“The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean” with Jessica Marglin

How a nineteenth-century lawsuit over the estate of a wealthy Tunisian Jew shines new light on the history of belonging.

Jessica Marglin is a Visiting Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard. Her research examines the history of Jews in North Africa and the Mediterranean in the modern period, with a particular emphasis on law. She draws on sources in Arabic, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and multiple European languages. Her first book, Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (Yale University Press 2016), was awarded the Salo Wittmayer Baron Book Prize by the Association for Jewish Studies, a National Jewish Book Award, and the Norris and Carol Hundley Award by the Pacific Branch of the AHA, as well as honorable mention for the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award by the American Society for Legal History. Her second book, The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean (Princeton University Press, 2022), was awarded the Albert Hourani Book Prize by the Middle East Studies Association, the J. Willard Hurst Prize by the Law and Society Association, the Mediterranean Seminar Book Prize, and was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award.