Ottoman History Podcast - Nationality on Trial in the 19th Century Mediterranean

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

with Jessica Marglin hosted by Brittany White | In 1873, Nissim Shamama died suddenly at his palazzo in Livorno. He was quietly one of the richest men in the Mediterranean. A Tunisian Jew born in the Ottoman Empire, Shamama had taken his place among the mercantile elite of a newly-unified Italy. He was a man who belonged to many places. But to whom would his vast inheritance belong? Our guest Jessica Marglin has published an award-winning book, The Shamama Case, that marshals an impressive array of archival sources to investigate how this question was resolved. As she demonstrates, the decade-long legal dispute over Shamama's estate was an international affair involving Tunisian officials, rabbis from throughout the Mediterranean, and some of Italy's foremost legal minds. In this conversation, we talk to Marglin about some of the highlights of the Shamama case, what it taught her about the history of citizenship and nationality in the 19th century Mediterranean, and the power of microhistory for disrupting conventional framings of the period. « Click for More »

Microhistory, you know, it's not going to answer all of the questions. It's not going to be able to really scale up in a super convincing way. But what it can do is disrupt what you think you know about certain categories. And that's really what I found this case to do. It really disrupted certainly what I had read in the secondary literature about citizenship, especially in North Africa and the Middle East. For a long time, I was sort of stuck in these categories, particularly the categories of citizenship and nationality, and thinking about them through this European lens. And through this case, I was able to finally sort of say,

okay, you know what? A lot of this just doesn't work and we need a whole new approach to understanding what I ended up calling legal belonging, which is the sort of more abstract category, which I felt like was much better suited, certainly to the North African context that Nisim Shamama came from,

but more generally to a kind of transnational case that crossed over between North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and Europe. When Nisim Shamama, a wealthy Tunisian Jew living in Livorno, Italy, suddenly died in 1873, a fierce lawsuit ensued over his grand estate. At the time of his death, he was considered one of the wealthiest men in Europe, but this fight over Shimama's riches was no ordinary family dispute. Before his estate could be divided between heirs, Italian courts had to first figure out his nationality to decide which law to apply to his estate. Was Nisim Shamama still a subject of the Bay of Tunis? Was he an Italian citizen? What of

his Jewishness should that be considered his nationality? Or had he become stateless after hastily leaving Tunisia for self-imposed exile. In this episode of Ottoman History Podcast, we'll trace the history and explore the implications of this decades-long case that was banned regional, cultural, and increasingly narrowly defined political borders. And through our conversation with Jessica Margolin about her prize-winning book, The Shamama Case, we'll discuss what the case revealed about changing notions of citizenship and nationality in the late 19th century Mediterranean world, how it offers us insight into the way legal belonging was formulated and proved, and finally, what it reveals about contemporary European citizenship and border regimes. I'm Brittany White. Stay tuned.

I'm so excited to talk. First of all, I mean, not off the record, on the record, I really love the book. It was so it was such a joy to read. And I mean, I'm sure you know that sometimes scholarly writing isn't always super fun, but yours was really fun and I really enjoyed it. Thank you. That was a goal too, actually, to make it something that would be sort of intellectually satisfying, but also pleasurable to read, or at least pleasurable for those people with some vague interest in the subject. Yeah. So I'm just going to start off with a very broad question. Why did you write the book? It's a great question. I, you know, I actually came to the subject of Dissim Shemama sort of, you know, through like a one of those footnote things, you know, I was writing a different article and I was

going down a rabbit hole about this rabbi who's a kind of fairly minor character in the book, Elia Ben Amozeg, who was a Kabbalist and a philosopher and a rabbi fairly minor character in the book, Elia Ben-Amozeg, who was a Kabbalist and a philosopher and a rabbi in Livorno in Italy, and also a printer. And I was working on some other North African rabbi who had printed some books with Ben-Amozeg, and I just wanted to know more about him. So I was looking him up and I found that he'd written this book about the Shamama case. I was like, oh, that's interesting. I've never heard about that. And it was the only legal thing that he'd written. Ben-Amozeg really wasn't like a legal scholar. That wasn't what he was known for. And as a legal historian, I was sort of intrigued. And so I kind of looked up the Nisim

Shamama thing. And then it turned out that there was all of this stuff written mostly, actually, I started getting at it through the responsa literature in Hebrew, the Tishuvot, which is like fatawa for those more familiar with the Islamic context. And, you know, there was just basically dozens of publications by different rabbis that I was like, oh, wow, this is interesting. And when I first started, I thought, oh, you know, it brings together Jewish law and Islamic law and, you know, Italian law, European law. And that was my kind of initial sort of foray. But when I got to the archives, I think what really convinced me was to write a book about the subject was just

the sense that the people involved were so fascinating, and that I could really kind of get a little bit at the characters. And this is something that, you know, historians obviously know how hard it can be to really get to know the historical figures that they're writing about if they're not already kind of famous. Nisim Shobaba was very rich, but he wasn't that famous at the time. And definitely not after his death, he was sort of largely forgotten. So I think I was really drawn in by the people. And then, you know, I was still interested in this sort of convergence of multiple legal systems, multiple sort of discourses of normativity. And I was really

drawn to the transnational aspect, the idea that I could write a book about North Africa that would involve certainly the Ottoman Empire, but also Europe. And so maybe part of it was just this idea that I wanted people who didn't think North Africa was important to realize that North Africa actually is really interesting, even if you are a historian of Italy or France or. Exactly. So at the end of his life, Nisam Shamama, a Tunisian Jew, a man at the center of your new book, became an Italian citizen by decree. Can you tell us the political and economic crisis in Tunisia and how that prompted Nisim to leave Tunisia at the time he was one of the wealthiest people in Europe?

