Elia Samuele Artom

“When, in 1938, I delivered my last lecture at this University, as a ‘libero docente’ [lecturer with official certification to teach at the university] of Hebrew language and literature I would not have believed...“: in this way, Elia Samuele Artom opened the commemoration of his brother-in-law, Umberto Cassuto, on 28 May 1952 in Florence, where he was just passing through. The change that so many lives, like his own, had to undergo as a result of anti-Jewish laws was radical. Artom embarked for Mandatory Palestine in September 1939, with his younger son Ruben. Upon arrival he found a land that was not simple, whose ‘promise’ – at the center of the sources of tradition so dear to him – proved to be far more elusive than certain rhetoric would lead one to believe.