The Jewish Ghetto of Turin and the March Toward Italian Unification
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As the capital of Piedmont — the region named for its position below the Italian Alps along the borders of France and Switzerland — the city of Turin was an unlikely place from which the modernization of Italy, and Italian Jewry, should emerge. The thousand-year-old House of Savoy had had modest beginnings as a family headed first by counts, then dukes, The Jewish Ghetto then princes, and finally kings. For centuries, it had been caught in the conflict between the of Turin and Holy Roman emperors and the popes. More re- cently, it was squeezed between the dominant the March Toward regional powers, France and Austria. Indeed, Italian Unification its capital had long been Chambéry, in pres- ent-day France, before moving to Turin. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Savoy Crown fought L. Scott Lerner on the side of the old-order powers. After the fall of Napoleon, its absolutist state was fully restored. For those who think of a common language as a central criterion for nationhood, Turin was an especially unlikely aspirant to the role of first capital of united Italy. Indeed, the last “Piedmont” king and first King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II, was a francophone, forever ill-at-ease in Italian. By the same token, if you have occasion to leaf through the correspondence of Victor Emmanuel’s famous prime minister, the Count of Cavour, who directed the unification process, you will delight in the douces mélodies of Cavour’s native French, but find little of the lingua di Dante. For most of its history, Turin was no more a Jewish city than, strictly speaking, an Italian one, especially compared to Rome, capi- tal of the ancient empire and home to an unin- terrupted Jewish community that pre-dated the destruction of the Second Temple. The first Jews settled in Turin in the fifteenth century. Savoy rulers initially granted residency per- mits on a sporadic basis. A ghetto was created in the city in 1679. It replaced a previous Jew- ish quarter and may have been initiated more in the spirit of urban reorganization than as 30 anti-Jewish discrimination. Only after Victor when Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti, the favorite of Amadeo II became King of Sardinia, ruling over the liberal and moderate factions of the Col- a much expanded territory, did the House of lege of Cardinals, was elected pope, generating Savoy finally cede to ecclesiastical pressure, in a tremendous sense of hope and optimism the climate of the Counter Reformation, and throughout the peninsula. Influential liberal extend the obligation to inhabit a ghetto to all Catholics envisaged a unified Italy in the form Jewish subjects of Piedmont. Because numer- of a confederacy headed by the pope. When ous cities and towns did not have ghettos, Pius IX refused to make war against Austria, many Jews were transferred to Turin. It was however, revolution broke out in Rome, the thus that a concrete space of the ghetto be- pope went into exile, and when he returned came identified as the symbolic place of Jews with the help of the French, there began a pe- in city life. riod of reaction on the part of the Vatican that Unlike most Italian ghettos, Turin’s would last the better part of seven decades. was established in a preexistent construction, Italian unification would thus proceed in in the center of the city, occupying a large direct opposition to a profoundly antimodern square block with several interior courtyards. papacy. Although the Kingdom of Sardinia had The structure had originally belonged to an not been the most liberal of the Italian states urban plan by a famous architect and city in the first half of the nineteenth century, it planner, Carlo Castellamonte. For this reason, quickly seized the opportunity to lead the the buildings were not readily distinguishable charge toward unification. In 1848, it became from neighboring structures, until exterior- the first Italian state to issue a constitution facing windows were banned and the effects and to emancipate resident Jews. Both acts of gradual overcrowding, in both the original would become defining characteristics of Ghetto Vecchio and adjacent Ghetto Piccolo, united Italy a little more than a decade later. became acute. The latter also featured a greater When Turin became the first declared number of stories than neighboring structures capital of Italy in 1861, the peninsula immedi- of similar dimensions. By the 1830s, city au- ately came to be dominated by two poles: the thorities became concerned about the impli- Italians based in Turin, and the papal domin- cations for public health of the poor hygienic ion in Rome. As a logical consequence of the conditions within the overcrowded and impov- gradual march toward unification, all the Ital- erished ghetto. In the decades leading up to ian ghettos would be abolished. Yet even more unification, the ghetto increasingly came to be was at stake: in the war waged against the perceived as an impediment to the “progress” Catholic Church for territory, public opinion and that was ever on the lips of the reformers who national identity, the Risorgimento depended on strove to ensure that Italy would soon join the the eradication of the institution of the ghettos. ranks of her more progressive neighbors. Indeed, no sooner would Italians abolish the At mid-century, a vision of a united ghettos than the Church would ensure their Italy was shared by republicans, revolutionar- resurgence in popular literature and journalism. ies, liberals (favoring constitutional monarchy), Having played a major role in procuring and liberal Catholics, and it was anyone’s guess their own emancipation in the 1840s — paving which of these groups might gain the upper the way for Jewish emancipation throughout hand should the Risorgimento become suc- Italy — Turin’s Jewish leaders also took the lead cessful. A crucial turning point came in 1846, in redefining the role and status of Jews within 31 the new nation. They accomplished this goal by seating almost 1,000 men, but also the requi- reinscribing Jewish space on the urban land- site women’s gallery, rabbi’s residence, school, scape of their capital city. The old ghetto, no bakery, ritual bath, offices, storage spaces, and longer an active institution regulating Jewish designated areas for lectures and ceremonies. life, but still home to a high proportion of the The structure was to stand 47 meters high and Jewish population of the city — the poorest part consist of two levels and a modest dome. If it — would have to be erased, and a new public had stayed like this, the building would still be sign of Turinese — and Italian — Jewry would the Synagogue of Turin. The reason it changed be erected in its place. The very same member is that Antonelli had other designs. He was of the Jewish community, in fact, Alessandro far less concerned with fulfilling his contract Malvano, oversaw both initiatives: the redevel- to provide a functional building to the Israeliti opment of the ghetto for residential and com- of Turin than he was with leaving an eternal mercial purposes (along with the displacement legacy to the world. By the time it was finally of hundreds of poor families) and the building completed in 1908, the Mole Antonelliana, as of a monumental synagogue. The structure it was now called, measured 163 meters and originally intended as the new synagogue of was one third taller than the dome of St. Peter’s Turin, the Mole Antonelliana, took on a life of Cathedral. The emblem of Jewish Emancipation its own at the hands of its ambitious, and argu- had gone swerving off course. In the 1990s, ably unethical, architect, Alessandro Antonelli, an appropriate use was finally found for this and has since become the symbol of the city. remarkable, impractical structure: as home The building that took its place as the city’s to the National Museum of the Cinema, the synagogue, by Enrico Petiti, was a more humble vast interior space it enclosed became a giant project, expressive, in a subtler register, of Jew- screen on which to project the intangible of ish life in Turin and the modern nation. the cinema. For a manageable price, Antonelli had Against the excesses of the Mole, the promised a square-planned stone structure that new synagogue, completed in 1884, posed a could accommodate not only a main sanctuary stark contrast. Years after the new nation’s capital had moved first to Florence and then to Rome, it was built on the other side of town. It is an example of the Moorish vogue in syna- gogue architecture. Its dimensions are almost Turin Synagogue, 1884, right. Mole Antonelliana, below. identical with those of the Valdesian neo-Gothic Church nearby, erected several decades earlier, and vastly more modest than those of the Mole. In one important respect the Synagogue of Turin typifies the eclectic architecture of eman- cipation: it affirms, by its monumentality, the equivalent status of Judaism with Christianity, and Jewish belonging to the city and Italian nation, while also expressing, thanks to the contrast of its Moorish style with the rest of the L. Scott Lerner L. urban landscape, a clear sense that Jews did not intend to blend fully with Christian Italians. 32.