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Rhyming Jewish: Secular Jewish poetry in nineteenth-century Italy

Rimes juives : La poésie juive laïque dans l'Italie du xixe siècle
מחורז יהודי: שירה יהודית חילונית באיטליה של המאה התשע-עשרה
Alessandro Grazi

Résumés

La poésie a toujours joué un rôle fondamental dans la culture juive italienne. Depuis le Moyen Âge, il y a eu une production ininterrompue de poèmes. En dépit de son importance, de sa variété et de sa longue durée, l'attention académique sur la poésie juive italienne n'a pas été abondante et s'est principalement concentrée sur quelques personnages et thèmes : le piyyut médiéval, le poète médiéval Immanuel de Rome et la Renaissance. Reflétant une tendance générale de l'historiographie et des études littéraires juives italiennes, qui se sont jusqu'à présent principalement concentrées sur la Renaissance et le xxe siècle, la poésie juive italienne du xixe siècle a presque été laissée de côté. Cet article souhaite apporter une contribution qui pourrait aider à combler cette lacune, en présentant trois poètes juifs italiens assez différents, couvrant la longue période du dix-neuvième siècle : Rachel Morpurgo (1790-1871), David Levi (1816-1898) et Crescenzo Del Monte (1868-1935). L'objectif de cet article est de dresser un portrait de la poésie juive italienne du xixe siècle, en mettant l'accent sur ses manifestations séculières et en saisissant l'occasion de réfléchir à la définition d'un canon juif séculier.

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  • 1 Pagis & Garribba, 1994, p. 6.
  • 2 Pagis & Garribba, 1994, p. 6. In the Italian original: “[…] non ha eguali nel resto del mondo, per (...)
  • 3 Lehnardt, 2016; Hollender & Chiesa, 1994; Menascé & Schirmann, 1969; Sonne, 1933.
  • 4 van Bekkum, 2007; Cassuto, 1906.
  • 5 Almagor & Salah, 1994.
  • 6 Rathaus, 2016.
  • 7 Grazi 2022, p. 7.
  • 8 Friedlander, 2004, קסז-קעו.

1Poetry has always played a fundamental role in Italian Jewish culture. From the Middle Ages on, there has been an uninterrupted production of poems.1 This long-standing poetic tradition has been defined by Dan Pagis and Ruth Garribba as “[…] unequalled in the rest of the world in terms of continuity and duration.”2 In spite of its relevance, variety, and long timespan, however, academic attention on Italian Jewish poetry has not been abundant and has mostly focused on a few characters and themes: medieval piyyut,3 the medieval poet Immanuel of Rome,4 and the Renaissance,5 spurred by the pioneering studies of Umberto Cassuto.6 Mirroring a general trend of Italian Jewish historiography and literary studies, which have so far mainly focused on the Renaissance and the twentieth century,7 nineteenth-century Italian Jewish poetry has almost been left out of the picture, only included as one aspect within broader analyses of renowned intellectuals, such as Samuel David Luzzatto (1800-1865), known through the acronym Shadal.8

2This paper wishes to offer a contribution that may help fill this gap, by presenting three rather different Italian Jewish poets, spanning the long nineteenth century: Rachel Morpurgo (1790-1871), David Levi (1816-1898), and Crescenzo Del Monte (1868-1935). The purpose of this paper is to offer a portrait of nineteenth-century Italian Jewish poetry, focusing on its secular manifestations. This will give us the opportunity for some reflections on the definition of secular Jewish canon, a concept which has often eluded the field of Jewish Studies—mostly for ideological or polemical reasons—and is therefore in need of a reassessment. The three poets presented here are by no means directly compared but serve as an attestation to the richness and variety of Italian Jewish culture. An element of evidence of such multi-faceted Jewish culture is the fact that the selected authors wrote poems in four different languages, respectively in Hebrew, Italian, Giudaico-Romanesco, the Jewish language of Rome, and Romanesco, the Roman dialect.

3The variety of languages used and themes addressed by these three writers helps us tackle the following question: How do we define, if at all, a secular Jewish literary canon? In other words, what is “Jewish” in their secular poems?

  • 9 Bialik, 1953.
  • 10 Halkin, 2008.
  • 11 Ibid.
  • 12 Ibid., p. 12.

4The question of definition of a secular Jewish canon has intrigued scholars of Jewish literature for over a century now, that is, at least since Chaim Nachman Bialik’s 1913 attempt at creating an anthology of secular Jewish writings, which he named kinus, meaning “gathering”.9 Bialik’s idea was conceived as part of the cultural program of Zionism, that is, as a national effort to recover a nonsacred Jewish literary tradition that was often inaccessible to most readers.10 However, his project, which was never completed, included only works written either in Hebrew or in other traditional Jewish languages, such as Yiddish. This choice was not due to Biliak’s belief that literary works written by Jewish authors in other languages lack a Jewish character, but because of the problems of definition this would have involved.11 These “problems” have been the main reason why, in spite of the high degree of intellectual interest in this theme, there has been reluctance among scholars to deal with such a thorny issue. For most of the twentieth century, in fact, the idea of a multilingual corpus of Jewish literature did not seem acceptable: “[…] A modern Jewish literature, defined neither by the religious beliefs, nationality, nor language of its authors but by a nebulous assumption of secular Jewish character or peoplehood […] hardly seemed a serious proposition.”12 A further problem is that delimiting the borders of a secular Jewish canon often goes hand in hand with the definition of a secular Jewish identity (not always, as we will see), which is a complicated and risky concept from a scholarly perspective.

  • 13 Wisse ,2000.
  • 14 Wisse, 2000, p. 3.
  • 15 Ibid.
  • 16 Ibid., p. 4.
  • 17 Ibid., p. 19.

5The first full-fledged argument in favor of a multilingual, secular Jewish literature was Ruth Wisse’s seminal book on The Modern Jewish Canon.13 Unlike Bialik’s project, which aimed at being much more comprehensive in historical terms, Wisse’s work focuses on modernity. Her two-fold implication is that, on the one hand, modernity (however she intends to define it) is the only large repository of secular Jewish literature and, on the other, that modern Jewish literature is mostly secular. The issue at stake here is that, if the Jewish character of sacred literature is basically self-evident, secular literature is more difficult to categorize. In this respect, a literary work’s language is not the only relevant factor, but one should also consider its author, content, and purpose. Unfortunately, the initial intentions of a writer might not be congruent with a book’s final result and reception, maintains Wisse. The readers have the right to categorize literary works with the criteria they deem most useful to their purpose. In any case, modern Jewish literature, she believes, is not theologically reliable.14 With this statement, I believe Wisse intends to underline the secular character of modern Jewish literature and the fact that it does not need to be corroborated by the sacred Scriptures. This implies that the modern Jewish canon is also aesthetically independent and can be positive or negative towards Jews.15 Thus, what are those criteria that allow us to qualify a literary work as Jewish? One of the main characteristics of the Jewish people, claims Wisse, is its ability to represent itself through a communal creative effort. Therefore, she regards modern Jewish literature as the repository of the modern Jewish experience.16 When wondering about the Jewish character of a literary work, we need to ask: Does this work tell us anything of the modern Jewish experience? The implication seems to be that we can recognize Jewish literature when we find it. Of course, this model has weak points too. It leaves the reader with the entire responsibility of judging the Jewish-ness of a certain work, thus allowing a certain degree of arbitrariness. She herself admits that she cannot illustrate her point with a theoretical paradigm that subsumes the whole but through individual examples. Nevertheless, she argues (and I would agree), that while the definition of Jewish literature is open to interpretation, its existence is not.17 We do, however, need some criteria to define it.

