An Ottoman Zionist: Joseph Nasi

At this moment Israel is asserting her national interest through military intervention, fighting Hamas, and Turkey asserting her national interest through verbal intervention, supporting Hamas. The national interests of a Jewish and a Muslim nation seem incompatible. But such was not always the case. In fact, Turkish Ottomans, once overlords of Palestine, gave their blessing to an early Zionist utopia promoted by the sixteenth-century Jewish tycoon Joseph Nasi (1524-79).

For the remarkable range of activities of Joseph Nasi, the term tycoon might be too narrow a designation. But it seems fair, since their common denominator was that Nasi worked his endeavours through the medium of money. Admittedly, some of his projects were flops. Indeed his Zionist project might fall into that category. This, however, does not detract from Nasi’s achievement to have broken new ground.

Joseph Nasi was born in 1520 in Lisbon to a prominent family of bankers and traders. Forced out of the country after a Portuguese royal marriage settlement with a Spanish Habsburg provided for restrictive measures against the country’s Jews, the family moved to Antwerp. Joseph Nasi shrugged off his humiliation at the hands of the Habsburgs in Madrid and soon he was on good terms with the Habsburgs in Brussels. Joseph Nasi moved with ease between court and counting room.

An even bigger career break beckoned after he moved to Constantinople in 1553. Nasi there replicated his business model of give-and-take with aristocratic elites, albeit on a much larger scale. On this occasion, a new succession to the Ottoman throne worked to his advantage. Having funded the successful pretender, Joseph Nasi was favoured with lucrative government contracts, ranging from tax collection to a monopoly on import of wine.

It was to be expected that a financial confidante of the Sublime Porte would be courted by resident agents of foreign firms and by emissaries of foreign governments. Several European monarchs sought out Joseph Nasi, and he was happy to oblige with advice and with advances. Putting to use his insider knowledge of diplomacy as well as finance, eventually he secured from the Sublime Porte a spectacular sinecure.

In 1561 Joseph Nasi was appointed Duke of Naxos, a group of Aegean islands. Joseph Nasi visited Naxos, but did not stay there long. The islands were small and added little to his income. All the same, he now had the trappings of an Ottoman grandee. He returned to his residence in Constantinople and set his sights on bigger prizes.

Perhaps his rapid ascent tempted him to overreach.

What followed in 1571 was a year of mixed results, for the Ottomans he served as well as for himself. That year Ottomans saw one significant success, the takeover of Cyprus, and one fatal reverse: defeat in the maritime Battle of Lepanto.  There is circumstantial evidence implicating Joseph Nasi in both events, although archives do not yield incontrovertible proof. He was thought to have harboured hopes of being installed as Ottoman ruler of Cyprus, if by commissioning a new coat of arms he would have intimated as much. Meanwhile an explosion at a munitions depot in Venice, Christian Europe’s principal naval base, which had occurred shortly before the fleet issued to sail to Lepanto, led to the trial and conviction of one of Nasi’s cousins.

These facts fed rumours to the effect that Joseph Nasi had lobbied to pit his new masters, the Ottomans, against his old masters, the Habsburgs. A biographer of Joseph Nasi, Cecil Roth, observed that rumours such as these circulated widely, and possibly far enough to have made Joseph Nasi a model for Christopher Marlowe, then writing The Jew of Malta.

These conjectures may be set aside. There were facts that can be corroborated, however, namely that Nasi lived out his days in peace, unmolested if neglected after Lepanto. A fact noteworthy in the current context, however, was another of Nasi’s initiatives.

Joseph Nasi, cosmopolitan though he was, never forgot to advance the cause of his coreligionists. In 1561, acting on the intuition that Jews would be attracted to the prospect of migrating to their ancestral lands, Nasi secured a grant to allow Jewish settlement in Tiberias in Palestine. This was a form of Zionism avant la lettre. Nasi had his sights in particular on attracting Jews from Italy, renowned as they were for their expertise in weaving, as well as for suffering resentment by officials. He put up investment in the project, funding the planting of mulberry trees to facilitate a silk weaving hub.

There was some correspondence between Joseph Nasi and Jewish communities in Italy, as was also testimony from contemporary travellers to the region, who witnessed in Tiberias a nascent Jewish community. But such traces of lasting expansion as might have been were lost – and quite possibly, after the Ottoman defeat at Lepanto had made Joseph Nasi persona non grata at court, he might have thought it impolitic to call attention to his projects.

Looking at Joseph Nasi’s progress — from one end of Europe to another, from Portugal to Turkey, from winding up a business in Lisbon to residing in a palace on the Bosphorus — one is tempted to consider his life the stuff of an oriental fairy tale. But there is more to be gleaned from it than one might from a life that was merely an historical curio. In particular, when Joseph Nasi was raised to the rank of Duke of Naxos, there was no indication that anyone found anything untoward in a Muslim ruler installing a Jewish duke to rule a Christian population.

This contradicts our perception that to keep religion apart from politics, a society must be secular — as the Ottoman Empire certainly was not. And moreover, if the career of Joseph Nasi seems unique to his time and place, then the wider political stage of his Levantine world seems a constant, a stage of kaleidoscopic transitions with utterly unpredictable turns of events that may occur faster than the flick of a hand.

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