Prospero Moisè Loria: A Case Study of Jewish Secularism in Liberal Italy

Abstract

In his will, Prospero Moisè Loria (1814-92) requested an autopsy and cremation and left his large inheritance to the municipality of Milan to establish a secular philanthropic institution, the Società umanitaria, "to enable all the disenfranchised poor, without distinction." Loria and other Italian Jews were at the heart of secularist activity in Italy's culture wars, as demonstrated by their engagement with secular philanthropy, battles for cremation, and Freemason activity. By exploring Loria as the most generous nineteenth-century Italian Jewish philanthropist, along with his affiliation with the Alliance israélite universelle as a secular Jewish institution in the Mediterranean, this essay shows how forms of secularism and Jewishness could coexist for Italian Jews and how secularism in Italy could include a commitment to a Jewish collective, and thus seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the composite mixture of secular Italians and to a discussion of Jewish secularism in an international context. KeywordsJewish secularism · Philanthropy · Freemasonry · Alliance israélite universelle · Liberal Italy and the Mediterranean 4 Stefania Licini, Guida ai patrimoni milanesi: Le dichiarazioni di successione ottocentesche Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Baronesses and revolutionaries: the activism of foreign-born Jewish women in Liberal Italy

“…5 In Italy, the AIU became the main platform for crossborder Jewish philanthropy and a forum in which Italian Jews could identify as both Jewish and self-consciously liberal. 6 Yet the dominant role of French imperial power in the Mediterranean from the 1880s led to tensions between the Parisian and Italian branches of the AIU, underlining the extent to which the networks of the old Jewish international had lost purchase in the new internationalist sphere. 7 Crucially, moreover, Italian Jewish women were excluded as agents from the AIU, even if they were rhetorically called upon to act as patrons.Jewish women had moved along transnational trajectories since the 17 th century.…”