Jews and Legal Belonging in the Modern Mediterranean: The Life and Afterlife of Nissim Shamama (1805-1873)

Welcome, everyone. Um good morning, good afternoon, good evening, um wherever you are. Welcome

to um this lecture, this year's Averroës lecture that is given by Professor Jessica Marglin. My name is Ali Behdad

and I'm the director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies here at UCLA and I welcome you all to this lecture. I would like to take

this opportunity to thank professor Sarah Stein and the Leve Center for Jewish Studies for the co-sponsorship of this lecture series.

As well I would like to thank my very dear colleagues at the Center for Near Eastern Studies,

especially Professor Aomar Boum, Professor Asli Bâli, and Professor Susan Slyomovics for their

intellectual leadership and help with organizing um these lectures, this lecture series. Today's talk is part

of our Averroës lecture series that has been underwritten by a generous

anonymous donor and which focuses on Jewish communities living in Muslim lands prior to the 20th century. We have named

the series Averroës, the latin name of Ibn Rushd, the 12th century Andalusian polymath whose philosophical

works integrated Islamic traditions with ancient greek thought to point to the rich history of Cordoba's Jewish muslim relation

as a model of coexistence and the connections between Averroës and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides,

both of whom were committed to intellectual exchange and communal life across religious boundaries.

Now I would like to um turn the digital podium to my colleague and professor Aomar Boum who

will introduce our distinguished speaker.

Aomar, in case you don't know him, is a um distinguished sociocultural anthropologist and directs our Mellon Program on

Minorities in the Middle East.

His stellar ethnographic work addresses the place of religious and ethnic minorities in the MENA region.

He has published widely on this topic. His publication includes an important book, for example,

"Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco,"

which was published by Stanford University Press and recently co-edited

a collection with Sarah Stein, "The Holocaust and North Africa," which was published by Stanford University

Press as well. Aomar.

Thanks Ali, welcome everyone, wherever you are. Good afternoon. Or good evening.

I pray that you are staying safe and taking care of yourself. Uh, I don't think it is an overstatement

to say that today's speaker Dr. Jessica Marglin is a once-in-a-generation historian of the Maghreb,

mediterranean world, and North African Jews.

If you are a fan of the academic work of Susan Miller, Abraham Udovitch, Mark Cohen,

Daniel Schroeter, and others, Dr. Marglin's research is not only a package, an embodiment, and

an addition to different aspects and dimensions of their scholarship.

She has received numerous different numerous awards and fellowships including the Rome Prize, the Fellowship

at the Institut d'études avancées in Paris, and the Fulbright Fellowship. A brilliant researcher with an amazing

linguistic background in French, Spanish, Italian, literary Arabic, Hebrew, medieval and linguistic background–

medieval and modern North African Judeo-Arabic,

Ottoman Turkish, and Moroccan Darija, Dr. Marglin is Associate Professor of Religion and the Ruth

Ruth Ziegler Early Career Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Southern California.

She earned her PhD from Princeton University and her B.A. and M.A. in Middle Eastern

Studies from Harvard University.

Her research focuses on the History of Jews and Muslims in North Africa and the Mediterranean with a particular

attention to law. Her book "Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco"

published by Yale University Press in was awarded the Salo Wittmayer Baron Book Prize,

a National Jewish Book Award, and the Norris and Carol Hundley Award. Drawing on sources in Arabic and Hebrew

and a number of European languages, Across Legal Lines traces the movement of Jews among the various legal institutions

that together made up what she calls Morocco's plural legal system.

The book demonstrates the law that law could act as a force for Jews'

integration into the broader Islamic society in which they lived.

I'm really happy to see this book coming in the next probably two months in an Arabic version

under the title [...], which will be published by University Muhammad V

and which will be translated, which is translated by my colleague

Khalid Ben Srhir. Marglin is currently or Dr. Marglin is currently working on the legal dispute over

the estate of Nissim Shamama, a trans- mediterranean case

from the legal 19th century involving Italian law, Jewish law, Tunisian law, and Islamic law.

