50 Livres

The Banque de Syrie et du Liban was a French-chartered institution operating under the Mandate, but by 1942 the political ground had shifted entirely — the Free French had displaced Vichy authority in Syria and Lebanon the previous year, and currency production had to be improvised accordingly. Routing the print job to the Government Printer in Jerusalem, then operating under British Mandatory Palestine, was a direct consequence of that wartime dislocation. Paris was inaccessible; the usual printers were not an option.

The Jerusalem connection makes this a genuinely anomalous piece of Mandate-era printing history — a French-authority banknote produced under British administrative infrastructure.