A Curious Mass Conversion
San Nicandro, Histoire D’Une Conversion
By Elena Cassin
Editions Plon (Paris). 256 pp. 900 fr.
Around the time that Mussolini decided to inaugurate a policy of official anti-Semitism, a community of peasants in the South Italian town of San Nicandro suddenly abandoned the Catholic faith, and—though they had never had any previous contact with Jews—proclaimed themselves Jews and began to observe the commandments of the Torah, finally emigrating, after the liberation of Italy, to Israel.1 Elena Cassin’s book is a brilliant attempt to explain this small but puzzling mass conversion with the help of historical, sociological, economic, and psychological analysis.
San Nicandro, Mlle. Cassin points out, lies in one of those depressed and backward areas of Southern Italy which are the victims of an incredibly ancient system of land tenure, a pastoral economy that in some respects has remained unchanged for thousands of years, and an unfortunate political history. All these factors have combined to foster a pattern of frustration, discontent, and despair that periodically finds expression in violence or in odd individual decisions rather than in the kind of social action which is characteristic of other depressed regions.
In the years between the two world wars, Southern Italy was deprived of three of its chief means of expressing discontent. The central government had clamped down on brigandage (which was still flourishing in Southern Italy hundreds of years after its heyday in England and Germany), emigration had been reduced to a trickle by American quota laws and by unfavorable economic conditions in other countries, and Communism had been effectively throttled by the Fascist dictatorship. During the decades of Mussolini’s regime, discontent thus turned inward, resulting in a rash of unorthodox religious movements, in conversions to revivalist Protestant sects, as well as in a powerful disposition to see “miracles” happening everywhere. Even today, throughout Southern Italy and Sicily, the Church is confronted with the problem of controlling mass hysteria, among those who have remained faithful to Catholicism, whenever a local girl is reported to have developed stigmata, a local statue of the Virgin is said to have wept, or a figure of Jesus on the cross to have bled.
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It is against this background that Elena Cassin interprets Donato Manduzio’s sudden discovery of the Old Testament, his conversion to Judaism, and his success in converting a number of his relatives, friends, and neighbors. He had long lost his faith in traditional Catholicism, had already dabbled in magic, and even flirted with various Protestant doctrines. But it was the Pentateuch that appealed to his deepest religious feelings, perhaps because it embodied in terms that he fully understood the faith of a pastoral people who had lived at a cultural level similar to his own.
Manduzio and his brethren were at first unaware of the existence of any Jews in the modern world; they had believed that they were reviving a long extinct religion. When they finally discovered their error and contacted the Italian rabbinate in Rome, they met with little encouragement. Originally distrustful, the Italian Jewish community had then become convinced of the sincerity of the converts, but had tried to dissuade them, if only to spare them the miseries of persecution. For their part, the converts were humble: they felt that they could not claim to be of the Chosen People, having entered its fold by a choice of their own, but they were determined to be Jews. They were also shocked by the laxity of contemporary Judaism. Their own strict orthodoxy, like that of the Karaites, is founded exclusively on the Pentateuch, and they find the more urban and legalistic Talmud difficult to stomach.
These conversions occurred without the stimulus of proselytizing or propaganda. But it would appear from Elena Cassin’s fascinating study that the propagandist for Zionism and the proselytizer for Judaism might find ready listeners among the underprivileged peasants of Southern Italy, of Sicily, of Sardinia, perhaps of Greece, of Spain, of the Berber hill country of Kabylia in French North Africa, even as far south, in the Sahara, as the M’Zab. We know, for instance, that many Berber tribes, before the Islamic invasion of North Africa, once practiced the Jewish faith. If Judaism or Zionism can now bring to these people a reasonable hope of escape from their present misery and despair, a more intimate awareness of integration within a religious community than they get from Catholicism or Islam, a surprising number of converts might well be recruited among them. Similarly with a country like Japan. At the Amsterdam International Conference of Reform Judaism in July 1957, it was pointed out that the postwar breakdown of Shintoism brought about a number of conversions to Judaism and even some requests that rabbinical missionaries be sent to the Far East. But such an action pursued in so many lands would require, on the part of the Jewish community in general, a less distrustful attitude toward converts than has been traditional and a greater willingness to proselytize.
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1 See Phinn Lapide’s “San Nicandro’s New Jews in Israel,” COMMENTARY, September 1951.
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