On Carlo Ginzburg (1939–2026)
It was like falling in love: passionate, immediate, and naive. In the library at the Scuola Normale in Pisa, Carlo Ginzburg, age 20, made three decisions in the same instant: to become a historian, to study witchcraft trials, and to try and rescue (to use his term) the voices of the defendants.
Ginzburg knew so little about the witch trials that his next act was to go and look up “witchcraft” in the encyclopedia. He had no idea the difficulties his project would pose, or what it would take to recover the beliefs and ideals of the accused from an archive built by their accusers.
There was not much to go on. Here and there in the archives, the words of the accused would leap out like a flash of lightning, but Ginzburg could discover these isolated clues only with persistence and luck, and connecting them to the broader historical picture required great feats of deduction and imagination. It called for another way of thinking about evidence, a kind of zooming in and out between the paradigm and the anomaly, like toggling the dials of microscope. This mode of analysis would become the basis for microhistory, the methodological approach Ginzburg helped to shape.
Years later, a fellow historian suggested to Ginzburg that it was “obvious for a Jew to work on witches and heretics.” This inference struck him as accurate, yet he had never considered it before. It was, he said, as if he had deliberately concealed the truth from himself—Ginzburg’s father was tortured to death by the Nazis when he was less than 5 years old. Carlo was well aware that the dead do not come back to life, but in his work he found a way to retrieve a few treasures from history’s endless losses.
+++
Carlo’s mother, Natalia (née Levi), was raised in a family of “old-school Socialists.” Pugnacious and explosive, her father could not resist exclaiming his disgust when he saw Blackshirts marching down the street. The family grew more and more isolated as the Fascist regime entrenched itself. At one point in her childhood, they hosted a mysterious guest, a bear-like man who would go running down the hall to hide any time someone knocked on their door. He was Filippo Turati, an antifascist on the run, waiting for the boat that would smuggle him safely out of Italy.
In 1938, Natalia married Leone Ginzburg, with whom she would have three children. Leone was a philologist and a gifted intellectual, but by the time they married his career was already over. He had been forced out of the academy in 1934 after refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the Fascists, and his antifascist activity later got him imprisoned for two years.
When the war started, Leone was sent into internal exile in Pizzoli, a tiny town in Abruzzo. Natalia would later describe that world in “Winter in the Abruzzi,” vividly recalling the men, coming and going to the rhythm of seasonal labor, the women, toothless at age 30, and the church bells ringing out over the deep snow:
Many bricklayers came from that area, and some of the houses were elegantly built; they were like small villas with terraces and little columns, and when you entered them you would be astonished to find large dark kitchens with hams hanging from the ceilings, and vast, dirty, empty rooms. In the kitchen a fire would be burning, and there were various kinds of fire: there were great fires of oak logs, fires of branches and leaves, fires of twigs picked up one by one in the street. It was easier to tell the rich from the poor by looking at the fires they burnt than by looking at the houses or at the people themselves, or at their clothes and shoes which were all more or less the same.
Then-3-year-old Carlo remembered nothing of the city life his parents had left behind—the tall buildings, the fine shops, the literary friends. Pizzoli was the only world he knew. The family’s 14-year-old maid, a local named Crocetta, told him macabre folktales; in one of them (as Natalia recorded) a little boy was boiled alive by his stepmother and eaten up by his father. The boy’s bones, left on the plate, get up and sing a little song.
In the snowy isolation of Abruzzo, Natalia worked on Proust, while Leone worked on Tolstoy. As a Jew, he was not allowed to sign his preface to the edition of War and Peace. Later, when a still-young Carlo read the book, not quite precocious enough to fully understand it, he didn’t realize that the single asterisk at the end of the page was standing in for his father’s name. But he must have picked up some essential germ from the encounter, as he later came to regard War and Peace as a forerunner of microhistorical analysis. Tolstoy knew that you cannot truly understand a battle without seeing it through the eyes of the humblest soldier on the field.
When the Mussolini regime collapsed in 1943, Leone felt safe enough to go to Rome, where he continued his work as editor of L’Italia Libera, an underground resistance paper. But soon the Nazis invaded, the paper’s offices were discovered, and Leone was arrested. Natalia received one last letter from him. “Be brave,” he told her; they both knew there was no hope. The day after he wrote it, he was dead.
Hiding with his mother’s family in Florence, Carlo was given a new name, Carlo Tanzi. His grandmother wrote it out for him inside a book called The Happiest Boy in the World. If anyone asked him his name, she cautioned, he should use this one. Later, he recalled this moment as the first time he thought of himself as Jewish….
https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/playing-roulette-in-the-archives/
+++++++++++++++++++
‘Baba’ – A Personal Tribute to Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi, by A. L. Basham
‘India’s First Radicals’ argues for a generous assessment of 19th-century Indian intellectual life
Kautilya’s observations on the causes of discontent in a polity
Late Victorian Holocausts: the famines that fed the empire
Ramachandra Guha’s ‘India After Gandhi’ – Gujarati translation launched in Ahmedabad
Toys from Trash: Teaching kids science using everyday objects / Visit Arvind Gupta’s Archive
The Derozio Affair – An Annal of Early Calcutta. By Rudrangshu Mukherjee
Dissent, Diversity Run Deep in Karnataka and in Indian Philosophy: A Conversation
