The tomb of Hayyim Yisraʾel Rafaʾel Yaʿakov al-ʿAsri (1793–1869), or Jacob Lasry as he came to be known in French Algeria, is not hard to find in the neglected and severely damaged Jewish cemetery of Oran.Footnote 1 The large neoclassical monument sits atop a raised stone tablet; six Doric-style columns run down each side, framing five arches, and two double columns frame additional arches on either end. The tomb is located on one of the cemetery's main pathways, and its French epitaph faces the path, while its Hebrew equivalent graces the back. Other large tombs are found in the Oran cemetery, but the vast majority are more modest memorials: rectangular stones lying parallel to each other in tight rows, with one or several names carved into them in French and/or Hebrew. Even among the other imposing memorials in the cemetery, Lasry's tomb, which resembles a miniature Greek temple, possesses a particular visibility.
There are significant historical reasons why Jacob Lasry was memorialized in such a way. The grandeur of his final resting place certainly attests to his wealth; his fortune, already significant, was augmented by business opportunities created during and by the French conquest of 1830. The classical theme, which often colored French colonial self-representation during the period, presumably alluded to his dedication to the colonial ideology of spreading “civilization,” “progress,” and “reason” to Algeria. Colonial archives certainly contain ample testimony to Lasry's work as president of the Consistoire Israélite de la Province d'Oran, an official French agency opened in 1847 under the direction of the Ministry of War and charged with assimilating the Israélites indigènes of Algeria to France.Footnote 2 During his tenure, Lasry often spoke of his ardor for French civilization and his hope that his less-prosperous coreligionists would embrace it. Lasry's very life span would appear to echo the French Jewish teleology of emancipation, regeneration, and civilization: he was born within several years of the 1791 emancipation of the Jews of France and died the year before the 1870 “emancipation” of Algerian Jews (or at least those under French authority). Like the classical symbolism of his tomb, most documentary evidence of Lasry's career—which dates from the previously mentioned years he spent as president of the Jewish consistory of Oran—reflects his enmeshment in the emergent French imperial ideology of civilizing.Footnote 3 Yet abundant records can lead the unwary historian astray; the pre-history of Lasry's rise to the presidency of the consistory, while less well documented, invites reflection on a critical earlier period in Algerian and North African history.
This study therefore focuses on events before the institutionalization of a civilizing ideology in Algeria during the late 1840s. Lasry's roots, it turns out, were hardly French and only partly Algerian. According to French état civil records, he was born in Rabat, Morocco, and family papers from Gibraltar (currently housed in Jerusalem) attest that he was a member of a large and prominent Moroccan Sephardic family with ties in Gibraltar, London, and Algeria.Footnote 4 British Foreign Office papers note that during the first years of the French conquest Jacob Lasry was in a business partnership with the son of a local vice consul of Britain, France's rival.Footnote 5 In Oran—in western Algeria near the Moroccan border—he established a synagogue following a Sephardic rite whose charter was written in Spanish and whose services were oriented toward Moroccan Jews. Lasry was still making donations to London's Sephardic Shaar Ashamaim synagogue in 1859, well after he began officially working for the French colonial administration as president of Oran's Jewish consistory, and his relative, Samuel Lasry, served as the chief rabbi of British Gibraltar from 1870 to 1887.Footnote 6 Moreover, his pragmatic and often opportunistic business ventures, though frequently in partnership with French generals, led to litigious clashes with the colonial administration as it sought to establish dominance in Algeria. The complicated story of Lasry's evolution from a Moroccan-born, British-protected, Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jewish merchant into a man who was to be memorialized as a patriotic French representative of the mission civilisatrice in Algeria reveals a story of disorder, opportunity, and adaptation—created in large measure by the nature of France's 1830 invasion—far more than it illustrates progressive ideological or cultural assimilation.
Lasry built his significant financial stature in a period of chaos triggered by the beginning of French colonialism in Algeria. In studying this dynamic, this article contributes to recent scholarship challenging an established historiographical paradigm. According to traditional accounts, early modern Jewish commercial networks declined with the rise of 19th-century empires, but Jews themselves benefited from new protections and opportunities brought by European colonialism. New work, however, argues that certain networks survived and even expanded beyond the Mediterranean in the 19th century, reaching into Asia and the new world.Footnote 7 Lasry's case was somewhat different. There is little evidence that his major deals ever depended upon a specifically “Jewish” network; his most important partners appear to have been British consuls, French generals, and Muslim beys. He did, however, belong to a certain Jewish merchant class that emerged from Gibraltar and Morocco, and his Jewishness eventually allowed him to parlay his commercial success into a specific form of social prestige in an empire legitimated by the civilizing mission. It also arguably helped him dodge the brutality of the emerging colonial racial hierarchy.
