La storia dei settanta contadini pugliesi che negli anni Venti diventarono ebrei e nel 1948 emigrarono in Israele
Sannicandro, oggi San Nicandro, è una cittadina pugliese, un paesotto del Gargano that has little to urban to date, let alone the end of the twenties of the last century, when it began an extraordinary adventure, that took some seventy of its inhabitants to become Jews to wait many years to be able to formally convert ' Judaism and then to move to Israel immediately after 1948. They were, subsequent to the First World War, years of political unrest and religious paths of each type in the south too, profoundly changed by the migration of her children in America. Widespread and were active in proselytizing Protestants, especially the Pentecostal movements. The protagonist of this story, only in the long history of relations between the Christian and Jewish world, is an illiterate laborer, Donato Manduzio, returned disabled from the trenches of the Great War. In the hospital he learned to read and write, and almost forced into immobility, spends his time immersed in reading. Readings varied, often haphazard. When a neighbor gave him a Bible had to be a Pentecostal preacher - a Bible in Italian, translated by Luther - Manduzio you put out completely, finding that the biblical text did not say or the Trinity or the Pope or Jesus and that there It is said instead of a people lost in distant lands to which God appeared on the mountain by delivering the "true faith." Around him are beginning to gather friends, relatives, neighbors. The group discusses the words lette da Manduzio, con ingenuità e curiosità, senza preconcetti.
E’ la prima volta che hanno l’occasione di affrontare direttamente la parola di Dio. A poco a poco, da semplice lettore, Manduzio diviene un interprete, pervaso di messianesimo e di tensioni mistiche, mentre i suoi seguaci imparano a leggere e a scrivere.
Di fronte a questa grave violazione religiosa – la lettura del testo sacro in italiano – intervenne il prete del luogo. Non solo però non riuscì a spuntarla, ma perse anche il suo sacrestano, che si unì al gruppo di Manduzio. Si fecero vivi anche i luterani, convinti di far proseliti e di strappare fedeli ai papisti. Ma, if the reading of the Bible and his followers had convinced Manduzio that Catholicism was not much to do with that we find in the text, but he had not driven in the direction of a conversion to Protestantism. They had come to the conclusion that the true faith was Jewish, as was exposed in the biblical text, and proclaimed themselves Jews. They were convinced, moreover, that the Jews no longer existed, which have been supplanted by the Christians. In short, they firmly believe to be the only Jews on the face of the earth. They began to observe the Sabbath, to keep away from the Catholic rites, to take those hard to know who learned Hebrew studying Leviticus.
They were obviously very far from the Jewish ritual itself, did not know the Talmud, and their only reference point was the biblical text. But when he accidentally came to know that the Jews on the face of the earth, and even in Italy, there were still many, and that if they wanted to be really Jews had contact with them, they decided to write to Rome and to inform the Chief Rabbi the existence of their community, asking to be converted. Twice, their letters go unanswered, then finally received response. David Lawn, the chief rabbi of the Community of Rome, urged them to wait three years to reflect on the past who wanted to do before tackling the problem conversion. Meanwhile, Rome sent their biblical texts, prayer books and shawls. It was 1934.
Slowly, the country became accustomed to the presence of a group of "Jews" who eat according to Jewish rules, celebrated the Jewish holidays, they read the Bible, praying and singing religious songs created. Rather were internal tensions, so much so that they formed two communities in conflict, that remained around Manduzio founded by a cobbler and bricks. But the times were becoming increasingly bleak. The Protestants were subject to many restrictions, and in 1937 the followers of Manduzio were warned and fined heavily by the police. It was not anti-Semitism, but the suspicion is that their anti-fascist meetings hiding activities. On that occasion, the Union of Jewish Communities intervened to clarify the situation. The President went to Raffaele Cantoni Sannicandro to visit these strange Jews, bringing them the gift of books.
In 1938, the past three years, Manduzio finally received a letter from the rabbinate urged them, for their own good, to have more patience: time was not very favorable to the Jews, better wait for the storm to pass the racial laws. At the time, it was not advisable to convert to Judaism. A decision to Sannicandro was interpreted as a refusal, and very painful. In 1940, con l’entrata in guerra, il Sud si riempì di campi di internamento per ebrei italiani e soprattutto stranieri, Mai, dopo il 1540, data dell’espulsione definitiva degli ebrei dal meridione d’Italia, queste zone avevano visto tanti ebrei. A soli cinquanta chilometri da Sannicandro, a Manfredonia, fu creato un campo di internamento, dove furono rinchiusi molti ebrei tedeschi, ma a Sannicandro la vita continuava a scorrere senza troppe tensioni. Soltanto poco prima dell’8 settembre, i tedeschi, che si avviavano ormai ad abbandonare la zona incalzati dall’avanzata alleata, si fermarono in paese a chiedere dove fossero gli “ebrei”, ma il paese intero li protesse.
