Introduction

the introduction reflects on the history of the Jews in Italy between the early modern period and the emergence of a unified Italian state, explicitly placing Jews within the history of the state-building process. Recent calls for ‘entangled’ historiography invite us to re-examine the relationship between Jews and official institutions of power and control. The growing bureaucratisation, visible at so many levels of both secular and ecclesiastical governance, deserves to be examined for its inevitable impact on Jews and other minorities. The evolving jurisprudence that redefined both the power of the absolutist state and the legal status of resistance to state claims also defined the place of Jews in society. And even something as ostensibly ecclesiastical as the Inquisition(s) is now widely discussed in the context of negotiated state power and state formation. On these and many other levels, therefore, it seems time to revisit the paradigm of the Italian state system and the Jews.