This article examines three of Lasry's business ventures in the 1830s. Beyond shedding light on a fascinating but largely unknown historical character, it offers novel insights on the history of early French rule in Algeria. First, by focusing on a period before fully developed discourses of civilization shaped French colonial policies, including toward Jews, the study reveals the general disorder of French military goals, strategy, and supply lines during this early period. The conquest emerges not as a brief transition to French rule and a new colonial order but as a bloody, confused, and long process that created a new economic, social, and legal landscape to which older business forms adapted. This period has not received the attention given to later decades, because scholars have been more interested in exploring colonial society, its consolidation, hierarchies, and ideologies, and its unraveling in the face of anticolonial nationalism, revolution, and emigration. Even recent work on the early period, undertaken in the shadow of later decades’ horrors, has often focused on the nature, culture, and long-term ramifications of the violence of the first decades of conquest.Footnote 8 But the early period was also marked by continuities, in which preexisting practices survived and adapted to the radical rupture of conquest, shaping French rule in the process.Footnote 9
Second, in addition to exposing the contradictions of the conquest (and the later civilizing justification for it), examining Lasry's activities in this early period complicates our understanding of colonial racial stereotyping. Excellent work has explored how colonial ethnographers and military officers (often the same people) reified categories such as “Kabyle,” “Berber,” and “Tuareg” to advance certain colonial policies. Lasry provides an example of how local figures not only had to negotiate new opportunities and dangers but also were able to reposition themselves in the new colonial hierarchies, perhaps shaping those very hierarchies in the process.Footnote 10 Lasry, a Spanish-speaking Moroccan-Gibraltarian subject of the English crown installed in Algeria, with family in Gibraltar and contacts in Tunis and Italy, proved capable of assuming a powerful stance vis-à-vis an underfunded and at times rudderless French army—a stance that, in the 1840s, paradoxically helped him position himself as a French patriot, a suitable leader of the newly baptized “indigenous Jews,” and a champion of French civilization.
Third, by considering a member of a wealthy North African merchant class that has appeared in the historiography without being fully examined, the article sheds light on how the conquerors outsourced the war both to proxy warlords and to influential local merchants such as Lasry who financially underwrote their exploits. These merchants adapted to and helped shape new economic and political realities. Recent scholarship has emphasized the significance of institutionalized violence during the early conquest,Footnote 11 yet it should also be noted that the French sometimes relied on local expertise to execute it. Through this process, the conquest disrupted and redirected preexisting links and networks that had made the Mediterranean and the Sahara “dynamic spaces,” each endowed with its own “deep history.”Footnote 12 France sought—with uneven success in the 19th century—to control Algeria and harness Saharan and Mediterranean commerce for its own benefit, redrawing the lines of trade, allegiance, and identity that had historically bound the Maghrib, the Mediterranean, and the Sahara.Footnote 13 These factors, in turn, shaped French patterns of domination.
That Algeria was not entirely dominated by the French, and that Lasry was an international figure, influences the archival base of this paper. The sources include French military correspondence and the records of British consuls, civil records, and Lasry family papers. The perspective they shed on Lasry is necessarily disjointed, a reflection of the anarchic times and certain aspects of the person who lived through them. French military archives read against the commercial concerns of British consular reports provide a picture that contrasts with most renderings of the conquest: the French unleashed horrific violence while creating new forms of knowledge, certainly, but they were dependent on local experts and practices. Because of the disruption of Turkish administrative structures in Algiers caused by the deportation of the ruling dey and his officials, French generals could not have even fed their troops without these local sources of finance and guidance, let alone maintained control. The survival and even flourishing of an adept and occasionally unscrupulous intermediary such as Lasry, so deeply imprecated in North African and Mediterranean commercial networks, is all the more interesting when contrasted with the patriotic and moralizing image he cultivated following the articulation of the civilizing mission starting in the mid- to late 1840s.
The precolonial patterns of trade that shaped Lasry's position provide a backdrop to his early colonial career. His fortunate location in Oran—a Spanish city until 1792—and in western Mediterranean commerce was probably an indirect result of the late 18th-century Moroccan push against Spanish influence, which involved nourishing maritime trade with Britain through Gibraltar.Footnote 14 In 1791, for example, Morocco granted most-favored-nation status to Britain and at nearly the same time rebuilt al-Qasr al-Saghir to facilitate trade between Tetouan and Gibraltar; lowered export duties paid by British merchants trading in Moroccan cattle, hides, and ostrich feathers; and opened Agadir to British shipping. Such developments probably shaped the networks within which Lasry and other members of a small merchant class in western Algeria worked during the early conquest. Yet, at the same time, Lasry profitably cut deals with French military men as they forged a new sphere of dominance in North Africa. The remainder of this article will explore these issues through three episodes in which Lasry proved a crucial accomplice—and sometimes a thorn in the side—of colonial authorities during the conquest.
THE RISKY MARKET OF THE EARLY CONQUEST
It is significant that the archival traces of Lasry's first dramatic encounter with French colonial authorities are found in the records of the British Foreign Office. Like other high-profile cattle, grain, and luxury-goods merchants in Algeria, Lasry was a protected subject of a foreign power (Britain) and operated in a sphere where business activities, communal leadership, and positions as political intermediaries overlapped. One of the privileges of the muqaddam (Jewish representative to the dey) of Algiers, for example, was to farm the two-percent duty on exports of ostrich feathers, tobacco, and wool.Footnote 15 Other preeminent Jewish merchants of the period included Mordechai Darmon, who served as an advisor to several beys, and influential persons at the court such as the Busnachs and the Bacris, who held key positions in the trans-Mediterranean grain trade. Jacob Coen Bacri, a prominent “Tuscan” Jew, held considerable French debts (which were left unpaid, helping to erode relations between the Regency of Algiers and France in the 1820s) and was given special privileges to trade in Marseilles in 1795 as the representative of Dey Hassan Pasha.Footnote 16 David Duran held the post of muqaddam of the Oran Jewish community in the early years of the 19th century while working as both consul general for the Republic of Ragusa and an active merchant in the trade with Spain.Footnote 17 When in 1828 Jacob Lasry ran into problems exporting cattle hides to Morocco, he appealed to the British vice consulate in Oran for help and did so as a British subject.Footnote 18
Several years later, during the 1831 French occupation of Oran, General Bertrand Clauzel, governor general of Algeria from August 1830 to March 1831, turned to this network of high-profile merchants in his quest for a local intermediary to help negotiate with tribes and procure supplies for the conquest. Through a process that remains cloudy, Jacob Lasry succeeded in stepping into this role. Given the dense trans-Mediterranean network linking Algerian Jewish merchants with diverse European states, General Clauzel would have seen nothing odd about taking on a Moroccan-born British subject as his intermediary. On the contrary, Lasry's comfort with regional forms of trade and finance—in which British (and Spanish) interests figured prominently—probably recommended him as a useful contact. For his part, Lasry's association with France was, at least at first, largely a matter of exploiting new business opportunities and hedging his bets in an uncertain world. While the scope of his fortune at the time of the conquest is unknown, it is certain that he was immeasurably wealthier than most of his local coreligionists. Early consistorial lists of Oran's Jewish “notables” include around twenty people (out of a Jewish population of several thousand), and given Lasry's coveted role as a cattle and grain exporter (for which one needed to purchase permits from the bey), it is safe to assume that even among Jewish notables in Oran, he was unusually wealthy.Footnote 19 His business experience was all the more important because Paris, having just undergone a revolution in 1830 and deeply divided over the ultimate objectives of the Algerian expedition, did not provide Clauzel or other generals with sufficient forces to hold or administer captured territories in North Africa.
