Women and Jews in imagined communities: their legal and political situation in German and Italian nation-building

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the legal and political status of women and Jews during the phase of German and Italian nation-building, addressing both the lack of participation as well as the strategies of historical actors who hoped to be accepted as equal members of the national community. It focuses on a number of exemplary protagonists whose initiatives demonstrate the options Jewish women in particular had for participating in the development of national consciousness. Their twofold outsider status as women and Jews led to different models of identities between national and Jewish loyalties. In this context, the central importance of secular Jewish identities will be considered, an approach that allows for a differentiated way of looking at the potential and the weaknesses of different ideologies of integration. These have yet to be considered from a comparative German–Italian perspective although they indicate the ‘divided union of wills’ of the two nations.

RIASSUNTO

Il presente saggio esamina la situazione legale e politica delle donne e delle minoranze ebraiche durante il periodo della costruzione della nazione tedesca e italiana. L’articolo si concentra sui deficit di partecipazione nonché sulle strategie dei protagonisti che speravano di essere accolti come membri alla pari della comunità nazionale. Una particolare attenzione è rivolta ad alcuni personaggi esemplari, le cui iniziative evidenziano le modalità che le donne ebree in particolare avevano per partecipare alla creazione di una coscienza nazionale. La loro posizione come persone emarginate due volte in quanto donne ed ebree risultò in diversi modelli di identità fra lealtà nazionali ed ebraiche. A tale proposito viene considerata l’importanza centrale delle identità ebraiche secolari. Questo approccio consente di analizzare i potenziali e le debolezze delle diverse ideologie di integrazione. Esse diventano indicatori dell’eterogeneità dei racconti di fondazione delle due nazioni e delle loro unità divise.

KEYWORDS:

• Liberal Italy
• German Empire
• nation-building
• emancipation
• secularity

PAROLE CHIAVE:

• Italia liberale
• Impero tedesco
• costruzione della nazione
• emancipazione
• laicismo

Notes

1. In the Italian south, there had been no Jewish communities since the expulsions during the sixteenth century by the Spanish rulers.

2. Sara Levi Nathan to Janet Nathan Rosselli, 2 May 1872, Fondazione Rosselli Torino, Archivio di Janet Nathan, C 1103.

3. Cf. “Programma per la fondazione d’un giardino infantile,” La Donna II, 53 (April 1869), 231–232.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruth Nattermann

Ruth Nattermann is assistant professor (Privatdozentin) at the Department of Contemporary European History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. Prior to this appointment, she was assistant professor at the Bundeswehr University Munich, and held postdoctoral positions at the German Historical Institute in Rome and at the LMU Munich. She has been principal investigator of the international DFG-network of scholars “Gender – Nation – Emancipation”. Among her most recent publications: Jüdinnen in der frühen italienischen Frauenbewegung (1861–1945). Biografien, Diskurse und transnationale Vernetzungen. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter 2020; ed. with Martin Baumeister and Philipp Lenhard, Rethinking the Age of Emancipation. Comparative and Transnational Perspectives on Gender, Family, and Religion in Italy and Germany, 1800–1918, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books 2020.