THE JEWS: THESE UNKNOWN ONES #2
Laura Camis de Fonseca
Of the history and culture of Jews in Europe only a few glaring but specific and time-limited episodes are taught, with jumps of many centuries between episodes. What emerges is not only a deficient view of Jewish culture and history, but a radically distorted one, in which Jews certainly appear suspect, if at such different times and in different places whole peoples decided that they had to devote great effort to trying to drive them out or exterminate them. Who the Jews are, how they lived between exterminations, what contribution they have always made to human history-all this is not told in history books and mostly remains obscure matter not only for students but also for teachers.
It would be interesting to conduct a survey among average Italians to find out what big names they know about Jewish history and culture. How many would cite Moses, Jesus Christ, and St. Paul first? And how many would remember Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, 1800 or 1900 years later? Even those who could place all these people in historical time and space and note that they were all Jews would probably not consider their common Jewishness to be significant, at least no more than they would consider any common hereditary propensity for hives to be significant. That the very common Jewish culture and history made them capable of radically innovative views of reality even in radically different environments and enabled them to be protagonists and drivers of major cultural revolutions, this would probably astonish and perhaps shock almost everyone. Yet it is so. The time has come to demand that the complete history of Jews, their culture and their role in the evolution of the institutions of Western democracies be included in the school curricula of Europe.
This is the theme that will be launched by the university conference to be held on Nov. 6 in Turin, titled “‘He who has a son who studies Torah is as if he will not die.’ Dialogues around identity and resilience in Jewish history.” Speakers will include Corrado Martone, Fabrizio Lelli, Ida Zatelli, Alberto Cavaglion, rav Alberto Somekh, Roy Chen and Zvi Eckstein. Mark the date!
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