On A cold December night in 1926 a band of anti-fascists gathered in the small northern Italian sea town of Savona to help Filippo Turati flee the country aboard a motor boat. The dean of Italian socialism and a former member of the Italian parliament, Turati was now old and demoralized, and unwilling to risk a confrontation with the fascists; he had been persuaded by friends and sympathizers to seek asylum in France. Along the escape route, as he was whisked from one hiding place to the next, he had stopped at the home of Camillo Olivetti, the founder of the famous typewriter company, and, a few days later, at the home of Professor Giuseppe Levi, the renowned histologist and neuro-anatomist. “One evening,” recalls Levi’s daughter, now known to literature as Natalia Ginzburg,

I heard my mother talking to someone in the hall. I heard her open the linen cupboard. Shadows moved across the glass panels of the doors. In the night, I heard someone coughing in the room next to me. . . . “He has to escape from Italy. He is in hiding. You must not tell anyone. . . .”

Turati was not the first Italian socialist to run to France for political exile. Two of his closest party friends, Giuseppe Modigliani and Claudio Treves, both with distinguished parliamentary careers, had also fled that same year. By a strange coincidence, the Modigliani and Treves had something else in common, being related to two famous 20th-century Italian painters: Giuseppe Modigliani was the brother of Amedeo; and Claudio Treves was the uncle of Carlo Levi (a writer as well as a painter).

All four were also Jewish. As were Camillo Olivetti and Dr. Giuseppe Levi. As were two of the younger anti-fascists now organizing Filippo Turati’s escape: Adriano Olivetti, Camillo’s son and heir to the Olivetti fortune, who served in the Italian parliament after the war, and Carlo Rosselli, who devoted his life and a good portion of his family fortune to anti-fascist activities in Italy and Spain and who, together with his brother, the historian Nello Rosselli, was assassinated by fascist thugs along a highway in France in a manner that recalls only too vividly Bernardo Bertolucci’s film adaptation of The Conformist, the novel by Alberto Moravia (a half-Jew).

The Rosselli assassination left deep scars in the Italian consciousness, and there is scarcely a city in Italy today that does not commemorate the Rosselli brothers with a street name. In previous centuries, it all but goes without saying, such testimonials would have been totally unthinkable. Indeed, if only because Jews had lived there longer than in any other European land, to Italy belonged the distinction of the most enduring history of anti-Jewish persecution in Europe.

Still, if Italy’s record vis-à-vis the Jews was no better than that of other European countries, it was also certainly no worse. The word ghetto may be Italian, but auto-dafé is Spanish. In Italy as elsewhere, fluctuations occurred between tolerance and repression, freedom and confinement, even survival and extinction. In Italy, however, those fluctuations tended to assume an extreme form—and it is in keeping with this fact that when Jewish emancipation and integration came in the 19th century, in no other European country were they as sudden and overwhelming as in Italy after the unification in 1870.

_____________

The fluctuation between extremes is what gives Italian Jewish history its volatile and contradictory character, and that complex, elusive character has been the subject of a panoramic exhibit mounted at the Jewish Museum in New York this fall, Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy (September 17, 1989-February 1, 1990). the exhibit was launched with a two-day conference, and is accompanied by a meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated catalogue containing a number of very informative articles.¹ In its historical sweep it is nothing if not comprehensive, spanning the legacy of Italian Jewry from Roman times through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, all the way down to the present, and covering almost every aspect of Italian Jewish culture from the religious to the social, political, artistic, and even terpsichorean.

The exhibit, which occupies two floors of the museum, divides neatly into two major sections: pre- and post-emancipation, with emancipation falling somewhere between the Napoleonic invasion of Italy and the final unification. The first-floor displays thus open with a cast from a detail of the Arch of Titus, showing captives carrying spoils from the ransacked Temple in Jerusalem, and proceed through a colorful array of scrolls, manuscripts, incunabula, prints depicting life in the medieval ghetto, marriage contracts, circumcision ensembles, and other objects of devotional and ceremonial art. The second floor is devoted to paintings by 19th- and 20th-century Jewish artists and to documents relating to modern Italian Jewish history. Together, both floors provide a necessarily selective yet nonetheless faithful and representative account of Jewish life in Italy.

