Jews of Italy
-
Giustina Rocca of Trani: The World’s First Woman Lawyer?
As we near the end of the nineteenth century, in country after country, we see women breaking through gender barriers. This was true in the law as much as in other fields. Giustina Rocca lived in the fifteenth century. Some say she is Italy’s, or indeed, the world’s, first woman lawyer. She was a native of the beautiful coastal city of Trani in Puglia. The city and local legal profession still celebrate her story. They are not the only ones to honour her. The European Court of Justice has named one of its three buildings the Rocca tower in her memory. However the real story is always more involved than…
-
Police Order Number 5: The Jewish Holocaust in Italy
For years talk of race had been everywhere and step by step the path led towards the Jewish Holocaust in Italy. When, on 30 November 1943, Duffarini-Guido, Minister of the Interior placed his signature on Police Order Number 5, what was already a reality of oppressive persecution became an implacable machine of death. Primo Levi passed through that machine when it sent him to Auschwitz. The War in Italy On 9 July 1943 allied troops had landed in Sicily and by 3 September the invasion of the Italian mainland began. The same day Italy signed an armistice with the allies. The Grand Fascist Council had already lost faith in “Il…
-
Commentary – Who am I to Speak to You of Italy
This article is the promised commentary on: “Who am I to Speak to You of Italy“, which I wrote in April. In part a commentary recognises that our words never really leave us. They travel along with us and reveal new unimagined meanings and inspire new departures as they speak to us from memory. Much is communicated in Who am I to Speak … by allusion; and many unwritten and written words lie under those that were set down, and a commentary may enrich communication. However, it is not necessary to read the commentary and you may choose not to do so, as commentary (even by writer) may also confine…
-
Primo Levi Zinc and the Pure Race
There is a place so deep in hell that Virgil could not bear to show it to Dante. Science, in unholy coupling with prejudice, indifference and self-interest, discovered it in our own times: and called it Auschwitz. Primo Levi, an Italian Jew, passed through that hell, and survived. Although, until Fascism made of him a thing to be exterminated, Levi hadn’t given any importance to his Jewishness. Zinc is a short story of Primo as a young chemistry student. Like countless young men before him he meets a girl: Rita, and shares the exhilaration of the first faltering steps of getting to know her. It could be the story of…
-
The Fifty-Three Known Forefathers of the Italian People: Latest Discoveries from Genetics
This is a story about Italian y-DNA. But putting it that way is misleading. For there is not a single coherent story of “Italianness” that stretches back in time. And that story is almost inseparable from the stories of the surrounding populations with which developments in Italy are intimately connected. But it is the case that the science of genetics is gradually unfolding a richer picture of the past than was known before. If we go back far enough (thousands of years) we find (along the patrilineal line) that virtually all Italians are descended from only fifty-three men. Why there are so few, we will see below. Casual labels are…
-
Doctor Who? Trotula of Salerno
She was a doctor and a master of the art of healing who taught others. She is usually called Trotula, although her true name was Trota or Trocta. For three centuries medical works on the health and treatment of women circulated under her name: “The Trotula”. She has been lauded as among the finest doctors of the European Middle Ages or she has been so forgotten that it has been said that she did not even exist. It was only at the end of the 20th century that her true practice of medicine was recovered. Salerno Trotula lived in Salerno: but the Salerno of Trotula’s time is almost as little known…
