Narrating Over the

Ghetto of Rome

L. Scott Lerner

Rome, 1555–1885

F or three centuries a walled ghetto separated the city’s Jews from

the rest of the population, its gates opening at dawn and closing
at dusk.1 In the form of a rectangular trapezoid, the ghetto
contained two main streets running parallel to the Tiber, several small
streets and alleys, three piazze and four piazzette that together occupied
a third of the seven-acre enclosure. The space was densely populated,
and extraordinary measures had followed population growth: addi-
tional stories perched atop row houses with annex constructions pro-
truding every which way. (See Figure 1.) Except for interludes under
Napoleon and the Roman Republics (1798–99, 1808–15, 1849), the
ghetto operated under papal control until the unification of Rome
with Italy in 1870.2 Even under the new regime, the quarter remained
the center of Jewish life in the city. Shops lined the streets, and many
Jews, especially the poor, continued to reside within the old confines,
together with a religious school, a rabbinical college, benevolent aid
societies, and five small synagogues in a single edifice called the
Cinque Scole.3 (See Figure 2.) Then, in 1885, 330 years after Paul IV
ordered local Jews into the ghetto, the City of Rome ordered them out.
Rome was now the capital of the Third Italy, and city officials had
begun to worry about its appearance. Major public works were
announced; after centuries of neglect, whole districts were slated for
face-lifting. At the top of the list appeared the ghetto, whose
risanamento was deemed “indispensable before any other urban initia-
tive.”4 As a bureaucratic term, “risanamento” is unusually evocative.
Sano means healthy; risanamento connotes a return to health. When
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Jewish
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Fig. 1. Ghetto in Rome, late nineteenth century.

(Courtesy of Alinari/Art Resource, N.Y.)

applied to a part of town, its meaning lies somewhere between “urban

renewal” and “slum clearance.” In relation to the ghetto, the term also
evoked a moral and cultural renewal consistent with the ideology of
regeneration. Central to the vision of the French Revolution, regener-
ation had carried a particular meaning in relation to Jewish emancipa-
tion, where it served to justify equal rights on the grounds that Jews
would naturally regenerate themselves once they achieved parity with
other citizens.5 Both the revolutionary vision of national regeneration
 [3]

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L. Scott Lerner

Fig. 2. Le Cinque Scole, Rome, as they appeared in the late nineteenth or early
twentieth centuries. (Courtesy of Museo di Roma—Archivio Fotografico Comunale)

and the specific notion of Jewish regeneration subsequently found

their way into Italy, converging in 1848 when patriot Massimo d’Azeglio
declared that the cause of one was also the cause of the other.6 As
though to seal this union, Giuseppe Verdi’s chorus of Hebrew slaves
longing for freedom in their own land became the unofficial anthem
of the Risorgimento.7
The risanamento of the ghetto visibly served this shared cause.
Just as, in the eyes of the Church, a subordinate Jewish presence
testified to Christian Truth, the Roman ghetto bore witness to the
temporal power of popes. The new leaders could hardly allow so
telling a vestige of the old order to remain, because it contradicted
the image of a regenerated Italy. The risanamento of the ghetto, in
contrast, offered a symbolic as well as a practical cure not only for
the Jewish quarter but also for the city and the nation. And so the
benign, bureaucratic term acquired yet another meaning: “to
demolish thoroughly. . . , erasing a source of epidemics and a dis-
grace to the Capital.”8 A correspondent for the Corriere israelitico
would describe the moment, in the 2,000-year history of Jewish
Rome, as a “critical period of transformation.” 9
 Rome, 1904–present

[4] The Great Synagogue stands majestically on the banks of the Tiber
near the Marcellus Theater and across from the Tiberina Island. Inau-
Jewish gurated in 1904, it is a central-plan domed building with massive and
Social compact forms. Its eclectic style combines Roman, Greek, Assyro-
Studies Babylonian, and Egyptian elements, the latter two appearing in the
decorative details, moldings, and column capitals.10 A square-shoul-
dered structure crowned by a brilliant aluminum cupola, the building
communicates stability, permanence, and strength. With a lateral
facade facing the river and the principal facade rising above a small
square, it cuts the figure of a modern fortress and its fiefdom. (See
Figure 3.) Along with the Synagogue of Florence (1882), the principal
reference for the Roman project was the main synagogue of Paris on
the rue de la Victoire (1874). (See Figures 4–5.) The latter in many
respects is more impressive than the Great Synagogue of Rome, yet to
an onlooker moving about either capital the Parisian synagogue, whose
90-foot-high facade is largely obscured on a narrow street, hardly
makes a greater statement about the new and equal space of the
modern Jew than its very visible 150-foot counterpart on the Tiber.11 By

Fig. 3. Great Synagogue of Rome (1904), V. Costa and O. Armani, architects.

(Courtesy of Alinari/Art Resource, N.Y.)
sight alone one can scarcely infer that the Rothschilds attended the
Synagogue de la Victoire—and had failed to secure an open perspec-
tive during Haussmannisation—whereas the members of the Roman [5]
synagogue had only just left the ghetto.12
Nor could an onlooker easily ascertain that the new building stood The Ghetto of
in place—indeed in the emptied space—of the ancient ghetto. Some Rome
•
L. Scott Lerner

Fig. 4. Synagogue of Florence (1882), V. Micheli, M. Treves, and M. Falcini, architects.

(Courtesy of Alinari/Art Resource, N.Y.)
 [6]

Jewish
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Fig. 5. Synagogue (1874), rue de la Victoire, Paris, A. Aldrophe, architect.

(Courtesy of Yale University Library)

years earlier the visiting historian Ferdinand Gregorovius described

the same area in these terms:

[D]irectly ahead are the ghetto houses in a row, tower-like masses of

bizarre design. . . . The rows ascend from the river’s edge, and its dismal
billows wash against the walls. . . . [See Figure 6.] When I first visited, the
Tiber had overflowed its banks and its yellow flood streamed through the
Fiumara, the lowest of the ghetto streets, the foundations of whose houses
serve as a quay to hold the river in its course. The flood reached as far up
as the Porticus of Octavia, and water covered the lower rooms of the
houses at the bottom. What a melancholy spectacle to see the wretched
Jews’ quarter sunk in the dreary inundation of the Tiber! Each year Israel
in Rome has to undergo a new Deluge, and like Noah’s Ark the ghetto is
tossed on the waves with man and beast. When the Tiber . . . goes into
flood the misery is multiplied. Those who live beneath take refuge in the
 [7]

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Fig. 6. Ghetto facing the Tiber, 1880s.

(Courtesy of Museo di Roma—Archivio Fotografico Comunale)

upper floors, which are intolerably crowded and tainted by pestilential

atmosphere. The stoppage of food supply and of work increases the
misfortune, and the flood ruins everything that cannot be removed.13

Gregorovius makes clear how today’s august site could once have been
destined for the Jewish ghetto: until the late 1880s the area was the
most insalubrious of the city thanks in part to the ravages of the river.
When the ghetto was demolished, the land was elevated and embank-
ments were built.14
The Great Synagogue had thus risen “above the ruins of the ancient
ghetto.”15 The razing of the ghetto had converted the centuries-old
space of Jewish life into a topographical tabula rasa on which the
synagogue appeared as a “visible sign.”16 As contemporaries were well
aware, a bold effect of erasure and re-inscription had operated on the
urban landscape. (See Figure 7.)

***
From the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, monumental
synagogues served as the most prominent vehicles for the public
refashioning of Jewish identity in Western Europe. Before Emancipa-
tion, synagogues tended to be small places of worship and study in
which Jews gathered to pray, certainly, but also to meet socially and to
conduct the business of the community. The buildings themselves were
modest and often so discreet as to be unrecognizable from the outside.
In contrast to these shuls and scole, monumental synagogues were
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Fig. 7. The area of the Roman ghetto after its demolition and of the Great Synagogue
(1905–6). (Courtesy of American Academy in Rome—Fototeca Unione)