And so how did he basically become a refugee? Yeah, it's interesting. I hadn't thought of him as a refugee. And that's, you know, in fact, one of the sort of open questions about his life that can be interpreted differently. But basically, what happened is Nisim Shamama sort of rose through the ranks of government service in Tunisia. He started out as a kind of relatively low-level tax farmer, which a lot of Jews were in Tunisia, really, since the early modern period. But he kind of was very savvy. He was very good at being a tax farmer,

and he knew who the right people were to kind of cultivate as patrons. And so he became sort of increasingly important. He got larger and larger tax farts until he basically became the head tax collector for all of Tunisia. And then he was very close also with the prime minister, who at the time was Mustafa Khaznadar. And Khaznadar and he were sort of central to trying to get international loans for the Tunisian government. The Tunisian government, like lots of governments around the world, wanted to modernize, wanted to invest in infrastructure, wanted to build aqueducts and railroads and telegraph lines and all of these things.

And most places were doing so by getting these big international loans from bankers in London or Paris or Frankfurt. So Ghaznodar and Nisim together, it's not totally clear what role Nisim played in this, but he certainly played some role and got one of these big international loans from a sort of sleazy banker who ends up playing a central role in the rest of the Shamama affair. But the loan, as many loans, especially in the Middle East and North Africa did, ended up really hurting the finances of Tunisia because it was not a very favorable loan for the Tunisian government. First of all, it had a really high interest rate, had a lot of fees, and the Tunisian government had sort of basically overestimated its ability to pay. So they ended up sort of in this like financial quagmire where

instead of this loan getting them out of the red, it just sunk them deeper and deeper into debt. And Khaznodar's reaction was, as most states would do, to raise taxes. And this was incredibly unpopular. The Majba was the head tax levied pretty much on all non-urbanites in Tunisia. So not in Tunis itself, but everywhere else. And it was raised precipitously to try to pay off these enormous loans. And it sparked a rebellion. And there was essentially a civil war between various sort of rural people and the Bay of Tunis, who was trying to kind of maintain his authority. Eventually, the civil war died down. But in the midst of this, which had, of course, started as a rebellion against higher taxes, understandably, Nisim Shabama, who was, you know, the highest ranking official in the Ministry of Finance, felt very vulnerable. It's not totally clear what role his

Jewishness played in that vulnerability. You know, there's a lot of evidence in general that Jews in positions of any power, especially financial power, were sort of more easily scapegoated. But one could also easily argue that if he had been a Muslim, he also would have been targeted just by virtue of being like, you know, an easy sort of target for people who were angry about the rise in taxes. Nobody likes the tax man. Nobody likes the tax man, exactly. And Mustafa Khazad-e-Rar was, you know, very, very powerful. He was literally the number two man in the kingdom. So he was a lot harder to attack.

So it seems pretty clear that that was a big factor. Now, later on, not sort of shortly before Ghani Simshimama's death, there were all of these accusations that started to swirl that in fact, the reason that he left was not just because he feared for his life, or maybe not at all because he feared for his life, but really because he had been slowly embezzling all of this money, basically with Khaznodar's permission, and that he wanted to get out with it. Now, that may have also been true. I tend to think that the fear was real. And there's there was some correspondence I was able to find between him and his sort of Jewish

associates, where he's sort of like asking them to help him pack up his belongings really quickly. And he's sort of leaving things behind in a terrible mess, which suggests that he really did leave suddenly. And, and he left with his great niece, Aziza, who's his kind of adopted daughter. And her baby was literally four days old at the time. And he lived with, you know, she and her husband and the baby lived with Nisim. The baby's name was Nisim after Nisim Shamama.

I just can't imagine that if they were planning, you know, a kind of premeditated escape, they would have done it at such a difficult moment with a four day old baby taking them on a long travel, you know, a long journey. It's sort of insane. So I tend to think that the fear was real, even if there might also have been some serious financial malfeasance going on at the same time. So you mentioned Nisim's grandniece Aziza. Tell me a little bit more about his family dynamics in his life just before his death and how was his wealth divided up after his death and in the will? Yeah. Okay. So Nisim was married multiple

times at various times to two women at once. Bigamy was totally cool for Jews in North Africa at the time. But he never had children of his own, which suggests that there was some sort of biological problem on his end. Aziza was the daughter of his nephew, a man named Shlomo Shamama, but everybody called him Kayed Momo. But she was sort of estranged from her father, seemingly at a pretty young age, and had lived with Nissim in Tunis and then followed him first to Paris and then eventually to Livorno. And she had lived first in his house and then in Paris. He got her and her family like a separate apartment above his. And then they eventually bought some houses next to each other, sort of matching townhouses.

And then in Italy, he bought this sort of big palazzo and they all seem to have lived together in the big palazzo. When he was still in Paris, he wrote a will in which he divided his estate, half going to Aziza and her young son, Nisim, who at the time he wrote the will was four years old. Then the other half of his estate was going to be divided evenly between two of his three living nephews who were his closest male relatives. The will, however, was kept secret. Nobody knew about it or, you know, even nobody was even sure it existed. So when he died, which was in January of 1873, and he died quite suddenly.

