The Jewish Ghetto of Turin and the March Toward Italian Unification

As the capital of Piedmont — the region named for its position below the Italian Alps along the borders of France and Switzerland — the city of Turin was an unlikely place from which the modernization of Italy, and Italian Jewry, should emerge. The thousand-year-old House of Savoy had had modest beginnings as a family headed first by counts, then dukes, then princes, and finally kings. For centuries, it had been caught in the conflict between the Holy Roman emperors and the popes. More recently, it was squeezed between the dominant regional powers, France and Austria. Indeed, its capital had long been Chambéry, in present- day France, before moving to Turin. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Savoy Crown fought on the side of the old-order powers. After the fall of Napoleon, its absolutist state was fully restored. For those who think of a common language as a central criterion for nationhood, Turin was an especially unlikely aspirant to the role of first capital of united Italy. Indeed,

the last “Piedmont” king and first King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II, was a francophone, forever ill-at-ease in Italian. By the same token, if you have occasion to leaf through the correspondence of Victor Emmanuel’s famous prime minister, the Count of Cavour, who directed the unification process, you will delight in the douces mélodies of Cavour’s native French, but find little of the lingua di Dante.

For most of its history, Turin was no more a Jewish city than, strictly speaking, an Italian one, especially compared to Rome, capital of the ancient empire and home to an uninterrupted Jewish community that pre-dated the destruction of the Second Temple. The first Jews settled in Turin in the fifteenth century. Savoy rulers initially granted residency permits on a sporadic basis. A ghetto was created in the city in 1679. It replaced a previous Jewish quarter and may have been initiated more in the spirit of urban reorganization than as

The Jewish Ghetto

of Turin and

the March Toward

Italian Unification

L. Scott Lerner

Page  31 anti-Jewish discrimination. Only after Victor Amadeo II became King of Sardinia, ruling over a much expanded territory, did the House of Savoy finally cede to ecclesiastical pressure, in the climate of the Counter Reformation, and extend the obligation to inhabit a ghetto to all Jewish subjects of Piedmont. Because numerous cities and towns did not have ghettos, many Jews were transferred to Turin. It was thus that a concrete space of the ghetto became identified as the symbolic place of Jews in city life.

Unlike most Italian ghettos, Turin’s was established in a preexistent construction, in the center of the city, occupying a large square block with several interior courtyards. The structure had originally belonged to an urban plan by a famous architect and city planner, Carlo Castellamonte. For this reason, the buildings were not readily distinguishable from neighboring structures, until exterior- facing windows were banned and the effects of gradual overcrowding, in both the original Ghetto Vecchio and adjacent Ghetto Piccolo,

became acute. The latter also featured a greater number of stories than neighboring structures of similar dimensions. By the 1830s, city authorities became concerned about the implications for public health of the poor hygienic conditions within the overcrowded and impoverished ghetto. In the decades leading up to unification, the ghetto increasingly came to be perceived as an impediment to the “progress” that was ever on the lips of the reformers who strove to ensure that Italy would soon join the ranks of her more progressive neighbors.

At mid-century, a vision of a united Italy was shared by republicans, revolutionaries, liberals (favoring constitutional monarchy), and liberal Catholics, and it was anyone’s guess which of these groups might gain the upper

hand should the Risorgimento become successful. A crucial turning point came in 1846, when Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti, the favorite of the liberal and moderate factions of the College of Cardinals, was elected pope, generating a tremendous sense of hope and optimism throughout the peninsula. Influential liberal Catholics envisaged a unified Italy in the form of a confederacy headed by the pope. When Pius IX refused to make war against Austria, however, revolution broke out in Rome, the pope went into exile, and when he returned with the help of the French, there began a period of reaction on the part of the Vatican that would last the better part of seven decades. Italian unification would thus proceed in direct opposition to a profoundly antimodern papacy. Although the Kingdom of Sardinia had not been the most liberal of the Italian states in the first half of the nineteenth century, it quickly seized the opportunity to lead the charge toward unification. In 1848, it became the first Italian state to issue a constitution and to emancipate resident Jews. Both acts would become defining characteristics of united Italy a little more than a decade later.

When Turin became the first declared capital of Italy in 1861, the peninsula immediately came to be dominated by two poles: the Italians based in Turin, and the papal dominion in Rome. As a logical consequence of the gradual march toward unification, all the Italian ghettos would be abolished. Yet even more was at stake: in the war waged against the Catholic Church for territory, public opinion and national identity, the Risorgimento depended on the eradication of the institution of the ghettos. Indeed, no sooner would Italians abolish the ghettos than the Church would ensure their resurgence in popular literature and journalism.

Having played a major role in procuring their own emancipation in the 1840s — paving the way for Jewish emancipation throughout Italy — Turin’s Jewish leaders also took the lead in redefining the role and status of Jews within

Page  32 the new nation. They accomplished this goal by reinscribing Jewish space on the urban landscape of their capital city. The old ghetto, no longer an active institution regulating Jewish life, but still home to a high proportion of the Jewish population of the city — the poorest part — would have to be erased, and a new public sign of Turinese — and Italian — Jewry would be erected in its place. The very same member of the Jewish community, in fact, Alessandro Malvano, oversaw both initiatives: the redevelopment of the ghetto for residential and commercial purposes (along with the displacement of hundreds of poor families) and the building of a monumental synagogue. The structure originally intended as the new synagogue of Turin, the Mole Antonelliana, took on a life of its own at the hands of its ambitious, and arguably unethical, architect, Alessandro Antonelli, and has since become the symbol of the city. The building that took its place as the city’s synagogue, by Enrico Petiti, was a more humble project, expressive, in a subtler register, of Jewish life in Turin and the modern nation.

For a manageable price, Antonelli had promised a square-planned stone structure that could accommodate not only a main sanctuary

seating almost 1,000 men, but also the requisite women’s gallery, rabbi’s residence, school, bakery, ritual bath, offices, storage spaces, and designated areas for lectures and ceremonies. The structure was to stand 47 meters high and consist of two levels and a modest dome. If it had stayed like this, the building would still be the Synagogue of Turin. The reason it changed is that Antonelli had other designs. He was far less concerned with fulfilling his contract to provide a functional building to the Israeliti of Turin than he was with leaving an eternal legacy to the world. By the time it was finally completed in 1908, the Mole Antonelliana, as

it was now called, measured 163 meters and was one third taller than the dome of St. Peter’s Cathedral. The emblem of Jewish Emancipation had gone swerving off course. In the 1990s, an appropriate use was finally found for this remarkable, impractical structure: as home to the National Museum of the Cinema, the vast interior space it enclosed became a giant screen on which to project the intangible of the cinema.

Against the excesses of the Mole, the new synagogue, completed in 1884, posed a stark contrast. Years after the new nation’s capital had moved first to Florence and then to Rome, it was built on the other side of town. It is an example of the Moorish vogue in synagogue architecture. Its dimensions are almost identical with those of the Valdesian neo-Gothic Church nearby, erected several decades earlier, and vastly more modest than those of the Mole. In one important respect the Synagogue of Turin typifies the eclectic architecture of emancipation: it affirms, by its monumentality, the equivalent status of Judaism with Christianity, and Jewish belonging to the city and Italian nation, while also expressing, thanks to the contrast of its Moorish style with the rest of the urban landscape, a clear sense that Jews did

not intend to blend fully with Christian Italians.

Turin Synagogue, 1884, right. Mole Antonelliana, below.

L. Scott Lerner