Making Italian Jews Family, Gender, Religion and the Nation, 18611918 [Hardcover]

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 private spheres plays a pivotal role in the analysis, and the self-fashioning of Italian Jewish ?lites is read alongside the evolution of the cultural stereotypes typical of the time. Reinterpreting the Italian national patriotic narrative through the eyes of the Jews, Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti is able to unveil its less known layers and articulations, while at the same time offering a new perspective from which to read the modern Jewish experience in the Western World.

FOREWORD.- Acknowledgments.- List of abbreviations.- 1. The Jew of the Past and the Jew of the Present.- PART ONE.- JEWS IN PRIVATE. RITUALS AND RULES OF BELONGING.- 2. In the family.- 3. Boundary lines: the body in religion and science.- PART TWO.- JEWS IN PUBLIC. FELLOW CITIZENS AND COMPATRIOTS.- 4. Individual liberties and community ties.- 5. Plural identities in the age of nationalisms.- CONCLUSIONS.- IndexThis comprehensive portrait of Italian Jewry between 1861 and 1918 sets itself to become a point of reference not only for the study of  contemporary Italian Judaism, but also for the wider fields of contemporary Italian and European history. & Focusing on both literary and documentary sources, the book deploys a novel approach that allows for innlÖ