Between ghetto and state: Religious policy, liberal reformand Jewish corporate politics in Piedmont, 1821-1831

Abstract

This dissertation considers the relationship between religious policy and liberal reform in Italy after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 by examining how the royal and civic administrations in the newly restored kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont grappled with the enforcement of religious policies governing the Jewish corporate community in the 1820s. It argues that modern state formation in Restoration Piedmont was the product of struggles between the state and various corporate interests over the direction and enforcement of Jewish policies designed to expropriate Jewish-owned properties. The failure to implement Jewish policies, including among other laws, prohibitions against property ownership and enforced ghettoization, resulted in as series of legislative debates that eventually culminated in Jewish emancipation by 1848. First, this study considers negotiations between the papacy and the Savoyard state over the forced sale of Jewish-owned property and the secularization of formerly ecclesiastical properties. Related issues discussed include debates surrounding the forced baptism and kidnapping of Jewish children in Genoa, revealing ways in which the church attempted to assert its power in the neo-absolutist state. Second, this dissertation examines processes involved in state-directed ghettoization, demonstrating that "ghetto" policies served as a means to expand Jewish real estate investment in Piedmont rather than confine and restrict Jewish business activities. Jewish family firms emerge as allies of the state as revealed in a case study of the Jewish silk manufacturing firm of David Levi e figli. Evidence relating to the study Jewish-Christian relations in Piedmont include debates over the hiring of female Christian servants in the ghetto and Christian tenants leasing from Jewish landlords suggest that the revival of ancien regime Jewish laws were inapplicable. In the end, by exploring specific patterns within the Jewish legal appeal process and debates that ensued, these research findings provide a new way of modelling the constitutional and institutional transformations that emerged in the Savoyard state as it struggled to establish hegemony in the decades following French Imperial rule.