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Acculturation & Its Discontents: The Italian Jewish Experience Between Exclusion and Inclusion, edited by David N. Myers, Massimo Ciavolella, Peter H. Reill, and Geoffrey Symcox. University of Toronto Press, 2008. 228 pp. $65.00.
Acculturation has been defined by Wictionary as “a process in which members of one cultural group adopt the beliefs and behaviors of another group.” Although acculturation is usually in the direction of a minority group adopting habits and language patterns of the dominant group, it can be reciprocal—that is, the dominant group also adopts patterns typical of the minority group. The subtitle of this book locates the cultural background in question as that of the Italian peninsula.
This book gathers the proceedings of the conference “Acculturation and Its Discontents: The Jews of Italy from Early Modern to Modern Times,” held at the University of California, Los Angeles, in April 2003. The introduction by one of its editors, David Myers, offers a useful outline of the nine contributions on the community “that stands at the center of our volume: the Jews of Italy” (p. 3). Myers points out the rich diversity—ethnic, regional, culinary and religious—of the Jewish experience in Italy, whose diverse presence basically corresponds to the regional variety of the Italian territory, consequently calling attention to the problematics of outlining a single Italian Jewish history. In fact, the essays listed in the table of contents identify research topics that deal with several places, times and peoples: Venice, Rome or Trieste —the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, late eighteenth and twentieth centuries—Avraham Portaleone and Giorgio Bassani.
Acculturation and its Discontents seems to fit in the trend of those more and less recent publications that aim to outline the history of Jews in Italy as unique and different, but at the same time being rooted in Italy’s cultural tradition, including works by Stanislao Pugliese, Andrew Canepa, Lynn Gunzberg, H. Stuart Hughes, Sergio Parussa, Cecil Roth, and Alexander Stille. This scholarship has dealt with Jewish identity and how Italian Jewry defines itself in relation to the Italian historical situation. This relatively new book, published in 2008, is welcomed for its thoroughness, academic and bibliographic accuracy, precise documentation, originality and new discoveries within the Jewish Italian tradition. Again, David Myers is quite assertive when he declares that “the challenge of this volume is to extract the conceptual gain from the premise of historical coherence without ignoring the diversity and tensions in the Italian Jewish experience” (p. 4). Furthermore, the nine chapters of this book seek to show the dialectical rapport between “commonality” and “divergence” in Italian Jewish life, as well as between Italian Jews and their non-Jewish Italian environment.
Three of the essays in the book focus on the Renaissance as a crucial time for the Jewish minority group to directly experience both exclusion and inclusion in the surrounding society that was open and hostile. These experiences therefore determined a cultural exchange that was quite multidirectional in early Modern Italy, “moving back and forth between Jewish and Christian communities” (p. 5). In a way, the creation of the Venetian Ghetto and the publication of the Talmud, both in the year 1516, belong to this key period in which Jews started to think about their “collective identity” (p. 6). Concepts such as acculturation and assimilation are first felt in the Renaissance as essential means “indispensable to Jewish survival” (p. 7). The “discontents” of this acculturation process have to be retrieved from all the obstacles that impeded Jews from passing unrestricted into Italian society. Hence the very first essay by Benjamin Ravid, “How ‘Other’ Really Was the Jewish Other? The Evidence from Venice,” enlightens by elaborating on the legal restrictions on Jews adopted by the city of Venice, restrictions that in spite of their intent seemed not to have prevented the social, cultural, and economical exchange between Venetian Jews and non-Jews. Don Harran’s essay, “Between Exclusion and Inclusion: Jews as Portrayed in Italian Music from the Late Fifteenth to the Early Seventeenth Centuries” (from which the very subtitle of the volume borrows its key words), studies the songs called ebraiche starting form the Early Renaissance. Harran evaluates both categories of inclusion and exclusion oftlinethrough a close analysis of the ebraiche songs’ lyrics written by Christians about Jews. The article on the sixteenth-century Jewish physician from Mantua, Avraham Portaleone, is a unique presentation by Alessandro Guetta on this erudite doctor who comes “to embody the very complex—and complexity—of acculturation” (p. 10). Kenneth Stowe then concentrates on the Jews of Rome around 1555 and their Roman ghetto experienced as a sort of a Jewish “quasi-autonomous” state, parallel but interactive with the cultural values of the non-Jewish community (p. 9).
In the second part of the book, five contributors explore the Jewish experience in eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy. These essays deal with the issue of modernity in a country that slowly and painfully, only almost at the end of the nineteenth century, became an independent and unified nation. Readers will therefore be engaged by several excellent articles on various topics, as well as on curious situations such as the divorce case of Rachele Luzzato Morschene in 1795 Trieste, when this city’s court ruled against the traditional Jewish courts by granting Mrs. Luzzato Morschene her divorce. This essay by Lois Dubin is indeed brilliant in pointing out that the intervention of the city court in rabbinic law was to be an indication of emancipation for the Jewish woman. In the Triennio Giacobino, we are able to feel the joy of liberty when Geoffrey Syncox focuses on the Napoleonic victory in Italy, which introduced new principles of equality and anticlericalism.
Again the musical theme reappears in Edwin Seroussi’s article on the music of Jewish liturgical ceremonies between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Seroussi presents to the reader the creation of new liturgical music categorized as “musica sacra” (sacred music), while at the same time outlining “the continuity of a largely a-religious aesthetic strand” in Italian Jewish musical culture (p. 12), that is reflected for instance in the Jewish passion for Italian opera.
Language and literature find their space in the last two contributions, respectively by Simon Levis Sullam on the “true tongue” of the Jews of Italy, and by Guido Fink on the “Fiction of Giorgio Bassani.” Levis Sullam tries “to excavate traces of Italian Jewish dialects that survived into the age of assimilation” (p. 12). Guido Fink concentrates on the literary depiction of “assimilated Jewish life” (p. 13) in the Northern provincial city of Ferrara. Fink shifts to the recollection of “Jewishness” on behalf of the so-called “Gentile” society. This final chapter, in a certain way, circles back to the very first one: from the Venetian Ghetto to the Fascist racial laws. Readers are thus directed to discover the cultural richness of the multi-faceted Jewish minority in Italy, a minority that, even though marginalized, segregated and confined to a ghetto, was able to be included in the dominant generalized Catholic culture of the Italian Peninsula, all the way until this continuous connotation of social exclusion-inclusion reached its highest form of exclusion in the Fascist regime.
This book is extremely engaging, and its essays are ideal for scholars, students and anyone interested in the roles of the Jewish population of Italy. Well written by experts of history, literature, and music, it offers a wide spectrum of research topics and succeeds in providing both very useful information and thought-provoking observations on the significant cultural influence of Italian Jews in the history of Italy.
Elisabetta Nelsen
San Francisco State University
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