There are many definitions of the term “modernity.” We will be content here to define it as the progressive change in the perception of the world that took place in Europe from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century (and into part of the twentieth), the principal elements of which are the development of science and the transformation, then the decline, of religion (“secularization”). These elements, combined with the broadening of the known and explored world and the growth of knowledge in every field, led on the one hand to an attitude of “disenchantment” toward the natural and transcendent sphere, and to a vision of man’s self-sufficiency. On the other hand, they led to an effacement of the differences between religious confessions, which translated into the idea — and the practice — of tolerance.
This movement was neither univocal nor linear. It met with considerable resistance and also nourished ideological and political currents (such as totalitarianism) which, by distorting one of its components, denied the others. The upheavals, sometimes violent, of contemporary societies are the effect of the exportation of European modernity — now more broadly “Western” — to the rest of the world.
If modernity is a category of European origin, it is obvious that it almost exclusively concerned Christian culture, with different results in its Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Calvinist and other denominations, born of the sixteenth-century reforms. Modernity is therefore the product of the transformation of a Christian sensibility, and it will be of interest to study how the only non-Christian minority in Europe, the Jewish minority, reacted to and perhaps even contributed to this phenomenon. In other words, the question is whether there exists a “Jewish modernity” characterized as such, or, in another more pertinent formulation, whether there is or has been a “Jewish path to modernity.”
It is generally accepted that, though with some delay, the Jews accepted Europe’s movement of modernization, to the point of becoming, in its mature phase, its protagonists.
Historians point to three principal stages of the Jewish path to modernity. The first is Amsterdam, in the seventeenth century [^trans: source reads “XVIe siècle” — corrected, since the Amsterdam Sephardi community of conversos and Spinoza belongs to the seventeenth]; there, the Iberian conversos who had returned as Jews in fact belonged to two different cultures — the Catholicism professed in their homeland and the Judaism of their new condition — a circumstance that favored a critical attitude toward all confessional religions and could lead to deism, even to atheism. Spinoza, the extraordinary expression of this complex culture, made possible by relative Calvinist tolerance, has in fact been considered, rightly or wrongly, the first example of a “modern Jew.”
The second stage is the Berlin of the Aufklärung, the city in which Moses Mendelssohn showed that it was possible to be at once a Jew observant of his own tradition and a universal philosopher, a citizen of the Republic of Letters in which religious affiliation had no importance. The third stage, directly inspired by the previous one, is that of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, which spread a few decades after the Berlin experience among the densely populated communities of Russia, Poland, Lithuania and other territories of Eastern Europe. It is here that modern Hebrew was born, expressed in journalism and literature, as well as the secular nationalism at the origin of Zionism.
But another Jewish experience of modernity, which preceded those described above and lasted longer, is less well known: for several centuries, from the late fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth, Italian Jews created a culture that may be qualified as “modern” in many respects, intertwining their fate with that of their non-Jewish compatriots — though with limits and contradictions which we will examine.
What are the reasons for the relative inattention paid by historians of Jewish modernity to this Italian-Jewish experience? The direct filiation from the Berlin Haskalah to the Eastern European Haskalah, and from there to the great cultural and political movements which nourished Zionist — and later Israeli — culture, doubtless conditioned historians’ reading. As for Amsterdam, the extraordinary character of the figure of Spinoza gave that community a visibility it would probably not have had on its own, despite its undeniably original features.
But it was the Italian-Jewish experience that created the intellectual models which subsequently developed in Germany and in the East. Its influence in those centers was not direct, because by the time they were developing there was already an objective weakening of creativity in Italy, and also because the Italian Jews who, as we shall see, reached levels of excellence in many areas of intellectual activity, were never numerous enough (50,000 at most) to exert a decisive influence on the other European communities.
