Ricerca: The Jewish Avant-Gardes and the "Republicanization" of Italian Political Cultures: A Laboratory of Modern European Politics, 1861-1915
This work, carried out in collaboration with Yale University, aims to study how, between 1861 and 1915, the Italian Jewish elite constituted an advanced laboratory of minority citizenship, in which the idea of the nation and the emancipatory process were continuously redefined through direct involvement in liberal-democratic, socialist, and nationalist political cultures.
The objective is to understand what conception of the nation these actors developed, negotiated, and defended, but above all, translated into concrete practices, from the Liberal era to the phases of increasing radicalization of nationalisms, when the nation ceased to be a lexicon of emancipation and became, increasingly, a mechanism of exclusion. To do so, this study intends to verify whether, and in what ways, the Italian Jewish elite played a vanguard role within the principal political cultures of the time, helping to steer them toward more openly emancipatory policies.
Reconstructing their positions, practices, and networks means not only observing from within how the idea of the nation was articulated in different ways over time, but also recognizing their active role in defining policies to integrate the masses into the nation's body politic and in developing democratizing ideologies that provided the indispensable background for sustaining the Jewish emancipatory process alive.
To this end, it will be shown not only how Jewish networks were politically activated in the claim for their rights, but above all, the presence of an intercommunal debate extending well beyond national borders on themes and value-based ideals necessary to the ideological sustenance of the emancipatory process.
Finally, drawing on the work of George L. Mosse and David Sorkin, it was decided to investigate the Jewish-Italian subculture that emerged during the process of emancipation, particularly in republican contexts. This reconstruction will make it possible to bring into focus the ideological legacy that, in the aftermath of Italian unification, helped shape the mindset of the new Jewish bourgeoisie, and to show how this theoretical, ideological, and linguistic repertoire of republicanism—albeit in an Italy that was by then monarchical—was reactivated above all in its communal and civic-duty dimension within the different political currents.