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All twenty-two original articles in the current volume are based on lectures given at the conference “The Jews in Italy: Their Contribution to the Development and Diffusion of Jewish Heritage”, which was convened in September 2011, at the University of Bologna, Department of Cultural Heritage. Geographically, the articles range from Italy to the Ottoman Empire (the Balkans and Aleppo), from France and Germany to the Middle East, including Israel, North and East Africa (Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Ethiopia). Chronologically, articles begin with the Roman period, through the Middle Ages and Renaissance until modern times. In this collection, the reader will find a wide range of subjects reflecting various scholarly perspectives such as history; Christian-Jewish relations; Kabbalah; commentary on the Bible and Talmud; language, grammar, and translation; literature; philosophy; gastronomy; art; culture; folklore; and education.
“Individually and collectively [the articles] provide valuable information and analysis about the current state of research of Italian Jewry in particular and in the context of Jewish studies in general. ... The Jews in Italy: Their Contribution to the Development and Diffusion of Jewish Heritage highlights how at the communal level Italian Jewish culture embodies Italian, and indeed global, culture.”
—Howard Adelman, H-Judaic
Mauro Perani is Full Professor of Hebrew at the University of Bologna, Department of Cultural Heritage. President of the European Association for Jewish Studies in 2006-2010, he is currently President of the Italian Association for Jewish Studies (AISG). In 2013, he discovered the oldest complete Sefer Torah, in the University of Bologna library. In the same year, he received a PhD honoris causa from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for his research on thousands of medieval Hebrew manuscripts reused in Italian archives as bindings in the 16th-18th centuries. Director and Editor of Materia Giudaica, journal of the AISG, he also founded the series Corpus Epitaphiorum Hebraicorum Italiae. He has worked on the “Italian Genizah Project” for thirty-five years, and is currently partaking in the “Books within Books” initiative as a Member of the Scientific Board. He is the author of a dozen volumes and more than four hundred articles.
Yaron Harel is Full Professor at the department of Jewish History at Bar Ilan University. He is the vice-chairman of the Israeli Historical Society, and incumbent of the Yekutiel and Hannah Klein Chair in the History the Rabbinate during the Modern Period, Bar-Ilan University. His research deals with political, social, and cultural history of the Jews in the Middle East in modern times. He published twelve books and several peer-reviewed articles.
Preface
THE ROMAN PERIOD
Roman Attitudes to Jews and Judaism in the First Century BCE
Miriam Ben Zeev
THE MIDDLE AGES & THE RENAISSANCE
The Oldest Complete Extant Sefer Torah Rediscovered at the Bologna University Library: Codicological, Textual, and Paleographic Features of an Ancient Eastern Tradition
Mauro Perani
Palestinian and Babylonian Traditions in Italy at the Outset of the Middle Ages: The Yerushalmi in the Writings of R. Isaiah di Trani (the Rid)
Yaron Silverstein
Abraham de Balmes’s Miqneh Abram: An Adaptation of Modistic Concepts by a Hebrew Grammarian of the Renaissance
Dror Ben-Arié
The Anonymous Hebrew Translation of Giordano Ruffo’s De medicina equorum and Its Language
Michael Ryzhik
Between The Book of Jossipon and The Book of Jashar
Carmela Saranga
Italian Jewry and Kabbalistic Rites
Moshe Hallamish
Ladino Translations from Italy: The Bible, Pirke Avot, the Passover Haggadah, and the Siddur
Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald
The Jews of France and Italy during the Later Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Shimon Schwarzfuchs
Torah and Nature in the Writings of Some Italian Jewish Thinkers of the Renaissance
Miguel Antonio Beltrán Munar
Prenuptial Agreements in Ketubot from Italy
Yoel Shilo
THE MODERN PERIOD
Jewish Ashkenazi Gastronomy in Northern Italy in the Early Modern Period: The Testimony of the Book Mitzvot Hanashim
Zahava Weishouse
The Depiction of Jesus’s Circumcision and Presentation in the Temple in Early Modern Paintings in Venice: Some Questions on Jesus’s Identity
Maria Portmann
Freemasonry and Saint-Simonism as Carriers of Enlightenment Values in David Levi’s Weltanschauung
Alessandro Grazi
The Unique Characteristics of Dybbuk Exorcisms in Rabbinic Documents from Eighteenth-Century Italy
Yaniv Goldberg
Rabbinic Ties between Italy and Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century
Leah Bornstein-Makovetsky
THE CONTEMPORARY PERIOD
Jewish Solidarity: The Actions and Support of the Union of Italian Israelite Communities for the Jews of Libya and Ethiopia in the 1930s
Yitzhak Mualem
The Dispute between Italy and France in Tunisia: The Role of Language and the Position of Italian Jewry
Filippo Petrucci
Jews as Promoters of Italian Civilization in Libya
Rachel Simon
The Relations of the Holy See with the Jewish People after the 1993 Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Israel: Divergence between the Interreligious Dialogue with the Jews of Rome and the Diplomatic Dialogue with Israel
Eliav Taub
Primo Levi: Chemist/Writer, Italian/Jew
Smadar Shiffman
Jewish Educational Proposals in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Florence
Silvia Guetta