The most important cause of historians’ inattention lies in the view of this period of Jewish history — or much of it — as an era of decadence, of the Jewish culture’s withdrawal into itself, even of obscurantism. It is, indeed, the age of the ghettos, those zones of mandatory residence with strictly regulated exits, which, beginning with the first example in Venice in the early sixteenth century, spread throughout central and northern Italy in the second half of the century and throughout the seventeenth. While it is true that, especially in their final phase in the eighteenth century, the ghettos constituted an obstacle to the Jews’ participation in the outside society, it is also true, as Roberto Bonfil has shown, that they were a factor of stability compared with the earlier regime of the condotte — renewable contracts — representing the highest degree of acceptance of the “other” that the Christian society of the time could allow itself.1
1. Was there an Italian Judaism?
It is obviously difficult to trace unified lines for the whole of Italian Jewish culture over a long span. It must first be specified that, in the period under consideration, the regions concerned are those of central and northern Italy; southern Italy and Sicily are emptied of their Jews from the sixteenth century onward, following the expulsion decreed by the Kings of Spain for all territories under the Crown. That said, the first problem that arises is one of the univocity of the definition; in other words: can one speak of Italian Judaism as a homogeneous whole, in which common elements outweigh local differences, and which has a consciousness of itself as such?
The problem is analogous to that of the history of the Italians in general — their divisions and their consciousness of forming a common group: the level of cultural adaptation of the Jews to the various situations was such that the discourse on the majority applies approximately to the small Jewish minority too. This holds equally for the Jews living in different regions of Italy.
For the latter, one must also bear in mind the important role of solidarity: if a community found itself in great difficulty — for instance, following a change in the local authorities’ policy or a natural disaster — all the Italian communities would mobilize to come to its aid as far as possible. In the case of problems affecting more than one center, the representatives of the communities would meet to decide on a common approach.
The instability of the Jewish communities — with which the local authorities concluded very precise contracts (condotte) defining the rights and obligations of the resident Jews, including the length of their stay — also favored a high degree of mobility, probably greater than that of the average Christian; this circumstance increased the degree of homogeneity of the Italian Jewish community, even if movements took place mainly within a single region.
On the other hand, Italy continually received Jewish migratory flows from neighboring countries: from southern and southeastern France, Germany, and later Spain (following the expulsion of 1492), the Maghreb and, to a lesser extent, the Levant. These migrations naturally brought in different cultures, manifest in language, professional skills and habits, and ways of studying traditional texts; but in the end, the older “Italian” element seems to have prevailed, assimilating the immigrants’ differences of origin.2
Even if the objective consciousness of being part of a homogeneous community seems to appear rather late (perhaps only in the seventeenth century), one may therefore affirm that, objectively, Italian Jews shared a common culture for the period under examination.
2. A society based on religion
All manifestations of Jewish culture in Italy had religious references. No aspect of knowledge was independent of the religious tradition, and the separation present in Christian society between the religious and the secular did not exist, since there was no secular sphere in the proper sense of the term. A notable exception is medicine, which is a “new” science and therefore lacking religious references. Together with the rabbi, the physician is the typical figure of the Italian Jewish intellectual in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Often the same person possessed both competences, and it was in any case unthinkable that the Jewish physician should not also have received a serious religious education. Mathematics, astronomy and the other natural sciences were also cultivated, but to a far lesser degree. The figure of the professional scientist, however, is absent from Jewish society, simply because there were no institutions in which to teach and practice science. Likewise, there is no pure poet or scholar, because there were no courts or patrons to support them. The rabbis were practitioners of traditional knowledge, teachers and judges; judicial activity, fundamental for regulating relations within the small Jewish society — even if, in the logic of its functioning, it did not differ greatly from that of civil judges — ultimately drew its source of authority from the principles of the written and oral Torah and not from those of human and natural law.