Dr Marglin is a central driver of Jewish studies in

the California system and beyond. In partnerships with Emily Gottreich at UC Berkeley and Sarah Stein

at UCLA's Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, she has steered a California workshop group on Jews in the Maghreb

and in the Middle East called [...] which support the research of graduate students and faculty

through regular workshops and conferences.

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Marglin who will be talking today about

"Jews and Legal Belonging in the Modern Mediterranean: The Life and Afterlife of Nissim Shamama (1805-1873)."

Dr Marglin the floor is yours.

Um, I don't know if blushing is visible on

Zoom but I certainly am. That was an incredibly generous and over-the-top introduction Aomar. Thank you and thank you

Ali and to Sarah Stein and for the invitation to present today. Needless to say it would be better in person but it really

is a pleasure to get to to talk to so many people and one of the great advantages of zoom of course is that

people from all over the place can join, which is it's fun to see a number of familiar names. And we're

here so thank you for being here and and I just want to also thank Christian for his wonderful logistical organization.

As always, he is so on top of everything and makes it very easy.

So without further ado because I hope to leave time for questions, um, I'll start with a story uh,

about this man Nissim Shamama who died in Livorno on January 24th 1873. He was one of the richest men in Italy,

probably one of the richest men in Europe and when he died um everybody was sort of at a loss

about what was going to happen to his enormous wealth.

And so immediately after discovering his body uh a cert– the search for a will started.

And in part the will was so important because Nissim Shamama had never had children.

And thus the future of his estate was particularly unknown. However, since even before

having left his native Tunisia for uh first France and then eventually for Italy, this woman Aziza Shamama

who was his great niece had become kind of like a daughter to Nissim. And indeed she had brought her young son

with her and named him Nissim when he was just a few days old, she and her husband Moshe and little Nissim jr. got on the boat

with the great Nissim Shimama and they fled Tunis in the middle of an uprising.

So after Nissim's sudden death and they finally found five copies of a will

in Judeo-Arabic and they just they discovered that the will divided the wealth of Nissim Shamama between

Aziza Shamama, his sort of adopted daughter and her son and then

two other surviving nephews Joseph Shamama and Nathan Shamama. And he had one

other surviving nephew, Solomon Shamama or Slomo Shimama, who everyone called Caid Momo who was

Aziza's father but an estranged father. But Caid Momo got almost nothing in the will. However as anybody who has ever studied

inheritance knows, oh here's a here's a slide that gives a bit

of a kind of diagram of how the estate was distributed. As anybody who's ever studied inheritance knows,

fighting over an estate is probably as certain as death itself. And this is certainly true when the inheritance

involves large sums of money.

So within hours after Nissim's death, the will was hotly contested by other family

members who stood to inherit if the will was deemed to be invalid.

Now, the distribution of this considerable estate all depended on

Italian courts. Right, it's because Nissim Shamama died in Italy, because he was

domiciled in Italy, it was up to the Italian legal system to

figure out how to distribute the estate. And the

um kind of relevant facts to know here is that Italy was one of the first

nations in Europe to adapt what came to be known as the nationality principle.

This was an idea that originated with this man, Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, one of Italy's most famous lawyers and a

specialist of international law before international law kind of became

a thing. In fact, he's sort of considered one of the founding fathers of international law. And he also was

one of the drafters of the Italian civil code which regulated questions like inheritance and particularly questions of the inheritance of

foreigners who happened to die in Italy.

Now the nationality principle that Mancini came up with dictated that questions of private law

including inheritance would follow the national law of an

individual.

Right, so if a foreigner died in Italy, the Italian courts would not apply Italian law to his estate but

rather French law, or Tunisian law, or whatever.

This was of course a way of kind of embodying

nationalism in the new legal code of Italy because the idea was that nationality was so important that it should follow people

wherever they went even if they died abroad.

