Vivian B. Mann (ed.), Gardens and Ghettos

Summary

In the last three or four decades in the history of art the importance of catalogues from exhibitions has been steadily growing. From very modest origins as an inventory or rather a list of displayed works with some badly reproduced photographs, the catalogue has evolved into something which can enable us to preserve the memory of every great exhibition through a large album with fine pictures, with texts which provide a synthetic outline of a period, region, or specific phenomenon. Some of those publications are and will for a long time remain both a source of information and the first attempt at synthetic analysis.

These observations fit the catalogue published in connection with a large exhibition which took place at the New York Jewish Museum in 1989. The history of the Jews in Italy shown through the art produced in or for their communities during more than fifteen centuries unfolds before our eyes the specific history of this diaspora, so similar to and at the same time so different from all other diasporas in Europe. Let me cite a fragment of Primo Levi's novel If Not Now, When? (after the text of Emily Braun in the catalogue of this exhibition): the hero of this novel, a man coming from the eastern part of Europe, ‘wondered if there were any Jews in Italy. If so, they must be strange Jews: how can you imagine a Jew in a gondola or at the top of Vesuvius?’ And in another place: ‘Italian Jews are as odd as the Catholics. They don't speak Yiddish. In fact, they don't even know what Yiddish is. They only speak Italian; or rather, the Jews of Rome speak Roman, the Jews from Venice speak Venetian, and so on. They dress like everybody else, they have the same faces as everybody else.'

The essays introducing the catalogue are: David Ruderman, ‘At the Intersection of Cultures: The Historical Legacy of Italian Jewry'; Mario Toscano, ‘The Jews in Italy from the Risorgimento to the Republic'; Vivian B. Mann, ‘The Arts of Jewish Italy'; Richard Brilliant, ‘Jewish Art and Culture in Ancient Rome';. Evelyn Cohen, ‘Jewish Ceremonial Art in the Era of the City States and Ghettos'; Emily Braun, ‘From Risorgimento to the Resistance: A Century of Jewish Artists in Italy'; Allen Mandelbaum, ‘A Millennium of Hebrew Poetry in Italy'.