This year edition of ARCHIVISSIMA is “quello che non c’è” (what is not there). For this year’s edition REDMIX brings an excerpt from the consular archives of Jeddah. Consular archives offer rare evidence of populations generally represented by the diaspora in host countries, characterized by limited visibility. Jeddah, the “Bride of the Sea,” is unique in being both the city home to the tomb of Eve (the ancestor, al-Jadda) and the Gate of Mecca, Islam’s first holy city, which attracts people from across the Muslim world to perform the Hajj. In the 19th century, the city, then under Ottoman rule, welcomed European consulates for the first time, tasked by their respective governments with assisting pilgrims from territories under colonial rule, including Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands.
Thus, the resident Muslim population and the passing pilgrims found themselves side by side in a European consular society, around which gathered merchants, brokers, adventurers, and travelers—social groups and minorities often defined as “invisible” within the city. This invisibility seems to cease as soon as one enters private spaces: the chancellery, which housed the consular services and usually also the consul’s residence, are the main ones.
The port, the health agency, and the city’s main commercial spaces are also included. These living spaces contrast with a forgotten place, partly overlooked by historiography: the cemetery, where the shadows of the city become visible only with death. The history of these places, and in particular of the Christian—or non-Muslim?—cemetery, is little studied. – of Jeddah, unique in the Ottoman province of Hijaz, is revealed to us by the French diplomatic archives in a specific file, where the correspondence between consuls and local authorities reveals the complexity of the role played by this “city of the dead” in the construction of the Ottoman urban space.
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