THE perception of the eighteenth century as nurturing the seeds of change for the Ottoman empire as a whole applies especially strongly to the Syrian Jewish community. The arrival of Italian Jewish merchants in eighteenth century Aleppo—attracted by flourishing French mercantile activity— fostered significant changes in the socio-economic fabric of the long-standing Jewish community: changes that set in motion Syrian Jewry's later transition from an old to a new order.

The roots of the uninterrupted Syrian Jewish settlement, the diaspora closest to Erets Yisra'el, lie in antiquity. Over the course of the centuries this community experienced cycles of growth and decline and changes in its pattern of settlement. The arrival in the late fifteenth century of several families of Spanish exiles was followed by an economic and intellectual flowering that continued into the sixteenth century, when Syria, like the rest of the eastern Mediterranean basin, came under Ottoman rule. In the eighteenth century the most significant force for change in the Syrian Jewish community was the extended exposure of Aleppo's Jews to new European Jewish settlers in that city. By creating reference groups outside the existing traditional context, these European Jews altered the communal and economic structure of Aleppine Jewry and ultimately affected other Syrian Jewish centres as well.

The Arrival of the Francos

Our starting point is the late 1730s, the conjectured date for the arrival in Aleppo of Hillel ben Samuel Picciotto of Leghorn (Livorno). This Italian Jewish merchant, like other of his compatriots, had visited Aleppo before; now he decided to settle there, and to found a permanent mercantile base in the city. The product of complex economic and political considerations, this move was primarily grounded in Picciotto's perception that a window of economic opportunity was opening in Syria, and more particularly in his chosen destination, Aleppo.

Aleppo had functioned as an important centre of international east–west trade for centuries, since Venetian merchants had founded the first European mercantile houses in the region in the period of the later crusades. The Venetians’ commercial activity peaked in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the Dutch, who used the land route to Baghdad on their way to India, subsequently overtook them, to be followed by the English, who next took the lead in setting up mercantile houses in Aleppo.