Rebecca and Herodias: The Image of the Jewish Woman in Three Italian Novels between Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

This study examines the image of the Jewish Woman as it is portrayed in three Italian popular novels, published in the years spanning from 1887 to 1912. This timeframe was pivotal for both the status of Italian Jews and for the status of women in Italy: combining these two topics within a single study leads, therefore, to a twinned focus on Jewish femininity. The portrait of the Jewish woman that emerges from these novels is a multi-faceted one: the Jewess is represented at times as a Rebecca---bearing a certain nobility and inherent goodness---at others as a Herodias---scheming and malevolent---along with a range of images in between. Carolina Invernizio's L'orfana del ghetto (1887) presents a seductive femme fatale Jewess who is prepared to kill in order to conquer the man she loves. Jolanda's Suor Immacolata (1904) portrays two models of bourgeois Jewish femininity, cautioning against the perils of Oriental laxness on the one hand, and against the extremes of modernity on the other. Matilde Serao's La mano tagliata (1912) casts its two Jewish female characters as inherently noble because of the proximity to Christianity that their Jewish origin entails and to which it ultimately points them.;The denouement of all three novels involves a final stripping away of Jewishness, which can be read as a social catharsis leading to the return of a society in which the Catholic majority rules and the destabilizing forces of Jewish emancipation and integration are eliminated. This may take place through a kind of reconciliation, represented by the ultimate conversion of the Jewish character, or by the ultimate neutralization of the dangerous asocial tendencies embodied by the Jewess through her death.;This imagery of the Jewess in these novels, I argue, sheds light on themes ranging from the very personal anxieties of the Fin-de-siecle woman writer: the social construction of self and 'Other' in the new Italian state; and a historical assessment of the place and, particularly, the nature of anti-Semitism in Italy as mirrored in representations of the Jewess.