The Merchant who Fell Out with Everyone
Josef Nataf’s 18th Century Quarrel with his Family.
Tens of thousands of Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 and thousands more from Portugal four years later. Most of them fled to the ports, forced to seek out new lives for themselves overseas, in lands they had scarcely heard of. The vessels they crowded onto were often unseaworthy, captained by men planning to profit from the misery of the refugees, crewed by those with minds set on extortion. Many of the exiles were murdered for their possessions before they were even able to set foot on the boats. Some managed to set sail, only to be sold into slavery on the north coast of Africa. Others were driven by the winds back to Spain or drowned in the sea. Only a proportion of the refugees survived.
Those who did survive settled in cities and ports across the Mediterranean. Some headed to the Ottoman Empire, to Constantinople and Alexandria, Muslim cities where they would be relatively free to practise their religion, released from the persecutions they had suffered in Christian Europe. Others headed for the Barbary Coast, the stretch of North Africa from Morocco to Libya or sought haven in the city states of Italy, notably in Naples, Venice and Livorno. Like all refugees they were obliged to rebuild their lives afresh. Like all refugees some succeeded, many did not.
One of the consequences of the dispersion was that families now found themselves broken up and scattered across the Mediterranean. Most had relatives, friends and associates living in other cities, in different lands. They all spoke the same language, were steeped in the same culture; the only thing that divided them was geography. For the more commercially minded refugees this was a tremendous boon. The world of the Sephardim, the former Jews of Portugal and Spain, became an international network, linked by an easily navigable sea. For those with the capital and drive the commercial opportunities were tremendous.
Jewish history is too frequently Eurocentric. The stories of the Sephardi merchants of the early modern period are not often told. We rarely hear of the the commercial empires they built, the marital alliances they contracted, their diplomatic and political entanglements with local rulers and nobles, the disputes they fell into and the legal battles they fought. Despite their geographical dispersion, the Sephardi merchant class constituted a small, wealthy, exclusive and privileged society. And sometimes they could be very contentious.
Joseph Nataf arrived in the Italian port town of Livorno in May 1757. He brought with him a document signed by his four cousins and their mother, empowering him to recover money owed to them by three members of the Saccuto family. The two families had been trading together for nearly forty years. The Saccutos sourced goods for the Natafs to import into their home town of Tunis, typically wool and dyes for the manufacture of hats, fine silks and refined sugars. The Natafs in turn supplied the Saccutos of Livorno with coral, beans, leather, wax and wool.
The Saccutos shipped the coral that the Natafs supplied to England from where it was taken to India and traded for diamonds. They used the proceeds of the coral sales to buy stocks on the London market for themselves and for the Natafs. Joseph Nataf arrived in Livorno claiming £8,300 from the Saccutos for investments they had bought with his money in London, along with other trading debts they owed.
The dispute between the Natafs and the Saccutos was about money but social class played a part in it. The Saccutos belonged to the upper echelons of the Livorno Jewish community. They looked down on the backward Barbary Sephardim, families like the Natafs who hailed from Tunisia. When Isaac Saccuto was accused by Nataf of fiddling his accounts, he expostulated “We are not in Barbary!” Nataf replied, “I may be a Barbarian but I am no thief.”
Joseph Nataf brought his claim to the Jewish tribunal in Livorno. They dutifully reviewed all the documents then referred the matter to the secular courts for adjudication. The courts found in Nataf’s favour. They ordered the Saccutos to pay him the money they owed and hand over control of the English investments.
There followed a spell of jiggery-pokery during which Isaac Saccuto tried to conceal his assets in the dowry of his wife’s niece and won several stays of execution from the secular courts. Eventually he reached a private deal with Joseph Nataf. It was then that the real trouble started.
It took seven years for Joseph Nataf to agree a deal with Isaac Saccuto. Meanwhile at home in Tunis, his cousins had been waiting patiently for his return, bringing them their share of the litigation proceeds.
But Joseph Nataf did not return home. In July 1765 he took a boat to Genoa, a town which was trying its hardest to attract new, moneyed settlers. One of the benefits they offered settlers was that any debts they had they had incurred anywhere else would be wiped out once they settled in the town, provided they were not the result of criminal activity. Joseph was confident he could settle in Genoa safe from any claims his cousins might bring against him.
The Nataf family in Tunisia only had two options. They could bring a criminal charge against Joseph or they could trash his reputation. They tried the criminal route first. It took four years but eventually they had him imprisoned in Genoa. Joseph appealed his sentence, claiming that his cousins had long owed him more than he owed them. The court accepted his argument and freed him from prison. He was clear of all obligations to them under the Genoan debt remission law.
The Nataf cousins then tried to destroy Joseph’s reputation. They brought a case against him in the rabbinic court in Tunis, demanding that he be placed under a herem, a ban of excommunication. The rabbis in Tunis complied. They excommunicated Joseph Nataf.
