In the venerable tradition of microhistory, my project uses the disputes over the estate of Nissim Shamama, a Tunisian Jew who died in Italy in 1873, to tell a new story about nineteenth-century Italy and its place in the modern Mediterranean. The case, which revolved around determining Shamama’s nationality, represents a meeting point among Italian, Jewish, Islamic, and European international law. I argue that Italian legal history in the nineteenth century is entangled not only with the history of its internal others, especially Jews, but also with that of the Mediterranean and particularly North Africa. I also show how Shamama’s case demands an understanding of postreunification Italy beyond the national or even nationalist frameworks in which modern Italian history is usually written.