Qā’id Nissim the Tunisian

This chapter describes how Augusto Pierantoni constructed a narrative about Nissim Shamama that diametrically opposed the one presented by Mancini. In Pierantoni's eyes, Nissim died a proud subject of the bey of Tunis; the Livornese court had thus “stripped the cadaver” of his true nationality. But before the ambitious young lawyer could demonstrate why Nissim died a Tunisian, he had to address a more basic question: whether a Jew like Nissim could even be a Tunisian national. In order to have Tunisian law applied as Nissim's national law, Pierantoni had to prove that Tunisian Jews were just as Tunisian as Muslims—which required him to weigh in on the relationship between rights and state membership. Next, Pierantoni turned to the question of expatriation; he argued that Tunisian law proscribed voluntary expatriation. The chapter then considers how Pierantoni heavily on Husayn's views on Islam. Tracing Husayn's reasoning offers a glimpse at how Muslims conceived of legal belonging in the Islamic world on their own terms—not as an imitation of European ideas about citizenship, but as an extension of Islamic legal principles.