Steinschneider and Italy, 2011
Asher Salah bezalel.academia.edu
Steinschneider and Italy, 2011
The role and the intellectual contribution of rabbi Eliseo (Elisha) Pontremoli (Casale 1778 - Nizza 1851), father of the more famous Esdra Pontremoli (1818-1888), director of the Vessillo Israelitico, and grand-father of the French architect Emmanuel Élisée Pontremoli (1865-1956), has been almost completely ignored by the historiography of the Italian and European rabbinate in the 19th century. None of his hundreds of extant sermons, responsa, biblical commentaries, astronomical works and texts of religious polemic, both in verse and in prose, has been ever published. Carried out between France and Italy, between the Napoleonic period and the Restoration, Pontremoli’s work sheds light unto the wide intellectual interests of a religious leader who tried to confront traditional Judaism with the challenges of Enlightenment philosophy and the emergence of a new historical consciousness in modern Judaism.

The correspondence of the Italian Hebraist Samuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865) and the German-Jewish Orientalist Salomon Munk (1803–1867) sheds light on the trans-European dimension of the movement known as the Science of Judaism. This article is based on the reconstruction of the friendship between Luzzatto and Munk as reflected in Luzzatto's letters to Munk in Paris. Their relationship was personal as well as intellectual: Luzzatto sent his son Philoxène, a promising Orientalist, to study under Munk's supervision. Together with Munk's letter to Philoxène, these letters provide us with details central to an understanding of the relationship between the two scholars. Although differing in their attitude toward Jewish faith and philosophy, Munk and Luzzatto shared a common interest in Hebrew and Oriental languages. Through their philological and linguistic studies, they challenged the Orientalistic attitude prevalent among European scholars and historians of philosophy in the first half of the nineteenth century.

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

In the Italian duchies of the Habsburg Empire arose in the early modern period (17th–18th centuries) a rich, Hebrew language Jewish–Christian controversial literature, which has remained unnoticed even in the scientific literature devoted to this period, although the approximately fifty texts, identified so far, clearly demonstrate the importance of the genre. The intended project tries to analyze the newly identified manuscripts 1.) as a new phase in the long-lasting history of Jewish-Christian controversy, and 2.) as a mechanism of the cultural integration and modernization of the Jewish community. These new perspectives not only promise to fill out a void in our historical map of Jewish–Christian interactions, but might revolutionize our understanding of the relation of the Jewish minority and its Christian surroundings in Europe in an age whose impact can be felt even today. Moreover, the project is likely to make considerable progress in the Jewish–Christian dialogue, too.