imposing structures in eclectic styles often considered exotic by the

standards of the day. The “architecture of Emancipation” of which they
were constitutive boldly announced that Jews were equal members of
society, enjoying the same rights and freedoms as the majority while
maintaining a comparable but distinct religious faith.17
Nowhere was the communicative power of the monumental syna-
gogue more evident than in Rome. As the seat of both the Roman
Empire and the Catholic Church, the city had played a uniquely
important role in Jewish history. Its Jewish community was the oldest in
Europe, dating to the first century. And the walled ghetto made possi-
ble a particularly striking transformation of real and symbolic space.18
In Rome, moreover, the granting of rights of citizenship to Jews had
come later (1870) than in most of Western Europe and other parts of
Italy (1848–60).19 During the 1860s in particular, as the Vatican held
Lazio after losing its other territories, Rome developed into a bastion
of old-world legislation and practices concerning Jews.20 At the same
time, Jews were integrating quickly elsewhere in Italy. Many had long
since cast their fate with the Risorgimento and by 1870 had risen to
positions of responsibility in government, the professions, and the
military.21 Consequently, no sooner was the Roman ghetto demolished
than plans emerged to mark with a public monument a transformation
that many wished to suggest had already taken place. When it became
possible to purchase some of the land on which the old ghetto had [9]
once stood, the situation could not have been more favorable for the
creation of a “speaking symbol” that would rise from the ruins of the The Ghetto of
ghetto to narrate the new place of the emancipated Jew in Rome.22 Rome
The new synagogues have sometimes found themselves victims of •
their own success. As the standard-bearers of the movement “out of the L. Scott Lerner
ghetto,” in the familiar expression of Jacob Katz, they have served as
focal points not only for celebrators of Emancipation but also for
critics.23 Emmanuel Lévinas and others have asserted that their very
monumentality created an inner void—that the buildings were empty
signs and poor substitutes for the communal and religious life they
replaced.24 It was also the case, however, that they opened Jewish spaces
in a new set of texts. Because the buildings were perceived as turning
points in the history and identity of their communities, they were
invariably accompanied by narratives that sought to make this meaning
explicit. These narratives frequently appeared as speeches delivered
during the inauguration ceremony of a new monumental synagogue. I
will call them “inaugural narratives” because of this association, and
also because they were meant to mark a new beginning, a passage into
modernity.25 Inaugural narratives present the construction of a monu-
mental synagogue as a key symbolic event and turning point in the
history of a Jewish community. The plot of the narrative and the
narrative identity of the community depend upon this event.
In this central role played by a particular event in recent history, and in
other respects as well, inaugural narratives resemble the “commemorative
narratives” described by Yael Zerubavel in her study of collective memory
in modern Israel.26 In contrast to Pierre Nora and Yosef Yerushalmi,
Zerubavel is persuaded that collective memory is alive and well in the
modern age. She challenges Maurice Halbwach’s classic distinction
between collective memory and history, showing how collective memory
operates as a negotiation between an available historical record and social
and political agendas.27 To this perspective on the relation of memory to
history, she also brings Hayden White’s conclusions regarding literary
form and historical representation.28 Inaugural narratives are, similarly,
the fruit of negotiations between historical records and present agendas.
Like commemorative narratives, they produce a moral message that
serves the end of collective memory. They also relate present events to
major historical moments and periods and underscore those events that
constitute turning points in the historical development of the group.
Finally, they rely on a “literary dimension of memory” insofar as the
 beginnings of their plotted narratives determine the endings and the
endings determine the beginnings.29
[10] In this article, I examine Jewish collective memory as it evolved with
the substitution of the Great Synagogue for the Ghetto of Rome. First,
Jewish I consider the architectural style of the synagogue along with the
Social architects’ understanding of its meaning. I then examine two speeches
Studies delivered at the inauguration ceremony. Finally, I look at a set of
articles published during the demolition of the ghetto 15 years before
the construction of the synagogue. These four representations recall
several familiar modes. The physical building and its stylistic references
constitute a kind of memory site. The first speech resembles an epic
narrative, and the second, a biblical history. The articles are presented
as a chronicle. A simple narrative function can be identified in the
memory site and becomes more sophisticated in the speeches, which
constitute full-fledged inaugural narratives. To these narrative modes,
the articles organized as a chronicle provide a striking contrast. A
principal aim of my article is to study the implications of plotted
narratives not for historiography, as White and others have done, but
for collective memory as understood by Zerubavel. More generally, I
explore innovative representations of the transformation of Jewish
space in Rome as a means of reconciling a long, recorded past with the
recent journey out of the ghetto.

Palestine, ca. 964 B.C.E.–Rome, 1904 C.E.: Costa and Armanni’s

Memory Site

To build a monumental synagogue over the ruins of the ghetto of

Rome, at the turn of the twentieth century, when eclecticism loomed
large in architecture, was to set out to create a lieu de mémoire. When
Nora launched his vast excavation of memory sites in France, he was
spurred by the “rapid disappearance of our national memory” to take
“an inventory of the sites where it had selectively become incarnated.”30
These were repositories of memory, not newly fashioned vessels. The
Great Synagogue is certainly a repository, because it embodies the
intentions and the spirit of the generation of 1904. Its creators, how-
ever, sought to erect from scratch—at least in a material sense—a vessel
of memory that would span 3,000 years. The synagogue thus stands
today as a mise en abyme of a lieu de mémoire: a memory site within a
memory site. Its designers partially assumed the role of historians,
narrating the past by means of historicist architecture. Insofar as their
building was not only a compilation of period styles but also a monu-
 [11]

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L. Scott Lerner

Fig. 8. First Prize Design for the Synagogue of Rome by A. Muggia, 1890.
(From Il vessillo israelitico 41 [1893]: 6)

ment situated in place and time, they also extended a bridge to the
past, establishing continuity between the monuments they evoked and
the one they built. In Zerubavel’s terms, the exercise resulted from a
negotiation between an available historical record and current social
and political agendas. In these respects it resembled the working of
collective memory, even though it was a repository of reproductions.
In the design competition of 1889–90, First Prize went to Attilio
Muggia for a twin-towered, four-story building with striped masonry
that echoed the Synagogue of Florence. (See Figure 8.) The building
was to have a square drum and an elongated cupola, borrowed from
the Mole Antonelliana, which was originally intended as the Synagogue
 [12]

Jewish
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Fig. 9. Second Prize Design for the Synagogue of Rome

by V. Costa and O. Armanni, 1890.
(Courtesy of Centro Bibliografico dell’Unione delle Comunità Ebraiche Italiane)

of Turin. Three tenets had informed his choice of style: the synagogue
was to be sufficiently distinguished from church designs; it was to evoke
the Temple of Jerusalem (hence the twin towers and the recessed
central block); and it was to be eclectic, reminding Jews that their
experience had been indissolubly associated with the many places in
which they had resided (hence his adoption of Phoenician, Assyrian,
Byzantine, and Arabic elements).31 The Second Prize–winning design,
by Vincenzo Costa and Osvaldo Armanni, was unusual among the 26
entries in that it eschewed the “Eastern” styles presently dominating
Italian synagogue architecture and because it lacked continuity with
other Jewish monuments.32 The building was to be in the form of a
Greek cross, although the exterior silhouette looked more like a five-
aisled basilica. The most prominent feature was a sloping vestibule that
resembled an Egyptian pylon. The design contained other Egyptian
features, and the ornamentation was borrowed from Mesopotamian,
Egyptian, and Islamic sources.33 (See Figure 9.)
In 1899, these same architects were invited to submit designs for the
new location Lungotevere Cenci with a budget reduced by a third. Only
Costa and Armanni submitted, and their design was approved. “Style
has always been the bearer of ideas, of the feelings and customs of
peoples,” they wrote in their final report.34 Like Muggia, they assumed [13]
that the synagogue should recall the place and architecture of Pales-
tine at the time of the Temple. Because no monument of the period The Ghetto of
had survived, they argued that it was appropriate to adopt a style Rome
evoking the historical period in which the religious system, to which •
the new building would be devoted, had originated. This they believed L. Scott Lerner
most probably to have been a fusion of the Assyrian, Egyptian, and
eventually Greek. They observed that “the recollection of ancient
architectural styles could prolong the memory of hard struggles and
calamitous times.”35 Finally, they argued that the building should har-
monize with the rest of the city. The “Arabic” style of the Temple of
Florence could serve Florence, because the majority of that city’s
architectural monuments date from the Renaissance, but Rome
required a more classical style.
Like Muggia, Costa and Armanni thought it imperative to recall the
Temple of Jerusalem and to employ historical styles in eclectic compo-
sition in order to invoke a specifically Jewish past. The architects
shared, then, an intent to use architectural style as a signifying medium
to recall origins and to narrate particular aspects of a collective history.
Whereas Muggia intended style to serve as a record of both Diaspora
wanderings and origins in Israel, Costa and Armanni wanted to limit
allusions to the Temple era, a desire that was compatible with their
concern that the building harmonize with the architecture of the city.
Their building would clearly affirm that, though Jews could be distin-
guished from other Romans by place of origin, their permanent home
was Rome. Muggia’s evocation of the Diaspora advanced a similar
point, insofar as it established an opposition between wandering and
permanent settlement, expressing the difference of Rome and modern
Italy from all past places of residence. It could also be understood,
however, as proclaiming Rome’s equivalence to other places of the
historical Diaspora. In particular, the Arabic elements of Muggia’s
project, which associated it with other synagogues of Moorish design
(Florence and Turin), made a paradoxical statement, raising doubts
about whether the “golden age” of the Jewish Diaspora was best
reflected in liberated Jewish Rome or Moorish Spain.
According to Andreina Griseri and Roberto Gabetti, eclecticism
“brought forth the idea of a narrating architecture.”36 Could it also
produce narratives, as defined by Hayden White? Does the revival
architectural of the Great Synagogue communicate a plot? The periods
invoked certainly followed a broad outline of Roman Jewish history,
 culminating in seemingly permanent establishment in modern Italy.
Historicist architecture may not have provided the most precise instru-
[14] ment for advancing plot, but it no doubt rendered a simple narrative
comprehensible to knowledgeable viewers. The building related a
Jewish beginning—the founding moment that was the construction of the
Social Temple; a middle—the wanderings of a people without a homeland;
Studies and an ending—the recognition of a home in Italy, communicated
symbolically via the construction of a monumental synagogue in the
capital. More subtle meanings would have to await the more precise
medium of verbal language.