So what we end up with is a situation in which Nissim's nationality was going to determine how

his estate would be distributed and whether his will was valid. In other words, the courts

had to determine to which state Nissim belonged. What was his nationality before

they could determine which law to apply to his estate? Nissim had left Tunisia in 1864 and in 1866 he

had applied for Italian nationality. He'd gotten a decree of naturalization from the king,

but it wasn't at all clear if this decree had actually taken effect because there were some irregularities in the way that it had been

processed. If it had worked and if Nissim had become an Italian national then Italian law would

apply to his estate.

The will would certainly be deemed valid. Aziza and little Nissim JR.. would inherit their millions

and at least that branch of the family would be very happy um.

Now you could imagine that this was something that was quite important to

Aziza and her small family and Aziza hired none other than hired none

other than Mancini, this man, the father of the national nationality principal to represent her

case before the Italian courts and to try to convince the Italian legal system that Nissim Shamama had and died had

indeed died at Italian.

However if it turned out that the problems with the naturalization decree were significant enough

that Nissim had never become Italian and that he had died a Tunisian national, then we would have a completely

different scenario. Right. In that case, Tunisian law would apply to the estate which would actually mean the application of Jewish law because

Jews in Tunisia lived under Jewish law certainly for matters like inheritance,

family law, marriage, divorce, etc., right. Now in this scenario, the will would very likely be thrown out

because it didn't obviously meet the criteria for a kosher will according to

Jewish law.

And then biblical laws of inheritance would apply because in the bible, sort of similar to in other religious traditions, and

there is a you know a clear sort of directive for who who should inherit from a person. It's the closest surviving male relatives. And in the case

of Nissim Shamama, it was it should be his three male uh his three closest uh male relatives, which are his nephews,

Nathan Shamana and Joseph Shamama, both of whom got a quarter of the estate in the will. And

then none other than Momo Caid, Solomon Shamama, Aziz's estranged father who was essentially cut out of the will.

So you can imagine right that Caid Momo in particular was very intent on making sure that the will

was thrown out and that the biblical laws of succession applied

so that Nissim Shamama's considerable estate, so that he would get a third of Shamama's considerable estate.

Now what we have here is a situation in which in order to to to do something with all of this wealth right, the Italian courts had to

answer what was really a deceptively simple

question: to which state did Nissim belong? What was Nissim's

shaman's nationality at the time of death?

Now in fact, there were four possibilities that were floated in the

course of the very long drawn-out lawsuit that kind of that that ensued. One that one was that he was Italian as I've said. The other

was that he was Tunisian.

Another was that he was stateless, that he lost his Tunisianality but never

acquired Italian nationality.

And finally there was the possibility that his Judaism, his jewishness, was in fact his nationality. And that by

virtue of being Jewish,Jewish law, was his national law unless Jewish law should apply to the state really regardless of whether he'd

naturalized as an Italian or not.

And now today I definitely won't have time to go into all four of these possibilities, so I'm

just going to talk a little bit about the arguments made for Nissim Shamama

having died as a Tunisian national, as a member of the Tunisian state.

But I'll just say that none of these possibilities were simple or straightforward. Right this wasn't a matter of just

checking the right boxes of nationality law, it took a decade of lawsuits, thousands of pages of legal briefs,

millions of francs and lawyers fees, and other fees and before resolving the case. And what this enormous sort of thorny

lawsuit offers us is an opportunity to rethink the way we understand Jews and citizenship in the modern mediterranean

and North Africa.

But before I get into the nitty-gritty of the arguments for Nissim's Tunisianness, I want to talk a little bit,

I want to sort of step back a little bit and talk kind of about the big stakes of the project and

and what I hope to accomplish in and spending so much time on this micro history right. Because of course, micro history

first of all, it is a very actually fun story and the characters are amazing and it's quite um, for me, it's been a total joy to kind of

get to know all of these historical actors and follow their

shenanigans across the mediterranean. And but, I've also found that my own thinking about the history of citizenship and nationality has changed

enormously in the process of researching and writing this book. And so I want to share kind of some of the overarching insights that I've gleaned

in a in hopes that they will be thought-provoking and perhaps even useful and to others. So I want to start by

talking a little bit about what I mean by this term legal belonging, which I use in the title

of the talk. And by legal belonging I mean a kind of neutral category to describe a bond between an individual and a state, right.

