Synopsis
With this heady exploration of time and space, rumors and silence, colors, tastes, and ideas, Robert Bonfil recreates the richness of Jewish life in Renaissance Italy. He also forces us to rethink conventional interpretations of the period, which feature terms like 'assimilation' and 'acculturation'. Questioning the Italians' presumed capacity for tolerance and civility, he points out that Jews were frequently uprooted and persecuted, and where stable communities did grow up, it was because the hostility of the Christian population had somehow been overcome. After the ghetto was imposed in Venice, Rome, and other Italian cities, Jewish settlement became more concentrated. Bonfil claims that the ghetto experience did more to intensify Jewish self-perception in early modern Europe than the supposed acculturation of the Renaissance. He shows how, paradoxically, ghetto living opened and transformed Jewish culture, hastening secularization and modernization. Bonfil's detailed picture reveals in the Italian Jews a sensitivity and self-awareness that took into account every aspect of the larger society. His inside view of a culture flourishing under stress enables us to understand how identity is perceived through constant interplay - on whatever terms - with the Other.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Robert Bonfil is Professor of Jewish History at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem. His extensive publications on the history of Italian Jewry in Hebrew, Italian, French, and English have earned him an international reputation. Anthony Oldcorn is Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University.
From the Back Cover
The first fully developed and sophisticated statement of a position that goes against the main current of Jewish historiography for the past century. . . . The book will be of interest to scholars (beyond the specific field of Italian Jewish history) and to thoughtful general readers.--Marc Saperstein, Washington University
From the Inside Flap
"The first fully developed and sophisticated statement of a position that goes against the main current of Jewish historiography for the past century. . . . The book will be of interest to scholars (beyond the specific field of Italian Jewish history) and to thoughtful general readers." Marc Saperstein, Washington University
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy
By Robert BonfilUniversity of California Press
Copyright 1994 Robert BonfilAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0520073509
I
The Laws of Topodemographic Distribution
First Phase:
Italy, Land of Immigration
The Dynamic Laws of Settlement
Static and Dynamic Factors
The demographic distribution of the Jewish presence in Italy, from the close of the thirteenth century throughout practically the whole of the fifteenth, came about as the result of a process that can be reconstructed with a fair degree of accuracy. In Sicily, from thirty to thirty-five thousand Jews, spread over twenty or so different localities, chiefly Palermo, Syracuse, and Messina, continued a presence that went back more than a thousand years, a presence that was substantially static in character. On the mainland, in contrast, the demographic distribution of the Jews was essentially dynamic : here the Jews seemed to be constantly on the move. Their constant mobility makes it impossible to determine their number, though one will not be too far off the mark in estimating them at another twenty-five to thirty thousand souls, out of a total peninsula population of between eight and ten million. With the exception of Rome, which, as will be seen later, constituted a point of departure rather than a point of arrival, the Italian peninsula was for the Jews, during this initial phase of our period, a land of immigration. This feature can be added to the dichotomy between Sicily and the mainland mentioned in the introduction.
There was an upward migratory flow, headed northward, of Jews of Italian origin, from Rome for the most part, and a twofold downward
flow, toward the south, of Jews of French and German origin. The French Jews, for the most part refugees expelled from their country in 1394, arrived from the west, whereas the German Jews, victims of the persecutions that came in the wake of the terrible plague of 1348, came down from the north in a slow but continuous stream. Others came in small groups from Alsace, the Rhine regions, even Poland. A return migration, on a reduced scale, was also recorded into southern Italy, from which the Jews had been expelled in 1291. Those involved were, for the most part, Jews of Italian origin, who were joined, roughly speaking toward the end of the fifteenth century, by a number of German and Spanish Jews.
The Reasons for the Migrations
What drove these people to move? In the first place, they moved because of conditions of absolutely ineluctable necessity expulsions, such as those mentioned above, to which others were added. These included the expulsion, for instance, of the Jews from the northeastern cities of Treviso, Vicenza, Feltre, Cividale del Friuli, and Udine, which probably occurred in the second half of the fifteenth century, an account of which can be found in a brief published chronicle.1 Next, a reason to move was a wide variety of ways of evaluating one's circumstances, in the light of which some places of residence might appear considerably less advantageous than others. In some instances, the motive may have been the pure and simple quest for adventure. The Jews, in any case, were not the only ones to display this behavior. Migrations made in the hope of finding better living conditions in the chosen destination than in one's place of origin were an everyday affair. The Italian cities north of Rome, which were experiencing a phase of expansion and economic development, naturally favored this general trend through a relatively liberal policy with regard to the granting of citizenship, of a share, that is, in the rights and protection enjoyed by their own citizens. This circumstance provides a possible key to the extraordinary capacity demonstrated by the Italian states at the end of the Middle Ages to make
the most of their human resources and therefore expand. Setting aside the sense of civic commitment or other values typical of the Renaissance, the interest someone might have in becoming and remaining a citizen (cives) of another city was often so strong as to justify any manner of sacrifice that city might demand. Seen in this perspective, the migratory movements of the Jews are perhaps one of the most typical expressions of their participation in the spirit of the century. Their migrations must also have been regulated, like those of the Christians, perhaps even more so, by the elementary terms of the age-old law of supply and demand.
It is not difficult to imagine how the various socioeconomic structures affected this law, making it more difficult for Jews to be accepted in those places where trade and professional guilds or groups of merchants enjoyed strong influence and translated their fear of competition into genuine hostility toward the Jews. Any investigation into the elements of the law of supply and demand which governed the migratory movements of the Jews can certainly take its cue from this essentially economic factor. Where this factor was operative, it was capable of permanently preventing Jewish settlement. In fact, commercially and industrially developed cities were very reluctant to accept Jews during the period that concerns us. Some, like Genoa and Milan, refused outright to allow Jews to settle there. Others, like Florence and Venice, allowed them in relatively late and after considerable hesitation.
Anti-Jewish Hatred and the Propaganda of the Mendicant Friars
The dynamics of opposition to Jewish settlement were, however, far more complex than appears from considerations of a purely economic nature. If one is to understand the problem better, one must return to a number of commonplaces that recent historiography has occasionally tended to forget. First and foremost, it should be emphasized that the presence of the Jews was, theoretically speaking, a circumstance abnormal enough to trouble a good Christan conscience, and hence was in constant need of justification. A particularly intense senti-
ment of Christian orthodoxy among the rulers was more than sufficient to prevent Jewish settlement or to provoke their expulsion. At times, the appeal to orthodoxy was simply a transparent pretext camouflaging more simple and ingenuous calculations of political pragmatism, such for example, as the desire to curry favor with the ecclesiastical authorities by making a show of strong opposition to the acceptance of Jews or by support for their expulsion. But, more often than not, it was a case of a sincere feeling of Christian orthodoxy on the part of those who believed that the day of divine judgment was at hand. Above all, one should not forget the friars of the mendicant orders, who preached vehement sermons to the crowds gathered in the churches and public squares, and whom the local municipal councils could ill afford to ignore. "In my opinion, we ought to make provision, either by ordinances or by whatever other means may prove more effective, to drive out and expel from within the city limits and from the surrounding contado [countryside] all of the Jews making usurious loans in our city, because, as Friar Bernardino repeated in his recent preachings, they devour our flesh and blood with their usury, without our being aware of it,"2 exclaimed a counselor from Foligno shortly after the visit of a Franciscan preacher to his city. And, rather than being an exceptional case, this was the rule.
