Recent Jews
San Nicandro. By Elena Cassin. (Cohen and West, 21s.) THE terrible poverty of Southern Italy has given birth—as recent literature has shown—to gang- sters, prostitutes and strange political sects. Elena Cassin's remarkable book shows that we must add Jews to this oddly assorted list. She tells the story of a peasant in a remote town in the Gargano peninsula so impressed by his reading of the Bible that he, and later some fifty others, adopted a form of Old Testament Hebraic religion. This happened in the Thirties. Subsequently most of the families took their conversion seriously enough to become circumcised and to emigrate to Israel after the war where they are now settled.
This moving episode can be viewed in many lights. No doubt a religious historian would see in it the all-powerful arm of Jehovah, however strange his choice of territory (one can imagine a Catholic writing about a similar conversion in reverse). But there is comedy, too, in the embar- rassment of the Chief Rabbi of Israel faced with such an unheard-of situation; and there is an almost intolerable poignancy in the story of these peasants, in the dreadful Europe of 1940, lament- ing their ill-fortune in not having been born Jews.
But it is the sociological approach that Mrs. Cassin adopts and this is the one that we are most likely to find acceptable. Over half of her book is devoted to a historical account of this neglected, ill-governed region where stories of Charlemagne are still widely read (or were until the coming of television); and where protest against an intoler- able life has again and again found outlet not only in lawlessness but in every kind of schismatic religious community. Viewed in this light the story is still a remarkable one, but the fact that the inhabitants of San Nicandro chose to become Jews is accidental. They might just as easily have turned into Seventh Day Adventists.
FRANCIS HASKELL
Previous page