Thus, lacking forces and expertise, Clauzel turned to Husayn Bey (r. 1824–35) of Tunis. Hoping to both appease the occupiers and possibly expand his authority, the bey agreed to Clauzel's request for a prince to serve as a local proxy in Oran (another proxy was requested to govern Constantine).Footnote 20 According to a treaty between Clauzel and Tunis signed in Algiers on 6 February 1831, Prince Ahmad, in exchange for promised treasure and supplies, would rule the putatively pacified province of Oran, continuing Oran's preconquest relationship with Algiers by paying tribute to the French command there. It remains questionable whether Clauzel expected the full arrangement to succeed; his successor General Berthezène accused Clauzel of making a short-sighted gamble in order to gain quick tribute.Footnote 21 Ahmad's officer Khayr al-Din Agha arrived in advance of his commander to find Oran in ruins, the treasury looted, and the surrounding region in chaos.Footnote 22 To make matters worse, Jacob Lasry, partnered with James Welsford, the son of British vice consul Nathaniel Welsford, had bought permits to export grain to Gibraltar from the former bey Hassan of Oran and now demanded (with British consular help) that Khayr al-Din, as Oran's new ruler, honor the permits. Pushing back, Khayr al-Din, in need of resources, insisted that Lasry pay again, which he eventually did. Conferral of such rights of export to individuals by cash-strapped states in exchange for funds was a well-established form of business transaction in North Africa. Quite early in the conquest, then, Lasry exploited his expertise in preexisting forms of commerce while catering to the financial needs of France's new local proxies.
If the French conquest opened new opportunities, they were also unpredictable ones. Soon after Lasry paid for the rights of export, the newly appointed French governor general of Algeria, Pierre Berthezène, sent a French general, Pierre Boyer, to western Algeria to replace Clauzel. Furthermore, the French government in Paris refused to ratify the agreement that Clauzel had concluded with the Tunisian state, thus both nullifying the appointment of Ahmad (who never arrived in Oran but reigned in Tunis from 1837 to 1855) and casting doubt on Khayr al-Din's sales of commercial export privileges to Jacob Lasry and several other merchants.Footnote 23 According to British accounts, Lasry and Welsford soon found that there were “impediments . . . in the way of the exportation” of grain and cattle, so they called upon the French king to verify that France would respect existing export agreements.Footnote 24 These “impediments” included a brief French-imposed ban on the export of grain to anywhere but France, Khayr al-Din's refusal to honor Lasry's export permits, and the lack of security around Oran. In August 1831, the French general Behaghel met with Lasry, another Jewish merchant named Joseph Zermaty, and several Christian and Muslim merchants at the Bardo Palace of the Tunisian bey just outside Tunis to discuss the matter.Footnote 25 The meeting's minutes would later be used as evidence that all local authorities (French, Tunisian, and British) agreed that the export permits were still valid. According to the British vice consul's notes, the French intendant civil sent subsequent assurance to his British counterpart that the rights would be honored as soon as General Boyer issued his formal permission.Footnote 26
The apparent capriciousness of French leadership and the disruptions of war continued to cause problems for Lasry and Welsford. In October 1831, the vice consul reported to London on another meeting he had with the French authorities (this time with General Berthezène), during which Welford produced “a document signed by every authority in Oran” and added “that British merchants residing there would be ruined, if no dependence could be placed on the official acts of the head of the Government at that place.”Footnote 27 Both Boyer and Berthezène, according to the consul, agreed that Lasry's claim was just but insisted that any losses he suffered should be taken up with the bey of Tunis. Meanwhile, in a note to the British consul to Tunis, Sir Thomas Reade, Welsford complained that while he and Lasry managed to export some goods, “it was not in the power of the said Her Edin [Khayr al-Din] to tranquillize nor to induce the inhabitants [of Oran] to become friendly,”Footnote 28 so they could not take full advantage of the permits they had purchased. Furthermore, they claimed that they “experienced a great hindrance in our commerce” because Khayr al-Din's troops were “frequently supplied with grain from our magazine.”Footnote 29 Welsford and Lasry, it appears, lost money because the French had failed to pacify the province and local French-allied troops took the grain they hoped to export. They sought restitution through the French, whom they believed had created the problem by investing a local appointee with only limited and short-lived authority.Footnote 30
Lasry's claim attracted the attention not only of British consuls in Algiers and Tunis but also of officials in London. In response to the British consul's interest in Lasry's case, General Boyer sharply retorted that “the Tunisian agent [Khayr al-Din] had no right to dispose of the future, which did not belong to him.”Footnote 31 The position of the French authorities was that even if they were responsible for both installing and removing Khayr al-Din, it was the latter's fault if he made an agreement based on authority he did not have or retain. Lasry, as well as other merchants, found that the French conquest not only disrupted commerce but also created a shifting corps of leaders without clear-cut policies or strategies and whose agreements did not always prove durable.Footnote 32
This episode demonstrates how the beginning of French colonial rule in Algeria presented merchants such as Lasry with new opportunities to adapt existing forms of commerce and expertise in order to conclude apparently lucrative arrangements with French officers and their proxies. At the same time, wartime disruptions and ephemeral local administrations took a toll on business. When Welsford and Lasry realized the futility of pressing the case with the French in Algeria, they turned to the Tunisian bey and the British consul in Tunis, hoping to apply pressure. Despite British (and to a lesser extent Sicilian) efforts, both French and Tunisian authorities appear to have denied the validity of Lasry and Welsford's financial claims.Footnote 33 Although he successfully coaxed Britain into exerting pressure on the French, Lasry was not able to save his investment. At this point in the conquest, a Moroccan Jewish merchant could enter into partnership with a French general while simultaneously eliciting British support in a conflict with French military authorities. France was not yet able to fully control commerce in its new territories nor could it rely on the full allegiance of its local partners.
