On the occasion of the centennial of the inauguration of our synagogue, which took place on February 16, 1884, we, the Jews of Turin, have decided to forgo, for once, our traditional twofold reserve. There is the well-known Piedmontese reserve, which, rooted in geography and history, has led some to see us as the least Italian of Italians, and then there is, superimposed on this, the ancient reserve of the Diaspora Jew, who has been accustomed forever to live in silence and suspicion, to listen a lot and say little, not to draw attention to himself, because “you never know.”
We were never many: scarcely more than four thousand in the thirties, the highest number we ever reached, and scarcely more than a thousand today. But I don’t think it’s too much to say that we counted for something, and continue to count, in the life of this city. Paradoxically, our humble and quiet community is linked to the history of the most important monument in Turin, which is certainly not humble, nor does it reflect our character. As Alberto Racheli tells us in detail in the following essay, we ran the serious risk of sharing with Alessandro Antonelli the responsibility for the presence, right in the city’s center, of the Mole, that huge exclamation mark.1 Of course, we, too, like all Turinese, have a certain affection for the Mole, but our affection is ironic and polemical, and we are not blinded by it. We love it as we love the walls of our houses, but we know it is ugly, pretentious, and of little use, that it involved a very bad use of public funds, and that, after the 1953 cyclone and the restoration of 1961, it still stands, thanks to a metal prosthesis. For some time, the Mole hasn’t even had the right to be mentioned in the Guinness Book of Records: it is no longer, as we were taught in school, “the tallest brick building in Europe.” And so we feel posthumous gratitude for the municipal councillor Malvano, our coreligionist, who in 1875 had the good judgment to resell the building—a voracious money eater that had been commissioned but not completed—to the municipality. Had the transaction failed, we would witness a sorry sight today. The few hundred Jews who attend temple on formal holy days and the few dozen who go there for daily rites would be almost invisible within the enormous space of Antonelli’s dome.
However, as I said, if we had not been here, the city would be different, and this exhibition intends to demonstrate that. When our fathers (for the most part not Turinese, but coming from small Piedmontese communities) moved to the city, toward the end of the nineteenth century, they brought with them the great, maybe the only, special talent that history bequeathed to the Jews: literacy, a secular and religious culture seen as a duty, a necessity, and a pleasure of life, at a time when most Italians were illiterate. Therefore, emancipation did not catch the Jews unprepared; as the stories of many of the families outlined in the displays indicate, within one or two generations Jews coming out of the ghetto moved easily from handicrafts and small trade to the nascent industries, administration, public offices, the military, and the universities. In fact, it is in the academic world that Turinese Jews have left an important mark, altogether disproportionate to their small number. Their university presence is still outstanding in both quantity and quality. This ascent, parallel to that of much of the Christian lower middle class, was also facilitated by a tolerant population. It has been said that each country has the Jews it deserves; post-Risorgimento Italy, a country of ancient civilization, ethnically homogeneous and immune to heavy xenophobic tensions, made its Jews into good, law-abiding citizens, loyal to the State and averse to corruption and violence.
From this perspective, the integration of Italian Judaism is unusual in the world. Even more unusual may be the balance achieved by Turinese-Piedmontese Judaism, which was easily integrated yet without giving up its identity. With the exception of rare and marginal cases, such as the centers in Yemen and the Caucasus, all the Jewish communities in the world carried (and carry) the scars of the tormented history of the people of Israel, interwoven with slaughters, expulsions, humiliating separations, exorbitant and arbitrary taxation, forced conversion, migration. Jews expelled from one country (from England in 1290, from France throughout the fourteenth century, from the Rhineland at the time of the Crusades, from Spain in 1492, up to the recent migration to the Americas) sought shelter elsewhere, joining existing communities or founding new ones. Thus they were doubly foreigners, because of their religion and because of their origins. This is why most communities are stratified and heterogeneous, with occasional tensions and divisions. Israel Zangwill gave a lively account of this in his renowned short novel The King of Schnorrers, where he describes the encounter-collision, in early-nineteenth-century London, between an arrogant beggar and a “German” Jew, assimilated, rich, and naïve. In Amsterdam the Jews, of German origin, welcomed the Jews expelled from the Iberian peninsula, but there was little blending between the two groups. In Venice there are still some five synagogues, originally intended for Jews of different backgrounds and rites. The current situation in Paris is similar, as Jews of old French stock live side by side with Algerian, Egyptian, Polish, Russian, German, etc., Jews. The most complex case, and of greater historical weight, is, of course, that of Israel, where the presence of Jews belonging to all branches of the Diaspora constitutes to this day an intricate problem of internal politics. The most recent development is in the Jewish community of Milan, where the great influx of refugees from the Arab states and Iran is causing upheaval and friction, along with an unexpected increase in numbers.
