6 - A True Public Minister: Consuls and Jewish Mediators

Summary

In May 1682, the Dutch consul Carel Alexander van Berck indignantly wrote the States General, asking them to reconsider the idea of having two consuls present at the court of Algiers. Berck's nemesis was Jacob de Paz, a Jewish merchant from Amsterdam who resided in Algiers and had served as provisional consul until Berck's arrival. Berck complained that “what good one does today, the other will undo tomorrow. This does not benefit the honor of the state, peace, nor the common good.” Berck's grievances suggest that Paz continued to play an influential role at court and acted as a competitor. The dominating presence of Paz in the life and politics of Algiers and the Republic was not uncommon. In the early modern world, the Sephardic Jewish community often mediated affairs between the Muslim Mediterranean and Christian Europe. The Iberian expulsion policies of 1492 and 1609 had launched a diaspora of Sephardic families who subsequently settled in port cities all over Europe, the Levant, and North Africa. The vast network of contacts, linguistic skills, and familiarity they maintained with Christian and Muslim cultures made them sought-after mediators in attempts to forge commercial and diplomatic relations between East and West, even if their engagement as cultural and commercial brokers was often illicit and put them at danger of prosecution.

The intervention of the Pallache family in regulating commercial-diplomatic affairs between the Moroccan sultan and the Dutch States General during the first half of the 1600s exemplifies this phenomenon. As stated earlier, the Pallaches were a Sephardic Jewish family from Morocco that quickly attained an influential position by facilitating diplomatic relations. Their mediation formed a strategic and convenient way for the States General to keep redemption costs in private hands while facilitating the arms trade. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the States General continued to rely on Jewish merchants to reestablish diplomatic relations with Algiers and Tunis and to ransom captives as part of the Dutch commitment to liberate them collectively. This practice, however, raised anxiety among Dutch consuls, especially when redemption became a condition of doing diplomacy after 1651.