As for literary and intellectual production independent of religion, such as secular poetry (including comic and even obscene poetry) and historiography (Jewish and universal), it was entirely detached from biblical and, to a lesser degree, rabbinical language, and drew on the conceptual universe of tradition. When an author ventures onto new ground, not envisaged by tradition, he surrounds himself with a thousand justifications drawn from past authorities. One example: Azariah de’ Rossi (Mantua 1511? – Ferrara 1577?), author of the pioneering work of history, philology and textual criticism Meor eiynayim (The Light of the Eyes, published in 1574 in Mantua, one of the most advanced centers of Hebrew culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), justified his arguments — and above all his method — by a series of Talmudic citations. De’ Rossi inaugurates the genre of the erudite philological essay, which frees itself from religious preoccupations and whose declared aim is the love of truth for its own sake; to that end, he cites many non-Jewish authors, justifying this unorthodox method by subtle arrangements based on traditional sources. But his precautions were not enough to avoid rabbinical sanctions: reading the Meor eiynayim was permitted only if authorized from time to time by the local rabbinical authority, and as a result this important work was read in extremely narrow circles and had no real audience. It was rediscovered in the nineteenth century by one of the protagonists of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (“Science of Judaism”), the German Leopold Zunz, who saw in de’ Rossi a direct predecessor.3
When, between the end of the sixteenth and the middle of the seventeenth century, Jewish authors begin to write about politics, military art, economics or other “profane” disciplines, they cast their remarks within a less theological than apologetic frame, at the center of which lies the condition of the Jewish people in exile. The Mantuan physician Avraham Portaleone composed a small treatise on the art of war, based on “modern” and openly anti-medieval ideas; but he set it — with an equally patent, and probably conscious, anachronism — in the period of the biblical Exodus, in order to show that the Jews had a warrior fiber like all other peoples, despite their present condition. Likewise, he writes a text on music theory inspired by the most recent experiments of Mantua, finding them again in the musical practice of the Temple of Jerusalem.
In short, in Italian Jewish society there was no intellectual activity that was not embedded in a traditional religious context, just as there was no art for art’s sake. This makes the transition to modernity all the more interesting, given that modernity tended to be hostile to tradition, to particularism and, in the end, to religion — a transition that followed particular procedures in this small marginal world, but was far from detached from the changes in the “great” world. One such feature is the impossibility of thinking in “universal” categories, and the constant reference to one’s own Jewish specificity in order to formulate concepts similar to those of non-Jewish contemporaries. The term “universal,” which seems to date from the eighteenth–nineteenth century, was in fact already used by the Venetian rabbi Simcha Luzzatto, who complained of the particularist spirit of his co-religionists.4 By “universal,” Luzzatto meant the whole of a society defined by the national political constraint (in his case, the Republic of Venice) — that is, precisely the dimension whose absence will be pointed to by the modern political ideology of Zionism as the origin of the defects and weaknesses of the Jews. In this sense, Luzzatto — like others of his contemporaries — may be considered pro-Zionist and, if Zionism was one of the most important forms of Jewish modernity, certainly as a precursor of that modernity.
In sum, the substantive modernity of the intellectual activity of Italian Jewish elites was expressed in an indirect, sometimes convoluted manner, with the constant concern to show that the new genres, methods or ideas did not break with tradition but were inscribed in its continuity. To break with tradition would have meant breaking with one’s own society, which in turn implied as the sole possibility entry into Christian society through conversion; there did not yet exist, in the richest period of Italian Jewish intellectual history, a Republic of Letters neutral with respect to religious origins, and the Jews could be “modern” only within the cultural (religious and national) categories constitutive of their society.
3. Language and modernity
3.1. Multiple uses of Hebrew
If there is one trait that characterized Italian Jewish culture over the long run, compared with other diaspora communities, it is the emphasis placed on language. In the average education of a young Italian Jew, the study of writing in Hebrew could include levels of great complexity.
The study of epistolography5 enabled people of average educational level (essentially men, but also a few women) to correspond fluently in Hebrew on any subject, just as the humanists did in Latin. The epistolary correspondence between rabbis, and also the teshuvot (legal decisions), required an extremely sophisticated style as well, based on biblical and Talmudic citations and verging on virtuosity. An inexperienced reader was not (and is still not) able to fully understand these texts.
