The Ghetto Renewed: Rebuilding Jewish Communities in Postwar Italy

This paper explores the postwar renewal of ghetto communities, which had been effectively destroyed by decades of persecution and violence at the hands of fascism.  After the Second World War, Italian Jewish communities sought to re-establish and re-invigorate their communities through orthodox religious observance, cultural organizations, newspapers, youth education, and memorialization, to name just a few.  But perhaps most significantly, community leaders looked to their distant ghetto past as source of inspiration in the face of decline and persecution.  The paper examines the cities of Venice and Rome, two cities with historically important ghettos and large member rolls, as case studies.  In this paper, I argue that a reinvestment in the Italian Jewish ghetto past was a form of antifascist resistance.  Postwar Venetian and Roman Jewish communities hoped to provide a bridge between the conflicted memory of the Jewish experience in Italy and the broader implications of minority influence and Zionist politics in the Catholic-majority Italian state.  For Venice, the community embraced its diverse Jewish past and invited the contributions of new transplants like the Lubavitcher Hasidim alongside the leadership of traditional, Italo-Jewish members.  In Rome, the idea of a homogenous, Zionist-oriented community politics supported the resurgence of Jewish participation in the community’s affairs, a community that now figures as the largest with 15,000 constituents.  The renewal of Jewish communities in Italy was part of the larger state project of rebuilding a liberal-democratic and pluralistic republic from the ashes of totalitarianism.