Jessica M. Marglin
THE SHAMAMA CASE: CONTESTING CITIZENSHIP ACROSS THE MODERN MEDITERRANEAN
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022: ISBN-13: 978-0691235875
Reviewed by Željka Oparnica1
History books open with promises of hitherto unseen yet illuminating perspectives on the past. The Shamama Case, by Jessica Marglin, certainly falls into this category. With the subtitle indicating the legal focus that the author chose, Contesting Citizenship Across the Modern Mediterranean, the book offers a bold interpretation that claims to change the way we understand citizenship in modern history. Still, from the beginning, The Shamama Case offers even more. Confronting us on the first page with the death of its protagonist, Nissim Shamama, Marglin captures our attention with the skill of a thriller writer. The author invites the reader to consider all the ways in which the life and death of a Tunisian Jew, principal tax collector for this Ottoman province, head of the Jewish community in Tunis, naturalized Italian, and one of the wealthiest persons in Europe, changes our understanding of modern history. The historical stage of Shamama’s story, the mid-nineteenth century, is the rise of modern, centralized nation-states, extensive social and political reforms in the Ottoman Empire, the age of European colonization of Africa, popularization of the perception of a civilizational divide between the West and the East, Jewish position in Europe and the East, all underpinned with notions of modern anti-Semitism.
Of course, as any careful historian, Marglin opens only one, albeit rich window into this complex history with a clear premise. Marglin aims to bridge everything we (think we) know about citizenship and identity by introducing the concept of legal belonging. She makes a point of distinguishing between “formal bonds that tie people to a state” (p. 1) and produces some formal obligation on the part of the state, and the normative categories of “citizenship” and “nation(ality).” This is not a book on identity, a question of subjective interpretation of belonging but rather on a complex, instrumental, and constitutive element of social reality. Legal belonging, thus, explains the ways individuals, in this case Nissim Shamama, lived and died within multiple legal contexts, and what this meant for the societies around them. What Marglin points out by introducing the term legal belonging is the construct of citizenship as a monolith of modern history. Through Nissim Shamama’s history we are bound to learn the complex ways in which different political and thus legal contexts framed, changed, and challenged individuals but also framed the world we inhabit.
In the first four chapters, Marglin portrays the astounding biography of this Maghrebi Jew. Born in Tunis in 1805, Nissim Shamama grew up in the hara, the town’s Jewish quarter. Yet his life was shaped by his influential family, whose one branch produced esteemed Jewish scholars. His education was typical for the time; he learned Hebrew well enough to participate in Jewish ritual. Similar to the great majority of his coreligionists in Tunis, he was among Judeo-Arabic speakers, the only language he ever mastered despite his international connections. Finally, in the context of the period, namely the significant changes that shook the Ottoman Empire and the entire Muslim world, Shamama found his way climbing up the social ladder with the help of the local Muslim elite.
It was a period of great social and political changes in the Ottoman Empire, Tunis was a province within the Empire and was affected by these changes in its own way. Due to the pressures coming from ever-greedier European empires, the Ottoman state introduced series of alterations to its social system based on Islamic law (sharia). Marglin is very careful with phrasing when she writes about the context that allowed Shamama, and other non-Muslims, social mobility; she uses the word reform often paired with “optimism.” And indeed, optimistic it seemed when he became in charge for tax collection in his province in 1827. Nissim was industrious and his influence grew quickly, thus is it no surprise that only a year later, in 1828, he became the head tax collector for entire Tunis. On the less optimistic side, extensive reforms required funds, and the treasury of this Ottoman province was not exactly full which invited involvement with the blossoming speculative business with not less industrious and profit-seeking Europeans. In this setting, Shamama got involved with finding a suitable loan for the bey of Tunis. What followed were the two most predictable parts of this story: the loan taken from a French investor turned to push Tunis into deeper financial crisis and Nissim was framed for this failure as the tax collector and a Jew. Marglin explains how the combination of the two social roles made him especially vulnerable; the trope of Jewish moneylender has a Mediterranean history as well.
Still attempting to solve this problem on behalf of the Tunisian bey, Shamama left Tunis for France with his closest family. His family history is no less interesting than the role Nissim played in the intricate history of Tunis in the mid-nineteenth century; polygamous marriages left him childless and he chose his niece, daughter of his brother, and her son as his principal heirs. Due to the declining trust Nissim enjoyed in Tunis, both on the side of his employer the bey but among the furious crowd who blamed him for rising taxes, Shamama found peace in Paris, even if not for long. The Franco-Prussian War, occupation of Paris, and the Paris Commune shook both Europe and the Shamama family, and Nissim decided to depart for Italy, or more precisely, Livorno.