Rome, 70–1904: Angelo Sereni’s Epic Narrative

From the first Republic to the end of papal rule, public discourses had
legislated, restricted, defined, confined, protected, and even liberated
the Jews of Rome. Always, however, Jews had served as objects rather
than agents of discourse. Paradoxically, this status was never more
apparent than when they acted as speaking subjects in two century–old
rituals. In the first, begun in the twelfth century and performed in
front of the Arch of Titus—which commemorated the imperial victory
over the Jews and the destruction of the Second Temple—they pro-
nounced words of deference (parole di ossequio) to the popes and made
a gift of a Torah.37 The practice was eventually replaced by Jewish
participation in the general custom of honoring popes by displaying
ceremonial placards. Jewish placards usually included a citation from
the Old Testament, inventive word games, and a gloss revealing an
allegorical message of hope and deference. The second ritual, known
as the omaggio in Campidoglio, was introduced in the seventeenth cen-
tury as a substitute for the once obligatory running of Jews—like horses
and other animals—in the Carnival races. Kneeling before city offi-
cials, a rabbi and pair of community leaders recited a formula that
expressed their humility before the Church, Senate, and People of
Rome, imploring authorities to treat the community with benevolence
and wishing for the long and peaceful reign of the pope and the
government. They also provided a substantial payment.38
In both rituals Jews participated in public discourse but did not
control the language they used; rather, it controlled them. It follows
that community president Angelo Sereni’s speech at the inauguration
of the Great Synagogue would have constituted a significant event no
matter what he had said. Delivered before the secretary of the interior,
representatives of the prime minister and the undersecretary of grace
and justice and of religions, and representatives of the prefect and
mayor (both absent from Rome), along with many other city officials
and delegates from Jewish communities throughout Italy, the speech [15]
was an unprecedented prise de parole, an act of participation in public
discourse never before accomplished by a Roman Jew. The only one The Ghetto of
missing from the audience, it seems, was the king himself, who had Rome
made a highly publicized visit a few days earlier.39 •
“The construction of this Temple,” Sereni began, L. Scott Lerner

is not only a manifestation of the religious feelings of one part of the

citizenry who alone may take pleasure in it. It is also an affirmation, a
solemn pronouncement that gives cause for rejoicing to all those, with no
distinction whatsoever, who harbor high and noble ideals of liberty,
equality, and love.40

Sereni’s reference to a “manifestation of religious feelings” indicated

that he was predictably adopting a nineteenth-century ideological
discourse that circumscribed Jewish identity within the framework of
religion. The slogan “liberty, equality, and love,” which he would twice
repeat, told a curious story of its own. In the first place, of course, it
echoed the motto of the French Revolution. When the Revolutionary
motto appeared on official documents in Rome under Napoleonic
control, it had already suffered the amputation of the term “fraternity.”
By adding “love,” Sereni was perhaps making an overture to his Chris-
tian audience. He may also have been seeking to reconcile the ideals
of the French Revolution with the religious tolerance that, over and
above the antisemitism provoked by the Dreyfus Affair, he wished to
affirm as the spirit of the Risorgimento and his own age.
The phrase “with no distinction whatsoever” had a particular reso-
nance in Rome on the site of the old ghetto. The concept of distinction
referred to the rights of free and equal citizens, of course, but also
recalled forms of visible distinction imposed on Jews in Europe and
particularly under papal rule. In Italy, a segno, or identifying badge, had
been required by the Church beginning with the Fourth Lateran
Council (1215) and had been subject to any number of modifications,
cancellations, reenactments, and changes in form and enforcement.
Nowhere had a segno been required by law later than in the papal
dominion, where it was mandated for the last time in 1827 by Leo XII.
When Sereni uttered the words “with no distinction whatsoever,” he
was making a speech act: with the power of his free speech, at this
public event, he was ostensibly declaring all mandated forms of visible
difference to be null and void, henceforth and retroactively since the
 liberation. By claiming that the inauguration did not separate “one
part” from the whole of the citizenry, he similarly overruled the princi-
[16] ple of necessary segregation on which the ghetto had relied (Cum nimis
absurdum, 1555).41
Jewish Sereni loosely patterned his tale on the epic genre. Like Virgil’s
Social Aeneid, which ends at the beginning of Roman civilization, his story
Studies would culminate with the commencement of permanent free Jewish
life in the city:

Here in Rome—where the ancient conquerors of the world barely toler-

ated us and considered us peregrini sine civitate [foreigners without a
country]—where a government that boasted of basing its acts on princi-
ples of charity and love humiliated and oppressed us in a thousand ways,
restricted us to a squalid quarter forcing us to carry out the rites and
customs of our religion in cramped and unsuitable spaces—here, today,
as free citizens, we have been free to build this Temple.42

Sereni thus began with the classic Jewish theme of flight from slavery
to freedom, although here the flight was through time: centuries of
hardship under hundreds of rulers. The endpoint, however, was a
single event that determined the rest of the tale: the building of the
synagogue. He then emphasized the concluding tale of liberation:

And thus, ladies and gentlemen, between the Capitol and the Gianicolo,
between the two hills of Rome sacred to the world’s greatest, most sublime
epic . . .—between the monument to Victor Emmanuel II and the monu-
ment to Garibaldi, the two great makers of our Italy—this Temple stands
today, majestically free and surrounded by the free and pure sun.43

As the synagogue appeared both in the culminating moment of the tale

and on the urban landscape, the distinction between the story being
recounted and the one being “read” on the landscape collapsed. The
landscape thus served as a complementary narrative in which the
monuments to the king, the general, and the Jews appeared as sequen-
tial events. In both the spatial and the verbal narratives, the emergence
of the synagogue, like the founding of Rome in the Aeneid, constituted
the culminating moment toward which the tale was leading.
Sereni’s particular vision built upon the idea that it was only after the
“liberation” of Italy that it became possible for the Jews to obtain their
own “majestically free” space. In his account, the synagogue emerged
from the interweaving into a single tale of two epic strands—the history
of the Jews of Rome and the “sublime epic” of the Risorgimento. The
textual merger was visually inscribed in the landscape where the syna-
 [17]

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L. Scott Lerner

Fig. 10. Monument to Victor Emmanuel II, G. Sacconi, architect, begun in 1885 and
inaugurated in 1911. (Courtesy of Meredith L. Clausen, 1996)

gogue was interwoven with the monument to the Liberator King, on

the Capitoline Hill, and the monument to the victorious general, on
the Gianicolo Hill. Like the massive white-marble monument to
Victor Emmanuel II that loomed above the vestiges of ancient
Rome, reshaping the history of city, empire, and nation (see Figure
10), the synagogue rose from the ruins of the ghetto to rewrite the
history of Roman Jews.

Babylonia, 538 B.C.E.–Rome, 1904 C.E.: Vittorio Castiglioni’s Biblical

History

The speech made by Rabbi Vittorio Castiglioni at the inauguration of

the Great Synagogue is a tightly organized, full-blown narrative
inspired by the last books of the Hebrew Bible, Chronicles. Like the
redactor of Chronicles, Castiglioni did not set out to write history or to
recount what took place, but rather to edify.44 His speech contains
several common characteristics of Old Testament narratives in general
and of Chronicles in particular: chronological breadth, theological
design, careful selection of historiographic material, documentation of
authoritative sources, and a well-defined plot.45 (Despite its title,
Chronicles is clearly a narrative and not a chronicle.) The result is a
rewriting of the history of the Jewish community of Rome leading up
 to the building of the synagogue. The narrative is indeed more than a
local account; Castiglioni adapted the history of the Jewish people to
[18] this new ending.
The chief rabbi of Rome aimed to reconcile his modern sense of the
Jewish significance of the moment as a turning point for Roman Jews with the
Social history of the Jewish people inherited from normative tradition. The
Studies challenge was to render the Jewish story of exile and return compatible
with the adoption of the Italian patria (fatherland). The solution
Castiglioni found was to demonstrate that Roman Jews, by recognizing
Italy as their homeland, were not forsaking Jewish history but complet-
ing it.46 The thesis depended on a conviction that the Jewish people no
longer had a political identity, at least not in worldly terms. As a result
their spiritual center, Jerusalem, no longer had to be conceived polit-
ically and geographically but could be understood to be present wher-
ever the people lived and worshipped freely.47 Castiglioni was certainly
not the first Jewish leader to promote this spiritual conception of
Jerusalem, but he had a unique opportunity to represent it in a plotted
narrative as an inevitable point of arrival thanks to the place of Rome
in history.
Making no mention of Rome or of the present moment,
Castiglioni initially proceeded by analogy and allusion, plunging his
listeners into an earlier epoch when the “sons of Israel,” exiled in
Babylonia, discovered that they would return to Jerusalem to
rebuild the Temple: “Seventy years had passed since the enemy
armies of Nabuchadonassor . . . had destroyed the famous Temple
of Solomon. . . ; for seventy years the sons of Israel exiled in a
foreign land had mourned their fatherland and their lost indepen-
dence . . . when the prophecy of the great Jeremiah was fulfilled!” 48
Castiglioni then quoted the prophecy in Hebrew and Italian (“For
thus said the Lord: When Babylon’s seventy years are over, I will take
note of you, and I will fulfill to you My promise of favor—to bring
you back to this place” [ Jer. 29:10]).49 He also explained how it came
to be fulfilled: “Indeed, Cyrus the Great, having conquered Babylo-
nia and openly confessed the omnipotence of the God of Israel,
issued a decree by which he freed the exiles and granted them
permission to return to their fatherland and to rebuild a new Tem-
ple of the Lord over the ruins of the first one.” Once again, he was
careful to quote his authority: “ Thus said King Cyrus of Persia: The
Lord God of Heaven has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and
has charged me with building Him a House in Jerusalem, which is
in Judah. Any one of you of all His people, the Lord his God be with
him and let him go up” (2 Chron. 36:23).
 Castiglioni then recreated the moment of rebuilding, recounted the
inauguration, and evoked the experience of those who knew the First
Temple and who still mourned the old even as they celebrated the [19]
new.50 Some nostalgia for the past was natural, he declared, but it
should be limited, for “[the] glory of this latter House shall be greater The Ghetto of
than that of the former one, said the Lord of Hosts; and in this place I Rome
will grant prosperity” (Hag. 2:9). Castiglioni thus invited his congrega- •
tion to identify with their ancestors who returned from exile to rebuild L. Scott Lerner
the Temple, and to understand their own experience through the lens
of the biblical parallel. The implicit analogy suggested that the con-
struction of the Great Synagogue over the ruins of the ghetto, like the
rebuilding of the Temple over the ruins of the original, was an act of
divine providence. A secondary analogy, moreover, almost seemed to
suggest that the new synagogue in Rome not only would be greater
than the “former” ghetto but, like the Second Temple, would indeed
surpass the former Temple. In this way the analogy further reinforced
the idea of the Roman synagogue as a marker of the end of exile. Here
the rabbi was of course reversing the biblical Chronicler who sought to
reaffirm Jerusalem as the authentic place of worship following the
return from Babylon and to portray the Babylonian exile as an “inter-
lude in the ongoing history of Judah and Jerusalem.”51
Castiglioni might have ended the analogy there, concluding that the
experience of the congregation was like that of the Israelites in the sixth
century B.C.E. His narrative makes a surprising move, however, shifting
to a later episode in the story of the Jewish people and their Temple:

And truly magnificent was the glory of this second Temple, especially
when . . . the great Maccabee . . . withstood the warring armies of Antio-
cus Epiphanes, . . . re-consecrated the Temple profaned by ignominious
idol-worship, and not only lifted Judaea to independence . . . but also
furnished one of the finest examples that history offers of ardent love for
faith and fatherland.52

Just as the full glory of the Second Temple was revealed only well after its
construction, when it was miraculously reconquered by the Maccabees, so
the glory of the Synagogue of Rome would be uncovered by future
generations who, like their ancestors—and like Castiglioni’s listeners—
would dedicate themselves to its prosperity. The concluding phrase rein-
forced the analogy between the Jews of old who fought for Temple and
Kingdom and a present congregation similarly impelled by love for coun-
try and faith. The distinction between the historic Jewish homeland and
the modern fatherland in Rome was effectively blurred.
 The rabbi then further collapsed the distance between the biblical
story and recent events in his city: “This heroic and sublime example
[20] was imitated if not surpassed by their descendants roughly two centu-
ries later, when they sought on their own to resist the immeasurable
Jewish power of imperial Rome whose cruel and greedy procurators had
Social dared to attack the faith and customs of the Jewish nation.”53 In a
Studies speech that brought the history of the Jews to his listeners in Rome, he
suddenly arrived at Rome in the history of the Jews:

But if in the struggle against the Syrians the Maccabees had been victori-
ous, God had not destined the same outcome in the times of Titus. Once
he had weakened the heroic resistance of the rebels, who had vigorously
rejected all proposals for compromise and preferred death to the Roman
yoke, he finally destroyed the Temple and thus brought to an end the
political existence of the Jewish nation.54

If the lost war signaled the end of political Israel, it also gave rise to a
providential dispersal of the Jewish people, “destined one day to
become the universal faith of all the peoples of the earth.” Although
Castiglioni made clear that history would culminate in the restoration
of the Jewish state, he also suggested that the universal mission would
prove greater than the old national entity, just as, in Haggai’s words,
“the glory of the latter House [would] be greater than that of the
former.”
The rabbi had now reached the point at which Sereni began his
history, with the enslavement of the Jews by the ancient Romans.
Castiglioni did not, however, recount the forced journey from Jerusa-
lem to Rome, nor did he make more than brief mention of their life in
the city over nearly two millennia. Rather, passing over the sufferings
endured “at the cruel will of princes and popes,” he plunged forward
“[e]ighteen centuries.”55 He stopped short of equating emancipation
with return from exile, but he underscored its part in the divine
scheme leading to the restoration of Israel. Furthering the parallel
between liberation by Cyrus and return from Babylonia, he declared
that, in contrast to the first exile—prophesied to last 70 years—this
second exile had no fixed endpoint ordained by God. Associating exile
with bondage, he asserted that a solitary decree could no longer
provide a remedy, because the nation had been dispersed. Some parts
had been freed (Western Europe) while others remained in bondage
(Eastern Europe and Russia especially). Only when all became free and
equal citizens of their states would the sequence of divine acts leading
toward the restoration of Israel reach completion. In this way
Castiglioni succeeded in associating emancipation with a providential
process of liberation and return without proclaiming—with a former
chief rabbi of Paris—the end of the Jewish people in favor of the spirit [21]
of Judaism.56
For Castiglioni, the “new Temples of the Lord” appeared as the The Ghetto of
“visible sign of the ready and complete forgetting of past offenses.” Rome
Through this sign, he maintained, “we Jews, like our fathers upon their •
return from Babylonia, wish to demonstrate . . . indestructible faith in L. Scott Lerner
our God and gratitude for the liberty granted us [along with the] . . .
love that binds us to our homeland and to all our brothers without
distinction who live with us on this same soil.” All monumental syna-
gogues shared this “historic and ethical” significance, but the Great
Synagogue also stood apart: Rome “saw . . . our fathers—kings only of
the most sublime patriotic love—dragged laden with chains behind the
triumphal chariot of Emperor Titus, insulted and frustrated to death
by a furious populous enraged at the thought of the countless victims
and tremendous sacrifices that victory had cost the empire.” Finally,
Castiglioni observed, “in no other city does there exist, as in this one,
a monument that reminds all the Jews not only of their heroic feat but
also of their defeat and its fatal centuries-long consequences.”
If Sereni’s narrative was woven through the two monuments of the
Risorgimento, Castiglioni’s was a tale of defiance in which the syna-
gogue stared back boldly at the arch. (See Figure 11.) The arch
functioned as an anti-Haggadah, reminding the Jews that they, too, had
experienced the destruction of the Temple, that they, too, were slaves.
According to Jewish tradition Rome would one day be called to account
in the form of a black comedy that included divine laughter directed
at Israel’s enemies.57 The rabbi’s story made no mention of divine
justice—nor of a peculiar aggadah (homily) relating the emperor’s
death—but it brought closure to this Roman Passover story: “[I]n place
of the Arch of Titus, defying the wrath of centuries there, in the Roman
Forum, a far more glorious emulator has been created here, over the
ruins of the ancient ghetto of Rome.” He emphasized: “If the one
personifies slavery and oppression, the other represents for us redemp-
tion and liberty; if the one recalls blood and merciless wars, the other
speaks to us of brotherhood and love; if the one is no longer but a sign
of times now gone by never to return, the other will see its significance
continue to grow.”
Castiglioni no longer gave the impression of presenting events, like
the founding of the Temple, in the service of historical analogy. His
listeners could no longer comprehend their present experience in
terms of the events related at the outset—of liberation, return, rebuild-
 [22]

Jewish
Social
Studies

Fig. 11. Arch of Titus, 81 C.E.

(Courtesy of Museo di Roma—Archivio Fotografico Comunale)

ing, and inauguration—because the narrative had advanced, revealing

that the inauguration in Jerusalem was not an end unto itself as it had
first appeared but part of a larger narrative design. With the implicit
authority of sacred history, Castiglioni thus reversed the central mes-
sage of his biblical precursor, representing not Jerusalem but rather
love for an Italian homeland and equality with Catholic Italians as
integral to a process of liberation and return that would bring an end
to exile. As his narrative drew to a conclusion, its various strands were
gathered, converging on the synagogue in a process that gave this
historic and seemingly sacred meaning to recent events.
Most monumental synagogues of Europe displayed the Tablets of
the Law on the facade above the tympanum as a means of marking the
building in the fashion of a Christian cross. The Great Synagogue
constituted an exception, bearing not only the tablets but also a seven-
branched menorah. (See Figure 7.) The architects and Jewish leaders
left no record of their intention, but the symbolic function was suffi-
ciently clear to warrant no further explanation. The Jews had repos-
sessed the menorah in Rome, lifting it high above the depiction of the
menorah of the Temple of Jerusalem depicted in bas-relief on the Arch [23]
of Titus. (See Figure 12.) The new menorah proclaimed that Roman
Jews, like the Maccabees, had defeated their vanquishers, reclaimed The Ghetto of
Rome
•
L. Scott Lerner

Fig. 12. Spoils from the Temple in Jerusalem, as depicted on the Arch of Titus.
(Courtesy of Museo di Roma—Archivio Fotografico Comunale)
 their eternal light, and rekindled it in the synagogue. In this way,
Castiglioni’s tale, too, was inscribed on the landscape.
[24]

Jewish Rome, 1885–89: Laudiadio Fano’s Modernist Chronicle

Social
Studies
According to Hayden White, the chronicle is a hybrid form, sharing
characteristics of annals and historical narrative. Like the former, it is
organized chronologically and typically lacks closure, or promises clo-
sure but fails to keep the promise. It thus lacks the quintessential
ingredient of the historical narrative: a fully executed plot.58 What I am
calling a modernist chronicle was a series of articles Rabbi Laudiadio
Fano contributed to the Corriere israelitico between 1885 and 1889,
almost 20 years before the inauguration of the Great Synagogue. The
articles meet the four criteria of the chronicle, containing a central
subject (“the reorganization of the Community and the total demoli-
tion of our quarter”), a geographic center (Rome), a proper beginning
in time (“14 June 1885”), and chronology as the organizing feature of
the discourse.59 They also give the impression of following a plot, but
then leave it hanging as the narrative terminates rather than con-
cludes. The presence and character of imaginative elements have led
me to add the term “modernist.”
“With feverish activity the pick-ax pursues its work of destruction,
and Fiumara and Capocciuto Streets as well as the Piazza delle Tre
Cannelle are no more than a memory,” wrote the chronicler in May
1886. He also reproduced this conclusion to a speech he recently
delivered in one of the ghetto scole:

Let us leave this modern Egypt, not as fugitives, but as vanquishers. . . .