THE TLEMCEN EXPEDITION
When the French undertook the Tlemcen expedition in 1836, Lasry was still serving as a partner, translator, and intermediary for General Clauzel.Footnote 34 Lasry's role must be understood against the chaotic and violent reality of early colonial conquest; French campaigns in the Algerian Tell, like those farther south, involved unreliable supply chains—or lacked them altogether—and thus relied on pillaging for the army's survival. In the case of Tlemcen, the French essentially outsourced the occupation's financing by employing Lasry and the Tunis-raised officer Yusuf to extract money and goods from the city's inhabitants.Footnote 35 Like Lasry, the latter was a powerful local (or semilocal) figure who took on great importance in the French occupation. He claimed he was born in Italy and had been captured by pirates as a child, then converted to Islam and was raised in the Tunisian court before Clauzel took him on as an interpreter, eventually making him capitaine indigène.Footnote 36 Yusuf and Lasry's reportedly brutal methods of obtaining goods from the friendly population of Tlemcen provoked severe criticism of Clauzel from the Ministry of War in Paris, leading to his eventual removal as governor general of Algeria. In the archival and published documents on this dispute, Lasry appears as increasingly interwoven into the French administration while remaining a self-interested, independent force capable of ruffling the military establishment.
Accused of marching on Tlemcen without orders to do so (among other infractions), Clauzel published his Explications in 1837 to vindicate himself.Footnote 37 According to his account, he was given verbal orders to march on Tlemcen and Mascara with the goal of destroying the power of Amir ʿAbd al-Qadir, the most formidable military opponent of the French occupation until his surrender in 1847 in western Algeria. Clauzel's division marched into Tlemcen (whose residents included about 500 Colougli families—descendents of Turkish troops and local women—and 300 Jewish families) on 13 January 1836 without firing a shot.Footnote 38 The bey of Tlemcen, Mustafa bin Ismaʿil, an ally of France, subsequently invited Clauzel to install a French garrison that would remain and protect the city from attack by ʿAbd al-Qadir's forces. Clauzel agreed, but instructed Mustafa Bey to collect 150,000 francsFootnote 39 as a contribution to the war effort. The operation was to be overseen by Yusuf in partnership with Jacob Lasry, whom Clauzel described as “a well-known businessman in the country, who had served as my intermediary in my negotiations with the tribes; he was at once interpreter of my dispositions and the agent who executed them.”Footnote 40 Clauzel's justification provides a clear description of Lasry's role and underlines the general's dependence on local expertise.
Clauzel's handling of the collection, however, became a matter of dispute. According to General Eugène Pélissier de Reynaud's accusations, which were later published in his Annales Algériennes, Lasry served as an intermediary between the population of a submitted city, the circle of local notables appointed by the French, and a French-allied military division hoping to extract money. Yusuf and Lasry were charged with the collection, but Yusuf apparently went rather far to procure the levy; Pélissier noted that he called on the same notables to contribute several times, and if they did not produce goods, he beat them.Footnote 41 Pélissier de Reynaud also asserted that the fact women's jewelry was being used as a source of funds indicated the city's residents had exhausted their cash resources. Finally, Pélissier explained that Clauzel employed Lasry to purchase jewelry from desperate families to avoid triggering “a traffic” in these goods. In control of the market, Lasry purchased the jewelry at “prices asked of men under the baton.”Footnote 42 The operation, done “in the name of France” and against a population that had willingly surrendered, was “reprehensible” and brought “shame” on France, argued Pélissier.Footnote 43
Clauzel offered a different account. According to him, it was a time-honored practice—even in France—to solicit funds from populations protected by the military and that according to local standards women's jewelry was a perfectly acceptable currency. He also claimed to have intervened in the collection once it came to his attention that his proxies had abused several notables.Footnote 44 Downplaying the violence described in Pélissier's account, Clauzel argued that “instead of bringing [the jewelry] to the assembly of Colougli, [residents] sold it publicly in order to make money.”Footnote 45 Then “the Jews bought it,” either by paying for the jewelry directly or by assuming preexisting debts. It must be remembered that Lasry's wealth was far from typical among Algerian Jews; according to Clauzel, a number of Tlemcen's Jews charged with the liquidation of the town's jewelry had no funds to cover the price. Lasry therefore forwarded them the necessary funds in exchange for a one-third stake in the subsequent sales. Lasry, according to Clauzel, was “in absolutely the same position of a businessman who acquires furniture from a French taxpayer [contribuable] whose goods have been seized for nonpayment . . . and then makes some profit from their purchase and resale.”Footnote 46 Clauzel insisted that neither Yusuf nor Lasry “exercised the least influence on the division of this contribution, nor on the methods of collecting it.” Whether or not Clauzel's assertions are credible, it is clear that the French command in Tlemcen employed Lasry to raise funds from the population. It is interesting that Clauzel defended Lasry's strategy for making a profit by insisting on its “absolute” similarity to military praxis and conduct in France.
