Over the last two decades, histories of the western Sephardim of the early modern period and, more specifically, of the Spanish Jewish mercantile diasporas that stretched across oceans and continents from global hubs such as Amsterdam and Livorno, have come to be viewed as paradigmatic (metonyms, even) of the early modern world, on the one hand, and as long-distance trading diasporas, on the other. Undergirding this hypothesis is an assumption that has circulated through the vast interdisciplinary literature on diasporas and cross-cultural trade: that diasporic connections and the commercial associations enabled by them are sustained and perpetuated by solidarity and intragroup trust. This argument has been little tested outside the field of economics. Historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, sociologists, political scientists, scholars of postcolonial studies—arguably all are guilty, to some degree, of reiterating a position that anthropologist Abner Cohen staked out as early as 1971 (in a study of West African trading networks) and that has been oft reiterated and nuanced since: that trading diasporas could be understood as a “moral community,” possessed of what Yuri Slezkine, some thirty years later, in his ambitious coda The Jewish Century, described as “intragroup trust that assured the relative reliability of business partners, loan clients, and subcontractors.”Footnote ¹

Until now, this hypothesis has been little tested. Certainly Jewish studies has lacked a scholar with the methodological training (or, perhaps, the critical investment) to question the position's stability, or, indeed, to ponder in specific terms how loyalty is built and maintained, or precisely what relationship shared religion, genealogy, or family ties bear on the sentiment, strategy, and element of human capital we call trust.

With breathtaking skill, Francesca Trivellato's The Familiarity of Strangers steps into this breach. The book explores a forty-two-year business partnership (1704–46) formed by two Sephardic families, Ergas and Silvera, who maintained a base of operations in the early modern Mediterranean entrepôt of Livorno and a subsidiary branch in Ottoman Aleppo. Trivellato's source base includes a rare and rich trove of business correspondence consisting of 13,670 original copies of letters penned among the business's partners and between these partners and their transhemispheric agents. By following the activities of Ergas and Silvera across the many locations in which the associated families and agents resided or conducted business, Trivellato's goal was to produce a “global history on a small scale,” thereby recovering “both the local and global dimensions that constituted their horizons” (8–9). What she discovers, among other fascinating things, is that shared genealogy—the fact of being of Iberian Jewish background—facilitated commercial exchange but did not ensure trust or successful relations for Ergas and Silvera. The firm relied on cooperative credit relations with a geographically and culturally broad array of agents: Sephardic, Ashkenazic, and non-Jewish, including Hindu Brahmins in Goa. What's more, for this firm, partnerships with Jews did not prove more reliable than those with non-Jews; as Trivellato details in a chapter that moves with the speed and intrigue of a mystery, it was an economic relationship with a Persian Jew (co-owner of a sixty-carat diamond that Ergas and Silvera obtained in Aleppo, had polished in Florence, and attempted to sell in Naples, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Leipzig, Berlin, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Venice) that brought on the company's catastrophic bankruptcy.

It is no coincidence that Trivellato's training is as an economic and social historian of Italy rather than as a Jewish historian. This fact, I suspect, allows her to look with a fresh eye at suppositions that scholars of Jewish studies might be more inclined to accept as fact, such as the argument that Sephardim traded with one another because they trusted one another or, indeed, that experience proved that they could trust other Sephardim, or even other Jews, more fully than they could trust non-Jews. The author of an earlier Italian-language study on Venetian glass manufacturing, Trivellato also turns with ease and acuity to relevant sources, primary as well as secondary, that most Jewish historians of the early modern world have not plumbed and, indeed, that tend not to be considered requisite terrain among scholars of things Jewish.

The result is a book that has broad and highly refined implications for students of the Mediterranean, early modern world, and economic history, as well as for students of Jewish history. Indeed, it is a great strength of this book that it cannot be easily categorized by field: for the relatively small field of Sephardic studies, in particular, this sort of expansiveness is not only intellectually justified but also something of institutional necessity.

Among the themes broached in The Familiarity of Strangers is the relationship between the western Sephardic trading diaspora and the European powers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Trivellato reconstructs how the Medici and Habsburg rulers in Tuscany competed for the services of western Sephardim in the Mediterranean, granting them the privileges required to thrive economically in Livorno's bustling economy, but stopping short of ensuring their success in the Ottoman lands. For this, a relationship with the French proved crucial. The resulting enduring association between Sephardic merchants and the French, argues Trivellato, was mutually beneficial (if asymmetrical) but did not “prove a breeding ground for deeper cultural communication and acceptance” (103). (Thus were patterns established in the early modern period that remained influential through the twentieth century.)

Other topics explored by Trivellato include the function of marriage and economic specialization for cross-cultural trade; the role of information, social networks, and legal institutions in the governance of commission agency; the etiquette of business letter writing; and the regional and ethnic interplay of various global supply chains, including those of Mediterranean coral and Indian diamonds. In exploring each of these themes, Trivellato muses on the unique intersection of mercantile culture, state politics, Mediterranean and trans-Mediterranean society, and the particular structure and nature of the western Sephardic diaspora.

The Familiarity of Strangers is among the rare books so erudite and elegant that even its “Note on Terminology and Units of Measurement” fascinates and edifies: embedded here is a meditation on the complexity of conscientiously labeling and naming early modern spaces, places, money, time, and Jews. Here, as throughout this book, Trivellato reveals herself to be a careful and expansive thinker. As a result of this marvelous combination, The Familiarity of Strangers offers a welcome challenge and contribution to the various fields with which its author is engaged.