Arnaldo Momigliano

The strong connection between Arnaldo Momigliano’s historical work and his Jewish cultural upbringing is today widely accepted, and not simply as regards his intellectual biography. The fact that the editors of the present volume have included him in a collection of essays entitled Makers of Jewish Modernity – the volume was the winner of one of the 2016 National Jewish Book Awards - indicates the importance and general significance accorded his views on ancient and modern Judaism. In this essay, I try to show how life, doctrine, and métier d’historien, all converge in his very original approach to the problems of Judaism in the modern world today.  Central to his position is an insistent and mandatory defense of historical truth and truthfulness, with which his commitment to what may be termed the ethical experience of Judaism is very closely interconnected.

These are very brief notes on the work of Richard Sorabji, Karl Löwith, Arnaldo Momigliano, and Hayden White. The goal is to summarize some of the main contributions of each author to the study of historiography and historical consciousness. Questions tackled include: Did Greeks, Jews, and Christians have alternate views of history--or of time, for that matter? How do conceptions of history relate to theories of time? Is the historian ever responsible for thinking about the philosophy of time? Or are the philosophy of time and (the philosophy of) history two distinct fields of inquiry?

Arnaldo Momigliano, Aspects of Hellenistic Judaism. Lectures delivered in London, Cincinnati, Chicago, Oxford and Princeton, 1977-1982. Ed. by Lea Niccolai and Antonella Soldani; Electronic resource available on the website of the Laboratorio di Antropologia del Mondo Antico of the University of Pisa (lama.fileli.unipi.it)

Modern scholarship seems to undervalue medieval commentaries on historical writings. This article intends to bring this phenomenon to scholars' attention by providing a preliminary overview of the forms and subjects of such commentaries. It examines various types of evidence including not only a few commentaries proper (Nicolas Trevet's on Livy and John of Dąbrówka's on Vincent of Cracow), but also different apparatus consisting of more or less systematic interlinear and marginal glosses and commentary-like additions to vernacular translations, mostly of Italian and French origin. It begins by considering various consultation-related signs and annotations, such as cross-references. Then, it studies the text-like features of sets of glosses (ascertained authorship and manuscript tradition) and briefl y discusses some of their patterns of display as found in single manuscripts. Turning to the contents of commentaries, the article first touches upon introductions to the authors (accessus) and upon comments on the historians' lives and the history of their writings. The article then discusses comments on different levels of meaning: first, explanations of grammatical forms, figures of speech, semantics of single words and entire fragments, then, different ways of exploring, or imposing, the inner senses of historical narration, mostly of an ethical nature. Finally, the text argues that among the different ways of expounding an historical account, comments on subject matter are especially worthy of attention from the perspective of the history of historical scholarship. Explanations of technical terms and place names often led to erudite digressions and revealed tensions between continuity and change. Expounding historical contents of entire fragments might include some elements of source criticism or tend towards a new historical synthesis. Medieval commentators were also able to read historical information beyond the factual account, often introducing subjects proper to antiquarian writings.

" The Rules of the Game, " expounded in ten remarkably bold theses, can easily be read as a synthetic retrospective or introduction to the formidable oeuvre of Arnaldo Momigliano. Indeed, this piece served as the opening chapter to his Introduzione bibliografica alla storia greca fino a Socrate (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975), and its subsequent reprints as an independent essay in several Italian journals and anthologies signal its importance for Momigliano. In this provocative and occasionally brilliantly witty essay, Momigliano sets forth his programmatic views on the ethos of the historian, as well as on the historical method and its applications in the study of ancient history. Here, as elsewhere, Momigliano is interested in detailing the link between ancient documents and their historical interpretations in later millennia. Ancient sources, he cautions, do not capture ancient realities transparently or completely, but are mediated documents whose historical value hinges, within certain limits, on the historian's analytical questions, inflected as they inevitably are by different ideological commitments. For this reason, he places special emphasis on the comparative method, stressing difference rather than similarity, and advises that historians with various areas of expertise collaborate, a point underscored throughout the essay. What is more, the essay contains the salutary reminder that the historian ought to attend not only to the surviving documents but also to the conspicuous silences and lacunae in the evidence.

This paper examines a facet in the long history of Italian Renaissance humanism: how later historians of philology understood Renaissance humanists. These later recon-siderations framed the legacies of Italian Renaissance humanism, at times by asking whether the primary contribution of humanism was philosophical or philological. Philologists-especially from nineteenth-century Germany in the generations before Voigt and Burckhardt-wrote about Renaissance humanists by employing prosopog-raphy and bio-bibliographic models. Rather than studying humanists and their works for their own merits, the authors of these histories sought to legitimize their own disciplinary identities by recognizing them as intellectual ancestors. Their writings, in turn, helped lay the foundation for later scholarship on Italian Renaissance humanism and defined, in particular, how later twentieth-century historians of philology and scholarship understood the Italian Renaissance.

