This monographic issue of Quest resumes this old practice of biographical trajectories, and aims at presenting six Italian Jewish characters whose lives and work span from the early nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. The six characters in search of a narrative are respectively David Levi (1816–1898), Tullo Massarani (1826–1915), Elena Raffalovich Comparetti (1842–1918), Bernardo Dessau, (1863–1949) Alfonso Pacifici (1889–1983), and Laura Orvieto (1876–1953), whose lives were entwined with Italian and European history. Their biographical trajectories intersect the local, national, and transnational dimensions of nineteenth and early twentieth century history. The Jewish facet of their lives tells a great deal about the diversity of their choices as Jews and as Italians, in respect to culture, politics, and religion.
These six stories will give us the chance to delve into some tenets of Jewish culture in the nineteenth century from a perspective that will also offer new insight into concepts of Judaism and religion.

In order to analyse some of the issues fundamental to the history of Jews in Italy, from the emancipation of 1848, to the Fascist period of the 1930s, the essays in this edition of Quest adopt a biographical approach. This decision is motivated by the fact that, following the Italian Jews’ acquisition of civil and political rights, their route towards integration in the majority society is composed of thousands of unique, individual experiences, rather than a single, monolithic vision.

As some of these biographies demonstrate, Jewish thinkers and intellectuals who inhabited Italian and European culture in the nineteenth century were fully involved with the political issues of their time. Their lives tell a story of strong commitments to social, political, and economic issues. They were often involved in religious questions and, despite their various paths to secularization, they contributed to a discussion that is often overlooked by historians: the construction of a modern world where the place of religion and tradition was debated. In pursuing their practical goals they acted as though they belonged to real and imagined communities, to recall Benedict Anderson’s famous notion.

Our six authors offer historians a possible way to look at the history of modern Italian Jewry, combining individual agency with general issues of national and transnational history. A more complex and nuanced historical portrait emerges, as biographical trajectories convey more than a reproduction of social structure or a unique possible historical experience. They offer historians new questions and challenges in interpreting the past, and in this case they invite reflection on how the history of minorities contributes to a different understanding of historical phenomena.