Last weekend, Napoli’s football team celebrated its 100th anniversary. This milestone marks the culmination of a story that began in August 1926 with the establishment of the team by the Jewish entrepreneur and philanthropist Giorgio Ascarelli. A beloved figure in Naples, Ascarelli owned one of the most important textile industries in Italy and Europe. He realized that investing in football was a way to build social and cultural strength by giving Southern Italy the opportunity to rival the overwhelming power of Northern Italy’s football teams.
Many other investments followed, including a stadium that Ascarelli built at his own expense in the Gianturco neighborhood. After Ascarelli’s premature death in March 1930, the stadium was named in his honor. Hundreds of Neapolitans from all over the city participated in his funeral, showing great respect and emotion. The local and national press proclaimed that Ascarelli would never be forgotten. However, as the fascist regime promoted state antisemitism, that sentiment declined, though it never disappeared.
As the celebration approached, Roberta Ascarelli, a Germanist and descendant of a cousin of Giorgio’s, recounted her family’s unique history in the newspaper Il Mattino. Originally from Spain, the Ascarellis were forced to leave after the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. They reached Rome and later Naples through Livorno, thanks to the new opportunities opened by the end of the Bourbon hegemony and the conquest of liberty and rights so long denied to Jews.
A special bond with Zionism.
Roberta Ascarelli offers an intriguing interpretation of the idea that led to the establishment of the Napoli football team. In her view, the “agonistic and social project” of Giorgio has many affinities with Theodor Herzl’s reflections on “the new man and the new Jew: healthy, athletic, enthusiastic, and capable of redeeming himself and the world.” Many members of the Ascarelli family were Zionists from the very beginning, forming a “precocious group” in 1920 while establishing themselves as protagonists in the Neapolitan entrepreneurial and political scene.
According to Roberta Ascarelli, in their vision “Naples was the right place not only to become Neapolitan, but also to create a possible Jerusalem.” She concludes: “If today I am here, out of my century and out of my story, it is just to take my own piece of the party, with the Neapolitan idea that a crowd does not have a curriculum. It is there, all together, at a convened time, facing something over which no one has authority except to be there.” Ascarelli maintains that persecutions can also be defeated this way: “With whistling, choruses, and maybe offering a pizza to a stranger.”
a.s.