Italian Jewish Literature (Ninth to Nineteenth Century)

Abstract

Prior to the formation of the Italian national state in the nineteenth century, the term “Italian” applied to the compound “Jewish literature” designates a vast and multifarious corpus of texts produced by Jews living in the geographic area of the Italian peninsula rather than a culturally and politically coherent literary tradition. At the crossroads of the Mediterranean, exposed to different civilizations, Italy has been over the centuries the home for Jews of manifold origins, traditions, and languages, Iberian refugees as well as Ottoman subjects, Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim as well as North African Judeo-Arabs. However, the continuous presence since Late Antiquity of an ancient Jewish community in Rome and other parts of the peninsula has determined the formation of a local Jewish community characterized by its own distinctive ritual and linguistic features. Its influence has been consistent well beyond the Italian peninsula, carried by the migration of Italian Jews to central and eastern Europe at the turn of the first millennium ce or fostered by the mercantile networks of Jews from port cities such as Venice or Leghorn, in the Levant, and in other regions under the sphere of influence of Italian states. Prompted by the rise of nationalism in Europe and in the spirit of the critical investigations of Jewish past of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, since the nineteenth century, the study of Italian Jewish literature has developed into a full-fledged field of scholarship. Scholars have traditionally depicted Italy as a land where Jews and Christians coexisted in a harmonious cultural symbiosis, focusing on those periods, such as the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when the exchanges between Jewish and Christian scholars were particularly intense and fruitful. This harmonistic vision has been challenged by recent scholarship uncovering the more complex dynamics of interaction with the Christian majority during the age of the ghettos (sixteenth to eighteenth century) and the involvement of Italian Jews in transnational frames of cultural communication within the Jewish diaspora. In the twenty-first century, the knowledge of Italian Jewish literature has enormously benefited from a growing number of studies devoted to leading authors, to different literary genera, and to specific periods. Also, a wide array of texts made available to the public in valuable and accurate critical editions has attested to the increasing interest in Italian Jewish culture. However, the literary output of the Jews in Italy still waits to be fully integrated in the general narrative of the history of Italian literature, and there is a consistent lack of studies dedicated to the legal and homiletic production of the Jews, which has been neglected in favor of scholarship devoted to their poetry and thought.