This postcard was mailed on August 17, 1880 to the rabbi Sabato Morais (1823-1897) in Philadelphia by the rabbi of Mantua Marco Mortara (1815-1894). Mortara, unable to write following a cataract operation, dictated the text to his son Ludovico (1855-1937), a distinguished jurist and Italian politician. It is one of the very first postal cards issued by the recently established Kingdom of Italy, only six year after they were first printed in 1874. Graphic illustrations on the postcard are negligible; only the national emblem and the image of the stamp appear. It would be ten more years before the first private picture postcards were introduced into the market.
The interest of this particular postcard is twofold. On one hand it shows the appearance of a means of communication that will threaten the existence of the lengthy, erudite letter on scientific matters that contributed significantly to the development of the Wissenshaft des Judentums ("Science of Judaism") on a European scale. On the other hand, it attests to the intellectual exchange of two Italian rabbis living on two sides of the Atlantic whose professional careers followed substantially different paths. Mortara represents the sedentary type of rabbi, deep-rooted in the territorial reality of his provincial community, who never left his city during the whole span of his active life. Morais is one of the last and renowned examples of an Italian port Jewish rabbi, in the line of David Nieto or Raphael Meldola before him, who was widely traveled (Morais was born in Livorno, lived in London, then moved to the United States in 1851. He is best known as the principal founder of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York in 1886). By the turn of the century, both types would be outdated by the radical demographic and cultural changes undergone by Italian Jewry. Ironically, Mortara and Morais had been illustrious authors who corresponded in the traditional manner of scholarly exchange at the precise historical period during which, at the end of nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, the postcard was disrupting the dynamics of intellectual sociability that were built through the erudite letter.
