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This is a digital postscript to supplement the new paperback edition of Sarah Reguer's The Most Tenacious of Minorities: The Jews of Italy (2013). Arriving in ancient Rome over 2,000 years ago, the Jewish communities of Italy have retained their identity throughout the millennia. This book traces their recreation of community, focusing on their economic, intellectual, and social lives, as they moved from south to north. Over the centuries, the localized Italian groups were reinforced with the arrival of German, Provencal, Sephardic, and—most recently—Ashkenazi and Middle Eastern Jews. Surviving religious persecution, ghetto-ization, and the Holocaust, the Jews contributed to Italian society when they could. Supplemented by maps, illustrations, sidebars, and primary sources, the book is a scholarly yet popular overview of a minority group that is proudly Italian and equally proud to be Jewish. Learn more & purchase: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/browse-catalog/the-most-tenacious-of-minorities-the-jews-of-italy
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Framing Jewish Culture: Boundaries, Representations, and Exhibitions of Ethnic Difference, Jewish Cultural Studies, Vol 4 , 2014
This essay presents episodes, mostly from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, that demonstrate how Jews existed within the spatial framework of Rome and elsewhere in medieval Christian Italy, straddling social, economic, and spatial boundaries. Using a variety of sources to physically locate Jews in Italian urban culture allows a better understanding of the civic space available to them in Italian cities in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. Stretching from just before the promulgation of anti-Jewish decrees at the Fourth Lateran Council until the creation of the Venetian ghetto in 1516, this was a tumultuous but transformative period of Italian and Jewish history, in which Jewish communities settled and thrived throughout the entire peninsula.
Rivista di Storia del Cristianesimo, 2017
For the past two decades in Italy, Jewish history has emerged as a cen- tral research preoccupation – even as it lags behind the historiography of other countries in this regard. From the standpoint of the relations between ghettoized people and the “ghettoist” Christians – the inventors of the ghetto – new researchs centered on the early modern period and on the moment of reclusion and confinement (16th-19th centuries) represent a case of a major interest and historiographical innova- tion. These are amply cited in the notes of the works that we present here, and to which we have hitherto referred. On the basis of thorough documentary surveys carried out in archives that have been neglected so far in this area and for this period, it is possible to look at the history of the Jewish minority from a new perspective. Indeed, unexpected results emerge to challenge the most common, but incorrect, interpretive paradigm of Jewish separation and insularity.
Jews as citizens in late medieval and Renaissance Italy: The Case of Isacco da Pisa
Jewish History 25, no. 3/4 (2011): 269–318., 2011
Our essay begins with an acknowledgment of the seminal contributions of Vittore Colorni and Ariel Toaff but then criticizes their narrow focus on demonstrating that the citizenship status of Jewish inhabitants in central and northern Italy, apart from holding public office and admission to the liberal professions, was basically on par with that of nonJewish citizens. We argue, instead, that not all Jews became citizens of the localities in which they resided; and, moreover, that Jewish inhabitants (habitatores) enjoyed a robust bundle of rights, privileges, and protections under the ius commune, local statutes, and Capitoli, whether or not they acquired citizenship. Even when Jews like members of the da Pisa family acquired local citizenship, they continued to be identified as habitatores. As a matter of law, the status of cives and that of long-term noncitizen habitatores were treated as virtually identical. Citizenship, assuredly a valuable status, was nevertheless only one of the potential sources of the legal rights and obligations of Jews in late medieval and Renaissance Italy. By reconsidering the civic status of Jews within an expansive jurisprudential framework and drawing on untapped sources, our paper provides fresh perspectives that shifts the debate into more productive terrain. With Osvaldo Cavallar. “Jews as Citizens in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy: The Case of Isacco da Pisa.” Jewish History 25, no. 3/4 (2011): 269–318.
Jewish Studies in the Italian Academic World - 2005
Published in ALBERT VAN DER HEIDE and IRENE E. ZWIEP (eds.), Jewish Studies and the European Academic World. Plenary Lectures read at the VIIth Congress of the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS) Amsterdam, July 2002; Collection de la Revue des études juives dirigée par Simon C. Mimouni en Gérard Nahon; Peeters, Paris-Louvain, 2005, pp. 67-116.