The aim of the essay is to analyze the formation of a “Zionist consciousness” in the Italian roman during the second half of the last century. The formation of a “Jewish imagination” in the Italian literature has been the topic of some...
moreThe aim of the essay is to analyze the formation of a “Zionist consciousness” in the Italian roman during the second half of the last century. The formation of a “Jewish imagination” in the Italian literature has been the topic of some historiography and literary works, which distinguish between high and low literature, Jewish and not Jewish writers and between anti-Semitic persecution and Jewish identity. This essay tries to face a historiography problem through a literary source, such as the novel: did the Italian Jew form a “nationalist” consciousness? If so, what kind of it? In the second half of the last century there were two kinds of novels, where a sort of “Zionist consciousness” appeared: the diasporic survival and the Israeli life. The first wanted to analyze the reaction of the Italian Jewish identity facing the Holocaust. The second one dealt with the “transformation” of the “old” Jew in the “new” Hebrew”. Does Zionism put an end to the so-called “Jewish question”?
