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ABSTRACT
This article explores the relationship between personhood and participation in wider political worlds that encompass (and dismantle) national, transnational and regional scales. It does so through a microhistorical study of Moise Pontremoli, an Italian Sephardic Jew displaced from Izmir to Alexandria and finally to Rome between the 1920s and the 1960s. After having returned to Egypt from the First World War as a ‘wounded Italian veteran’, Pontremoli purchased a plot of desert land from local Bedouin. This land became home to his experimental farm. He wrote expressively on his greening of the desert landscape during the interwar years, until he was cut off from it by the Second World War. Between 1952 and 1956 local authorities destroyed his crops and sequestered his land. He petitioned the Egyptian Sequestrate and received minor compensation; then, in a much longer and unanswered battle, he pursued Italian diplomatic authorities for what he saw as their abandon in favour of state interests and a diplomacy of political ‘friendship’ with Egypt’s emergent nationalist regime. He wrote obsessively to journalists, politicians, lawyers, human rights activists, and to anyone who might listen to his case. With great frustration, Pontremoli repatriated in 1963 and settled in Rome to continue his campaign. His letters gained attention only in the turbulent years of late-1960s Italy, just before his death in 1968. This article argues that Pontremoli’s articulation of personhood through his wounded body and lost land knotted histories of migration, empire, war, and decolonization into one tale of twentieth-century Mediterranean discontent.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
* This essay has benefited from comments from Pamela Ballinger, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Kim Bowes, Dario Gaggio, Jessica A. Marglin, Erik Mueggler, James A. Palmer, Maria Robles Gila, Aya Sabry, and the journal’s anonymous reviewers. I am especially grateful to Gisele Levi for the numerous conversations we had at the archives of the Unione Comunità Ebraiche Italiane.
1 It is worth noting that between 1914 and 1962, the Egyptian Pound was pegged to the British pound sterling.
2 Unione Comunità Ebraiche Italiane (UCEI), Fondo Moise Pontremoli (MP), ‘successione’.
3 In a sense, Pontremoli resembles Mennochio in Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (Citation1980). Although debates about ‘cosmopolitanism’ are beyond the scope of this article, Nora Lessersohn (Citation2015) has made a similar methodological claim for articulating what she calls the ‘provincial cosmopolitanism’ of late Ottoman Anatolia through the writings of an Armenian shoemaker.
4 I emphasize this point to bring the focus away from reductive claims about Mediterranean ‘cosmopolitanism’ that pervade analyses of Mediterranean port cities. Instead, I aim to highlight the more complex processes that transformed geopolitical configurations of the late-nineteenth and twentieth century Eastern Mediterranean. See Tabak (Citation2007) for a thorough discussion of the political economic changes that influenced dynamics in and between Mediterranean port cities and in which regimes of legal pluralism formed and from which they eventually disappeared.
5 I do not intend to develop a phenomenology of the self here, but rather to show that personhood can be understood as a vehicle for historical time, a coming together of multiple, layered histories. Victor Turner (Citation1980:, 158) contends that indeterminacy embraces ‘the possibility of becoming’, and I accept this for Pontremoli insofar as that ‘possibility of becoming’ is placed in dialogue with historical processes that originate (and terminate) outside of Pontremoli’s perception and individuated experience.
6 For an anthropological understanding of how these categorical identities can work at the temporal scale of the moment, see Katherine Ewing (Citation1990); important ideas regarding the question of continuity and narrative identity instead are discussed in Pierre Bourdieu (Citation1987); see also Gérome Truc (Citation2011). For the idea of ‘games of scale’, I refer to the collection of essays carrying the same title, specifically to the introductory chapter, in which Jacque Revel (Citation2006) argues that the variations of scales between social actors and collective events permits the microhistorian to pass from one story to another.
7 Archivio Cancelleria Consolare del Cairo (ACCC), Nessim Pontremoli di Behor - 1914.
8 For further historical analysis of the capitulations and their increasingly complexity—and in Turkey eventual abolition—see Ahmad (Citation2002).
9 Archivio Storico Diplomatico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri (ASDMAE), Contenzioso diplomatico 1857–1937, Pacco 4, ‘Protetti e cittadini italiani in Turchia’.
10 Evidence of this is amply recorded in the archives of the Italian diplomatic representation in Cairo. ASDMAE, Ambasciata Cairo (AC). See also Petricioli (Citation2007).
11 ACCC Ralph Pontremoli (167); UCEI, MP, D.S. ‘Nasser mi ha tolto 50 anni di vita’ Moise Pontremoli, Lo Specchio, 17 March 1968.
12 Census information for 1907 counts Italian residents at 34,926, while in 1917 the population had grown to 40,198 (Amicucci Citation2000, 82).
13 Personal communication, Rosina Roscioli 7 October 2012.
14 Archivio Central dello Stato (ACS), Presidenza dei consigli ministri (PCM), 15/3 68251 Guido Fiore Miraglia to Pella 3 December 1953.
15 ASDMAE, AC 1923 B133, fasc. ‘Associazione Mutilati di Alessandria d’Egitto’.
16 This is something that the surviving members of his extended family fail to explain. They too do not know how he gained such intimate knowledge of desert agriculture. Dario Israel and Sarina Roscioli (née Pontremoli), personal communication.
17 The engineer who drew up the map of Pontremoli’s land was Carlo Tortelotti, one among the founders of the Dante Alighieri Society in Izmir, who had also been displaced by the events of Italo-Turkish war. See http://www.giustiniani.info/italianiasmirne.pdf.