That life, in the centuries prior to the modern era, could best be described as one of abiding discomfort. Documents in the exhibit include a decree expelling Jews from Naples (1504), another expelling them from Bologna (1590), and an edict of 1553 calling for the burning of the Talmud. Nor were Jews in Italy immune from blood libel: on display, for example, is a late 15thcentury painting by Gandolfino di Roreto d’Asti, The Martyrdom of Simon of Trent. Of the Jews blamed for the death of the lad Simon (who was subsequently canonized), many were tortured, some “confessed” and were executed, while others were forced to convert to Christianity.

But there were also golden years, in which Jews were able to lead fulfilling religious and communal lives. Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen as well as several Popes and heads of famous families—the Sforzas, the Medicis, the Estes, the Gonzagas—granted rights and privileges which, though tentative and subject to immediate withdrawal, permitted Jews to thrive tolerably well. One does indeed have a sense that, within limits, they flourished richly; they had their businesses and their academies, and many could travel where they pleased. They also had a certain access to the mainstream. Jewish doctors were coveted, Jewish translators were respected, and, with the Renaissance, Jewish learning was sought after by Christian Hebraists and by philosophers like Ficcino, Pico, and Bruno.

_____________

Unlike other Jewish communities around the world, which by and large kept to themselves, Italian Jews were drawn to Italian culture and were eager to participate in it. One proof of this lies in the number of beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscripts shown in the Jewish Museum exhibit, particularly in those manuscripts that were illuminated by, or in collaboration with, Christian artists. Jews were also very quick to take advantage of Gutenberg’s invention, and a Jewish printing house, the Soncino Press, was established before the end of the 15th century.

A Hebrew book published by Soncino in 1492 and included in the exhibit illustrates quite vividly the degree to which Jews had integrated Italian culture and turned it to their own creative purposes. The book is the Notebooks (Mahberot) of Immanuel of Rome (ca. 1265-ca. 1331), an extravagantly gifted poet whose verse pulsates with the ribald vitality of a Boccaccio or a Chaucer. Immanuel was not only the first poet to write a sonnet in Hebrew, but he composed respectable Italian verse as well, including a stil nuovo tribute to Dante (whom he may have met) upon the great poet’s death.

In later times, pious Jews would be forbidden to read Immanuel’s poetry, no doubt because of sentiments like these (the translation is by Allen Mandelbaum):

I’m an errant Jew, yet not a
   Muslim,
And I don’t set my ship toward
   Christians.
But of every law I’m willing to
   observe a part:
The Christian’s gobbling and
   guzzling,
Good Moses’ seldom fasting,
And the wantonness of Islam
which keeps no faith from the
   waist down.

On different but related grounds, Jews would also be forbidden even to own a copy of another book shown in the Jewish Museum exhibit, Azariah de’ Rossi’s Me’or Einayim (“Enlightenment to the Eyes”). By using non-Hebraic sources, and by subjecting Hebraic sources themselves to critical examination, Rossi (ca. 1511-ca. 1578) was able to compute a chronology of Jewish history that contradicted established tradition. A man of the Renaissance who had read all the classics, Rossi was also the first to translate into Hebrew an important Greek pseudepigraphical document, the Letter of Aristeas, relating to the translation of the Holy Scriptures into Greek under the ancient Ptolemies.

