Article of the Month - March 2021
 “Pontremoli’s Cry:
Personhood, Scale, and History in the Eastern Mediterranean”
(Joseph John Viscomi: History, Classics and Archaeology,
Birkbeck, University of London)

Viscomi, Joseph John. “Pontremoli’s Cry: Personhood, Scale, and History in the Eastern Mediterranean.”
History and Anthropology 31 (2020): 43-65.

Article 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 bnally 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.

Keywords: Eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, Italy, Italian Fascism, empire, personhood, microhistory, decolonisation, historical anthropology

Nomination Statement:
Joseph Viscomi's well-researched article contributes to a wide body of scholarship on migration and displacement in the twentieth century. Focusing on the life of an Italian Sephardic Jew displaced across the Mediterranean (from Izmir to Alexandria and later to Rome), Viscomi’s analysis sheds light on questions of personhood and subjecthood (or lack thereof) in the modern Mediterranean. The use of microhistory as a methodological approach for the study of the Mediterranean is innovative, and Viscomi makes good use of it to reinterpret the modern period focusing on the question of personhood in direct relation to geopolitics.

Author’s Comment:
“Pontremoli’s Cry” emerged as I tried to make sense of a collection of archival documents that I had found at the Unione Comunità Ebraiche Italiane while conducting research for my doctoral dissertation in Rome. Although two distinct intellectual projects, the stories constantly touched, overlapped, and knotted with one another. Yet, in the fragmented remnants of Pontremoli’s life (and death), I was fascinated by how every turn of his story seemed to elude common perceptions of modern and contemporary history. The echoes of his suffering were haunting, especially due to their seemingly paradoxical concreteness and mercurial nature. At times, I felt I had recognised Pontremoli. Turning to microhistory and the anthropology of personhood, I attributed this to an assumption among too many historians of the modern and contemporary period that the wealth of documentary evidence available to us means greater clarity about the boundaries between individuals and communities, and the institutions (and categories) into which they fit. At other times, Pontremoli’s experiences and perceptions seemed unfamiliar and detached, remote even. I wrote this, therefore, as a methodological exploration of how historical processes constitute the person, and vice versa. The monograph I’m writing, Uncertain Futures, moves beyond the individual to explore wider processes of community formation, the collapse of Italian fascist imperialism, and the decolonisation of the Mediterranean through the lens of anticipated, actual, and remembered departures of Italians from Egypt.

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