Flows and Frictions: The Camondo Family as Cultural Translators between the Ottoman Empire and Europe in the Eighteenth Century

• Applicant: Dr. Irena Fliter
• Subject Area: Early Modern History ; Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 405015355

The analysis of the Jewish Ottoman Camondo family is an opportunity to conduct a micro-historical study that reflects global transformations. These have gripped the Ottoman world and led to growing contacts, confrontations, and negotiations with its European neighbours in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The study shows that members of the merchant-banker family were early modern cultural, commercial, and political translators between the Ottoman and European bureaucratic and economic systems. In addition, they functioned as cultural translators between the Jewish and non-Jewish traditions in local settings. Inspired by translation and cultural studies as well as global and postcolonial approaches, the project links questions of cultural encounters with transformations in the area of economic and political modernisation. The focus is on the different commercial strategies, political identities, and bureaucratic documents of the Camondos, as the study maps out an environment in which practices of translation had become indispensable and ubiquitous. Two areas are to be investigated: first, the trans-imperial one through additional geographical regions, commercial cultures and strategies, and second, the structural one through the relationship between translation and political power. The study thus makes an important contribution to the methods and objectives of the second phase of the Priority Programme. The project shall result in a monograph composed of five chapters, whereby the first two will be completed by the end of the first phase. While the first chapter introduces the Camondo family as cultural and commercial intermediaries in eighteenth-century Istanbul, the second chapter discusses the exile of the Camondos from the Ottoman Empire to the Habsburg port city of Trieste in 1782. In the third chapter, I aim to address the family’s commercial, financial, and social activities in Trieste and Vienna. The fourth chapter shall explore the Camondos’ commercial networks in France, the Netherlands, and the German-speaking territories. It will especially emphasise their translation and utilisation of different commercial regulations, currencies, and promissory notes. In the fifth chapter, I intend to explore the Camondos’ return to Istanbul in the early nineteenth century and their re-translation of the experience and knowledge from the Habsburg into the Ottoman context. This examination should reveal how the Camondos endured the period of upheaval in the Ottoman financial system and ultimately contributed to its transformation. Finally, I hope to draw comparisons between the experience of Jews and that of other groups in order to emphasise the peril situation of cultural translators as both influential brokers and casualties of the ambiguity of their legal and cultural position between the Ottoman Empire and Europe.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 2130: Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Times