Bookhouse: American Sephardi Federation, Centro Primo Levi, Dan Wyman Books, a cooperative initiative.
New book roundtable with Bernard Dov Cooperman, Serena Di Nepi, and Germano Maifreda.
Reservation is required: rsvp@primolevicenter.org
Jews and State Building: Early Modern Italy, and Beyond. Edited by Bernard Dov Cooperman, Serena Di Nepi, and Germano Maifreda. Leiden-Boston, Brill: 2025
In 2019, two scholarly meetings (University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins, and University of Rome La Sapienza) sought to explore forms of cooperation, imitation, exchange, alliance, and interaction between Jews and Christians in early modern Italy. The research project aimed at challenging the traditional paradigm that looks at the history of Christian-Jewish interactions only through the prism of anti-judaism and at Italian history in the sole perspective of the realization of the nation-state. These exchanges have highlighted the self-standing nature of the kingdoms, principalities, signorie, and republics that flourished in the peninsula, as well as strategies of coexistence between different religions and cultures that helped shape early modern political and social history in what was to become modern Europe..
The editors of this multifaceted volume will discuss its content, historiographical background, and prospects.
Historiography in Motion: Jews and State Building
