Where Three Civilizations Meet

Abstract

In 1848, the Jewish scholar Samuel David Luzzatto presented an exposition of I giudaismo illustrate, with the purpose of instilling his coreligionists with veneration for their ancestral tradition. Luzzatto gave pride of place in his monograph to his own legacy. Italian Judaism, wrote Luzzatto, always orthodox and more or less enlightened. Jewry had never undergone a period of total domination by an alien culture this was what Luzzatto meant by the term orthodox; and it was enlightened because it had never passed through a dark age, but remained throughout its history civilized and cultivated. Nearly one hundred and forty years later resonances of Luzzatto's characterization of Jewry can be heard in the personal memoirs of another scholar. Shortly before his death in September 1987, Arnaldo Momigliano wrote a preface to a collection of some of his writings on Jewish subjects. ' The preface consisted of reminiscences and an affectionate evocation of his Jewish home in a little town situated near Cuneo in Piedmont. According to Momigliano, his was one of the few families that had maintained a strictly orthodox Jewish life. They kept a flat in Cuneo where the family stayed for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, presumably to enable them to attend the synagogue on these occasions. In a slightly humorous vein he describes the country home which had been chosen with due consideration for the permitted distance which constitutes a Sabbath day's journey. Domestic routine was governed by Jewish ritual requirements. Indeed, an article written in 1938 in a local fascist newspaper provides further evidence of the preservation of traditional observances by his family. The author of the article claims that the cruel practice of ritual slaughter had now fallen into disuse among Jews, the only exception being a certain rich Jew of Caraglio, an undoubted snide