Ernesto Nathan

Born in London, Ernesto Nathan moved to Pisa, a Tuscan university town, with his mother following his father’s death. Nathan attended the University of Pisa, afterward encountering the ideas of Italian nationalist and republican Giuseppe Mazzini, his primary political influence. In 1870, Nathan moved to Rome and by 1888 had gained Italian citizenship, becoming a Freemason and associating with the mason’s lodge Grande Oriente d’Italia. Becoming a prominent voice of Italian liberalism and its assertively secular vision of Italian nationhood, Nathan was elected mayor of Rome in 1907, the first Jew to attain such a position and the first who did not come from a Catholic party or an aristocratic family of the former Papal State. During his tenure as mayor, a position he held through 1913, he advanced secular educational alternatives to the established education system controlled by the Catholic Church at the time.