The mendicant friars sometimes had a decisive say in determining the fate of the Jews of the period. In the eyes of the Observants, animated as they were in the words of Lon Poliakov, to whom the present outline is not a little indebted by a psychological dynamic which lay in "an inextricable mixture of love for the Christian people and hatred for the Jews," the latter were seen above all as usurers and enemies of the poor, and therefore as doubly odious.3 The truth is that the Jews, as will be seen, were not all usurers; but this did not prevent the stereotypes spread by the hostile propaganda of the itinerant friars, especially the Franciscans, from dwelling almost exclusively upon this one aspect of their activity. The tendency to identify the Jews as usurers had taken root so profoundly in the mentality of the period that it can easily be unearthed even in linguistic expressions still current in our day. Bernardino of Siena (13801444), Giacomo della Marca (13911476), Giovanni da Capis-
trano (13861456), Bernardino da Feltre (14391494) are only the best-known names among a profusion of Observants who spread terror amongh the Jews. Exploiting the most venomous associations of ideas whenever they mentioned the Jews, the monks insisted in their sermons above all on the ancient myths of ritual murder, the profanation of the sacred host, and most of all on the rhetorical image of the blood sucked by Jewish moneylenders, immediately associated with the blood of Christ and with ritual murder. "You are far worse than pagans," thundered Giovanni da Capistrano, "by reason of the crime committed by you against Christ; you should be slaves, not only of the Christians, but also of Saracens and pagans."4 Even more explicit was the less famous bishop of Amelia, Ruggero Mandosi, when he compared the Jews to powerful and voracious bears, or to rabid dogs, who, jaws gaping horribly open, such the blood of good Christians.5 How often one encounters this comparison of the Jews with bloodsuckers! How often we are reminded that, wherever the Jews have been permitted to lend out money on interest, the almost inevitable result has been the impoverishment of Christians. "In Bassano, a town in Lombardy," preached Bernardino da Feltre in Florence, "there was a Jew who lent out money at interest for forty-two years, so depleting the city and its surrounding contado that there is no longer a penny to be found there."6 It appears that this was one of the Observants' arguments that never failed to make an impression. The head prior of Foligno mentioned above was so struck by it that he added to his proposal to expel the Jews the following consideration: "You heard what a vast sum they are able to accumulate by lending out fifty ducats at thirty percent interest for fifty years!" And how could it have failed to make an impression on the minds of the common people in the far-off fourteenth century, if there have even been modern historians who, on the basis of the same arithmetic as Bernardino's, have seriously claimed that in 1495, little more than fifty years after they were admitted to the city, the Jewish moneylenders in Florence had accumulated nothing less than the fabulous sum of 49,792,556 florins?7
But the preachers were not always so explicit in their sermons. Frequently ambiguous, they were not above playing upon double entendres,
thereby encouraging the climate of violence without openly preaching it. Fortunato da Perugia, for instance, insistently defended the founding of a Monte di Piet (loan bank) in Amelia in words whose meaning was far from transparent: "This crime of usury, and the excommunication it brings with it, is a horrible and grievous sin visited upon the entire population of Amelia, as a result of the charter of agreement concluded with the Jews."8 What did he imply in practice? That they should throw themselves upon the Jews? Carry out a pogrom? Drive them out of the city perhaps? Or would it be sufficient simply to annul the clauses relating to usury contained in the residence permit issued to the Jews? In Orvieto the agreement with the Jews was annulled after the visit of Bernardino da Siena, who in addition boasted openly of having caused the expulsion of the Jews from Vicenza.
However ambiguous they might be, the semantics of the terms "usury" and "usurer" were sufficiently clear as to leave no doubt as to their immediate target: the Jews. To whom was Bernardino da Siena referring when he promised his listeners a sermon on usury "which would make them go into a cold sweat even in mid-January"? In theory, of course, he was referring not necessarily to the Jews. Still, given that the term "usurer" was generally used as a synonym of "Jew," Bernardino was in fact referring only to the Jews. On other occasions he could be more explicit:
Money is the vital heat of a city. The Jews are leeches who ask for nothing better than the opportunity to devour an ailing member, whose blood they suck with insatiable ardor. When heat and blood abandon the extremities of the body to flow back to the heart, it is a sign that death is near. But the danger is even more imminent when the wealth of a city is in the hands of the Jews. Then the heat no longer flows, as it does normally, towards the heart. As it does in a plague-ridden body, it moves towards the ailing member of the body; for every Jew, especially if he is a moneylender, is a capital enemy of all Christians.9
The image of the Jew immediately called to mind the ideas of cheating, sin, and evil. "Oh!" exclaimed Bernardino da Feltre, "to speak of a good Jew is like speaking of a good scoundrel!"10 What more was there to say? "The usurer is the evilest of men, he is a martyr to the devil's cause, a
cancer to the state and to the poor. Usury is forbidden by natural law, by canon law, and by civil law." The usurer is a pig, a thief, he destroys the natural order of things. Usury "is called tokos in Greek, which means 'childbirth,' because it is contrary to nature."11 The anomaly represented by the presence of the Jews among the Christians was thus associated in the last analysis with everything that is contrary to nature , as was, for example, that other great scourge, real or imaginary, of the period: homosexuality.
At bottom, all of this was not necessarily aimed at driving out the Jews, and still less at persecuting them. The chief purpose of every attitude taken with regard to the Jews was that of converting them to Christianity. Everyone wanted to see sufficient pressure brought to bear on the Jews to convince them to convert. Every Jewish conversion was transformed into an occasion for festive celebration and Christian pride. Nobles and high-ranking ecclesiastics considered it a great honor to act as sponsors at the baptism of the neophytes, who for this reason frequently entered Christian society with aristocratic names. The better Christian a man was, the more ardent his desire to contribute to this holy cause. All the mendicant friars did was to give expression to the current mentality. Giovanni da Capistrano, for example, never ceased repeating, for the benefit of the Jews compelled to attend his sermons: "If I did not love the Jews, I would not be a good Christian. Were not Jesus and the Blessed Virgin both Jews? Were not the Apostles also Jews?"12 This was the reason why "he would have done as much for converted Jews as he would have for his closest relatives."13 Relatives like this could be dangerous!
Be that as it may, the common people were certainly not attuned to these subtle nuances. In fact many sermons ended in pogroms, like the one that took place in Florence in 1488, after an inflammatory sermon by Bernardino da Feltre, which took Manuelino da Camerino as its victim. Bernardino had addressed his sermon to the young, inviting them to organize militarily into armed prayer companies in a crusade for the reform of moral behavior; but, despite the fact that the monk had not explicitly incited them to assault the Jews, as the chronicler reports, "they were far from interpreting the call to arms in a spiritual sense."14 The spiritual rite
became quite naturally transformed into a rite of violence against Jews, and it was no less to be expected that the ones in the front rank should be the adolescents. This Florentine example was in no way exceptional. There are many witnesses to confirm the fact that popular uprisings and attacks on Jews frequently followed in the wake of Franciscan sermons. These disturbances clearly functioned as a catalyst for the anti-Jewish measures promulgated by those in power.
The majority of the religious, who were certainly not on a par with their more famous brethren, did not even bother with the appeal to ambiguity and simply incited their hearers to persecution and expulsion. In his famous diary, the Venetian Marino Sanudo describes how, on Good Friday of 1509, a certain Father Ruffino preached in Santa Maria dell'Orto "that it was lawful to strip the Jews of all their money and not permit them to live."
From statements like this to accusations of ritual murder was not after all such a far cry. This kind of accusation was perhaps relatively uncommon beneath the blue skies of Italy (a systematic statistical survey would be needed, however, to affirm this with certainty), but they were certainly not lacking, and they turned out to be fraught with tragic consequences. The accusation of having murdered little Simon, made against the Jews of Trent in 1475, is paradigmatic in this regard. On the basis of the accusation, on which the last word is still to be heard, the entire local Jewish community some thirty persons was exterminated. The description of the tortures inflicted upon these poor people to make them confess to a crime they had not committed is enough to make one's flesh creep even today, centuries after the event. Only a few women succeeded in resisting the pain and continuing to protest their innocence. (The steadfastness of the women is an interesting phenomenon, of which Jewish history offers a number of instances, such as the persecutions at the time of the Crusades.) According to medieval practice, the bodies of the confessed "culprits" were exposed to public mockery in order to reinforce in the popular mentality the idea that truth had triumphed and justice had been served. The Holy See itself, traditionally opposed to this
"Ritual murder" of Simon of Trent, as depicted in Hartmann Schedel's Book of
Chronicles from the Beginning of the World [Liber chronicarum cum figuris et
imaginibus ab initio mundi], Nremberg, 1493. It was published by Germany's
largest printer (Anton Koberger) and contained over 2,000 woodcuts. Some
1,500 Latin and 1,000 German copies were printed .
kind of anti-Jewish myth, later canonized little Simon, demonstrating its support for the accusation, which was not retracted until 1965.
The Trent affair deserves particular attention, not simply because of the unusual position taken by the Holy See, but more particularly because this was the first time the recent invention of printing was employed in the service of a hate campaign. The broadsides with the martyr's picture, and the pamphlets which described his martyrdom paying morbid attention to the gruesome details, proved capable of making a much stronger impression on public opinion than a mere rumor passed
by word of mouth. A recent iconographic study has pointed out the influence exerted by the events at Trent on a whole series of figurative works painted in the churches of Lombardy, clear proof of the fact that what might have remained a passing incident ended up assuming a very different role in the formation of Christian fantasies with regard to Jews. A by no means negligible number of these churches belonged to the Franciscan order. This same accusation of ritual murder can no doubt be traced to the sermons of Bernardino da Feltre who, that very same year, had mentioned in passing in Trent, in his Lenten sermon, how "he had sometimes heard tell that the Jews drink Christian blood during their Easter celebrations."15
Surviving documents mention more than a dozen cases similar to the one in Trent during the second half of the fifteenth century, most of which have been brought to light only recently which shows how incomplete our knowledge in this area continues to be. Over and above the individual circumstances, on the level of typology, every case boils down to the same thing. The accusations of ritual murder occurring in Italy are no different than similar accusations made elsewhere, which go back as far as William of Norwich (1144), the prototype of this kind of accusation in Europe. This would be sufficient in and of itself to cast doubt on the widespread conviction that Italian Christians had an extraordinarily favorable attitude toward Jews, spoiled only by the negative attitude of the Franciscans. We should certainly not make these itinerant propagandists, dispensers of the soul's salvation, the chief instigators of every misfortune that fell to the lot of the Jews. In order to be efficacious, even the most fiery preaching needs ears ready to be convinced. If the Franciscans and their institutions did indeed play an especially important role in the dynamics of the rites of violence against the Jews, this is because they were particularly in tune with the music of their times, to the strains of which Jews and Christians neither sang nor danced nor drank together, not even in Italy, whatever Cecil Roth may have thought to the contrary.16 Of course, it is not impossible that such peaceful coexistence may exceptionally have occurred. But the general tenor of public opinion with regard to the Jews was certainly negative, and the Franciscans had no
trouble stirring it up. It is legitimate to ask why the Franciscans had the principal role in almost all the Jewish tragedies of the period. We might reply with a hypothesis that has yet to be verified. The Franciscans were recruited from among the merchant classes, rather than from among the landed aristocracy, and, on account of their social origins, were therefore more sensitive than their brethren in other religious orders to the socioeconomic needs of the times. Perhaps this is the reason why the "Jewish question" was bound up in their eyes with the problem of usury and took on so urgent an aspect.
