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The history of the Jews in Trieste goes back over 800 years.
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The history of the Jews in Trieste goes back over 800 years.
The oldest official document available mentioning a Jewish settlement in Trieste goes back to the year 1236. [1] It records a bishop who borrowed 500 marche from David Daniele, originally of Carinthia, now residing in Trieste.
After Trieste sided with Austria in 1382, Jewish people from Germany, some subjects to the Austrian dukes while others to local princes, came to live in Italy. Lacking a synagogue and legal recognition, the small Ashkenazi Jewish community held services in a private home from the 15th century. The nucleus of Jewish Trieste was, for much of the next few centuries, formed by Ashkenazi moneylenders, such as Solomon of Nuremberg, who signed a contract with the city to reside as the "public banker". [1] Other Jewish families resided in Trieste under the protections and privileges granted by various Holy Roman emperors, in exchange for services of "goods and blood" during times of war; these included sovereign justice, the right to practice Judaism unmolested, the right to residence in any town where Jews already lived, which included Vienna, immunity from any taxes not levied on Christian merchants, and others. [2] The community also included scholars; at least four Jewish students attended the University of Padua and the work of rabbi Menahem Zion Porto still survives in the National Central Library in Florence. [2]
Relations between gentile Trieste and the Jewish community were largely positive until the mid-17th century, when the general economic decline of the city began to fuel resentment against the Jews. A notable exception to this was the accusation of Jewish culpability for the plague outbreak in 1601. [2]
From 1684 to 1785 the authorities ordered the construction of a ghetto and the compulsory residence there; the first order for the implementation of a ghetto in Trieste came from Vienna in 1693 and was instituted in Trieste in 1697. [2] However, after the first Jewish public synagogue was built, the Jews from Trieste felt the need to give a constitution to their community; therefore the evening of 14 December 1746, the chiefs called a meeting of the particolari, that is the heads of families who contributed to the expenses of the community.
In the beginning of the 18th century, Trieste was declared a free port by the Habsburgs, with the first free port patents inviting persons of "any religion or nationality" to both trade and settle in Trieste. [3] Trieste official explicitly argued for a policy of luring foreign merchants, with a focus on Greek and Jewish traders, with privileges of freedom of commerce and settlement. Under this policy, the Jewish population of Trieste began to increase dramatically, from under 100 at the beginning of the 18th century to 1,250 in 1800, constituting 5-7% of the total population. Jews in Trieste were granted a range of liberties, including ownership of real property, free and equal engagement in both inland and maritime commerce, artisanry, and manufacturing. The wealthiest Jewish merchants held seats on the Trieste Commodity Exchange from its founding in 1755, holding 6 of the 42 seats by the early 1780s. [3] By the end of the 18th century, the Trieste Jewish community was primarily composed of Italian and Ashkenazi Jews; the Sephardic Jewish population in Trieste was small but growing. [4]
On 19 April 1771, Maria Theresa granted two Sovereign Licenses to the Jews of Trieste, licenses that constitute real regulations. [3] In 1782, with the famous Edict of Tolerance, Joseph II admitted the Jews to some charges in the stock exchange and to other liberal professions. A year later the Jewish primary school was opened with the name of Scuole Pie Normali Israelitiche. The following year, in 1784, the gates of the Ghetto were opened so that the Jews of Trieste could live together with their fellow citizens of different religions; however most of them continued to live in the ghetto. Indeed, after a short occupation of the French in 1797, they began to build two new synagogues in the street of the Jewish schools, but they were demolished during the first quarter of the 20th century when the Old Town was destroyed.
In the 19th century, the Jews of Trieste become more and more important in various fields such as humanities, industry, and commerce, and they also gradually grew in number. Jews became pioneers in the realms of banking, commerce, and insurance that drove the city's spectacular growth. They held prominent political positions, established important firms and founded or were leading figures in insurance companies such as Assicurazioni Generali, RAS, and Lloyd Adriatico. Several local Jewish families were even raised to the nobility by the House of Habsburg. Importantly, too, the Trieste Jewish community produced towering cultural figures such as the writer Italo Svevo and poet Umberto Saba, both of whom today are commemorated with busts in the city's public gardens.
