Quest 29 is a Miscellanea issue, bringing together five articles that discuss important aspects of the contemporary Jewish past in a variety of settings and on the basis of different kinds of sources. Despite their diversity, the articles share a common thread: memory and its complex elaborations as a driving force in Jewish history, particularly in the aftermath of modernity, the Holocaust and twentieth-century mass migrations. Another noteworthy feature of these contributions is their use of sources that extend beyond traditional archival documents, ranging from literature and autobiographical writing to oral interviews and visual representations in the press. This variety testifies once again to the breadth of Jewish historical studies today and to their fruitful dialogue with neighboring disciplines such as literary studies and ethnography.
The first article, “Jews in Modena in the Period between Italian Unification and the Fin de Siècle: Society, Urban Space, and Identity,” by Federica Di Padova, focuses on the lesser-known Jewish community of Modena, a city in northern Italy not far from Bologna. Di Padova examines the period between Emancipation and the end of the nineteenth century, primarily from the perspective of urban and spatial history. Among other topics, she analyses the construction of a new synagogue in Modena, offering an original interpretation of the ways in which Jewish modernity and integration unfolded in a provincial Italian town.
Andrea Wuerth’s article, “Home Making: Caregivers in Post-Holocaust Children’s Homes in England, France and Germany,” turns instead to Jewish care homes in England, France, and Germany in the period following the Second World War and the Holocaust, examining both similarities and differences among the selected cases. The article draws on first-person accounts, testimonies, memoirs, photographs, and personal papers. Together, these sources reveal how caregivers and child survivors understood the immediate post-Holocaust period and shed light on the contexts in which the directors of these care homes operated.
The third article, by Martino Oppizzi, “A Jewish Memory or an Italian Memory? The Narration of the Colonial Past by Members of the Livornese Community in Tunisia,” examines how the Italian-Jewish community in Tunisia, known as the Livornese community, reconstructed its collective memory and narrated its shared historical experience. Drawing on a corpus of literary and autobiographical texts published between 1996 and 2016, Oppizzi demonstrates that the Livornese Jews’ distinctive social position and multiple affiliations produced a multifaceted memory, shaped by trajectories of emigration and by the broader processes of assimilation experienced by former European colonisers.
In “East or West: Musrara Neighbourhood and the Dynamics of Mizrahi-Palestinian-Ashkenazi Relations,” Michael Hazan examines the Jerusalem neighborhood of Musrara. He first considers the neighborhood before 1948 through the retrospective accounts of Palestinian residents who were dispossessed of their homes, and then turns to the marginality and hardship experienced by the new Mizrahi population that inhabited the area between 1948 and 1967. Drawing on oral interviews with Mizrahi activists and other sources, the article subsequently explores the different perspectives of Musrara’s residents following the Six-Day War and the reopening of the neighborhood’s borders.
The fifth and final article is Daniele Passeggi’s “ ‘Holocaust Vietnam 1979’: Boat People and Analogical Uses of Catholic Memory of the Shoah (1978-1980).” Here, the focus shifts to Italy and to the ways in which the memory of the Holocaust was evoked within Italian Catholic culture—particularly in the press—during the Indochinese refugee crisis of 1978-1980, at the beginning of John Paul II’s pontificate. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, the article examines the use of symbols associated with Nazi extermination camps and their reinterpretation through the lens of Christian tradition.
The issue also includes a “Discussion” section featuring two essays, by Guri Schwarz and Scott Ury, on Jonathan Judaken’s Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism. Both contributions shed light on the important role of the volume in theorizing antisemitism from philosophical and historiographical perspectives, while also situating it within the broader context of recent scholarship on antisemitism and other forms of racism. The “Reviews” section includes discussions of seven books covering a broad range of subjects, including Jerusalem under the British Mandate, the Israeli Black Panthers, the deportation of the Jews of Rhodes, and antisemitism and hate speech in the twenty-first century.
This Miscellanea follows a special issue of Quest dedicated to the seventieth anniversary of CDEC, which was also the last issue supervised by Cristiana Facchini as editor-in-chief. On behalf of the editors and editorial assistants, the new editor-in-chief, Dario Miccoli, would like to express his gratitude to Cristiana for all her work. Our hope is that Quest will continue to serve as a recognized and authoritative venue for scholarly publication and discussion in the field of contemporary Jewish history, as it has done for the past sixteen years.
