Di Nepi, Serena
Senior Fellow: May-June 2024
Research Project: Room for Doubts. Models, Practices, and People in the Ghetto System (Rome, 16th to 19th centuries)
In recent years, numerous studies have investigated the ghetto system. Rarely has research addressed the internal organization of the ghetto and the weight of individual choices. It was the Jews’ ability to develop individual and collective strategies of resistance that ensured that the group survived in its diversity. In this sense, the doubts about the present and future of the individual ghettoized Jews could be seen as a structuring factor of the ghetto. Moving from this, I would like to propose a new reading of the ghettoization model that considers doubt as a categorizing element of both Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Jewish relations. I will aim to redefine the ghetto as an ecosystem of interactions in which doubt functions as a relational superfield. If by relational field we mean precisely the space of mediation in conversion processes, then the ability to resist as Jew becomes the functioning and motivating framework of mediation itself: On the part of the majority group, doubts about identity are nurtured in favour of baptism; on the part of the minority group, tools are employed to thin out these very doubts. This hypothesis will be tested on the history of the ghetto of Rome, which will be studied for the first time from this perspective.
Serena Di Nepi is a professor of early modern history at Sapienza Universitá di Roma.