The Most Tenacious Of Minorities The Jews Of Italy [Hardcover]

Since arriving in Rome more than 2,000 years ago, the Jewish communities of Italy have retained their identity over millennia. This book traces the foundations of their community, focusing on their economic, intellectual, and social lives as they moved between northern and southern Italy. Over the centuries these localized Italian groups were reinforced with the arrival of German, Provencal, Sephardic, andmost recentlyAshkenazi and Middle Eastern Jews. Surviving religious persecution, ghetto-ization, and the Holocaust, the Jews contributed to Italian society when they could. Supplemented by maps, illustrations, sidebars, and primary sources, this book is a scholarly yet popular overview of a minority group that is proud to be Italian and equally proud to be Jewish.Few Jewish communities in the Diaspora are as old as the one in Italy, and thats one of the reasons Reguers account is well worth reading. She takes us on a journey, full of promise, peril and renewal, that begins during the Roman empire and ends in present-day Italy. Its quite a trip.Sara Reguer (PhD Columbia University) is chair of the Department of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She is the co-editor and co-author of The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times (2003, with Reeva Simon and Michael Laskier).A thoroughly researched and engagingly written presentation.