TRA PADOVA E BERLINO: IL CARTEGGIO DI SAMUEL DAVID LUZZATTO E MORITZ STEINSCHNEIDER

[Moritz Steinschneider's correspondence with S. D. Luzzatto and other member of Luzatto's circle in Padua and elsewhere in Italy, such as Moisé Soave, Giuseppe Jaré, Giuseppe Almanzi, has been preserved in the Steinschneider Archives at the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York, while Steinschneider's epistolary exchanges with Luzzatto can be consulted at the Centro Bibliográfico dell'Unione delle Comunità Ebraiche Italiane in Rome: it offers an extraordinary sample of 19th-century letter-writing habits between two of the main representatives of the Science of Judaism. Those of his letters which are known to us are monuments of erudition and throw an invaluable light onto the intellectual world of many of the key figures of the European Wissenschaft des Judentums and represent as well a precious key in appraising the kinds of social relationships prevalent between scholars and lay people, Jews and Christians, in the crucial period when both Germany and Italy were becoming independent. Through the examination of this conspicuous documentation we shall try to assess the exposure of Italy to the values of the science of Judaism such as it was being developed in German speaking areas.]