Discovering Yiddish treasures in a glorious Italian library

Parma, Italy is best known for parmesan and prosciutto, but it is also a place of Jewish pilgrimage,

Yiddishists come here, as I did last October on a YIVO tour, to visit the Palatina Library and walk in the footsteps of the first Yiddish linguist – Max Weinreich.

 Born in 1894 in what is now Latvia, he studied in Germany, lived in Vilna  and escaped the Holocaust to become a professor of Yiddish at City University in New York.

Like many 20^th century Jewish intellectuals, Weinreich sought a contemporary Jewish identity “neither in Moshe Rabeinu nor the Messiah”, in the words of one of our on-board historians, US-based Professor Sam Kassow, a specialist in Ashkenazi Jewish history. Our other was US-based Professor Elissa Bemporad, a specialist in Italian Jewish History.