From General Rapatel's 1838 inquiry into the Tlemcen “contribution,” we learn more telling details about the importance of Lasry's role in financing the French army in Algeria. Rapatel, who was serving as commander of the province of Oran, questioned Lasry about the sums he had received following the campaign. Lasry responded with an indignant letter accompanied by detailed records of a meeting he had with the military subintendant of Oran, Mr. Poinchevalle, as well as a Mr. Falcon, who was responsible for army accounts. According to these papers, on 9 December 1836, Lasry advanced 18,500 francs to the army's treasury, then advanced Mustafa Bey of Tlemcen another 1,000 francs for his own expenses, 247.50 francs to Mazary, known as khālifa of Mostaganem, 160 francs for iron to build fortifications, and, on 12 January 1837, another 20,140 francs to a French military officer.Footnote 47 In other words, on Clauzel's orders, Lasry provided more than 40,000 francs to French officers and their allies during the conquest. On top of this, Clauzel asked Lasry to advance him 15,753 francs in December 1835, at the time of the expedition. Mustafa Bey was charged with repaying this last sum by taking it out of the 150,000 francs to be raised in contributions from the residents of Tlemcen.Footnote 48 As for the money Lasry received from the army's treasury, he angrily pointed out to General Rapatel that he received only 55,800 francs, as compensation for loans advanced to the army, and not a franc more.Footnote 49
Far more than acting as mere intermediaries or translators, wealthy North African merchants such as Lasry had a significant role providing on the ground financing for the conquest, including by serving as local contractors for squeezing wealth out of conquered populations. The French installed Muslim “beys” and “aghas” with direct power over the residents, and these proxies in turn relied on local intermediaries who adapted their business practices to profit from the economy of the conquest. Yet the French use of “contractors” like Lasry exposed both the contractors and the commanding officers to charges from other elements of the French administration that they had abused their power. Lasry's angry, exasperated responses to military inquiries about money contrasts with his later persona as a champion of French civilization in Barbary; he did not “choose” to attach himself to the conquest but rather did what was necessary to continue operating in his niche. As for French officers, they simply compared their actions to acceptable business practices in France in order to rebuff criticism of their own abuses. The central historical paradox of the Tlemcen expedition might be that Lasry's successful adaptation of his precolonial expertise to a market defined by haphazard military conquest would, more than a decade later, position him to rebrand himself as an agent of French civilization.
THE YUSUF AFFAIR
The third contentious dispute began after the Tlemcen expedition, when Lasry advanced several large loans to Yusuf. This story further highlights the continuing importance of earlier models of trade in the early years of the French occupation by revealing how barely supervised indigenous proxies depended upon local financing to execute their missions. Exploiting his expertise and connections in cattle export and finance, Lasry cut deals with officers who were short on cash but eager to exercise a form of colonial power that was officially “French.” Yet the affair of Yusuf in Constantine illustrates another aspect of the outsourced conquest: semilocal officers such as Yusuf acting under French authority attempted to organize locally enlisted Muslim fighting corps. Reports on Yusuf's dealings reveal that little central authority was imposed upon these proxies, who actually managed the newly conquered Algerian territories and peoples. At the same time, the efforts made by both Yusuf and the French command to reduce Yusuf's debt exposes how much power local financiers could acquire. This power, we shall see, was at once a testament to Lasry's important role, a mark of continuity of older patterns whereby Jewish merchants provided funds to Muslim leaders, and a thorn in the side of the French military administration.