Also in the 1830s, there was an influx of Jews from Corfu, leading to the establishment of a Sephardic community alongside the long-standing Ashkenazi presence.
One of Jewish Trieste's most illustrious sons, Rabbi Professor Samuel David Luzzatto, (1800–1865) known as the Shadal, was a philosopher, poet, Biblical scholar, and translator. He directed the newly established rabbinical seminary, Collegio Rabbinico in Padua. His scholarship combined the deep erudition of the medieval rabbis with the newer trends in Judaic scholarship emanating from the enlightened Haskalah circles of northern Europe. He was a master of Hebrew philology and translated the Bible into Italian. His literary circle included Hebrew poets, such as his cousin Rachel Luzzatto Morpurgo — whose sonnets, elegies, and wedding poems in the style of the Spanish Hebrew religious poets and the Italian Renaissance related mostly to family and biographical incidents.
Although most Triestine Jews were not of Italian origin, they rallied to the unification of Italy. The peace settlement brought Trieste into the Kingdom of Italy in 1919. Immigration swelled Jewish numbers to 6,000; Jews were prominent in the city's economy and assimilation spread unchecked. In 1910, the affluent Trieste Jewish community approved the construction of the Great Synagogue of Trieste. Designed by the Christian architect, Ruggero and Arduino Berlam, its plan followed the trend of other central European communities in a style reminiscent of Middle Eastern buildings, ancient and modern.
The Trieste Jewish community supported Jewish settlements in Palestine decades before Theodor Herzl's call for the establishment of either a Jewish state or political Zionism, beginning in the 1860s with calls to support an agricultural school in Jaffa. [5]
By the turn of the 20th century, the Jewish community supported Zionist efforts both philanthropically and as a link to Italy's political and economic interests in the Mediterranean. Trieste became known as the "gateway to Zion" as a result of the city's ties to the Habsburg commercial networks and connections to trading communities in central and eastern Europe. It was also the site of the publication of the Israelite Courier (Italian : Il corriere israelitico), founded in 1862, the first Jewish periodical in Italian to support Zionism. [5] Trieste was also the home of Dante Lattes, a leader of Italian Jews, champion of Zionism, and grandfather of Amos Luzzatto. Triestine Jews led early efforts from Italy to help fleeing Central European refugees escape Hitler's regime.
In 1938 the Fascist and racist legislation was introduced in Italy and in 1940 there were some attacks against the Jews. In reaction to the school and job discrimination enacted in 1938, the Trieste Jewish community opened a private secondary school, which operated until 1943, when the Germans took direct control of the city. The Nazi threat prompted those with means to try to escape. By 1940, half of the city's Jews had left the city, although some chose to convert. The number of Jews in this time who converted to Catholicism was very high in comparison to other Italian Jewish communities. [6] Italian Fascists desecrated the synagogue in 1942. During the Shoah (Holocaust) the Nazis made round-ups against the Jews on 19 October 1943 and 29 January 1944; in the latter the target were the old and sick people living in the old people's homes of Trieste, including the Jewish one.
Trieste was one of the major European ports of embarkation in the mass emigration to the Americas in the last part of the 19th century. With the approach of the Second World War, it was the Gateway to Zion, an emergency exit for Jews leaving Europe for Israel. Two ships operated on the Trieste - Haifa route. The Jewish captain, Umberto Steindler of the SS Jerusalem boasted over one hundred trips to Palestine between the world wars. After being turned back to its homeport because of the outbreak of war, the Jerusalem weighed anchor once again on 1 September 1939, and arrived in Haifa with 600 Jewish immigrants.
After World War II around 1,500 Jews remained in Trieste, they restored the Synagogue and renewed Jewish communal institutions; in 1965 the number lowered to 1,052 out of 280,000 inhabitants. This drop was mostly due to a lack of balance between death and birth rates. Today the Jewish community counts about 600 members. The Jewish community of Trieste today represents the organizational structure of the association of Jewish people living in Trieste. The organization was established in order to provide for the needs of the Jewish community, and to establish a statute and appropriate guidelines.
