The Shamama Case

"In the winter of 1873, Nissim Shamama, a wealthy Jewish merchant from Tunisia, died suddenly in his palazzo in Livorno, Italy. His passing initiated a fierce lawsuit over his large estate. Before Shamama's riches could be disbursed among his aspiring heirs, Italian courts had to decide which law to apply to his estate-a matter that depended on his nationality. Was he an Italian citizen? A subject of the Bey of Tunis? Had he become stateless? Or was his Jewishness also his nationality? Determining to which state he belonged took a decade-long legal battle involving Jews, Muslims, and Christians across the Mediterranean. This book traces the lawsuit as it played out between Tunisia, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire. On its face, the question at the heart of the lawsuit seems simple: to which state did Shamama belong when he died? But the case proved anything but; it took over ten years, hundreds of pages in legal briefs, and thousands of dollars in lawyers' fees before the man's estate could be distributed among his quarrelsome heirs. The book largely follows the chronological unfolding of events, from Shamama's rise to power in Tunis, to his self-imposed exile in France, to his untimely death in Livorno, Italy. Then the focus shifts to the motley crew who dedicated their lives to the Shamama lawsuit: the various heirs who hoped to inherit a part of the merchant's considerable estate; Tunisian government officials; an Algerian Jewish fixer; rabbis in Palestine, Tunisia, and Livorno; and some of Italy's most famous legal minds, especially Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, a towering figure in international law, and his protâegâe and son-in- law, Augusto Pierantoni. Nationality on Trial brings these figures to life by drawing on a broad array of correspondence, legal briefs, contracts, and court rulings in Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, French, Judeo-Arabic, and Ottoman, culled from archives and libraries across the Mediterranean. It tells a tale about individuals whose lives defied the divide separating Europe from the Middle East and the legal systems that insisted on rigid, one-dimensional categorizations of identity. In the process, it reimagines how we think about Jews, the Mediterranean, and belonging in the nineteenth century"--