Umberto Cassuto studioso dell’epigrafia ebraica di Venosa e dell’Italia meridionale

Umberto Cassuto, Scholar of Hebrew Epigraphy of Venosa and Southern Italy.
Even in the early years of the twentieth century, Cassuto was interested in the history of Jewish conversions that took place in southern Italy in the thirteenth century. Starting in the early thirties, he also worked on He-brew epigraphic documentation in Puglia and Basilicata, particularly for the early medieval period, while not neglecting the texts of the late Middle Ages. Following in the footsteps of Graziadio Isaia Ascoli and perceiving, perhaps for the first time, the full importance of this wealth of material in defining a significant and hitherto little-explored Italian Judaism from a historic and cultural-historic viewpoint, the Florentine scholar worked hard, albeit intermittently, on this rich material for nearly twenty years. During that period, he published several studies on the inscriptions of Bari, Taranto, Trani, Lavello and especially of Venosa, for which – in 1945 – he created the first epigraphic corpus of all the texts then known dating back to the ninth century.