[O]n the shores of the new Eritrea we will extol . . . the demise of the last
bulwark of intolerance among us. Let us extol moral and civil progress;
let us extol the magnificence of the new Temples that will rise majestically
from these ruins.60

Fano spoke not of “new times” (tempi nuovi) but rather of “new Tem-
ples” (nuovi Templi). The play was deliberate: future synagogues would
stand for—stand as—new times, celebrating the transformation of a
“modern Egypt” into a land of freedom. Fano thus evoked a plot in
progress. He implied that the first steps toward the demolition of the
ghetto, with which the narrative began, would be followed by a conclu-
sion in which new synagogues, symbols of the new age, would stand
in place of the ghetto. The vision was at once eschatological, in its
longing for the new (messianic) age, and “within-time” in its celebra-
tion of Progress.61 The allusion to Eritrea introduced a felicitous
trope. Rather than declaring the New Jerusalem in Europe, Fano [25]
redirected the Exodus. Fleeing slavery in Egypt, the Israelites
crossed the Red Sea and landed not in Sinai but on Italian shores— The Ghetto of
in the Italian colony in northeast Africa.62 If a master narrative Rome
lurked behind these images, it was necessarily a hybrid, created from •
the conflation of biblical history and the ideology of Emancipation L. Scott Lerner
and Italian nationalism.
In a subsequent article, the chronicler abandoned these external
tropes and retreated into the community, where he fixed on a strange
figure, seemingly part-real, part-imagined: “They call him Biancone,
although his sun-tanned coloring would seem to call for quite a differ-
ent name.”63 Out among the people, working under the sun, Biancone
cut the figure of everyman, of a simple unheroic Jew. Yet Fano also
played on the whiteness of his name, rendering him ghostlike, “the
nightmare of all the little children of the neighborhood . . . strange,
fantastic, and horrifying at the same time.” Biancone appeared as a
screen onto which the wildest fears of the people were projected: those
dreamed up by the children. Here the chronicler evidently tapped a
different well—of Romanticism. The opacity of our simplest member
becomes a figure for the unknown, the focal point of our fears. Still a
part of us, a member of the group, he is also the part of our collective
body that we cannot control: our raving mind. Biancone’s state was not
merely ghostly, but pathological: “[a] compendium unto himself of all
the gradations of neurosis, the epitome of all the ills that afflict the
nervous system.” Suffering from the totality of ailments that could
develop in any individual but that together affect only the group, he
represented the collective potential for affliction.
Then all of these aspects—the folkloric, the pathological, and the
Romantic—became joined. Biancone, Fano wrote, suffered “the con-
vulsions of a man bit by a tarantula, the delirium of a person affected
by lycanthropy.” The rabbi now drew on the popular imagination
where epileptic fits that could transform a person into a demon were
attributed to tarantula bites, just as lycanthropy—the werewolf’s dis-
ease—was the source of delirium and other effects of the moon, magic,
and witchcraft. “He is a queer type, like the characters of Walter Scott
who solicit compassion and disgust, but he is also harmless to those
who leave him in peace.” And,

He has a fixation: the belief that he is a locomotive. . . . The movement of

the pistons and safety valves . . . the gears and various mechanisms of the
 steam engine are imitated by him . . . the track is the streets of the Ghetto.
He runs along them furiously, gesticulating with his right hand while the
[26] left remains permanently raised to his ear. He runs, always runs, letting
out a whistle that resembles the buzzing of large flies . . . sheeeh . . .
Jewish sheeeh. . . . The locomotive-man is terrible in the exercise of his func-
tions, no obstacle holds him back. . . . Then he appears to your imagina-
Social
tion as the demon of destruction that revels with abandon in the midst of
Studies
the storm, attracting lightning bolts that destroy everything, that wreak
havoc on humanity.

Was this a condemnation of Progress, of frail humanity crushed

under the tracks of great steel trains? Was Biancone subhuman,
because machine-like? Was this how Fano feared for the future? Or
was Biancone in fact more human, because more humanly trauma-
tized by the changes that in more limited measure traumatized
everyone, just as he might be more human, rather than less, because
more susceptible to human diseases, more strongly affected by
human imagination confronted with fear and the unknown? In this
role that had been thrust upon him, would he emerge as the agent
of doom, the “demon of destruction . . . wreak[ing] havoc on
humanity”? Only the “activity of coreligionists who ensure the con-
struction of new and majestic temples,” the chronicler concluded,
would bring an end to “the martyrdom of this being who symbolizes
the woes of a past of sad memory.”
In November 1886, obser ving workers eclipsed by the dust they
were raising, “walking in the half-light like phantasms,” the chroni-
cler wrote: “[A] feeling of consternation assails you, seeing them
move among the ruins, leaning out over the edge of the abyss.” 64
Such was the description of the “dying Ghetto.” No real progress had
been made in the plans for new templi, again linked to the “demands
of the times” (tempi). The following August, Fano reported that the
demolition was reaching its term.65 Alluding to the death of Napo-
leon in Alessandro Manzoni’s famous poem, “ The Fifth of May,” he
declared that “before long, the last houses will be torn down, and of
the Ghetto of Rome it will be said: [it] was.” Looking with “true
satisfaction” upon the disappearance of “this last rock of obscuran-
tism and intolerance,” he also expressed concern about Jewish chil-
dren who no longer had access to Jewish instruction and were
receiving a Catholic education in the public schools near their new
homes. His view of this “phase of transformation, filled up with diffi-
culties and dangers” soon became clear: “What value is there in com-
bining all our forces in order to build sumptuous temples that
harmonize with this metropolis of metropolises, if by building for the
Jewish religion we neglect Jewish life and feelings?”66
Three years after beginning his chronicle, in June 1889, the situation [27]
could no longer be evoked by means of a single, symbolic figure like
Biancone. Fano imagined the whole of the former ghetto community The Ghetto of
as a body surgically dismembered. “[ T]he operation was performed Rome
quickly in an attempt to alleviate the patient’s suffering. This last task •
had been assigned to the Relocation Committee.” The demolition of L. Scott Lerner
the ghetto and decentralization of its inhabitants may have constituted
a necessary surgery, but “the wound bled all the same . . . and won’t
soon be healed. Topical and local medications have proved ineffective,
and the pain has set in.”67 The hope-filled prophet of “tempi nuovi”
had come full circle. The community was fragmenting, and his escha-
tological vision of a future symbolized by the emergence of new tem-
ples had vanished.
“The last small home, in whose place the new Temple is to be built,
has finally been demolished,” Fano wrote in his final letter of Septem-
ber 1889.68 “That old prison that always swarmed with noisy people is
now a pile of rubble. How many events, how many memories are
concealed beneath those stones?” He recalled the old days and the
constant fear of mothers that “the caprice of a maid, the fanaticism of
some bigot, bad faith, the betrayal of midwife, have ripped from their
arms the object of their love.” In one such incident a woman and her
six children had been taken to a “place of torment” and separated from
one another. The children proved unable to hold out and eventually
converted, whereas she endured “forty days of physical and moral
torture” before being allowed to return, alone, to the “people of her
God.” Having buried “all her maternal feelings,” she insisted that her
caretakers call her “Amara” (bitter). “Why would you call me Dolce
[sweet] when the Lord has borne witness against me, and the Omnip-
otent has afflicted me?”
Aware that such stories ran against the spirit of the age, Fano
declared that speaking about heroism had become anachronistic now
that “the passage from one faith to the next is no longer a great leap,
because indifference has confused the borders.” He described how
some of the Jewish poor, who made a great fuss to receive matzah at
Passover and charity following the Sabbath, also attended evangelical
services, collecting a few coins for each appearance. Some Jews man-
aged to pay their higher new rents by subletting rooms to these evan-
gelical groups, with the result that Christian hymns preceded Sabbath
prayers. Fano’s conclusion? “A strange amorphousness, this, that hides
under the guise of tolerance the idolatry of the Golden Calf. Let’s say
 it in this way, because certain pedants mumbling the holy name of
tolerance would impose silence on those who let out a cry of alarm. . . .
[28] [I]f God doesn’t help us we’ll lose our square just as we’ve lost our
compass.”
Jewish In the tradition of biblical history and religious preaching, Fano, it
Social is true, attempted to interpret events through a moral lens. He set out
Studies not only to describe the changes he witnessed but also to reveal their
meaning, to edify. He selectively observed and recounted, sometimes
giving free rein to imagination, yet taking pains to ensure that his
recording would not mislead. The path he took in his search for the
meaning of contemporary events is well marked. At the outset he
expected his account to lead to an ending whose significance, if not
exact form, he could anticipate. As a chronicler, however, he found
himself in the role of ongoing witness, eager to see how contemporary
events would take form without knowing their relation to the master
narrative. He could follow events but could not guide their direction
or organize their sequence. By degrees he discovered that the direction
was not the one anticipated and that it failed to render the meaning he
expected, or any meaning at all. He had invested meaning in a pro-
jected symbol, envisaged its arrival as a symbolic event, and organized
an edifying narrative around it. When the symbol failed to materialize,
he looked elsewhere for meaning, beyond plot, to character, anecdote,
and the imagination. This shift in perspective allowed him to look
critically at the symbolism of the monumental synagogues and to
question their ability to bring the Jews into the modern age without
letting their collective life disappear along with the ghetto.