was liberation, with the Anglo-Americans that were circulating everywhere handing out chocolate and cigarettes. It was on this occasion that the Jews of Sannicandro discovered in disbelief and awe, the star of David on the trucks. It was the famous Jewish Brigade, composed of Jews of Palestine enlisted in the British army. It will be an officer of the Brigade, Phinn Lapide, to forge stronger relationships with them, reading cards Manduzio, his diary records that he told those thirteen years, from 1930 onwards, which had formed the small community . In 1953 he wrote a book about their story, "The Prophet of San Nicandro", translated into Italian in 1958 under the title "Moses in Puglia "(Longanesi). Among those intrigued by its history, went to visit Manduzio, there was also, in March 1944, a British army officer. He was an Italian jew who came from Palestine and was engaged in a mission to help the Jews still under Nazi occupation. His name was Enzo Sereni, and is today considered one of the founding fathers of the state of Israel.
In May of that year, will make his latest mission, dropping in Tuscany, where he will be arrested by the Nazis, then to die in Dachau. After the war, the Jews of Sannicandro finally get converted, not without further difficulties. Conversion, an unprecedented mass conversion of seventy people, including men, women and children, took place in August 1946. Donato Manduzio, strongly opposed to leave his land for the new Jewish state, will shut down in March 1948. Between 1948 and 1950, his followers will do all the aliyah to Israel, settling near Tzfat, and Sannicandro are only five Jews. Currently, there are fifty and maintain the life of a small community.
But what was the cultural context in which the conversion of Sannicandro was born? What memories of the Jewish presence in southern talia, centuries after the expulsion? In the Dark Ages, Jews, Italians were mainly allocated to the south, on the coast.
Apulia was particularly important here in those centuries, in the dense populated Jewish communities that had been introduced to the Babylonian Talmud and had, apparently, made the same as a community. This world was over at the beginning of the second millennium, and the remaining Jews in the South had been converted by force or exiled under Angevin rule. Three hundred synagogues in Apulia had been turned into churches. But this was not the memory behind the conversion. More recently was the memory of the conversion and exile that accompanied the beginning of English rule, and especially the phenomenon of marranesimo: the criptogiudaismo converted to force, or descendants of converts, who continue to maintain a hidden beliefs, rites and customs of the Jews harshly persecuted by the Inquisition, sent to the stake if caught. The south of Italy is full of reminiscences of family members (names, customs, special) that traced a distant Jewish origin lost in the generations.
Manduzio not look at this memory. He reads the Bible, does not know the Talmud, Mishnah, rabbinic culture. His Judaism, that of his followers, comes directly from the biblical text. But on something he had to engage. We think first of all, the wide spread of Protestantism, with which the same Manduzio, first approach to Judaism, had come into contact, the practice of a direct reading of the biblical text of Protestant origin, although there are different conclusions that he drew Manduzio. Also, remember that there were in southern Italy, before this, cases of Catholics, not descendants of converted Jews, the Jews discovered that reading the texts. "Old Christians", to put it using the language of the time, who wanted to become Jews to be rooted more or less distant, but out of conviction. A few years ago a historian, Giovanni Romeo, has some traits from oblivion.
They ended badly, of course: at the stake, in prison, suicide, considered crazy. Fascinating figures of people or any of mystics and intellectuals, such as Giulio Cesare Gambardella, a young Neapolitan plagued by a physical deformity and considered "fool's brain", tortured and condemned to perpetual imprisonment in 1579, as John Leonard Cats, too Naples, Doctor of Law, declared insane, especially as the eighth in Puglia Arimini, philosopher and theologian, who will be executed after a trial in Rome where he'd been "completely unbelieving dela Christian faith" and believing instead in "one God in heaven costume Jews." Another interesting case is that of Scipio Valley, also home Puglia, a young man caught in Naples in 1605 decided to reject Catholicism and to be jew, reaching groped for circumcised. Reported to the hospital by her confessor, died before the inquisitorial process is accomplished. In his statements, as well as the exaltation of monotheism, on a messianic spirit. These cases, although sporadic, can reveal how the Jews have played an important role as a reference point of a religious dissent is particularly common in the south in the early decades of English rule. Same as the flight of Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella of the conspiracy, at a time of reflux of the pressures of Protestant reformers.
Finally, there is another matrix that deserves to be analyzed in the search for a conversion Sannicandro: the peasant culture. A strong will to learn, a desire to bring high culture to the test of its criticism, stubbornness, and if we are also a lot of confusion, and the idea that learning will enable it to decide. There is a strong sense of their own capacity to understand that an illiterate learn to read and the teacher and almost a prophet. Like Campanella, Manduzio also had soaked eyes on oil lamps and the culture was put before everything else. A common thread unites the various aspects of this bizarre world of heterodox culture of Southern Italy, in all forms it takes, as in the God who refuses to accept that.
Anna Foa
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