Naturalized

The naturalist is an observer

of nature, making him conserver

of everything that grows and does

no harm, thus giving him a buzz

from observing the performance

of what most naturally occurs,

and therefore in complete conformance

of what rarely ever errs,

to all of nature’s laws conforming

naturally, meanwhile performing.

Naturalized in Britain as a child,

the nature by which I’m beguiled

is the state called Torah I

observe with a poetic eye,

its citizen, whose verse and prose,

my I.D.’s, shorter than my nose,

prove I’m a member of a nation

I joined without naturalization,

and now, binationally Ameri-

can, loyal to two nations—very!

Abigail Green writes about a wealthy Tunisian Jew who became stateless in “Belonging to No Nation,” LRB, 3/2/23, reviewing The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean by Jessica M. Marglin, writes:

Nissim Shamama, a Tunisian Jew, became an Italian count and fast-tracked his way to citizenship by royal decree. But he was also a refugee who fled his country of origin in a moment of political crisis, never to return, and lived for the rest of his life in Western Europe, without learning to speak a language other than Arabic. After his death in 1873, the civil court of Livorno declared him stateless, a ‘cosmopolitan’ who ‘did not belong to any nation, and thus did not have – nor could he have – any national law’. This verdict would have shocked Shamama, who was still bound to Tunisia by ties of family, ambition and financial obligation, but had taken great care to establish a new legal identity. If he had died poor, his citizenship would have been an irrelevance. The verdict mattered because he was so rich that it took nearly four years to establish an inventory of his estate, which turned out to be worth nearly 28 million francs, making him ‘among the very richest people’ in Europe. Despite this, he died, to use Theresa May’s phrase, a ‘citizen of nowhere’, and his estate, as Jessica Marglin details in this absorbing microhistory, became the subject of celebrated lawsuits.

Shamama was born in the hāra, the old Jewish quarter of Tunis. His family were influential but unremarkable. He started out under the patronage of a prominent local figure, Mahmud Ibn ‘Ayyad, as a tax farmer. Over time, more and more of the Tunisian state’s finances fell into the hands of Ibn ‘Ayyad’s family. Shamama then came to the attention of Ahmad Bey, the ruler of Tunisia, who eventually made him tax collector for the entire country and later receiver general. He began to acquire monopolies on the export of wood, lime, salt, charcoal and olives, and in time became rich enough to lend money to the government. The 19th century may have been the ‘European century’ – a bold new age of industrialisation, globalisation and empire – but it was still possible for a North African Jew to become one of the wealthiest men in the world.

When Shamama was making his fortune, Tunisia was on the path to financial ruin. Because this was the European century, countries like Tunisia were under pressure to modernise, in order to compete internationally and maintain their independence. But modernity did not come cheap, and the money Tunisia needed came from Europe – in the form of costly international loans, negotiated by bankers in Paris and London on terms that became ever more profitable as the Tunisian state finances grew more disordered. The result, as in Egypt, was bankruptcy. Tunisia was peculiarly vulnerable because it was not quite a state, but a semi-autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire (which disputed the government’s right to contract international loans at all). So when the Tunisian prime minister Mustapha Khaznadar set out to borrow money in Europe, he failed to attract established Continental houses and had to do business with an arriviste.

Nissim Shamama reminded me of my family who came to England before the Second World War as stateless refugees in 1939.  Whereas Nissim Shamama failed to become naturalized by Italy or France, our family became naturalized by Britain after war.  Unlike the naturalist described in the first verse of this poem, when my family became naturalized we were all observers less of nature than of halakhah, the Jewish law, whose observance is supposed to be based on a Jew’s second nature.