He literally woke up one morning with a stomach ache and was dead a few hours later, which happened fairly frequently in the 19th century. So there was a real kind of like, I mean, the correspondence from that period is quite fascinating to read because there was a serious kind of information gap. People did not know what was going to happen. People did not know he had this big fortune. He didn't have any biological children. There was a real question mark about what was going to happen to his wealth. Fairly soon after he died, the Livornese police came and they sort of commandeered the situation and searched the house and found a will. And the will was read publicly a couple of days after and not immediately, but afterwards.

And the will was written in Judeo-Arabic, which for those who aren't familiar is Arabic written in Hebrew letters. But of course, there are many dialects of Judeo-Arabic just as there are different dialects of Arabic. And so the Judeo-Arabic that Nisim used was the dialect of Arabic spoken by Tunisians in general and more specifically by Tunisians.

And this, by the way, was almost certainly the only language that Nisim Shabama was literate in. He spoke Arabic, as did everybody. And he almost certainly read Hebrew, but unless you had a very kind of advanced rabbinic education, you wouldn't really be able to read or write in Hebrew. So it's quite normal that he would have written in Judeo-Arabic. He had a lot of course, we have a lot of his correspondence in Arabic, but it was clearly written by secretaries of whom he had many. He had many secretaries who came with him from Tunisia to Paris and then to Livorno. And they helped him kind of manage his life in general. Yes, exactly.

With the language differences. Exactly. Yes. Although it's not clear how he dealt with French and Italian, neither of which he spoke either. It seems that he basically sort of surrounded himself with Tunisians, both Jews and Muslims, actually, and that a lot of his sort of social world was other Tunisians,

family members that he had brought over with him, not just Aziza, some rabbis that were sort of like his personal rabbis, plus his secretaries. And, you know, it was a little bit hard to get a kind of sense of his like day-to-day existence in Paris in particular, where there weren't, there wasn't a community of Tunisian Jews. But, you know, the little bit that I got, there was a newspaper article that very briefly mentioned a soirée, like a sort of evening party at Nisim Tramama's with all of the Cologne Tunisien, like the Tunisian colony, the Tunisian like expats, basically.

The Tunisian community in Paris. So that also suggests to me that there was a kind of... And there's another article that mentions him going on a trip to somewhere else in France and he has a retinue of like 40 people. Oh, okay. So he's traveling with a big posse. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

He had a serious entourage going. In Livorno, he would have had less trouble meeting other Tunisian Jews because there was quite a lot of back and forth, especially with the Grana community, the community of quote-unquote Livornese Jews living in Tunisia, and particularly in Tunis. And so there was an

enormous amount of sort of networks and people sending family members back and forth and people traveling back and forth. And indeed, there were a few sort of Grana Jews who participated in his funeral in Livorno that suggests that he was in touch with basically his fellow Tunisian Jews while he was living there. Anyway, right. So he dies, they find this will, they read it, they discover that he's left half of his fortune to Aziza and to two nephews. But then, of course, there are people who are sort of expecting to get something from the estate and are cut out of the will. And that's predominantly Aziza's father, Kayed Momo, who is the third living nephew. And the reason that he's expecting to get a large

chunk of the estate is that Jewish law, kind of like Islamic law, basically determines a set way of dividing estates. And according to Jewish law, if a man dies without children, then the estate is supposed to go to his closest male relatives. So for Nizin, that was indisputably his three living nephews. Khayyad Mumu and he had clearly fallen out. There are traces of this in the archives. It seems to be largely a financial dispute, as so often is the case. Classic. Classic. But there's some suggestion that they didn't get along so well beforehand anyway. But Mumu was not ready to just throw his hands up and say, okay, never mind. This was really a huge fortune.

I mean, as you mentioned, he was one of the richest people in Europe. He was not as rich as the Rothschild who died shortly before him in Paris, but close, right? It was on the same order. He was like the 0.01% of society. So he was really very wealthy. So even, you know, Momo not getting, he was expecting a third of the estate and not getting that was a matter of losing 9 million francs approximately. So he sort of went into action. And part of what happened also is that the Tunisian government by this point had started basically adopting this narrative that

Nisim Shamama had embezzled a large amount of funds and that Nisim's estate owed the Tunisian government a whole lot of money. They started working on various ways of getting their money back. One of the ways was by getting Mumu to sign an agreement saying that he would give the Tunisian government 25% of his share in the estate, which again, even a fourth of 9 million francs is quite a lot of money. And so the Tunisian government became sort of immediately involved. I mean, part of the best archival sources for the case come from the correspondence between the Tunisian, basically, consul. He wasn't officially recognized as a consul because of disputes between the Tun full sovereignty. And they wanted Tunisia to be essentially an Ottoman province. But he was a man who was for all intents and purposes, the Ottoman consul in Livordo. And he writes about all the sort of confusion swirling in the days and weeks after Nisim Pidmama died, basically about whether the will that was discovered would be valid or not. And the sort of main question

that they landed on was the question of Nisim Shamama's nationality. Quick question. How common was it for a state, a government like the Tunisian government, to get involved in these wills or after-death affairs of their officials? Was it just, had you seen anything else like that before? Or was it just really with Nisim because of his high status and his amount of money? So Nisim's first patron in the government was a man named Ibn Ayyad.

