Quest - Issues in Contemporary Jewish History

The journal was created in Italy but it aims to provide a platform connecting diverse cultural and accademic settings, creating a place of encounter, of serene and rigorous discussion between Italian, European, Israeli and American scholars. Quest thus wants to be an instrument of research, communication and debate, operating at an international level. For this reason it is entirely published in English and it has opted for the free open access philosophy. Quest is thus a journal devoted to historical research and historiographical debate on Jewish life and history in the period comprised between the mid-18th and the beginning of the 21st century. It wants to be inclusive of all Jewish realities as they developed in the modern period at a global level. From a thematic perspective, Quest covers a diverse array of topics: the Jewish enlightenment and emancipation, the old “nation of the Jews” and the new “State of the Jews”, the traditional religious and the new secular identities, Jewish communal life and intra-Jewish solidarity as well as relations between Jews and other religious, ethnic or national communities. Quest is also a forum for research on Zionism and anti-Zionism, the Shoah and its memory, Jewish modernity and modern antisemitism. To sum up, Quest is open to the political, cultural, religious and institution al history of Jewish communities and societies, and to Jewish means of social, political and cultural expression, to be investigated in their specific contexts. Launching a journal on the history of the Jews in the modern period does not mean that Quest subscribes to a Jewish reading of modernity, nor that it considers Jewish history to represent a separate historiographical paradigm. On the contrary, Quest intends to investigate and contribute to the scholarly debate on the ways in which Jews have contributed to modernity and, vice-versa, the ways Jewish societies and individuals were shaped by modernity.