Abstract
In the years following the fall of Napoleon, the Vatican found itself embroiled in two particularly striking cases of conversion: the first, known as the Labani affair, involved a young Roman Jew named Salvatore Tivoli, who converted to Catholicism in 1804 at the age of twenty-three, taking the name Giuseppe Labani. According to Rome’s baptismal registry, he was one of only twelve individuals to convert that year.1 Since conversion entailed cutting ties completely with the Jewish community, the rector of the Catechumens, Don Filippo Colonna, hired Tivoli as a cook until the young man could find accommodation and a job outside of the ghetto.2 About a year after his conversion, however, Tivoli had a change of heart, renounced his newly adopted religion and sought to return to Judaism. He could not return to the Jewish community in Rome, since under Inquisition law apostasy was a crime for which one would be imprisoned.3 Forced to flee the Papal States altogether, Tivoli sailed to Turkey, where he settled among the Jewish community of Adrianopolis. In 1808, however, Tuscany was annexed to the French empire. For Tivoli, this change of government meant that he could finally return to one part of the Italian peninsula without fear of being arrested.
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Notes
R. Po-Chia Hsia, Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 14.
John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 64. Also see Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets.”
Samaja “La Situazione degli ebrei nel periodo del Risorgimento.” Rassegna Mensile d’Israele 23, nos. 7–9 (July-Sept. 1957): 298–309; 359–71; 414–21.
See Francesco Gambini, Dell’Ebreo Possidente (Turin: Stamperia Pane, 1815) and Della cittadinanza giudraica in Europa (Turin: Tipografia di G. Pomba, 1834). For further discussion, see Franco della Peruta, “Gli ebrei nel Risorgimento fra interdizioni ed emancipazione,” Storia d’Italia, Gli ebrei in Itctlia: dall’emancipazione a oggi, vol. 11.2 ed. Corrado Vivanti, (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 1135–67.
Alessandro Roveri, La Santa Sede tra rivoluzione francese e restaurazione: Il cardinale Consalvi, 1813–1815 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974), 144.
George Mosse, The Culture of Western Europe: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1988), 90–91.
ASF.PAC, Parte Prima, Filza 14, 488. Livorno, June 18, 1814. Accusations of poisoning were one stereotype that served as a weapon against the Jewish community well after this case. Laws that separated the two communities, from not hiring Christian servants to not eating food prepared by a Jew, were all established with the aim of saving Christians from death by poison. See Nino Samaja, “La Situazione degli ebrei nel periodo del Risorgimento,” Rassegna Mensile d’Israele, “La Situazione degli ebrei nel periodo del Risorgimento.” Rassegna Mensile d’Israele 23.7–9 (July–September 1957): 298–309; 359–71; 414–21.
We see illustrated here the parallel between the position of the European Jew and the colonial subject. There is a significant body of literature on Orientalism, colonialism, and the European Jew. In particular, see Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) and Orientalism and the Jews, ed. By Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005). In Tudor Parfitt’s essay entitled “The Use of the Jew in Colonial Discourse” that appears in this collection, for example, the author notes that Jewish ancestry was thought to explain the ancestry of many of the peoples whom European colonizers met upon their conquest of new lands. Thus the relationship between colonial subject and Jew is brought even further together (51–67).
Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry, “Telling Stories Out of School: An Essay on Legal Narratives,” Stanford Law Review 45 (April, 1993): 827.
This was proven at the first Vatican council, which was organized in 1869–1870 by Pius IX, when theologians elaborated on the idea of the Church as ‘societas perfecta.’ See Giovanni Miccoli Fra Mito della Cristianita e secolarizzazione (Casale Monferrato: Marietti, 1985), 71, Fra For further discussion of the relationship between Europe and Christianity, see Aylward Shorter, Toward a Theology of Inculturation (London: Cassell Publishers, 1988).
Sander Gilman and Steven Katz, eds., Antisemitism in Times of Crisis (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 2.
Cited in Pickering 76. Susan Zickmund, “Approaching the Radical Other: The Discursive Culture of Cyberhate” in S. G. Jones, ed., Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety (London: Sage, 1997).
For a thorough discussion of reactionary attitudes within the Vatican from the return of Pius VII through the reign of Pius IX, see Daniele Menozzi, La chiesa cattolica e la secolarizzazione (Turin: Einaudi, 1993).
For a thorough discussion of medieval views of Jews, see Joan Young Gregg, Devils, Woman and Jews: Reflections of the Other in Medieval Sermon Stories (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 169–235.
Peter Brooks, “The Law as Narrative and Rhetoric,” Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law, ed. Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 17.
Peter Brooks Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage Books), 1984, 216.
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© 2008 Ariella Lang
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Lang, A. (2008). Rewriting the Jew in Restoration Italy. In: Converting a Nation. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230615816_3
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