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Ouvrages Année : 2017

Donato Manduzio's Diary, From Church to Synagogue

Résumé

Donato Manduzio was an illiterate Southern Italian peasant who only learned how to read and write at the age of thirty-two, while convalescing from a wound during the First World War. Then his reading of Scripture and the visions he experienced led him to turn to Judaism and to seek an official conversion for himself and seventy-odd followers. For twelve of the sixteen-year-long process, Manduzio wrote about his experiences. Although some excerpts from the Diary have been translated, the manuscript has remained unpublished either in Italian or in any other language up to this day. In her latest book, From Church to Synagogue, Viviane Serfaty has translated the full text of Manduzio's Diary from the original Italian into English in order to make it available to a wider public. After providing a social and historical framework for the trajectory of this remarkable man, Serfaty retraces Manduzio's mystical visions and spiritual development, as well as his struggle to create and maintain a Jewish community in a remote corner of Apulia at a time when Fascism was taking hold of Italy. She also shows how the text fits in the context of religious conversion narratives and of literary studies, thus shedding a fresh and fascinating light on the subject.
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Dates et versions

hal-01542393 , version 1 (19-06-2017)

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  • HAL Id : hal-01542393 , version 1

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Viviane Serfaty. Donato Manduzio's Diary, From Church to Synagogue. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017, 978-1-4438-1276-4. ⟨hal-01542393⟩
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