***
David Damrosch points out that “[the] norms of genre are funda-
mental to the construction of meaning in texts, but at the same time,
paradoxically, they are susceptible of constant alteration, deliberate or
inadvertent, as new authors attempt to adapt old forms to changed
circumstances and purposes.” Damrosch shows how the redaction of
the Hebrew Bible took place in the midst of such change and emerged
as a “far-reaching transformation of earlier genres.” The existing
genres whose “confluence” he describes—the historical chronicle and
the poetic epic—as well as the genre that resulted—biblical historiogra-
phy—are in fact analogous to the literary forms produced in post-
Emancipation Rome. The presence of epic elements is perhaps
unremarkable, since “[one] of the basic functions of epic,” Damrosch
reminds us, “has often been to explain, justify, and celebrate the
establishment of a culture.”69 That the new narratives were inspired by
biblical historiography may also be unsurprising in light of Jewish
textual tradition. The “return” of chronicle, however—if we can call it
that in reference to a single example—is in some ways the most [29]
innovative literary turn.
Architectural style and the architects’ justifications for their choices The Ghetto of
combined, as we have seen, to produce a rather rudimentary plotted Rome
narrative. Sereni’s narrative was substantially more complex, constitut- •
ing a history of the Jewish community of Rome and especially its L. Scott Lerner
participation in the liberation of Italy from the tyranny of the past.
Around a public event identified as a turning point—the inauguration
of the synagogue—he constructed a narrative that symbolically revised
the public discourses that had affected Roman Jews over the centuries.
His speech implied a new master narrative in which Jewish and Italian
history were merged. Castiglioni’s tale, in contrast, was almost uniquely
Jewish, of temples destroyed and rebuilt, of particularly Jewish freedom
lost and regained. Both inaugural narratives celebrated the new syna-
gogue for what it said about the place of the Jews in present-day Rome.
Speech acts redefined relationships of power and pulled people out of
slavery. New symbols overturned two millennia of symbolic domination
by supplying a new ending to an old story. Finally, just as Sereni’s
speech marked an entrance into autonomous public discourse, the
synagogue reclaimed the Jewish sign in Rome. No longer were Jews
publicly defined in Rome by the scenes on the arch or by a quotation
from Isaiah inscribed at the entrance of the church nearest the Jewish
quarter, San Gregorio della Divina Pietà, where forced conversion
sermons had long been held. In Hebrew and Latin, beside an image of
the crucified Christ, this reference was to “a rebellious people, which
walketh in a way which was not good, after their own thoughts; a people
which provoketh me to anger.” After centuries in which public markers
like these had served to shame and humiliate, the new and affirmative
symbolism—if criticized by some as insufficient—surely served others
as they strove to integrate into modern society.70
For all their seeming completeness, however, the narratives are also
remarkable for what they leave out of the story. Neither the president
nor the rabbi directly mentioned the other cupola visible from the
Tiber, to which the new synagogue related with equal candor: St.
Peter’s Basilica. Sereni decried the power of former popes but made
no mention of the present one in the Vatican.71 The juxtaposition was
evident to all, however, and a less conciliatory spokesperson had
aggressively drawn attention to it a few years earlier. Alluding to the
notion of the pope as “prisoner of the Vatican”—as Pius IX had
famously called himself in the early years of Unification—and punning
 on the name Leo XIII, Leone Racah had envisaged a synagogue on the
Tiber “between Saint Peter’s cupola and the Capitoline summit,
[30] between the Lion’s [Leo’s] menagerie [il serraglio del Leone] and the
Liberator’s apotheosis.”72 With fierce irony, Racah had suggested that
Jewish the synagogue would emerge from a series of radical reversals: the
Social “apotheosis” was no longer with the Vatican but with the king; the Jews
Studies no longer lived in a walled ghetto (“like two-footed beasts in a menag-
erie”); instead, the pope-lion (Leone)—in self-imposed reclusion in
the Vatican after the unification of Rome with Italy—was confined to
his own “serraglio.”
The inaugural narratives took no account of present-day polemics
with the Church, and they made another significant omission: Zion-
ism. In an 1897 telegram to Theodor Herzl, with which the inaugural
speakers were most likely aware, the first Roman Zionists had referred
to themselves as “prisoners of Titus.” Rome and Roman Jewish history
were participating in the fledgling Zionist narrative, and the movement
itself, in the person of Herzl, appeared in the eternal city in 1904 as the
synagogue was being completed. Within months of the meeting
between Rabbi Castiglioni and Victor Emmanuel III, the Zionist
founder also obtained an audience with the king. Herzl thought he had
found a sympathetic listener to his request for aid, yet in truth the
young monarch recognized a conflict that was represented in neither
of the inaugural narratives. The king’s desire to integrate Italian Jews
as Italians, his understanding of them as of Italian nationality, was
incompatible with Zionism as he perceived it.73 Strangely, perhaps, it
would turn out that Castiglioni had kept Zionism out of his narrative
but not out of his life. In 1906 he published a sonnet in Italian and
Hebrew in honor of Herzl.74 This ambivalence, if that is what it was, was
incompatible with the plot of the inaugural narrative that Castiglioni
had composed. Other events were simultaneously challenging Sereni’s
patriotic narrative, as for example when Italian Zionists reawakened
appropriated a sleepy term: “regeneration.”75
Fano’s chronicle was of a different sort. His initial terms established
new synagogues as the recompense for the loss of the quarter. He
conceived “nuovi tempi” in terms of “nuovi templi.” Gradually, how-
ever, as the ghetto was dismantled and nothing appeared ready to
replace it, he grew increasingly skeptical of the simplicity of his own
terms, and he drew upon his imagination to evoke a reality he had
previously understood as following a predetermined course. If Hayden
White is right about narrative, Fano was thus free not only of a
“demand for closure” but also of “a demand for moral meaning, a
demand that sequences of real events be assessed as to their signifi-
cance as elements of a moral drama.”76 Because Fano did not set out to
write narrative history, however, his account may make a limited con-
tribution to the debate over narrative as a cognitive function or as a [31]
literary operation that necessarily moralizes.77 He did not intend his
message to be more objective, but it nonetheless emerged empirically The Ghetto of
from the events he witnessed. It seems undeniable that he gained and Rome
communicated important insights as he distanced himself from the •
plot, detaching the ending from the beginning and freeing meaning L. Scott Lerner
from the endgame of narrative. I doubt that his explicitly literary
devices ultimately prove any less valuable as representations of reality
than his initial outline of a plot. According to White, “One can produce
an imaginary discourse about real events that may not be less ‘true’ for
being imaginary. It all depends upon how one construes the function
of the faculty of imagination in human nature.”78
Inaugural narratives, perhaps like all narratives that seek to estab-
lish or reestablish a culture, are a fusion of power and fragility. It
may be worth remembering that sometime after 1904 the monu-
ment to Victor Emmanuel II, once known as the Altar of the Father-
land, metamorphosed into Italy’s largest typewriter (as it is
commonly referred to today, thanks to a physical resemblance that
could not have been anticipated at the turn of the centur y). The
grandson and namesake of the Liberator King, the young Victor
Emmanuel III who so graciously honored the Great Synagogue with
its first official visit, doomed the monarchy by associating with
Benito Mussolini. Castiglioni’s eldest son became an apostate, for
opportunistic reasons, and made an immense fortune in Austria before
losing it all in the depression of the mid-1920s. A nephew of patriot
Sereni emerged as a key Zionist pioneer; another nephew became an
important communist.79 And the Great Synagogue outlived a twentieth
century that saw the unparalleled rise and fall of ideologies. It wit-
nessed a deportation, endured the silence of Pius XII, and received the
historic visit from John Paul II. A fortress-monument to Emancipation
and the Risorgimento, it is now protected by Israeli security guards.
Meanwhile, new national narratives are being woven on behalf of
Etruria and Canaan on the pages of at least one major academic
journal.80 For all of Biancone’s apparent ravings, who is to say whether
he did not voice the more stable truth?
 Notes

[32] This article is a revised version of a lecture delivered at the Center for Euro-
pean Studies and at the Ford Foundation Workshop on Visual Representa-
tion and Cultural Critique, Harvard University. Sections have been
Jewish
presented at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference and the Ameri-
Social can Association for Italian Studies Colloquium. I am indebted to these audi-
Studies ences for suggestions and criticisms. Unless otherwise noted, translations
are my own.