And Ibn Ayyad had similarly sort of absconded from Tunis. And he clearly had left, not in the midst of a war, but just when he thought that he was getting caught for all of the embezzlement that he was engaged in. And then he managed to take a lot of money with him to Paris. And it seems clear that part of the reason that Nisim was accused of embezzlement and perhaps, you know, had embezzled was because everybody knew that Ibn Ayyad had done so. The Tunisian government did not go after Ibn Ayyad's estate in part because Ibn Ayyad lived for much longer. But they did send a very important official, a man named Khairuddin, who became very famous in Tunisian history later on. He was a sort

of reformist statesman. He ended up also partly in the Ottoman Empire after he left the service of the Bay of Tunis. Ibn Ayyad had, you know, the Tunisian government had mounted a lawsuit against Ibn Ayyad in Paris and essentially lost. They hadn't really managed to recover the funds that they accused Ibn Ayyad of owing them. It's not clear to me whether part of the reason that they chose to go after Nisim Shamam's estate was because they had been unsuccessful with the Ibn Ayyad lawsuit. But it's clear that Shamama was worried about lawsuits. Actually, Ibn Ayyad himself was suing Nisim Shamama during Shamama's lifetime. He outlived Shamama by almost 10 years.

And it's clear that for Shamama, the question of nationality, right? So you started this question about why did he become an Italian? It's clear that for Shammama, the reason to naturalize as an Italian was about jurisdiction. He was worried that Tunisians like Ibn Ayyad or perhaps people from the government would sue him and he would be forced to go back to Tunisia. But if he were Italian, then the jurisdiction would more clearly be based in Italy or France or somewhere else in Europe. And perhaps from the experience of the Ibn Ayyad case, he sort of had his hunch that things would go better for him if any lawsuit against him was based in Europe. So like you've said, this whole quagmire comes down to nationality and law in

Italy, which had just become a unified kingdom in 1848. Its civil code wasn't passed until 1865, about 20 years later. So it was still a very new country trying to negotiate social and legal structures at the time of Nisim's death in 1873. And a man named Pasquale, I don't want to butcher the rest of his name. Mancini. Mancini. Pasquale Mancini was at the center of all of this. Can you tell us about his concept of,

this concept of nationality as principle and how Mancini used this in Nisim's case? Right, yeah. As I mentioned, the question of the validity of the will all came down to Nissim's nationality. And that is, as you say, due to Mancini. Mancini was this sort of star international lawyer. He helped write Italy's civil code in 1865.

And his whole rise to fame was because he married the ideas of nationalism with international law. And he basically figured out a way to justify the tenets of nationalism in international law. And one of the ways he did that was by saying that nationality was so important to a person that it shouldn't continue to matter if that person was not in their national state. So an Italian was so wedded to Italian law that that law should be respected, even if the Italian was in France or in Tunisia or in Germany. And that is essentially the basis of the nationality principle, that at least for matters of private law, your national law follows you around like a bubble no matter where you are. So if you die in France and you are an Italian,

then your national law applies to your estate and your will or whatever, your succession is adjudicated according to Italian law. Same goes for marriage and divorce and child custody and all other aspects of personal status. So I imagine that international law and certainly this this nationality principle is like fairly new in the 1900s, where other international lawyers having similar conversations about um about the about nationality principle um or is mancini pretty much on the forefront of this mancini is the sort of poster child like he's the he's or maybe the spokesperson but he's got a whole bunch of people who agree with him that the nationality principle is a good idea and so 1873 the year that Nisim Shabama dies is also

the year that the Institut de Droits Internationaux, the Institute of International Law is founded, which is the first sort of professional association of international lawyers. Mancini is elected the first president because he is the kind of elder statesman of international law, widely recognized as such in Europe. And his main sort of hobby horse in the Instituto de L'Internationale is to try to get a sort of agreed upon language for instituting the nationality principle in every country's sort of nationality legislation. And so that's part of why he writes it into the Italian Civil Code. The Italian Civil Code is definitely one of the very first pieces of legislation to adopt the nationality principle, but it becomes very popular.

It gets adopted not only all over Europe, but also in Latin America and elsewhere. And it becomes a kind of well-known approach to what is called private international law or conflicts of law in the United States. So what were the specifics of Nisim's case and how did his religious status as a Tunisian Jew complicate these questions that they were asking about his identity? Right. So once they figured out that Nisim's inheritance all came down to a question of nationality, there were sort of four main possibilities. One was that he was Tunisian, right? That he had died, that he was born in Tunis, that he had never lost his Tunisian nationality in part because Tunisia, like the Ottoman Empire,

didn't recognize expatriation or voluntary expatriation. And in fact, they cited the Ottoman Nationality Law of 1869 as sort of not because they... Interestingly, the Italian courts did not view Tunisia as part of the Ottoman Empire. They viewed it as an autonomous state. And this was just part of basically European diplomatic politics at the time. And it was largely about the sort of colonial ambitions of Italy and France. And for them, it was going to be much easier to colonize Tunisia if it wasn't part of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were just a kind of, you know, basically a sort of symbolic authority. And actually, Tunisia was for all intents and purposes. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Which I think,

you know, very much undersells the complexity of the relationship of sovereignty, for sure. But in any case, they still sort of looked to the Ottoman Empire as, well, if the Ottomans do it, then it makes sense that the Tunisians do it. So one option was that Nizam Shumam had never lost his Tunisian nationality. The other option is that he had become Italian. And indeed, he applied for Italian nationality in 1866. He even got a sort of decree of naturalization from the king, but he never followed the instructions in the decree. Oh, he didn't follow the fine print. Right.

