Alessandro Guetta 

 

Research does not always proceed according to a predetermined plan.

In some cases, the opposite is true: only when a work is completed can we observe its fundamental inspiration, which was implicit from the start. The essays presented in this book demonstrate the latter: the coherence of the collected pieces-the common elements that connect them-was visible only post factum. Only in collecting some of the articles I wrote between 1998 and 2012 was I able to see clearly the common elements in theoretical approach and conclusions which, when viewed as a whole, reveal a rather uniform result.

 

The motivations that drive the scholar to choose a certain field of research, a specific subject within that field, and the way that subject will be approached are difficult to pin down, perhaps even mysterious. But within that choice itself lies a large measure of the results: in the sciences, or at least in the human sciences, the answers one finds are guided largely by the questions one asks.

 

My field of research is the intellectual history of Italian Judaism. Though this choice obviously stems from my own experiences and cultural training, my choice of eras is the result of an attraction that is difficult to explain, whose motivations are probably found in that murky area between emotion and intellect, or in the inputs from emotion to the intellect, guiding its choices. Read 

 

 

James Nelson Novoa 

 

Serena di Nepi's new book presents a vast, all encompassing portrait of Jewish life in Rome in the tumultuous sixteenth century, when the centuries-old Jewish community, often evoked as Europe's oldest, was submitted to the same confinement as other communities in the papal states in 1555 with the creation of the ghetto.   

 

Her book is as ambitious as it is informative. She literally purports to analyze the manifold transformations which the Jews of Rome underwent in what she rightly identifies as a century of fundamental importance for their self definition through the Early Modern period, when they received the imposition of a modus vivendi which would go on to the end of papal rule and the abolition of the ghetto after 1870.

 

Indebted to the recent scholarship of Anna Foa, Anna Esposito, Kenneth Stow and Bernard Dov Cooperman di Nepi nevertheless breaks new ground.  Hers is an approach rooted in Social History, as interested in the internal life of the Jewish community itself as its interactions with Christian society and the wider world.  In order to do this she consults a staggering variety of archival sources: notaries documents, both Jewish and Christian, documents from the Roman Inquisition, sources from the Apostolic Chamber and from the tribunal of the Governor of Rome.  All contribute to a thorough and overarching vision of Jewish life in the Eternal City during the century in question.

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Fabrizio Lelli

 

During the fifteenth century, Italian Jews continued adhering to the same tradition of intellectual exchanges with Christian scholars that had long characterized Italian culture. However, significant changes in the intercultural relations between Christians and Jews took place in the early Renaissance. This was partly due to the massive immigration of Jews fleeing to Italy from other regions of the European diaspora: instead of strengthening the connections within the Jewish communities on Italian soil, this socio-historical phenomenon fostered the scholarly dialogue between Italian Jews and Christian humanists.

 

In fact, Jewish intellectuals working in late medieval and early Renaissance Italy had long been accustomed to use traditions originating from different cultural areas. For instance, on the basis of a common interest in Aristotelian philosophy and the natural sciences, which allowed them to play the significant role of physicians in both northern and southern Italian regions, Italian Jews had been elaborating for centuries traditions imported from Byzantine and Iberian areas. Similarly, the philosophical tradition based on Maimonides was the result of a secular rethinking of Aristotelian and neo-Platonic categories originating in the Iberian peninsula and Provence, and adapted to the cultural life of Italian communities, where Jewish scholars shared some of the intellectual concerns of contemporary non-Jewish philosophers and theologians. Read