So that could be a kind of formal membership in a state, something that we usually describe as

citizenship or nationality.

And but it could also be various other forms of belonging or

bonds between individuals and states that particularly the 19th century were very very current and common but

have kind of largely fallen from view.

So for instance, colonial subjects who in some ways belong to the state, they were under the jurisdiction of the

empire under whom they lived but they weren't necessarily considered

they certainly for the most part weren't considered citizens and they often weren't even considered nationals.

And or if anybody in this crowd is familiar with the extra territoriality that sort of

characterized um legal regimes across the Islamic mediterranean in the 19th century, right, whereby these foreigners, mainly

foreign europeans and some Americans, would sort of benefit from extra territorial privileges similar to the

kinds of privileges that we accord to diplomats today.

And that the that these kinds of extraterrestrial privileges would be extended certainly to foreigners but also sometimes to

local subjects who might remain technically a Tunisian national or an Ottoman national or Moroccan national

but also fall under the jurisdiction of

the French state. So legal belonging is this kind of big umbrella category that can describe all of these different ways of belonging to

the state.

And because of that it encourages us to think about belonging as something existing along a spectrum right. And this is something that I'm

very much inspired uh in thinking this way, I'm very much inspired by the work of Sarah

Stein and others. But she in particular has written about this idea of belonging as a spectrum. So on one end of

this sort of spectrum of belonging are those who fully belong citizens full citizens with voting rights and things like that

and then the other end are sort of more you know contingent bonds such as extra territorial perfect consular protection or extraterrestrial

protection. And and it's part of the interest in thinking about citizenship as existing along a spectrum is that it allows us to think

of citizenship as multiple and fragmented, instead of as a binary right. We so often tend to think of citizenship as

something that you have or you lack. you are inside this the nation or you are outside it you are a citizen or you

are a foreigner. But in fact historically and I would argue even to a large extent

today, that is not how belonging often worked. And trying to fit the case of

Nissim Shamama into these binary categories really is a fool's errand. And in fact, it's by opening things up to this more sort of spectrum

uh based approach to belonging that suddenly the multiplicity of both belonging and sovereignty in the 19th century really

become clear.

Part of the interest in doing away with sort of more contextually specific terms like citizenship and nationality and

with this kind of binary is that I think it helps us to approach a new way of understanding citizenship in the

Middle East in particular. Right there's a kind of older narrative about Middle Eastern citizenship in

which basically citizenship is a modern invention and that in the Middle East

they they imported it from Europe just like

they imported other aspects of modernity: capitalism, secularism, etc.. And

I think there's a lot of good new recent work that's challenging that and part of what I want to encourage us to think about through this

idea of legal belonging is that belonging maybe not citizenship but

belonging is a category that does exist pretty much everywhere. It's a trans temporal trans-political trans-regional category

that certainly existed in the pre-modern Middle East and in Tunisia and in particular, that's obviously the

the case that I'm looking at here. And and so it allows us to sort of

see legal belonging in Tunisia as something that emerged from indigenous categories. And indeed that is how the

Tunisians involved in the Nissim Shamama lawsuit talked about belonging in Tunisia and talked about

Tunisian nationality. Not as this kind of import or um sort of imitation of modern western regimes of citizenship

or nationality law but rather as something grounded in Islam and Islamic law

and in the relations between the sovereign and subject. And then finally I just want to say a

little bit, I will get back to the story and the characters and the arguments

soon, but I just want to say a little bit since this is the Averroës lecture, I

would just want to say a little bit about why this story is important for the history of Jews in the Islamic world. And

what what we can learn about it. And the first thing I'll say is by following one of these trans regional

cases right the Nissim Shamama case allows us to break down these barriers that still so

often really impact our thinking about sort of Europe versus the Middle East as these two totally distinctive zones and instead

to take a more holistically mediterranean approach.

And Jews also prove particularly helpful to thinking about citizenship on both sides of the mediterranean in part because on both sides of the

mediterranean they're kind of a thorn in the side of new ways of thinking about belonging,

particularly in the light of nationalism which becomes of course increasingly important in 19th century Europe.