He basically didn't follow the fine print. The decree itself says the degree has to be registered with an Italian official, and he has to take an oath of fealty within six months of getting the decree. He didn't do those things. Why? That's a big question. And it's clear though that, you know, for his purposes, it didn't really matter. Everybody still considered him Italian after this decree. He joined a sort of leading Italian charitable association in Paris. When he went to Italy and registered his domicile there, he declared himself Italian and

everybody believed him. I mean, the notary public in Livorno dutifully wrote him down as an Italian national. And it was only after his death that people raised questions basically like, wait a minute, it's not clear that this guy ever actually became Italian. So one possibility was that basically it didn't matter that he hadn't registered the decree, that he had still become Italian, that everybody thought he was Italian. So he had died Italian. Another possibility was that he had lost his Tunisian nationality, that leaving Tunisia and applying for a new nationality was essentially equivalent to self-expatriation. And so he was no longer Tunisian, but he had failed to become

Italian. So he was stateless. He died with no nationality. This was a kind of unusual argument because statelessness was considered a kind of anomaly in international law. It wasn't, unlike the sort of post-World War I context where there was just an enormous amount of statelessness. It wasn't ever considered a good thing, but it was obvious that lots and lots of people were stateless. In the 19th century, it was like people who fell through the cracks. It was very bizarre and it was not considered good, but it did sometimes happen. So that was a possibility. And then you asked about his Jewishness, and that turned out to produce a sort of fourth option of his nationality, which was that being Jewish was itself a nationality, and that thus his national law,

for the purposes of the nationality principle, should be Jewish law. Now, this was a sort of odd argument, even for the time, in part because everybody recognized that most of the time when jurists were talking about nationality, they were talking about nationality associated with a state. And of course, Jews didn't have a state. But there was also a kind of new sense in which nationality was very important. This was really the height of nationalism. And there was this question that was very seriously considered by some of the jurists involved of whether Jews, since they are a nationality, should thus basically constitute their own national group despite not having a state with their own national law. And that if Italy is serious about the nationality principle, then they should respect Jewish law for Jewish nationals, especially those who might be deemed stateless. Mainly, this argument came up in the context of, well, if Nisim Shammama had died

stateless, normally Italian law would apply to stateless people. But the argument was, well, in this instance, that really doesn't make sense because he's Jewish, he has a national law, and that is Jewish law. So if he is stateless, then you should apply Jewish law to his estate. Do you think that had Nisim been Muslim or Christian, would religious law still be a consideration in his case at all? If Nisim Shumama had died Muslim, then Sharia certainly would have been a consideration because if he had been deemed to have died Tunisian then Tunisian's inheritance is definitely sort of regulated by

is under the jurisdiction of Qaldi courts so for sure and I would say also that you know on the one hand this is a very Jewish story because Nisim Shumamu was Jewish and because Jewishness was this major sort of question at the center of

what is his nationality. But this is not a story that is unique to Jews. And indeed, there was a similar case of both disputed inheritance and questionable nationality that arose about 15 years after his death, which is the subject of another wonderful book that I think, I can't remember if there was an Ottoman history podcast about it, but Mohamed Waldi's A Slave Between Empires is about Hussain ibn Abdallah, who was a Mamluk in the court of the Tunisian Bey and who also died in Italy. And his inheritance was disputed not so much because there was a question of whether he'd become an Italian national. He had never naturalized as an Italian, but because the Ottoman state claimed jurisdiction

over his estate, the Ottoman consul in Florence at the time, because there was a question of whether a Tunisian... This was already post the colonization of Tunisia by France. So there was a question of whether a Tunisian who died abroad should be considered an Ottoman or a French subject. And this was the sort of the nature of the dispute over that inheritance. Okay, so how did, spoiler alert, how did the case turn out? How did, spoiler alert, how did the case turn out? And what were the ramifications immediately after?

Are there any long-lasting legal impacts that this case had on the Italian legal and justice system and thinking about nationality and religion? To put it very briefly, the case went through multiple rounds of appeal, as everybody sort of expected, when there's so much money at stake, there's a lot of appeal. There are many appeals. So it went to first the court of first instance Livorno, and then the court of appeals in Lucca, and then the court of cassation in Florence, which basically reversed the initial ruling, which had been that Nisim Shomama had died stateless. And once that was reversed, it became clear that the court was sort of leaning towards declaring him Tunisian, which it did finally in the final ruling in 1883 in the Court of Appeals in Florence. And declaring him Tunisian when he died basically said, no, he never acquired Italian nationality,

but he also didn't lose his Tunisian nationality. And this was really a deference in deference to the Tunisian government's own interpretation of Tunisian nationality law. And also again, drawing on Ottoman nationality law and saying, yeah, there is no voluntary expatriation. The Bey never gave him permission to expatriate himself. Thus, he must have still been Tunisian when he died. Because Jews in Tunisia were under the jurisdiction of Jewish law, of halakha, for, again, matters of personal status, then the court in Florence had to apply Jewish law to his estate. But they did so in a way that was rather unexpected. Now, everybody sort of knew that there was a possibility that Jewish law would apply because, of course, if he was Tunisian, then it was going to be halakha that sort of determined how his will was going to be read. And from very early on,

