Jews in Italy. Three conferences

AJS Review, 1996

researched study of an often-misunderstood period of Jewish history, but also because in this original book he offers a pioneering model of the application of the Annales mentalité model of history writing to the study of Jewish history. It wrestles with two equally stimulating questions: (1) To what extent was the history of the Jews in Italy different during the Renaissance than in the preceding Middle Ages? (2) How can the historian discover the describe the mentality of Jews who lived in different periods of history? These questions, for Bonfil, are more significant than the conventional question of the extent to which Italian culture of the Renaissance influenced the Jews, because for him this question assumes that these were two distinct cultures, and assumption he will not accept.

Never before the creation of the State of Israel did Jews of so many origins live together, and in such a stimulating environment, as they did in the land they soon started calling in Hebrew i-tal-yah, an “Island of Divine Dew.” A crossroad of world cultures, Italy has been for over two millennia a haven for Italian, Sephardic, and Ashkenazi Jews, in the heartland of Christianity. The Italian-Jewish symbiosis ourished with the Modern Era, in the Renais- sance ghettos, continuing through the 19th century Emancipation, and up to the present. Thus, Jewish Italy appears before our eyes both as a time capsule, where ancient cultural traits have been safely preserved, and as a laboratory, in which such traits were adapted to constantly changing living conditions. While maintaining centuries-old traditions, Italian Jews also tested out new cultural formats that came to de ne Jewish modernity. Featured prominently among these are the emergence of women as a foundational constituency of the Jewish social fabric, the printing of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud as hypertexts, the illustration of Hebrew manu- scripts as forms of public Jewish art, the public performance of Jewish culture as entertainment for society at large, and the cultivation of the synagogue as a porous space fostering multicultural encounters. Italian Jews successfully negotiated their way across tradition, diversity, religious con icts, emancipation, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism, all at the very heart of Christianity. Their vicissitudes mirror the history of the Jewish people at large, both because of Italy’s strong cultural in uence upon many European countries, and because of its central place in the Mediterranean. Their cultural wealth progressively lost traction at the turn of the 20th century, and effectively came to a halt with the rise of Fascism and the anti-Semitic laws proclaimed in 1938. All major Jewish museum collections include important artifacts from Italy, and The Magnes is no exception. This exhibition presents a selection of manuscripts, books, ritual objects, textiles, photographs, and postcards collected by The Magnes over ve decades to investigate the global signi cance of Jewish history in Italy.

Journal of Jewish Identities, 2022

2019

2000 of Italian-Jewish History, Keynote Lecture held at the Annual Conference of the Association of European Jewish Museums / AEJM, Ferrara 2019

IN his introduction to Early Modern Jewry, David Ruderman reveals something of his intellectual autobiography by relating to three seventeenth-century figures who inspired him in his scholarly path and had a significant impact on how he conceives of the Early Modern as a distinct era in Jewish history. Each figure is connected in some way to the Italian port of Venice. Though they differ considerably from one another, in their distinctive hybridity Leon Modena, Simone Luzzatto, and Joseph Shlomo Delmedigo were each paradigmatic of the age. Modena, the enigmatic rabbinic figure, was full of internal contradictions. A man of great learning-restless and creative with no bounds, critical and sharp like a knife, courageous and questioning-he delved into the new and traditional worlds of knowledge that engaged Jewish culture in his day. Modena, as a man of many worlds and interests, a dabbler and an intellectual, holds in his person the vicissitudes and internal conflicts of the early modern intellectual experience. The second, Simone Luzzatto, while also a Venetian rabbi like Modena, was dramatically different from Modena. Standing in between the Jewish community and the Italian surrounding, Luzzatto sought to lower the walls of the ghetto. His 1638 Discorso circa il stato de gl'hebrei et in particolar dimoranti nell'inclita città di Venetia (A discourse on the state of the Jews, particularly those dwelling in the illustrious city of Venice) fused notions of Italian civic thought with emerging concepts of raison xii  Adam Shear, Richard I. Cohen, Elchanan Reiner, and Natalie B. Dohrmann d'état. This stirring apologetic for the Jews of Venice forcefully argued that their petty trading, their overall usefulness and, especially, their loyalty to the Republic combined to make a significant contribution to the welfare of the city. In a work that is cited repeatedly in modern discussions on the emancipation of the Jews, Luzzatto enunciated a new political vision for the Jews, one in which they would be integrated more fully, even if not seamlessly, into seventeenth-century society. The third figure, Delmedigo, charted a course for Jews toward the new sciences of the early modern period. Born in Crete, and of very distant Ashkenazic origin, Delmedigo's identity was no less imbued with Sephardic and Mediterranean roots. He studied medicine in Padua, where he learned astronomy with Galileo, and spent a year in Venice where he encountered both Modena and Luzzatto. Delmedigo was clearly not the sedentary type. He traveled to the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and later to Central Europe, taking with him his conflicting identities and interests, inter alia, science and Kabbalah, rabbinism and Karaism, East and West, new books and old manuscripts. Even more than the other two, Delmedigo reflects in his person the cultural image of the period to which this book is dedicated. Despite the fact that these three were individuals on the margins (or perhaps because of it), their restlessness, curiosity, and lust to travel were symptomatic of an age of changing boundaries and kaleidescopic new vistas. The Talmud tells of a stone in Jerusalem, the so-called stone of claims (even to'im). From atop this stone, in this highest city at the navel of the world, a person would announce what they had found, ask one's great questions, and stake one's claims. Ruderman's stone of claims-his intellectual touchstone-has always been Venice. Venice was not just the incidental meeting place of these enigmatic men; it is the metropolis that best emblemizes the Italian world that sparked the intellect and curiosity of David Ruderman. Writing in the late 1980s, he described this Italian Jewish world in the following words: In absorbing diverse Jewish and non-Jewish cultural forms and creatively molding them into constantly novel configurations, in patiently tolerating diversity and discord, in channeling ideas and values from one place to another as an entrepôt and clearing house of merchandise, and in allowing individuality to blossom within a framework of communal consensus, Italian Jewry was expressing its own vitality, its own creativity. Perhaps the function of mediating and correlating, of translating one universe of discourse into another, is not so passive, not so unspectacular an achievement… From the perspective of the postmodern world in which we live, one of diverse cultural lifestyles and values where no single ideology reigns supreme but where bitter acrimony and extremism hold sway, the image of Italian Jewry seems refreshingly appealing. Perhaps in its quiet sanity and dignified restraint, in its mutual respect and tolerance for competing and dissenting parties, and in its harmonizing and integrative capacities, can be located not only the essential legacy of Italian Jewish civilization but also its enduring significance for contemporary culture. 1

The New Italy and the Jews. Annali d'Italianistica 36, 2018

Published in ALBERT VAN DER HEIDE and IRENE E. ZWIEP (eds.), Jewish Studies and the European Academic World. Plenary Lectures read at the VIIth Congress of the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS) Amsterdam, July 2002; Collection de la Revue des études juives dirigée par Simon C. Mimouni en Gérard Nahon; Peeters, Paris-Louvain, 2005, pp. 67-116.