Joseph Nasi

Origins and early life

Joseph Nasi was born around 1524 in Portugal as João Micas, into a family of Marranos — Jews forcibly baptized in 1497 who kept their faith in secret — and his father Agostinho Micas, in Hebrew Samuel, was a physician and professor at the University of Lisbon. Orphaned young, he was raised in the house of his aunt Beatriz de Luna, the future Gracia Mendes Nasi, who has her own fiche on this site, and followed her and the Mendes banking fortune from Lisbon to Antwerp, where he studied at Louvain, jousted at the court of Charles V and lent money to the emperor.

Work and career

When the Inquisition's shadow reached the Low Countries the family fled to Venice and Ferrara and finally, in 1554, to Constantinople, where Joseph could at last live openly as a Jew: he was circumcised, took the name Joseph Nasi and married his cousin Reyna. In the Ottoman capital his knowledge of European courts made him indispensable. Suleiman the Magnificent leased him the ruined town of Tiberias in 1561, and Nasi rebuilt its walls, planted mulberry trees for silk and invited the persecuted Jews of Italy to settle there, the first attempt in modern times to found a Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel.

When Selim II, whose favor he had won as a prince, became sultan in 1566, he made Nasi duke of Naxos and the Cyclades, the highest rank a Jew held in the empire. He negotiated with Poland and France, pressed Selim toward the conquest of Cyprus in 1570, and used his influence to protect fleeing Marranos, once persuading the sultan to threaten Venice on their behalf; his rivalry with the Venetian-backed Grand Vizier Sokollu is stated plainly here, as is the fact that the Cyprus war he encouraged ended in the Ottoman defeat at Lepanto.

After Selim's death in 1574 his power waned, and he devoted himself to his library and to a Hebrew press. He died in Constantinople on 2 August 1579.