“When publishers complain, we have to take the past into account. For over 500 years editors and publishers have complained that books don’t sell enough or that it’s too expensive to make them. We can read this even in the very first documents regarding printing, so there is nothing new here”. Thus Roberto Barbieri, executive director of the European Research Center Book Publishing Library (CRELEB), in an interview with Pagine Ebraiche proves wrong the pessimistic predictions regarding the publishing industry’s state in Italy.
Sure, there is no shortage of critical issues and much more still needs to be done to promote reading. “Nonetheless,” he argues, “the industry’s state is not as bad as is often depicted, even compared to other European countries”. Especially if you consider it in the light of a centuries-old path that has made Italian publishing “a voice for pluralism. In Italy there are a lot of publishing houses, which on some level create great dispersion, but on another level, they represent a pluralist culture”.
This is a matter very dear to Barbieri, who a few days after the Turin International Book Fair brought into focus, together with the CDEC Foundation (Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation), a central element of this pluralism – a Jewish voice – in the seminar: “The Jewish world’s contribution to the development of the Italian publishing industry. From the unification of Italy to racial laws”. It is an opportunity to reflect on the role Jews had in building Italian culture and the damage fascism and its racial laws entailed for the latter.

The Treves brothers, Leo Olschki, Angelo Fortunato Formiggini, the Calabi and Lattes families. These are only a few of the publishers mentioned during the conference. They all have something in common: a Jewish identity, whether more or less obvious. What other elements do they share and why is it important to remember them today?
The names you mentioned, as well as the other publishers discussed in the seminar, began their entrepreneurial life during the nineteenth century. Indeed, they were Jewish personalities, but at the same time they printed texts that have nothing to do with religious life. Their contribution to Italian publishing can be identified with a wide international openness. For example, they spoke different languages, while many other publishers did not. They mostly came from the book trade, while the others mostly came from the world of typography, which provided them with a different kind of logic that helped transform the industry. Additionally, they possessed the business skills to diversify publishing products which would later on serve as a model for the modern publishing industry.

Translated by Klara Mattiussi, revised by Annadora Zuanel, students at the Secondary School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Trieste, interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities – Pagine Ebraiche.

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Italy takes part in the network of collaborations initiated by the National Library of Israel, more specifically with the "I-TAL-YA Books" project that started a few years ago from the cooperation of UCEI (the Union of Italian Jewish Communities) with the National Central Library of Rome and the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, thanks to the contribution of the Jewish Cultural Heritage Foundation of Italy. The goal, as reported in the past in many of our articles, is to create a unified catalog of all the Jewish books present in the national territory. The project involves thousands of volumes.
Manuscripts, incunabula and ancient texts have thus become available both to scholars and the general public. They can be found in the digital Teca of the National Library of Rome, that was also adapted into Hebrew for the purpose. "This is an important and exciting initiative, in the sign of a strong interconnection between different realities", said to Pagine Ebraiche Stefano Campagnolo, current director of the National Central Library of Rome, during a conference dedicated to State libraries in Lazio and Tuscany held recently at the headquarters of the former UCEI Bibliographic Center.

Translated by Annadora Zuanel, revised by Martina Bandini, students at the Secondary School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Trieste, interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities – Pagine Ebraiche.

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Le sud de l’Italie et les Juifs : voilà l’intrigant objet de recherche des nombreux projets en cours sur le territoire qui va des Pouilles à la Sicile, en passant par la Calabre.  Digne d'intérêt est le projet universitaire de restauration de la frette du puits du cloître de la basilique La Magione, à Palerme, qui est désormais sur le point d’aboutir. Ce monument, avec des inscriptions hébraïques sur deux côtés, remonte probablement à 1467 et constitue une des plus anciennes témoignages des vicissitudes des Juifs de Sicile, ensuite chassés de l’île par le décret de bannissement de la fin du XVe siècle.   
Les travaux ont commencé début janvier, sous l’impulsion de l’université locale. La responsable du projet est l’étudiante Carlotta Bertella, en dernière année d’études, qui travaille sous la direction du professeur Giuseppe Inguì et la supervision de la Surintendance du patrimoine culturel. Les travaux sont financés par une cotisation du département de physique et chimie de la Faculté de Conservation et Restauration des Biens Culturels.

Traduction de Marta Gustinucci, révisée par Onda Carofiglio, étudiantes à l’École Supérieure de Langues Modernes pour les Interprètes et les Traducteurs de l’Université de Trieste, stagiaires dans le bureau du journal de l’Union des communautés juives italiennes – Pagine Ebraiche.

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"An example of a passionate resistance to the horror of dictatorships and the fight for the defense of rights, Edith Bruck embodies a model of civil and intellectual commitment and a profile of great humanity". With this motivation, the Campiello Foundation honored with an achievement award the writer and poet of Hungarian origin who, as a child, survived deportation and extermination camp, during the presentation event in Rome of the finalist authors of the 61st edition of the prestigious Literary Prize Campiello. Bruck, reads the motivation, was chosen "for her exemplary biographical and artistic parable, which makes her an exceptional witness of the European and Italian twentieth century and a courageous relay of its values in the present century".

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By Joshua Teplitsky*

As the COVID-19 pandemic seems both behind us and still present as a threat and a collective trauma, Susan Einbinder’s Writing Plague: Jewish Responses to the Great Italian Plague could not have come at a better time. Exploring the acts of writing as response to epidemic catastrophe, the book offers a valuable lens onto cultural, religious, and liturgical encounters with epidemic catastrophe by the people who survived and sought to reckon with plagues past. This is the second of Einbinder’s contributions to studies of premodern plague, following upon her 2018 After the Black Death (University of Pennsylvania Press). Whereas that study explored the impact of the initial, catastrophic, and surprising outbreak of bubonic plague in the fourteenth century, this study breaks new ground, moving into the Italian peninsula in the seventeenth century, an age in which plague, however horrific, was no longer an agent of shock or utter confusion.

*This article was originally published on Marginalia on JUne 9, 2023.

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