Enigmas of Modern Jewish Identity

Abstract

What is left of identity when both language and religion are gone?" This is the question posed at the outset of a monograph on six twentieth-century Italian writers whom the author, the late H. Stuart Hughes, designates as Jewish. 1 The difficulty of answering his own question is not reduced because of his choice of writers: Italo Svevo and Alberto Moravia were baptized Catholics whose novels barely contain any Jewish characters. Also a Roman Catholic was the mother of Natalia Ginzburg, who herself grew up without any religious instruction. Both Carlo Levi and Primo Levi suffered under Italian fascism for their political activities, rather than for the faith that they did not practice; nor did either have a strong sense of peoplehood. Of Hughes's writers, only Giorgio Bassani--the author of Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, translated in 1965 as The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, adapted into a famous film by Vittorio De Sica--wrote fiction in which Jewish life was presented not merely as a parenthesis, and he showed a keen interest in cultivating his ethnic heritage.