Nationality on Trial: A Tunisian Jew in Italy and the Making of the Modern Mediterranean

My project uses the disputes over the estate of Nissim Shamama, a Tunisian Jew who died in Italy in 1873, to tell a new story about the nature of the modern Mediterranean. The case, which revolved around determining Shamama’s nationality, represents a meeting point among Jewish, Islamic, Italian, and European international law. Such disputes offer a new understanding of law and nationality in the modern Mediterranean. While recent work has sought to connect the fields of modern European and Middle Eastern history, most seek to do so within the framework of colonialism. While a Mediterraneanist approach offers an alternative way to write interconnected histories of Europe and North Africa, most scholars consider the Mediterranean—as a space connecting people across religious and cultural divides—to have dissolved by the modern period. My project argues that the Mediterranean’s distinctive connectivity did not cease with the coming of modernity. Indeed, the very features that made the Mediterranean a coherent region in the pre-modern period shaped the changes associated with modernity in the Middle Sea. Jews were the quintessential intermediaries among cultures in the pre-modern period, and these transnational ties continued to define them in the nineteenth century. I further argue that European legal history in the nineteenth century is entangled not only with the history of its internal others, especially Jews, but also with that of the Mediterranean’s southern shores.