Keynote by Sonia Gentili, Roma - La Sapienza, 2021-2022 Paris IAS fellow, as part of the “Gentile” Antiquity. The Reception of Antiquity in Modern Italian Jewish Culture colloquium organized by Giacomo Loi (Johns Hopkins/FMS fellow), Martina Piperno (Durham), Guido Furci (Sorbonne Nouvelle), with the support o the Mémorial de la Shoah.

Identifying the origins through archaeological excavations and the "legends of foundation" that - not always scientifically - derive from them is not enough: for a world like the Jewish one, constantly faced with the spectre of its end, it is necessary to orient these origins in history in order to establish whether they are only an elegiac myth of the past or also a real perspective for the future.
From Emmanuel Lévinas' biblical reflections on the Garden of Eden to the representation of this myth in Giorgio Bassani's Giardino dei Finzi Contini, from Professor Ermanno Finzi Contini's "Warburgian" archaeology to the extreme and final excavation of the descent among the dead, the condition of survival of poetry in Auschwitz for Celan, Debenedetti and Bassani himself, Jewish culture tries to answer this crucial question. Is the Edenic guardian, the happy condition of the origins, then, placed in the past or in the future? Is what Lévinas said, based on Rabbi Levi's Talmudic commentary on Gen 2:10, that "the expulsion from paradise and the crossing of time allow for a perfection greater than that happiness tasted in the guardian of paradise", really sustainable?

See the detailed programme and the registration process attached.