Francesca Bregoli, Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti, Guri Schwarz, editors
ITALIAN JEWISH NETWORKS FROM THE SEVENTEENTH TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: BRIDGING EUROPE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN
New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2020, ISBN: 978-3319894041
Reviewed by Jane S. Gerber1
The Jewish historical experience in Italy is sui generis. Neither Ashkenazic nor Sephardic, Italian Jewry consisted of a patchwork of local communities comprised of Jews of several origins and cultures that rarely totaled 30,000 souls at any given time. Italy’s geographic position facilitated the formation of a network of Jewish cultural and economic interconnections that crisscrossed Europe, the Balkans and Ottoman territories in North Africa and the Middle East. Strictly speaking, only after the political unification of Italy in the nineteenth century can one speak of an Italian Jewry. Even then, its several regions exhibited a diversity of dialects, customs, and localisms. The several political entities that dominated the fragmented Italian Peninsula until the unification of Italy resulted in multiple Jewish identities and loyalties complicated by diverse local cultures and dialects (complicated by the multiple political allegiances). Although Italian Jewry was quite distinctive, it also reflected many of the broader trends of Jewish life in Western Europe and anticipated some of the challenges of the modern era as well.
The eight studies in the present volume draw upon papers presented at an international conference that convened at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in March 2015. Its case studies explore the institutional, economic, familial, and communal ties that bound Italian Jews to one another and to the broader Mediterranean Jewish world from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. These ties are examined through a trans-regional and transnational lens by scholars from a variety of disciplines. Three of the eight chapters contained in the volume concern aspects of Jewish history in Livorno, the Tuscan port that housed the largest and most commercially dynamic Italian Jewish community in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The volume opens with a fine introductory essay in which the editors skillfully weave the regional specificities and specialized studies in the book into a broader picture of the problematics of Italian Jewish acculturation in the modern era, relating the small local Jewish communities to the larger Jewish world. The local community, such as Livorno or Modena, thus emerges as one link in several intersecting networks of cultural, commercial, and intellectual chains. The introduction also provides an excellent discussion of recent bibliographical and historiographic trends in Italian Jewish history.
Italy served as a crossroad as well as a destination; it was a place where texts as well as merchandise were shared by scholars as well as merchants. Its famed publishing houses, initially in Venice in the sixteenth century, and subsequently concentrated in Livorno in the seventeenth and eighteenth century produced many of the Hebrew, Arabic, and Judeo-Spanish books for the Mediterranean Jewish world. Italy’s place as a publishing center, while declining by the nineteenth century, nevertheless persisted in Livorno (Reiman). Italy also served as the transit point and way station for Jewish scholars en route to and from the Holy Land. It housed gatherings and circles of secret Sabbateans who met to exchange the latest pronouncements from the circles of the mystics of Safed (Goldish). Emissaries from the Land of Israel who sought donations in Europe for the upkeep of the yeshivot and economically dependent communities in Palestine would sojourn in Italy, sometimes for many years, receiving funds collected further north in other European centers of Jewish life (Lehmann) that were then transmitted via Italy to Istanbul and Palestine. For uprooted European scholars at the time of the advent of Nazism, Italy also became a refuge and a not unimportant, albeit brief, center of Jewish scholarship (Faccini). In the aftermath of World War II, Italian displaced persons camps served as collection points and jumping off places for survivors of the Holocaust en route to Palestine (Marzano). In the anxious years of reconstruction following World War II, Jewish philanthropic agencies from the pre-war period assumed a vital role in rescue and rehabilitation (Catalan), maneuvering among themselves and with international refugee agencies for the rescue of a remnant of pre-war Jewry. A study of the vicissitudes of idealistic Jewish émigrés to Palestine between 1945 and 1948 concludes the diverse offerings in the volume (Simoni). In sum, Italy’s geographic position endowed its Jewish communities with many essential roles as intermediaries of ideas and rescuer of beleaguered Jews.
The sources employed in the several essays are quite rich and varied; family archives, letters of introduction of itinerant emissaries from Jerusalem penned by the rabbinical authorities in Constantinople and inserted into minute books of local Jewish communities (Lehmann), the archives of the Joint Distribution committee, and the Zionist archives on Italian Jews in Israel after the establishment of Israel in 1948 (Simoni), and nineteenth century Jewish publication inventories of the Benamozeghs of Livorno (Boulouque).
The Jewish personalities examined in the volume reinforce the reality of Italian Jewry as a multifaceted and multi-ethnic community. It was not cut off from the broader currents coursing through the Jewish world of its time: the Sabbetean mystic R. Abraham Rovigo (ca. 1650-1714) hosted a like-minded circle of followers in his home in Modena (Goldish. The printing activities of Elia Benamozegh (1823-1900) (Boulouque,), throw new light on this little known facet of the scholar’s life as well as the continued liveliness of the printing world in nineteenth century Livorno. By the nineteenth century, Livorno’s economic importance was in decline, eclipsed by Genoa, Marseilles and, especially, Trieste. Its networks of business and family ties with Tunisia played a critical role in Jewish communal life in Tunis as well as in the aspirations of Italian colonialism in North Africa. The impact of Tuscan citizenship and especially Livornese connections on Jews living in Tunisia (Reiman) is amply illustrated through the study of the archives of several generations of the Moreno family. In the twentieth century, pioneering Jewish scholarship in Europe on the development of early Christianity and medieval Islam flourished in Germany and Hungary, but also found a niche in Italian universities among native and refugee Jewish scholars.
The many themes touched upon in the volume emphasize the connectedness of Italian Jewry to the intellectual developments in the broader Jewish world. They also recall the place of Italian Jewry, particularly of Livorno, within the Mediterranean world. While its analysis of Jewish identities within a multi-ethnic and multinational context is unevenly developed in a few of the chapters, it does shed new light on the many commercial, rabbinic, and philanthropic Italian Jewish networks of the early modern and modern period. Its exploration of these ties that bound the many Italian Jewish communities to one another and to the wider Jewish world is enriched through its trans-regional and transnational approach.
1 Jane Gerber is Professor Emerita of History at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.