Ferrara, Giuseppe Bassani

As is well known, A. Z. Idelsohn had devoted little part of his monumental endeavors to Italian Jewish musical traditions, when he started writing to informants on Italian soil, presumably to fill that gap. One such informants was a lawyer from Ferrara, Giuseppe Bassani. In an exchange of letters dating from November 1933 to September 1934, Bassani described to Idelsohn the composition and characteristics of the Ferrara Jewish community, as well as of the general distribution of synagogues and their rites throughout Italy; and organized the transcription of a significant number of traditional melodies pertaining to the three active scuole in Ferrara: the scuola tedesca, scuola italiana and scuola spagnola. The items in this collections are reproductions of the original transcriptions sent by Bassani, preserved in the Idelson archives at the Israeli National Library.