Letters without Borders: Exploring the Italian Correspondence of Sabato Morais

As part of my internship to complete the Certificate in Judaica and Hebraica Librarianship—a graduate-level program run by the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Association of Jewish Libraries—I’ve had the privilege of contributing to the Sabato Morais Transcription Project at the University of Pennsylvania. My involvement in this project was anything but accidental; it grew out of the convergence of several meaningful factors that drew me toward it. To begin with, during my research stay at Penn in 2024–25 as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow in the Jewish Studies program—under the supervision of Joshua Teplitsky—I became acquainted with the vibrant scholarly community around Judaica and Hebraica collections at Penn Libraries, including the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. I had the pleasure of spending many hours in conversation and learning from Arthur Kiron, the Schottenstein-Jesselson Curator of Judaica Collections, and Laura Newman Eckstein, the Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Curator of Judaica Digital Humanities at Penn.

While looking for an internship opportunity before the summer, Arthur and Laura told me about the ongoing project to provide digital access to the writings and correspondence of Sabato Morais. When Arthur showed me the Morais Papers at the Katz Center, the project immediately resonated with me. As a historian of Jewish culture and book history, I am fascinated by the way texts, letters, and objects carry memory across time and space. Moreover, it perfectly aligned with my European Commission-funded project titled BookSHUK, shedding light on the international market of Jewish manuscripts and books of Italian provenance following the Emancipation of Italian Jewry.

During my educational and research experiences working on Italian Jewry, I frequently encountered the name of Sabato Morais, though I had never delved deeply into his life and works, which, on the contrary, were extensivelyand thoroughly investigated by Arthur (see endnote). What I did know was that Morais was a prominent Italian-American rabbi of Portuguese descent who eventually settled in Philadelphia and that his papers are preserved in the Library of the Katz Center. What I did not realize at the time was that his life and correspondence constitute an extraordinarily rich and fascinating archive, one that offers a vivid reflection of international Judaism at a pivotal moment of transformation—when Jewish communities were negotiating questions of identity, politics, religion, and belonging across Europe and the United States.

As a project intern, my work centered on three main tasks: 1) transcribing Italian letters and writings from the Morais Papers and creating descriptive metadata; 2) managing workflows in a digital humanities project, including launching a crowdsourcing campaign; and 3) implementing outreach strategies to promote digital archival projects to both academic and non-academic audiences.

Over the course of roughly 150 hours, I produced transcripts of 284 Italian letters and writings (for a total of 1,296 pages) through the FromThePage crowdsourcing portal, while also creating and enriching metadata with information on languages, notes, and contextual details. Depending on the material, I either transcribed the text from scratch or used the Beta test version of Leo, an AI-powered transcription and text analysis tool, to assist the process. In most cases, the AI-generated transcriptions proved reliable, though they still required careful review and correction. 

The implementation and acceleration of these tasks have not only relied on my work and AI but also on the efforts and enthusiasm of a team of volunteers: after launching a crowdsourcing campaign on social media and via the mailing list of the Italian Association for Jewish Studies (AISG), I was joined by Pia Settimi (independent researcher), Martina Perrotta (PhD candidate at the University of Trento), Alessia Fontanella (PhD student at Bar-Ilan University) and Camilla Berveglieri (Master student at the University of Venice).   

The content of the Sabato Morais Papers is strikingly diverse, ranging from political and religious debates to intellectual and scholarly exchanges, discussions of publications, higher education, and many other topics that might have occupied a nineteenth-century communal and religious leader, educator, scholar, and philanthropist.

Political anxieties and aspirations concerning democracy, freedom, the civic status of Jews, and the rising currents of Reform Judaism emerge as some of the most recurring and defining themes in Morais’s correspondence. Morais’s family and circles were ardent supporters of Italian patriotism, and it is not unusual to encounter references to Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi in his correspondence. In one striking example, Morais’s friend Leon Provenzal wrote to inform him that he had become very close to Garibaldi at the home of his sister in Pisa, where the hero of Italian unification was recuperating from his leg injury in 1862 (see here).

In a letter dated 1860, written on the birth of Sabato’s first son, his brother Leone closed with a telling flourish: Viva Garibaldi, l’Waschington d’Italia! The exclamation not only celebrated Giuseppe Garibaldi as the Italian counterpart to George Washington but also shed light on the deep republican fervor that animated the Morais during the years of the Risorgimento.

Philanthropy also dominates a substantial portion of the correspondence. On the institutional level, Morais was instrumental in founding the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1886. On a more personal scale, his papers are filled with appeals for aid and with replies highlighting his efforts to assist Italian migrants in need, whether recently arrived in Philadelphia or struggling to find stability elsewhere.

Baron Maurice de Hirsch (1831-1896)

A significant number of letters discuss the Carmel Colony in New Jersey, an agricultural settlement funded by Baron Maurice de Hirsch from Paris to provide a refuge for Jewish refugees from Russia and Eastern Europe fleeing the pogroms. His correspondence includes exchanges—primarily in Italian, and occasionally in French—with other prominent philanthropists, among them Sir Moses Montefiore, the renowned Anglo-Jewish philanthropist originally from Livorno whom Morais met in London, and Emanuel Veneziani, likewise a Livornese, who served as almoner for the Baron.