  • 18 Jewish intellectual movement that emerged in the second half of the Eighteenth century and propose (...)
  • 19 Feiner, 2010.
  • 20 Ibid., p. 5.
  • 21 Proponents of the Haskalah
  • 22 Ibid., p. 4-5.
  • 23 Grazi, 2022.

6In addition to the definition criteria for a modern secular Jewish literature, it is opportune to describe its historical and literary context. For the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this context is constituted by the Haskalah18 and its belletristic, as a result of secularization processes within the Jewish world, which paralleled similar processes occurring in general European culture. Shmuel Feiner has recently painted a rich picture of such secularization processes.19 Without entering the debate as to whether secularization processes in Jewish society actually predated the eighteenth century, and without digressing excessively within the intricate meanders of secularization studies, certainly beyond this paper’s scope, it is nevertheless opportune to briefly describe the cultural background in which the secular poetry at hand could develop. In fact, secularization processes became evident when they emerged in the public sphere in the form of literature.20 In a sense, secular literature was the direct result of modernization processes within Jewish society. At the same time, it should be clear that the maskilim21 were neither the only ones nor the first ones to produce secular Jewish literature and, even more importantly, that modernization and secularization modes were multiple and led to different results.22 For a long time, the predominant view has been to consider only two possible outcomes for the Jewish encounter with modernity: either adaptation within tradition and religion, or alternatively seamless assimilation in majority society, with a total rejection of Jewish identity and tradition.23 But it has now been clear for a few decades that this model is much too simplistic. Both ends of the spectrum (religious Orthodoxy and seamless secular assimilation) contain several nuances and outcomes in their encounters with modernity.

  • 24 Grazi, 2022, p. 18.
  • 25 Frankel & Zipperstein, 1992.
  • 26 Kaplan, 2000, p. 26.
  • 27 Endelman, 2015.

7The three poets presented here illustrate three different ways of challenging Jewish religion and tradition, ranging from Orthodoxy to a total abandonment of the religious and traditional dimensions, yet with a strong attachment to one’s Jewishness and Jewish heritage. Showing three different individual modes of modernization is consistent with current research. Modernization and secularization are not uniform processes but consist of various modes and mechanisms that cannot be subsumed under a single all-encompassing paradigm. On the contrary, the trajectories of individuals have to be taken into consideration in order to single out commonalities and differences among the diverse experiences of this phenomenon.24 Several studies have unraveled some of these trajectories. As long ago as 1983, in her research on the Jews of Vienna, Marsha Rozenblit acknowledged that, in their process of assimilation into the host society, Jews “devised new ways of asserting Jewish identity” that did not entail Orthodoxy nor the abandonment of Jewish religion and tradition (3). Here, however, Rozenblit investigated group dynamics, as opposed to individuals retaining forms of attachment to tradition and religious practices. The idea of a multifaceted approach to modernity was then picked up and further elaborated from the 1990s onwards. Frankel and Zipperstein made this approach systematic in their comprehensive collection on Jewish assimilation in nineteenth-century Europe.25 Showing the dynamics of the Sephardi Jews in the Netherlands, Yosef Kaplan also challenges the dichotomy of tradition/modernity. His subjects displayed “religious laxity or indifference” but never fully abandoned tradition.26 Finally, Tod Endelman has devoted most of his academic career to the study of radical forms of Jewish assimilation in their host society, mostly taking into consideration cases of conversion.27 It is important to bear in mind that most of these works focused on entire societies or groups, thus utilizing methodologies that differ from those employed for the analyses of one individual. Nevertheless, they all constitute important theoretical points of reference, with different objects and purposes, in their attempt to grapple with aspects of Jewish secularization and modernization.

  • 28 Feiner, 1996.
  • 29 Feiner, 2004.
  • 30 Feiner, 2010.

8Within Orthodoxy, the main ways of addressing modernity consisted of innovative educational tools and new scientific approaches to the texts of Jewish tradition, as we see within the Haskalah and the Wissenschaft des Judentums movements. However, the extents to which individual Jewish religious intellectuals were willing to go in order to update tradition to modernity differed greatly, not only within the two aforementioned movements but also through the creation of alternative cultural trends such as the so-called “pseudo-Haskalah”28 or the “counter-Haskalah.”29 We will not delve deeper into these concepts, which have been mentioned to better clarify the context of secular literature within more general processes of Jewish modernization. The pedagogical and the literary realms, however, were not the only ways in which tradition was challenged. We can observe several ways of criticizing Jewish society from within an Orthodox and traditional dimension that were addressed at different elements of society itself.30 An example of this is precisely Rachel Morpurgo and her feminist criticism of arranged marriages, as we will see.

  • 31 Cohen, 2001, p. 157.
  • 32 Ibid.
  • 33 Ibid., p. 151.
  • 34 In this case, I intend the term Ashkenaz in a rather broad sense, as central and eastern Europe, a (...)

9Returning to maskilic secular literature, we observe that, due to the importance they attributed to secular studies, the maskilim often engaged in writing fiction. In so doing, they–unsurprisingly–emulated general European models31. Coherently with this, they mostly adopted three main genres: satire (comedy), romance (novel), and poetry. They basically “Judaized” their works but maintained the general existing structures of these genres32. Their works were mostly written either in Hebrew or in Yiddish, according to the genre and readership they wished to address. Comedy based on everyday life was addressed to a wider public and was therefore written in Yiddish, while epic poetry and novels were mostly written in Hebrew33. Obviously, Yiddish was the elected language for popular Jewish literature in the areas of Ashkenaz34 that have been the object of a large part of research on the Haskalah. In the Italian context and time frame of this paper, as we will see, secular literature was mostly written in other Jewish languages, , or in other vernacular local languages, and even in Italian.

  • 35 Feiner, 2002, p. 229-273.
  • 36 Patterson, 1964.
  • 37 Feiner, 2002, p. 229.
  • 38 Ibid.

10If we briefly zoom in into romance writing, an important part was of course played by the historical novel,35 in perfect nineteenth-century style. The most prominent representative of the maskilic historical novel is probably the Lithuanian writer Abraham Mapu (1808-186736). A deep analysis of this figure would be beyond the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, it is important to mention that his historical novels were very popular and reflected the traditional maskilic goal of using history didactically, to transform society.37 The popularity of his novels is due to the fact that, although they were written in Hebrew, they were translated into Yiddish, thus reaching a wider audience, including women.38

  • 39 a traditional Jewish primary school teaching the basics of Judaism and the Hebrew language
  • 40 A yeshiva is the highest traditional Jewish educational institution focused on the study of Rabbin (...)
  • 41 Cohen, 2001, p. 144.

