Campania, at the roots of the Jewish communities

Campania, at the roots of the Jewish communities. Synagogues in Naples, Benevento and Salerno. The 1540th century Ghetto in Capua, active until XNUMX

Synagogues in Naples, Benevento and Salerno. The very ancient Jewish communities in the period of Ancient Rome in Bacoli, Brusciano, Ercolano, Marano, Nola, Nuceria Alfaterna, Pozzuoli and Stabiae

The testimonies of the Jewish presence in Campania are numerous and important, because they intersect with the two-thousand-year history of the territory. Even if today the Jews in Campania are little more than a hundred, compared to the thousand of a century ago (after the Second World War in Naples alone there were 534), the relevance of this presence is absolute because it embodies indisputable values.

In its long journey, in fact, Jewish civilization has also preserved strong elements of identity in Italy: for example, social cohesion, the propensity for trade, the deep bond with Jerusalem, the uniqueness of the Jewish God, the censorship of idolatry, the rigid dietary prescriptions, the observance of the Sabbath, often considered a kind of privilege due to its implications in working and military life. A wide range of peculiarities that invites historical study, as rarely in a people is there such a close interconnection between the distant past and the present.

This overlap between different historical periods is confirmed in the pages of the book “L'edera e la stella”, just published by Herkules book, written by Professor Salvatore Russo, professor of Greek at the Pontifical Urbaniana University and reviewed by Unsic.

In the 318 pages of the volume, this unicum of Jewish communities emerges clearly, which has ended up not only by marking groups that tend to be entrenched in life around the synagogues, but also by re-proposing similar problems over time, such as the internal contrast between absolute fidelity to the teachings of the fathers, with isolation and oppression as a frequent outcome, and the path to integration, with the consequent risk of liquefying the rich heritage of values.

It is precisely this dualism between the strenuous defense of traditions and the choice of cultural annexation that is the guiding thread of Professor Russo's research, which focuses in particular on the embryonic phases of the diasporas, with specific attention to the important Jewish-Hellenistic community that settled for 400 years in Alexandria, Egypt, between the XNUMXnd century BC and AD, where all the factors characterizing the subsequent Jewish history up to the present day are already present.

The author's analysis is rigorous and in-depth starting from the use of sources reported in the original language (Greek and Latin) and translated by the expert scholar into Italian: the four books of the Maccabees, the Septuagint (the first translation of the Old Testament into a foreign language, Greek), the works of Strabo (60 BC-21 AD) and the four texts of the man of arms Titus Josephus Flavius ​​(37-100 AD), a proud Jew and Roman citizen.

From the pages of the volume emerges first of all the troubles linked to the Palestinian land, crucial for international trade and therefore always the object of appetites, forcing the Jews to continuous exoduses. The first already during the Babylonian conquest of Judea, then during the reign of Ptolemy I up to the emperor Vespasian who, razing Jerusalem to the ground, will give rise to an interminable exodus.

The diasporas directly concern Italy, where Jews have resided since the 40nd century BC, when numerous merchants, artisans and scholars arrived in Rome from Judea, who were joined, on several occasions, by prisoners of war. In the following centuries, significant Jewish communities settled first in Northern Italy and then throughout the South, welcomed by Arabs and Normans, frowned upon by the church. In the XNUMXth century, out of eight million Italians there were already over XNUMX Jews, a presence that has remained constant to the present day. This is how current events and history overlap once again.

The author of the book “The Ivy and the Star” focuses attention on the crucial meeting between theHebraism and Hellenism, which matures with the crisis of classical Greece and the hegemonic conquests of Alexander the Great from the Nile to the Indus until the conquest of Egypt by Rome (Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian): the Greek cities, maintaining the role of cultural guide, determine an osmosis between Hellenism and the millenary Egyptian culture, placing the Jews in front of the usual dilemma between the adaptation to the new world, with the obligatory path of integration, and its rejection, with the choice of isolation, but also of internal conflicts and persecutions. The study of this period is crucial to understand the subsequent Jewish history, made of alternations between tolerance, oppression and diasporas.

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