Maifreda: “Studying the Jewish Texts to Understand the History of Italy”
Jewish book collecting is a field that has not been extensively researched, yet some important initiatives are underway to interpret, catalog, and valorize it. One such initiative is the catalog of printed Jewish volumes by I-Tal-Ya Books. This project is coordinated by the Foundation for Jewish Cultural Heritage in Italy, in collaboration with the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, the National Central Library of Rome, and the National Library of Israel. Thus, the title of the volume, Am HaSefer: Readers and Bibliophiles in Jewish Italy Between the 17th and 20th Centuries, should not be understood only in the traditional sense, referring to the Jewish people. It also refers to the wider public of readers and bibliophiles who, over the centuries, have collected, reorganized, arranged, and preserved books and manuscripts across space and time. All of this was done to make it possible to get them to us, in our hands and in our libraries.
The most important topic of the volume, edited by Dario Disegni and me, is the general theme of how Jewish and non-Jewish societies and cultures have expressed and interpreted their relation with the world of books and their collections differently. These studies cover a period during which at least two general problems emerged. We believe the perspectives introduced by the history of books, reading, and bibliophilia help shed light on these problems.
The first problem concerns the applicability of the general historical category of “modernity” to the experience of the Jewish diaspora. The term “Modern History” is the academic classification commonly used to identify all centuries between the second part of the 15th century (between the passage of Constantinople from the Eastern Roman Empire to the Ottoman Empire and the advent of the first geographical and commercial explorations of the Americas) and the first half of the 19th century, with the French Revolution, the Restoration, and the Springtime of Nations of 1848.
Does the category of modernity also apply to Jewish history? One answer can be found in the history of Jewish printing and the use of Jewish books, which changed during the early modern period.
Jewish books reveal great differences as well as unifying experiences among the major European and Mediterranean Jewish subcultures (Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and Levantines), both in their content — particularly in legal treatises — and in their writing styles. This continued until the diversification of gender induced by books for women, a trend that Jewish printing highlighted during the early modern period.
The second issue to which these essays refer, either directly or indirectly, is the characteristics and limitations of the complex emancipation process pursued by Italian and European Jews between the French Revolution and the beginning of the 20th century. What meaning did it have for the Jewish people and for society at large? What were its driving forces and limitations? What factors promoted it and what hindered it? In particular, how can the history of books, reading, and bibliophilia help deepen and improve our understanding of this process?
Germano Maifreda
Translated by Elizabeth El Khoury and revised by Caterina Mansani, students at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Trieste, trainees in the newsroom of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities – Pagine Ebraiche.