This is the third time that Quest offers its readers a miscellaneous issue. We have planned to resume the publication of monographic special issues, yet we will be open to considering the possibility of publishing unrelated articles in miscellaneous issues in the future.

With this latest installment of our journal we offer the readers four articles, authored by scholars based in the U.S. and in Italy and covering diverse topics and time periods. We o-pen the Focus section with an essay by Phil Keisman, dedicated to the study of the German periodical Shomer Tziyon Hane’eman (1846-1855), a key publication to understand the dia-lectic relationship between modern Orthodoxy and the developing reform movement. In an effort to comprehend the techniques employed by segments of the Orthodox world to com-pete with its adversaries, the author investigates the periodical’s reading public, its network of contributors, as well as its content. We then move to the analysis of a blood libel case and the ensuing trial that took place between 1855 and 1856 in North-Eastern Italy, in Badia Po-lesine, at the time under Hapsburg rule. Emanuele D’Antonio reconstructs in detail the epi-sode and the Jewish responses, illustrating how the minority was able to organize its defense with the support of some Catholic intellectuals as well as the State apparatus, leading the trial to become an analytical refutation of ritual murder accusations. The third article in this issue, written by Sonia Zanier, leads the readers well into the second half of the XXth centu-ry, enquiring on the matrices of the anti-Zionist and, at times, anti-Semitic rhetorics that, since the late 1960s and through the 1970s, developed within the rich and diversified world of the Italian New Left. The last article published in the Focus section is authored by Car-men Dell’Aversano, a literary scholar who proposes a theoretical reflection on the concept of assimilation. Her approach is not a historical one. She employs Gérard Genette’s concept of hypertextuality and argues in favor of a transdisciplinary methodology, suggesting that semiotics and literary theory may offer useful insight also for a historical understanding of the issue.