In the Family

Abstract

This is the first of the two chapters dedicated to analysis of the private sphere. It examines representations of the family, especially the role of women, within the wider redefinition of Jewishness in the context of a process of social and cultural integration of the Jewish minority. The analysis focuses on the issue of mixed marriages, condemned in the Jewish press as a social evil because of their destruction of Judaism and the Jews; it traces the evolution of the language used to discuss and represent this threat, including its representation in literary forms. As many examples show, from the 1880s onwards there was an increasing use of terms and expressions linked to the conceptual world of ‘race’, in order to define the Jewish minority identity.