The "Need" for the Jews
We have insisted at such length on this anti-Jewish prejudice in order to emphasize a consideration of prime importance to the understanding of the dynamics of Jewish settlement in the cities of Italy. In order to counter the essentially anti-Jewish tendency of public opinion, or at least neutralize it, cogent arguments were always needed. In the absence of a time-honored tradition of residence which the Jews could appeal to in the case of Sicily or Rome, but not too easily elsewhere it was usually necessary to come up with some justification for deciding to allow them to live among Christians. The arguments were usually of a utilitarian nature and stressed those practical needs that, in the opinion of the rulers, could best be met by recourse to the Jews. These arguments, however, are not without their ambiguous side.
The argument most frequently used was that the Jews were "necessary." What was the specific "need"? Bearing in mind the Franciscan campaign against usurers, one immediately tends to think of moneylending; but, as has already been pointed out, the Jews were not always moneylenders. One has only to recall, for example, the medical doctors. Jewish doctors were professionally trained, sometimes better trained than the majority of their Christian colleagues. Even the popes preferred them to Christians, in spite of ecclesiastical regulations forbidding them to avail themselves of the services of the Jews, on account of the supposed danger of assassination. Jewish doctors were less expensive than their Christian
counterparts, for reasons there is no need to dwell on. In the case of the doctors, then, it would be reasonable to appeal to the concept of "necessity" in order to justify the invitation to take up residence among Christians. The chief justification offered by the documents, however, was in fact moneylending, a practice for which the Jews were considered essential. The issue deserves closer study. Did there really exist an economic need capable of setting in motion mechanisms of an automatic or practically automatic nature? There is every reason to doubt this impression, however firmly ensconced it may be in the interpretation (or misinterpretation) of the period.
The economic mechanisms sometimes referred to in historical interpretations of the period are often insufficient to explain why the "Jewish solution" was preferred in some places, whereas in others, where socioeconomic conditions were identical, different solutions were adopted. One has the impression that, by adhering to the letter of the documents that speak of the "need" for the Jews, and using this kind of expression as a basis for generalization, without taking into account the context in which it is found, one runs the risk of falling into the same error of method denounced by Marxist historiography the error, in other words, of underrating the importance of the structures presupposed by such categories of thought and of then considering their verbal expression as constituting history. This is the case of the historians who saw in the allusions to the "need" for the Jews proof that this need went well beyond mere moneylending. At times historians have posited the existence of far-reaching economic mechanisms, which the available documents, even if one were to take them at their face value, would have difficulty justifying. A gifted scholar recently proposed that one should interpret the settlement of the Jewish moneylenders north of Rome in the fourteenth century in light of the financial policy of the Holy See, considering them as mercatores romanam curiam sequentes , that is to say, merchant-bankers upon whom the popes relied to carry out their financial transactions, in particular their transferrals of capital, which consisted for the most part of transferrals of the remittances paid to the Apostolic Chamber. Today we are quite well informed about the ways in which the
popes used the mercatores romanam curiam sequentes to consolidate their power and extend their influence in the context of an expansionist policy. We have also been familiar for some time with the particular pontifical privileges granted to certain Jews known in the documents as mercatores curiam nostram sequentes . This is the case, for instance, of the document issued on 1 February 1255 to Angelo, Sabbatino, Musetto, Salamone, and another Angelo.17 Nevertheless, the documentation adduced does not seem sufficient to convince us to abandon the usual view, which denies the Jews a prominent position in the papal economy. One cannot see in every Angelo, Sabbatino, or Musetto, with a capital of a few hundred or even a few thousand florins, an equal of the Florentine mercatores romanam curiam sequentes , such as the Medici, the Strozzi, the Acciaiuoli, or the Peruzzi, in whom papal political executives could place their absolute trust. Moreover, not a shred of evidence exists to suggest that any Jewish moneylender ever in practice played a role similar to bankers of this kind. This does not mean of course that the popes were loath to take advantage of the services of the Jews whenever the occasion arose.
The Jews in any case did not possess capital comparable to those of the great Christian bankers. Granted, no one has yet undertaken, for any Italian city, an overall quantitative analysis of the real contribution of Jewish capital to the local economy. We can nevertheless affirm, without fear of contradiction, that, except in a few rare instances, that contribution was not particularly high, especially when compared to the total budgets of the Italian states, about which we are in some cases quite accurately informed. One example: from 1320 to 1321 the expenditure of the Apostolic Chamber increased from 112,490 to 528,857 florins, and, in the years 13251326, 336,000 florins were budgeted for the war in Lombardy.18 Another example: in the thirty-year period between 1402 and 1433, the budget of Florence showed annual deficits of the order of half a million florins. In 1426 the deficit was slightly higher, reaching a peak of 628,622 florins. In the same year, expenditures for the hiring of mercenaries reached a sum total of 550,499 florins, which was anything but a record: this figure was exceeded several times in the course of the ten-year period 13901402.19 Now, in the year 1437, the Jews in Florence
invested, in the banks they were authorized to open, 14,000 florins. And the Jewish banks were four in number, compared with an overall total of almost a hundred. More than a little imagination is needed if one is to be persuaded that these Jews made a substantial, indeed fundamental, contribution to the Florentine economy!20 Quite to the contrary, one is left with the impression that whenever considerable sums were called for, the best thing to do was to seek loans from the Christian banks. Another example: when in 1290 the Commune of Perugia found itself in urgent need of 30,000 florins, they turned to six Florentine banks.21 That same year, there were Jews in Perugia who placed at the disposal of the Commune such sums as they were in a position to lend. They were sums of a quite different order of magnitude.22 So, although the imposition of taxes on the Jews was never a negligible affair, and although at times the hundreds of ducats paid by the Jews provided relief to drained economies, it was always relatively little compared with the overall dimensions of the local economies. In other words, contrary to some assertions, the Jews never took the place of the Christian financiers, who were allegedly compelled to give them a free hand in the field of medium and small credit. Rather, they filled the small vacuums left by the Christian financiers, who were forbidden by local authorities, with increasing zeal as the fifteenth century progressed, to number among their economic activities small consumer loans. The insistence with which this ban, with respect to which late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century practice had shown itself to all intents and purposes indifferent, was pursued, must be explained in light of the more general changes in the religious attitudes of Italian society during this period, changes that must be attributed at least in part to the preaching of the mendicant orders. As proof, one may cite the fact, not yet studied from a diachronic point of view, that whereas in the last few decades of the thirteenth century usurious loans by Jews are documented alongside similar activities on the part of Christians, and sometimes even in partnership with them, as time goes by this activity tends to become more and more the exclusive prerogative of Jews. This additional note of ambivalence seems in any case worthy of note: the selfsame mendicant orders that, as has been shown, were responsible for the hos-
tility toward Jews were also instrumental in the spread of a mental climate favorable to the attribution of the role of usurious moneylenders exclusively to Jews.
This ambivalence, however, never found a doctrinal, still less an ideological, justification. At this point, it is important to put in its proper light a kind of syllogism occasionally encountered in the documents, in which one is too often tempted to see a linear explanation of the true state of affairs. Given that usury is prohibited by law, and given that individual consumer loans are nonetheless necessary, it follows that Jews must be tolerated. What does this mean? Lon Poliakov has already pointed out that, from the standpoint of Christian doctrine, the usurious loans practiced by the Jews could not be viewed as purely and simply permitted. Many canon lawyers would have considered them forbidden in the same way that loans practiced by Christians were forbidden. In their eyes, the introduction of the Jewish moneylender presented problems of a rather complicated nature, even more complicated, paradoxically, than those regarding the tolerance of the Christian usurer. For the Jews had two strikes against them: not only were they usurers, they were also Jews. As one Franciscan monk said, "The Christian usurer, though his sin may be graver than the Jew's, is nevertheless preferable to the Jew in one sense, because he quite often makes restitution; whereas the Jews, who over and above usury, bear hatred for the Christians, after they have grown rich at Christian expense, frequently strain their ingenuity to expatriate their profits."23 In other words, though usurious loans might be necessary, it was by no means a logical consequence that the activities of Jewish money-lenders were therefore to be tolerated. For the Christians who wielded power, solving the problem by recourse to the Jews was a choice fraught with serious questions; and in general it was the Franciscan preachers who formulated them. How many problems could have been avoided if only they had come up with a "Christian solution"! Why not attempt to tackle the situation without recourse to the Jews? Wouldn't simple Christian charity have done the trick, if only they had taken the trouble to cultivate it? The preachings of the Franciscans in favor of the founding of Monti di Piet, of institutions, that is, designed to fulfill certain roles and to
eliminate the "need" for the Jews, amounted to nothing more than variations on the theme of "do it yourself!"
