The paper analyses the claims to Habsburg subjecthood advanced by the prominent Jewish merchant Haim Camondo following an Ottoman imperial order banishing him from Istanbul to Cyprus in 1782. As the Jewish merchant was the holder of Habsburg and British berats, the Camondo affair came to concern the European ambassadors in Istanbul. Eventually, the merchant and his family were able to escape to Habsburg Trieste with their lives and most of their fortune secured. How the European ambassadors, the Ottoman government, and Haim Camondo translated their understandings of legal belonging and identification to each other during the affair, omitting aspects which did not help their respective cases, sheds further light on notions of imperial subjecthood at a crucial period of transition of these concepts in the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. Analysing the web of cultural and political translations in which the Camondo family was caught up also adds to our understanding of trans-imperial families and contributes to the history of (national) identification and subjecthood.

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