The context for Lasry's next deal was Clauzel's decision to appoint the corrupt and brutal Yusuf as “bey of the Constantine” before the city or province was actually taken and the local ruler, Ahmad Bey, defeated. Clauzel failed to supply Yusuf with the sums required to support the expedition and buy indigenous allies, providing Lasry with an opportunity. On 10 March 1836, Lasry, his Bône-based relative and partner Isaac Lasry, and a third associate named Aaron Waknin met and agreed to furnish Yusuf with 20,000 francs. The loan was signed, witnessed, and translated into Arabic in a French court in Bône, which had been taken in 1832.Footnote 50 According to the agreement, Yusuf would repay the debt within eighteen months of 10 March. Lasry and Yusuf gambled on the success of the first (failed) military assault upon a well-defended city that many regarded as impregnable.Footnote 51
Yusuf was to repay the sum once he had taken Constantine by seizing or requisitioning herds of cattle there and forwarding them to Lasry in Oran, who would exploit his expertise and manage their export. To be specific, Yusuf would send Lasry 2,000 head of cattle “as soon as he is able to procure them,” with each head “valued at ten boudjoux each, and one boudjou valued at eighteen and one half francs.”Footnote 52 The contract specified that cows and bulls would be worth the same price, and calves would be worth five boudjoux. The contract also specified that if, for some reason, Yusuf could not procure enough cattle once in Constantine, then Lasry would accept sheep (two boudjoux), lambs (one boudjou), or even locally made wax (one franc per pound). Interest on the loan would be charged (presumably starting after the period of the loan ended) if Yusuf failed to procure enough goods to satisfy his debt and was obliged to make up the difference in cash—in which case the rather considerable rate of 2.5 percent monthly (30% annually) would be charged.Footnote 53
Lasry was speculating. Yusuf's post in Constantine had yet to be assumed, and Ahmad Bey had yet to cede the city. Lasry's contract reflected this risk, specifying that if “the installation of Bey Yusuf does not take place,” presumably meaning that Lasry would be unable to acquire cattle, then “the said bey commits to paying Mr. Jacob Lasry, after the expiration of eighteen months, the totality of the sum of 20,550 francs.”Footnote 54 Whether this was to be paid in addition to interest or the interest would begin to accrue after the initial eighteen months is unclear. Lasry clearly thought it prudent to include language that would shield him from some of the risks inherent in betting on the acquisition of yet to be seized goods from a yet to be occupied city. He gambled on the ability of a proxy of a French-invested but locally enlisted commander to effectively pillage local populations of their goods; a winning bet would allow him to deploy his precolonial expertise in cattle exportation to make a profit from the conquest.
By May, before the Constantine expedition had taken place, Lasry acted to spread the risk. Perhaps he had new doubts about Yusuf's ability to repay him, or he simply hoped to sell off some of the debt for an immediate payoff. In either case, Lasry traveled to Tunis to conclude a deal at the chancellery of the consulate of France with another Bône businessman by the name of Mustafa bin Karim. According to the deal, Lasry ceded one-quarter of the contract with Yusuf to Mustafa, in exchange for 12,090 francs, delivered in cash up front. The terms specified that “it is understood that le sieur Mustafa bin Karim will share in whatever profits or losses that result from the contract between commander Yusuf and the sir Jacob Lasry.”Footnote 55 The agreement further stated that Mustafa would undertake to “execute or have executed all the clauses in the abovementioned contract,” suggesting that Lasry sought allies for help recouping his money. French officials angered by Lasry's usurious practices and undue influence would later cite this deal as evidence of bad faith.
Following Yusuf's unsuccessful 1836 mission to Constantine, his career path continued to produce illustrative examples of what sorts of military ventures locally recruited French officers undertook and North African intermediaries like Lasry underwrote. As a sort of consolation, Yusuf assumed the French command at Bône, which according to documents submitted to the Ministry of War in Paris, he spent 49,900 francs to pacify.Footnote 56 Notably, between March 1836 and April 1837, Lasry helped Yusuf pay for “the investiture of 115 chiefs who all received red bournous (13,800)” and for the “costs of the installation of the camp of Dréan . . . in order to rally to our side [puissance] the largest possible number of tribes: tents, carpets, music, flags, arms, etc., etc.” The costs of the conquest further included “gifts to several principle tribal chiefs in the area around la Calle . . . (4,000)” and even, if Yusuf's claim is to be believed, “expenses for the Turks coming from Tunis to be incorporated in the battalion of Turkish infantry . . . and supplied with uniforms almost entirely at [Yusuf's] expense (4,800).”Footnote 57 In these early years, the “Frenchness” of the French occupation varied from place to place.
However, such practices saddled Yusuf with an unmanageable debt, and on 24 April 1837, Lasry was back in court. He was there to lodge a complaint concerning Yusuf's considerably augmented debt—peaking at 36,000 francs—and failure to provide more than 200 head of cattle. This was despite the fact that somewhere along the way of the failed expedition, Yusuf had managed to take 800 heads “from the Arabs.”Footnote 58 The problem was that he had, according to Lasry, sent a portion of them to a Mr. Villards, a supplier for the army to whom Yusuf was evidently also in debt. (Other documents suggest that Lasry actually did profit from the sale of all 800 head of cattle.Footnote 59) In any case, the huissier Footnote 60 of the Bône court concluded that Yusuf must pay Lasry at least 26,900 francs immediately. Yusuf, however, was unable to pay.
Like the debate over the Tlemcen expedition, efforts to resolve the affaire Yusuf illuminate the striking amount of power possessed by Lasry (and presumably other such North African intermediaries). Lasry was both wealthy enough and secure enough in his position vis-à-vis the colonial power to exert significant financial pressure on Yusuf, the French-appointed commander. Indeed, by mid-July 1837, Yusuf felt compelled to travel to Paris to appeal to the Ministry of War for help resolving his untenable state of indebtedness, which he described as amounting to 49,000 francs (36,000 apparently owed to Lasry). According to a letter and a list of expenses he prepared in Paris, Lasry and his associates had put a lien on Yusuf's wife's home in Bône and had moved to force its sale to satisfy outstanding debts. According to Yusuf, “it is far from being worth the sum of the lien, and so, Sir, if I do not benefit from your most lofty protection, I shall soon find my family driven from their home . . .” Tragically, he explained, even the exchange value of his wife's house would be insufficient to free him from debt.Footnote 61 The ad hoc reality of the early conquest period, and above all the tangle of legal pluralism and institutionalized violence, permitted influential local merchants such as Lasry not only to profit from the woes of colonial proxies but also to threaten them with bankruptcy.