While it is true that the best Jewish grammarian of the sixteenth century, Elia Bachur Levita, was Ashkenazi (though he spent most of his life in Venice6), and that in Italy linguistic research did not reach the heights of theoretical and normative research, it is also true that every educated Jew had a perfect mastery of the language, which he was able to adapt to any form of expression — and he probably did so better than his co-religionists in other countries. Hebrew poetry in Italy perhaps did not attain the levels of excellence of the tenth–thirteenth centuries in Spain, but every rabbi was able to write poetry correctly, following the cumulative metrical and formal constraints of the Spanish and Italian schools.
The Italian Jews shaped Hebrew, adapting it to literary genres new or unusual for their culture. Their travel correspondences have been read by contemporary scholars as an original nucleus of narrative fiction, well before the classical attempts of German and Eastern European authors of the Haskalah,7 and scientific prose was brought to a satisfactory level of clarity.8
3.2. The use of Latin and Italian, and their intellectual implications
It is well known that Jews, in their various places of residence, were always at least bilingual, combining the Hebrew of the religious sphere with the language spoken in daily life. This language can be extremely close to the language spoken by the whole society (such as Judeo-Arabic), or constitute a jargon proper to the community alone (such as Yiddish in the Slavic-speaking regions, or Judeo-Spanish in the regions of the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth century onward).
The Italian Jews developed their own characteristic language, with its phrases, cadences and vocabulary; but Judeo-Italian, close to the Romance vernacular and rich in Jewish elements, was also a written language, especially for didactic and liturgical ends. Up to the sixteenth century, translations of the Bible and of sections of the ritual formulary were composed, generally to teach the sacred text to children and help them understand the prayers.
The intellectual elite also knew Latin, the learned language par excellence of Christian society. Indispensable for medical studies, Latin was useful for legal acts outside the community and, in rarer cases, for access to the philosophical and theological library of the time. In the sixteenth century one finds examples of Latin works written by Jewish authors, a unique case in Jewish literary history. These works were naturally addressed to a Christian public and conveyed contents that went beyond Jewish intellectual interests, even if the reference to Judaism was always present.
In the second half of the sixteenth century, Judeo-Italian was progressively abandoned as a written language, replaced by Tuscan or literary Italian. The translations of biblical texts, of poetry and of philosophy were henceforth done in this language, with stylistic ambitions and no longer for a merely didactic purpose.
The decisive break with the medieval tradition of Italian Judaism was carried out by the Venetian rabbi Leone Modena (1571–1648), the “modernizer” par excellence of Italian Jewish culture.9 In the introduction to a Hebrew–Italian biblical-rabbinical dictionary, Modena explicitly uses the term “modern,” hoping that his co-religionists will use Tuscan, which had by then acquired literary dignity and national diffusion:
I bethought myself […] that the Tuscan language has broadened and embellished itself for many years, and that it is now at its apogee; so that the old manner of interpreting [translating] that was used among us is at present altogether clumsy and graceless, whence also follows so great a discordance among our masters […] that if a disciple changes master, or studies or converses with a companion, they find themselves as though they were of two different tongues. That is why I have judged it necessary to bring forth a modern interpretation which should serve in all these respects.10
As for the translations into Italian, it is worth noting that almost all of them concern sapiential or religious texts of universal scope, such as Ecclesiastes or Proverbs. Their authors clearly meant to bring out the non-exclusivist characteristics of their religion, whose values could be shared by all human beings and not only by Jews. While observances remain strictly confessional, the Jews begin to develop the idea of a religion that unites them with Christians.
It is founded on ethical values and beliefs (such as the immortality of the human soul) which qualify it above all in relation to a common adversary, materialist atheism.
