This volume focuses on the intricate, interwoven sets of ties that connected Jews in the Italian peninsula with other Jewish groups in wider European and Mediterranean circles from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. It originates from an international conference held in New York City in March 2015, and cosponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University, and other institutions,1 which aimed to examine early modern and modern Italian Jewish history in a transregional and transnational context. The eight American and European scholars featured in this collection move beyond a geographically bound approach to the history of the Jews of Italy to explore a variety of contact situations between Jews living in Italy and other Jewish groups, institutions, and communities. They illustrate, from diverse perspectives, the sophisticated networks of familial, economic, institutional, and cultural ties that connected Italian Judaism to Europe and the Mediterranean.
The chapters present specific case studies that address rabbinic connections and ties of communal solidarity in the early modern period; the circulation of Hebrew books as a vehicle of connectivity, and the complex overlap of national and transnational identities after emancipation; the Italian side of the Wissenschaft des Judentums and the impact of foreign, German-educated rabbis on the Italian intellectual debate; the role of international Jewish agencies in providing assistance in the years of Fascist racial persecution; the interactions between Italian Jewry, Jewish Displaced Persons, and Zionist envoys in the aftermath of World War II; and the impact of Zionism in transforming modern Jewish identities.
This selection, which highlights the mobility of ideas and people, the role of the Tuscan hub of Livorno as a crossroads of interactions, and Jewish solidarity networks across the ages, reflects our aim to study the history of Italian Jews not in isolation, but within a broader Mediterranean and European framework, highlighting the circuits of exchange that shaped its experience. By doing so, we situate the Italian Jewish trajectory within a transregional and transnational context that is mindful of the complex, at times conflicting, and certainly evolving set of networks, relations, and loyalties that characterized diasporic Jewish life from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. By tracing developments in translocal relations over a period of four centuries, at the same time the volume seeks to problematize the passage from early modern transregional ties to modern transnational relations, illuminating whether new contact opportunities arose and how existing ties evolvedâwere they maintained over time or rather eroded as different priorities took center stage? An important question that needs to be addressed is how traditional diasporic connections rooted in early modern practices of commerce, communal solidarity, and the circulation of legal and religious knowledge changed as a result of the end of the ancien rĂ©gime corporate states and the creation of the unified Italian kingdom, with its powerful sense of nationhood. Can we speak of any continuities between the practices and ideals that connected Jewish subjects in the old Italian states with their coreligionists across the Mediterranean and in northern Europe, and those that connected Italian Jewish citizens to other Jews in modern nation states?
1 Exceptional and Representative, Local and Global
By focusing on transregional and transnational diasporic relations it is possible to nuance the dichotomy of âexceptionalityâ and ârepresentativenessâ engrained in dominant historiographic narratives on Italian Jewry, and to offer alternative ways of conceptualizing its experience. While the Italian Jewish settlement has been the object of important researchâexamining cultural, socio-economic, and institutional aspectsâit has at times been considered as a peculiar and often isolated case. Indeed, Italian Jews have always been a very small fraction of the world Jewish population.2 But despite their small number, the history of this community has long fascinated Jewish historians, with the Renaissance, the process of ghettoization, and the Fascist period receiving the most sustained scholarly attention among Italian and non-Italian specialists.
