ESSAYS OUR HISTORY AS ITALIAN JEWS

Anna Foa, Opening speech at the Italian Jewish Congress 2011  

 

The intensity and strength of the Italian Jewish minority's connection with Italian Unification is well known. Knowing that any hope of emancipation - long denied them by the old regime - lay with the novatori, Italian Jews took an active role in the conspiratorial actions of Mazzini, the movements of 1820-21 and 1830-31, the battle for the Roman Republic of 1848 in defense of which they spilled blood, the wars of the Risorgimento, and in the seizure of Rome on September 20, 1870. During this last action, it was a Piedmontese Jewish officer who gave the order to open fire.

But emancipation, won together with the Waldenses  by the Piedmontese Jews in 1848, and in due course by the Jews of the other Italian states was not merely a radical change of direction by the Jewish Communities that populated the peninsula. It was no less than a defining moment in the construction of the new Italy. Far from being some sort of incidental consequence of unification, the principle of emancipation profoundly marked the course of the new state, and was to become - along with the related principles of religious tolerance and equality - one of its cornerstones. 

It is no coincidence that in those decades the Jews of Europe took their lead from the Italian Risorgimento. Moses Hess, socialist philosopher, one of the founders of Zionism and the author of the famous book Rome and Jerusalem (1861) drew inspiration for his idea of a Jewish national revival from Italian nation-building. In the same spirit, in 1918, Dante Lattes defined irredentism (from the Italian political movement  born in the second half of XIXth century and claiming for Italy all the "unredeemed" regions under Austrian rule) as Italian Zionism and Zionism as Jewish irredentism. Read
THANKS
The Primo Levi Forum is made possible through the generous support of the Cahnman Foundation, the Viterbi Family Foundation and Dr. Claude Ghez.
The new logo of CPL  is designed by Jonathan Wajskol.

BOOKS FORCED BAPTISMS 

Historian Marina Caffiero re-examines the policies of the Roman Catholic Church from the 16th to 19th centuries, of coercing the Jews of Rome into converting to Christianity.The book exposes the complexity of relations between the papacy and the Jews, revealing the Church not as a monolithic entity, but as a network of competing institutions, and the Roman Jews as active agents of resistance.
Read
PROGRAMS ITALY MADE! 
Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles and Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA/Viterbi Program in Mediterranean Jewish Studies

Jews have lived in Italy from Roman times and played a critical role in shaping Italian identity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews were one of the most fervent nationalist groups in the nascent Italian State as they hoped unification and liberalism would lead to equal rights and to a redefinition of the notion of citizenship. Italy was one of the last countries in Europe to eliminate the ghetto with the liberation of Rome in 1870. Read

BOOKS UMBERTO ECO: THE PRAGUE CEMETERY 
Guido Vitale interviews Umberto Eco (Pagine Ebraiche). Translated by Nathania Zevi

It is thirty years since The Name of the Rose first appeared. It was not only the affirmation of an important novelist, but also the beginning of a new literary genre. A genre based on strict historical documentation, yet a page-turner filled with adventure.  Four more novels have followed. Now, in these restless times, we have The Prague Cemetery, a book that many readers will not want to miss. Guido Vitale, editor of Pagine Ebraiche, met with the writer at the time of the book launching.

 

Guido Vitale: Professor Eco, what will happen during the next few days?  

 

Umberto Eco: I don't know.  The only thing I can say is that I was amused while writing The Prague Cemetery. It was a long period of work with rigorous research, since the material I dealt with is very delicate and I wanted to report only the documented facts, to speak about people who really existed, about lives that were actually lived. Read