By expressing themselves in Italian on religious themes, the Jews not only bring out the elements they share with Christians, but also contribute their own particular share to a non-confessional religiosity. In the sonnets of the Venetian Sara Copio Sullam (1594–1641) and, later, in the elegies for the death of his wife by the Tuscan Salomone Fiorentino (1743–1815), there emerge the ideas of an absolute divine justice, to which man, responsible for his acts, entrusts himself, as well as the firm belief in the immortality of the soul — the necessary corollary of the notion of retribution. Neither of them refers in his or her religious poetry to elements that characterize the Jewish religion.
Jews and Christians, each with their own interpretations of their own traditions, begin to form a common front against atheism: indeed, Sara Copio Sullam is accused by a Catholic prelate of denying — against the faith of her fathers — the belief in the immortality of the soul, and the Venetian Jewess responds with a “Manifesto” in which, once again, no mention is made of the dogmas of her own religion. The theological cleavage between Christianity and Judaism manifestly loses some of its interest.11
4. Kabbalah and rationalism
It is well known that from the sixteenth century onward, the Kabbalah (literally “reception”), the esoteric current of Judaism, passed from the status of a doctrine reserved to a few initiates to that of a culture widespread in all layers of the Jewish population, in every community, regardless of geography. Even without a thorough understanding of the complex speculations of the Zohar — the collection of texts of the fundamental doctrine — or of the kabbalists of Safed in Galilee (notably Isaac Luria, 1534–72) on the relations between God and the world, the simplest of the faithful began to organize their practices according to kabbalistic “intentions.”
As a center of Jewish printing and a place of transmission of books and ideas between the communities of the Muslim world (the Land of Israel in particular) and those of the Christian world, Italy played a fundamental role in the diffusion of the Kabbalah. Not only is the Zohar printed there for the first time (in Mantua and Cremona between 1558 and 1560), putting the fundamental text of Jewish esotericism within the common reader’s reach, but in Venice the doctrines of the other great master of Safed, Moshe Cordovero, begin to be taught and his books published. The initiator of this important cultural operation was the rabbi Menachem Azariyah da Fano (1548–1620), who wrote important kabbalistic texts of his own. After making Cordovero’s work known, Fano turns toward those of Isaac Luria, slightly later and even further removed from a rationalist approach.
The Kabbalah swept away what remained of medieval theological rationalism.
No other philosophical work was written, in Italy or elsewhere, until the time of the Haskalah: faith in kabbalistic ideas — attributed to prophetic revelations or even to the revelation of Sinai itself, and transmitted by unimpeachable authorities — replaced the medieval search for an accord between religion and reason. But this did not occur without resistance, particularly in Italy.
In a certain sense, the Kabbalah played a modernizing role, for it contributed to the disappearance of medieval culture, preparing the ground for other logics and sensibilities as well as other social behaviors. The activity of the confraternities devoted to the study of the Kabbalah in a place other than the synagogue led, according to Roberto Bonfil, to the transformation of the latter from a place of worship and study (the Italian schola, corresponding to the Ashkenazi Schule) into a place of worship only. In other words, the synagogue moved closer to the church, which constituted an element of rapprochement between Jewish and Christian religious behavior that may be read as “modern.”12
But if, in the Christian world, the devotion and mysticism of the seventeenth century — which may in certain respects be compared to the sensibility of the Kabbalah — were accompanied by the development of a scientific thought tending to gain autonomy from the religious tradition, in the Jewish world this second aspect is practically nonexistent. As we have noted, Jewish culture did not envisage an intellectual sphere theoretically autonomous from religion, any more than it envisaged a “secular” social role for the professionals of knowledge.
A curious phenomenon therefore took place: certain aspects of scientific logic, which were not cultivated for their own sake, became manifest within the very heart of the new anti-rationalist culture. This phenomenon is already visible in the Jewish work of Avraham Portaleone. This brilliant physician of Mantua, whose position in favor of the “modern” over the “ancient” we have described, underwent in the last years of his life a “conversion” very similar to that of the Jesuit penitents: in the Hebrew book he wrote to expiate his intellectual sins, Portaleone attributed to the mere performance of the commandments (the mitzvot) and to the even mechanical reading of sacred texts an effective action upon the divine spheres, which in turn acted upon the earthly world and upon man. In other words, an empirically minded scientist “converted” to mystical devotion transferred the mechanistic schemas of terrestrial physics to the relation between the divine and human spheres.13
In the final phase of the period under consideration, the first decades of the eighteenth century, on the threshold of the Jews’ integration into Italian society and the consequent loss of originally Jewish creativity, the demands of scientific rationalism make themselves felt even among the most orthodox kabbalists.
