Trieste Reading

My last two blog posts, Trieste and How Trieste Became Secular, have been about the Jews of Trieste, Italy. I was especially seeking information about the secular nature of this community and how it got that way. For this project, I have read several books and articles, such as the beautiful large-format book illustrated at right.

To obtain background material on Trieste at the beginning of the twentieth century, I read the pre-war-written article in my incredible old Brittanica:

Encyclopedia Brittanica, “Trieste” (1921 edition, Volume 17, pp 267-268)

Because Trieste’s Jewish community had such a strong influence on James Joyce, I tried to see what Joyce would have found during his stay there. This question is of interest to Joyce scholars because Joyce transferred much of what he learned about and from the Trieste Jews to his portrayal of the character Leopold Bloom (who of course in the novel Ulysses spends the entire time in Dublin).

Besides Joyce’s most famous friends novelist Italo Svevo and newspaper owner Teodoro Mayer, he encountered a variety of other Jews who were there. I learned for example, that during the early years of his time there, Joyce even rented rooms for a time from a Jewish landlady, who helped out when Nora Barnacle was having her first child (Years of Bloom p. 39). I learned that among many concerts he attended, Joyce once heard a performance of a Mahler symphony conducted by the composer (Years of Bloom p. 124).

Works on this subject:

Maura Hametz, "Zionism, Emigration, and Antisemitism in Trieste: Central Europe's 'Gateway to Zion,' 1896-1943," Jewish  Social Studies, New Series, Society, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Spring/Summer 2007), pp.103-134

Gur Alroey, "Journey to Early-Twentieth-Century Palestine as a Jewish Immigrant Experience" Jewish Social Studies, New Series, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Winter, 2003), pp. 28-64

John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920. University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.

John McCourt, James Joyce: A Passionate Exile. Orion Media, 2000.

Peter Hartshorn, James Joyce and Trieste. Greenwood Press, 1997.

For my second post, How Trieste Became Secular, as noted there, I read:

Lois C. Dubin, The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste: Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture. Stanford University Press, 1999.

How Trieste Became Secular

The book The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste by Lois C. Dubin (Stanford University Press, 1999) presents the history of the small Jewish community of 18^th century Trieste. This history seems to offer a lesson in how Enlightenment ideas formed a new idea of a Jewish community -- a much more secular one than previous communities. 

Dubin documents how some Jews resisted the development of a more flexible way of life. They saw positive factors in the confinement of a self-governing Jewish body, and were not enthusiastic about introduction of more individual freedoms. Other members of the Jewish community welcomed the changes and the promise of more independent decisions regarding religious practice. Ultimately the result of the changes was a more assimilated group with more individual self-determination.

In around 1719  the Austrians invited capable Jews from their own lands, from Italy, from the Ottoman Empire, and elsewhere to participate in developing an economic miracle in the Habsburg’s principal Mediterranean port, joining a small community that had been there for centuries. In this newly free port, Jewish communal privileges were greater than those in cities of the Austrian Empire such as Vienna and Prague. Further, the Jews were not to be the only religious minority: Protestants, Greek Catholics, and members of other Eastern Christian groups were also welcomed if they brought economic contributions to the growing city.

Jewish bankers and entrepreneurs were attracted by a number of favorable conditions in the new free port. As elsewhere, all the Jews in the city had to belong to a self-governing community (sometimes called a Nation). Jewish authorities, designated or approved by the Habsburg rulers, controlled all aspects of life inside the community, religious and otherwise. Rabbis and other communal leaders enforced Jewish laws for marriage, divorce (legal for Jews not the Catholic majority), religious observance, education, personal relationships, economic contracts between Jews, and crime of Jew against Jew (theft, bodily harm, etc). Jewish courts tended to Jewish affairs. Jews became subject to civil law only when it concerned their external economic affairs, their relationships with Christians, or crimes committed outside the Jewish community.

The Jewish community of Trieste received a number of special privileges, mainly economic, distinguishing them from other Habsburg Jewish communities and most communities elsewhere in Europe. Trieste’s Jews were exempt from certain extra taxes paid by Jews elsewhere in the empire, from payment for civil cases in court, and from restrictions on travel.

The number of Jews in Trieste was small but growing. In 1735, there were 103 Jews in a total population of 3865. By 1802 it was 1247 out of more than 20,000; by 1820 it reached around 2400 out of 33,000. (Dubin, p. 21) For this community, the enforcement of a Ghetto where Jews were required to live was very casual, and over time, Jews began to live in other quarters, sometimes even sharing residences with non-Jews. Living outside of the enforced Jewish neighborhood occurred mainly for material reasons; the religious practice of the in- and out-dwellers appears not to have been particularly different. Until the end of the 18^th century, the Jews in Italy, where most of those in Trieste came from, were strictly confined to Ghettos, most famously that of nearby Venice; strict residence requirements and prohibitions existed in most other countries as well.