1 In spite of these physical barri- A liberal Gregory XVI, in turn,

ers—some say because of
them—documentary evidence
has increasingly shown that Ital-
ian Jews had more contact with
the dominant society, rather
than less, during the ghetto
period. For differing views of
the implications, see Roberto
Bonfil, “Lo spazio culturale
degli ebrei d’Italia fra
Rinascimento ed Età barocca,”
in Storia d’Italia 11, Gli ebrei in
Italia, Corrado Vivanti, ed., 2
vols. (Turin, 1996), 1: 411–73;
Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in
Renaissance Italy, trans. Anthony
Oldcorn (Berkeley, 1994); Ariel
Toaff, “La vita materiale,” in
Vivanti, ed., Gli ebrei in Italia, 1:
237–63; and Ariel Toaff, Il vino e
la carne. Una comunità ebraica nel
Medioevo (Bologna, 1989).
2 Napoleon abolished the institu-
tion and made equal citizens of
the Jews. He left the walls stand-
ing, however, allowing the
ghetto to be reestablished each
time the French were expelled.
Post-Napoleonic reaction
proved severe, peaking in the
1820s under Leo XII, who rein-
stated the practice of forced
attendance at conversion ser-
mons and revived the harsh
bull of 1775, Edict Over the Jews.
allowed the gates to stay down
after they fell during the
upheavals of 1830. The walls
were removed in 1848 by order
of Pius IX. The next year, a
short-lived Roman Republic
emancipated the Jews for a sec-
ond time, only to be reversed
six months later by an
embittered Pius IX upon his
return to power. The wall-less
ghetto continued to operate
until 1870. The standard refer-
ence on this history is Attilio
Milano, Il ghetto di Roma.
Illustrazioni storiche (1964; rpt.
Rome, 1988).
3 Referred to as the architectural
jewel of the ghetto, the Cinque
Scole housed five independent
synagogues in one building as a
result of papal stipulations limit-
ing each community to a single
place of worship. The last survi-
vor of the ghetto era, the
Cinque Scole was damaged by
fire in 1893 and demolished in
1908–10. See Bice Migliau, “Le
vicende dell’edificio delle
Cinque Scole,” in Architettura e
urbanistica. Uso e trasformazione
della città storica, Giorgio Ciucci
and Vanna Fraticelli, eds. (Ven-
ice, 1984), 442–47, and Milano,
Il ghetto di Roma, 216–17.
 4 Alberto M. Racheli, “La
demolizione e ricostruzione del
quartiere del Ghetto (1885–
1911),” in Ciucci and Fraticelli,
eds., Architettura e urbanistica,
437–38.
5 See Mona Ozouf, “Regenera-
tion,” in A Critical Dictionary of
the French Revolution, ed.
François Furet and Ozouf,
trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 781–
91; Jay R. Berkovitz, The Shaping
of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Cen-
tury France (Detroit, 1989); G.
Gatti, La rigenerazione politica
degli israeliti in Italia. Discorso
religioso, pedagogico e sociale
(Casale, 1848); and Franco
Della Peruta, “Gli ebrei nel
Risorgimento fra interdizioni
ed emancipazione,” in Vivanti,
ed., Gli ebrei in Italia, 2: 1135–67.
6 Massimo d’Azeglio, Dell’emanci-
pazione civile degl’israeliti (Flor-
ence, 1848), 56.
7 Giuseppe Verdi, “Va, pensiero,”
in Nabucco (1842).
8 Cited in Racheli, “La
demolizione,” 437–38.
9 Laudiadio Fano, “Corre-
spondenza particolare del
‘Corriere Israelitico,’” Il corriere
israelitico 26 (1887–88): 149.
10 See Carol Herselle Krinsky, Syna-
gogues of Europe: Architecture, His-
tory, Meaning (Cambridge,
Mass., 1985), 366–67.
11 I use the term “space” in the
sense made familiar by Michel de
Certeau, as a “practiced place”
(de Certeau, The Practice of Every-
day Life, trans. Steven Rendall
[Berkeley, 1984], 115–30).
12 The City of Paris had acquired
a plot at the intersection of the
rue de la Victoire and the rue
de Châteaudun, and it should
have been possible to orient the [33]
building on the larger street.
According to unconfirmed tra-
The Ghetto of
dition, the Empress Josephine Rome
herself demanded that the
facade not be on the street that •
led from the Trinité to Notre- L. Scott Lerner
Dame de Lorette. See Domi-
nique Jarrassé, L’Age d’or des
synagogues (Paris, 1991), 67.
13 Ferdinand Gregorovius, The
Ghetto and the Jews of Rome, trans.
Moses Hadas (1853; rpt. New
York, 1948), 85–86. Five years
earlier, Massimo d’Azeglio had
described the ghetto in similar
terms (d’Azeglio,
Dell’emancipazione, 24–25).
14 The ghetto extended to the
river only after its area was
expanded in 1589 (Milano, Il
ghetto di Roma, 190).
15 Vittorio Castiglioni, “Sermone
pronunciato dal Cav. Prof.
Vittorio Castiglioni
Eccellentissimo Rabbino Mag-
giore dell’Università Israelitica
di Roma,” in Ricordo della con-
sacrazione e inaugurazione del
nuovo tempio israelitico di Roma
(Rome, 1904), 27.
16 Ibid., 25. The notion of the syn-
agogue as a “visible sign” was
not new. In 1872, for example,
Chief Rabbi of Paris Zadoc
Kahn referred to the synagogue
as the “visible symbol and effec-
tive instrument of our union”
(Kahn, “Le Temple,” in his Ser-
mons et allocutions. Première série
[Paris, 1875], 171).
17 See L. Scott Lerner, “The Nar-
rating Architecture of Emanci-
pation” Jewish Social Studies n.s.
 6, no. 3 (2000): 1–30. For a gen-
eral introduction to “Emancipa-
[34] tion architecture” in Italy, see
Alberto Maria Racheli,
“Architettura e architetti delle
Jewish
sinagoghe italiane del periodo
Social eclettico,” in Italia judaica: Atti
Studies del I convegno internazionale
(Rome, 1983), 483–97. The best
single source for Europe gener-
ally is Krinsky, Synagogues of
Europe.
18 Throughout Europe, Jews had
been subject to strict residency
laws, but only in a relatively
small number of Italian cities
and papal territories had they
been confined to a ghetto.
19 See Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto:
The Social Background of Jewish
Emancipation, 1770–1870 (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1973), and Attilio
Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia
(Turin, 1963), 358–90.
20 The Mortara Case, for example,
in which the pope’s soldiers for-
cibly removed a Jewish boy
from his family after a servant
had secretly baptized him,
stood in stark contrast to
accepted behavior beyond the
papal territories. See David I.
Kertzer, The Kidnapping of
Edgardo Mortara (New York,
1997), and Corrado Vivanti,
“Presentazione,” in Vivanti, ed.,
Gli ebrei in Italia, 1: xxiii.
21 On Jewish emancipation as a
goal of the Risorgimento, see
Della Peruta, “Gli ebrei nel
Risorgimento,” 1149, 1154.
22 The term belongs to Zadoc
Kahn, “Sermon prononcé à
l’inauguration de la synagogue
de la Ferté-sous-Jouarre le 21
septembre 1891,” in his Sermons
et allocutions, 3me série (Paris,
1894), 121. For an account of
the extraordinary events that
resulted in the acquisition of a
riverside plot and the fluke that
left the synagogue soaring high
above neighboring buildings,
see Racheli, “La demolizione,”
436–41.
23 Katz, Out of the Ghetto.
24 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Comment
le judaïsme est-il possible?”
(1959), in his Difficile liberté:
Essais sur le judaïsme (1963; rpt.
Paris, 1976), 342, 348; see also
Lerner, “ The Narrating Archi-
tecture,” 16–19.
25 One might also be tempted to
call them “Emancipation narra-
tives.” This term provides an
additional degree of historical
specificity but also implies a
somewhat different perspective.
An “Emancipation” narrative
would seem to direct us toward
the past, to the passage “out of
the ghetto,” whereas an “inaugu-
ral” narrative is principally con-
cerned with insertion into a
post-Emancipation environ-
ment.
26 Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots:
Collective Memory and the Making
of Israeli National Tradition (Chi-
cago, 1995).
27 See Pierre Nora, “Entre
mémoire et histoire,” in La
République (Paris, 1984), xviii,
vol. 1 of Pierre Nora, ed., Les
Lieux de mémoire, 3 vols. (Paris,
1984–92); Yosef Hayim
Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish His-
tory and Jewish Memory (1983;
rpt. Seattle, 1989); Maurice
Halbwachs, La mémoire collective
(Paris, 1950); Zerubavel, Recov-
 ered Roots, 3–12. Zerubavel’s
understanding of collective
memory as a negotiation
between historical record and
social and political agendas
seems more persuasive than
Edward W. Said’s characteriza-
tion of it as a phenomenon that
preexists this negotiation and is
itself subject to manipulation
(Said, “Invention, Memory, and
Place,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2
[2000]: 179).
28 See, esp., Hayden White, The
Content of the Form: Narrative Dis-
course and Historical Representa-
tion (Baltimore, Md., 1987).
29 Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 5–9,
221–22. The reader of
Zerubavel’s study comes away
with little sense of how Israeli
culture produced its collective
memory by performing many
of the same operations as post-
Emancipation Jewish culture in
Western Europe. Before Zion-
ism, the ideology of Emancipa-
tion made the shift from a
theological to a historical frame-
work, tended to favor the term
“israélite” over “Jew” (which in
the view of many evoked a long
history of opprobrium), and
grouped 18 centuries of Jewish
history into a single period—
with a focus on persecution
more than exile, liberation and
progress more than return. It
also identified turning points
that would lead to a restruc-
tured plot of the Jewish past in
opposition to “traditional Jew-
ish memory in Europe.” The
project of Jewish collective
memory in Israel, of course,
partly depended on the “forget-
ting” of such parallels. See
Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 12,
16–17; Berr Isaac Berr, [35]
