Resumen de Gino Luzzatto e l’archivio storico della comunità ebraica di Livorno
Tommaso Munari, Francesca Trivellato
In Spring 1940, the great medieval historian Gino Luzzatto stumbled across a treasure trove of documents held in the synagogue of Livorno. Banned from his university post and from accessing all Italian state archives and libraries by the Fascist racial laws, he asked his anti-Fascist and Jewish friends who had emigrated to the United States to help him secure the financial support he needed to work in Tuscany. They failed. And by 1944, Allied bombs had all but destroyed Livorno, including its synagogue. This article reconstructs Luzzatto’s aborted plan for writing a history of early modern Mediterranean commerce on the basis of records that are now mostly lost.