And nationality as a legal status right as this formal bond between an individual and a state increasingly came to overlap with

nationality as an ethnocultural category right. So having Italian nationality and somehow being Italian

came to be fused and these ethnocultural categories just never fit well with Jews because Jews were never perceived as

having the same race and obviously not the same religion as the rest of the people uh with whom

they shared bonds of belonging. And then finally, Jews are particularly emblematic of the legal

hierarchies that inevitably excluded some individuals from the rights of full citizens

on both sides of the mediterranean. And in the late 19th century, you know we have to remember the Jews

were not counted as sort of you know full members of polities in most places, including not in Europe, right at France

and then later Italy were sort of exceptions and having full emancipation of Jews and of course I

don't need to tell you that that didn't necessarily mean that Jews were

completely accepted.

And but the the interesting thing about legal belonging is that it allows us to see the ways that even when Jews lacked full citizenship they

still belonged to a state right. And that they brought up these questions of the boundaries of belonging in a state like Tunisia or

even in states like the Habsburg empire or Russia.

And it gives us, in particularly in talking about the ways in which jews belonged in Tunisia while still having a distinctive set of rights and

privileges say for Muslims, allows us to explore discourses about equality that were

really different from the ones that we think of as sort of you know, dominating modern western thought about

um religious relations inter-religious relations and sort of a secular regime. And so that's

one thing that I want to explore in particular today is these questions about uh you know contestations of what

equality might mean.

Okay without further ado, I want to get back to the Nissim Shamama case and

talk to you a little bit about the argument that was made by um a number of people

for the idea that Nissim Shamama had died at Tunisia. That he was a Tunisian national at the time of his death

um and that thus Tunisian law and therefore Jewish law should apply to his estate.

And in order to sort of talk about this

I need to introduce you to a few more key players in the lawsuit right. so I had mentioned Caid Momo,

the nephew, the estranged father of Aziza, and he was the sort of in some ways the main driver between trying to get

behind trying to get the will thrown out and.

But Momo got behind him the entire weight of the Tunisian government because after leaving Tunisian, Nissim Shamama himself had fallen out of favor

with his former patrons back in Tunis. And he had been a government official. He'd been a very high-ranking minister

in the ministry of financing. It had a lot of power. and after he left eventually a narrative emerged accusing him of having skimmed enormous

sums from the treasury. So by the time he seemed shaman died he was persona non

grata in Tunis.

And Caid Momo was working for the Tunisian government. And the Tunisian government decided that one way that they might

recuperate some of the funds from the estate that they believe Nissim Shamama had owed

to this treasury at the time of his death was by convincing Caid Momo to sign a personal contract with the government

saying, I you know I, Caid Mom, will hand over a quarter of the estate that I inherit, a quarter of

the of the inheritance that I get from my late uncle, um to the government as a kind of payment for all

debts. Now yes the government could have sued the estate and indeed it did. but that

lawsuit kind of never went anywhere. The judicial government wasn't able to assemble

the documentation that it needed to prove in Italian courts that Nissim Shamama had died owing the treasury a lot of

money. So the Tunisian government instead sort of became a kind of personal party to the case through this contract with Caid Momo

and they sent this man uh Husayn Abdullah who was known as General Husayn

who was a high-ranking Tunisian official and a kind of, you know close to the man who very soon after Nathan

Shamama's death became prime minister, a man named [...]. And General Husayn moved to Livorno and

kind of set up what was called the Livorno Mission and

where he essentially managed the judicial government's interests in the case and hired basically a team, maybe even a

small army of lawyers, to argue the case. And the first lawyer that he hired

was this man named Augusto Pierantoni. Agusto Pierantoni was again a rising star of international law in Italy at the time.

He was very active in politics, he was very well known. He was also kind of a name on the international legal scene. He

was a member of the sort of first uh founding member of the

first kind of international association of lawyers working on international law.