Several museums in Trieste shed further light on local Jewish culture and history:
The old cemetery was created in 1446, when Michael Norimberga bought a vineyard to make a cemetery for himself and his coreligionists. The Jews from Trieste buried their dead there for four centuries. In the middle of the nineteenth century the cemetery became too small, so it was extended until it reached the slopes under the Castle of S. Giusto. In 1843 a new Jewish cemetery was built near the Catholic cemetery of Sant'Anna.
Italian Jews or Roman Jews can be used in a broad sense to mean all Jews living in or with roots in Italy, or, in a narrower sense, to mean the Italkim, an ancient community living in Italy since the Ancient Roman era, who use the Italian liturgy as distinct from those Jewish communities in Italy dating from medieval or modern times who use the Sephardic liturgy or the Nusach Ashkenaz.
The Synagogue of Trieste is a Jewish house of worship located in the city of Trieste, northern Italy.
Palestinian Jews or Jewish Palestinians were the Jewish inhabitants of the Palestine region prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
The history of the Jewish community of Venice, which is the capital of the Veneto region of Italy has been well known since the medieval era.
The First Aliyah, also known as the agriculture Aliyah, was a major wave of Jewish immigration (aliyah) to Ottoman Palestine between 1881 and 1903. Jews who migrated in this wave came mostly from Eastern Europe and from Yemen, stimulated by pogroms and violence against the Jewish communities in those areas. An estimated 25,000 Jews immigrated. Many of the European Jewish immigrants during the late 19th-early 20th century period gave up after a few months and went back to their country of origin, often suffering from hunger and disease.
The history of the Jews in Slovenia and areas connected with it goes back to the times of Ancient Rome. In 2011, the small Slovenian Jewish community was estimated at 500 to 1,000 members, of whom around 130 are officially registered, most of whom live in the capital, Ljubljana.
The Jewish people of Bosnia and Herzegovina are one of the minority peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to country's constitution. The history of Jews in Bosnia and Herzegovina spans from the arrival of the first Bosnian Jews as a result of the Spanish Inquisition to the survival of the Bosnian Jews through the Holocaust and the Yugoslav Wars. Judaism and the Jewish community in Bosnia and Herzegovina have one of the oldest and most diverse histories of all the former Yugoslav states, and is more than 500 years old, in terms of permanent settlement. Then a self-governing province of the Ottoman Empire, Bosnia was one of the few territories in Europe that welcomed Jews after their expulsion from Spain.
Judah he-Hasid Segal ha-Levi was a Jewish preacher who led the largest organized group of Jewish immigrants to the Land of Israel in the 17th and 18th centuries.
From the founding of political Zionism in the 1890s, Haredi Jewish leaders voiced objections to its secular orientation, and before the establishment of the State of Israel, the vast majority of Haredi Jews were opposed to Zionism, like early Reform Judaism, but with distinct reasoning. This was chiefly due to the concern that secular nationalism would redefine the Jewish nation from a religious community based in their alliance to God for whom adherence to religious laws were "the essence of the nation's task, purpose, and right to exists," to an ethnic group like any other as well as the view that it was forbidden for the Jews to re-constitute Jewish rule in the Land of Israel before the arrival of the Messiah. Those rabbis who did support Jewish resettlement in Palestine in the late 19th century had no intention to conquer Palestine and declare its independence from the rule of the Ottoman Turks, and some preferred that only observant Jews be allowed to settle there.
The Old Yishuv were the Jewish communities of the region of Palestine during the Ottoman period, up to the onset of Zionist aliyah waves, and the consolidation of the New Yishuv by the end of World War I. Unlike the New Yishuv, characterized by secular and Zionist ideologies promoting labor and self-sufficiency, the Old Yishuv primarily consisted of religious Jews who relied on external donations (halukka) for support.