11Considering that a maskil had to be a lamdan (scholar), a good knowledge of Hebrew was a prerequisite for writing this fictional literature, albeit secular, and obviously even for reading it. In fact, many Haskalah writers came from strongly traditional and highly educated backgrounds, attended the cheder39 and the yeshiva,40 often before turning away from Orthodoxy. The consequence of this is that Haskalah fiction was male-oriented, as it was written and read by men.41 We will elaborate on gender-related issues and the role of women in Jewish secular literature in more detail in Rachele Morpurgo’s section.

12I will now try to illustrate some of these points through some concrete examples of secular Italian Jewish poetry in the long nineteenth century. Methodologically, my selection is based on multilingualism. As mentioned above, it is important to reiterate that the authors and works I present here are by no means exhaustive nor are they compared with one another. They are simply representative of nineteenth-century Italian Jewish poetic production and I deemed them suitable for a reflection on the theme of a modern, secular Jewish canon. Finally, I am not interested in nor do I have the competence for an assessment of the style and quality of the poems that I am going to present.

Rachel Morpurgo (1790-1871)

  • 42 Cohen, 2016; Arbib, 2015; Ibid., 2011; Steindler Moscati, 2006; Katz, 2000; Piperno, 1998; Castigl (...)
  • 43 Arbib, 2011, p. 397.
  • 44 Ibid., p. 399.
  • 45 Piperno, 1998, p. 33.
  • 46 Cohen, 2001, p. 146.

13The first poet I am going to present is basically the only nineteenth-century Italian Jewish poet that has received some well-deserved scholarly attention, and is actually a poetess: Rachel Morpurgo (1790-1871), nee Luzzatto.42 Marina Arbib claims Morpurgo was the first Hebrew-language female poet in Western Europe.43 She was born in Trieste in 1790 and was a first-degree cousin of the famous Samuel David Luzzatto, 10 years her junior. It appears that the two of them had been quite close since Luzzatto’s childhood, which is also evidenced by the great public support she received from her cousin on several occasions, including after some unconventional choices she made in life, as we will see. She certainly grew up in a culturally stimulating environment and it is possible that Shadal’s fame and support helped her to receive the accolades she actually deserved. Understandably, scholars of modern Jewish literature and history have been intrigued by what was at the time the exceptional circumstance of a woman having such a high educational level that she was able to have her works published in some of the most important Jewish journals in Europe. She wrote almost exclusively in Hebrew, both prose and poetry. Contemporaries praised the high level of her Hebrew language,44 which is one of the most interesting aspects about her. There is sufficient evidence that Italian Jews in the nineteenth century had a rather scant knowledge of Hebrew, which was often limited to a mnemonic repetition of the liturgy and some words that were of common use in the Judeo languages extant in Italy.45 This makes her Hebrew proficiency even more remarkable. Jewish women did learn the Hebrew alphabet and prayers by heart but could not read canonical texts. They could, however, read Yiddish texts.46 Once again, this is valid for the areas of Ashkenaz, on which the Haskalah studies have traditionally focused. In nineteenth-century Italy, Yiddish did not play the same major role, even among the Ashkenazim of the German oriented Habsburg regions, which included Rachel Morpurgo.

14Her knowledge of Hebrew is crucial for an assessment and a correct contextualization of her work. As we are here elaborating on her secular poetry in particular, we need to frame this part of her oeuvre within the fictional writing of the Haskalah, as clarified in the introduction of the present essay. In Morpurgo’s case, in fact, the linguistic aspect takes on more meanings than in the other two poets we are presenting here and is inseparable from opportune considerations on the role of women in nineteenth-century Italian Judaism and, in particular, as producers and consumers of Haskalah texts.

  • 47 Ibid., p. 145.
  • 48 Ibid., p. 146.

15Traditionally, the maskil had to be a lamdan, a scholar. In terms of gender orientation of the Haskalah, this is rather significant, because of course the yeshiva was an exclusively male-dominated environment and, consequently, only a few women had a deep knowledge of Hebrew, both as writers and as readers.47 In practice, “writing in Hebrew meant the renunciation of female readership.”48

  • 49 Ibid., p. 157-165.

16The male orientation of Haskalah literature was not only due to this fundamental linguistic fact but was also influenced by the structures and models the maskilim used as inspiration. As we have seen, they imitated general European literary models in their fiction. This meant they adopted the same concept of women as well. According to Tovah Cohen, there were two kinds of women in fictional Haskalah literature: 1) satirized and 2) heroine, thus reflecting similar female roles in the broader European comedy and novel genres.49

  • 50 Ferrara degli Uberti, 2007, p. 408; Del Bianco Cotrozzi, 2007, p. 330; Grazi, 2022, p. 111.
  • 51 Catalan, 2007, p. 358.
  • 52 Ibid., p. 366.
  • 53 Ferrara degli Uberti, 2007, p. 414.
  • 54 Ibid., p. 408.

17The imitation of general European models in terms of the role of women in society was not only a literary feature of the Haskalah but was also a shared societal approach among European Jews in the nineteenth century. If we zoom in on our geo-political context, the situation is similar. Society attributed several characteristics to women that were common across its different socio-economic layers but were particularly reinforced and propagated by the bourgeois middle-class, irrespective of religious adherence. Middle-class Italian Jews were immersed in the same general system of bourgeois values and shared them with their Catholic counterparts. All the tasks ascribed to women were of course domestic roles.50 According to this view, the domestic hearth was the natural domain of the woman, the ideal place for the realization of her mission. As a wife, she was supposed to arrange everything in the house in such a way that the husband could find an idyllic abode, where he could feel at ease and forget the difficulties of the working day, and she was expected to share his joys and pains as a constant manifestation of her love for him.51 Her role as a mother intertwined with that of educator, as she was expected to cover two different domains, the religious and the national, by passing on to her children the Jewish traditions of their forefathers and by transferring patriotic values to them.52 Although these values were certainly shared with the Italian Catholic majority, the Jewish woman had the additional task of preserving the Jewishness of the family, making sure it was observed within the home.53 This appropriation of traditional bourgeois values was common also among women, who often adhered to these traditional views but wished to channel them towards more useful roles within modern society. They claimed for themselves this positive function and demanded societal acknowledgment.54 As we will see, however, Rachel Morpurgo did not really adhere to all of these middle-class values – in particular concerning the romantic sphere.

  • 55 Jewish mysticism
  • 56 Arbib, p. 2011.