He also happened to be Mancini's son-in-law. And he was hired first and

then when Aziza kind of figured out that Augusto Pierantoni the super famous lawyer was going to be arguing on the other

side, right the government side the side of people who wanted to prove that

Nissim had died Tunisian. She responded by hiring the only person who was the more famous lawyer who again

happened to be Pierantoni's father-in-law. So Mancini and Pierantoni

are like the two biggest names in Italian international law and they're facing each other on opposite

sides of the courtroom in the Shamama case making opposite arguments about who Nissim Shamama was and what his nationality was at the time

of death.

Now Pierantoni, so Pierantoni's task was to convince the Italian courts that Nissim Shamama had died Tunisian. But of

course, in order to do so he he really didn't you know he had to learn a lot about Tunisian law, and he relied very heavily on Husayn. And Husayn

in some ways became like a kind of almost informal legal advisor himself. He

wrote a number of briefs in Arabic which were then translated into French and Italian and from which Pierantoni borrowed

heavily in his own legal briefs, in his own legal briefs for the case. Now when Pierantoni and Husayn set out to

make this argument that Nissim Shamama had died a Tunisian national, they were already facing something of an uphill battle,

because by this point in the case in 1878, 1879 there had already been an initial ruling from the lower court.

Everybody knew this case was going to go to appeals so everybody knew that the first round was kind of just,

you know, warm up. But the lower court uh Liberty's court of First Instance had

ruled in 1887, sorry 1877

that Shamama had never been a Tunisian national. Not that he didn't die a

Tunisian national but he couldn't even have been a Tunisian national because as a Jew, Shamama would have been barred from enjoying

full civil rights in a society, quote, regulated by the Quran which had yet to guarantee the, quote, absolute equality of all his

subjects before the law regardless of their religious faith.

In other words, the liberties court had distinguished between a subject with somebody just under the

jurisdiction of a sovereign and a national, which is which they basically used as a synonym for citizen, right.

And national was somebody who had full rights full civil rights.

A subject was somebody like a Jew, like Nissim , who would have lacked such rights.

Because Tunisia did not have religious equality according to this first this quarter first instance, non-muslims

like Shamama were just subject and not nationals and thus he couldn't have been a Tunisian national.

And so this whole idea of applying Tunisian law was moot anyway. Now Husayn took it upon himself to pen a

detailed response to this idea. Um in general. to the lower course ruling but particularly to this idea that Nissim Shamama could not have been

a Tunisian national.

And in so doing he argued that Islamic law, again he's grounding his

understanding of Tunisian nationality in Islamic tradition. And he argues that Islamic law accords

Jews full belonging in the polity. And I'll quote and the Arabic is there for those who are interested.

In islamic law nationality is based on religion for Muslim subjects and on the pack of dhimma for non-Muslim subjects. Now let me just say a little

bit about what what the pact of dhimma is. I imagine many of you are familiar with this term but but some of you may not be.

So and this the legal status of Jews and Christians uh in the Islamic world was as Dhimmis. Dhimmi means a protected person.

Dhimma in this context means protection. And the dhimmis, these non-muslim subjects, were under the really personal

protection of the Muslim sovereign who agreed to ensure that they had the right to practice their religion,

to essentially life, liberty. and property right, in exchange for their agreeing to a number of restrictions,

partly on their religious practices. So restrictions on public

uh expressions of religious uh faith, restrictions that were intended to kind of maintain a certain social hierarchy

that put Muslims above Jews or Muslims above dhimmis in general.

So for Husayn, the pact of dhimma is not just a way of ordering society according to a religious hierarchy but

also it's the basis for the belonging of Jews.

The fact that they are dhimmis is what puts them under the jurisdiction of the sovereign and what thus also makes them owe allegiance to the

sovereign. So rather again, rather than basing Tunisian nationality law in a series of reforms that were enacted

in the 1860s which is how historians have usually done it,

right, and which were very much kind of modeled on on Ottoman law and then also on on

European law, Husayn is insisting that Tunisian nationality that belongs to the

Tunisian state is grounded in the sort of basic principles of Islamic social organization. But Husayn went

even further right. He argued that not only were Jews Tunisian nationals because they had this bond of belonging

based on their status as their needs, but also that they were in fact equal before the law

to Muslims. And I'll quote: the Islamic religion accords dhimis and Muslims the same rights and

the same obligations. Now part of the kind of context for Husayn's uh insistence um on the kind of equality

before the law between dhimmis and Muslims between Jews and Muslims is that he was really fed up with the

tendency of Europeans to kind of assume that non-Muslims were systematically oppressed in the Islamic world.

