Research: The idea of nation and race in Italian jewish culture: from the unification of Italy to the racial laws (1861-1938)
As highlighted by the historiography on the subject, starting from the works of scholars like Leon Poliakov and George L. Mosse, towards the end of the 19th century, racism became a distinct political ideology, which eventually aligned and intertwined with nationalism and the new nationalist mass movements, and thereby with modern political antisemitism. This influenced and fueled those cultural and political tendencies regarding the crisis and degeneration of Europe (as highlighted, among others, by Karl D. Bracher) that also penetrated Jewish culture (for example, think of Max Nordau). This involved the spread of ideologies that, intertwining with each other, ended up creating a dangerous cultural undergrowth that internalized palingenetic war myths centered on a vision of reality based on the total distinction between type and antitype, insider and outsider, friend and enemy, each marked by belonging to a specific nation and race. The idea of the nation, following the trend of radicalization of the interpretative paradigms of reality, thus ended up taking on an increasingly exclusivist form; fueled also by pseudoscientific theories, the will to power, descent, and blood ties were seen as its constitutive factors.
The project, therefore, intends to examine how Italian Jews interpreted and reinterpreted the idea of nation and race, what were the cultural and identity processes they implemented in response to the liberal nation, the processes of integration and assimilation, and, crucially, the ideologization of the idea of the nation and its progressive characterization in an ethnic and racial manner. Is it possible to identify a similar interpenetration between race and nation in the Italian Jewish environment? What were the reflections of the contemporary European debate? How was Italian national identity thought of in relation to the Hebrew nation? How was national identity perceived within Italian Jewish culture and how was it influenced and reinterpreted in response to what Jews were experiencing in Italy and Europe? What was the debate in the face of the spread of racist and antisemitic ideology? How did the idea of race influence the perception of national identity within Italian Jewish culture and how was it read in the aftermath of the key issues that characterized the history of Italy between the 19th and 20th centuries?