_____________

The musician and composer Salamone de Rossi (17th century)—some claim he may have been Azariah’s son—is an equally significant figure in this show, as is the 15th-century dance master Guglielmo da Pesaro, who was attached to the Medici court and was the author of a famous Renaissance dance manual. (Rossi’s music can be heard at the Jewish Museum on audio tape, and Pesaro’s dances can be seen on video.) Dance instruction, indeed, was a profession to which more than one Jew turned; the great Venetian rabbi Leon da Modena (1571-1648) may himself have been a dance instructor, and was certainly an enthusiast of Salamone de Rossi’s music, which he wanted to include in Jewish religious services. Modena’s Historia dei riti hebraici (“History of the Jewish Religion”), written on request for King James I of England, is on exhibit next to the text of Azariah de Rossi—no accident, since Modena admired de Rossi’s book and was deeply influenced by it.

Leon da Modena was a man of many trades and many skills; he had a very agile mind and was no stranger to ambivalence, perplexity, and indecision. He was a compulsive gambler who denounced gambling, an anti-kabbalist who defended the Kabbalah, a religious free-thinker who vigorously defended established religious practices. As a boy, he wrote a poem (Kinah shemor, or Chi nasce, muor) which when read aloud makes sense in either Italian or Hebrew: an emblem, perhaps, of the beguiling contradictions, and instabilities, inherent in his cultural situation.

Modena’s Autobiography—not in the exhibit—tells a tale of the most lamentable existence. At the same time, it gives a very clear picture of the animated intellectual and religious climate which prevailed among the Jews of Venice, a community huddled together in unthinkable numbers, persecuted, denounced, periodically banished, readmitted, robbed, cheated, and interned, yet still enjoying greater comfort and a far richer cultural life than their Eastern European or Levantine co-religionists.²

In the city of Leghorn, which unlike Venice did not have a closed ghetto, Jews at about this same time were free not only to practice their religion but also to convert back to Judaism after they or their ancestors had forcibly embraced Catholicism in Spain or Portugal. The same privilege was granted to the Jews of Ferrara. But it hardly prevailed throughout Italy as a whole, then or later. One of the most disturbing pictures in the exhibit is a small print by the Swiss artist Hieronymus Hess entitled The Conversion of the Jews. Dated 1823, it depicts a jowly priest delivering a conversion sermon to a congregation of terrorized if passively defiant Jews, one of whom has a finger thrust in each ear to fend off the hateful message.

Yet less than fifty years after this print was made, while Russia was still busy slaughtering Jews in a succession of pogroms, compelling them to flee to other lands, the Italian Jewish community had thrown in its lot with the forces of liberation. As Dan Vittorio Segre writes, Italian Jews at that period “felt themselves not only citizens but also founding fathers of a new nation.”

_____________

The history of the Risorgimento is summed up in the careers of four men—Mazzini, Manin, Cavour, and Garibaldi—and in all four careers Jews played unusually prominent roles. Manin, who became president of the revived Venetian Republic in 1848, was half-Jewish and appointed other Jews to his cabinet, among them a Rosselli and a Moravia ancestor. Carlo Rosselli’s great-grandparents, the Nathans and Rossellis, supported, financed, and indeed cared for the aging Giuseppe Mazzini, who died in their house in Pisa. Ernesto Nathan, a personality very reminiscent of Charles Haas—the prototype for Marcel Proust’s Swann—knew both Mazzini and Garibaldi and was to become the first Jewish mayor of Rome. The Jewish Isaac Artom was the private secretary of Count Camillo di Cavour, the architect of Italian reunification. And finally, fighting for Garibaldi was yet another Jew, Giuseppe Ottolenghi, later to become a senator and minister of war.

Jews had never been so visible, in such numbers. As Susan Zuccotti relates in her book, The Italians and the Holocaust, both the youngest and oldest winners of medals for valor to die in World War I were Jews. A third, lesser-known Rosselli brother, Aldo, also died in combat in the war. And in the years after the war Jews continued to be conspicuous by their civic contributions, by their activities at the highest levels of culture, and by their unswerving national devotion—none of which, when the next war came, would save the Italian Jewish community from the gas chambers.