And even this is something that he was frustrated with even many years before

the Shamama case. In 1861 he wrote this long letter which was actually sort of about whether Tunisian Jews should be able to participate in a new high

council in Tunis. And in fact Husayn argued that they shouldn't.

Um, but he sort of he sort of uh predicts the the pushback from Europeans who will say oh

this is so unenlightened of you, you know, enlightened countries are allowing Jews to do things. And he said you know really you have no leg to stand

on because Jews in so many parts of Europe are not full and equal citizens and he said basically just in France right. This was in 1861 so before the

full emancipation of Jews in Italy. And and you know and it is essential you know stop taking the moral high

ground when in fact there's a huge amount of difference in terms of the treatment of Jews in Europe.

Nonetheless, I think it's fair to say that the the insistence of a kind of absolute equality for Muslims and dhimmis um and and in fact the wording of

Husayn's phrase that Jews and Muslims, that dhimmis and Muslims have the same rights and the same obligations is a stretch right.

And in fact, dhimmis did not have the same rights and did not have the same obligations in Tunisia. The means for instance did not

have the obligation to serve in the military and they did not have the same rights of Muslims in terms of testimony

and other other issues. And, but I don't think Husayn was being completely disingenuous even if he was being a little sloppy with his language.

And I've discussed elsewhere in previous work uh focused on Morocco there was actually a kind of,

it seems pan-Maghrebi, pan-north African um inclination among Muslim officials to argue for the sense that Jews and other dhimmis might be

juridically distinct from Muslims but that they nonetheless were entitled to equality before the law. And in this

sense, Jews were entitled to civil rights right um. And I think this is a very

important point because again it models a different kind of equality. So for Husayn, Jews could be equal to Muslims before the law even if they weren't

equal in a kind of sense of you know in the Napoleonic sense of flattening everybody under the same exact civil law regime. And interestingly, this

this case is made by a man named Leon Elmilick who was an Algerian Jew whom Husayn hired as a kind of go-between to work

with rabbis and various shaman heirs and he essentially also says in in a

brief written originally in Hebrew that Jews and Muslims are equal before the law. And in fact, he also has this kind of long rant

against European Jews who are always flouting you know how superior it is to be a European Jew over

the you know the situation of Jews in North Africa. and you know, in another Context he sort of complains, well in

Europe, the Talmud is relegated to dusty libraries and it's only in north Africa the Jews can really live

as Jews fully you know under the

jurisdiction of Jewish law. So again Elmilick is similarly articulating a kind of different model of what equality might mean, not equality

in a sense of absolute equality but inequality in a sense of being equal before the law and having an equal right to justice. Now what happens with

Pierantoni, when he's sort of faced with Husayn's

argument um and Elmilick's argument about equality. Well, Pierantoni is of you know, is is in a bit of a tight spot because he's a good

liberal. He's on the left. And he's very much sort of you know wants Jews to be assimilated and integrated into Italian society.

And but he can't quite stomach the idea of making the argument that Jews and Muslims in Tunisia are equal

probably because he just thought it was too outlandish to be believed right.

Probably because he just thought nobody would take him seriously if he made such an argument because indeed it went against

received wisdom that Jews and Christians were severely oppressed in the Middle East.

But nonetheless what Pierantoni did was kind of take a slightly roundabout way and say that you know what matters is that Jews belonged to

Tunisia and that it's possible to belong to a state without having full and equal rights. And he actually gives the example of Italian Jews before

emancipation whom he says you know yeah

they weren't emancipated, they weren't citizens but, they belonged to Piedmont or Tuscany or whatever whatever city-state they were living in

and. So again equality is not a requirement for belonging right. And he's sort of breaking apart this idea that rights and belonging are

necessarily tied up together.