The Monti Di Piet
Halfway between modern credit banks and charitable institutions, the Monti di Piet were a definite failure throughout the entire Renaissance period, at least until the second half of the sixteenth century. Why? Taking into account their hybrid nature, it is perhaps possible to hazard a reply. The Monti di Piet, insofar as they were credit institutions, were intended to resemble real private banks, both in their internal organization, as well as in the way they amassed and administered their capital. Nevertheless, the very facts that they were created with a charitable purpose in mind, that deposits were nonproductive and could be encouraged only by the promise of eventual rewards in heaven, that the attitude of their administrators was more "governmental" than private, with the resulting proliferation of officers, sinecures, fiscal irresponsibility, embezzlements, and financial scandals, obviously placed obstacles in the way of the development of a true banking ethos. The charitable character of the Monti di Piet put further difficulties in the way of their development. By placing an arbitrary ceiling on the amounts that could be loaned, by compelling borrowers to declare, under oath and under pain of arrest, that they were taking out the loan strictly for their own personal needs and not for commercial purposes, or, worse still, to satisfy their appetites for vice and vanity, all that was achieved was to drive away potential customers, whose only recourse then was to Jewish usurers or to "Judaizing" Christians.
The Franciscan solution did not become truly practicable until all these obstacles had been overcome, until the Holy See, that is, authorized the payment of interest to those who made cash deposists (1542) and the Council of Trent approved the procedure, though still with the proviso that the money be deposited for charitable purposes and not for profit. Now that the Monti di Piet had to guarantee their depositors a
City walls of Montagnana near Venice, where German Jews established a colony of moneylenders in 1383.
Courtesy of Azienda di Promozione Turistica, Padova.
rate of interest, they were compelled to invest their capital on the sly, becoming transformed in the process into commercial banks. This evolution was inevitable. Loans to the poor took second place, becoming a mere pretext, whereas the institutions' various activities became more and more purely financial in character. The reversal of the trend, and of economic structures, could not be more evident. If, in the first phase, the pretext of loans to the poor served to legitimize the introduction of Jews and their insertion into the economic activities of the Italian cities, the selfsame pretext would later serve to legitimize the banking activities of the Christians and to render the presence of the Jews absolutely superfluous. The result was the economic suffocation of the latter, a problem to be returned to later. For the moment, suffice it to say that the greater part
of the history of the Jews in Renaissance Italy takes place between these two extreme phases, in a period in which it proved easier to overcome the problems posed by the toleration of Jewish moneylenders than the problem of making Christian banking institutions responsive to the needs of the Christian poor.
How the Jewish Presence Was Justified
The strategem that was to enable the Italian cities to welcome Jewish moneylenders and doctors without pangs of conscience was the papal dispensation. Jewish sources amply confirm that this formed the basis of the permission granted to Jews to practice usury, a practice otherwise considered contrary to canon law. As Leone Modena acutely remarked: "Permission to make interest-bearing loans is conceded by the Pope as a mark of tolerance, and the explanation given is the following: 'according to strict doctrine, Jews ought not to be permitted to lend money to Gentiles; this circumstance notwithstanding, We are nonetheless prepared to make an exception in favor of so-and-so, and to allow him to practice moneylending. We have no intention that this should become the general rule; but, if the suit is insistent, We reserve to Ourselves the right, after due examination of each case, to grant permission or to refuse it.'"24 There is plenty of evidence to confirm that the papal dispensation was at times considered by the communal bodies a necessary prerequisite to the granting of a residence permit. In such cases, the Jews involved were compelled to procure at their own expense from the papal chancery a pontifical brief of authorization.
Generally speaking, however, the existence of precedents and a sense of independence vis--vis the pope on the part of the local secular authorities was enough to exempt them from the duty of appealing to the pope before granting residence permits to Jews. Thus, in 1533, the Duke of Milan asserted: "Inasmuch as the Jewish nation is tolerated by the Most Holy Church and by Christian Potentates and allowed to reside in their places, states and cities, in order to protect Christians from the occasion of sin, in the form of usurious depravity, as well as to provide as-
San Marino, where Jewish loan banks appeared as early as 1369. It was a well-established community by
1442. Courtesy of photo studio MW.
sistance to their poor and needful subjects; in keeping with the example of our Illustrious predecessors, we have been moved to concede to the aforesaid Jewish nation the right to reside in our State."25
There can be no doubt that, once this preliminary obstacle had been overcome, the "Jewish solution" was for Christian rulers the most convenient, effective, and advantageous course, from both the fiscal and the sociopolitical point of view. The Jews were always handy, forever on the lookout for hospitable shores on which to disembark, and no doubt more willing than anyone else to accept the restrictive conditions imposed on
them with regard to interest rates and the like; furthermore, they made far more profitable taxable subjects than most; and, finally, they did not represent a source of potential political danger to the ruling forces as might have been the case with other Christians. As the Dominican Sisto dei Medici remarked toward 1550, the raison d'tre for the presence of the Jews could be put quite simply: "quia magis timidi, quia profugi, quia servi, quia sine favoribus, quia foris sunt (because they are more timid, because they are refugees, because they are servants, because they are without protection, because they are outsiders)."26
Nevertheless, none of this proved sufficient to avoid recourse to the solution of the Monti di Piet. The Monti di Piet won out in the end. The real problem, then, is to understand why their victory took so long, leaving the field open to the Jewish moneylenders throughout the entire first phase of the period. A quantitative detail, which has so far gone relatively unobserved, may perhaps help us find the answer. The low rates of interest, imposed as a condition on the Jews by the Christian authorities, had an evident fiscal component. The most explicit example is provided by Venice, which in 1387 gave moneylenders the alternative of lending at a high rate of interest and paying an annual tax of 4,000 ducats, or of reducing the interest rate by 2 percent and eliminating the tax.27 We may therefore estimate the sum of 4,000 ducats to be the equivalent of 2 percent of the total interest that the Jews could presumably have earned. As it was, the Jews preferred to lend at lower interest rates rather than pay the annual tax and try to earn more, which demonstrates that the estimate was still somewhat high. Of course, it was wartime, and they certainly were not above adding a few coppers to the empty coffers of the state: this, however, does not prevent the sum involved from being, in the eyes of the Senate of the Most Serene Republic, a derisory one. In order to have an idea of just how derisory it was, all one has to do is to read the text of the speech made by the Doge Tommaso Mocenigo to the Signoria in April 1423, in which he estimated the gross product of Venetian commerce at no less than 20 million ducats, a figure that included 4 million ducats in annual profits for the merchants of Venice.28 Had they been so inclined, the governments could have easily reduced interest rates
to zero and taken upon themselves the responsibility of assisting their poor. What would 20,000 or 30,000 ducats more or less have signified in the annual budget of the wealthy Venetian republic? Less, certainly, than the Most Serene Republic saw fit to distribute to the numerous members of the impoverished nobility. The problem of the "Jewish question" is fairly well reflected in the debate that took place in Venice in November 1519 among the Savii of the Great Council concerning the proposal to renew the statutes of agreement with the Jews. The debate was summed up in the shorthand notes of his diary by Marin Sanudo, who also added his own opinion, not without a hint of regret at not having been able to express it in the Senate as a member of the ruling body. The lengthy and emblematic passage, not easy to follow because of its colloquial syntax, is nonetheless worth quoting here almost in its entirety:
The first speaker was Sier Antonio Condulmer, a former Savio di Terra Ferma. At first the Council was reluctant to hear him out, because he said they could not and should not make any agreement with the Jews and allow them to practice usury in this city. Once order had been restored to the Consiglio, he began to speak out against the Jews and to say that he did not want them in this city on any account, demonstrating by appeal to the sacred canons that Jews should not be permitted to lend out money in this most Christian city, and, citing saintly texts, he caused to be read out loud many former decisions to the effect that they should not be allowed to remain in the city, though during the present war they had stayed in the heart of Venice, and everything had been permitted. Sier Zacaria Dolfin also, being one of the Savii of the Consiglio, said they should go to the Ghetto so that they would not stay among us, adding that they have been given a castle and could not be better provided for, and he encouraged the Council, showing great hypocrisy in not wanting them and not wanting the agreement drawn up by the Savii to permit them to set up secondhand dealerships and take the bread out of the mouths of Christian secondhand dealers. And then he said that if they really wanted them, then make them live in Mestre where they lived before the war, and make them pay 10,000 ducats and not 6,000. And if they were kept, we should beware of the wrath of God, for in France and in Spain there are no Jews, and God makes those monarchs prosper, and so on. And he called for Francesco Bragadin, one of the Savii who had sponsored the motion, to come and answer his arguments. Bragadin spoke at considerable length, and he spoke out well against the Jews, but not on the subject at issue, saying that once it was necessary to have Jews for the sake of the poor there being no Monte di Piet as in other cities; whether to house them in Venice or in Mestre was
something that could be discussed later, as well as whether the terms of the agreement were good or not; but he cautioned about arguing against the Jews, for even the Pope keeps them in Rome, though they are not allowed to engage in moneylending.