It would be tempting to suppose that in the 20’s and 30’s most Italian Jews were, like the Rossellis and the Modiglianis, committed to the struggle against fascism. But that was simply not the case. Many supported Mussolini, at least until the fascist movement turned openly anti-Semitic, and a few remained faithful to Mussolini right up to the declaration of war. Even such rabid anti-fascists as Carlo Rosselli, Carlo Levi, and Leone Ginzburg were convinced that fascism differed fundamentally from Nazism on the question of the treatment of Jews. Not coincidentally, for many years one of Mussolini’s most steadfast supporters was his Jewish mistress, Margherita Sarfatti. (Her portrait, by Boccioni, is in the exhibit.) She had been the galvanizing force behind the artistic movement Novecento; one of its members was Aldo Carpi, whose grisly concentration camp sketches are on display at the museum.

All such discriminations, however, were lost on the fascist press, which soon launched an unbridled campaign of anti-Semitic and anti- Zionist propaganda. The Turati affair, which would have cost Carlo Rosselli a five-year jail term had he not escaped, became an occasion for insinuating that Jews were disproportionately represented among those opposed to, and indeed willing to act against, Mussolini’s regime. Though the charge may not have fully registered the first time around—blame for Turati’s escape was also shared by two prominent non-Jewish anti-fascists, Ferruccio Parri, later Italy’s prime minister, and Sandro Pertini, later its president—the second time around no one was allowed to miss it.

_____________

That was in 1934, in the wake of what would become known as the Ponte Tresa affair. An Italian Jew named Sion Segre had been caught at the border town of Ponte Tresa trying to smuggle in anti-fascist propaganda from Switzerland. The literature in question reflected the view of Giustizzia e Libertà, a non- Marxist, non-Zionist anti-fascist organization founded and led by Carlo Rosselli. Segre’s accomplice managed to escape by swimming across the icy river to Switzerland, all the while hurling insults at his pursuers: “Italian dogs, cowards.” The escaped young man turned out to be none other than Mario Levi, Professor Giuseppe Levi’s son and Natalia Ginzburg’s brother.

In fact, the list of people implicated in the Ponte Tresa affair reads like a roster of those already involved, some of them marginally, in Turati’s flight. Of the seventeen final suspects in the incident, eleven were Jewish. Four knew each other very, very well: Leone Ginzburg, Giuseppe Levi, Gino Levi, and Carlo Levi. It might even be argued that those Italian Jews who attained any degree of fame in the years surrounding World War II could all be traced, in one way or other, to the circles intimately involved in the Turati or Ponte Tresa affairs. Most, as it happens, turn up in the museum show.

Leone Ginzburg, the brilliant Russian émigré who was eventually killed by the Nazis, married Natalia, Professor Giuseppe Levi’s daughter and Mario Levi’s sister. Mario Levi himself was to marry the painter Amedeo Modigliani’s daughter. Gino Levi, Natalia’s other brother, also implicated in the Ponte Tresa affair, was eventually promoted to manager of the Olivettis’ typewriter factory. He was a very close friend of Adriano Olivetti, who fell in love with and married still another Levi daughter, Paola. A cousin of Giuseppe Levi, Margherita Sarfatti, besides being Mussolini’s mistress, was a friend of Anna Kulischova, Turati’s life-long mistress and, of course, Mussolini’s arch-enemy. In yet another irony, Natalia Levi Ginzburg’s path would ultimately cross the writer Primo Levi’s (no relation) when, as an editor at Einaudi immediately after the war, she would reject his manuscript, Survival at Auschwitz.