This took place in two ways. The first was the acceptance of the new scientific paradigms, for which an agreement with Talmudic and kabbalistic ideas was sought, and the second was the exposition of the Kabbalah according to the categories — to a certain extent — of scientific rationalism. The principal representative of the first attitude, the Mantuan rabbi Avi’ad Sar Shalom Basilea (1680–1743), was at once an orthodox kabbalist and an erudite scholar. Alongside the attempt to demonstrate the validity of tradition in the light of modern scientific theories and discoveries, Basilea expresses a certain skepticism toward science’s claim to hold definitive truths. Just as Aristotle’s system was replaced by that of Descartes, Basilea writes in Emunath Chakhamym (The Faith of the Sages, Mantua 1730), the latter may also prove ephemeral; the only certainty one can rely on is that of tradition.14
Yosef Ergas (1688–1730) of Livorno and Moshe Chayyim Luzzatto (1707–46) of Padua represent another attitude.15
It is worth noting that, in Moshe Chayyim Luzzatto of Padua, the rational need coexists with a mystical-messianic soul. His name is indeed linked to the revelations of a celestial voice of which he declared himself the recipient: a circumstance that cost him an outright persecution at the hands of (non-Italian) rabbis who openly distrusted any novelty. The trauma of the dramatic end of Sabbateanism — the messianic movement which had stirred all Jewish communities — was clearly still very present. Forbidden to teach the Kabbalah, Luzzatto leaves Padua to live in Amsterdam, then in Acre, in Palestine, where he dies still young.
Yosef Ergas and Moshe Chayyim Luzzatto were studied and published after their deaths principally in the Ashkenazi communities of Eastern Europe, thus becoming the object of an important translatio studiorum. Luzzatto has been, and still is, the object of great admiration verging on veneration; in recent years an Israeli New Age current has come to regard him as the modern protagonist of Jewish mysticism and of an uncomprehended and persecuted religious passion. But in Italy the Kabbalah ceased to represent a dynamic cultural element, surviving exclusively in popular customs and beliefs.
The community of Livorno, formed in the seventeenth century by former conversos returned to Judaism (as in Amsterdam) and open to the influences of Mediterranean Sephardi culture from North Africa and the Land of Israel, is an exception. In the Tuscan city the presence of the Kabbalah remained important, thanks also to the presence of figures coming from those countries.
In the nineteenth century, in the full “modern” period of the Jews’ integration into national life, the two souls of Italian Jewish culture, the rationalist-scientific and the kabbalistic, manifest themselves in the works of two important figures, who are in some sense epigones: Samuel David Luzzatto (1800–65), a native of Trieste and professor at the rabbinical college of Padua, and Elia Benamozegh (1823–1900), a native of Livorno of Moroccan family. Luzzatto is the last representative of the rationalist opposition to the Kabbalah,16 while Benamozegh — a kabbalist by training — attempts to show the links between Jewish esotericism and modern thought (including scientific thought), following a typically Italian line that goes back to the Kabbalah with the neo-Platonic veins of the Renaissance and continues with the kabbalists of the eighteenth century. It may not be superfluous to recall that, in these two representatives of the great Italian Jewish culture, the relation between intellectual orientation and ideological views was reversed compared with the most obvious configuration: the rationalist Luzzatto had a resolutely anti-modern ideological leaning, while the kabbalist Benamozegh was an enthusiastic partisan of progress in the political and scientific domains, sharing many traits of the positivist thinkers. This is proof of the mobility of intellectual attitudes and of their historicity.
