When Emmanuel Carasso Turned Italian: A Biography of Extraterritoriality and Questions of Nationality in the Ottoman Empire

Abstract

Emmanuel Carasso (Turkified as Emanuel Karasu) (1863-1934) was a lawyer who hailed from a Sephardic Jewish family in Salonica, where he became instrumental after the turn of the century in the establishment of Macedonia Risorta, the local branch of the Italian masonic lodge Grande Oriente. The Salonica lodge quickly became an important center of Young Turk revolutionary activity in the following years, as privileges offered by capitulations enabled secrecy for lodge members. After the Constitutional Revolution of 1908, Karasu applied for Ottoman nationality and then became a member of the parliament representing Salonica and later Istanbul. During the course of his political career, he is best known for being a member of a delegation of four who went to Abdulhamid II to relay to him the news of his dethronement in the aftermath of the Counterrevolution (April 1909). Using his strong positions within the Committee of Union and Progress, Karasu managed to amass considerable wealth during the First World War, when his name also got popularly involved with corruption. Unlike other Unionists who left the imperial capital as the war came to an end, Karasu remained in Istanbul, where a number of court cases were brought against him. This is when he applied for Italian nationality, a request that started a lengthy bureaucratic paper trail that sheds light on an interesting nexus of political influence, capital, and extraterritorial privileges. This paper seeks to trace available Ottoman records in a bid to reconstruct the post-WWI odyssey of Karasu and trace the ways in which litigations were worked out in occupied Istanbul, how Allied Powers interacted with Ottoman authorities when it came to questions of nationality, and what these episodes imply in the transition to a post-Ottoman Middle East.