But more important to the exhibit at the Jewish Museum is Carlo Levi—again no relation to either Giuseppe Levi or Primo Levi. He was a physician, painter, and writer, and also Filippo Turati’s friend. Carlo was the lover of Paola Olivetti, Adriano’s wife; she is the “Small Nude” on exhibit at the museum, where one also finds Levi’s portraits of his friends Carlo and Nello Rosselli, of Leone Ginzburg, and of the novelist Alberto Moravia (born Pincherle). Moravia was Carlo and Nello Rosselli’s first cousin. His sister, Adriana Pincherle, was a painter in her own right; her colorful self-portrait, which already shows traces of Modigliani’s influence, is part of the show.

The network, however, is even more intricate. Carlo Levi was an extremely devoted friend of the Triestine Jewish poet Umberto Saba, himself a good friend of the painter Arturo Nathan, whose desolate portrayals of rocks, shipwrecks, and volcanos (on display at the museum) trace their origins both to the influence of Giorgio de Chirico and to psychoanalytical sessions with Freud’s first Italian disciple, Edoardo Weiss. Another Triestine Jew with an interest in psychoanalysis was Italo Svevo (born Ettore Schmitz), arguably Italy’s best-known 20th-century novelist and, incidentally, the first Italian translator of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.

Saba’s poetry, too, is laced with the history of his lifelong relationship with psychoanalysis. His meditative, introspective vein has been captured by the painter Vittorio Bolaffio, whose contemplative portrait of Saba against the lush blue of the Triestine esplanade is one of the most lyrical paintings at the exhibit. It was along that same esplanade that the aging Italo Svevo once confided to a friend the sad thought that it is not race or ethnicity but life itself that makes one a Jew.

_____________

One should not be misled by this cat’s-cradle of names. True, the individuals themselves often joked about the peculiar fatality that always seemed to draw one totally secularized Jew to another, equally secularized Jew. And the reticulum is just too intricate not to be reminiscent somehow of ghetto life. But the irony is that if one thing distinguished Italian Jews from their Eastern European co- religionists at this time, it was precisely that they had outgrown the ghetto and the mentality that went along with it. Most were totally assimilated Jews for whom the question of a Jewish identity, much less of a Jewish homeland, was entirely supererogatory.

The word “assimilated” has come to acquire a pejorative connotation, implying a loosening or even a renunciation of Judaism. That is partially what took place in Italy. The Jewish middle class had embraced all aspects of Italian national life and defined its aspirations in terms of the prevailing social, economic, and intellectual conditions. Jews may have continued to attend synagogue and to pray in Hebrew; but many knew enough only to mouth the words, while others did not know them at all or were more familiar with Christian than with Jewish ritual. A sizable number intermarried. For the Jewish intelligentsia, Judaism as a defining principle of life could never compete with the ferment of ideas brought about by the European Enlightenment.

The Olivettis, for example, had intermarried—as had the Rossellis and the Pincherles—and led entirely secular lives, complete with a love for fast cars, Hollywood-style parties, and hasty jaunts to skiing resorts. Emilio Sereni and Umberto Terracini were totally given over to the Communist cause. The very title of Carlo Levi’s book, Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945), seemed intended to jostle readers with an image at loggerheads with the author’s last name. Alberto Moravia’s novels reflect the estrangement, boredom, and indifference of middle-class characters fatuously preoccupied with sexuality.

The case of Giorgio Bassani, himself Jewish and the author of The Garden of the Finzi-Contini (1962), is hardly different. In the wonderful film made from this book there is a lingering scene of a Passover seder as it was still being celebrated by the upper-class Finzi- Continis; but a better flavor of the essentially secularized life led by these Jews occurs toward the end of the novel when, in a heart-to-heart chat, the narrator’s father, a physician, congratulates his son for paying regular visits to a brothel and cautions him against venereal disease.

Natalia Ginzburg provides another example of Jewish assimilation in her book Family Sayings (1963) as she quotes her father gruffly insisting that Leone Ginzburg, her future husband, is very ugly, because all Jews are ugly. “But aren’t you a Jew also?” teases Levi’s wife, who is not Jewish. “Well, yes, I am ugly too.” But then later he adds, “He [Ginzburg] is ugly because he is a Sephardic Jew. I am an Ashkenazi and that is why I am less ugly.” It would be just typical of a secularized Jew not to know that a Ginzburg from Russia would be most unlikely to be a Sephardi.

