The Most Tenacious of Minorities

Since arriving in Rome more than 2,000 years ago, the Jewish communities of Italy have retained their identity over millennia. This book traces the foundations of their community, focusing on their economic, intellectual, and social lives as they moved between northern and southern Italy. Over the centuries these localized Italian groups were reinforced with the arrival of German, Provencal, Sephardic, and—most recently—Ashkenazi and Middle Eastern Jews. Surviving religious persecution, ghetto-ization, and the Holocaust, the Jews contributed to Italian society when they could. Supplemented by maps, illustrations, sidebars, and primary sources, this book is a scholarly yet popular overview of a minority group that is proud to be Italian and equally proud to be Jewish.