When he had stepped down, Sier Antonio Grimani, Procurator and Savio of the Consiglio for the week, got up and went to the stand and answered him, and he spoke well for an eighty-six-year-old man, saying that Jews are necessary to assist the poor, and that it makes no difference whether they live in the Ghetto or go to live in Mestre, but the statutes must be confirmed . . . and the Jews allowed to lend at interest, because they have no other livelihood, but the statutes should be carefully amended as they have been by the College, and that during the time they lived in Mestre, Mestre was burned by our enemies, and then, when they came to live in the city, we recovered our dominions. And that in this war they assisted us with large sums of money . . . and with other words befitting of a virtuous old man, he urged the Consiglio to vote in favor of confirming the statutes and continuing to behave as this State has behaved for many years, deciding in favor of having Jews; and already in the year . . . , it was proposed and voted that Christians could pay 10 percent interest on objects pawned and 12 percent on paper guarantees, and he had them read. Furthermore, when Cardinal of Nicea [Johannes, or Basilius, Bessarion] was Legate in this city in the year . . . , with great authority, he permitted Jews to be kept in this Dominion and to lend at usury; and he had the said brief read out loud, and so forth.
Next Sier Gabriel Moro, knight and Provveditore al Sale, got up and spoke out against the Jews, saying they should not be kept, and that Spain drove them from her lands, then they came to Naples, and King Alfonso lost his kingdom. The Duke of Milan was driven from power because he had favored and protected the Jews; and now we were going to do the same thing and stir up the wrath of God against us. And he added other things, saying he could prove that it was not good to harbor the Jews, and it is not in the Pope's power to give them permission to practice usury. Along with other considerations, and so on and so forth.
And many members of the Consiglio, who were concerned for the well-being of the poor, said that when the Jews were driven out of Spain they brought with them a great quantity of gold. They went to Constantinople, and Selim conquered Syria and Egypt. Others did not want the Jews to remain in the city and not even in the mainland Dominion, some for reasons of piety, others because they wanted to be the ones lending money out, not just at 20 percent interest but at 40 percent or 50 percent or more, as they do on the Rialto. With the result that the Consiglio was undecided: some against and some in favor; but nobody dared speak in favor of the statutes, for fear it be said that the Jews had put them up to supporting their cause.
And had I, Marin Sanudo, been a member of the Senate, as I was last year, I would have spoken out, but not to speak for the Jews because I would have described the tricks they get up to when loaning money, but to speak about the provisions that concern them, so as to have them amended, demonstrating that a city needs plenty of Jews and bakers, and especially ours, for the common good, citing laws and the way our forefathers have always behaved, and the opinions of the learned doctors Alessandro de Imola, Pietro de Ancorano, Baldus, and others, who conclude that jews can be kept to lend money at interest, and I would have spoken to the point. True, I wouldn't have been in favor of them keeping secondhand shops, so as not to deprive Christians of their livelihood, although keeping them would be a great benefit for those who have things to sell. But at no time have our elders approved of the Jews having commercial shops in this city; rather, they are to buy and sell and then go their way. Nor do we need such tomfoolery in our State, like driving out the Jews, when there is no Monte di Piet. The coffers of the Monte Vecchio and the Monte Nuovo are unable to pay interest, and the Monte Novissimo has trouble paying; the city has very little trade; the shopkeepers complain that they can't sell their goods; and they won't allow somebody to take out a loan at 15 percent interest from the Jews with his own property as security, for his own needs and in order to maintain and support his family. And on this point I would have really insisted, but unfortunately it was not to be. Excluded from the Giunta [Addition to the Consiglio] by a few votes, I came in thirtieth, and since then I have not been elected either to the Senate or the Consiglio. . . .
Sier Sebastian Foscarini, a doctor and teacher of philosophy and a member of the Senate, went to the podium. He spoke briefly, and he said that the Pope de iure divino could not permit the Jews to lend at usury, since it was against God's commandments, which say non sinerabis fratrem tuum , and so forth, citing in addition other passages from Holy Scripture; but he is right to permit the harboring of Jews, as long as they do not lend at usury. It is true that, if a sin or an evil is committed, the Pope can absolve it, therefore the Cardinal of Nicea could not make this concession. In conclusion, it is not advisable to keep Jews in this Christian city, but to send them away to their damnation, and so on. The vote was called: 10 abstentions, 64 in favor, 66 opposed, and those opposed prevailed, that is, the statutes proposed by the Savii were not approved.29
This is not the place for the detailed analysis that this balanced passage, suggestive as it is and full of typical local color, would rightfully deserve. But there is no one, even after the most superficial reading, who will fail to be struck by the author's powerful individual personality, as well as by the axiomatic nature of the negative image of the Jew a neg-
ative charge that strong utilitarian self-interest might attenuate, but never eliminate. However irritating and stereotyped the case against the Jews may seem, even to the taste of Sanudo's contemporaries, who in their own defense appealed to the notion of the health of the state, and so forth, the fact remains that in the present instance it proved more successful than the opposing arguments. The main thing to observe from our point of view is that it never occurred to anyone to suggest that the State should take care of the poor. This fact is brought out even more clearly, in a subsequent session, by the way the opposition was overcome and the statutes signed. The description, taken once again from Sanudo, shows no change in basic assumptions, which cast the Jews in an essentially instrumental role, at the mercy of aleatory criteria of expediency not referable to a general model. It nevertheless demonstrates with extreme precision the importance of the role played by the chance of the moment, as well as the logic that informed the change of heart of the decision makers determining the reversal of policy. The occasion was offered by the report on the deficit balance of the Arsenal.
Then . . . Sier Alvise di Prioli, Provveditore for the Arsenal, took the stand, and reported on the state of the Arsenal, saying that the construction of a number of ships had still to be completed, but there were no funds available unless the Consiglio decided to make some provision. And he and Councilor Sier Hieronimo da Pesaro, both Provveditori for the Arsenal, proposed a half tithe for the needs of the Arsenal; and the Procurator Antonio Trun, one of the Savii of the Consiglio, proposed a full tithe. Whereupon, Sier Andrea Trivisan, the Cavalier Savio of the Consiglio for the week, said he was against any kind of tithe, and that the Arsenal had received 20,000 ducats and had spent the money building warehouse space, and so forth. As a result, the full tithe was not granted, nor was the half tithe. But it was said by some that the Jewish issue should be dealt with, and their money used for the Arsenal. Whereupon, the Procurator Sier Antonio Grimani, Sier Piero Capello, Sier Lunardo Mocenigo, Sier Andrea Trivisan, the Cavalier Savio of the Consiglio, Sier Pandolfo Moresini, Savio of Terraferma, proposed confirming the agreements with the Jews as they were for another five years (and here they were read), and that they should pay 10,000 ducats per year, with 4,000 ducats to be paid immediately [de praesenti], to be discounted from the annual payments at the rate of 1,000 per year, ut in parte . Sier Hieronimo Barbaro, doctor and knight, a member of the Senate, went to the
stand to argue against the measure, saying they were excommunicates. The Consiglio would not listen to him, and the question was called. The vote was 93 in favor, 65 against, 15 abstentions, and the motion was victorious. And this is how the Jewish issue was dispatched, for fear of having a tithe.30
The number of votes against the renewal of the charter had not changed. The "fear of having a tithe," coupled with a greater diligence on the part of the Jews, no doubt caused the supporters of the renewal to do more lobbying than on the previous occasion, thereby ensuring themselves of a decent majority. It would no doubt have been easy to cover the momentary deficit of the Arsenal by imposing a "half tithe," as the Provveditore had proposed. It is also clear that, in addition to the current deficit, the administrative program of the Arsenal was also at stake (whether to continue to "build warehouse space" or not), and that the latter point had made it easier to influence the voting members. And finally, there can be no doubt that the supporters of the renewal of the charter were clearly influenced by their personal interest and their desire to economize the "fear of having a tithe" that Sanudo cites with a touch of irony. But it was certainly not an "extraordinarily urgent" situation of necessity, as Cecil Roth once defined it, as, in perfect keeping with his own point of view, he went so far as to imagine how the senators "looked at each other with terrified expressions."31 The first to realize it was the Jew Anselmo del Banco, who, when he was invited to sign the agreement, thought there was still room for negotiation. Instead, he was presented with an aut aut , take it or leave it, so that, and again our source is Marin Sanudo, he gave the reply destined to become famous: "When desire fights with power, power always has the upper hand."32 But the thing most noteworthy is the fact that the Council's first reaction was to saddle the government with the economic responsibility, bringing into play the usual mechanism of ad hoc taxation. The argument goes like this: The Jews are always an evil. But, whenever it looks like they may not be the worst of evils, then it becomes possible to keep open a breach in the wall of Christian hostility.
