My paper examines commercial networks in early colonial Algeria, while simultaneously questioning the meaning of Jewish "communities" in pre-colonial Algeria. It explores the career of a wealthy merchant by the name of Jacob Haim Lasry through the first decades of French rule. It argues that a coherent Jewish "community" was largely a product of French colonial policy, but pre-colonial commercial networks allowed certain merchants to profit from France's new religio-administrative order. Like other Sephardic merchants of the time, Lasry's networks were hardly limited to one faith, and he grew quite rich with the help of Tunisian beys, British consuls, and others. With the French occupation of Oran in 1831, however, Lasry lost considerable sums. The new governors cancelled his contracts with French-sponsored Tunisian bey installed in Oran, so he lost the right to export cattle. In the early 1840s, French "civilizing" efforts threatened his private synagogue (a form of investment) in Oran. In response, Lasry made explicit efforts to make the new masters of Algeria understand that he, as a Sephardic Jew, did not belong to the local (largely Arabic-speaking) Jewish community of Oran, so his property should be spared. He underlined his Spanish-Moroccan merchant identity to protect his interests. Lasry, however, soon found new opportunities in the colonial order. His considerable wealth led the French to invest him with a newly-created leadership position over the Jewish community of Oran (itself a newly-imagined body). Colonial policy brought Lasry, a man whose wealth derived from his position in non-sectarian trans-Mediterranean networks, to a leadership position of a community to which he adamantly denied belonging earlier in the conquest. His story allows us to interrogate not only how colonial policies affected pre- and early-colonial Jewish community structure, identity, and loyalties, but how one merchant tactfully "changed" his identity to secure his place in French Algeria's emergent racial hierarchy.