And then there is the case of Primo Levi who, at Auschwitz, drew some form of spiritual solace not from reciting Jewish texts or by recalling Jewish ritual but by remembering and quoting passages from Dante, the most Christian of Italian poets. One could, of course, claim that any such manifestation of love for a remembered text in periods of exile or confinement is a distinguishing trait of the People of the Book. But then the 19thcentury Italian patriot Silvio Pellico whiled away the years of his political imprisonment by memorizing a canto a day from The Divine Comedy. It was, after all, a very Italian thing to do.

_____________

Precisely because of the high degree of assimilation among Italian Jews, it is difficult to isolate what exactly distinguishes Judeo-Italian art. Indeed, any attempt to single out some all-embracing characteristic that would make such art unique or different is bound to rest on questionable methodological grounds. If anything, it is the absence of such an element which is striking in the exhibit at the Jewish Museum, particularly among the modern painters.

But this has not deterred the organizers of Gardens and Ghettos, or the contributors to its catalogue, from trying to locate that elusive quiddity. The following sentence is from Emily Braun’s article, “From the Risorgimento to the Resistance: One Hundred Years of Jewish Art in Italy”:

While it is difficult to detect nuances of an ethnic identity in the styles of these late 19th-century intimists, the probing psychological depths led to a growing sense of detachment rather than unquestioned assimilation among the artists and writers of Trieste.

Or take this remark from a wall label accompanying the work of the 20th-century painter Antonietta Raphael Mafai: “A personal ethnic flavor distinguishes her art from that of the more assimilated, native Italian Jews.”

From the works themselves, it is difficult to determine what might constitute these distinguishing “nuances,” these traits of “ethnic flavor.” In the case of Antonietta Raphael Mafai, at least, the scene being depicted is a Yom Kippur service in a synagogue. But one can no more extrapolate a broad ethnic meaning from that scene—as one might, say, with a similar scene by Chagall—than one could from the arrangement of the Kol Nidrei prayer by the composer Max Bruch, who after all was not even Jewish.

Such speculations—and, to be fair, they are very few—betray, perhaps, an unstated assumption on the part of the show’s sponsors: that, regardless of the degree to which Italian Jews were, or tried to be, completely assimilated, they continued to exhibit aesthetic and intellectual tendencies indissolubly linked to their Jewish origins. Assumptions of this sort are tricky in every sense of the word. And yet one sees why they are made. For one thing, they enable a viewer to apprehend all these diverse and various artifacts and works of art under a single overarching principle. But more importantly, the assumptions themselves reflect the inevitable reinterpretation of the meaning of Jewish experience that has taken place in the wake of the Holocaust.

For, in addition to shaping the course of postwar Jewish life and consciousness, the Holocaust has cast a long shadow backward as well. In particular, it has pulled the rug out from under the hapless dance of assimilation. From the vantage point of today, it is impossible to view pre-World War II Jewish Italian art without drawing some connection, however naive and even historically unfair, between, for example, Vittorio Corcos’s woman with the provocatively dreamy gaze, or Carlo Levi’s father convalescing with his arm in a sling, or Levi-Montalcini’s languid summerscape with friends slouching everywhere on the grass, and Aldo Carpi’s hurried sketches of corpses heaped upon a wagon in front of a crematorium. Alongside the indisputable charm and color that radiate from every facet of this marvelous show, there thus lingers as well an aura of finality, of sadness, and of implacable historical judgment.

_____________

¹ Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy, edited by Vivian B. Mann. University of California Press, 354 pp., $55.00.

² My review of the new English translation of Modena's Autobiography appeared in the May 1989 COMMENTARY.