The exhibition “Ebrei, una storia italiana. I primi mille anni”, held by the Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah in Ferrara covers over two-thousand years of vital and uninterrupted Jewish presence in Italy: from the early settlements to the development of an established Jewish Italian identity and its impact on Italian society, to the alternating stretches of peaceful cooperation with periods of brutal persecution, leading up to the Holocaust.

The exhibition does a wonderful job in bringing to life the social, spatial and cultural context in which the Jewish Italian community developed. It consists of over two hundred rare pieces, many previously unseen, such as manuscripts, books printed in the 15^th and 16^th century, medieval documents, Roman epigraphs, rings, seals, coins, oil lamps and amulets.

The catalogue features a collection of scientific essays written by leading experts in the field, both Italian and foreign, and a description of every piece displayed in the exhibition.

Thanks to archaeological, historical, literary and philosophical sources the exhibition accomplishes the incredible feat of telling the story of the Jewish people in Italy, not just as a collection of facts, but from the point of view of the people that lived through it, both Jewish and Italian, and how they elaborated and passed it down to the next generation. Most of the sources used are Jewish: mainly historians and writers, but also doctors, scientists, poets and musicians. Naturally the rabbinical literature, the vast collection of exegetic, normative and narrative texts that are the Mishnah, Talmud and Midrash, was also an essential source of information.