Enigmas of Modern Jewish Identity

C ^ x *rhat is left of identity when both language and religion are gone? This is the question posed at the outset of a monograph on six twentieth-century Italian writers whom the author, the late H. Stuart Hughes, designates asJewish.1 The difficulty of answering his own question is not reduced because of his choice of writers: Italo Svevo and Alberto Moravia were baptized Catholics whose novels barely contain anyJewish characters. Also a Roman Catholic was the mother of Natalia Ginzburg, who herself grew up without any religious instruction. Both Carlo Levi and Primo Levi suffered under Italian fascism for their political activities, rather than for the faith that they did not practice; nor did either have a strong sense of peoplehood. Of Hughes's writers, only Giorgio Bassani-the author of Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, translated in 1965 as The Garden of theFinzi-Continis, adapted into a famous film by Vittorio De Sica-wrote fiction in which Jewish life was presented not merely as a parenthesis, and he showed a keen interest in cultivating his ethnic heritage. The Jewish patrimony of these half-dozen authors is therefore an elusive one. A distinctive Jewish language had already disappeared in Italy a couple of centuries earlier, and so fully had most of its Jews propelled themselves from the severities of law and ritual that, as Hughes noted, Reform Judaism exercised no attraction because it seemed so unnecessary. Although Carlo Levi and Primo Levi brandished priestly appellations, the surnames of many Italian Jews-a synonym like coreligionists does not seem apt-have often been drawn from the towns their families inhabited. How might the historian of modern Jewry penetrate what Freud, in a seemingly offhand remark to the B'nai B'rith in Vienna in 1926, called innere Identitat

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