Miscellanea, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, n. 7 (2014)

The ‘Focus’ section of this edition of ‘Quest’ is composed of very diverse contributions, authored by both junior and senior scholars. The articles cover a wide range of topics, time periods and geographical areas. We open with the Greek Islands, considered from very different points of view: Cristina Pallini and Annalisa Scaccabarozzi offer us a study of urban history, analyzing Salonika’s lost synagogues, while Varvaritis presents the ‘Cronaca Israelitica’ – the first Jewish newspaper in the Ionian Islands – and the discussions of Jewish emancipation in the late XIXth century. Then we move on to Finland, with a contribution by Tarja Liisa Luukkanen that presents the 1897 discussion concerning the legal condition of the Jews that took place within the Finnish Diet, and in particular within the clergy, illustrating the role of antisemitism and the reception of Adolf Stoecker’s ideology. From the Baltic Sea we move back to Southern Europe, with an essay by Bojan Mitrović dedicated to the forms of social integration and of nationalization of Serbian Jewry as seen through a peculiar case study. Udi Manor’s article makes us leap to the North American continent, and to Jewish New York in particular, discussing Jewish 'identity politics' through the prism of the “Jewish Daily Forward” in the early XXth century. The last three articles concentrate on the second half of the XXth century. Rolf Steininger presents the figure of Karl Hartl, the first Austrian diplomat in Israel, and his perception of the country. Michele Sarfatti carefully reconstructs how foreign (non-Italian) historiography interpreted Fascist antisemitism between 1946 and 1986. Finally, the ‘Focus’ section is closed by Anna Baldini’s attentive depiction of Primo Levi’s role in shaping Italy’s memory of the Shoah.