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 on Moment: https://momentmag.com/italian-jews-rome-the-renaissance-and-beyond/