Although they came from a discriminated and numerically weak society, which cultivated the ideology of separation founded on a language and on religious behaviors and beliefs different from those of the majority, Italian Jews never lost contact with the changes of the world in which they were embedded. Forced to occupy socially marginal roles, far from the political, juridical and military spheres which constituted the backbone of public life, they developed a particular path toward modernity. That path manifested itself in a series of adaptations and transformations of their religious culture, or in an attempt to overcome the barriers between the two cultures in a universal intellectual and religious proposal. The ancient language conveyed new ideas, with a perfect consciousness of change, and symmetrically the language of the general society was used to express the Jewish contribution to a religiosity that transcended differences. As for the Kabbalah — a doctrine of which the Jews considered themselves the authentic, if not exclusive, depositaries, and which turned toward the past of prophetic revelation and certainly not toward the progress of human knowledge — modernity traversed it in multiple ways, affecting its internal logical structure and its content.
Bibliography
R. Bonfil, Gli ebrei in Italia nell’epoca del Rinascimento, Sansoni, Florence 1991.
Id., Rabbis and Jewish Communities in Renaissance Italy, The Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation, London-Washington 1993.
D. Bregman, Il sentiero dorato (in Hebrew), Ben-Zvi Institute - Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Jerusalem – Beer-Sheva 1995 (translated into English by A. Brenner, The Golden Way. The Hebrew Sonnet During the Renaissance and the Baroque, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe Ariz. 2006).
G. Busi, Libri ebraici a Mantova. Le edizioni del XVI secolo nella biblioteca della Comunità ebraica, Cadmo, Fiesole 1996.
Id., Libri ebraici a Mantova. Le edizioni del XVII, XVIII e XIX secolo nella biblioteca della Comunità ebraica, Cadmo, Fiesole 1997.
G. Cozzi (ed.), Gli ebrei e Venezia, secoli XIV–XVIII, Edizioni di Comunità, Milan 1987.
R. C. Davis and B. Ravid (eds.), The Jews of Early Modern Venice, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore Md. – London 2001.
B. Garvin and B. Cooperman (eds.), The Jews of Italy. Memory and Identity, University Press of Maryland, Bethesda 2000.
A. Guetta (ed.), Poesia ebraica italiana: mille anni di creazione sacra e profana, monographic issue of “La Rassegna mensile di Israel,” LX (1994), nos. 1–2.
Id. (ed.), L’Italie, laboratoire de la modernité juive, monographic issue of Les cahiers du judaïsme, no. 22 (2007).
M. Luzzati (ed.), L’Inquisizione e gli ebrei in Italia, Laterza, Rome-Bari 1994.
A. Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia, Einaudi, Turin 1963.
D. N. Myers, M. Ciavolella, P. H. Reill and G. Simcox (eds.), Acculturation and Its Discontents: The Italian Jewish Experience Between Exclusion and Integration, University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2008.
C. B. Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia Pa. 1946.
D. B. Ruderman (ed.), Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, New York University Press, New York – London 1992.
Id. (ed.), Preachers of the Italian Ghetto, University of California Press, Berkeley – Los Angeles – Oxford 1992.
D. B. Ruderman and G. Veltri (eds.), Cultural Intermediaries. Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 2004.
A. Salah, La République des Lettres. Rabbins, écrivains et médecins juifs en Italie au XVIIIe siècle, Brill, Leiden – Boston Mass. 2007.
Storia d’Italia. Annali, XI/1. Gli ebrei in Italia. Dall’alto Medioevo all’età dei ghetti, ed. C. Vivanti, Einaudi, Turin 1996.
See on this subject the analyses of R. Bonfil, Gli ebrei in Italia nell’epoca del Rinascimento, Sansoni, Florence 1991.↩︎
An exception is constituted by the ex-converso Jews who arrived in Italy from the Iberian Peninsula between the late sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth century. In this case, attachment to the original language and culture was maintained until the late nineteenth century. But this is a fidelity to Hispano-Portuguese origins rather than to a particular Jewish culture — an attitude characteristic of those who had lived as Christians (and thus as full members of society) or of their descendants.↩︎
See the introduction and critical apparatus of the English translation of Meor eiynayim. The Light of the Eyes, ed. J. Weinberg, Yale University Press, New Haven Conn. – London 2001.↩︎
S. Luzzatto, Discorso cited, pp. 37–38.↩︎
The writing of letters, the art of writing them.↩︎
On Elia Bachur, the best Jewish grammarian and lexicographer between the medieval and early modern periods, see the monograph by G. E. Weil, Elie Lévita, humaniste et massorète (1469–1549), Brill, Leiden 1963. His theories on the late appearance of vowels in the biblical text may be considered “modern,” for they oppose the traditional view of their origin in the revelation of Sinai, and follow only a historical and philological logic.↩︎
A. Salah, “Y a-t-il eu un roman hébraïque ? Roman et romanesque dans la littérature juive en Europe occidentale du XVIe siècle au XVIIIe siècle,” in Babel, no. 7 (2003), pp. 95–120.↩︎
With the writings of Azariah de’ Rossi, Avraham Portaleone, Shlomo Delmedigo (see below).↩︎
Leone Modena has a “modern” vision of his religion, which he begins to consider from an anthropological standpoint, moving away from medieval theological polemics. Leone Modena was probably also the author of an apocryphal text recommending the evolution of the Jewish religion in a biblical direction, abandoning the rituals that characterized it as particularist. Modena was also the author of dramas in Italian and the editor of a remarkable Italian comedy by the Jewish author Angelo Alatini, I trionfi (written in 1575, published in Venice in 1611).↩︎
Ariyeh mi-modena, Py Ariyè (The Mouth of the Lion), G. Calleoni, Venice 1640, introduction. Modena is also the best representative of the intellectual exchanges between Jews and Christians, which began in the sixteenth century and intensified throughout the seventeenth.↩︎
On Sara Copio Sullam, see U. Fortis, La bella ebrea. Sara Copio Sullam, poetessa nel ghetto di Venezia del ’600, Zamorani, Turin 2003.↩︎
See on this subject R. Bonfil, “La Sinagoga in Italia come luogo di riunione e di preghiera,” in Il centenario del Tempio Israelitico di Firenze, Atti del Convegno (24 ottobre 1982), Giuntina, Florence 1985, pp. 36–44.↩︎
A. Portaleone, Shiltey ha-Ghibborim (The Shields of the Mighty), Mantua 1612, introduction. See A. Guetta, “Avraham Portaleone, le scientifique repenti. Science et religion chez un savant juif entre le XVIe et le XVIIe siècle,” in G. Freudenthal, J.-P. Rothschild and G. Dahan (eds.), Torah et science: perspectives historiques et théoriques. Études offertes à Charles Touati, Peeters, Paris 2001, pp. 213–27.↩︎
On Italian Jewish authors of the eighteenth century, see the bio-bibliographical dictionary by A. Salah, La République des Lettres. Rabbins, écrivains et médecins juifs en Italie au XVIIIe siècle, Brill, Leiden – Boston Mass. 2007.↩︎
See especially Ergas, Shomer emunym, Amsterdam 1735, and Luzzatto, Ma’amar ha-wiquach (The Book of Discussion), also titled Choqer u-mequbbal (Rationalist and Kabbalist), in Shaarè Ramchal, ed. Ch. Friedlander, Bnei-Brak, 1989, pp. 29–94 (French translation by J. Hansel, Le philosophe et le cabaliste, Verdier, Paris 1991). On Luzzatto, see the monograph by J. Hansel, Moïse Hayyim Luzzatto (1707–1746). Kabbale et philosophie, Cerf, Paris, 2004.↩︎
S. D. Luzzatto, Dialogues on the Kabbalah (in Hebrew), J. B. Seita, Gorizia 1852.↩︎