18But let us now focus on Morpurgo’s poetry. She wrote poems of every kind; many had a religious connotation and contained several quotations from the Hebrew Bible or from other books of the Jewish tradition, including mystical literature. In fact, several scholars have studied not only her poetry production but also her intellectual stance towards the Kabbalah,55 for instance, which was one of the most heated debates among Italian Jewish intellectuals in the 1800s56. However, she had an important secular poetic production as well, covering a wide range of themes, from current politics to social customs, and more. Nevertheless, even her secular poems that were not liturgical per se and did not deal with a specifically religious subject always included direct or indirect citations of the sacred Scripture, as we will see. These two aspects, the secular and the religious, intertwined within the female poet and could not really be separated. This does not change the secular character of such poems but shows how relevant the religious dimension was for Rachel Morpurgo.

19She started publishing her poems in 1847 in the maskilic journal Kokvei Yitschaq (“Stars of Isaac”), edited by Mendel Stern, which would then host her works for several years. In 1890, Rabbi Vittorio Castiglioni of Trieste, future Chief Rabbi of Rome and himself a poet, decided to collect all of her writings, published and unpublished, in an anthology called Ugav Rachel (Rachel’s harp), in order to mark the 100th anniversary of her birth. The title immediately identifies Rachel Morpurgo as a female poet, which was rightly considered the main trait of her artistic activity.

  • 57 Cohen, 2016.
  • 58 Ibid., p. 76-300.
  • 59 Ibid., p. 76-87.
  • 60 Ibid., p. 191-300.
  • 61 Ibid., p. 76.
  • 62 Castiglioni, 1890, p. 51.

20The picture that emerges from her poetry is of an Orthodox and quite profoundly religious person. Religious, however, did not mean acritical, in her case. Her successful struggle to emerge as an important intellectual is already per se an act of rebellion against the established consensus of the time, both among Jews and non-Jews, who relegated women to the domestic realm, as we have seen. Tova Cohen has written extensively about her feminist act of rebellion.57 In fact, for the well-known Israeli scholar, the feminism of her poetry, her thought and, ultimately, her life, is one of Morpurgo’s salient traits.58 In her recent monograph devoted to the Italian female poet, Cohen embarked on a project that can be defined as feminist on two levels: on a meta level, her own narration about Morpurgo is defined as a “feminist biography”;59 while feminist is also used to describe the writer’s poetry and philosophy.60 Considering her open protest against the traditional view of the woman of the time, Cohen maintains that writing a feminist biography of Morpurgo is not an end in itself, but is necessary to do justice to her approach and views.61 This rebellion took explicit literary form, for instance, in a poem in which she claimed her right to marry whomever she wanted, instead of somebody chosen by her parents. Interestingly, this poem is an answer and token of appreciation for the support of her choice expressed in a different poem by her well-known cousin Shadal:62

(5576 – 1816)

וזאת תשובת רחל לשד''ל

תּוֹרָה תּוֹפַע אוֹרָה מִנִּי כָל-רוּחַ,
אַף טוֹב סַחְרָהּ אֶל כָּל-תּוֹמֵךְ בַּשּׁבֶט;
אַךְ אִם הֵשַׁח ראֹשָהּ אֵל בּוֹרֵא רוּחַ,
וַיֹסֶף זֹהַר לָהּ לִפְנֵי כָל-שֵׁבֶּט

מַה-זֶּה אֶעְשֶׂה אֵפוֹא (יָשִׁיב הָרוּחַ)
אִם לֹא-אַשׁפּיל עַצְמִי תַּחַת הַשֵׁבֶט?
אֶל בַּת-שִׁירֵךְ אָשִׁיב מָקּצֶר רוּחַ
אֵדַע כִּי לֹא-אֵבוֹשׁ, אֶשָּׁא הַשֵּׁבֶט.

מָצָאתִי הַפַּעַם נַעַר בֶּן-חָיִל,
לֹא יַחְפֹּּץ בַּמֹּהַר, אוֹ אֶשְׁכֹּל כֹּפֶּר,
בּוֹחֵר יַחַס כָּשֵׁר מֵהוֹן וָחָיִל.

אַךְ לֹא-רָצוּ הוֹרֵי, לֹא-אָבוּ כֹפֶר-
לָתֵת בַּקָּשָׁתוֹ; עִם כֹּחַ חַיּל
טָחוּ לִבֶּם בַּטִּיחַ וּבְמוֹ-כֹפֶר.

לָזֹאת אָמוֹר אֹמַר (הַסְכֵּת מַה-שִׂיחַ):
לֹא אֶנָּשֵׂא לָעַד, אַף עִם מֶשִׁיחַ.

(5576–1816)

  • 63 All the English translations of the original texts are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

And this is Rachel’s answer to Shadal63

The Torah manifested its light to every wind,
And its trademark is good for every supporter of the tribe;
But if it bent down its head to the creator of the spirit,
And increased its splendor before every tribe,

Therefore, what shall I do, (answers the spirit)
But submit under the tribe?
To the fruit of your poem, I will answer with impatience.
I know I won’t be ashamed; I will endure the tribe.

This time I found a brave boy,
He won’t ask for a dowry, or a bunch of ransom money,
He is choosing a “kosher” relationship
Rather than wealth and strength.

But my parents didn’t want, they weren’t willing
to give in to his request; with brave strength
they turned their hearts to the ground and to the pitch.

Therefore, I might as well say (what an expression);
I’ll never get married, not even with the Messiah.

21The strength of her verses in the Hebrew original is evident. At the same time, it is possible to notice at least one situation where she plays with the Italian language as well, by using Hebrew terms that make sense per se but remind the reader of Italian words in their phonology. These plays on words were typical of the Italian/Hebrew poetic production. Here we can admire the brilliance of her penultimate verse, where that “amor omar” in Hebrew can be translated as “I might as well say” or “I am going to say” in English, but immediately recalls the Italian expression “amore amaro”, a bitter love, giving meaning to the entire poem. That the assonance effect is deliberate is evidenced by the following exclamation in parenthesis, “what an expression”, where she draws her cousin’s attention to her play on words and appears proud of her own linguistic construction.

  • 64 Arbib, 2015.
  • 65 Ibid., p. 13-15.
  • 66 Ibid., p. 13.

