Italian Jewish Networks From The Seventeenth To The Twentieth Century

The volume investigates the interconnections between the Italian Jewish worlds and wider European and Mediterranean circles, situating the Italian Jewish experience within a transregional and transnational context mindful of the complex set of networks, relations, and loyalties that characterized Jewish diasporic life. Preceded by a methodological introduction by the editors, the chapters address rabbinic connections and ties of communal solidarity in the early modern period, and examine the circulation of Hebrew books and the overlap of national and transnational identities after emancipation. For the twentieth century, this volume additionally explores the Italian side of the Wissenschaft des Judentums; the role of international Jewish agencies in the years of Fascist racial persecution; the interactions between Italian Jewry, JDPs and Zionist envoys after Word War II; and the impact of Zionism in transforming modern Jewish identities.

This book investigates one of the major issues that runs through the history of Italian Judaism in the aftermath of emancipation: the correlation between integration, seen as the acquisition of citizenship and culture without renouncing Jewish identity, and assimilation, intended as an open refusal of Judaism of any participation in the community. On account of that correlation, identity has become one of the crucial problems in the history of the Italian Jewish community. This volume aims to discuss the setting of construction and formation--the family-- and focuses on women's experiences, specifically. Indeed, women were called through emancipation to ensure the continuity of Jewish religious and cultural heritage. It speaks to the growing interest for Women's and Gender Studies in Italy, and for the research on women's organizations which testify to the strong presence of Jewish women in the emancipation movement. These women formed a sisterhood that fought to obtain rights that were until then only accorded to men, and they were deeply socially engaged in such a way that was crucial to the overall process of the integration of Jews into Italian society.

This volume represents one of the first extensive studies that investigates the persistence of questions of race and racism in Italy from the liberal age to the present, through colonialism, Fascism and post-war Italy. It adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to investigate the intertwining of the cultural, social, legislative and political dynamics of discrimination in Italy’s past and present. Drawing upon the expertise of historians, political scientists, sociologists, scholars of literature and experts in cultural studies, the original essays collected in this volume show a remarkable continuity and the persistence of racism in the Italian cultural and political discourse, in society and in the representation of Others. They also speak of the shifting of practices of Othering from one group to another in different historical contexts.

After the Shoah, Jewish survivors actively took control of their destiny. Despite catastrophic and hostile circumstances, they built networks and communities, fought for justice, and documented Nazi crimes. The essays, illustrations, and portraits of people and places contained in this volume are informed by a pan-European perspective. The book accompanies the first special exhibition at the re-opened Jewish Museum in Frankfurt.

This book focuses on the experiences of thousands of Jewish displaced persons (DPs) who lived in refugee camps in Italy between the liberation of the southern regions in 1943 and the early 1950s, waiting for their resettlement outside of Europe. It explores the Jewish DPs’ daily life in the refugee camps and what this experience of displacement meant to them. This book sheds light on the dilemmas the Jewish DPs faced when reconstructing their lives in the refugee camps after the Holocaust and how this challenging process was deeply influenced by their interaction with the humanitarian and political actors involved in their rescue, rehabilitation, and resettlement. Relating to the peculiar context of post-fascist Italy and the broader picture of the postwar refugee crisis, this book reveals overlooked aspects that contributed to the making of an incredibly diverse and lively community in transit, able to elaborate new paradigms of home, belonging and family.

From its modest beginnings in 1818 Berlin, Wissenschaft des Judentums has burgeoned into a scholarly discipline pursued by a vast cadre of scholars. Now constituting a global community, these scholars continue to draw their inspiration from the determined pioneers of Wissenschaft des Judentums in nineteenth and twentieth Germany. Beyond setting the highest standards of philological and historiographical research, German Wissenschaft des Judentums had a seminal role in creating modern Jewish discourse in which cultural memory supplemented traditional Jewish learning. The secular character of modern Jewish Studies, initially pursued largely in German and subsequently in other vernacular languages (e.g. French, Dutch, Italian, modern Hebrew, Russian), greatly facilitated an exchange with non-Jewish scholars, and thereby encouraging mutual understanding and respect. The present volume is based on papers delivered at a conference, sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem, by scholars from North American, Europe, and Israel. The papers and attendant deliberations explored ramified historical and methodological issues. Taken as a whole, the volume represents a tribute to the two hundred year legacy of Wissenschaft des Judentums and its singular contribution to not only modern Jewish self-understand but also to the unfolding of humanistic cultural discourse.

This is an intellectual biography of the Italian Jewish writer and politician David Levi (1816-1898). Freemasonry, Saint-Simonianism, and the Enlightenment are his vessels for a new, secular, interpretation of Jewish identity and for innovative views on Judaism’s relation with modernity.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, traditional historiography has emphasized the similarities between Italy and Germany as “late nations”, including the parallel roles of “great men” such as Bismarck and Cavour. Rethinking the Age of Emancipation aims at a critical reassessment of the development of these two “late” nations from a new and transnational perspective. Essays by an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars examine the discursive relationships among nationalism, war, and emancipation as well as the ambiguous roles of historical protagonists with competing national, political, and religious loyalties.