ABSTRACT
The main characteristics of the history of the Jews in Italy in the early Modern Age are connections, not isolation, and mobility. First of all, this history must be inserted into the much larger European and global system of Jewish communities, in which networks of family relationships, economic exchange, and cultural, religious, and “national” commonalities conditioned individual and collective choices and behaviors. Second, what emerges is the dense network of relations that these communities maintained with the surrounding non-Jewish context. There is no self-referential “history of the Jews”, separate from Italian and European history. There is a single history, interconnected and global, in a system of exchanges between minorities and majority contexts. The third characteristic, mobility, is linked to these first elements, a consequence of the fact that Italian Judaism traces its most distant origins to a process of immigration. Thus, for twenty centuries, Italian Judaism developed with a strongly distinctive trait created by migrations, with a plurality of paths and identities that leads us to speak not of Judaism but of Judaisms.
