This book depicts the cultural imagination of the Italian-Jewish minority from the unification of the country to the end of the First World War. The creation of an Italian nation-state introduced new problems and new opportunities for its citizens. What did it mean for the Jewish minority? How could members of the minority combine and redefine Jewishness and Italianness in a radically new political and legal framework? Key concepts such as family, religion, nation, assimilation and - later - Zionism are observed as they shift and change over time. The interaction between the public and...

Beginning with the establishment of the first ghetto in Venice in 1516, then followed by that of Rome and other cities, the Jews had to measure themselves against this circumscribed and ambivalent place, which included them in the urban perimeter and at the same time isolated them. For almost three centuries this was the space in which the Jews cultivated their identity, on the one hand preserving the characteristics of a millenary culture, while on the other drawing from the world that opened up beyond that border: the constant relationship between the "inside" and the "outside" of the...