The Bacri Family

Family tradition and historiography agree on one point of distant origin: Spain, left in the pain of expulsions and inquisitorial persecutions. The Bacri belong to that vast movement of Sephardic Jews who, from 1492 onward, scattered all around the Mediterranean, carrying with them their language, their prayers and their merchant knowledge [Bacri — Wikipédia]. This narrative of an Iberian origin, transmitted from generation to generation, binds the family to the great founding trauma of Sephardic identity — the expulsion — and to the long resilience that followed from it.

The decisive stage was Italian. In the seventeenth century, Jewish immigrants from Livorno, a Tuscan port that became a refuge for Sephardim under the protection of the Medici, reached North Africa. In the seventeenth century, Jewish immigrants from Livorno, Italy, arrived in North Africa. It is from this hearth that the great merchant houses of Algiers drew part of their origin: historians recall that it is the Bacri and Busnach affair, named after two great Algerian Jewish merchants originating from Livorno. These Livornese Jews, called in the Regency the Gorneyim — the people of Livorno — formed a cosmopolitan merchant elite, speaking Italian, Judeo-Spanish and Arabic, weaving networks from Marseille to Genoa, from Tunis to Alexandria.

In this founding period, the virtue that the lineage already expresses is that of faithfulness: faithfulness to a Jewish identity maintained despite successive exiles, faithfulness to community bonds that, from port to port, allowed Sephardic families to recognize one another and help each other. This diasporic solidarity — this capacity to form networks and to welcome one's scattered own — is not an ornament of the narrative: it is the very condition of the survival of a people without land, and the Bacri, like the Busnach to whom they allied themselves through blood and business, were its concrete artisans. Here, the singular history of a family merges with the collective memory of Israel: that of a people who made mutual hospitality and belonging a form of mobile homeland.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the Bacri house, allied with the Busnach family, established itself as the leading commercial power in the Regency of Algiers. At the end of the eighteenth century, two Algerian Jewish merchants — Bakri and Busnach — held the monopoly on grain trade in the Regency of Algiers and supplied France, then at war, with a significant quantity of wheat. The granary of the Mitidja, this fertile plain that encircles Algiers, fed through their intermediation the armies of the Revolution and then of the Empire.

The scale of these transactions gives the measure of their weight. In 1797, two Algerian merchants, Bacri and Busnach, sell 14 million worth of wheat to the French Republic, which remains unpaid. In 1818, Hussein, creditor of Bacri and Busnach, claims this sum from Louis XVIII. The wheat delivered served, according to chroniclers, in Bonaparte's campaigns in Italy and Egypt [JEWISHERITAGE]. The house did not confine itself to commerce: it lent, advanced funds, stood surety, to the point that its credit engaged the Regency itself. The Parisian representative of the firm, Jacob Bacri, negotiated at the highest level of the French State, even with Talleyrand [Les Mots et les Choses, S. Bouterfa].

This position was neither without ambiguity nor without danger. The house owed everything at once to France and to the dey of Algiers, caught in a game of crossed debts where private interest and State interest became confused. The representative of the Bacri house, Jacob Bacri, would write concerning the negotiations conducted with Talleyrand in terms that betray the high finance maneuvers of the era. The lineage deployed real talent there — economic action carried out on the scale of empires —, that virtue of commerce which the Jewish tradition has never despised as long as it also served the community. For the great Algerian houses, Bacri foremost among them, played the role of protectors of the Jewish community of the Regency, financing its institutions and interceding with Turkish power. But the archive also imposes its shadows: this fortune rested on monopolies, fierce rivalries and dependencies on an arbitrary power, whose following chapter will reveal the bloody price.

The splendor of the Bacri-Busnach house had its reverse side. To become the bankers of a dey was to expose oneself to his anger and that of his rivals. The favor of princes, in Algiers as everywhere in the Judeo-Muslim world of the time, was a vertiginous position: it placed the court Jew at the summit of wealth while designating him as a target in case of political upheaval. The chronicle of the Regency preserves the memory of violence that struck the heads of these houses, mingling palace intrigues, unpaid debts and popular resentments — a pattern that the history of court Jews, from the Andalusian vizier to the Hofjude of the Holy Roman Empire, has tragically repeated through the centuries.

It is here that family memory joins the collective memory of Israel in what is most bitter about it: the precarious status of the Jewish elite in diaspora, wealth tolerated and envied, indispensable and vulnerable. Halakha and rabbinic ethics have always warned against the pride of power and reminded of the fragility of those who build on the favor of kings; the fate of the Bacri offers an almost biblical illustration of this. That the fortune of the house eventually dissolved into a matter of state debt — the famous receivable never paid — says enough about how much the money of princes is quicksand.

Yet in this very precariousness, the lineage manifested a form of dignity: that of assuming the role of intercessor. The great Algerian families were not merely merchants; they bore, before those in power, the voice of a vulnerable community. In pledging their credit and their person for the Jewish collectivity of the Regency, they embodied arevout, that mutual responsibility which means that every Jew answers for his brother. Virtue here is not in wealth — the archival record forbids any complacency — but in the communal use that was made of it, and in the courage to hold an exposed position in the name of one's own.

From commercial dispute, the Bacri-Busnach affair became a casus belli. The French debt to the house, transferred to the Dey of Algiers who was himself a creditor, poisoned relations between Paris and the Regency for thirty years. In 1826, Hussein wrote to Charles X to complain of the length of the proceedings, without response; in 1827, at the official reception of Bayram, the affair reached its breaking point.

