IL REGISTRO E GLI STATUTI DELLA HEVRAT GEMILUT HASADIM DI FINALE EMILIA (1615-1750) CON CENNI DI STORIA E BIBLIOGRAFIA SULLA CARITÀ NELL’EBRAISMO

In his study in part I, Mauro Perani attempts to retrace the long history of charity in Judaism, documenting that the rise of Jewish brotherhoods in the 16th century Italy does not constitute a new reality, but a mere adaptation to modern-age-requirements of a value, already stated in the Bible, the Mishnah and the Talmud. The practice of works of mercy is actually attested in the most ancient documentation of this subject in our hand, i.e. the fragments of the Cairo Genizah. Subsequently we have documents from the 13th-14th century in Spain, Provence and Sicily and from the 16th in Italy and other European countries. Perani concludes the study with an extensive bibliography on the topic, whose aim is to help new researches on this important field of Jewish History. In part II, Alice Frisoni, after a brief presentation of the Jewish community of Finale, publishes the Hebrew text and the Italian version of the Statutes of the Gemilut Hasadim brotherhood of Finale Emilia for the years 1615-1750. In the thirteen articles of the Statutes that this confraternity of mercy has given itself, the spiritual values animating the Jewish community of Finale for a span of 135 years do emerge. Were it not for the fact that, when the minutes cease to be written in Hebrew and pass to Italian, there is a gap of 9 years without any written traces, reducing to 126 the years of the documentation. This document reveals us new and significant data, which enrich the already significant studies on this community, based on mostly external sources in Italian and Latin.