Italki

The Italkim are the Jews of Italy, present since the Roman Republic, with epitaphs from the second century BCE; Rome's is among Europe's oldest continuous Jewish settlements. They keep their own Italian synagogue rite, distinct from Ashkenazi and Sephardic rites, and speak Judeo-Italian dialects.

Early medieval learning flourished in Rome and Bari; Shabbethai Donnolo (died 982) wrote medical and religious works. The papacy generally protected its Jews, and the Papal States never expelled them, though Bologna did so in 1172. From 1492 Sephardic refugees enlarged the communities.

In 1516 the Venetian Republic confined its Jews to the world's first ghetto. In 1555 a papal bull imposed the Roman ghetto and the yellow badge, two years after Talmud copies had been burned across Italy. The mystic Moses Hayyim Luzzatto (1707–1746) was the last great voice of this tradition before Napoleon's army opened the Venetian ghetto in 1797.