According to Georg Picht, in opening his 1933 course on Horace, Felix Jacoby equated Hitler with Augustus. Arnaldo Momigliano accused Picht of lying to justify Heidegger’s adherence to Nazism. Starting from his testimony on Jacoby, whose reliability is assessed on the basis of a new examination, this paper offers an overall portrait of Georg Picht. Related to the Curtius and to the Weizsäcker families, influenced by the George-Kreis, pupil of Heidegger and Schadewaldt, friend of Adorno, Picht was one of the most influential intellectuals of the Bundesrepublik (with a particular interest in ancient and modern philosophy). Playing a leading role in public debates on school reform and in the fight against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, he went through the most important stages of German history of the 20th century, from National Socialism to the Cold War, in a difficult balance between Platonic-Christian elitism and Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

Il secondo volume della collana “Alle origini di Roma” prende in esame le ricerche di Massimo Pallottino, András Alföldi e Arnaldo Momigliano. Come per il primo volume, dedicato a quattro studiosi contemporanei che col loro lavoro hanno animato il dibattito sulle origini di Roma in questi ultimi decenni, anche questo secondo volume fa seguire alla ricostruzione del pensiero dei tre studiosi un commento, che ne sottolinea punti di forza e debolezze, allo scopo di evidenziare gli aspetti che risultano ancora oggi utili per la ricostruzione storica.

The strong connection between Arnaldo Momigliano’s historical work and his Jewish cultural upbringing is today widely accepted, and not simply as regards his intellectual biography. The fact that the editors of the present volume have included him in a collection of essays entitled Makers of Jewish Modernity – the volume was the winner of one of the 2016 National Jewish Book Awards - indicates the importance and general significance accorded his views on ancient and modern Judaism. In this essay, I try to show how life, doctrine, and métier d’historien, all converge in his very original approach to the problems of Judaism in the modern world today. Central to his position is an insistent and mandatory defense of historical truth and truthfulness, with which his commitment to what may be termed the ethical experience of Judaism is very closely interconnected.

The following chapter explores how the defence of History’s epistemological value was carried forward by some Italian theorists of the artis storicae (Robortello, Patrizi y Speroni) who were compromised with philosophical scepticism in its different branches. The author continues with the fruitful line of research, initiated by R. Popkin y Ch. Scmitt, and argues that the recuperation of Ancient philosophical scepticism had interesting projections in European historiography in the second half of XVIth century.  This work challenges and proposes a revision of A. Momigliano’s influential interpretation, according to which anticuarism, due to the influence of scepticism, and religious and political controversies was considered until late XVIIth century as a kind of imperfect history, downgraded in favour of political history. On the contrary, through the strategies developed by these Italian theorists, Vidal founds that already in the XVIth century, scepticism had a positive appreciation.

The book focuses attention on the reception of Thucydides in XIX Century Germany and first-half-XX Century Italy, when and where Historicism culminated, and examines some major historians and classical scholars of this age, that is the German L. Ranke and E. Meyer and the Italian G. De Sanctis, A. Ferrabino and A. Momigliano; these Italian scholars had a different relationship with the philosophy of B. Croce and different reactions to Fascism.
Gli storici europei hanno per molto tempo considerato Tucidide come il padre fondatore della propria disciplina, modello inarrivabile di ricerca severa e inflessibile della verità, capace come nessun altro di interpretare i fatti al di là delle apparenze. Quasi un culto, che ha avuto il suo culmine nella storiografia tedesca dell'Ottocento e del primo Novecento nell'epoca dello storicismo, riassumibile nei nomi di Leopold von Ranke ed Eduard Meyer, e che conobbe una stagione ricca ma più problematica nell’Italia tra le due guerre mondiali, quando antichisti come Gaetano De Sanctis, Aldo Ferrabino e Arnaldo Momigliano pensarono la storia antica in un rapporto dialettico con lo storicismo di Benedetto Croce. La ricezione di Tucidide si rivela così una sorta di prisma che permette di ripensare alla storia degli studi classici italiani nel nostro paese in una fase caratterizzata, per un verso, dalla dialettica tra storici dell'antichità e filosofia crociana, per l'altro, da un clima politico sempre più autoritario.

The essay deals with a specic issue of the brief epistolary exchange between Federico Chabod and Arnando Momigliano, when the two friends argued about a necrologio written by the latter for Carlo Antoni and to be published on the «Rivista Storica Italiana» in 1959. The work focuses on the use of the Italian world necrologio; both scholars used it, however, with different nuances. Momigliano’s necrologio shares several features of an Anglo-Saxon obituary. Although necrologio and obituary are mutually translated, to borrow Bridget Fowler’s words, an obituary might include «a form of critical discourse» not found in the Italian equivalent. The essay deals with few more necrologi/obituary written by Momigliano in the late 1950s, in particular two for Gaetano De Sanctis, Momigliano’s formal tutor. The analysis shows that the text for Antonio should not be regarded as exceptional, neither in its form, nor in its contents. Moreover, the necrologio for Antonio shows the influence that English Scholarship and Academia had on Momigliano (who moved to England in 1939). In particular, English-speaking Academic genres participated in modifying the way Momigliano took part to the Italian-speaking historiographical debate.

One of the greatest historians of the twentieth century, Arnaldo Momigliano (1908-1987) is known for his path-breaking studies of ancient Greek and Roman history. The encyclopedic knowledge of the ancient world that Momigliano brought to his work, however, enabled him to make connections between ancient history and the subsequent study of that history. His sweeping vision stretched from antiquity to the present day.

At its core, this collection is devoted to one of Momigliano's most celebrated subjects the history of antiquarianism, and one of his most audacious claims, that the decay of early modern antiquarianism actually gave birth to the modern cultural sciences - history, sociology, anthropology, art history, archaeology, and history of religion. Filling a gap in the scholarship, this erudite collection will prove fascinating to teachers and students of classics, history, and the human sciences.