Category:Bedarida, Guido (1900-1962)

Guido Bedarida (Italy, 1900-1962), scholar

"Born in Ancona, February 18, 1900, Guidi Bedarida was a scholar of Italian Judaism, and considered one of the greatest authors of works in Bagitto or Bagito, a mixed Judeo-Livorish language, with a base close to Italian enriched with Tuscan, Spanish, Portuguese and Hebrew components, and even traces of Greek and Yiddish. Guido Bedarida, fourth of four children, was born in a Sephardic Jewish family in Ancona. The Bedarida family had arrived there from Livorno in 1838; here in 1886 they had founded a flourishing business, thanks to their factory of wool for mattresses, with 120 employees, suppliers among others of the Royal Army. Guido, who had just finished high school, formed here his particular artistic and cultural vein, growing up in the Jewish environment of Livorno, then intellectually very lively, rich in illustrious men and prominent personalities such as Giuseppe Emanuele Modigliani, his brother Amedeo Modigliani, Alfredo Sabato Toaff. He began his university studies in 1919 in Pisa; in 1922 he had already graduated in Law. Against fascism and sensitive and emotional by temperament, he chose to devote himself to historical research, to the activity of writer and to numismatic and art collecting. Opposed to any form of violence had been, for a long time, vegetarian. Between the years 1924 to 1935 is the author of numerous essays on Jewish subject that signs with the pseudonym "Eliezer Ben David". In 1924 he organized in Livorno the IV convention of the Young Jews of Italy, stating that in order to be aware of their Jewish identity, the Jews had to have the necessary cultural and intellectual tools, the most important of which was the Hebrew language, conceived as the fundamental element that infused the identity of the nation and the unity of the people to the Jews dispersed in the world. In the same year he founded the Livorno Zionist Group. Until 1938 he is director of "La Rassegna Mensile di Israel". In 1932 in Casale Monferrato, he married Pia Toaff, sister of the Chief Rabbi of Rome Elio Toaff and daughter of one of the most illustrious Rabbis and Jewish scholars of the time: Alfredo Sabato Toaff, Chief Rabbi of the Jewish Community of Livorno and director of the local rabbinical school, known for its excellence. In the early '30s he began to take an interest in the family's industrial activity, maintaining commercial contacts with customers and suppliers around the world. In 1938, with the worsening of the Italian political situation as a result of the fascist racial laws, forced to remove their children from schools in the Kingdom and also close the factory, Guido Bedarida with his family fled to France and the Principality of Monaco; beyond the Alps he remained until 1943 when the changed circumstances due to the German occupation and the Armistice at home recommended the return to Italy. He hid first in the Tuscan countryside and then in the family estate, the Villa Marsiliana. In 1945 he finally came back to Livorno with his whole family, restarting the family business whose machinery had been looted during the conflict. At the same time he also resumed his activity as a scholar and writer, even if in a less prolific way because of the serious health problems due to the sufferings of the war; he continued however to write and prepare material for his studies and writings until 1962, the year of his premature and sudden death."--https://www.loquis.com/