religious, commercial and kinship ties, both being the descendants of Jews expelled from the Iberian peninsula in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they could easily collaborate to out-bid the English traders. Although the Sephardic Jews were not the only ones banned from the Company, whose exclusive charter limited the membership to the freemen of the City of London, the Company’s anxieties surrounding Jewish cooperation were particularly high. However, by the mid-eighteenth century, the Levant Company found itself confronted with growing competition from French merchants and a decline in the cloth and silk trade. Several petitions from 1744 demanded a lowering of the membership admission fee and an opening of the Company to all subjects of the Crown. Despite the argument that the lifting of the trading monopoly would contribute to a revitalisation of trade, Parliament rejected the petitions and ruled in favour of the Company. This victory, however, did not last long. In 1753, another round of petitions demanded again the opening of the Company’s ranks to a diversity of members. This time the bill passed, although with an addendum echoing fears of Jewish cooperation and banning London-based Jews from hiring Jewish intermediaries in the Ottoman Empire. While the Company became more inclusive in theory, in practice its character had changed little.

Throughout the early modern period, the relationship of the Levant Company with the Sephardic Jews in the Ottoman Empire and back home continued to be shaped by prejudice, apprehension, and exclusion, as well as economic interdependence. Yet, starting in the mid-eighteenth century, the Company had to acknowledge that it was facing increasing political opposition and economic rivalry, not being able to afford its exclusiveness and discriminatory policies towards the Jews any longer. One sign of the changing attitudes was the establishment of a Jewish dynasty of British consuls in the Dardanelles. The Taragano family continued to provide consuls and enable trade with Britain nearly until the end of the Levant Company in 1825.

Bibliography

Bashan, Eliezer. ‘Contacts between Jews in Smyrna and the Levant Company of London in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’. Jewish Historical Studies 2 (1986): 53–73.

Bashan, Eliezer. The Taragano Family: Jewish Diplomats in the Dardanelles, 1699–1817. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1999 (Hebrew).

Frangakis-Syrett, Elena. Trade and Money: The Ottoman Economy in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2010.

Ülker, Necmi. The Rise of Izmir, 1688-1740. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1975. 

Wagner, Michael. ‘The Levant Company under Attack in Parliament, 1720-53’. Parliamentary History 34, no. 3 (2015): 295–313.

Wood, Alfred C. A History of the Levant Company. London: Frank Cass and Co., 1964.

Irena Fliter is currently the Principal Investigator of the project "Flows and Frictions: The Camondo Family as Cultural Translators between the Ottoman Empire and Europe in the Eighteenth Century,” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) at Göttingen University. Her research deals with the cultural, administrative, and financial translation activities of the Jewish Camondo family from their first appearance in Istanbul in the early 18th century until the establishment of one of the first banks in the Ottoman Empire, the Isaac Camondo & Cie bank, in the early decades of the 19th century. The project is part of the Priority Programme “Early Modern Translation Cultures (1450-1800)." She received her BA from Humboldt University Berlin and her MA and PhD from Tel Aviv University. 

Image: Letter to Israel Taragano, photo taken at the National Archive at Kew