Abstract

In this article I discuss the history of Italian Jews from the Emancipation to the racial laws of 1938 and their present-day attitudes to Judaism and the State of Israel. My aim is to suggest how the policy of social integration enabled Italian Jews to construct a new identity without losing their ancestral heritage. The example of Italian Jewry is relevant to understanding the growing need in today‘s European Union—now comprising 27 countries with different languages, cultures, and values—of revising the concept of national identity and of exploring ways of constructing a new European identity.