As Jessica Marglin argues, the Shamama case offers an ‘insight into the way legal belonging was proved – not only in the Shamama lawsuit but in countless cases both before and since: as a narrative’. Scholars of European nationalism have long understood that citizenship and nationality cannot be readily equated, and that legal and ethnocultural belonging are not the same thing, but there is nonetheless a benefit in viewing these issues through the eyes of a Tunisian Jew.