Murray Baumgarten
"What new happens to me": Leone Modena, Herman Broder, and the Construction of Modern Jewish Identity
Summary
Dr. Murray Baumgarten's talk was on Leone Modena, focusing on how his autobiography reveals the fault lines of his identity. His detailed narrative reveals and hides his accomplishments: communal life and personal life entwine. As he recounts his effort to make a living as a religious scholar, who becomes of necessity and through his diverse talents and genius, a jack of all Jewish religious trades, his narrative implies his continuing discontent with Jewish communal life. While he tells of his ambition and struggle to achieve rabbinic ordination in his wanderings from Ferrara to Ancona to Modena as an itinerant teacher and preacher, we also discover how much he feels at home only in Venice. While Venice has given Modena great opportunities it has also simultaneously accentuated his abject state as a Jew, sequestered in the Ghetto. Dr. Baumgarten argues that Modena's account expresses the contradictions in the self-identification of a representative and celebrated Venetian Jew. His narrative is informed by the unspoken assumptions of Venetian life: it is an important document in the recovery of the latent meanings of Jewish life in Venice in the seventeenth century, and reveals how the Jews turned in Sennett's words the "accursed place" of the Ghetto into a sacred space. That is, they turned the conditions of their exile into the opportunities of diasporic life.Dr. Baumgarten also reported briefly on my Dickens talk in Genoa. That paper focused on Dickens's view of Venice. I noted that Venice challenges Dickens's abilities as a writer: as the critic Tore Rem notes, "Venice made an impression on Dickens beyond anything else he had experienced. The man who controlled everything in such confident imaginative ways with his pen had to admit" his amazement, which is registered throughout his letter to his friend John Forster: "Venice is above, beyond, out of all reach of coming near, the imagination of a man. It has never been rated high enough. It is a thing you would shed tears to see." Venice, I go on to argue, enters into Dickens's imagination: as he puts it Venice "is a bit of my brain from this time . . . But the reality itself, beyond all pen or pencil. I never saw the thing before that I should be afraid to describe. But to tell what Venice is, I feel to be an impossibility" (Pilgrim letters, p. 217). This experience marks a shift in Dickens's writing which I follow in his Pictures from Italy and Our Mutual Friend.
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