Although he had left Italy many years earlier, Morais maintained a steady and respected presence in Italian Jewish periodicals such as Il Vessillo Israelitico and in broader scholarly networks. His ongoing engagement was widely recognized and praised, underscoring the durability of his intellectual ties across the Atlantic. Dozens of letters testify to the richness and variety of his publications and translations, his active participation in learned exchanges with figures such as Marco Mortara, Elia Benamozegh, Isaia Luzzatto, and others, as well as his enduring fascination with the dynamics of the book market—including the frequent frustrations he faced in trying to have volumes shipped to Philadelphia.

This enduring attachment to Italy and the continuity of transatlantic connections are even more striking when seen through the lens of his more intimate correspondence. In an era without emails, telephones, instant messages, or social networks, the written letter served as the lifeline binding together relatives and friends across oceans. From Livorno to Philadelphia and back, every sheet of paper, folded and sealed, carried with it a weight of emotion: the excitement of sharing news, the anxiety of waiting for a reply, the fear that a message (and often money checks) might be lost at sea or delayed for weeks or months. 

The letters also reflect the rhythm of Jewish life and the cycle of the Jewish year. Mirallegro for births, weddings, and other mitzvot, alongside condolences for funerals and for the deaths of relatives and acquaintances in Livorno and beyond, were carefully recorded, offering a poignant glimpse into how families experienced both continuity and rupture across generations and the ocean. At the same time, the familiar cadence of Jewish holidays runs through the correspondence: greetings for Rosh ha-Shanah, Pessah, Shavuot, or Hanukkah, each combining tradition with personal warmth. These exchanges link the intimate with the communal, illustrating how Jewish ritual bound together dispersed families in an age marked by migration and transformation.

The deep affection among the Morais siblings (Sabato was the third of nine children, seven daughters and two sons) is particularly reflected by the correspondence with his brother, Leone, and his sisters Nena, Gentile, Estere, and Rosa. Many of these letters refer to the pressing financial worries of his sisters and their children, to which Sabato promptly responded. Through the letters, we glimpse the role of their parents, Samuel Morais and Bona Wolf, in shaping their education and childhood in Livorno. 

The condition of women emerges almost incidentally but poignantly, through the stories of the women’s family, often burdened by their roles as wives, mothers, or family caretakers. For example, when the Livornese Clara (daughter of Leone) writes to her American cousin, Nina (Sabato’s daughter), to congratulate her on her engagement, she is a bit surprised that her fiancé did not order her to stop her study of Italian, while she had to interrupt her study of English (even if she doesn’t say clearly that this was an order of her own husband). More hints in this and other letters reveal the gap between the conditions of the Italian and American Morais girls and women.

From the many letters to Sabato sent by his sister Nena, wife of Cesare Lunel, Attorney General of Egypt, we have the portrait of a woman who, like many others, devoted her entire life to her husband and raising children. After Cesare’s death, she kept taking care of her daughters, sons scattered, and grandchildren between Egypt, Italy, and Paris, but also enjoyed little moments of freedom and relaxation. On September 5, 1889, she writes that she often went to the Exposition universelle in Paris and that she went to the top of the Eiffel Tower, where she even had breakfast! She adds that “it is a marvelous spectacle to see Paris from 300 meters high. Paris looks like a candy box, rather than the large and populous country that it is.”

Now that I live in Paris and often pass by that same Eiffel Tower one hundred and thirty-six years later, I find myself reflecting more and more on the role of archives in connecting us with those who came before. Reading these letters is not only an act of historical inquiry but also an exercise in empathy, a way of entering into the lives, concerns, and emotions of past generations.

Even if my internship came to an end, the work on the transcription of Sabato Morais’s Italian correspondence will go on. Stay tuned!

Notes:

1.  Among the many publications dedicated by Kiron to Morais, see his Golden Ages, Promised Lands: The Victorian Rabbinic Humanism of Sabato Morais, Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1999, as well as many other contributions such as ““Dust and Ashes”: The Funeral and Forgetting of Sabato Morais,” American Jewish History 84/3 (1996): 155-188; “Livornese Traces in America Jewish History: Sabato Morais and Elia Benamozegh,” in Per Elia Benamozegh, ed. Alessandro Guetta (Milan: Edizioni Thalassa De Paz, 2001); “Varieties of Haskalah: Sabato Morais’s Program of Sephardi Rabbinic Humanism in Victorian America,” in Renewing the Past, Reconfiguring Jewish Culture: From Al-Andalus to the Haskalah, eds. Ross Brann and Adam Sutcliffe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 121-145; “Heralds of Duty: The Sephardic Italian Jewish Theological Seminary of Sabato Morais,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 2015/2 (2015): 206-249; “Cutting and Pasting: Interpreting the Victorian Scrapbook Practices of Sabato Morais,” in For the Sake of Learning. Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton, eds. Ann Blair and Anja Silvia Goeing (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 641-658.