it seemed clear that the will wasn't going to be considered kosher according to Jewish law, essentially. It lacked certain important formulae that were sort of central to a will that was valid under Jewish law. However, there were also from very early on, from just months after Nisim died, disputes among rabbis about the validity of Nisim's will according to Jewish law. And this sort of parallel discussion among rabbinic authorities swirled while Italian lawyers and French lawyers and Tunisian government officials were discussing this question of nationality. There was this sort of parallel discussion of Jewish legal principles and how they applied in particular to Nisim's will. Ultimately, though, it wasn't

really up to the rabbis. It was up to these Italian judges, three Italian judges, who, of course, had no training in Jewish law and who relied mainly on these legal briefs written by Italians with some familiarity with Jewish law. And interestingly, both sides also hired Italian Jews, including Ben-Amozeg. That's how he ended up writing for the case. Ben-Amozeg was in some ways the most obviously qualified because he was a rabbi, but he wrote a really kooky book in response to the question of whether the will was valid. And the judges basically ignored him for the most part and relied largely on a legal brief written by these two Jewish lawyers who, it's not clear if they had much training in Jewish law, but they clearly had some access to the Jewish texts. And they wrote these very kind of accessible briefs sort of breaking down what

Jewish law might have to say in support for saying that the will was kosher. I think that the Italian judges were sort of inclined to validate the will because it seemed like the right thing to do. It seemed clear that that's what Nisim Shamama wanted. And there were arguments to be made according to Jewish law for why one could say that the will was valid. And so I think it was sort of, they thought it was a good idea to respect Nisim Shamama's wishes and to give Aziza her share of the inheritance. Of course, by this time, the family members had all run out of money paying their lawyer's fees

and waiting for this inheritance to come. It had been literally 10 years by the time the final ruling came down. This is where that sleazy banker that I mentioned earlier, a man named Emile Darlanger, who was originally from Frankfurt, but moved to Paris and established himself as a banker. And he's the one who gave Tunisia its first international loan.

He knew Nissim through that experience. When Nissim moved to Paris, he spent some time with him, you know, negotiating new loans. And he knew, he must have known about Nissim's death. And so after Nissim's death, a few years after when people were starting to be desperate for money, he went around and signed agreements with each of the potential heirs, basically saying, I'll give you some cash up front in return for your giving me your rights to the share of inheritance when the will is finally adjudicated. So basically, the heirs all got a small portion of what they could have. And this banker made off with the largest sum. And he also

struck a deal with the Tunisian government to kind of give them a share, basically to sort of stop them from further appeals and kind of say, okay, you will get whatever money you claim from Nissim's estate. So the lawyers made a lot of money because they were paid huge fees. And the banker made a lot of money. The Tunisian government didn't make much money. And by the time the will was finally adjudicated, the Tunisian government was already under French colonial rules. So they also didn't have all that much autonomy. So things had changed a lot by 1883 when the final ruling came down. You asked a question about what is the significance for this case for Italian law? And interestingly, it didn't have a whole lot of significance. It gets cited once in a while, but part of that is structural because Italian

law is a sort of civil law system based on a code much like France's. You don't have the same sort of importance given to precedent the way you do in Anglo-American legal systems where the precedent of a court case can become incredibly central and get cited over and over again. That doesn't mean that the rulings, especially of courts of appeal, were published precisely so that lawyers and judges could refer to them. But this was one of those cases that was strange enough that it didn't have a very obvious set of applications.

I think that when I first started working on this case, I was very keen to try to figure out some way in which the case was important to law afterwards, because that tends to be a way in which legal historians can make a good argument for spending a whole book on one legal case. And I finally concluded that it's not that it's totally unimportant, but that's not its main interest. Its main interest is really to kind of reveal all of the different arguments being made, particularly about nationality and citizenship, as they get imagined across the Mediterranean and across this sort of imagined divide between Europe and North Africa and the Middle East, Christianity, Christendom, and the Islamic world.

And those are very real categories for the international lawyers in particular involved, and how they're sort of thinking about how law applies, how to incorporate Tunisian law, how to incorporate Jewish law, and how to think about all of this in this, as you said, sort of emerging field of international law, which really is brand new. And this whole idea of the nationality principle is pretty brand new. So this whole idea of the nationality principle is pretty brand new. So trying to kind of expand it beyond what are usually, frankly,

the presumed borders of international law, which is Europe and the Christian world. So from what I understand, Italy today has very hotly contested citizenship laws. Whether or not they're connected, you let us know. But what are Italy's citizenship laws today? And how do they conceive of the Italian nation or being an Italian national? Italy's citizenship laws today are not wildly different from what they were in the 19th century, as far as I can tell.

