Jews and State Building : Early Modern Italy and Beyond

This volume aims to shed new light on the history of the Jews in Italy between the early modern period and the emergence of a unified Italian state, explicitly placing Jews within the history of the state-building process. It seeks to reconsider Jewish history systematically by stressing the relation of Jews and the state and to trace how Jews and their communities were reshaped in the early modern period.

Bernard D. Cooperman currently holds the Louis L. Kaplan Chair in Jewish History at the University of Maryland. He has edited five volumes of scholarly essays, has translated and edited works, and has published over thirty scholarly essays. He is currently preparing a book-length study of the development of institutions of self-government as a sign of Jewish modernity.

Serena Di Nepi is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at Sapienza - University of Rome. She is an expert on the history of religious minorities in Early Modern Italy, with a special focus on Rome and the Papal States. The revised English version of her first book Surviving the Ghetto was published by Brill in 2020.

Germano Maifreda is professor of Economic History at the University of Milan, Italy. He is an expert on the European political and economic history of the Reformation and Counter-reformation, working at the intersection between business history, religious minorities, and institutional discriminations. His books include The Trial of Giordano Bruno (Routledge 2022) and his biography of cardinal Giovanni Morone with Massimo Firpo is being translated by Brill.