The Golden Age of Italian Jews: 1848-1938

"[A] fas­ci­nat­ing and improb­a­ble tale" that "holds many lessons for our own era."
—Jewish Book Council

“With this fine book, Gino Segrè weaves together the history of the golden era for Italian Jews, dating from its optimistic beginning in Piedmont in 1848 to its bitter end, less than 100 years later, with the rise of fascism and the 1938 passage of the Racial Laws. Written with his customary style and warmth, sense of history and penetrating irony, and using the often-moving stories of individual lives, many of them drawn from his own distinguished family tree, Segrè brings to this story of his own deep and abiding roots, an important cultural and political history with many lessons for our own times.”
—Judith R. Goodstein, author of Einstein’s Italian Mathematicians: Ricci, Levi-Civita, and the Birth of General Relativity

The Golden Age of Italian Jews by Gino Segrè covers the nine decades from 1848 to 1938 during which Italian Jews rose from their socially constrained ghetto life to acquire full civil rights and eventually to occupy commanding positions in Italian society. Never more than one tenth of one percent of the total Italian population, Jews became army generals, mayors of major cities, prime ministers, foreign secretaries, and high-ranking university professors.

Segrè explains what made this meteoric rise possible, relating how Jews negotiated their futures with a three-step process: seizing opportunities to gain acceptance, excelling in their trades and professions, and often successfully assimilating into the upper strata of Italian society. By the early twentieth century, Jews were integral to Italian life, but all of their progress came to a sudden cataclysmic end in 1938 with the institution of Italy’s racial laws by the fascist government.

Segrè includes several illustrative anecdotes from his family’s history. One tells of his great-grandfather Marco Treves, who was born in 1814. Treves became an architect, a career path previously closed to Jews: he worked in Rome and Paris before settling in Florence. There, ever a pious Jew, he reached the pinnacle of his career, designing the city’s grand new synagogue and cemetery. His favorite daughter, the author's grandmother Amelia Treves Segrè, was caught in a 1943 Nazi roundup in Rome and transported to Auschwitz where she died.

Clear and concise, The Golden Age of Italian Jews conveys the dramatic rise and brutal fall of Jews in Italy. It is a poignant and important story.