It is legitimate to conclude, then, that the strongest argument for the
settlement of Jewish moneylenders was the fact that the authorities were never willing to deal with the problem of poverty at the administrative level. Whenever the current political situation made it desirable to avoid recourse to taxation that would have been a burden on their own shoulders, their preexisting mental tendency was corroborated by considerations of self-interest, which were capable of overcoming all other reservations. Perhaps this provides a clue to why the Franciscan solution of the Monti di Piet would only begin to work toward the end of the sixteenth century, in a period, that is, when the medieval mentality was going through a phase of rapid change.
The Poor, the Jews, and the Prostitutes: "Necessary" Elements of Society
To the mentality of the period leading up to the end of the sixteenth century, the poor were never a problem in search of a solution: they were too necessary to the spiritual economy of the period. The rich needed the poor: by distributing alms, they were assured of the absolution of their sins. The have-nots were also necessary to throw into relief, by contrast, the wealth of the haves. They were necessary to provide labor for those whose ideal it was to live as gentlemen and who scorned "mechanical labor." They were necessary, in a word, if the rich were to play their ideal role as patrons, for which they felt themselves predestined by Divine Providence. Perhaps no one would have formulated this list of "necessities" as was done above, but they can all be amply confirmed in the literature and institutions of the period. This "need" for poverty carried with it, as a corollary, the necessity for the state not to concern itself with poverty directly: had the state done so, it would have brought down upon itself the hatred and hostility usually directed against the Jews. One is therefore entitled to interpret in this sense the stereotypical formulas used by those in power in which they justified the permits granted to Jews "for the good of the poor." These authorities, and with them all of Christian society, purged themselves of the accusation of perpetuating poverty by offering the palliative of Jewish money-
lenders. At the same time they exonerated themselves from the consequences of their decision to exclude the poor from society, in the name of the general health of the social and spiritual body, by associating the poor with the Jews, or more accurately, by placing the latter at the service of the former.
These two functions were structurally consistent. Did not the continued presence of the Jews in the bosom of the Christian world present itself as necessary to the spiritual economy of Christianity? The centuries of Christian meditation, preaching, and legislation, modeled on the Augustinian notion of the need for the Jews as witnesses to the Truth, were there to suggest this consistency. From this point of view, the Jews were necessary to the Christians in order to provide, through their ultimate conversion, the psychological certainty of the truth, the realization of the triumph of Ecclesia over Synagoga , Good over Evil, God over Satan. Like the poor, the Jews were, then, necessary to the Christian world, for the help they provided in ensuring the salvation of the world, the final Redemption. Like the poor, the Jews were necessary to provide a foil to Christian wealthspiritual wealth of course, but also material wealth, since Christian legislation had by this time institutionalized the inferiority of the Jews at a number of levels (the status of Jews before the law was not comparable with that of Christians, they could not serve on juries or act as witnesses in trials in which Christians were involved, and so forth). Like the poor, the Jews were considered potentially dangerous, and therefore to be avoided, though not eliminated.
Nonetheless, the very real service that Jews rendered to Christian society caused them to be associated in the mentality of the time with another category of persons who were considered necessary, however undesirable they might be on account of the many negative consequences that might result from contact with them: prostitutes. The association of ideas was so obvious and entrenched that there were even petitions, however odd it may seem to our modern eyes, in which Jews and prostitutes figured side by side. One such example is provided by the epistle sent on 13 July 1566 to Pope Pius V, "in which His Holiness is exhorted to tolerate in Rome Jews and Courtesans." In this epistle, the writer defends
the usefulness of allowing a limited number of "unhealthy" elements into the social body, elements to which he attributes the role of emphasizing and reinforcing the healthy elements: a kind of inoculation of germs that would act as a vaccination, to put it in modern terms. According to the writer, if vice were to be extirpated, even the salutary coming of Christ would have been to no avail: "If the Lord God had wished to extirpate the vices of the world, it would have been in His power to do so. But human nature and the law would have suffered, and, had He taken away grace and the gift, as it was in His hands to do, the chief good would have been lacking, and the coming of His Divine Majesty would no longer have been necessary for our salvation, which however was done out of necessity with supreme magistery, as Your Holiness knows, you who, in imitation of the Lord, tolerate in the world Jews, adulterers, and prostitutes; some as witnesses to His sacred law, others so that there may be wicked people in the world for the exaltation of the righteous, and other wicked for the conversion of the righteous." The allusion to the adulterers was brilliantly inserted into the text so as to evoke the analogy between Christ's gesture in favor of the adulteress in the gospels and the desired behavior of the Vicar of Christ toward prostitutes. The writer, then, was prepared to extend the idea of the role of witnesses to the Truth, assigned by the Augustinian ideology to the Jews, and, openly expressing what all his readers had known in their heart of hearts since time immemorial, went right ahead and associated the Jews and the prostitutes. So that it was perfectly logical for him to continue: "So you too in your grace and goodness will tolerate all and sundry with the law of nature granted by the Lord Peter in Christ and with the Blessed example of Catholic living that Your Holiness pursues, and in this way you will win over with your tolerance many Jewish souls, as you have already done, and you will convert them by choice and not by violence, not to speak of many evil women, guiding their lives toward a better end."33
The author of this curious epistle to the pope was attempting to cast in a positive light an idea that had long been present with a negative connotation in the mentality of the period. It had found expression on more than one occasion in specific municipal ordinances. A number of the lat-
ter, such as those promulgated in 1439 in Perugia, went so far as to specify that Jews, like prostitutes, were forbidden to touch fruit that they had not previously paid for.34 In more general terms, just as prostitutes were supposed to wear a conspicuous identifying sign designed to make them easily recognizable, so the Jews were compelled to wear a red or yellow badge of identity, usually a circle on their coats or a special cap, an obligation they could only escape through the concession of a special privilege. A privilege of this kind then, by definition an exception to the rule, was tantamount to a declaration that the Jew who was the beneficiary was different from other Jews. The same was true for prostitutes, who could transform themselves along similar lines from common whores to privileged courtesans. In other words, both Jews (equated with usurious moneylenders) and prostitutes had, in premodern times, analogous roles to play: they provided a useful but despised service, just as the manual labor of those not in a position to have others serve them was also despised.
Furthermore, one should not forget that the condition of the Jew was supposed in theory to be that of servitus . This was how the theologians would have it, this is how it was institutionalized by kings, emperors, dukes, and marquises, as well as by the governing bodies of the communes. From this point of view, the attitude toward the Jews seems to develop as a necessity of a mental and psychological rather than an economic order. In a sense, this is what the Franciscans were preaching, and, looking at it from their point of view, it would be hard to fault their logic. For them the way toward love for poor Christians led through hatred for the Jews. When all was said and done, the end result was still love for the poor! Moreover, by insisting on the economic solution, that is, on the side of the problem that brought charity into play, the Franciscans were touching a sore point. The problem of the poor could not be solved until they were admitted into the society from which they had been excluded. This may have been why the Franciscans never condemned the 5 percent to 10 percent interest rates that, in their interpretation of canon law, were necessary to cover the running expenses of the Monti di Piet. Had they done so, they would have saved themselves the doctrinal squabbles with which their Augustinian and especially Domin-
ican brethren continued to afflict them. But the Franciscans pursued a sociopolitical policy consistent with that adopted in the fourteenth century when, against the opinions of the Augustinians and the Dominicans, they gave their seal of approval to an interest rate of 15 percent on loans enforced by the communes. This is another problem of the mentality of the time which calls for further investigation.
