Cutting Out the Middleman: The Diamond Industry & the Politics of Displacement in a European Port City

Abstract

Beginning in the 1990s, Belgian officials raided diamond offices and captured assets offshored in Swiss bank accounts. Trade and manufacturing in the diamond midstream pipeline steadily relocate from Antwerp to Dubai and Mumbai. Power has largely shifted from Jewish to Indian merchant diasporas. My dissertation examines the vicissitudes of governmental policies towards merchants and trade in Antwerp’s diamond industry. I pay particular attention to Antwerp’s Jewish community (which worked exclusively in the diamond industry), as its growing, Hasidic community struggles to secure work, and as its philanthropic base emigrates to Israel to make fiscaliyah (fiscal-aliyah), to reap the benefits of Israel’s status as a global tax haven.

The story I tell about Antwerp’s diamond industry offers an alternative to the one offered by law and economy scholars. These scholars have famously pointed to the diamond industry as a case study in “stateless” commerce. Rather than relying upon state courts, this system depends upon ethnically homogenous Jewish and Indian trading diasporas to enforce communal norms. I argue that this received understanding has systematically misrecognized the diamond industry as a political space deeply entangled with histories of state intervention.

My dissertation begins with a brief historical section. Drawing upon Belgian Jewish labor archives, an untranslated French ethnography, and Jewish memoirs, my dissertation provides historical background to the contemporary predicament in which Antwerp’s Jewish merchants find themselves. I trace the economic incentives that the Belgian government offered to Antwerp’s Jews throughout most of the 20th century, and the shifting governmental policies that precipitated the transfer of power from Jewish to Gujarati merchant diasporas.

The next section of my dissertation draws upon over eighteen months of fieldwork that I conducted among diamond traders, brokers, and artisans, interviews that I recorded with diamond industry and governmental officials, and my training as a certified polished diamond grader. I examine how the city government is mobilizing the historical mythology of its mercantile past, as a port-city of “tolerance,” to demarcate good and bad forms of mobility and belonging in contemporary Fortress Europe. Governmental officials often deflect their own vacillating attitudes towards diamond merchants and the legality of their trade onto the criminal activities of particular “bad actors.” I reveal how merchants, in turn, take up these racialized accusations against one another, to explain the breakdown of trust relations in everyday commercial transactions.

The last section of my dissertation draws upon my everyday interactions with Hasidim in Antwerp and my study of a Hasidic business institute. I examine how Hasidic men, caught in the crosshairs of these shifting governmental policies, must reinvent themselves “legitimate” workers for the local Flemish workforce. They must contend with the spectral and overdetermined figure of the European Jewish merchant, and their more particular association with the tarnished diamond industry.

Through fine-grained analysis of everyday commercial transactions among religious merchant diasporas in Antwerp, my dissertation reframes the diamond industry as a space to think about politics in contemporary Europe and trouble the received boundaries between race and religion, law and economy, and state and diaspora.