And this of course points to this idea of the spectrum of belonging that I was talking about in my introduction. So again sort of just to sum up the

arguments and then I want to leave time for questions so I'll try to kind of move through the rest of the talk fairly quickly.

I think what we see here is in some ways also the ways in which

Jews and particularly Tunisian Jews posed this kind of thorny problem for questions of legal belonging right. Most of nationality doctrine was

premised on the idea that individuals were members of a state or they were foreigners right.

Nationality law presumes this kind of boundary. but nationality law obscures the reality of the multiple degrees of

belonging that existed in the real world and that's something that I'm trying to recover.

Um I don't really have time to say much about the outcome of the case so first of all hopefully you'll read the book when it comes out, inshallah.

But I'll just say briefly that it had a bit of a tragic outcome. Pretty much all the heirs ran out of the money and everybody in the end ended up

selling their their shares to this incredibly handsome very slimy Franco-Jewish Franco-German Jewish banker Baron Emile D'Erlanger

who went around buying up all the all the possible shares of the estate.

And then um you know made off like A bandit while everybody else essentially just

was stuck with big lawyers fees, and so the lawyers and the bankers were the ones who won in the end.

But what I do want to kind of end by saying is the ways in which the Shamama case can shift our perspective um about citizenship right away from a kind

of rights-based orientation of that citizenship studies tends to take in towards what I think of as a more expansive approach invited by the term legal

belonging and one that really does fit the mediterranean context much better.

And I think what's what's fun about this case is that it places Jews and particularly North African Jews at the center of these tensions that

were really inherent to new ideas about nationality and citizenship right.

Precisely because Jews never fit and particularly Jews from places like Tunisia don't fit easily.

And it moves North Africa and the Middle East more broadly but particularly North Africa

to center stage, right. Rather than seeing these places as peripheral,

either for the history of citizenship or for Jewish history.

And I want to argue that actually we can get these really important insights into how we understand belonging more generally

from this case that was connecting Europe and North Africa.

I think that in some ways there's there's a there's a way in which sort of the recent history of citizenship tends to cloud our

perception of belonging in the 19th century, right. Because for very good reason and in very important ways, over the course of the

20th century activists and organizers and politicians have worked so hard to erase distinctions among different categories of belonging, to say that

everybody, no matter your race, no matter your religion, no matter your gender, everybody has the should have access to the same rights right.

And so they rejected this idea of fragmented belonging or the multiplicity

of belonging. But I think this this push for equality is also a bit of a flattening and it's led to something of a historical

forgetting right. And I think that it's made it hard for us to see the way in which belonging did exist as a spectrum right.

And that it you know we're kind of encouraged to just really buy the seductively simple binary of citizen versus foreigner even when that

completely doesn't fit the way that citizenship and belonging actually worked. And I think ultimately looking at the history of Jews

in 19th century, in the 19th century mediterranean, and by forcing us to see belonging in a different way, by forcing us to see the

multiplicity belonging. It can certainly help us understand the past better. But I

think it can also help us better understand the present and better reimagine the future which

is I think what history does at its best.

Thank you so much uh Jessica. It's really, it's always a pleasure to listen to your work and I think what you bring and, I'm saying this from the

bottom of my heart, I think we're lucky in the field of not only Jewish studies but also North African studies

to have a person like you with the skills, not only the linguistic skills but also the way you read text and how you interpret them.

So it's always a pleasure to listen to you and I would like, I want to

thank again Ali. I want to thank Asla Bâli, and I want to thank Sarah Stein for their support for this

program. And at the last word, I'll give the last

word to Ali to close.

Thank you very much Aomar and Jessica for that wonderful talk.

It's incredibly informative. I very much enjoyed it and thank you all for joining

us today. I would also like to encourage you all to check our website, the CNES, for other talks we have.

As you know a series of lectures on minorities in the Middle East.

And I would invite you all to join us for those talks and thank you again Jessica for that great great talk and

and to all of you who joined us.