UC San Diego

My dissertation explores the way fear of Jewish identity haunts the Italian literary imagination and allows a new understanding of the Risorgimento as a negotiation between centuries-old religious struggles. My first chapter begins with the establishment of the Venetian ghetto in 1516 described in diaries by Marino Sanuto alongside Pietro Aretino’s drama La Cortigiana and correspondence between Sarra Copia Sulam and Catholic bishop Baldassare Bonifacio. Reading these texts together reveals two competing perspectives – one which envisions Jewish identity as ‘subaltern’ through coded language that emphasized the

need for confinement and conversion and the other which advocates for tolerance and integration.

The second chapter examines the diary of Anna del Monte within the larger epidemic of forced baptisms and the exchange between G.B.G. D’Arco and Benedetto Frizzi on the role of Jews in their Catholic communities. My analysis suggests that the tensions in their writings reveal a strong connection between the rhetoric of fear and confinement and its actuality. In this way, Jewish identity continues to haunt the literary imagination and the same tensions in 16th-17th century Venice are made visible in social thought in the 18th century.

My third chapter reads the portrayal of Jewish identity in Risorgimento writings as a culmination of this haunting. This chapter provides a radically new interpretation of canonical texts which reveals two competing nationalisms – one based on an assumed ethnoreligious heritage and the other a pluralist perspective based on a shared sense of political affiliation. Incorporating works by Cesare Balbo, Antonio Fogazzaro, and Vittorio Alfieri facilitates my reading of Ugo Foscolo’s epistolary novel, Le ultime lettere, as an iteration of the Wandering Jew narrative.

Focusing each chapter on a different snapshot of Italian history shows how, across time, Jewish identity occupied a precarious position with an uncertain future which contextualizes the consequences of assimilation into the pluralist national cause or exclusion from the emerging ethnoreligious nationalist movement of the 19th century. Thus, my research enables the field of Italian literature to move beyond the traditional ‘secular versus Catholic’ competitive view and instead understands Risorgimento writings as way to envisage solutions to prior religious tensions.