22Another highly interesting element about this poem is constituted by Morpurgo’s references to traditional Jewish texts. In addition to a partial quotation of the book of Proverbs in the second verse (31, 18), the female poet includes a quite explicit reference to the Zohar (v. 4), the main book of Jewish mysticism. I believe this reference takes on different meanings. The context once again requires clarification. There is a long-standing tradition among Italian Jews which sees the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism in a positive light. Despite this fact, some prominent scholars in the Italian portion of the Habsburg empire took a critical stance towards Jewish mysticism, as a polluting element of Judaism, which actually distanced people from the “real” tradition, posed obstacles to a scientific approach to the sacred texts, and ultimately consisted of a collection of magical superstitions, unacceptable in the modern world. It has been noted, instead, that Rachel Morpurgo’s view of the Zohar and the Kabbalah was extremely positive, in defiance of the cultural climate surrounding her.64 Agreeably, Arbib maintained that this had to do with Morpurgo’s feminist stance, which on the one hand wanted to go against the established consensus of male power around her and, on the other, wished to show, also to an international readership, that it was possible to reconcile Jewish mysticism with modernity.65 Morpurgo acquired this view from an important text that had become a bestseller among Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Pinchas Hurwitz’s Sefer ha-Brit (“The Book of the Covenant”). This work is also a good illustration of the particularity of Trieste’s traditional Judaism. In fact, Sefer ha-Brit tries to reconcile the Kabbalah with the needs of modernity and especially “with a conception of knowledge compatible with the ideals of the Jewish Enlightenment”.66 For the female poet, supporting this view helped her in corroborating her attachment to Jewish religion and tradition, while at the same time rebelling against some aspects of it, such as a marriage recommended by her parents. Just like the apparent contradiction of a reconciliation between Kabbalah and the Enlightenment, her own life could equally be adherent to tradition and yet be modern.

  • 67 Boulouque, 2020; Grazi, 2018. Recent scholarship has challenged the old narrative, according to wh (...)
  • 68 Grazi 2018, p. 262; Luzzatto Voghera, p. 1216.
  • 69 The Edict of Tolerance was issued by the Habsburg emperor Joseph II. As part of his reforms, this (...)
  • 70 Dubin & Catalan, 2000.
  • 71 Grazi, 2021 and 2018; Salah.
  • 72 Cohen, 2016, p. 414.
  • 73 Grazi, 2021, p. 42-43.

23If the theme of marriage can have connections to religious life, the second poem presented here has an even more evident secular character. One poem would not be sufficient to draw definitive conclusions in this respect, but it really appears as though Rachel Morpurgo was manifesting political interest, especially in the most popular themes of the time, such as Jewish emancipation, the relation between Italian and Jewish identity, and the Risorgimento, as did several Italian Jewish intellectuals of the time, as it has recently emerged.67 In fact, as the Risorgimento had the purpose of liberating and unifying Italy, it was often seen by a number of Jewish intellectuals as the ideal means for a democratization of Italy, hence the achievement of civil equality for Italian Jews. Also in this respect, it is important to provide a little historical context. Firstly, it is crucial to clarify that, although living geographically on the Italian peninsula, Morpurgo was a Habsburg citizen until 1866, when these Habsburg territories were annexed to the Kingdom of Italy. Before Italy’s unification of 1861, Italian Jews were characterized by a strong fragmentation, caused by the highly divergent social and legal conditions of the regions which were home to Jewish communities in the pre-unification period. The Jews living in the Habsburg territories of the Italian peninsula were immersed in a different cultural atmosphere than the one characterizing other Italian Jews,68 and lived under distinct socio-economic conditions. The famous Toleranzpatent69 issued by Joseph II in 1782 improved the status of the Jewish communities residing there.70 For instance, the Jews living and working within the Italian part of the empire have traditionally been considered less enthusiastic about the theme of emancipation, their relation to the Risorgimento national movement, and Italian identity, at least for the period preceding 1848. But recent studies have instead started to suggest that this was not necessarily the case and that the enthusiasm for the Risorgimento, although mostly kept secret for understandable security reasons, did actually exist.71 In view of these recent considerations, Morpurgo’s following poem is not particularly surprising. However, in this poem Tova Cohen sees a certain reservation of Morpurgo towards the Risorgimento and, certainly, towards war in general. Cohen emphasized how, in her opinion, Morpurgo believed the final redemption of the Jews by God and the Messiah would be more important than the Italian Jews’ political emancipation.72 While one can agree with the Israeli scholar about Morpurgo’s wish not to hide her lack of enthusiasm for war in general and emphasis on the fact that real redemption has a religious dimension rather than a political one, I would disagree with the idea that she would have no interest for the Risorgimento. Indeed, it was possible to feel contentedness with one’s Habsburg political citizenship and, at the same time, sympathy for the liberation movement and a strong attachment to one’s Italian-ness, in cultural and linguistic terms.73

  • 74 Castiglioni, 1890, p. 59.

24Thus, in line with the widespread enthusiasm for the European revolutions in 1848, Rachel Morpurgo wrote a poem about this too74

(5608 – 1848)

קוֹרוֹת הַזְּמָן (הר''ח)

מַשְׁפִּיל גֵּאִים הִשְׁפִּיל כָּל-מַלְכֵי אָרֶץ
הֵרִים לִבּוֹת עַמִּים וַיָבֵא קָרֶץ
אֶל כָּל עָרֵי מבְצָר פֶּרֶץ עַל פֶּרֶץ
הִרְוָה מִדּם אָדָם זוֹחֵל וָשֶׁרֶץ.

חוֹגֵר כָּל אִישׁ חֲרְבּוֹ זָקֵן וָנָעַר
יִשּׂא קוֹלוֹ לַטְרֹף מֵחַיְתוֹ יָעַר
צוֹעֵק לִהְיות חָפְשִׁי חָכָם וָבָעַר
כִּי כָל-סְאוֹן סוֹאֵן מִיָם בַּסְּעַר.

לִפְרוֹק מֵעֹל כְּבֵד מֻטַּל עָלֵימוֹ
יִרְצוּ חַכְמֵי לֵבָב, וּבְכָל-חֵילֵמוֹ
יִרְהֲבוּ אֶת מַלְכָּם כּּי סָר צִלֵּמוֹ
קָרַב קִצָּם אֲשֶׁר נִגְזַר עָלֵימוֹ.

לֹא כֵן עַבְדֵי הָאֵל גִּבּוֹרֵי חָיִל
יִלְחָמוּ אֶת יִצְרָם יוֹמָם וָלָיִל
אֶת עוֹל צוּרָם יִשְּׂאוּ גַּם יִשְׂגּוּ חָיִל
דּוֹמֶה דוֹדִי לִצְבִי וּלְעוֹפֶר אָיִל.

שׁוֹפָר גָּדוֹל יִתְקַע יָבִיא בֶן-פֶּרֶץ
צֶמַח צַדִּק יִצְמַח יִפְרֹף בָּאָרֶץ
צוּרָם יִרְפֶא ציִרָם יִגְדֹּר כָּל-פֶּרֶץ
כִּי יְיָ מָלָךְ תָּגֵל הָאָרֶץ.
ושם הקטנה רחל.

(5608 – 1848)

Current Events

He who humiliates the proud, humiliated all the kings of the earth
He lifted up the hearts of peoples and destruction will come
to every fortified city, breach after breach
he flooded with human blood every reptile and insect.

Every man girds his sword, old and young
He will raise his voice to prey more than the wild beasts
The wise and the ignorant scream to be free,
For, every victory shout sounds louder than a stormy sea.

In order to shake off the heavy yoke imposed on them,
the wise-hearted will rush, and with all their strength
they will behave insolently with their kings, because their protection has been removed,
their end is nearing, which has been decreed for them.

It is not like this for God’s servants, brave warriors
They will fight their instinct day and night
They will bear the burden of their fortress and will achieve valor
My beloved resembles a deer and a fawn.

