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AN INVITATION TO VISIT J-ITALY
A new portal begins to build an English language cultural and geographical map of Jewish Italy. Marche and Apulia are the first regions to be featured. What follows is a guide to explore and contribute to the site.
Arnaldo Momigliano on the Jews of italy
Italian history is always a difficult subject. Behind it and inside it there is the extraordinary variety of regional and urban units: the history of Florence is not the history of Pisa, or even that of Arezzo or Siena or Volterra. Where the Jews are involved, the differences in local traditions are increased by substantial local differences in the past treatment of Jews. Much of southern Italy and Sicily-splendid Jewish centers in the Middle Ages-lost their Jews in the sixteenth century during the Spanish rule. It is sometimes forgotten that Jews were kept out of most of Lombardy for more than a century until the Austrians replaced the Spaniards in 1714. Read
Leo Levi on Music
What is the status of the minhaghim with regard to liturgical music and its distribution in Jewish Italy today? The goal of this paper is, first and foremost, to report on my findings in contemporary Italy. Then, in order to better contextualize my research, I will also go back and trace the history of these musical traditions from the Middle Ages. It is a difficult task but perhaps not an impossible one. Read
Annie Sacerdoti on Museums
In 1930 in Livorno, Rabbi Alfredo Toaff, with the help of the painter Ulvi Liege (Luigi Levi), set up an exhibition hall next to the city's main synagogue, to exhibit the collections of the local community. That was probably the first step toward the idea of a Jewish Museum in Italy.Read
Ariel Toaff on Cuisine
The culinary history of any people is inevitably tied into its cultural identity which, born of the religious, social and economic evolution of that people, tells the complex story of its past. This is especially true of the Jews. Clearly the most significant historical factor governing the food choices of the Jews were the strict dietary laws rooted in biblical prohibitions, which rabbinical establishments consequently interpreted and expanded. Read
Riccardo Di Segni on Liturgy
Italian Jews are under many respects an island in the Jewish world. Even the name of the land that has given them home for over twenty-two centuries was traditionally interpreted as a Hebrew word: I-tal-ya: "Island of the divine dew." The liturgy of the Italian Jews sets them apart from all of the other communities in the Diaspora. Read
Library: Mauro Perani on the Italian Genizah
After the discovery of the Cairo Genizah at the end of the 19th century, scholars hoped to discover a similar European Genizah. By a twist of fate, the scholars' dream of discovering a European Genizah came true in the last two decades. Read
Library: Fabrizio Lelli on Apulian Judaism
The history of Judaism in Puglia is a distillation of thousands of stories of Mediterranean Judaism - fragments that across the millennia collectively comprise a powerful identity. Here are stories of wandering, of links sustained across great distances by faith in ancient traditions; and stories of commercial and cultural exchange across the length and breadth of this Mare Nostrum, where Jews have always played a mediating role. Read
Library: Luisa Levi D'Ancona on Women
The history of Italian Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is essentially a story of social integration and embourgeoisement, with the exception of the years of Fascism, the racial laws (1938) and World War II. In Italy, each pre-unification state had a particular relation to its Jewish population, reflecting the strong regional differences that in many ways were maintained even after political unification in 1860. Read
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