The thing about Italian citizenship law in the 19th century that is quite different from what is going on today is that, especially in the time of the Shimama case, so in the 1860s, 70s, Italy was still, like the borders of Italy were still very much up for grabs. And as you said, you know, the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian national unity really gets going in 1848, but it's a long process, right? 1860s, they get a whole bunch of important regions like Tuscany, the capital moves to Florence in 1861, but they still want other regions that aren't part of them. Rome and the Papal States don't become part of the Italian state until 1871. So really shortly before Nisim Shumama dies. And even after that, which is the sort of last major land acquisition for a long time, there's still all of these other areas where there are Italian speakers

that Italy thinks, oh, this should eventually become part of the Italian nation state. And so many of their citizenship laws are based on the idea that this irredentism can be partially realized through granting of citizenship. So people who are from Italian speaking regions with Italian fathers, quote unquote, can much more easily claim Italian nationality or Italian citizenship than a sort of true foreigner. And this is something, Mancini not only is, of course, the architect of the nationality principle, but also gets hired to work on the Shamama case. He gets hired by Aziza to represent the argument that Nisim Shamama died in Italian. And his whole case about why Nisim died in Italian is based on the idea that Nisim's parents came from Livorno, that his father was a Livornoese Jew, which by the way, probably isn't true,

but this is something that Nisim himself said. And again, you could say these things until there was a big inheritance dispute. Like nobody really checked up on you. Nobody cared. So Mancini's whole point was, well, you know, Livornese Jews or Livornese Christians, anybody who is Livornese, even if they have lost their Italian nationality,

should be able to recuperate it basically just by moving to Italy and saying, I want to be an Italian. And this is part of this vision of greater Italy. And for him, it wasn't so much the Livernese Jews that he was really thinking about. He helped write this into the law in 1865, but it wasn't the Livernese Jews in Tunis that he was thinking about. It was the Italians in the Fiume, right? In places like, in countries that are now Slovenia, which Italy thought maybe one day would be part of Italy. Places like Trieste, which still weren't part of Italy, but were Italian speaking and they really wanted eventually to become part of Italy.

So there was this sense of a kind of broader notion of what Italianness and Italian nationality meant. And eventually, that particular argument does have really important repercussions, especially in the 20th century around the Mediterranean, because you have all of these expatriated Italian communities in Algeria, in Tunisia, in Egypt, especially, where once the process of decolonization starts, you have a lot of people returning to Italy. Many of them, of course, have lived their entire lives in North Africa and the Middle East, but they choose to come back to Italy upon decolonization. And there's that sort of rhetoric of, well, these are Italians even though they haven't been in Italy, is a kind of a holdover from some of the irredentism that you see in the 19th century.

So one last fun question, or not last fun question, one fun question. What was your favorite part about writing this book, whether it be a specific person, whether it be working with a specific source? What was your favorite part of this project? Oh, that's a that's a great question. I would say the the most fun was trying to bring these characters to life. There's one character when we haven't really there's one sort of personage that we haven't really talked about, who is one of my favorites. He's not a very likable person. It's a story filled with lots of antiheroes, actually. But I find him to be a fascinating person. His name is Eliyahu al-Malik, or Lionel Malik in Italian and French. He was a Jew,

originally from Algeria. He moved to Tunisia as a young man and kind of made his career there in Tunis, though with the status of a French protege, because as an Algerian, he was considered French under the sort of extraterritorial regime that was, that kind of, you know, managed the status of foreigners and foreign subjects in Tunisia and the Ottoman Empire. And al-Melech basically kind of sold himself as a really good intermediary for the Shamama case. He came to Hussein, who was the Mamluk that I mentioned earlier, who was sort of appointed the Tunisian government's representative in Florence. And he said, hey, I can help you out with talking to the rabbis and getting their opinions and talking to the heirs and basically being an intermediary between the Tunisian government and the Jews. And he was also, he billed himself as a translator. He knew Judeo-Arabic, he knew Hebrew, he knew Arabic. He also seemed to know French and Italian or at least French. And he ended up getting very involved in the lawsuit. He ended up writing his own legal

briefs, which were published in Hebrew, French, and Italian. He probably wrote them first in Hebrew and then self-translated them. You know, he was the one who made some of the most outlandish legal arguments. And he was the most interested in arguing that Nisim Shamama had died, that his nationality was Jewish, that Jewish law was his national law. And I liked working on him in part because his personality shone through the strongest of all in these archival documents. And I have this vivid recollection of my very first trip to Tunis when I was just starting to work on this project. I didn't yet know if it would be a book or maybe just an article. And I got to the archives and first of all, I was like, wow, there's like dozens and dozens of boxes filled with correspondence

just about Nisim Shumama. I think this is probably more than an article. But also I started reading some of the correspondence with El-Maliyah, which is in Arabic and French, a little bit in Italian, a little bit of Judeo-Arabic. And he's, you know, it's, he's just this really pugnacious guy who just wants to fight with everybody. And he, you know, after the lawsuit is over, he's the one who's like, I don't want it to be over. And he makes another round of appeal. After 10 years? After 10 years. And then he proceeds to sue everybody else, including Hussein, his former employer, you know, for various unpaid wages and all of these things.

