The promised land: biblical themes in the Risorgimento

As was the case in the rest of Europe, in Italy too from the 1830s writers defined themselves as a cast and trasformed their words and writings into a principle of collective identification. They did so by drawing on their religious tradition, although they transformed radically its meaning in order to make their religious belief the common denominator of their collective identity. This article, by comparing the writings of the Catholic Vincenzo Gioberti and the Jewish David Levi, demonstrates the affinities of their reflections, not so much with regards to the specific content of their civil religion, but rather to the morphology of the nation as they conceived it. Both inspired by Saint-Simon's doctrine, they imagine the nation as a religious community, considered the men of letter its natural priests, and employed the Bible to define its content.