Proof of this interpretation is once again provided by Venice, where the prevalent spirit, at once pragmatic and conservative, led the authorities to approach the problem of poverty from above, without overturning the preexisting structures, which made the poor and the Jews together the objects of the same exclusion. Venice had been late recognizing the usefulness of the services offered by the Jews and had done so only when, toward the end of the period, it had discovered that its vocation was more financial than commercial. Venice was the first to face, in a somewhat more efficient manner than had previously been the case, the problem of the poor, without, however, clearly separating it from the problem of the Jews. In Venice, toward the end of the sixteenth century, the existing Jewish banks were simply transformed into Monti di Piet, "Banks for the Poor," thus preserving the charitable character of the Monti, but at the same time avoiding their attendant drawbacks. An inspector sent from Paris to study the workings of the Italian Monti di Piet noted significantly, "The Republic of Venice, like the other sovereign states of Italy, has understood that it would be very useful to the poor to find a place where they could receive on their personal belongings the wherewithal to relieve their pressing poverty, but the Republic has made strange use of this reflection and I believe it is only at Venice that the Monti di Piet is run by Jews."35
The Jews would have been better advised to try and avoid becoming the instruments of a social order based on the oppression of the poor. But this was too much to ask, too remote indeed from their mentality. With the benefit of hindsight, it is not an exaggeration to say that their choice, dictated by myopia and considerations of immediate advantage, was in a way responsible for part at least of their misfortunes. Centuries-old practices fell in too easily with the opportunity of the moment for
them to remember the old loci talmudici condemning moneylending to the gentiles from the standpoint of Jewish morality and recommending that whoever practiced it be persuaded to look for another way of earning a living. Even an enlightened spirit like Rabbi Joseph Colon makes only a passing allusion to the problem. Nevertheless, the allusion could be viewed as quite significant, since it was made in 1468, when the monks' preachings placed the Jewish community of Mantua in serious danger.36 More than a century later, when the about-face had become a fait accompli, people's eyesight had gotten sharper. Leone Modena could still discuss the problem in apologetic terms. Since the Jews were forbidden "to possess land practically everywhere, as well as to exercise many other forms of commerce, and other useful and reputable pursuits, they have lost heart: and that is why they have made it permissible to lend out money at usury."37 That this was not merely an apology for Christian consumption can easily be deduced from the fact that various other witnesses confirm the change in attitude that took place in the course of the seventeenth century. In this connection Lon Poliakov cites the violent words of an anonymous chronicler: "I have already repeated on several occasions that the expulsions of the Jews were chiefly due to the extraordinary usurious interest they demanded of the townspeople, as they robbed them of their very substance." Or elsewhere: "The children of Israel chose this profession in preference to all others, because from it they obtained peace and prosperity. Perched on their plump cushions, they earned their livings, with neither pain nor effort, knowing they would never lack for anything. This is why they all chose this profession. And they neither knew or understood that this was the cause of the envy and hatred directed against them; experience never taught them that this was the cause of their misfortunes."38 Better late than never!
It may be concluded that there was no apparent utilitarian motive on the part of the Christians for maintaining that the Jews were necessary, apart from the mentality and psychology of the time. This does not, however, imply that such a "necessity" did not exist. Once it had been identified, official Christian theology, from Augustine on, was naturally able to provide doctrinal justification for the presence of the Jews among
the Christians. The Jews were after all witnesses to the truth of the Gospels. In theory, however, the Christians were under no obligation to welcome them. On the contrary, it was always possible to find reasonable objections to the practical arguments, maintaining the conviction, dear to the hearts of the Franciscans, that the Christian world could solve its problems perfectly well without recourse to the Jews. Throughout the first phase of the settlement of Jewish moneylenders in the cities of Italy, no such settlement took place in any locality where the determination to do without them was sufficiently strong. For the hundreds of localities in which the presence of Jews is recorded, there are just as many where they were never authorized to set foot. One may therefore conclude these general considerations by establishing an elementary law that determined Jewish migration in the period: the Jews settled where they were given permission to settle and where life was not rendered unbearable by Christian hostility.
Some Factors Affecting Choice of Residence: Security and the Nature of the Political-Juridical Regime
The general tendency was of course to choose among the various places where it was easy to obtain a residence permit. What were the factors that influenced this choice? In the first place, localities where the guarantees of physical safety seemed insufficient were avoided. Preference was given to a locality defended by solid walls, whether it be a city, a small town, or a castle. Wars were anything but infrequent, and everyone knew from experience that the combatant troops, made up of mercenaries, considered it their right to put conquered cities to the sack. The condottieri , especially when they were Italians at the head of German or Swiss mercenaries, might try to mitigate the fury of their soldiers, but it was unreasonable to imagine that they could persuade troops to throw themselves into battle without luring them on with the promise of a good day's free looting in the case of victory. In these circumstances, no one
was invulnerable, but the Jews were even more vulnerable than the Christians: first of all because they were moneylenders and had ready cash on hand, which was the main thing the plunderers were looking for; and also because, when the time came to stipulate conditions of surrender and consequent priorities for the protection of the various categories of citizens, the rulers of vanquished cities were certainly not likely to give special consideration to the Jews. One finds, for example, a chronicler who records how the inhabitants of Castel San Pietro (near Bologna), having surrendered to Niccol Piccinino in 1434, promised to pay over 12,000 ducats and to give free rein to Niccol's soldiers to "plunder the Jew who lent money in the castle precincts."39 The same chronicler later reports how, in another negotiation, one of the conditions imposed by the victors was that they first be allowed to plunder the Jews and then drive them out of the city and the surrounding countryside. Despite these dangers, solid walls could still offer a relative guarantee of protection against dangers of this kind, and it was therefore perfectly natural that the Jews should seek a locality surrounded by walls rather than one without them.
It would be superfluous to insist that considerations of safety naturally included the nature of the political regime, the idiosyncratic attitudes of the governing classes toward the Jews, the stability of the government and of public institutions, starting with juridical institutions, and the like. If the choice were to present itself between a stable regime of the Lordship type, though nominally republican, as was the case of Florence and Venice, and a communal regime, in which political equilibrium and stability might appear more problematic, it went without saying that the former would be chosen. The Lordships were much more malleable on a day-to-day basis than the Communal Councils; the bigoted influence of the religious was probably less powerful on the more cosmopolitan princes than on the bourgeois gentlemen belonging to the citizen Councils; it was easier to satisfy a prince, always short of money, than to placate an entire municipal Consiglio; and in any case it was easier to deal with a single individual than with many, possibly in disagreement amongst themselves; and lastly, in the case of republics, it was in their interest to
have strong men to deal with. From this point of view, the myth that had grown up around the regimes of Venice and Florence no doubt played a catalyzing role. In every myth there is a core of truth.
There is a great deal of evidence to confirm the general impression that the decision of the individuals in power was the determining factor in favor of the Jews, whenever things threatened to turn out badly as a result of some dangerous initiative like that of the itinerant friars. In 1484, the Marquis of Mantova, Francesco Gonzaga, for instance, ordered the city authorities to instruct Bernardino not to preach any more in the town square but rather in the church of San Francesco, and to confine himself to condemning vices, "using gentle persuasion, and sticking to language befitting a good churchman."40 In the same year, 1484, the Lords of Bologna invited Father Francesco da Bologna not to go too far in his sermons, so as not to provoke his listeners "to commit any evil against the jews, to molest them, or to bring against them any impediment or violence."41 In 1487, in the name of the Duke of Urbino, the same overzealous monk was forbidden to incite the crowds of Gubbio, probably for fear that the threat to expel the Jews he had provoked the previous year might be repeated. The Lords of Venice were similarly irate in 1492, in their ducal epistle to the governors of Brescia and Crema:
It has been brought to our attention that Fra Bernardino . . . has been there or is on his way there to preach the divine word to the population. And since, very recently, while performing this duty in Padua, as well as in this and in other places, he incited the populace against the Jews, and there followed as a result great riots, perturbations, and scandals, which we would not like to see and hear repeated there or anywhere else in our territories, we have therefore deliberated to send you the present letter, to command you to call in the aforesaid Fra Bernardino and tell him in our name that, although we are well pleased that he should instruct and guide the people in the divine precepts and preach the word of the Lord, it would, on the other hand, be no less offensive and unwelcome to us if he were to stir up the people against the Jews, indeed nothing could be more pernicious to our ears, since incitements of this kind could lead to far-reaching scandals and unwanted novelties. Wherefore, as we have instructed you on other occasions, warn him that, if he values our favor, he must absolutely refrain from inciting the populace against the Jews, or even from mentioning them, openly or tacitly, or in any other way. And if he does not obey, inform us
as soon as possible of the entire incident, so that we can take measures to deal with his disobedience in whatever way we see fit.42
The stability of juridical institutions was perhaps even more important. Whatever degree of autonomy the Jewish community may have obtained, and it will be seen in due course that it was not especially pronounced, as long as the plaintiff in the case was a Christian, the Jews remained subject to the Christian juridical authorities and to the Christian penal and civil codes. It goes without saying that the standards of criminal justice were far from being standards with which modern sensibilities could begin to feel comfortable. Thomas More regretted in his Utopia that thieves were often condemned to be hanged alongside murderers. Counterfeiters risked being burnt at the stake, homosexuals were hung and then burnt, traitors hung, drawn, and quartered. Torture was the order of the day. Executions served to inculcate respect for the law and for public order, though this was an area in which the men of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance seem to have had trouble separating the useful from the entertaining. The execution in the public square, in the presence of a crowd of spectators who flocked to attend out of morbid curiosity, constitutes perhaps the most telling example of the gulf that separates the modern mentality from the mentality of the time. At this point, however, it is possible to look ahead and formulate a general rule: a reliable juridical structure, the less authoritarian the better, would no doubt make the danger of a possible encounter with the law less distressful. Such a structure was therefore deemed a necessary preliminary to any choice.
