In 1591 and 1593 Ferdinand I, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, gave the Jews charters, known as the livornine. These charters granted extensive rights to the Jews who came to settle in Livorno, far beyond what Catholic states at that time were willing to accord them. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Jewish community of Livorno had more than two thousand members and became the second largest community of the Western Sephardic Diaspora, after that of Amsterdam. This Diaspora, relatively small but vigorous, was composed of communities established in port cities in Western Europe by Iberian conversos, who had returned to Judaism after generations of isolation. Hence they were distinct from the Sephardic communities that were established in the Levant and in North Africa by Iberian Jews, who had arrived there at the time of their expulsion from Spain in 1492. The rulers of Tuscany wished to attract Jewish merchants from the “Spanish and Portuguese Nation” to Livorno, since they were known as energetic entrepreneurs with great experience in international commerce. Livorno developed into a cosmopolitan city where merchants and visitors from various ethnic groups met, and it became the most important redistribution center in Italy, and, quite probably, the most important port in the Mediterranean, until Marseilles overtook it in 1715. Francesca Trivellato's splendid book, The Familiarity of Strangers, sheds new light on the Jewish community of Livorno and on the Sephardic Diaspora in the early modern period, concentrating on the wide-ranging commercial activity of the Ergas and Silvera firm, which was active between 1704 and 1746. The founders of this partnership were descended from Portuguese New Christians who had returned to Judaism generations earlier and who had struck root in Livorno and other centers of the Mediterranean basin and in northwest Europe, at the same time as other branches of their families continued to live as Christians in Spain and Portugal. The main commercial activity of this firm was pursued in the Mediterranean, but their business connections extended much farther. They exported coral beads manufactured in Livorno to India, via Lisbon or London, and they played a most significant role in forging connections between the Mediterranean and colonial markets. Through their ties with Lisbon, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Amsterdam, and London, they imported staples from the colonies in the Americas and exported both raw materials and manufactured goods from Italy and the Levant to Western Europe. However, Trivellato's fascinating study is far more than a monograph on the trade activities of a certain community or the history of a firm. The questions she raises relate in sophisticated fashion to political, economic, social, cultural, legal, and rhetorical factors that find expression in the commercial connections of an ethnic Diaspora with particular cultural characteristics. In her innovative work, Trivellato deals with a variety of questions that arise in relation to the wide-ranging trade of Ergas and Silvera: How did these merchants manage to maintain commerce over such a broad geographical area, overcoming the difficulty of belonging to a stigmatized minority, trading with countries where the presence of Jews was forbidden by relying on foreign agents of different religious affiliation, bridging deep cultural differences, and coping with a large variety of judicial norms? The book sheds new light on the economic activities of the Sephardic merchants of the eighteenth century and proves that even after 1670 Mediterranean trade retained its vitality, although many studies of European commerce in the early modern period largely ignore it.

Trivellato's work is based on the analysis of a great deal of archival material (among other things, 13,670 original copies of letters written by Ergas and Silvera). However, beyond that, the book demonstrates creative engagement with economic and anthropological theory. This is global history on a small scale, bringing out the cosmopolitan connections of Sephardic merchants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who helped build bridges between southern Europe and the Atlantic Ocean and who established a cross-cultural network with agents in many countries, including Catholics in Lisbon and Hindus in Goa. The expression, “communitarian cosmopolitanism”—which she coined to characterize the experience of the Sephardic merchants of Livorno, who managed to meld multiple traditions and to cooperate with non-Jewish merchants within the framework of a corporatist society, where separate and unequal groups operated—is illuminating, and it is quite likely that it will gain currency in historical research about other diasporas whose members functioned as cross-cultural brokers. This is one of the best books about the Western Sephardic Diaspora that I have read in the past twenty years, and it deserves special praise for showing how to combine Jewish history and global history and thus removing scholarship in Jewish history from the insularity to which it is all too often prone.