On the other hand, the Turinese Jewish community, which has remote French-Provençal and Spanish origins, never experienced sizable incursions from other regions. At different times there were infiltrations—as attested to by some family names of evident German origin (Ottolenghi, Diena, Luzzati, Morpurgo, and, obviously, Tedeschi2) and by the single dialectal and liturgical expression ij ursài—the anniversary of a death, that is, the corruption of the Yiddish yahrzeit, “time of year.” However, these influences were quickly absorbed into a social fabric that remained ethnically stable up to the forty-year period (1880–1920) covered by this exhibition, in fact even up to now, in striking contrast to what happened in the city of Turin, which, during the economic boom, took in five or six hundred thousand immigrants in the space of two or three years, with profound changes for all its structures and infrastructures.
The prevailing endogamy, rarely extended outside the boundaries of the region, confirms that this was a small tribe, aware of its identity and with well-established features, almost like a village embedded in the Savoyard capital. Further confirmation is found in the odd Jewish-Piedmontese dialect, today a subject of research for linguists and sociologists, but earlier described by Alberto Viriglio, a keen observer of Piedmontese life. For this linguistic hybrid to be born and to survive, a deep assimilation with the majority population was indispensable, along with an adequate recollection of the language of the liturgy (the only pathway by which Hebrew and Aramaic followed the currents of the Diaspora), and an environment in which there were no strong tensions between majority and minority. When such tensions exist, no hybrid languages are formed. Thus, for instance, a Jewish-Polish dialect never developed, nor did Italian-German hybrids in Alto Adige, while Italian immigrants in the United States, in spite of the limited phonetic compatibility, developed from the outset their own way of speaking, which was adroitly used by Pascoli in a famous short poem.3
Our fathers, and above all our mothers, used Jewish-Piedmontese every day and unaffectedly; it was the language of home and family. Yet they were aware of the intrinsic humor that emerged from the contrast between the fabric of the speech, the unrefined and laconic Piedmontese dialect, and the Hebrew inserts, taken from the language of the Patriarchs, remote but revitalized every day by public and private prayers and the reading of the Holy Books, a language made smooth by the ages like a riverbed by the glaciers. But this mirrored another, essential contrast of Judaism, which, scattered among le genti, or peoples—the Gentiles—is torn between its divine calling and its daily tribulations; and yet another, much broader contrast, the one inherent in the human condition, since man is bipartite, a mixture of heavenly spirit and earthly dust. The Jewish people, after the Diaspora, experienced this conflict painfully, and derived from it, alongside their wisdom, their laughter, which is absent from the Bible and the Prophets.
This exhibition is dedicated to these honest, hardworking, and witty forefathers. They were neither heroes nor saints or martyrs; they are not too far from us in time and space. We are aware of the limits of the exhibition, which were deliberately restricted. Other things could be said, and of quite different weight, about the history of the Turinese Jews in the following decades: their early anti-Fascist militancy, originating in that craving for freedom and justice that runs through Jewish history and paid for with long years of imprisonment and internment; the exemplary lives of such men as Umberto Terracini, Leone Ginzburg, Emanuele and Ennio Artom, Giuseppe, Mario, and Alberto Levi, and the fallen partisans Sergio, Paolo, and Franco Diena; Jewish participation in the Resistance, again much greater than the size of our community warranted; the eight hundred people deported, of whom nothing is left but a plaque in our cemetery. But on this occasion we do not want to talk about victories, defeats, struggles, and massacres. Today we want to remember, invite others to remember, and make ourselves known before it is too late. Indeed, for every human group there is a critical mass below which stability ends: then it diminishes ever more rapidly, heading toward decline, and a silent and painless dissolution. Barring unforeseeable developments, our community seems to be moving down this road. With this exhibition we intend an act of filial piety, to show our Turinese friends, and our children, who we are and where we come from.
From the exhibition catalog Ebrei a Torino: Ricerche per il Centenario
della Sinagoga (1884–1984) (Jews in Turin: Studies for the Centenary of
the Synagogue [1884–1984]) (Turin: Allemandi, 1984)
1. The Mole Antonelliana is a major Turin landmark. Originally conceived as a synagogue, it was designed by Alessandro Antonelli and constructed between 1863 and 1889.
2. Tedesco is the Italian word for “German.”
3. “Italy,” from the collection Poemetti (1904), by Giovanni Pascoli (1865–1912).