A Museum of Italian Jewish History Tells a Very Local Story

In 2018, the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah opened in the city of Ferrara, whose Jewish history is known to Americans primarily because of the 1971 film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, based on Giorgio Bassani’s novel of the same name. Created pursuant to an act of the Italian parliament, the museum was the result of a nearly eighteen-year discussion of where and how to create a memorial to the Holocaust. The result is as much about the history of Ferrara’s Jews as about their fate under fascism. Carlin Romano writes:

[T]he House of Este . . . ruled Ferrara from 1240 to 1598. Ercole d’Este (1431–1505) welcomed Sephardi Jews expelled from Iberia and left the city a remarkable array of palaces, gardens, and grand avenues, as well as medieval walls and a Jewish quarter, which became the ghetto in 1624 after the Vatican seized power from the House of Este.

One reason Ferrara got the nod from the founders of the museum is that it continues to have an active, if tiny, Jewish community, as well as a non-Jewish population that largely appreciates [the Jewish] presence. Massimo Torrefranco, the Roman-born vice-president of the Jewish community, . . . offers a tour of the [community’s headquarters] at Via Giuseppe Mazzini 95. Originally housing two synagogues (German and Italian), it’s the oldest Jewish communal building in Italy still in use. Damaged in the 2012 Emilia region earthquake, it is currently open only to members of the community.

In 1861, when most of the Italian peninsula’s individual states came together to form the Kingdom of Italy, Ferrara had a Jewish population of about 3,000 in a city of 33,000. . . . [T]he community numbers only 80 today.

On the first floor [of the museum, the exhibit] The Renaissance Speaks Hebrew narrates a groundbreaking perspective that squares with much contemporary academic scholarship: namely, that Jewish involvement in the Renaissance, largely omitted from standard histories, must be rediscovered and studied. “There is no Italian Renaissance without Judaism,” declares Giulio Busi, co-curator of the exhibition, from a monitor at the entrance to the installation, “and we would not be able to imagine Italian Judaism without the Renaissance.”

Read more at Moment

More about: Holocaust, Italian Jewry, Jewish museums, Renaissance

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF