The Familiarity of Strangers
- Subtitle: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period
- Author: Francesca Trivellato
- Publisher: Yale University, 2009 – 470 pp.
- LOC Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/2008045629
- Availability: out of print, but used copies are affordable
Review
The primary line of inquiry in this book explores the ways in which early modern merchants transcended inter-ethnic boundaries for mutual benefit, but one of its significant incidental merits is that it uses the Western Sephardic community of Livorno as its central case study. The city, which began as a minor point of settlement in Portuguese Jewish society, ballooned into the most populous Sephardic port after Amsterdam, and was home to the highest proportion of Jewish residents in any Western European capital. Trivellato thus has a rich backdrop for her analysis, which offers much new insight into the Livornese community of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
The study is a classic microcosmic history, using the relatively narrow lens of Sephardic trade in the Tuscan state to understand sweeping social changes that unfolded on a global scale. At its most micro, the text follows the trading partnership between the Ergas and Silvera families in their commercial connections with Syria. Yet from this limited narrative arc, it blossoms into an expansive reflection on the mercantile and cultural practices that ushered in the Western Sephardic golden age, in which ex-converso elites came to dominate the early modern Jewish world.
The study is a classic microcosmic history, using the relatively narrow lens of Sephardic trade in the Tuscan state to understand sweeping social changes that unfolded on a global scale. At its most micro, the text follows the trading partnership between the Ergas and Silvera families in their commercial connections with Syria. Yet from this limited narrative arc, it blossoms into an expansive reflection on the mercantile and cultural practices that ushered in the Western Sephardic golden age, in which ex-converso elites came to dominate the early modern Jewish world.
Contents
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Introduction
Diasporic families and the making of a business partnership Livorno and the Western Sephardic diaspora Livorno, the Jewish Nation, and communitarian cosmopolitanism Sephardim in the Mediterranean Marriage, dowry, inheritance, and types of commercial association Commission agency, economic information, and business cooperation Cross-cultural trade and the etiquette of merchants' letters Ergas and Silvera's heterogeneous trading networks The exchange of Mediterranean coral and Indian diamonds The "Big Diamond Affair:" merchants on trial Conclusion Notes References Index |
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