A great shofar will sound and the son of Peretz (Messiah) will come
The plant of the righteous will flourish and will spread over the earth
He shall repair their fortress and close every breach
Because the Lord rules and the Earth rejoices.
And the name of little Rachel.

  • 75 Klausner, 1921, p. 23-24.
  • 76 Ibid.
  • 77 Moscati, 2006, p. 233.

25In spite of dealing with current political events, the poem is also fraught with biblical references and expresses a religious dimension, which is typical of Morpurgo and never really abandons her work, even when it focuses on eminently non-religious subjects. If the poem’s language were not enough to reveal the author’s Jewish identity, this religious register would be sufficient to manifest the writer’s Jewishness. In particular, the penultimate stanza’s last verse is a quotation from the Song of Songs. Joseph Klausner noted that this verse was often used by the Sabbateans, the followers of the false Messiah Shabbetai Zvi.75 While Klausner himself expressed doubts that Rachel Morpurgo was aware of this fact,76 it is possible to agree with Gabriella Steindler Moscati, who argues that Morpurgo knew about this verse’s popularity with Sabbateans, thanks to her high level of education and also to her kinship with Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, himself an admirer of Shabbetai Zvi.77 Finally, the entire last stanza’s religious register is evidently projecting the poem’s Jewish essence, particularly the reference to the future coming of the Messiah, indicated as the Son of Peretz.

  • 78 Halkin, 1984, p. 56.
  • 79 Cohen, 2001, p. 144.
  • 80 Ibid.

26Another consideration triggered by this poem pertains to the relationship between reality and fiction. Simon Halkin famously claimed that the prose of the Haskalah described the “real” Jew, while maskilic poetry rather depicted the ideal Jew.78 Tova Cohen makes this definition her own, stating that “poetry […] does not reflect extra-literary social reality to the same extent as the prose genres.”79 Although I believe this definition is perhaps too clear-cut to be applied universally, it can well make sense for both Morpurgo’s cited poems. Both her wish to marry for love, according to her own will, and not due to some pre-determined societal scheme, as well as her desire for a future political unification of the Italian peninsula, with consequent acquisition of civil emancipation for its Jews, reflect how Jewry could be or, better, should be, in Morpurgo’s view. With this in mind, it is important to stress that the description of an ideal and desirable situation does not only describe a fantasy or a theoretical world. Through the depiction of the “ideal Jew” and of an “ideal political condition”, we learn something of the real Jew as well, as seen in a kind of mirror. Cohen also acknowledges this phenomenon and speaks of “refraction”.80

27These are two examples of secular poems written in Hebrew. For the time period considered here, the Hebrew language of a literary work is obviously a good hint of the Jewish character of such work. If it is true, that the rebellion against her parents’ decision, or the sympathy for the Risorgimento or even quotations from the Bible could be equally part of the cultural references of a Christian author of that historical context, the Hebrew language, the specificity of some biblical references, and the author’s identity are unequivocable markers of Jewishness in this case. In other words, in order to assess the Jewishness of this secular poem, we cannot address only one single element (be it the language, the author or the subject), but we need to take into consideration the combination of all of these factors.

28Therefore, if we ask the question: are these two poems a repository of the modern Jewish experience? We can answer positively without hesitation: not only are they written in Hebrew, but they also contain direct and indirect quotations of the Hebrew Bible and they refer to some typical experiences of nineteenth-century Italian Jews. However, knowing the author and the context are not irrelevant elements. Certainly, it is crucial to know that the author was an orthodox Jewish woman, who lived in a certain place and a certain time, under specific socio-political conditions.

David Levi (1816-1898)

  • 81 Grazi, 2022; Sofia, 2011; Conti, 2005; Cavaglion, 2001.

29The situation becomes a bit less self-evident if we consider a secular Jewish author who wrote secular poetry in Italian such as David Levi.81 David Levi was born in 1816 in Chieri, near Turin, Piedmont, the leading region of the Risorgimento national movement. He belonged to an upper middle-class traditional Jewish family. He received a broad education that included both traditional Jewish subjects and secular ones, specifically Italian and classical culture. Early in life, he abandoned the traditional and religious spheres of Judaism but always remained strongly attached to his Jewish heritage, as clearly emerges in his oeuvre.

30Levi, who was philosophically a Saint-Simonian, took an active part in the Risorgimento, as a member of Freemasonry and of Giovine Italia. He was elected in 1861 as one of the first Jewish members of the parliament of newly unified Italy, within the ranks of the Historical Left.

31Levi was also a prolific writer. His most prominent works were what he called “historical dramas”, which dealt with Judaism and Italian nationalism. His oeuvre also included several collections of poems and a comedy.

  • 82 Levi, 1884, p. 187.

32Thus, through David Levi I would like to show two examples of a different kind of poetry, namely playwrighting. The first short example is from his opus magnum, Il Profeta, a historical drama that Levi claimed he started writing during the Risorgimento but was actually published after Italy’s unification (in two editions, in 1866 and in 1884) and earned him international recognition. In this drama, Levi used a common topos of the time, the prophecies of Prophet Jeremiah and the Jews’ liberation from Babylon as a metaphor of the Italians’ liberation from foreign powers and Italy’s unification. This is the same theme, for instance, as the one we find in Giuseppe Verdi’s famous opera Nabucco, which premiered in 1843. As is clear from the introduction, however, Levi’s focus is not only the enthusiasm for the Risorgimento, but especially the Jews’ future universalistic role in unified Italy through a reinterpretation of their history. Again, the author’s identity and context are crucial in reading this as a Jewish work. If some quotations can be understood and have some impact on a general audience as well, they have nevertheless a special resonance for a Jewish reader. For instance:82

Odi Israello, é il Signore tuo l´Eterno,
Eterno ed Un

Listen oh Israel, your Lord is the Eternal
Eternal and One

33Here, the reference to the prayer of the Shema Israel is evident.

34The history of Judaism is again the protagonist of an important section of Il Mistero delle Tre Melarancie, an unpublished comedy I discovered in David Levi’s private archive at the National Museum of the Risorgimento in Turin (Folder 31.4–12). It is Levi’s last work, as witnessed by the publisher’s rejection letter of November 1897, exactly a year before his death.

35In this comedy, Tartaglia, the prince of the fantasy kingdom of Frattombrosa, set off on a journey to find the Tre Melarancie, the only thing that can help him regain his lost happiness. This journey is ultimately a long metaphor of Levi’s reflections and search for his own Jewish identity. Towards the end of his journey, Tartaglia/Levi finds himself in Egypt, walking through an imaginary market of religions, where merchants from all over the world sell religions of all kinds. He suddenly runs into one of these merchants, identified as Isaac Laquedem, the Wandering Jew. In the conversation with Tartaglia, Laquedem traces the history of Judaism. The term Judaism never appears in this description, but the reader would undeniably understand that Judaism was the subject of this section.