The notion that the trajectory of Italian Jewish history was somewhat atypical can be most prominently associated with the formulation by Salo Baron in the 1937 edition of his pioneering Social and Religious History of the Jews. There he argued that the Jews of Italy had experienced an early âeconomic emancipation,â together with an âintellectual emancipationâ that anticipated the Berlin and Eastern European Haskalah (the same phenomenon was also ascribed to seventeenth-century Sephardic Jews in the Netherlands).3 Italian Jewry was, in other words, both unique and exemplary avant la lettre. A different take on Italian Jewish uniqueness had been expressed by Isaiah Sonne in a 1924 essay in which he argued that Italian Judaism, throughout its history, had not developed an independent, indigenous tradition, but had rather been a vessel for Jewish influences that had first originated in distant communities and later been transported to the Italian peninsula. As a result of this atypical development, Italian Jewry lacked, according to Sonne, a clear profile and character. Italian Jews were supremely tolerant of diverse cultural forms, but they had not been able to leave a distinctive mark on world Judaism.4
An approach that highlights the peculiarity of the Italian Jewish case is still common when it comes to early modern studies, although Sonneâs negative evaluation has been rejected.5 For instance, elaborating on Baronâs claim, David Myers has recently represented the Italian Jewish experience as both an extraordinary case apart from the better known Ashkenazic and Sephardic examples and as a model of general Jewish history on a small scale, because its pre-emancipation social dynamics anticipated questions and problems of acculturation that would become evident later on among other, numerically more influential, European communities.6
The rhetoric of uniqueness has also been incessant and widespread in the representation of the modern period, with different figures such as Arnaldo Momigliano,7 Antonio Gramsci,8 Cecil Roth,9 and Attilio Milano10 all placing a particular emphasis on the extraordinary speed and quality of the integration process in unified Italy and on the virtual absence of anti-Semitic prejudice. The representation of a country in which modern anti-Semitism did not take root gained traction after World War II, as the âgood Italianâ became a counter image to that of the âevil German.â The âmyth of the good Italianâ was coherent with the general anti-Fascist narrative that lay at the foundation of the Italian Republic, centered on the representation of Fascism as a betrayal of the authentic spirit of the nation, and offered reassurance to the former victims of persecution in their search for reintegration in the post-war order.11 Such a simplistic representation certainly contributed to set the Italian case aside; it had significant echoes also in scholarly circles, finding support in Renzo De Feliceâs pioneering attempt to write a history of the Jews in Fascist Italy,12 and then enjoying a long-lasting success in international historiography, only to be challenged by scholars since the late 1980s. A lively season of original research has developed since then, leading to the publication of several novel contributions and to an overall reassessment of the history of the Jews in Italy both in the age of emancipation13 and during the Fascist period.14
A focus on local contexts has additionally characterized Italian Jewish studies both in Italy and abroad. In recent years, in particular, much historiography on early modern Italian Jews has concentrated on the topic of acculturation, investigating intellectual and social relations, tensions, and conflicts between Jews and Christians, and their institutions, within their immediate regional context. Within the corporate society typical of early modern Europe, Jews living in the Italian states expressed clear local allegiancesâsocial, political, and intellectualâwhich historians have investigated with detailed studies.15 Such a sustained local attention proceeds also from understandable historiographic caution, given the political fragmentation of the pre-unitary Italian peninsula and its uneven Jewish geographical distributionâafter the expulsion from the Spanish-dominated southern areas and with the start of ghettoization, Jewish life concentrated in selected areas of central and northern Italy. For the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the exploration of Jewish reactions to the processes of nation building and nationalization similarly points to a fundamental emphasis on relational aspects of the Jewish experience on Italian soil. These approaches attest to a generalized tendency to investigate the Italian Jewish reality primarily alongside and within its Italian non-Jewish environment.
Such a focus has greatly expanded our understanding of the early modern regional specificities of Italian Jewish history, such as the power dynamics between Jewish communities, state authorities, and the Church, and the intense, uneven, and always complex social and intellectual relations that took place between Jews and their neighbors.16 For the modern period, careful studies have illuminated the nuances of the process of nationalization of the Jewish minority, reframing the issue of anti-Semitism in unified Italy and, most of all, emphasizing the originality, autonomy, and the serious implementation of Fascist persecutions. Yet, as a result of the intense scrutiny of the local/national contexts, the parallel and at times competing axis of bonds and exchanges in which Jews living in Italy participatedâthose that involved other, non-Italian Jewish groups to the south, the east, and the north of the peninsulaâhas been relatively neglected.17 By so doing, historians may risk losing track of the diasporic entanglements that connected the small Italian Jewish minority to the rest of the Jewish world, as well as ignoring possible parallels between the experiences of this group and those of other Jewish communities. This is especially true for the study of the modern era, a period when the nation becomes an unavoidable and omnipresent heuristic and interpretive category that can be deconstructed and analyzed but not ignored.
2 Italian Jews and Translocal Ties
Italian Jewry was embedded in webs of supra-regional and transnational relations articulated at the individual, familial, and communal level, which resulted in overlapping identities, tested internal and external bonds of social and political allegiance, and provided outlets for border-crossing opportunities, whether cultural, thanks to the spread of ideas, rituals, and practices from Jewish center to Jewish center, or physical, through the actual movement of people from region to region. While it is certainly true that the complex upheaval determined by the first (1790s) and second emancipation, along with the nationalization of the Jewish minority, transformed some of these bond...