The kibbutz of the sun : Enzo Sereni reads Tommaso Campanella

The paper aims to present the re-reading of the thought of the Dominican friar and theologian Tommaso Campanella as it was elaborated by the Italian Socialist Zionist Enzo Sereni. The analysis is based on an unpublished manuscript written in 1919 where, clearly basing on Campanella’s utopian essay “Civitas Soli” (1602), the young Zionist from Rome portrayed the advent of a new social and political order only apparently depicted for the Italian context after World War I. It might be suggested, on the contrary, that the archetypal model was actually conceived in order to flawlessly foresee the socialistic, democratic and egalitarian reality embodied by the kibbutz-system, of which, only few years later, Sereni himself became one of the most prominent souls in Italy and one of its first agents in Eretz Israel. As such the paper will tackle the issue of the contact between Jewish and non-Jewish culture from the point of view of the history of the ideas. It illustrates how, in that specific case, Zionism applied to and stroke up strong ties with the theoretical repertoire formulated in the peculiar frame of an heterodox wing of Catholicism, suggesting a possible reading of social utopias as a field of intellectual encounter and exchange beyond, but at the same within, religions and cultures.