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{en} David N. Myers, et al., eds. Acculturation and Its Discontents: The Italian Jewish experience between exclusion and inclusion. Toronto [Canada]: University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2008.

Abstract

"Exploring the fascinating cross-cultural influences between Jews and Christians in Italy from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, Acculturation and Its Discontents assembles essays by leading historians, literary scholars, and musicologists to present a well-rounded history of Italian Jewry ... The contributors offer rich portraits of the many vibrant forms of cultural and artistic expression that Italian Jews contributed to, but this volume also pays close attention to the ways in which Italian Jews - both freely and under pressure - creatively adapted to the social, cultural, and legal norms of the surrounding society. Tracing both the triumphs and tragedies of Jewish communities within Italy over a broad span of time, Acculturation and Its Discontents challenges conventional assumptions about assimilation and state intervention and, in the process, charts the complex process of cultural exchange that left such a distinctive imprint not only on Italian Jewry, but also on Italian society itself ... This collection of rigorous and thought-provoking essays makes a major contribution to both the history of Italian culture and the cultural influence and significance of European Jews."

Contents

• How 'other' really was the Jewish other? The evidence from Venice / Benjamin Ravid
• Emotion and acculturation: masquerading emotion in the Roman ghetto / Kenneth Stow
• Between exclusion and inclusion: Jews as portrayed in Italian music from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries / Don Harraþn --
• Can fundamentalism be modern? The case of Avraham Portaleone (1542-1612) / Alessandro Guetta --
• Jewish women, marriage law, and emancipation: the civil divorce of Rachele Morschene in late eighteenth-century Trieste / Lois C. Dubin
• The Jews of Italy in the Triennio Giacobino, 1796-1799 / Geoffrey Symcox
• Singing modernity: synagogue music in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy / Edwin Seroussi
• 'Their true tongue': history, memory, language, and the Jews of Italy / Simon Levis Sullam
• Growing up Jewish in Ferrara: the fiction of Giorgio Bassani / Guido Fink.