Tartaglia (…): Che fate buon uomo di tanti idoli e Numi?

Isaccco Laquedem: È il mio segreto. (…)
Ecco, io li compro in Oriente e li porto in Occidente, ivi li trasformo, li rimetto a nuovo per rivenderli ad alto prezzo.
Colà i popoli hanno la mente grossa, correranno a gara a farne acquisto per adornarne case e templi.

[…]

Dottore: E il vostro Dio qual è, come si chiama?

Isacco Laquedem: Il mio Dio lo porto nel pensiero, lo sento ma nessuno lo vede né può afferrarlo (fa per partire).

[…]

Dottore [Volto a Laquedem]: Dite, buon uomo, da quanto sembra voi avete percorso tutto il mondo.

Isacco Laquedem: E tutti i secoli.

[…]

Tartaglia: Passano gli Dei, come gli uomini. Essi passarono, ma tu rimani e perduri. Come mai ti fu dato sopravvivere a tutti?

Dottore: Dal tuo volto mal si potrebbe discernere gli anni che porti, sei vecchio o giovane?

  • 83 Tre Melarancie, v. 99-103.

Isacco Laquedem: Nacqui vecchio e sono sempre giovane; d’etá in etá mi rinnovo. Non muoio, mi eclisso per riapparire e ritornare a nuova vita. Tale il mio destino.83

Tartaglia (…): What are you doing, good man, with so many idols and Gods?

Isaac Laquedem: This is my secret. (…)
Well, I buy them in the Orient and bring them to the West, where I transform them, I renovate them to sell them at a high price.
There [in the West] the peoples have a thick head. They will compete to buy them and decorate their homes and temples with them.

[…]

Doctor: And which is your God, what is his name?

Isaac Laquedem: I bear my God in my thoughts, I hear him but no one can see him, nor grasp him.

[…]

Doctor [addressing Laquedem]: Tell us, good man, it looks like you have travelled the whole world.

Isaac Laquedem: And all the centuries.

[…]

Tartaglia: The Gods pass, and so does humanity. They passed but you remain and endure. How was it that you were allowed to survive everyone?

Doctor: From your face one cannot possibly understand how old you are; Are you old or young?

Isaac Laquedem: I was born old and have always been young; in each age I renovate myself. I don’t die, I disappear to then reappear and come back to a new life. Such is my destiny.

36Both Il Profeta and Il Mistero delle Tre Melarancie are written in Italian and can speak to a general, non-Jewish Italian audience. But they are also evident repositories of the modern Jewish experience, more specifically, that of Italian Jews.

Crescenzo Del Monte (1868-1935)

  • 84 Leisawitz, 2020; Procaccia, 2007.
  • 85 Ibid.

37The last author I would like to present is Crescenzo Del Monte. Del Monte was a Roman Jew, as he himself explicitly liked to say, emphasizing the local rather than the national. He spent his entire life in Rome, where he was born in 1868 and died in 1935.84 I will not delve into the last part of his activities, firstly because it is beyond the scope of this paper and secondly because it intersected with the Fascist era, presenting a number of issues that cannot be discussed here. He was born within the ghetto, only two years before Rome’s annexation to the Kingdom of Italy, when all the legal restrictions for the Roman Jews were removed. At that time, the life of the Roman ghetto was characterized by diffused poverty and generally poor socio-cultural conditions. He spent the first 20 years of his life in the ghetto, until he moved with his family to an apartment in a more fashionable area of the city, where he remained until the end of his life. Between 1895 and 1934, he published 296 poems in Giudaico-Romanesco, the vernacular of the Jews of Rome, strongly influenced by the general Roman dialect, as well as several poems in simple Romanesco and in Italian. His main goal was a preservation of the Roman Jewish vernacular and a transmission of the traditions and life of the Roman ghetto. In his poems, the inhabitants of the ghetto often converse in direct dialogues. A strong sense of belonging and pride are a common thread throughout his oeuvre: first and foremost, to the Jewish community, then to Rome and finally to Italy. He has been examined in great detail by the American scholar Daniel Leisawitz, who studied Del Monte especially for the linguistic aspects of his work85.

  • 86 Ibid., p. 208-209.

38One of Del Monte’s earliest poems, “Lo ‘Sciabbàdde’” (Shabbat), provides a typical example of his style and approach86:

Lo “Sciabbàdde”

“Canchera negra, levete de là!
T’a, p’ ’oo nome de Dio, faccio vedé’!
Varda chherpà, ch’è questa qua, ma eh!?
de Sciabbàdde, vedella cucinà’!”
“Ma statte zitta, ma me làssi stà’?!
Stàe mal de córpo, ma chi màle c’è
a scallasse ’na goccia de cafè?!
ma cos’è meglio, a famme reggettà’?”
“Bévet’un micchiér d’acqua, mordedì!
Te fa bene listesso, se nun più.
Ma no, che t’ajo da vedé così!
De Sciabbàdde! ma èh!? ma ‘o sa’, tu,
‘o sa’, Sciabbàdde, tu, cosa vo’ di’?!
Gran fatto strano, mo, ’sta gioventù!”

“Shabbat”

  • 87 I’ll show you for…’s sake (re: the epenthetic a added to the pronoun when a parenthetical clause c (...)
  • 88 (blushing) shame.
  • 89 (Staio) I am.
  • 90 (for love of you) A benevolent expression, in this case rather ironic.
  • 91 I have…you.
  • 92 A strange or deplorable thing.

“You good-for-nothing, get out of there!
I’ll show you, for God’s sake!87
What a disgrace88 this one is,
to see her cooking on Shabbat!”
“Will you shut up and leave me alone?!
I don’t feel89 good, so what’s the harm
in heating up a drop of coffee?!
or would you rather have me throwing up?”
“Drink a glass of water, my darling girl!90
It’ll work just as well, if not better.
But oh no, instead I have to see you91 like this!
On Shabbat! Come on! Don’t you know?
the meaning of Shabbat?! Don’t you know?
Kids these days are a sorry bunch!”92

39This poem presents an interesting portrait of domestic life during the Shabbat. But it also contains several important themes related to the generational differences in following the Jewish tradition, the concepts of assimilation and integration, and so on.

40After the case of Levi, which required a more attentive examination, with Del Monte we re-enter a dimension in which the poems’ Jewish character is self-evident. The language here plays a fundamental role. It is not simply a Roman dialect, but it is specifically Giudaico-Romanesco, Judeo-Roman, as it is manifest in the several Hebrew matrix words appearing in the text, adapted to the Roman pronunciation. The lively descriptions of ghetto life, moreover during a Jewish festivity and the Roman Jews’ relation with the Catholic majority, make these poems, and I would argue in this case all of Del Monte’s oeuvre, unmistakably Jewish works.

