Jonathan Malino
Merano, the Jews and Italian Culture: Anomalous Familiarity
Merano is in the region Italy denominates "Alto Adige," but which most of its inhabitants refer to as "SudTirol." This was its sole name until 1918, when the Allied victory transformed a lure into a prize for Italy's having joined the winning side in WWI. In modern times, the first Jews came to Merano in the 1830s, and played an important role in transforming Austro-Hungarian Meran, from a sleepy medieval Tirolean town into a thriving winter spa, visited by fin-de-siècle Jewish intellectuals whose cultural flowering I intended to teach. There was a Jewish bank, Jewish doctors, kosher hotels, a fascinating cemetery, a sanitorium for poor Jews with tuberculosis, and many Jewish-owned shops. The rabbi in Meran during WWI was Adolf Altmann, the father of one of my undergraduate teachers, Alexander Altmann, a professor at Brandeis and a leading 20th century scholar of Judaism.
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