Continuing in the wake of a fruitful cultural collaboration that began in recent years, the provincial committee of Rome of the National Association of Venezia Giulia and Dalmatia has organized a conference dedicated to the Day of Remembrance at the Casa del Ricordo (a structure that it manages on behalf of Rome Capital together with the Società di Studi Fiumani), involving as speaker Claudio Procaccia (opening photo), Director of the Department of Cultural Heritage and Activities of the Jewish Community of Rome.

“The Jews in Venezia Giulia and the Eastern Adriatic: coexistence and sharing” is the topic that was discussed on Thursday 3 February: the conference is visible on CDM YouTube channel (Multimedia Documentation Center of Julian, Istrian, Rijeka and Dalmatian Culture) and, in compliance with the current health restrictions, saw the participation of both members of the Jewish community and associations of Adriatic exiles.

In his opening speech at the proceedings directed by Prof. Maria Grazia Chiappori (director of the Roman ANVGD), Procaccia recalled the adhesion of the Italian Jewish communities to the Risorgimento, culminating with the convinced participation in the mobilization of the First World War, in which, however, European Jewry experienced the laceration represented by Jews in one uniform shooting other Jews in another uniform. Even more devastating for the Italian Jews was the bolt from the blue represented by the promulgation of the racial laws, which would strike a community that had almost completely assimilated into the social, political (with transversal adherence to fascism, communism and socialism) and cultural fabric. The collapse of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and the diaspora of the “Via Panisperna boys” represented, for example, a brain drain that seriously affected the Italian scientific community. And the worst was yet to come. Procaccia bitterly noted that two world wars that devastated Europe and the totalitarianisms that caused millions of victims are children of the much vaunted “Belle Epoque”. And the tragic consequences of this system also include the foibe and the exodus: «With their departure, the exiles impoverished the lands in which they had been rooted for centuries – observed Procaccia – and for a long time they were unable to enrich the places that had welcomed them. Left on the margins of Italian society, their story was exploited, becoming a myth for the right and a taboo for the left. Research, teaching and dissemination, similarly to what we ask for the Shoah, represent the tools with which to recover this page of Italian history»

Giuliana Eufemia Budicin (Anvgd manager) focused on the history of the Jewish presence in the Istrian peninsula, a topic on which there is not much research carried out by local magazines and historians, even though the newspaper of the Italian Community of Piran “Il trillo” has recently brought attention to the topic. However, it has never been a particularly large component, even though traces of it have remained in various locations. Piran precisely, Capodistria, Rovinj and Pola, especially after the city of the arena became the most important naval base of the Habsburg fleet: in fact, Jewish tombs are found in the military cemetery. After September 8 and the establishment of the Adriatic Coast Operations Zone, just over twenty Jews were deported from Istria, while in the immediate post-war period, “Geppino” Micheletti, the doctor of Jewish descent (original surname Michelstaedter and in fact he was a relative of the famous Carlo) who did his utmost to save the wounded in the Vergarolla attack (August 18, 1946), became a memorable figure. The painter Bruno Mascarelli, born Maskarel in Sarajevo in 1926 and entrusted by his mother to the Catholic nuns of the Bosnian capital when the Ustaša unleashed anti-Semitic persecution, was instead a Rovinj native by adoption. Having converted to Catholicism and then returned to the Jewish faith, at 18 he joined the partisans in Macedonia, after the war he studied Fine Arts in Belgrade and Zagreb to finally find his ideal residence in Rovinj, where he would perfect his artistic activity. Through his own life story and his art, he strongly affirmed the importance of identity and a culture without borders, through his Jewish origins.