18 That this exchange happened in 1938 is important. It was the same year that the Fascist regime enacted the racial law decrees, one of the first explicit acts of state-sanctioned racial policy and a sign of the regime’s acquiescence to German Nazism. The implications of this act may suggest that Pontremoli was ‘taking sides’ in the broader political spheres and imperial rivalries. UCEI, MP, II scatalone.
19 Personal communication, Dario Israel 28 March 2015.
20 CEAlex (Centre d’Études Alexandrines), extrait 1939 Survey of Egypt.
21 ‘anni di lavoro di pioniere nelle terre arride e desolate del Deserto, che ho trasformato in giardini lusse [sic]’. UCEI, MP, ‘Busta 3’.
22 For more on the role of political fascism in Egypt, see Gershoni and Jankowski (Citation2010) and on the specific case of Italian fascist interests in Egypt.
23 It should be added that this is reflected in both Italian sources, which closely observed any movement of individuals or groups hostile to the regime in Egypt, and British sources, where the search for antifascist Italians who could serve as potential informants and allies for British authorities continued to prove fruitless.
24 Angelos Dalachanis illustrates that, from within, the abolition of the Capitulations was seen as the beginning of the end for the community of Greek residents in Egypt. Indeed, Dalachanis’s narration of the ‘exodus’ of Greeks from Egypt chronologically begins in 1937 (Citation2017, 17). Elsewhere I have argued that the departure of Italian residents from Egypt encompasses a longer durée history, which includes an anticipation of the consequences of an end to extraterritorial jurisdiction (Viscomi Citation2019). See also Hashish Citation1994 and Morsy Citation1984a, Citation1984b.
25 UCEI, MP BXIV; see also BI, ‘certificat d’internement’ 24 June 1940, which does not - in contrast to most internees - contain a date of release.
26 UCEI, MP, BXIV, permission to travel for a two-month long stay granted on 11 October 1945 from the Military Governor’s Office.
27 For a comprehensive analysis of the Company Law, see Karanasou (Citation1992).
28 UCEI, MP, BXVI Le Progres Egyptien ND on Law 37 of 1951 forbidding the ownership of agricultural lands by foreigners.
29 Archivio Consolato Generale Alessandria d’Egitto (ACGA), Sidi Mosè di Daniele 1906.
30 ‘ … il medesimo parli correntemente la nostra lingua, abbia dimostrato sinceri sentimenti d’italianità e possa ritenersi assimilato all’ambiente nazionale’. ACCC, Pontremoli Nessim di Behor - classe 1914.
31 ASDMAE, AP Egitto 1956 B1006 rapporto consolare 1954 30 June 1955.
32 The French government faced similar dilemmas in developing policy around repatriation in the decolonization of Algeria. See Shepard (Citation2008) and Mandel (Citation2014).
33 MAE AP1955 Egitto B1006 ‘Rapporto Consolare 1954’ Alexandria 30 June 1955.
34 ‘di sacrifici per Patria carità ne abbiamo fatti molti e in silenzio’ UCEI, MP, 2° scatalone; ACS, PCM 15/3 68251, Guido Fiore-Miraglia to Giuseppe Pella 3 December 1953, Guido Fiore-Miraglia to Janelli 17 March 1953.
35 A similar letter had been sent from the president of the Associazione Mutilati ed Invalidi di Guerra, Guido Fiore-Miraglia in 1952, noting that neglecting to abruptly and properly distribute the 150 thousand LE, Italian institutions and services were left in a state of disarray and disorder and ‘l’Autorità Consolare ha favorito la divisione del patrimonio comune’. ACS, PCM 15/3 68251, Guido Fiore-Miraglia 14 March 1952.
36 ‘il danno verrebbe a pesare con conseguenze enormemente superiori, sulle spese di rimpatrio e nella responsabilità di nuove sistemazioni in un Paese [Italia] già troppo intensamente popolato’. UCEI, MP, 2° scatalone.
37 ASDMAE, AP Egitto 1955 B1006 Appunto 20 October 1954.
38 UCEI, B.3.
Nel 1956, per assicurarsi le concessioni petrolifere Egiziane che appartenevano “alla Shell” nel Sinai, L’ENI ha imposto una politica filonasseriana al governo, che lo ha docilmente secondato … Le autorità diplomatiche italiane d’Egitto PIU CHE LA POLITICA DELL’ITALIA, HANNO FATTO QUELLO DELL’ENI.
39 UCEI, B.10.
40 UCEI, MP, BXVI 3 May 1956.
41 UCEI, MP, BX processo 3 September 1957.
42 UCEI, MP, BX, Judgement of experts 16 October 1958, note opposition ND.
43 I use ‘historic’ in the sense described by historian Claudio Fogu (Citation2003).
44 UCEI, MP, BIII, Moise Pontremoli to Virgilio Lilli, and Virgilio Lilli ‘Il vecchio emigrato rimpiange l’Egitto “paradiso degli occidentali”’, Corriere della Sera 14 June 1958.
45 Their initial organizations aimed to procure legal and representative rights for members of this ‘displaced’ community, and was quite unlike the later form of associational life that surfaced among repatriates and refugees from formerly colonial territories. See Borutta and Jansen (Citation2016) and Karttunen (Citation2013).
46 UCEI, MP, BX ‘Promemoria’.
47 ‘Avevo creato un paradiso nel deserto, e speravo di finirci i miei giorni. Quando ho perduto tutto, e tutto è stato distrutto, sono tornato in Italia per morire qui’. UCEI, MP, D.S. ‘Nasser mi ha tolto 50 anni di vita’ Moise Pontremoli, Lo Specchio, 17 March 1968.
48 UCEI, MP, B.III ‘Il deserto e i suoi pericoli’.
49 UCEI, B.X ‘A l’ombre des pyramides’. ND.
50 Turner, ‘Social Drama’, 168.
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