CLH ARTICLE: Jan WITTLIN, Coverage of the Jewish people by legal solutions granting compensation related to population transfers in twentieth century Europe (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 2 (December), pp. 252-276)

(Image source: Taylor&Francis)

Abstract:

While population transfers were an inseparable part of European policy in the twentieth century, providing compensation for immovable property left behind faced formidable legal, political and economic challenges. Compensation schemes frequently failed to be implemented or left claims of significant groups of migrants or their descendants unsettled, often for several decades. The Jewish minorities, present in most European countries for many centuries and featuring a unique combination of ethnic, religious and nationality related factors were often amongst the most severely impacted. A comparative analysis of the legal frameworks of prominent cases in twentieth century Europe – the population exchanges between Greece and Türkiye in 1923, the post-war border shifts of Poland and the resulting Bug River claims, expulsions from former German territories after World War II and the loss of Carpathian Ruthenia by Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union – focuses on finding factors impacting Jewish communities, common solutions and evolutionary trends.

To read the article, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History.

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2579473

BOOK: Jessica M. MARGLIN, The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), 384 pp., ISBN 9780691235875, £28

(image source: Princeton University Press)

Book description: 

In the winter of 1873, Nissim Shamama, a wealthy Jew 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? Tracing a decade-long legal battle involving Jews, Muslims, and Christians from both sides of the Mediterranean, The Shamama Case offers a riveting history of citizenship across regional, cultural, and political borders.

On its face, the crux of the lawsuit seemed simple: To which state did Shamama belong when he died? But the case produced 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. Jessica Marglin follows the unfolding of events, from Shamama’s rise to power in Tunis and his self-imposed exile in France, to his untimely death in Livorno and the clashing visions of nationality advanced during the lawsuit. Marglin brings to life a Dickensian array of individuals involved in the case: family members who hoped to inherit the estate; Tunisian government officials; an Algerian Jewish fixer; rabbis in Palestine, Tunisia, and Livorno; and some of Italy’s most famous legal minds.

Drawing from a wealth of correspondence, legal briefs, rabbinic opinions, and court rulings, The Shamama Case reimagines how we think about Jews, the Mediterranean, and belonging in the nineteenth century.

About the author: 

Jessica M. Marglin is associate professor of religion, history, and law and the Ruth Ziegler Early Career Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Across Legal Lines.

More information can be found here.