Nationality on Trial in the 19th Century Mediterranean

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.

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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.

Contributor Bios

Jessica Marglin is Professor of Religion, Law, and History, and the Ruth Ziegler Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Southern California. She earned her PhD from Princeton and her BA and MA from Harvard. Her research focuses on the history of Jews and Muslims in North Africa and the Mediterranean, with a particular emphasis on law. She is the author of Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (Yale University Press, 2016) and the co-editor, with Matthias Lehmann, of Jews and the Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2020).

Brittany White is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. Broadly, she is interested in the African Diaspora in former Ottoman territories.

Credits

Episode No. 554
Release Date: 27 November 2023
Sound production by Brittany White and Chris Gratien
Music: Chad Crouch
Bibliography and images courtesy of Jessica Marglin

Further Listening

	Sarah Abrevaya Stein	434 11/20/19	Family Papers and Ottoman Jewish Life After Empire
	Devi Mays	417 7/4/19	Mexico and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora
	M’hamed Oualdi & Hayri Gökşin Özkoray	362 5/15/18	Slavery and Servitude in the Ottoman Mediterranean
	Christopher Silver	498 3/22/21	The Maghreb in the Gramophone Era
	Kristen Alff	438 12/3/19	Local Capitalists in the Late Ottoman Levant

Images

‘Aziza, Moshe, and Nissim Jr., 1868 (courtesy of Gilles Boulu)



Tunis and its environs, with Nissim Shamama’s sixty-six properties, circa 1873



Shamama Coat of Arms (Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Presidenza del consiglio dei ministri, consulta araldica, fascicoli nobiliari e araldici delle singole famiglie, Busta 9, Semama, Nissim e Moisè)

Bibliography

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