Challenging the Myth of Italian Jewish Assimilation
- Challenging the Myth of Italian Jewish Assimilation
There is a widespread belief that Italian Jews in the modern period “assimilated,” meaning that they merged with the gentile society to such an extent that they abandoned their Jewish identity. This belief is based on the fact that modern Italian Jews became less observant. From the nineteenth century onwards, Italian Jews attended synagogue less frequently, observed kashrut less stringently, and married Christians in growing numbers. Most scholars have concluded from these trends that Italian Jewish identity disintegrated. This article argues to the contrary. Using a wide array of sources, including Italian Jewish community archives, newspapers, memoirs, and oral histories, it shows that the Jews of modern Italy maintained their distinctiveness from non-Jews and invented entirely new forms of Jewish culture. From the late nineteenth century until World War II, the Italian Jewish communal system consolidated and centralized. Jewish leaders harnessed state laws to strengthen their communities, and established national organizations where none had stood before. A growing Jewish newspaper industry fostered the sense of belonging to a Jewish collective. Women and girls participated in Jewish public life more than in the pre-modern period. Religious practice developed in dynamic ways as Italian Jews, like their German and French brethren, introduced reforms. Jewishness found expression in daily life through domestic religious practices, life-cycle events, and culinary customs. In all these ways, Italian Jews forged a modern Jewish identity.
THE CASE FOR ASSIMILATION
The idea that modernity led to the disintegration of Jewishness began over a century ago. In the 1890s, the Russian Jewish historian, Simon Dubnov, argued that emancipation, the process that granted Jews political and civic equality, threatened to corrode Jewish culture, particularly in Western and Central Europe. Jews in these areas, he warned, were nearing “national assimilation” that would eventually “impel [End Page 76] Jews to merge with other nations – and Judaism would disappear.”1 This paradigm ruled supreme for decades. Scholars, particularly of Eastern European origin, described the Jews of France, Germany, Austria, and Britain, as communities on the path to losing their Jewish distinctiveness. Russian-born historian Ben-Zion Dinur led this argument in the 1950s. Modern Western Jews, Dinur posited, had gone down a path of “self-negation.” With only “a minimal degree of Jewishness,” they had become “a diffused minority with no clearly distinct way of life … [and] only the very vaguest traces of the ancestral heritage.”2 Galician-born Raphael Mahler repeated this view in the 1970s. The French Revolution, he wrote, although it signaled the start of emancipation on the continent, “heralded a period of national disintegration and assimilation.”3
Scholars of Italian Jewry joined this line of thinking. Focusing on the rise of mixed marriages and the decline of strict observance, they stated that Italian Jews shed their Judaism in the modern period. “The impact of emancipation upon the internal life of Italian Jewry was … deleterious,” wrote British-Jewish historian Cecil Roth in 1946, for “assimilation had made appalling progress.” Roth described Jewish culture in Italy as “wasted,” “dwindled to vanishing point,” “neglected,” and “pathetic.”4 Italian scholars, both Jewish and non-Jewish, made the same argument. In 1962, non-Jewish historian Renzo De Felice published his seminal Storia degli Ebrei Italiani. Reprinted in seven editions and translated into English in 2001 as The Jews in Fascist Italy, this book claimed that the twentieth century saw the “rapid and massive assimilation of the Italian Jews, morally and materially, into Italian society.” This attachment, De Felice held, “caused a repudiation of their own Jewishness, as if being Jews meant that they were not able to be completely Italian.”5 In his 1963 Storia degli Ebrei in Italia [The History of the Jews in Italy], Jewish historian Attilio Milano charged modern Italian Jews with “drowsiness.” When emancipation abolished the ghettos, he opined, it also destroyed “a wall against external influences …, a rock protecting [Jewish] individuality, traditions, and culture.” Emancipation “corroded” Jewish culture and “slackened” Jewish ties, Milano stated.6 Italian-American historian Andrew Canepa agreed with this argument, positing in 1977 that post-emancipation Italian Jewish history was one of “conversions and absorption … [which] determined the triumph of the assimilationist conception...
