The National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah intends to illustrate the originality of the Italian Jewish history in the larger context of the European and Mediterranean environment; at the same time, it will promote cultural initiatives that are able to underline the vast patrimony of ideas, artefacts, and experiences produced in Italy by the Jews over more than two millennia. To achieve these goals, there will be a section with temporary shows, plus a variety of collateral institutions, such as a library, a research centre, a children’s wing, seminars and courses, periodic lectures and presentations of new books.

Over two hundred objects including twenty manuscripts, seven incunabula and cinquecentine, eighteen medieval documents, mostly coming from the Genizah of Cairo, forty-nine epigraphs of Roman and medieval age and one hundred and twenty-one among rings, seals, coins, lamps, amulets, little known or never exhibited before, lent by leading Italian and foreign museums. It is an engaging exhibition path, rich in images, reconstructions and experiences offered to visitors.

The exhibition “Hebrews, an Italian story. The first thousand years “, which in fact constitutes the first segment of the permanent path of the MEIS, communicates in an original way the uniqueness of the history of Italian Judaism, describing how the Jewish presence was formed and developed in the peninsula from the Roman age to the Middle Ages and how the Jews of Italy built their own peculiar identity, even compared to other places in the Diaspora.

Through five major divisions, the path identifies the areas of origin and dispersion of the Jewish people, traces the routes of the diaspora and exile towards the western Mediterranean, after the destruction of the Temple. It documents the Hebrew stay in Rome and in southern Italy, talks about migration, slavery, integration and religious intolerance, in relation to both the pagan and the Christian world. It follows the flowering of the Early Middle Ages and then, in a political climate marked by the Longobard, Byzantine and Muslim dominations, the clarification of an Italian Jewish culture, even in the North. Until the Crusades, the massacres, the forced conversions that marked the German Jewish communities.