The Double Bond, Primo Levi, A Biography, By Carole Angier, c. 2002

853 ANG

I thought I had already taken notes on this book. Perhaps not.

I. Paradiso

It begins:

Italy is the oldest home of Jews in Europe, and Jews are among the oldest continuous inhabitants of Italy. There were Jews in Rome two centuries before Christ: neither Ashkenzim (German and East European Jews) nor Sephardim (Spanish and Portuguese Jews*), since neither of these two main families of European Jewry yet existed, but still earlier exiles direct from Palestine, Egypt, and Bablylonia.

*Wouldn't it have been easier, tighter to say "Iberian Jews"?

Palestine, Egypt and Babylonia are interesting choices:

• Palestine: Canaan
• Egypt: Canaanites regularly traveled to Egypt during famines
• Babylon: the exile

Wow.

First wave: two centuries before Christ, from Palestine, Egypt, and Babylong
Second wave: 14th century -- from France and Germany
Third wave: late 15th century -- from Spain and Portugal
those who settled in Sicily and southern Italy expelled again in the 16th century when much of the south fell under Spanish domination
northern Italy more liberal and desperately in need of money: therefore, after 1497, the date of the expulsion from Portugal) the only centers of Jewish life in western Europe for over 100 years were in northern Italy.

By comparison: Jews wer only readmitted into England (expulsion: 1290) and France (expulsion: 1394) in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Primo Levi, therefore, was born into the only part of western Europe, apart form a few German cities, where Jews had been living uninterruptedly for at least 500 years.