As emancipated Jews joined Italy's mainstream cultural, economic and political life, their centuries-old traditions became confined to the realm of the synagogue. There, Italian Jews could explore their modern identity without fully breaking away from the past. Liturgical music of this epoch, handed down in oral tradition and manuscript sources, presents a fascinating link between the age of the ghettos and modern times. Musica sacra, a new kind of"sacred music" composed for the synagogue, sonically represented the aspirations of the era. Inside the new "monumental" synagogues, composers wrote music inspired by opera, church liturgy, and Risorgimento marches, sung by choirs with organ accompaniment. This essay focuses on a now forgotten liturgical repertoire especially created to mark the 1848 Emancipation with annual synagogue celebrations that included a dedicated ritual, new poetry (in Hebrew and in Italian), and new music that is reminiscent ofltaly's own national anthem.

This essay investigates the ways in which Italian Jews used Ladino song as a vehicle to define their cultural identity during the 20th century. The revitalization of a musical repertoire sung in Ladino happened twice during the last century. During the 1920's, a small corpus of Judeo-Spanish songs were incorporated in a new Judeo-Italian folk repertoire, created by the writer, ethnographer and community activist, Guido Bedarida (1900-1962). Bedarida's original research drew on the history of Livorno as a center of Ladino press since the 18th century. Decades later, beginning in the 1980's, a handful of Jewish performers - mostly women - helped spreading the repertoire of the international Ladino revival to Italy. These performers often incorporated both Ladino and Yiddish songs in their performances and recordings, based on commercially released sources from Israel and the United States. The two waves of Ladino revival in Italy have served distinctly different purposes. The first revival centered on Sephardic culture as a more "noble" form of Jewish heritage than the local Italian one was perceived to be (by Italian Jews themselves), which could serve as a vehicle resuscitating the pride in the local culture. The second revival can instead be seen as an attempt to create a "new" Jewish culture after the loss of Italian Jewish traditions since the Holocaust. In both instances, however, songs in Ladino have contributed to the creation of a virtual Jewish identity, based on ethnographic sources that are removed from local Italian Jewish culture.

Traditional melodies from diverse Jewish liturgical traditions used by Benedetto Marcello in his Estro Poetico-Armonico are examined in the context of Judeo-Christian relations in the Venetian Ghetto in the early eighteenth-century.

Critical review of paradigms, models and topics in the study of Jewish music.

Donatella Calabi ed. "Venice, The Jews, and Europe," Venice, Marsilio 2016: 264-269.

This paper can be bought in book form from Amazon books.com

Never before the creation of the State of Israel did Jews of so many origins live together, and in such a stimulating environment, as they did in the land they soon started calling in Hebrew i-tal-yah, an “Island of Divine Dew.” A crossroad of world cultures, Italy has been for over two millennia a haven for Italian, Sephardic, and Ashkenazi Jews, in the heartland of Christianity. The Italian-Jewish symbiosis ourished with the Modern Era, in the Renais- sance ghettos, continuing through the 19th century Emancipation, and up to the present. Thus, Jewish Italy appears before our eyes both as a time capsule, where ancient cultural traits have been safely preserved, and as a laboratory, in which such traits were adapted to constantly changing living conditions. While maintaining centuries-old traditions, Italian Jews also tested out new cultural formats that came to de ne Jewish modernity. Featured prominently among these are the emergence of women as a foundational constituency of the Jewish social fabric, the printing of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud as hypertexts, the illustration of Hebrew manu- scripts as forms of public Jewish art, the public performance of Jewish culture as entertainment for society at large, and the cultivation of the synagogue as a porous space fostering multicultural encounters. Italian Jews successfully negotiated their way across tradition, diversity, religious con icts, emancipation, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism, all at the very heart of Christianity. Their vicissitudes mirror the history of the Jewish people at large, both because of Italy’s strong cultural in uence upon many European countries, and because of its central place in the Mediterranean. Their cultural wealth progressively lost traction at the turn of the 20th century, and effectively came to a halt with the rise of Fascism and the anti-Semitic laws proclaimed in 1938. All major Jewish museum collections include important artifacts from Italy, and The Magnes is no exception. This exhibition presents a selection of manuscripts, books, ritual objects, textiles, photographs, and postcards collected by The Magnes over ve decades to investigate the global signi cance of Jewish history in Italy.

Global India: Kerala, Israel, Berkeley unveils the extensive holdings of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life documenting the history of the Jewish community in Kerala, South India. The exhibition includes over one hundred individual items, many of which were never catalogued before. Thanks to a dynamic collecting campaign in the 1960s and 70s, The Magnes has become one of the world’s most extensive repositories of materials about the Jews of Southern India, taking on an important role in the preservation of their culture alongside the historic Jewish sites in Kerala, as well as national and private collections in Israel, where most of the Kerala Jews settled after the founding of the State in 1948. The Magnes Collection includes hundreds of ritual objects, textiles, photographs, archival records, Hebrew books, and manuscripts, including liturgical texts, illustrated ketubbot (Jewish marriage contracts) and amulets, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Malayalam, Judeo-Spanish, and English. These materials constitute an invaluable source of information on the Kerala Jewish community, one of the oldest in the world, and its deep connections with India’s society and cultures and with the global Jewish Diaspora, across India, the Middle East, and Europe. Among the most notable items on display are the Torah Ark from the Tekkumbhagam synagogue in Mattancherry, Kochi, an extremely rare amulet on parchment, designed to protect women in childbirth and newborn children, and the diaries of A.B. Salem, who provide a vivid account of Jewish life in Kochi throughout the 20th century. This exhibition is the culmination of years of curatorial work devoted to assessing and documenting the holdings of The Magnes, conducted in collaboration with experts in Israel and the US. It also inaugurates a new season of research, engaging the scholarly community at UC Berkeley and beyond, and intersecting Jewish and Asian Studies. The catalog includes an essay by Dr. Barbara Johnson (Ithaca College). http://bit.ly/global-india