By moving the story to the port city in Tuscany, Marglin takes us to a specific Jewish context, both within the Mediterranean and Europe. Livorno was the center of the Italian Jewish Enlightenment, and a cultural, social, and economic center throughout the eighteenth century. By the time when Shamama settled there, Livorno has already passed its peak. In fact, Marglin reflects on the course the family took, which was opposite to the contemporary standard of migration from North to South. The African and Middle Eastern coasts of the Mediterranean offered better opportunities. Still, Livorno gave a sense of relief for Nissim and his entourage. He managed to secure naturalization into the Italian nation with his vast wealth, build a mansion and make social connections, and start a new life in the expanding Italian Kingdom. Yet, his good fortune was short-lasting; Nissim died suddenly at the age of sixty-eight after a short illness.
Up until this point, The Shamama case reads as a biography with well-researched and attentively presented insights into the history of Tunis and North Africa. Even if these chapters underpin the complexities and overlaps of different contexts, including Nissim’s life as a Jew in a changing, albeit Islam-dominated land, his futile attempt to gain French citizenship due to complex requirements, and finally his success in gaining Italian citizenship via the shortcut of purchasing a noble title, one gains an impression that Marglin wrote a biography worth reading. What remains is a burning question: can the life of a remarkable person, by all criteria, be studied, understood, and presented as a micro history? In the final chapters of her book, the author convincingly shows that this is indeed possible.
As Marglin indicates in the beginning of her study, Nissim’s death becomes the moment when the larger narratives reveal the intricacy of this unique man’s existence. Namely, Marglin broadens her lens to include processes that shaped the modern world. At the time of Shamama’s death in Livorno in 1873, the Italian nation-state was only emerging, and intellectuals and scholars were assessing the postulates of Italian nation within the wider, European family of nations. Shamama’s case turned out to be extremely complex. Nissim gained Italian citizenship but did not fulfil a certain bureaucratic protocol to make his addition to the Italian nation official. This omission brought his citizenship into question, and by extension his will, and his entire, handsome inheritance. The zestful debate surrounded one crucial aspect: did Nissim Shamama die as an Italian, Tunisian subject, (Tunisian) Jew, or stateless? Answering this question was crucial to allow for a lawful division of his wealth among many who claimed a part of his inheritance. As a number of renowned lawyers, interpreters of sharia and halakha, and translators got involved, the Shamama case became an issue of interpretation of Islamic, Jewish, Italian, and, finally, international law.
Intricacies of Marglin’s legal belonging come into forefront in the closing three chapters of the book that examine different legal perspectives of Nissim’s death: Italian, Tunisian, and Jewish. Even when she goes into legal details, Marglin succeeds in painting the bigger picture. In that way, for instance, she interprets one of the lawyers’ insistence on Shamama as an Italian while explaining how this fit into the larger narrative of Italian nationalism. The interpretations of Nissim as a Tunisian subject are no less intriguing. Moreover, they showcase the ways in which Islamic law sat at the table with the modern nation-state laws. Finally, Marglin probes the concept of Jewish nationality in light of halakha and emerging international law. These three chapters feature the practice of legal belonging, a form of adherence to different political, social, and legal contexts, while albeit not belonging to any of them fully or conclusively. Finally, Marglin does a wonderful job with portraying the effects of Nissim’s life and death on his family and brings us well into the twentieth century in the epilogue.
On its own a rich study into complexities of modern legal systems and societies they have created, The Shamama Case opens a number of intriguing and relevant topics. Scholars of colonialism and postcolonialism will find enlightening the detailed deciphering of historicization of legal systems between Europe and North Africa. On the other hand, those interested in Mizrahi and Sephardi studies will find counterintuitive inclusive histories of different Jewish groups co-existing on both shores of the Mediterranean. Finally, this is a book that is of interest to anyone who is interested in modernity or, more precisely, in its construction, as it formulates the fragile beginnings of modern nation-states, citizenship, and individuals and groups who did not and do not yet easily conform to these categories.
1 Željka Oparnica is a Jewish History Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Her doctoral thesis dealt with Sephardi politics in the Balkans in the first half of the twentieth century. She is currently working on a history of political minorities in the Adriatic.