Diatribe accademiche, steccati, rimozioni. Storia economica e storia degli ebrei in Italia

the essay focuses on the role that the history of the Jews in Italy played – and is still playing – in the historiographical national literature. In the first three paragraphs I have quickly analyzed the theoretical historiographical trends which influenced the national debate between the late ‘70s and the early ‘90s. In those years the interest in the contribution that economics, as a science, could have given to the historical analysis and/or the scholar’s focus on global history (Braudel) and/or the will to represent a Medieval Ages totally mercantile and Italian brought them to set aside the Jews’ history contribution to understand the Italian economic history. In the third paragraph I have tried to clarify -by using some examples focused on a homogeneous communitary framework (Mantua Community) – why the epistemological interpretative grid of the New Economic History does not work for the Late Medieval and Modern Age society. The latter are indeed characterized by the existence of split regulative and social spheres that prevented the application of strict and unvarying rules to all the citizens. The fourth paragraph focuses on the interpretative distortions deriving from the discovery of many condotte that urged the Nineteenth century historians to consider the feneratores as representatives of the Italian Judaisms as a whole. The fifth paragraph analyses the ways by which the ventures of the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Institute and of some scientific societies devoted to the study of the history of Judaism in Italy have revitalized the researches on the history of the Jews in Italy by proposing new questions, new sources and new interpretative paradigms.