And he basically dies embroiled in all of these lawsuits. He goes back to Tunis eventually, and it's his son, his eldest son, who kind of settles the lawsuits after his death, probably because he was like- I don't want to deal with this. Exactly. And I remember being in the archives and thinking, wow, this is a character and I want to try to bring this guy to life. And it was working on people like him, trying to bring Aziza more to life, getting to know the lawyers, including the Italian lawyers, who are really fascinating. And there are all of these bit players, some of whom ended up playing less of a role in the book, but who at various times I spent months with in the archives, just really immersed in their correspondence. And they're all just so interesting. And I felt like part of what motivated me to write the book was the idea that

this legal case had all of these really interesting things to say about nationality, about citizenship, about this legal dispute across the Mediterranean. But it also was a chance to bring these historical figures to life in a way that I hadn't been able to do with previous projects. So that was definitely a lot of fun. The very last archival trip I made to Tunis, I also found this amazing source, which was a very detailed list of all the different properties in Tunis and its surroundings that Nisim Shumama had owned, which eventually was sold at auction by the French colonial government after the trial had gone. And that was also totally fascinating because it gave me this whole other insight into who Nisim had been in Tunis and just how wealthy he was and all of this real estate

investment that he had sort of, you know, speculated on essentially. And he owned some property. I mean, he owned these just incredibly high profile properties, one of which was the former consulate of France in this gorgeous, beautiful house built right at the entrance of the Medina, of the kind of old city. I was shocked. I had no idea that he had owned that. And it really just gave me a sense also of just how, what it was like to be Nisim Shabama

in Tunis at the height of his power just before he left. And that was also really fun. And I was able to kind of like walk around the city and try to find some, yeah, I like hunted down some of these properties. That was really fun. Well, I think anybody reading the book would be able to tell that you one enjoyed your research sounds and from talking to you and from the writing, and that you really were able to bring out these characters, which brings me to my last question about micro history. Why micro history for this particular project? Had you done micro history before? And

what can historians learn about the past through narrating a single person or legal trial community or object? I had not really done micro history before. And for a long time, I kind of resisted the label for no real good reason. I just didn't like being pigeonholed. But then eventually, I came around and I embraced it. And I think that it wasn't so much that I went in thinking, okay, I'm going to write a micro history. It's really that I discovered the case and it was so rich and there was so much there. And it felt like a story to me. You know, it really felt like this drama that I was seeing unfolding.

I mean, I did a lot of piecing together and believe me, like I went down so many- Rabbit holes. Rabbit holes and things that didn't end up in the book. But I felt like it deserved a kind of narrative treatment that I felt like was only going to work as a microhistory. I think that what I also came around to eventually also, of course, I ended up reading some of the kind of more theoretical work about microhistory. And

I would say that Francesca Trivolato's approach was the one that was maybe most influential. I was also very influenced by Simona Cerruti, both of whom, to some degree, come out of this sort of Italian microhistorical school, but both of them were also interested in kind of global microhistory. And their point was that a micro micro history, you know, it's not going to answer all of the questions. It's not going to do a great job of showing change over time. It's not going to be able to really scale up in a, you know, super convincing way. But what it can do is disrupt what you think you know about certain categories. And that's really what I found this case to do. It really disrupted certainly what I had read in the secondary literature about

citizenship, especially in North Africa and the Middle East. It's not a very robust literature, but I found it very problematic. And for a long time, I was sort of stuck in these categories, particularly the categories of citizenship and nationality, and thinking about them through this European lens. And through this case, I was able to finally sort of say, okay, you know what, a lot of this just doesn't work. And we need a whole new approach to understanding what I ended up calling legal belonging, which is this sort of more abstract category, which I felt like was much better suited, certainly to the North African context that Nisim Shamama came from, but more generally to a kind of transnational case that crossed over between North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and Europe. And so it's that sort of disruptive potential that I think microhistory can be really good at. And, and again, it's not for everybody. It's not for every project. Right. But I, I would say I mean, I think

it's, you know, I think it was also the, the luck of having found this for my second project, I felt a little bit more liberated to just go for it. And a little bit more, you know, willing to take a risk on writing a whole book about this obscure guy that nobody had ever heard of. It paid off. It was really, again, a really very enjoyable read. As somebody who's interested in the Mediterranean, but just as somebody who likes good writing, it was just good.

I appreciated the effort you put into the narrative style. Thank you. Yeah. I'm a big fan of the Ottoman History Podcast. It's fabulous, And it's such a pleasure to be on here. And, and I'm just so glad that you guys are interested in the Maghrib, you know, and that you're including books about North Africa. And I have always benefited so much from, you know, just the work that is being done in in sort of more like heartlands Ottoman history.

And I think it's such a great sign that north africanists are increasingly also ottomanists and ottomanists are increasingly also working in north africa and and this is you know this book for the first time took me to the ottoman archives the bush well formerly known as the bush con like in istanbul and that was an amazing you know discovery and i just loved working in those sources and i feel like it's it's you know, discovery. And I just loved working in those sources. And I feel like it's, you know, one real potential growth area for Mediterranean history, Ottoman history, and Muggerby history is to bring these fields together more strongly. Awesome. Thank you so much for spending this hour with me. Again, I'm so sorry. I missed you actually in Charlottesville, but this was really

nice. Oh, yeah. I'm so glad. No, and absolutely. It was such a blast. Thank you for your excellent questions. And I hope we get to meet in person soon. That concludes our interview with Jessica Margolin about the Shamama case, contesting citizenship across the modern Mediterranean. If you're looking to learn more about the death of Nisim Shamama and legal belonging in the Mediterranean, visit our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com, where you'll find a quick link to the book, as well as other resources in this interview's bibliography. You'll also find tons of other episodes on the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean world. That's all for now. I'm Brittany White. Thanks for listening.