Revealing of the outsourced nature of the early conquest is that both of the central players in the Yusuf affair were influential North Africans deeply invested in the French occupation. Yusuf presented himself as a dedicated but poor patriot struggling to fulfill his duties toward France, up against a powerful and predatory Jewish financier. He underlined his service to France, such as the fact that he contributed significantly to the taking of Bône and since then had made the “great sacrifices that my exceptional position requires” in order to “attach a Muslim corps to the Christian [troops], as well as [enlisting] the chiefs of the enemy tribes.” Part of his patriotic service, then, was recruiting local Muslims to join his French-allied forces. He went on to describe how both his soldiers and the allied tribesmen “received several tokens of my generosity.”Footnote 62 Because his salary was not sufficient to pay for the services he performed out of “patriotic zeal,” he had “soon exhausted the paltry means” he possessed. He thus asked for the means to be freed of the lender who put the lien on his wife's house and for an understanding that the various gifts and payoffs, although not included in standard French military budgets, were a strategic necessity in what he called the “African” context he presumably knew well.
It was not only Yusuf who evoked his local roots for purposes of identification and vindication during the affair; his supporters also underlined his “indigenous” identity. When Governor General Damrémant turned to General Trezel to investigate the affair, Trezel supported Yusuf's request for financial relief. Trezel noted that Yusuf had lost many horses, mules, and other “precious items” in the Constantine expedition and that it was “incontestable that commander Yusuf rendered France honorable and eminent services since the possession of Bône.”Footnote 63 It would be both “an injustice and poor politics” to abandon Yusuf in misery “after having elevated to our employ the most eminent of the indigenous [people].” His conduct and administration had been beyond reproach since his arrival in Bône and his mistakes “belong far more to the laws and customs of the country than in [his] personal character . . .” Regardless of the fact that Clauzel, impressed with his services, had made Yusuf chef d'escadron, Trezel argued that he was essentially a product of Africa whom “one must judge not as a French officer, but as a mameluke, full of courage, competence, and devotion to France.” Damrémont, in his own letter to the minister of war, declared that he was “far from sharing Trezel's opinion regarding [Yusuf's] irreproachable administration” but agreed that Yusuf was appointed bey, and as such “the dignity of France” required that he be compensated.Footnote 64 For Trezel, Yusuf's identity as an indigenous “mamluke” fighting for France excused his excesses.
It is a testament to Lasry's power that the affair dragged on. Over the course of late 1837 and 1838, the Ministry of War made funds available to various administrators in order to satisfy a number of Yusuf's smaller debts. The archives bear witness to various administrators suggesting reduced payments to lenders if they agreed to drop further claims. These creditors included both French officers and local businessmen such as Lasry. For example, Yusuf's friend and fellow squadron chief Armandy, who served with him in the failed Constantine campaign, noted that he, too, had lent Yusuf money and that he could affirm the latter used it well. According to a note he sent Trezel in September 1837, Yusuf's gifts and negotiations with local tribes were so successful that their division “arrived practically below the walls of Constantine without firing a single rifle shot.”Footnote 65 Yusuf's loan of 1,000 francs was repaid by the French government, as were several others of similar amounts. Yet, by the first half of 1838, the accumulated interest on the Lasry loan had reached an enormous sum—59,817.21 francs, according to accounting sheets conserved at the Ministry of War—and could not be dealt with so easily.
In much the way that Yusuf's brutality or corruption was understood as a symptom of his “African” nature, Lasry's real or perceived financial strength vis-à-vis the fledgling French military administration was woven into European anti-Semitic tropes translated to the North African social landscape. By the time the director of Algerian affairs in Paris secured 10,000 francs to settle the lien against Yusuf's wife's home in 1837, the office of the conseiller d’état wrote to General Trezel, noting that the “the Minister knows that the Jew Lasry, whose name has acquired a certain infamy, is pursuing the former bey of Constantine for considerable amounts.”Footnote 66 He had studied the terms of the loan and was “horrified by the enormous usury, the scandalous greed which is evident.” He noted that while he did not yet know of a party who could “deliver Yusuf from this voracious lender [créancier dévorant],” such a person certainly existed, and in the meantime the civil judge in Bône needed to put a stay on the judgment for the “public interest” while the matter was studied. In much of the correspondence between Yusuf, the procureur général, the conseiller d’état, and the Ministry of War during this time, Lasry's name is prefixed by “the Jew.” French generals were apparently as willing to interpret locals’ power as confirmation of their preexisting stereotypes as they had been to hire local Jewish and Muslim talent to conduct an occupation they were incapable of conducting on their own.
Lasry's stature and recalcitrance led the procureur général of the court to accuse Lasry of “immoral”—and identifiably Jewish—behavior. In March 1838, he noted to the Ministry of War that Lasry had both objected strenuously to a three-month adjournment for settling the affair and undertaken a questionable deal with Bin Karim. The official urged the minister to be wary of “the morality of the transaction involving the Jew Lasry . . . and his coreligionist Mustafa bin Karim.”Footnote 67 The implication seems to have been that Lasry knew not only that his rates were usurious but also that he had little chance of recuperating the full sum; in a manner evoking recent derivative market strategies, Lasry made some of it back by dividing up the bad loan and selling it to a third party. While French military officers and Paris held ultimate responsibility for the failures of their poorly paid and power-hungry “mamluke,” the outsized debts that such a policy inevitably produced were blamed on a “usurious,” “immoral,” and “voracious” local Jew.