Excommunication was a severe punishment. Not only was the offender denied all religious rights and privileges, he would be ostracised by the entire Jewish community. Nobody would trade or socialise with him. Joseph Nataf would become a pariah in the Sephardi commercial world.
Nataf fought back. He published scholarly pamphlets refuting every argument the rabbis in Tunis had made in their judgement. He printed the pamphlets in Italian rather than Hebrew. He wanted them to be read by the movers and shakers in the Italian Jewish communities whose grasp of Hebrew was rudimentary. He gambled that, once they read his rebuttals, the cultured Italian Sephardim would ignore the verdict of the unsophisticated Tunisian rabbis. They wouldn’t ostracise him.
Except the Tunisian rabbis weren’t fools. They also printed pamphlets, translating their judgement and verdict into Italian, so that they too could be read by the people whose support Nataf was hoping to enlist. The battle was far from over.
The following year an anonymous letter appeared. Apparently written by a learned rabbi in Mantua, it was a fierce and malevolent attack on the Tunisian rabbis. It claimed that the chief rabbi of Tunis, who headed the court that had excommunicated Nataf, was a tyrant whose daughter was married to one of Nataf’s cousins. This chief rabbi, the letter said, had a personal grudge against Nataf and had persecuted him when he lived in Tunis, forcing him to Tripoli. The excommunication was the result of this rabbi’s personal vendetta.
The senior rabbis in Mantua dismissed the anonymous letter as a forgery. But they conceded that there were technical problems with the excommunication that the Tunisian rabbis had imposed on Nataf. The Tunisian court was not recognised as one which could exert authority overseas. The cousins should have complained in Genoa, where Nataf was living, and the case should have been heard by a rabbinic court empowered to rule in that locality. The authoritative Lithuanian rabbi, Moses Margoliot, confirmed that for these technical reasons the decree of excommunication was flawed. The cousins in Tunis reluctantly accepted they had run out of options. Joseph Nataf had got away with their money and there was nothing they could do.
There was only one more thing both sides could try. If was the hardest of all, but worth having a go. They could strive to put the argument behind them and see if they could make peace.
Seventeen years after he had first set out for Livorno, Joseph married Hafsa Nataf, the sister of the cousins he had been in dispute with. The cousins contributed a sum of money to her dowry, equal to the amount he had claimed in Genoa that they had owed him. We may never know whether he handed them their share of the litigation proceeds in return.
There are probably many stories like this. But it’s the ending that really matters. Yes, the family had been in dispute and it had indeed become extremely nasty. At the end of the day though what really mattered were the family ties. Only by Joseph and Hafsa Nataf marrying could the family move forward, with their place amongst the dynasties of Sephardi merchants intact.
When all is said and done it is family and family connections that matter. Not vicious disputes over money.
I would like to add a comment to this article. As you said, a great many Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, which happens to be the year Christopher sailed to what he believed was India, but was America. After Columbus was refused financial support by the Christian countries, he went to Muslim Spain.
The Umayyad Muslims ruled Spain for 700 year, at the time when Europe was in the dark ages. Christians destroyed many of the classical Greek and Roman books of philosophy and science, because they considered them heathen.
At that time, when few European nobles, even in the clergy, could read and write, the Arab nobles in Spain were expected to be scholars and scientist, as well as skilled warriors.
The Arabs had reached a high level of civilization. An enormous library was established, first in Alexandria, Egypt, and then others in Toledo, Spain and on Sicily, where they preserved the works Christians had destroyed in Europe. The Arabs developed our ten-based number system and algebra. They knew many things about medicine and science that were not known in Europe until centuries later.
The Muslims and Jews lived together in harmony in Spain. Jews held high positions in government and the military.
In the 15th century Christians recaptured various Spanish cities, and Granada was the last to fall to the Christians in 1492. They did not actually capture Granada. They starved them out in a siege, and promised they could practice their own religions and would be fairly treated if the surrendered.
After the Christians entered Granada, they did not keep their word. Many Muslims and Jews fled Spain. They were so sure this was only temporary, that they took the keys to their houses with them.
We were taught in American schools that King Fernando and Queen Isabella were heroes because, Queen Isabella sold her jewels to finance Columbus’ voyage.
What we were not taught was, that they forced the conversion of Muslims and Jews to Catholicism. The Spanish inquisition was established by the Catholic Monarchs, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile, and authorized by Pope Sixtus IV, who sent an inquisitor to Spain.
Thousands of people were burned alive, for either refusing to convert, or were thought not to have converted in good faith. It is difficult to know exactly how many were killed, but modern estimates are up to 150,000 over a period of three centuries, including in various Spanish colonies. The inquisition was disbanded on the 15th of July 1834.
If Columbus had arrived in Granada a few months earlier, before the siege of Granada, he would have discovered America for the Muslims.
Regards,
William McCreight