A richly researched, fluently written history of Italian Judaism, revealing its centrality to the rise of art and science.
Deep roots in the heart of Christianity.
“It is impossible to think of a history of Italy without the Jews,” writes Foa, an Italian historian. Her book, she notes, is “also a history of Italy, an Italy distinguished by the existence of the Jewish minority in its bosom.” Jews have lived throughout Europe since the Roman Empire, and nowhere, Foa argues, was Jewish culture transformed as intimately through imperial and, later, church life as in Italy. Roman emperors often sought accommodation with Jewish congregations. With the conversion of the empire to Christianity in the early fourth century and with the establishment of the Catholic Church, Italian Judaism shaped itself through persecution and isolation. The Venetian ghetto may have enisled Jews from others’ lives, but Jewish financiers remained central to the success of the Italian banking families and, ultimately, to the flowering of the Renaissance itself. The author brings out aspects of Jewish history little-known to modern readers: For example, kabbalistic mysticism emerged as a central feature of Italian Judaism, and it had an immense impact on the observations of scientists in the early modern period. This was a symbolic way of thinking, a faith in the power of numbers, and the miracle of the word. Would there have been a Galileo without this climate of Jewish inquiry? Would there have been, too, the florescence of holy and secular music without “the musical preeminence of the Jews?” The story of Italian Jews moves through the Enlightenment into the 20th century, when fascism pushed scientists, such as Enrico Fermi, and writers, such as Primo Levi, to the exiled brink of brilliance. Italian Jews shaped Western intellectual life as much as their Eastern European brethren, and this book is replete with stories of the men and women who continue to make the modern world.
A richly researched, fluently written history of Italian Judaism, revealing its centrality to the rise of art and science.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9780691218687
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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