As time went on, Lasry's morality drew increasingly vituperative commentary. In 1840, the director of Algerian affairs insisted that because “a part of these loans could and should be contested” and further investigation would “have consequences . . . [that are] very damaging for him,”Footnote 68 Lasry was sure to accept a compromise. “With this in mind . . . the minister thinks that 20,000 francs should suffice to satisfy [désintéresser] this creditor.” The Ministry of War arrived at the sum by considering, among other things, the absence of certain paperwork, the market prices for cattle at the time Yusuf delivered them to Lasry (as opposed to the sum Lasry credited to Yusuf's account for each head), and the legal rates of interest (30% was considered illegally high).Footnote 69 Furthermore, the ministry decided to recalculate the interest so that it was compounded annually rather than monthly. “If the Jew Lasry accepts this new arrangement, the sum of 20,000 francs will be delivered under the following conditions,” including the renouncing of the remainder of the debt, the withdrawal of suits against Yusuf, and the cancellation of the lien against his income.Footnote 70 However, his reflections on the possibility that “this “avaricious lender,” might not accept the compromise are revealing:
In the case where, against all probability . . . Lasry listens only to the council of his own inconceivable cupidity, [and] refuses all settlements, you will allow things to follow their own course, [but] nevertheless letting him know the possible consequences that could result from the circumstances in which his obstinate maintenance of his unreasonable demands puts him.Footnote 71
What the “possible consequences” were is not specified in the note. But the director further noted the “dishonest conventions that the Jew Lasry imposed on Yusuf” and insisted that because Lasry's interest rate of 30 percent was twice the legal limit, “we should demand that the Jew Lasry be satisfied with it.”Footnote 72 His tone expressed both fury and a certain powerlessness to easily impose a compromise.
Lasry's rejection of the offer unsurprisingly triggered more venomous tirades among French officers. General Lamorcière wrote to the Duc de Dalmatie (who now presided over the Ministry of War's Directorate of Algerian Affairs) on 6 March 1841 to inform him that Lasry had refused the offer. The Duc de Dalmatie responded:
Since this Jew has not taken into account your observations and since he persists in his inadmissible demands, we must . . . let the affair follow its course. He will have no one to blame but himself, his blindness, and the insatiable avidity that he ceaselessly demonstrates, if its results are contrary to his hopes.Footnote 73
At the same time, the director of Algerian affairs made it clear to Lamorcière that if Lasry became “more enlightened as to his true interests,” then the general would remain authorized to distribute the 20,000 francs to settle the affair.
Hardly two weeks later, Lasry had indeed had a change of heart and was willing to accept the offer.Footnote 74 The conditions were clearly laid out in a letter he submitted to the French government on 3 May 1841. He agreed to accept the 20,000 francs from Lamorcière (18,564 in capital and 1,436 for costs), to relieve Yusuf “without reserve” of all debts, and to lift the seizure order (saisie arrêt) on Yusuf's income (and perhaps property) he requested in January 1840. Given what he had already received by way of cattle sales, payment for the lien against Yusuf's wife's house, the Bin Karim deal, and seized income (not to mention any interest payments not specified in the correspondence), Lasry was assumed to have made money on the loan despite being reimbursed for less than half of what he claimed he was owed.
CONCLUSION
Lasry's turbulent relationship with French authorities in these affairs illustrates the interplay between the “old” power of trans-Mediterranean merchants invested with certain export rights and political privilege and the incorporation of compliant local notables into the French colonial administration. As such, it sheds light on a transitional but understudied moment in Algerian history. The conquest was a chaotic affair, affording Jacob Lasry opportunities to adjust his export and lending operations in order to profit from shifting colonial goals. Lasry's deals and debacles demonstrate how the French conquest relied on local shaykhs, beys, and businessmen to execute, manage, and extend their conquests. Yet this put men like Lasry in a position of power with regard to the French administration. The dynamic whereby Lasry both underwrote and undermined French colonial authority also served as a vehicle for bringing European anti-Semitism to the North African context, crystallizing a negative view of the Algerian Jewish intermediaries upon whom French officers relied.
The energetic denunciations of the “avaricious” and “immoral” character of “the Jew Lasry” put into relief the contradictions of France's civilizing mission in Algeria. In 1855 Lasry officially became part of the civil authority in Oran as president of the city's Jewish consistory. In effect, the government chose Lasry, in part thanks to his wealth and prominence gained through activities such as those recounted in this article, to spearhead France's moralizing campaign to “civilize” Jews in Algeria.Footnote 75 This campaign would lead, one year after Lasry's death, to the 1870 Crémieux Decree naturalizing all Algerian Jews under French authority. As has been argued elsewhere, the Crémieux Decree did not reflect the adoption of French culture on the part of its beneficiaries.Footnote 76 The paradox of the opportunistic Lasry being recast as a moralizer fourteen years after the conclusion of the Yusuf Affair could be said to echo the paradox of a “liberal” decree that projected an enlightened pallor onto a racist colonial order.
Lasry's business enterprises were the product of an economy of conquest in which the French were uncomfortably entangled with local merchants and their networks. The episodes recounted here reveal both financial and military elements of the conquest contracted out by the French, who became dependent on local experts and practices. Lasry's enterprises had little relation to any attachment he or his French associates had to “French civilization” or a “mission” to spread it, as neither discourse commanded a prominent position in colonial ideology of the 1830s. Rather, such enterprises help chart how merchants such as Lasry both maintained their positions as intermediaries and adapted to the evolving French domination of Algeria. When, in the late 1840s, the ideology of civilization began to justify new policies in the colony, the French again sought local expertise to represent and spread those policies, and Lasry, once again, was well positioned to provide it.
