Having trouble viewing this email? Click here June 14, 2021 - 4 Tamuz 5781

What did contemporary Jews see in Dante Alighieri? How did subsequent generations deal with and elaborate on his legacy? And what themes mainly capture the attention through these centuries of study and interpretation? In the 700th anniversary of the Italian poet death, many scholars confronted for Pagine Ebraiche the relationship between Dante and the Jewish world in a dossier of which the following article is an example.
 
By Anna Segre*

Where are the Jews going to end up in Dante's afterlife? That is the question I have asked myself since I discovered the existence of the Commedia. In Limbo - my grandmother used to say firmly - and for many years I have assumed that she was right. In fact, Dante does not place in Limbo only characters who lived before Christianity. Seneca, Lucan, Galen, Ptolemy and, most importantly, Averroes, Avicenna and even Saladin, three Muslims who were almost his contemporaries can also be found there.
However, it is not granted that those who live among Christians and partially share their holy texts, yet follow a different religion, can be treated with the same generosity. Perhaps, Jews could be among the heretics. But there is nothing that can confirm this hypothesis in the tenth canto of Inferno about heretics (one of those which are always read at school). Just as there is no ground for saying that the characters in the fourth and last part of the ninth circle of Inferno, the worst traitors of all - completely buried in the ice, so much so that is not even possible to talk to them - are Jews.
The hypothesis derives from the fact that the area is called Giudecca, like the places inhabited by Jews in many medieval cities. Yet, it is much more likely that the name simply derives from Judas Iscariot. He is there, in the depths of Inferno, forever mangled by one of the three mouths of Lucifer. Moreover, apart from the name of the area, in the text there is nothing that suggests that the damned of Giudecca were Jews.

*Teacher

Above, a Gustave Doré engraving for the first lines of Canto I in Dante's Inferno.

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Translated by Antonella Losavio and revised by Silvia Bozzo, students at Trieste University and the Advanced school for interpreters and Translators of Trieste University, interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.

A painting and a show. Two different and complementary ways to honor the memory of Dante on the 700th anniversary of his death, focusing in particular on his relationship with Judaism, the stimuli he collected, the perception of him over the centuries. This is the initiative of the Jewish Museum of Bologna, which Tuesday will host a work by the artist Tobia Ravà: Dante Lost in the Alchemical Forest (sublimation on acrylic satin, 2021). At the center is the encounter between the Florentine poet and the thought of Abulafia, a philosopher and mystic from Sephardic Spain and one of the major scholars of medieval Kabbalah. Ravà, in his characteristic style, makes a symbolic reading of it and applies to it that path of the Hebrew language which is ghematrià, or the correspondence between letter and number of words.
Three will be the appointments with the show “Dante and the streets of the Jews”, conceived by Il Ruggiero, by and with Emanuela Marcante and Daniele Tonini. The show will debut on Thursday 17 June in Cesena, in the courtyard of the Malatesta Library, in collaboration with the Municipality, the Dante Alighieri Society, the Historical Institute of the Resistance and Contemporary Age, and the association Friends of Music “A. Bonci”.

Above, Dante Lost in the Alchemical Forest by Tobia Ravà.
 

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“For many years I have met young people in schools who repay me with their reading and I will go on as long as I have breath. This is my mission and also a moral duty. Young people are better than we think”. So explains the writer Edith Bruck, who last week won the Youth category of the Strega prize, the most prestigious Italian literary award. Her new book, Il pane perduto (La nave di Teseo), which is among the final five nominated to Strega prize and traces her life, marked in her youth by deportation to death camps, was the most voted by a jury of girls and boys between the ages of sixteen and eighteen from over 60 high schools in Italy and Europe (Berlin, Brussels, Paris). That tragic experience is a comparison from which the Hungarian-born but Italian by adoption author never escapes, aware of the fact that “illuminating a single conscience is worth the effort and the pain of keeping alive the memory of what has been”. To propose to the direction of the most prestigious Italian literary award, the journalist and former parliamentarian Furio Colombo, creator of the Act that established in Italy the Day of Memory, who speaks of the book as “dense and bearer of truth” characterized by “literary beauty, stylistics, emotions”.
 

By David Bidussa*

Maybe it's time to reread Sholem Aleichem. So, just to not have the presumption of thinking that we live in a new and therefore incomprehensible time. But above all, to rediscover the irony and not just the tears.
 
*Social historian of ideas

 

 

By Basia Monka*

Not many people know how to dream. Of those who do, even fewer know how to turn their dreams into actions. But Ronny Fellus, the founder and one of two artistic directors of Film Festival Cinema Italia in Israel, and the founder and director of Festival “Finita La Commedia” (sic) knows very well. His passion for cinema and for connecting Italians and Israelis through films brought him back to Israel.
In 2019 he left behind the sun of Tuscany (and his own olive tree orchards where he still produces high-quality olive oil today) and the picturesque streets of one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Rome, where Ronny Fellus lived for most of his life, to settle for good in Tel Aviv, the city where he was born. Fellus was born to an Italian Israeli family. His father, an Italian from Tripoli, met his mother while living for 18 years in Tel Aviv. Ronny Fellus likes to tell his family story of three generations born in the Land of Israel, but officially in different countries.

*This article was originally published on The Jerusalem Post on June 10, 2021.

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