“Réflexions sur la régénération
complète des Juifs en France
The Ghetto of
[ . . . ],” reprinted in La Rome
Révolution française et
l’émancipation des Juifs, 8 vols. •
(Paris, 1968), 8: 12–13; and L. Scott Lerner
Phyllis Cohen Albert, “Israelite
and Jew: How did Nineteenth-
Century French Jews Under-
stand Assimilation?” in
Assimilation and Community in
European Jewry, 1815–1881, Jona-
than Frankel and Steven J.
Zipperstein, eds. (Cambridge,
Engl., 1991), 93–95.
30 Pierre Nora, “Présentation,” in
La République, vii.
31 See “Il nuovo tempio israelitico
di Roma (Con disegno pro-
spettico). Cenni biografici
dell’Ingegnere Architetto
Attilio Muggia,” Il Vessillo
israelitico 61 (1893): 114–16. On
the imitation of the Temple of
Jerusalem in synagogue archi-
tecture, see Krinsky, Synagogues
of Europe, and Jarrassé, L’Age
d’or des synagogues, 114–121. On
the Egyptian style, see Ruth
Wischnitzer, “The Egyptian
Revival in Synagogue Architec-
ture,” American Jewish Historical
Society 4, no. 1 (Sept. 1951): 61–
75, and Krinsky, Synagogues of
Europe, 77–78.
32 Fano, “Correspondenza
particolare,” Il corriere israelitico
28 (1889): 279–80.
33 See “Il nuovo tempio israelitico
di Roma,” L’Architettura italiana
10, no. 5 (1915): 1, 50–58;
Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe,
364–65.
 34 V[incenzo] Costa and
O[svaldo] Armanni, Il nuovo tem-
[36] pio israelitico di Roma. Relazione
al Consiglio di Presidenza e alla
Commissione Tecnico-
Jewish
Amministrativa della Università
Social Israelitica Romana (Rome,
Studies 1904), 11.
35 Ibid., 12.
36 Andreina Griseri and Roberto
Gabetti, Architettura
dell’eclettismo, un saggio su G.B.
Schellino (Turin, 1973), 98.
37 Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia,
307–10.
38 Ibid., 319–22. See also Toaff,
“Gli ebrei a Roma,” in Vivanti,
ed., Gli ebrei in Italia, 1: 126–7.
39 See “Il Re Vittorio Emanuele al
Tempio” Il corriere israelitico 43
(1904): 77; “L’arrivo del Re”
(reprinted from Giornale
d’Italia), Il corriere israelitico 43:
78–79.
40 Angelo Sereni, “Discorso pro-
nunciato dal Cav. Uff. Avv.
Angelo Sereni presidente
dell’Università Israelitica di
Roma,” in Ricordo della con-
sacrazione, 15.
41 On the bull, see Milano, Il ghetto
di Roma, 71.
42 Sereni, “Discorso,” 15.
43 Ibid., 16.
44 What I. Benzinger writes of the
author of Chronicles is also true
of Castiglioni: he did not delib-
erately distort history, nor did
he hesitate to fill in gaps or
occasionally embellish in the
interest of his cause. He was
“not a historian, but a Midrash-
ist” (Benzinger, Die Bücher der
Chronik [ Tübingen, 1901], x,
cited in Jacob M. Myers, “I
Chronicles,” The Anchor Bible,
vol. 12 [New York, 1965], xxx,
xviii).
45 Shemaryahu Talmon, “1 and 2
Chronicles,” in The Literary
Guide to the Bible, Robert Alter
and Frank Kermode, eds. (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1987), 365–72.
46 Castiglioni was a disciple of Sam-
uel Luzzatto, but it seems likely
that he was also influenced by
Italy’s other major nineteenth-
century rabbinical figure, Elia
Benamozegh, who taught that
the priestly mission of Israel,
within a providential plan for
the unification of humanity,
was to be realized in the diverse
national homelands of contem-
porary Jews. See Francesca
Sofia, “Su assimilazione e
autocoscienza ebraica nell’Italia
liberale,” in Italia Judaica IV. Gli
ebrei nell’Italia unita. 1870–1945
(Rome, 1993), 40–41.
47 This idea of a wholly spiritual,
nongeographical Jerusalem was
introduced by Moses Mendels-
sohn (Jerusalem, 1783) and
widely embraced in post-Eman-
cipation Europe. See Kahn, “Le
Temple,” 159, and Arnold
Eisen, Galut: Modern Jewish Reflec-
tion on Homelessness and Home-
coming (Bloomington, Ind.,
1986), 63–64.
48 Castiglioni, “Sermone,” 21.
49 English translations of the
Hebrew Bible are from JPS
Hebrew-English Tanakh. The Tradi-
tional Text and the New JPS Trans-
lation, 2d ed. (Philadelphia,
1999).
50 Castiglioni’s is the only exam-
ple in Italy or France of which I
am aware that recounts the
inauguration of the Temple of
 Solomon in the context of a
speech inaugurating a monu-
mental synagogue, although
Zadoc Kahn took a similar
approach in a published ser-
mon (Kahn, “Le Temple,” 153–
54).
51 Myers, “I Chronicles,” xxxvi.
52 Castiglioni, “Sermone,” 23–24.
53 Ibid., 24.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid., 24–25.
56 Lazare Isidor, “Sermon de M.
Isidor, Grand Rabbin de la Cir-
conscription de Paris,” in
Inauguration du Temple Consisto-
rial Israélite de la ville de Paris
(Paris, 1852), 15–16.
57 On the black comedy, see
Eisen, Galut, 42–43. The
aggadah recounts how a gnat
entered the emperor’s nose
and pounded in his brain for
seven years until he died, where-
upon his brain was split open to
reveal “something like a spar-
row two selas in weight” (B. Git
56b, cited in Marc Saperstein,
“History as Homiletics: The Use
of Historical Memory in the Ser-
mons of Saul Levi Morteira,” in
Jewish History and Jewish Memory:
Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim
Yerushalmi, Elisheva Carlebach,
John M. Efron, and David N.
Myers, eds. [Hanover, N.H.,
1998], 121).
58 White, The Content of the Form,
16–21.
59 Laudiadio Fano, “Gli ebrei di
Roma,” Il corriere israelitico 24
(1885): 36.
60 Laudiadio Fano, “Corre-
spondenza particolare del
‘Corriere Israelitico,’” Il corriere
israelitico 25 (1886–87): 7–8.
61 See Paul Ricœur, Time and Nar-
rative, trans. Kathleen McL-
aughlin and David Pellauer, vol. [37]
2 (Chicago, 1985).
62 In his equation of a colony with
The Ghetto of
the freedom of a republic, Fano Rome
seems unaware of the irony that
could hardly escape our twenty- •
first-century sensibility. L. Scott Lerner
63 Fano, “Correspondenza
particolare,” Il corriere israelitico
25: 63–64 (here and for the
quotes in the following two para-
graphs).
64 Ibid., 154–55.
65 Fano, “Correspondenza
particolare,” Il corriere israelitico
26: 81.
66 Ibid., 149–50.
67 Fano, “Correspondenza
particolare,” Il corriere israelitico
28: 36–37.
68 Ibid., 109–11.
69 David Damrosch, The Narrative
Covenant: Transformations of
Genre in the Growth of Biblical Lit-
erature (San Francisco, 1987), 3,
37–41, 47.
70 Countless signs of these feelings
can be found in the literature
of the period. See, e.g., the ref-
erence to the yellow badge in
this account of Castiglioni’s visit
to the king: L. Bondi, “Il Prof.
Castiglioni dal Re,” Il corriere
israelitico 43: 260.
71 The relation of a synagogue to
Rome’s most famous domed
building had long been a promi-
nent consideration of its back-
ers. See, e.g., G. C. Linotte,
“Tempio Israelitico in Roma”
(pamphlet; Rome, 1890), 1.
72 Leone Racah, “A proposito del
nuovo Tempio di Roma,” Il
corriere israelitico 33 (1894): 205.
 Both Pius IX and Leo XIII had
been identified with anti-Jewish
[38] polemics. Pius IX had referred to
the “Synagogue of Satan” and to
his persecutors as “nuovi giudei.”
Jewish
Leo XIII was associated with a vir-
Social ulent anti-Jewish campaign con-
Studies ducted by the periodicals Civiltà
cattolica and Osservatore romano,
which would intensify with the
Dreyfus Affair in the years lead-
ing up to the construction of the
Roman synagogue. See Giovanni
Miccoli, “Santa Sede, questione
ebraica e antisemitismo,” in
Vivanti, ed., Gli ebrei in Italia, 2:
1405–7, 1428, 1505–8. Racah may
have also been alluding to Leo
XII, who had reinstated the infa-
mous Edict on the Jews in the 1820s.
73 Alberto Cavaglion, “ Tendenze
nazionali e albori sionistici,” in
Vivanti, ed., Gli ebrei in Italia, 2:
1301, 1304, 1310; see also
Mario Toscano, “Ebraismo,
sionismo, società: Il caso
italiano,” in Stato nazionale ed
emancipazione ebraica, Mario
Toscano and Francesca Sofia,
eds. (Rome, 1992), 410.
74 Vittorio Castiglioni, Nizmei
Zahav (1906). This volume con-
tained 126 sonnets, several of
which were in Italian with
Hebrew translation. Among
these was the sonnet in memory
of Herzl.
75 See Tullia Catalan,
“L’organizzazione delle
comunità ebraiche italiane
dall’Unità alla prima guerra
mondiale,” in Vivanti, ed., Gli
ebrei in Italia, 2: 1270, and F. del
Canuto, Il movimento sionistico in
Italia dalle origini al 1924
(Milan, 1972).
76 White, The Content of the Form,
21.
77 See Louis O. Mink, “Everyman
His or Her Own Annalist,” and
Hayden White, “The Nar-
rativization of Real Events,”
both in On Narrative, W. J. T.
Mitchell, ed. (Chicago, 1981),
233–39, 249–54.
78 White, The Content of the Form,
57.
79 An interesting account of this
family history, including Enzo
Sereni’s participation in Italian
Zionism and in the founding of
the State of Israel, can be found
in the documentary novel writ-
ten by his niece and Angelo
Sereni’s great-niece. See Clara
Sereni, Il gioco dei regni (Flor-
ence, 1993). The author discov-
ered this family history only as
an adult following the death of
her father Emilio, a communist,
who transmitted almost none of
it to her.
80 Basem L. Ra’ad, “Primal Scenes
of Globalization: Legacies of
Canaan and Etruria,” PMLA
116, no. 1 (2001): 89–110. See
also Zeev Sternhell, The Found-
ing Myths of Israel: Nationalism,
Socialism and the Making of the
Jewish State, trans. David Maisel
(Princeton, 1998); W. J. T.
Mitchell, “Holy Landscape:
Israel, Palestine, and the Ameri-
can Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry
26, no. 2 (2000): 193–223; Dan
Rabinowitz, “Postnational Pales-
tine/Israel? Globalization, Dias-
pora, Transnationalism, and the
Israeli Palestinian Conflict,”
Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (2000):
757–72; and Said, “Invention,
Memory, and Place,” 175–92.