The Jewish residents of Trieste soon challenged Jewish authorities by ignoring certain religious traditions, as Dubin documents in interesting detail. Authorities or neighbors accused their peers of openly eating non-kosher food in non-Jewish establishments, or of violating the prohibitions of work, reading or travel on sabbath and holidays. The Jewish communal authorities in some cases declared long-patronized bakeries and taverns off-limits. Ordinary people didn’t necessarily comply with the tighter rules – or any rules. One couldn’t call it freedom, but people seem to have been making choices that weren’t available in more restricted environments.

Meanwhile, in the course of the 18^th century, Austria was modernizing under the influence of the Enlightenment. The Haskalah, Jewish version of the Enlightenment led by Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin, influenced the Jewish response to these laws. As the century progressed, the Habsburgs made new laws covering civil regulation of all residents with wide reprecussions for the Jews of Trieste.

One change arose from a new decree that all communities in the empire should educate their children in secular subjects and languages. Elsewhere in the empire and in Germany, Jewish communities saw secular education as a threat to their way of life, and resisted or insisted that the children’s education be in two separate schools. Jewish scholars for and against the Haskalah debated about such a change. Italian Jews had been allowed to attend the University of Padua and other Christian schools to become physicians and obtain other education, and thus were likely to value secular education.

After discussing all these influences, the Jews of Trieste were among the first to have a Jewish school that also taught state-mandated subjects like history, Italian and German languages, and literature outside the traditional Jewish curriculum.

A bigger conflict of interests emerged when the Habsburgs created a body of civil law regarding marriage, specifying that the religious authorities comply with the civil law while still performing the marriages. The government’s laws set the age of consent to marriage: parental consent for the new civil marriage was 24 but in was and always had been 13 for Jewish law. Civil law required advance public announcement (bans) for legal marriage; Jewish law respected private ceremonies with a small number of witnesses. Jewish laws about which relatives could marry and restrictions on a Kohen marrying a divorced women conflicted with civil law. Several high-profile cases testing these issues – which Dubin presents with much evidence from the archives --  ultimately undermined the strength of the religious authorities.

Similar conflicts engulfed the Jewish communities of France under the revolution. However, in Trieste, there was no sudden change, meaning that a variety of individuals participated in the process of resolving the conflicts. Debate as well as court cases engaged those supporting traditional religious practice, those fearing conflict with the authorities (and thus threat to their  extraordiary well-being and prosperity), and those who had embraced the ideas of the Enlightenment and the Haskala.

Trieste was never all that important in the general scheme of things. Much more important historically were the French Revolution – applying the “rights of Man” to Jews -- and the dramatic acts of Napoleon in destroying the gates of the ghettos in Mantua and Venice. But the debates and changes that Dubin describes seem to illuminate many ideas that still affect the relationship of established religion and secular government, and the continuing conflicts in modern times that emerge from the dictates of religion and long Jewish traditions.

Trieste

Trieste as I saw it a few years ago was a quiet European city far from the standard tourist itinerary. A main attraction of Trieste is called Miramar: the castle of Maximillian of Austria, built in the mid-19^th century. Compared to Tuscan hill towns, Sicily’s Greek ruins, and Roman splendor it’s not much. I found it very stuffy in its Victorian way!

During the first years of the twentieth century, Trieste was a very different type of place – the major port of the Austrian Empire, bustling with ship-building and related industries, international trans-shipping and trade, insurance companies, and more: it was a commercial and cultural hub.

Miramar Castle, Trieste

The Trieste of 100 years ago is one of the cities of Eastern Europe that I find intriguing, and I’ve begun reading about it in my ongoing study of Jewish secular culture of the past. Its history resonates with similarities to Odessa (a free port, with many ethnic and language groups attracted by the freedom) and influences from Vienna, both of which I read about earlier this year.

Politically a lot was going on in Trieste as well: the 75% of the population who were Italian, especially, had nationalist Italian sentiments, and socialism attracted others. Italian opera and plays were popular, and a variety of newspapers reflected political and intellectual trends in Italy. Numerous civil servants of the Empire used German as their main language, but in the street and culturally, Italian predominated.

