see: www.quest-cdecjournal.it

Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History / Questioni di storia ebraica contemporanea is an open acces and peer reviewed journal published by the Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea (CDEC).

Quest is a journal devoted to historical research and historiographical debate on Jewish life and history in the period comprised between the mid-18th and the beginning of the 21st century. It wants to be inclusive of all the Jewish realities as they developed in the modern period from the ancient Mediterranean communities which emerged from the Spanish and Portuguese Diasporas to the ‘new’ Eastern and Central European Jewish experiences, up to American Jewish history and Israeli history. From a thematic perspective, Quest includes the Jewish enlightenment, the emancipation, the old “nation of the Jews” and the new “State of the Jews”, the traditional religious and the new secular identities, Jews as mi grants, inter-ethnic Jewish life and solidarity as well as relations between the Jewish group and national societies. Quest also includes research on Zionism and anti-Zionism, Shoah and its memory, Jewish modernity and modern anti-Semitism. To sum up, Quest is open to the political, cultural, religious and institution al history of Jewish communities and societies, and to Jewish means of social, political and cultural expression, to be investigated in their specificities and in their relations with their non-Jewish counterparts.

Launching a journal on the history of the Jews in the modern period does not mean that Quest subscribes to a Jewish reading of modernity, nor that it considers Jewish history to represent a separate historiographical paradigm. On the contrary, Quest intends to investigate and contribute to the scholarly debate on the ways in which Jews have contributed to modernity and, vice-versa, the ways Jewish societies and individuals were shaped by modernity.