Carlo Cetteo Cipriani of the Dalmatian Society of National History spoke about the Jewish communities of Split and Ragusa, highlighting that both arose at the end of the sixteenth century from groups of Jewish traders expelled from Spain and Portugal after the Reconquista and initially transited through the Ottoman Empire. In Split, it was the Senate of Venice that granted the so-called Marranos a “staircase” in which to reside and carry out their commercial activities: a small ghetto was established only at the end of the eighteenth century. In the other case, however, it was the authorities of the aristocratic Republic of Ragusa that granted the settlement and, implicitly, also the possibility of having a synagogue, despite the fact that it was forbidden to practice other religions other than Catholicism in the city of San Biagio, which was nevertheless set in territories populated by Orthodox and Muslims with whom it traded and maintained good neighborly relations. In both Dalmatian towns the Jewish component never exceeded 200 units and the arrival of Napoleon led to the closure of the ghettos (Split 1804, Ragusa 1808). The entrepreneurial adventure of the Stock family began in Split (Lionello founded the distillery of the same name in Trieste), the Morpurgo family flourished there (original surname Marpurg, that is, from Marburg, today's Maribor) and the writer Adolfo Mussafia was born. During the Second World War, Italian troops in Dalmatia welcomed many Croatian Jews fleeing the persecution of the Pavelić regime into special internment camps; they were then transferred to the island of Arbe, from which they escaped on 9 September 1943 before being captured by the Germans.

The Jewish presence in Fiume and Trieste has long been the subject of studies and research, so Professor Donatella Schürzel (President of the Anvgd of Rome) dedicated her speech to the context of Gorizia and Istria. In the capital of the Isonzo, the first ghetto dates back to the last years of the seventeenth century, but in fact the community never experienced phenomena of closure or foreclosure and the Jewish community of the city became increasingly established over time thanks to merchants, entrepreneurs and important representatives of the social and cultural fabric. From the nineteenth century onwards, the presence of intellectuals such as Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, a linguist and glottologist who identified with the struggles of the Risorgimento and coined the neologisms of the Three Venices in order to indicate the lands that had not yet reunited with the Kingdom of Italy after three wars of independence, was evident in the Jewish community of Gorizia. Carlo Michelstaedter (who committed suicide at a very young age) would have had a very complex relationship with his Jewishness, especially in the dialectic with his father Alberto, who did not teach him the language of his ancestors. However, some traits of Israelite culture emerge in the work of the young eclectic writer, close to the emerging irredentist ideals: he calls "rhetoric" what his father calls Lie, his "persuasion" is for Alberto the Truth and the young artist's thought is influenced by cabalistic hints and above all he masters irony like the best Jewish authors. Considering "the Morpurgos", a large family that, starting from their native Dalmatia, saw various family branches establish themselves in many places in Venezia Giulia and the rest of Italy, D. Schürzel remembered Salomone Morpurgo, director of the National Central Library of Florence, one of the greatest librarians of the time, a man of great culture, one of the first exponents of Trieste irredentism and friend of Cesare Battisti. Upon his death in 1942, a deafening silence fell on this highly esteemed intellectual. The racial laws prevented any reference to the passing of a Jew… Another eminent representative of this incredible family was Luciano Morpurgo: a great photographer, he was born in Split, but then came to Rome where he perfected his activity, already realizing in the years between the two world wars “Memoria di una festa”, a work dedicated to the devotion and pilgrimages to the Sanctuary of the Trinity of Vallepietra, a mountain resort in Lazio, in the twenties and thirties, revealing in his reportage anthropological attention and a great sensitivity for a context of Christian spirituality.

Also particularly interesting is the research conducted by Professor Schürzel at the State Archives of Pisino in Istria, which has allowed us to reconstruct the story of Dr. Bruno Peschle, a highly esteemed and well-known Jewish doctor from Pola (here there were about twenty Jewish families, totally united with the urban fabric without any distinction) whose altruism and patriotism would have earned him the approval and praise of the local fascist authorities, ready to apply for the granting of the Knighthood. The advent of racial legislation officially interrupted his career, but many families from Pola continued to seek his care even though he had been struck off from the professional orders and his story was lost in oblivion. «Events like this one – Professor Schürzel underlined – clearly demonstrate how inconsistent it is to talk about “tolerance” and how instead the Jewish component was perfectly within the social and cultural fabric of the Eastern Adriatic, reaching in particular a complete mixing with the native Italianity».

At the end of the conference, Marino Micich (Società di Studi Fiumani) brought a message of greeting, recalling the work of his institute regarding the Jewish presence in Carnaro, and the former councilor of the IX Municipio Roma Capitale Carmen Lalli, who, after having known the microcosm of the Julian-Dalmatian Quarter of Rome as a public administrator, still follows its stimulating cultural production.

Lorenzo Salimbeni
Source: National Association of Venezia Giulia and Dalmatia – 05/02/2022

Registration on the CDM YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QvdpVe9KW0