The Hebron massacre was the killing of sixty-seven or sixty-nine Jews on 24 August 1929 in Hebron, then part of Mandatory Palestine, by Arabs incited to violence by rumors that Jews were planning to seize control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The event also left scores seriously wounded or maimed. Jewish homes were pillaged and synagogues were ransacked. Some of the 435 Jews in Hebron who survived were hidden by local Arab families, although the extent of this phenomenon is debated. Soon after, all Hebron's Jews were evacuated by the British authorities. Many returned in 1931, but almost all were evacuated at the outbreak of the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine. The massacre formed part of the 1929 Palestine riots, in which a total of 133 Jews and 110 Arabs were killed, the majority of the latter by British police and military, and brought the centuries-old Jewish presence in Hebron to an end.
The Jewish Community of Gdańsk dates back to at least the 15th century though for many centuries it was separated from the rest of the city. Under Polish rule, Jews acquired limited rights in the city in the 16th and 17th centuries and after the city's 1793 incorporation into Prussia the community largely assimilated to German culture. In the 1920s, during the period of the Free City of Danzig, the number of Jews increased significantly and the city acted as a transit point for Jews leaving Eastern Europe for the United States and Canada. Antisemitism existed among German nationalists and the persecution of Jews in the Free City intensified after the Nazis came to power in 1933. During World War II and the Holocaust the majority of the community either emigrated or were murdered. Since the fall of communism Jewish property has been returned to the community, and an annual festival, the Baltic Days of Jewish Culture, has taken place since 1999.
The Port Jew concept was formulated by Lois Dubin and David Sorkin in the late 1990s as a social type that describes Jews who were involved in the seafaring and maritime economy of Europe, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Helen Fry suggests that they could be considered to have been "the earliest modern Jews."
The history of the Jews in Florence can be traced over nine hundred years. Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. The Jews of Florence have one of the oldest continuous Jewish communities in Europe. The historic Jewish community in Florence is one of the largest and one of the most influential Jewish communities in Italy. The Jewish community in Florence also serves the smaller neighboring Jewish communities in Pisa, Livorno, and Siena.
Lebanese Jewish Migration to Israel included thousands of Jews, who moved to Israel, similar to how 1948 witnessed the emigration of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries. Yet, "unlike Jewish communities in many other Arab states, the Jewish communities in Lebanon grew after 1948 and it was not until the end of the civil war of 1975 that the community started to emigrate." This "Lebanese difference" derives from two components: more positive Lebanese relationships with European authorities during the French Mandate than experienced by other Arab states, leading to a more pluralistic outlook in Lebanon than its neighbors; some elements in the Maronite Christian community who were tolerant of Zionism.
The history of Jews in Ancona, Italy, dates back to the 10th century, when records show the first instance of land rented to a Jew. At some point, a synagogue was built, which was destroyed by an earthquake in 1279. By the 1300s, the Jewish community was more established, and there was an influx of immigrants from Germany. Jews faced special taxes and restrictions on where they could live.
The Jewish Museum “Carlo and Vera Wagner", is located in via del Monte 5/7, Trieste, Italy. It was inaugurated in 1993, by the initiative of Mario Stock together with the generous support of the Wagner-de Polo family.
The Jewish Museum of Rome is situated in the basement of the Great Synagogue of Rome and offers both information on the Jewish presence in Rome since the second century BCE and a large collection of works of art produced by the Jewish community. A visit to the museum includes a guided tour of the Great Synagogue and of the smaller Spanish Synagogue in the same complex.
The Canton Synagogue is one of five synagogues in the Jewish Ghetto of Venice, Italy. Established only four years after the nearby Scuola Grande Tedesca (1528), it is the second oldest Venetian synagogue. Its origins are uncertain: it might have been constructed as a prayer room for a group of Provençal Jews soon after their arrival in Venice, or as a private synagogue for a prominent local family. Repeatedly remodeled throughout its history, its interior is predominantly decorated in the Baroque and Rococo styles.
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