"Minhag Italia": Negotiating Jewish modernity in the nineteenth century through the prism of Italian prayer books

The project was carried out at the IEG from 2018 - 2023. The aim of the project was to carry out a digital and conceptual analysis of nineteenth-century Italian Jewish prayer books (Siddurim and Maḥzorim), in order to challenge the traditional narrative about some fundamental categories of Jewish modernity: the divide between Orthodoxy and Reform and the importance in modern Judaism of the differentiation among three of the most prominent Jewish groups in Europe: Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and Italkim.