Living in Exile: Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Study of Religion in Italy (1890s-1930s)

At the onset of the twentieth century Italy had a small Jewish community that had been granted full emancipation in the 1870s after the fall of the Church State. In difference to other Western European countries, the Italian kingdom was less attractive for Jews who emigrated westward. Nevertheless, for political, cultural, and religious reasons, small waves of Jewish emigration reached the country. This article investigates Jewish intellectual contribution to the Wissenschaft des Judentums through the trajectories of Polish scholars and rabbis who were trained in Germany, in combination with those of Italian Jews who were influenced by new intellectual currents influenced by neo-Idealism. Moreover, it offers a glimpse onto issues of history of religions among Jews of different religious persuasions, Catholic intellectuals, and secular scholars caught between the waning of the Liberal regime and the rise of Fascism, where everybody became, for different reason, an exile.