Italian Modernities: Competing Narratives of Nationhood

The New Italy and the Jews. Annali d'Italianistica 36, 2018

The question of the contribution of Italian Jews to the Italian Risorgimento and nation-building cannot be answered univocally. This essay studies the Italian Jews' role in the Risorgimento and its immediate aftermath by means of a contrast between two distinct regional and often strongly divergent approaches to Italian nationalism and nation-building. Specifically, it examines the life and writings of two prominent Jewish intellectuals of the time: David Levi (1816-1898) from French-oriented Piedmont, and Samuel David Luzzatto (1800-1865) from the German-oriented Italian regions under the Habsburg Empire. Without being directly compared, the two authors are invoked here to distinguish between the cultural contexts of Piedmont and Habsburg Italy, as reflected in the Jewish cultural milieu of their respective regions. Their lives and works will be utilized to answer the following questions: What impact did the different socio-political situations and cultural orientations of these regions have on these authors' concepts of Jewish and Italian identity? How did this impact determine their attitudes toward the Risorgimento? Jews and Judaism in Pre-Unification Italy: A Methodological Premise Scholarship on Italian Judaism has rested upon the idea of the uniqueness of Italian Jewry. According to this theory, Italian Jews represented an exceptional case in the history of integration in their host lands because of their widespread use of the Italian language and their deep participation in Italy's general culture. Through a more attentive analysis of documentary and literary sources, however, recent historiography has developed the awareness that this idea of uniqueness was partly created by nineteenth-century Jewish literary constructions, specifically authors who were eager to emphasize the Italian Jews' strong patriotism and loyalty to their host society (Ferrara degli Uberti 19-22). Recent investigations have shown how these misconceptions can be addressed better by problematizing the very concept of Italian Jewry and adopting a trans-regional and trans-national approach, and by focusing more closely on individual experiences rather than on Italian Jewry as a monolithic block independent from international networks and influences (Facchini 33; Luzzatto Voghera, Il prezzo 19). Two key elements that make Italian Jewry's place in Italian culture so intriguing and complicated are the heterogeneous composition of the Jewish population and the different socio-political environments of the regions that

But Marconi does finally relocate to Italy, roughly at the time Mussolini comes to power. And Raboy devotes the last of the book's five sections to this often neglected (or sanitized) phase of Marconi's life. Indeed, Raboy has the courage, and the archival documents, to challenge the euphemisms and silences that have marked other studies, in Italian and English, of Marconi's later life. He explores Marconi and D'Annunzio's mutual admiration, Marconi's negotiations with the Vatican (especially in relation to a desired divorce, but also around the propaganda possibilities of wireless), and his compromises with Mussolini and the Italian scientific community (chapter 31 is entitled, 'A Servant of the Regime'). Already a senator, Marconi accumulates new titles and leadership roles that can, Raboy shows, scarcely be dismissed as ceremonial. This is some of Raboy's most provocative analysis, striking only a few dissonant notes, as when he devotes several pages to the question of whether Marconi was personally anti-Semitic and might have supported the racial laws of 1938 (he instead died in 1937). The evidence seems equivocal, at least much more ambiguous than Marconi's enthusiastic embrace of racist projects in Ethiopia. But we may also be inclined to ask whether this is the right (or most pressing) question to ask. Racial sciences and legislation (in Italy as elsewhere) were, after all, more than the product of individuals' ill will toward Jews and others; they also had their roots in the bio-political logics that informed Mussolini's demographic campaign and the colonization of East Africa. Here, we might say, the projects of the historian and the biographer begin to diverge. But they never drift very far apart, and Raboy mostly resists psychologizing. In fact, it is only in the final pages of the book that the author suggests Marconi suffered from cycles of depression for much of his life, and that was something 'was missing in his emotional development ' (p.675). Perhaps an earlier mention would have encouraged another kind of neat and tidy reading of the complex life that unfolds in the pages of this wonderful book. Instead we learn to be satisfied (and very) with unresolved questions, ambiguity, contradiction, even muck.

Italian Studies, 2018

Italian Studies, 73:2, 220-221, DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2018.1444711

Journal of Jewish Identities, 2022

Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2015

Elizabeth Schachter's The Jews of Italy, 1848-1915 presents an overview of the communal structure, major movements and key figures in the modern history of the Jews of Italy beginning in 1848. While this is primarily a descriptive history, the author's analytical approach considers Italian Jewish history within the framework of sociological approaches common to Jewish history in the 1970s and 1980s, depicting the process of assimilation as tensions between tradition and modernity. Sources she draws from are primarily Jewish sources including family narratives and memoirs, newspapers, and documents from Jewish communal and Zionist archives, however, there is a notable absence of socioeconomic sources such as wills and dowries. The second chapter provides prosopographical summaries of key Italian Jewish historical figures from Isaaco Artom to Arnaldo Momigliano and short discussions under headings such as "religious conversion" and "marital assimilation." The chapter will be useful to scholars of Jewish history and Italianists who wish to identify important figures. In addition, it outlines the history of Italian Jewish emancipation. The author's claim, however, that the "first" Italian emancipation takes place in 1848 is problematic since the first emancipation occurred when Napoleon annexed Piedmont in 1797. To her credit, Schachter reminds us that the Risorgimento and Jewish emancipation intertwined, yet she does not explain the impact of the first emancipation on the rise of the Jewish community in politics and culture of the new unified Italy. The second chapter sketches the Italian Jewish communal structure compared to other Western European and British models. The discussion of Italian Jewish national conferences in Ferrara and in Florence, a good descriptive overview of the material provides main debate issues from philanthropy to education. Chapter 3 deals with anti-Semitism citing the case of Isaaco Pesaro Maurogonato and the anti-Jewish stance of the Catholic Church, among other episodes. This is the weakest chapter in the book. It does not take into account the important impact of the Napoleonic era in which a small but influential group of Jewish entrepreneurs bought up substantial amounts of Church lands. The secularization of Church lands and Jewish property ownership was the test of the Restoration and led to the second emancipation of Jews in Piedmont in 1848 and the weakening of the Catholic Church. Without this context, the question of anti-Semitism remains simply a pretext for larger issues within Italian society. Chapter 4 considers Italian Zionism. Schachter gives a good descriptive overview of Zionist Federation conferences in Italy. Although she raises the question of the nature of Zionism among Triestine Jews who supported Zionism but did not seek to settle in Palestine, she failed to connect Triestine Jewish support of Zionism with earlier chapters on