The Jews of Italy, 1848-1915: Between Tradition and Transformation

Elizabeth Schachter challenges the widely held view that Jewish integration in Italy from the second emancipation (1848) to the First World War was an unqualified success, and thus an anomaly in European Jewish history. She draws on contemporary Jewish journals, memoirs, autobiographies, oral testimony, private correspondence and archival material to illustrate her case. She explores the principal areas of concern for Jews in Italy: the tensions and pressures of acceptance in the host society, ‘the anguish of assimilation’; the complex relationship between Jewish identity and nascent national identity; the erosion of the traditional bonds that bound the individual Jew to his community; the abandonment of religious practices, leading, in some cases, to mixed marriages and conversion. A rich and wide-ranging treatment of Italian Jewish identity in the period of Italian unification and Liberal Italy, set within the broader framework of European Jewish history.