The gesture became legend. On April 30, 1827, exasperated by French delays, Dey Hussein Pasha struck the French consul Pierre Deval with a blow of his fly-whisk. The event of the "fly-whisk blow," inflicted by the Dey of Algiers Hussein Pasha on the French consul Pierre Deval, had as a consequence, three years later, the dispatch of a French expeditionary force led by General de Bourmont for a landing at Sidi-Ferruch. This is the beginning of a conquest that would extend throughout the country for one hundred thirty-two years. At the heart of this incident that overturned the history of Algeria, a money dispute linked to wheat delivered and never settled: they had supplied enormous quantities of wheat to France which was then drained by the Napoleonic wars.

Modern historiography confirms the central role of this dispute in triggering the 1830 conquest. The affair is considered one of the causes of the French invasion of the Regency of Algiers in 1830. Thus a Jewish family of Algiers found itself, despite itself, at the junction of two worlds: the end of the Turkish Regency and the beginning of French Algeria. The name Bacri, engraved in the manuals of diplomatic history, speaks to this strange condition of a lineage whose private affairs aligned with the destiny of nations. One cannot draw a virtue from it — the history here is that of a tragic mechanism. But one can read in it what the Jewish tradition calls the consciousness of the weight of acts: how a transaction, a debt, a word can, in the fabric of the world, engage far beyond those who bound them.

After 1830, the world of the great merchant houses faded, but the Bacri lineage endured, merging into the Jewish population of Algeria that was destined for profound transformation. The Crémieux Decree of 1870, by collectively granting French citizenship to the indigenous Jews of Algeria, made the Bacris full French citizens — a major shift that reconfigured their language, their schooling, their horizons. Onomastic registers attest to the wide diffusion of the surname throughout the Algiers region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the city of Algiers to Constantine, a sign of a large and deeply rooted family.

This entry into French modernity was, for the Jews of Algeria, a path of ascent but also of ordeals. The lineage traversed decades of schooling, professional and intellectual engagement, before facing one of the darkest hours: under the Vichy regime, the repeal of the Crémieux Decree in 1940 brutally stripped the Jews of Algeria of their citizenship. The Bacris, like all their coreligionists, then experienced exclusion, numerus clausus and humiliation, before Liberation restored their rights. This episode, documented by the History of the Jews of North Africa under Vichy, reminds us that belonging to France did not shield them from persecution, and inscribes their Memory in the long History of injustices endured and overcome.

From this period, the lineage inherited a cardinal value of Jewish tradition: endurance in trial, the capacity to maintain transmission despite ruptures. It was this same tenacity that, a few years later, at the time of the 1962 exodus, enabled the family to rebuild elsewhere, in metropolitan France, carrying as their only baggage the Memory of a lost world — a Memory that its sons would soon transmute into literature.

In the twentieth century, the lineage that had carried commerce became a carrier of words. Roland Bacri (1926-2015), writer, poet and journalist born in Algiers, became one of the most compelling voices of the vanished pied-noir culture. Long a contributor to Canard enchaîné, he devoted an entire body of work to preserving the language and spirit of Jewish and popular Algeria before the exodus. Three of his works are linked to the Zakhor corpus and form a monument of Memory: Le Roro, dictionnaire pataouète de la langue pied-noir (1969), Les Rois d'Alger (1988) and J'ai descendu dans mon Jourdain (1999) [Zakhor corpus].

With Le Roro, Roland Bacri accomplished the work of a linguist-poet: gathering pataouète, that savory speech of Algiers blending French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and Judeo-Spanish, so that it would not die with those who spoke it. This gesture—fixing in writing an oral language on the verge of disappearing—partakes of the highest virtue that the Jewish tradition attaches to the word: the struggle against forgetting, zakhor, the injunction to remember. Where his ancestors had nourished armies, he nourished Memory; where the Bacri house had circulated wheat, the writer circulated the words of an engulfed world. The very title of J'ai descendu dans mon Jourdain says enough of how the tender humor of pataouète there intertwines with an intimate Jewish gravity, mingling the river of Algiers with the biblical river.

This memorial and artistic vein was prolonged in other figures whom the family notice gathers under the same name: Eddy Marnay, born Edmond Bacri (1920-2003), one of the greatest lyricists of French song, and Jean-Pierre Bacri (1951-2021), actor and major screenwriter of French cinema, whose writing, with Agnès Jaoui, made clarity about human failings a form of moral requirement [Bacri — Wikipédia]. Through them, the lineage gave to France not only merchants and citizens, but a part of its sensibility, its language and its laughter. Here, documented history and transmitted Memory answer one another perfectly: literary knowledge, attachment to language and the refusal of forgetting become the modern form of an old Sephardic fidelity.

From Spain to Livorno, from Livorno to Algiers, from Algiers to Paris, the Bacri lineage traversed the entire map of Western Sephardic diaspora. It was in turn exiled and sovereign, banker to princes and involuntary actor in a historical turning point, citizen stripped of rights then restored, finally melancholic guardian of a vanished world. Few families will have thus embraced, in a single movement, both the greatness and the fragility of the Jewish condition in exile.

If the archive imposes its shadows — the precariousness of wealth, the tragic machinery of the 1830 dispute, the Vichy ordeal — memory retains a constant. What this lineage expressed, among all virtues, most fully was the struggle against forgetting in service to the collective. Among merchants, it was arevout, mutual responsibility toward the Algerian community whose voice they carried to those in power. Among writers, it was zakhor, the injunction to remember: Roland Bacri fixing through words a language and a world condemned, so that they might endure. From the wheat of the Mitidja to the dictionaries of Pataouète, one and the same calling traverses the centuries: to nourish one's own and to preserve the trace. In this, the Bacri lineage fully partakes of the virtue that the tradition of Israel carried through all its exiles — to make of memory a homeland, and of remembrance an act of fidelity.