![]() The best book I know on the subject is The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews by Edda Servi Machlin. The Jews of Italy developed their own, very distinct but yet very Italian cuisine. ![]() Then came the Holocaust, which resulted in the extermination of about 15% of Italy’s Jewish population and the end of many Jewish communities like the one that had been found in the village of Pitigliano, known as “the Little Jerusalem”. ![]() ![]() The complicated ups and down of Jewish life in Italy over the years are ably outlined in this article, but, to make a long story short, by the 20th Century the principal Jewish communities in Italy were to be found in Rome, Venice and Tuscany. A great number of Jews settled in Italy after the mass exiles from Spanish in the wake of the Reconquista in the late 15th Century. That presence grew during the late Middle Ages, when Italy presented a relatively tolerant environment (with emphasis on the ‘relatively’) as compared with other European countries. A Jewish community existed in Rome dating from during the Roman Republic, even before the Empire, in the first centuries BCE. ![]() It may come as a surprise to some, but Italy has a Jewish tradition going back not just centuries, but millennia. ![]()
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