Conclusion

41In conclusion, if we accept Ruth Wisse’s criterion of asking ourselves whether a literary work is a repository of the modern Jewish experience in order to establish its Jewish character or lack thereof, we see that the work alone does not necessarily answer the question but obviously has to be seen in connection to its author but also in relation to its historical context. One first conclusion we draw from this is that a literary works’ Jewishness is intrinsically bound to the Jewishness of its author. This apparently self-evident statement, which is often taken for granted in any discussion on a secular Jewish canon, is the main reason why scholars tend to avoid this topic. This inevitably leads to a discussion on the concept of secular Jewish identity, which is however beyond the scope of this paper. If, in the cases of Rachel Morpurgo and Crescenzo Del Monte, the correlation Jewish author–Jewish poem is almost direct, in David Levi, we probably first have to question the writer’s Jewish identity and then open a discussion on his oeuvre. This paper, however, does not seek to concentrate on the theme of Jewish identity, instead the authors’ Jewishness was a given as a point of departure. Nonetheless, an author’s Jewish identity, be it religious or secular, is not sufficient to define any of his/her works as Jewish. If this statement might appear obvious, it serves to clarify something I have mentioned earlier in this paper: For modern times, an inclusion in the Jewish canon cannot simply be assessed by means of one factor, such as the author’s identity, the language and the poem’s theme. It necessarily requires the assessment of all these elements combined, including the geo-socio-historical context in which a certain poem was published. With these considerations, I hope to bring further evidence to the fact that a modern Jewish canon can consist of several languages. Last but not least, in this article I wished to give the reader the opportunity to enjoy some delightful poems of three prominent Italian Jewish authors.

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Notes

1 Pagis & Garribba, 1994, p. 6.

2 Pagis & Garribba, 1994, p. 6. In the Italian original: “[…] non ha eguali nel resto del mondo, per continuità e durata.

3 Lehnardt, 2016; Hollender & Chiesa, 1994; Menascé & Schirmann, 1969; Sonne, 1933.

4 van Bekkum, 2007; Cassuto, 1906.

5 Almagor & Salah, 1994.

6 Rathaus, 2016.

7 Grazi 2022, p. 7.

8 Friedlander, 2004, קסז-קעו.

9 Bialik, 1953.

10 Halkin, 2008.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., p. 12.

13 Wisse ,2000.

14 Wisse, 2000, p. 3.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., p. 4.

17 Ibid., p. 19.

18 Jewish intellectual movement that emerged in the second half of the Eighteenth century and proposed the application of some Enlightenment principles to Judaism, such as a clear distinction between the merely religious and the national dimensions and a rational critical approach to the texts of Jewish tradition, placing thus a strong emphasis (in different degrees) on the secular subjects and on the theme of civil emancipation.

19 Feiner, 2010.

20 Ibid., p. 5.

21 Proponents of the Haskalah

22 Ibid., p. 4-5.

23 Grazi, 2022.

24 Grazi, 2022, p. 18.

25 Frankel & Zipperstein, 1992.

26 Kaplan, 2000, p. 26.

27 Endelman, 2015.

28 Feiner, 1996.

29 Feiner, 2004.

30 Feiner, 2010.

31 Cohen, 2001, p. 157.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid., p. 151.

34 In this case, I intend the term Ashkenaz in a rather broad sense, as central and eastern Europe, and as all the geographical areas in which Ashkenazi Jews resided and used Yiddish.

35 Feiner, 2002, p. 229-273.

36 Patterson, 1964.

37 Feiner, 2002, p. 229.

38 Ibid.

39 a traditional Jewish primary school teaching the basics of Judaism and the Hebrew language

40 A yeshiva is the highest traditional Jewish educational institution focused on the study of Rabbinic literature

41 Cohen, 2001, p. 144.

42 Cohen, 2016; Arbib, 2015; Ibid., 2011; Steindler Moscati, 2006; Katz, 2000; Piperno, 1998; Castiglioni, 1890.

43 Arbib, 2011, p. 397.

44 Ibid., p. 399.

45 Piperno, 1998, p. 33.

46 Cohen, 2001, p. 146.

47 Ibid., p. 145.

48 Ibid., p. 146.

49 Ibid., p. 157-165.

50 Ferrara degli Uberti, 2007, p. 408; Del Bianco Cotrozzi, 2007, p. 330; Grazi, 2022, p. 111.

51 Catalan, 2007, p. 358.

52 Ibid., p. 366.

53 Ferrara degli Uberti, 2007, p. 414.

54 Ibid., p. 408.

55 Jewish mysticism

56 Arbib, p. 2011.

57 Cohen, 2016.

58 Ibid., p. 76-300.

59 Ibid., p. 76-87.

60 Ibid., p. 191-300.

61 Ibid., p. 76.

62 Castiglioni, 1890, p. 51.

63 All the English translations of the original texts are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

64 Arbib, 2015.

65 Ibid., p. 13-15.

66 Ibid., p. 13.

67 Boulouque, 2020; Grazi, 2018. Recent scholarship has challenged the old narrative, according to which Italian Jews would have had a seamless process of integration in Italian society at the time of their civil emancipation, which in many cases coincided with Italy’s unification (1861). As this was the immediate political goal of the Risorgimento national movement, older scholarship had somewhat uncritically described Italian Jews as enthusiastic about the national movement. Recent scholarship has started problematizing this issue and has unraveled a much more complex picture. Nevertheless, recent studies have also highlighted the support for the Risorgimento or at least for a sense of Italianness on the part of some important Italian Jewish rabbis of the time, even in cases in which they were thought to have no interest in the topic.

68 Grazi 2018, p. 262; Luzzatto Voghera, p. 1216.

69 The Edict of Tolerance was issued by the Habsburg emperor Joseph II. As part of his reforms, this law improved the religious freedom of Habsburg Jews.

70 Dubin & Catalan, 2000.

71 Grazi, 2021 and 2018; Salah.

72 Cohen, 2016, p. 414.

73 Grazi, 2021, p. 42-43.

74 Castiglioni, 1890, p. 59.

75 Klausner, 1921, p. 23-24.

76 Ibid.

77 Moscati, 2006, p. 233.

78 Halkin, 1984, p. 56.

79 Cohen, 2001, p. 144.

80 Ibid.

81 Grazi, 2022; Sofia, 2011; Conti, 2005; Cavaglion, 2001.

82 Levi, 1884, p. 187.

83 Tre Melarancie, v. 99-103.

84 Leisawitz, 2020; Procaccia, 2007.

85 Ibid.

86 Ibid., p. 208-209.

87 I’ll show you for…’s sake (re: the epenthetic a added to the pronoun when a parenthetical clause comes between it and the verb to which it refers).

88 (blushing) shame.

89 (Staio) I am.

90 (for love of you) A benevolent expression, in this case rather ironic.

91 I have…you.

92 A strange or deplorable thing.

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Alessandro Grazi, « Rhyming Jewish: Secular Jewish poetry in nineteenth-century Italy »Yod [En ligne], 24 | 2024, mis en ligne le 13 octobre 2024, consulté le 06 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/yod/5562 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12j35

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Alessandro Grazi

Excellence Cluster “Religion and Politics” University of Münster

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