Italya. Jewish Stories, Italian History by Germano Maifreda (review)

A melting pot of cultures in the heart of Western Christendom, Italy, or the "island of divine dew," as described by the creative Hebrew etymology I-tal-ya, has seen a diversified presence of native, Ashkenazi, and Sephardic Jews for over two millennia. The Italian-Jewish coexistence and interaction has had a great historical impact on society that contributed to the identity-making and evolution of the country. However, despite an exceptionally long Jewish existence in the peninsula that dates back to Roman times, most Italians still think about Jews' vicissitudes as something apart from the nation's mainstream history. Jews have always been seen as an isolated, passive, and persecuted minority, and thus, their history is usually considered separate from the general one. As the title underlines, Germano Maifreda aims to dismantle such historiographical misconceptions, which are principally due to the fact that for many years the events relating to Italian Jews have been mainly reconstructed by scholars through the documentation produced by the majority society, thus leading to the emergence of fallacious metanarratives. The author argues that without taking into account the sources produced within the Jewish communities, the historical process of assimilation between Jews and Christians may appear distorted, like the one described through the medium of "pink spectacles" by eminent historians such as Jacob Burckhardt and Cecil Roth, or merely reduced to a histoire larmoyante, whose partiality was denounced by Salo Baron's famous thesis.

In order to understand Italian history as inclusive of the Jewish experience, Maifreda suggests going beyond the antisemitism parameters and reflect on how the Jews have systematically negotiated their own position within the Italian authorities over the centuries. With the art of diplomacy, Jewish mediators operated discreetly through trying to use their influence and various expedients to moderate rulers' decrees. Yet, the history of Jewish diplomatic efforts contradicts the myth of Jewish passivity, because in reality, their efforts involved a much broader web of interactions than just the "vertical relationship" between sovereigns, communities, and Court-Jews. According to the author, it is necessary to develop an overall approach devoted to articulating the meaning of "identity" in the history of Italian Jewry, taking into account the reciprocal influence between Jewish communities and their Christian counterparts. Also, thanks to newly discovered documents, Maifreda proposes some case studies that cover multiple relationship issues and environments that occurred over the course of several centuries.

In 1516, the governor of Venice declared that Jews had to live in a ghetto, which was the first of many Jewish enclosures ordered by political powers in the Italian peninsula. The Jewish community became an important cosmopolitan center of the Republic, bringing significant economic growth for the city, including nuanced networks with Christian neighbors. In the first chapter, the author sheds fresh light on this complex interfaith encounter by showing us different types of integration, or even prohibited unions, such as the forbidden love between the Christian sailor, Moretto, and the Jewish woman, Rachel, a story that reminds us of Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet, but in an early-modern Venetian ghetto.

In the court of Ferrara, Jewish refugees from the Iberian peninsula, invited by the Duke of Este, played a fundamental role, thanks to their financial skills. Most of the conversos in Ferrara were wealthy bankers and traders, with international relations with partners based in Middle Eastern markets or in various ports located in the Mediterranean. An emblematic figure of the complex social stratification experienced by Ferrarese Judaism after the arrival of Portuguese Marranos is that of the influential Gracia Nasi, alias Beatriz de Luna. She openly professed the Jewish religion, financing, among other things, a translation of the Bible in Judeo-Spanish printed in Ferrara between 1551 and 1553. In Chapter 2, the story of Gracia Nasi demonstrates that there was not one single Italian-Judaism model, nor a single way of living as Jews.

At the start of the sixteenth century, we witness the birth of...