James Joyce offers the most famous Jewish connection with Trieste – in fact, he’s surely the most famous person who lived there during those glorious years. He arrived there almost at random in 1904 with his life partner Nora Barnacle (eventually his wife, but not then). After a false start in a nearby town, Joyce settled into a job teaching English at the Berlitz school and sometimes freelance; he stayed until Trieste became a battleground in World War I. He became fluent in standard Italian and the local Italian of Trieste, and wrote reviews and other types of essays for one of the papers, as well as giving public lectures about Ireland and other subjects. The nationalists identified with the Irish independence struggle as Joyce described it.

Joyce’s students were typical of the white-collar middle class of Trieste. They wanted to learn English mainly for advancement in their jobs in international business. Trieste was growing as new rail lines were being built to connect new cities in Austria, and as the port was being expanded; languages beyond the native German, Italian, Greek, and Slavic were needed.

Among Joyce’s contacts and students were many Jews, including a newspaper owner and other prominent intellectuals. Interested in the ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity of this port city, Joyce often attended various religious services (although remaining a strictly lapsed and anti-cult Catholic). He seems to have been partial to one of the Eastern Catholic services.

Attending a synagogue service once, he recognized many of his students – though quite a few of his Jewish associates and students were themselves lapsed from religious practice. Something like 1200 of the 5500 Jews in Trieste at the time were “without confession,” which could mean they weren’t practicing or that they had intermarried with non-Jews. The Jewish community counted them and found them a matter for concern (as Jewish communities have been doing ever since).

Joyce’s closest friend among the local community in Trieste was his student Italo Svevo. At the time they met, Svevo needed to learn English because of his work as a manager for a supplier to the ship-building industry. Privately, Svevo was also an author – unrecognized and unappreciated. Joyce was not much more successful yet either. They read each other’s work, discussed their efforts, and mutually supported one another. Eventually, Joyce became a highly successful author, and was able to arrange for much wider distribution, reviews, and translations of Svevo’s work, but at the beginning they were much closer to equals.

Svevo was one of the lapsed Jews that the community worried about. He had been raised as a Jew in a complicated, partially Jewish family, but married a Catholic in a civil ceremony, and eventually converted to Catholicism. Joyce, being fascinated by all things Jewish, used Svevo as one of many sources and inspirations while writing Ulysses. In an interchange between Stanislaus Joyce (brother of James who lived with the family in Trieste), and Svevo, it is said that Svevo asked Stanislaus for some secrets or unknown facts about Irishmen – claiming he wanted to be even with James Joyce who constantly asked him about the Jews.

I try to imagine Trieste as Joyce and Nora saw it before the Great War: coffee shops, restaurants, well-dressed, ambitious affluent people in the street, much building and development of infrastructure and industry. They lived downtown where there was lots of activity, as well as the school where Joyce worked. They loved to take walks, including to Miriamar whose gardens were open to the public.

Despite being surrounded by prosperity, the Joyces struggled to make ends meet; after her second child was born in a charity ward, Nora received a cash gift because they were so poor. They struggled to support their two children, and often begged or demanded money from friends and relatives. Svevo once referred to Joyce as “a leech” but he seemed good natured and in fact was very generous towards him with loans and gifts of money.

Among the many appealing features of the city, Trieste was full of activity and trade with the Levant and the West and with people traveling. Joyce’s strong sense of himself as an exile and themes of exile in his work are often (I mean really often) discussed – I wonder how his sense of exile was influenced by the many travelers and emigrants, especially by the opening in 1904, about the time he arrived, of direct emigrant service from the port of Trieste to New York for the masses of people leaving the Austrian Empire and Eastern Europe.

A few other emigrants leaving Trieste from Central and Eastern Europe were Zionists departing for Jaffa via Alexandria – though many more would have traveled through Odessa, because the fare was half as much and the voyage was direct. Some of the Jews of Trieste were committed to helping these emigrants in transit, though most of them were quite content with their Triestine lives, not interested themselves in making Aliah.

All this ended with World War I; the city, important as it was, was directly affected. Joyce’s brother Stanislaus was interned in a camp for four years for possibly unjust political reasons. Joyce and Nora left with their children.

After the War, the Joyce family briefly returned to Trieste. The Italian nationalists had what they always wanted: they were now part of Italy. But it didn’t turn out the way they had hoped, because the importance of being the sole port of the Austrian Empire was lost, and the city quickly became a backwater. Further, the post war era was a time of shortages and desperation – Joyce couldn’t afford any decent clothing, and did not find even the low level of employment he had before the war. They left for Paris and Zurich, and Trieste continued to decline.

Things went even worse for the Jews, who lost their opportunities and often their livlihood, were persecuted mildly by the Fascists, and then exterminated by Hitler.

I will discuss my sources for this in a future blog post, as well as going into more detail about the Jews of Trieste.