Storia degli ebrei nell'Italia moderna. Dal Rinascimento alla Restaurazione

This work presents a nuanced history of Italian Jewry in the early modern era, from the Renaissance to the Restoration, ending in approximately 1825. Tracing a dense web of relationships, Marina Caffiero situates Italian Jewish communities not only in their specific contexts on the Italian peninsula, but also in broader networks extending through Europe, to North Africa, the Levant, and beyond. Throughout the book Caffiero presents Italy’s Jewish communities as dynamically engaging with their surrounding neighbors and environments, and insists upon mobility (intra- and extra-peninsular alike) as a key aspect of the Jewish communities she depicts. The book is divided into three sections: the first addresses what the author terms the “geopolitics” of Italian Judaism in the 15th and 16th centuries; second, the establishment of ghettoes in the 17th century; and third, the age of emancipation from the late 17th-early 19th centuries. In the first section, Caffiero examines Jewish communities in situ as it were; a quick survey of the places she studies reveals the diversity of political and socioeconomic contexts they faced: Bologna, Ancona, Ferrara, Venice, the Marches, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, Livorno, Lombardy, Liguria, Piedmont. She details the fallout of the Alhambra Decree of 31 March 1492: not simply the arrival of the Sephardim from the Iberian peninsula, but the friction and conflicts as Italian Jewish communities struggled to incorporate the newcomers, and the resulting various “nuclei” of Jewish “nations”. In addition to the arrival of Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the late 1400s, Jews continued to migrate to central and northern Italy from the south, the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily, a trend in motion since at least the late Middle Ages. Women’s roles in these Italian communities command a chapter here; and Caffiero uses the extraordinary life of the “marrana” Beatrice Mendes de Luna/Gracia Nasi to show how these larger historical events affected individuals and women in particular. The book’s second section covers the “century of the ghetto,” when that institution of segregation—which would ultimately confine approximately 75% of the Italian Jewish population—was promoted in Italy by the papacy. In this section, Caffiero is especially able to draw upon her prior scholarship on questions of relations between a majority and a minority, specifically, forced conversions and methods of religious indoctrination, such as Rome’s House of Catechumens (“Casa dei catecumeni”). She also addresses strategies of survival and resistance to ghettoization. Despite ghettoization, Caffiero argues, ghettos and their inhabitants were integral to the urban fabric of cities such as Turin, Mantua, Modena, Florence, Pesaro, and Rome; and the figure of the converted Jew played a significant symbolic social role. Moreover, Caffiero delves in detail into the flourishing of Jewish culture in the 18th century, a flourishing nourished by exchanges with non-Jewish neighbors and embodied in such figures as Leon Modena/Jehuda, Simone Luzzatto, Debora Ascarelli, Sara Copio Sullam. The third section of the book addresses the late 1700s to early 1800s, when reforms opened the way to emancipating Italy’s Jews, premised however upon assimilation. Caffiero turns to the lives of individuals again to demonstrate how Jews grappled with the Enlightenment—Benedetto Frizzi, Isacco Lampronti et al—and underscores the problems inherent in Enlightenment ideas of Jewish “regeneration” and the diversity of responses (Jewish and non-Jewish alike) to the 1789 Revolution and Napoleon. But by 1815, Restoration governments had negated the emancipatory reforms and ghettos would reappear. Finally, in the last chapter, Caffiero traces the various arguments concerning the distinctions between traditional Catholic anti-Judaism (“l’antigiudaismo cattolico”) and modern anti-Semitism: the development of the latter, she concludes, though evolving in stages, depended upon the ground prepared.

Le comunità ebraiche dell'Italia moderna erano numerose e per la maggior parte , a partire dal 1516, con il prototipo di venezia erno rinchiuse in un ghetto, istituto che si puà definire una "invenzione " della Controriforma. Il libro discute la presenza ebraica nella societò italiana, la sua cultura, l'economia,la mobilità, la capacità di adattamento e soprattutto gli scambi con il contesto cristiano. Esamina la nascita dell'antiebraismo e il suo rapporto con l'antisemitismo contemporaneo.