Additional Factors: Size, Economic Conditions, the Existence of Established Jewish Settlements
No one settled, naturally enough, where it was going to be difficult to earn one's daily bread. Perhaps this proposition should be formulated in positive terms: localities in which it was possible to predict good business earnings were preferred. A moneylender of the day
might have put it this way: he gave his preference to cities surrounded by an extensive contado , a nearby countryside with a large number of peasants, all of them potential customers for consumer loans, especially at seedtime or just before the harvest. In point of fact, the majority of what are now called the "seasonal poor" were made up of peasants, people who lived on the edge of poverty, to which they could be reduced by the slightest setback, and who were therefore frequently in need of ready cash to tide them over the lean months. It would in fact be a long time before the Italian cities would protect their peasants the same way they protected their citizens, which meant in practice that the moneylender could insist on a higher rate of interest from the peasants than was consented in the case of the city-dweller. As already pointed out, the Jewish money-lenders showed themselves no more sensitive about exploiting the poverty of Christian subjects than did the Christian authorities. Finally, those localities were preferred where the exploitation of the poverty of others did not bar the newcomers from assuming a real role in the local economy localities, that is, where Jews were not forbidden to engage in commerce or to invest in local industry, as the Christian trade and professional guilds would have preferred.
The variables that determined the attraction for Jews of a particular locality were, then, manifold. It is impossible to present a universally valid descriptive model, particularly if one bears in mind that the variety of human idiosyncrasies also played an important role in the process of decision making. It was not unheard-of that, between two places close to each other, with identical socioeconomic characteristics and subject to the same form of political regime, one would appear attractive to the Jews, and the other not. A Jewish writer, who probably lived in the fifteenth century, wrote a parody of the world of the moneylenders in which he summed up in a few lines the whole problem of the choice of a place to settle: "The bank must be located in a city surrounded by walls, with its gates barred throughout the night, so as to be protected from armed and unarmed bands eager to get their hands on objects of value. This city must hold an annual fair, and a weekly market. There must be
shops that sell bread and meat and other essential products. There must be a resident tribunal with judges and gendarmes, but the people who live in the contado must not enjoy the same rights as citizens. This city must be a heavily trafficked crossroads; it must be wealthy; and above all it must have a navigable river, though if the worst comes to the worst, a spring will do, or a freshwater well."43
The choice of a place to settle was strongly influenced by two contradictory factors. On the one hand, other things being equal, the best possibilities existed where other Jews had not yet settled, in other words, where one had no fear of competition from other jewish moneylenders. Places fitting that description tended, however, in the nature of things to be smaller and smaller, since the bigger cities were obviously the first to be chosen. On the other hand, unlike the big cities, a small town did not offer many business opportunities. Another pair of contradictory needs must also be taken into consideration: the big cities were more attractive, not only for the economic opportunities they offered, but also because they frequently harbored a sufficient number of fellow worshipers to satisfy the most elementary cultural and religious needs of the group. In fact the Jews were seeking a situation where they could perform their devotional duties in groups of ten males over the age of thirteen, as required by the Jewish religious rule. They also wanted to be able to take part in some kind of study of the traditional texts and to hear rabbinical sermons on the Sabbath and on feast days. They hoped to provide a good education for their children, if possible in the company of children the same age, without having to pay for a preceptor out of their own pockets, and without having to send their children away to school. And finally they wished to be able to enjoy a minimum of social life with their fellow Jews, to eat with them and to drink a glass of wine without running into problems involving the dietary laws. In a word, they sought to enjoy the advantages offered by the existence of more or less organized groups: ritual services, the production of cheese and the ritual slaughtering of cattle, baths for the ritual immersion of women, a Jewish cemetery. All this could be found only in places where other Jews had already settled, pos-
sibly in considerable numbers, in other words, in the larger cities. But how many large cities were there in Italy in which a Jewish moneylender could find his little place in the sun?
In the mid-sixteenth century, Italian cities with more than fifty or sixty thousand inhabitants could be counted on the fingers of two hands: Rome, Naples, Bologna, Florence, Genoa, Milan, and Venice. The others, however important, rarely reached such figures: Ancona, Pesaro, Urbino, Rimini, Perugia, Siena, Pisa, Ferrara, Mantua, Cremona, Piacenza, Pavia, Verona, and Padua. Many Italian cities did not exceed ten thousand souls. Thus the choice was rather limited, all the more so because Jews were not accepted everywhere. It has already been pointed out that, toward the end of the period under examination, two of these big cities Genoa and Milan would only accept Jews in the most exceptional circumstances. These cities only granted residence permits under very special conditions to the occasional merchant or doctor, or a safe-conduct for a very limited period. The same may be said for Venice, except for a brief period (13821397) when extraordinary events convinced the leaders of the Most Serene Republic to admit Jewish moneylenders. In fact, it was not until 1509 that the Jews were admitted to Venice as war refugees (of the war in which the confederate League of Cambrai opposed Venice). When the war was over, the Jews were not required to leave, and in this way the ground was laid for that famous Jewish community.
The case of Naples was in a certain sense the opposite of that of Venice. The Jews of Southern Italy, after the expulsion of 1291 and the subsequent resettlement, went through a single short period of flowering shortly before 1492, concurrently with the grandiose and magnificent programs of King Ferdinand (14581494), who very probably encouraged the insertion of a number of Jews into the economic and cultural context of his realm. The subordination of the kings of Naples to Spanish policies became such that, after 1492, the atmosphere of the kingdom became quite unbearable; hence, anyone who had a slightly better alternative within reach moved out. The Jews were finally expelled from Naples in 1541. As for Florence, the Jews were admitted only in 1427, con-
siderably later than the other cities of Tuscany, and even then they did not settle in a permanent manner. The competition of the trade and professional guilds made their settlement in this famous center of arts and letters difficult: add to this the interests of the Florentine bankers, who, though willing to leave small consumer loans to the Jews, did not welcome their competition outside of this very limited sector. In any case, the Jews were driven from the city on several occasions. For the entire period that interests us, then, Florence was not a center of particular attraction. Among the really large cities, the only one left was Bologna, where in fact, attracted by the particularly fortunate geographical position and by the possibilities of entering into the city's economic life, the Jews settled in considerable numbers throughout the first phase of our history, only to leave after the city became incorporated into the State of the Church and Pope Pius V ordered the expulsion of the Jews from his dominions in 1569.
One should not of course forget Rome. Jews had resided in Rome uninterruptedly for more than a thousand years. Nevertheless, in the period concerned, Rome ceased to be a center of attraction for anyone, and even less for Jews than Christians. By this time the possibilities of making one's fortune somewhere else seemed considerably greater. Those who were even slightly well off quit Rome for other localities, realizing they could earn their daily bread more easily as moneylenders elsewhere. Rome was no longer a privileged destination.
Where else could they go then? There were few choices, among the large or relatively large cities. Almost all of them have already been mentioned. It was in those localities that the highest demographic concentration of Jews was recorded. But they could not accommodate everyone. In order to heighten competition, and thereby reduce interest rates, rulers showed themselves ready upon occasion not to place any limits on the influx of Jewish moneylenders. For the same reason, however, the moneylenders who had settled there first were not at all favorable to the idea of increasing the number of their competitors. To prevent their settlement, they had a number of means at their disposal. They could, for example, quite simply obtain a monopoly from the Christian authorities. In the
early decades of Jewish settlement in the Italian cities, the granting of monopolies was by no means rare. Still, one is left with the impression that, the more the years progressed, the fewer monopolies were granted. The phenomenon, however, has still to be studied in depth, and it is not sure to what it should be attributed.
Nonetheless, the Jews could prevent the settlement of newcomers by recourse to the traditional institutions of Jewish law. They could appeal, for instance, to the ordinances forbidding anyone to settle where he could not claim legitimate right of residence (Hezkat ha-Yishuv ) under pain of excommunication (Herem ha-Yishuv ). Examples of this kind of opposition are not lacking. Nevertheless, it seems that such recourse was not very common practice. Compared with the large number of banks in the hands of Jewish moneylenders in this period, the evidence of suits based on this argument is truly negligible. Not that Jews did not litigate among themselves for reasons of this kind; quite to the contrary. Economic realities seem, however, in the long run to have been the deciding factor. In fact, before granting permission to set up a loan bank, the authorities insisted that the Jews make a minimum capital investment. It goes without saying that, the larger the city, the higher the sum. Moneylenders with little capital were therefore naturally driven out of the big cities and were forced to make do with small localities, or change their profession.
A second law determining Jewish migratory movements can therefore be formulated. On the one hand these movements seem to be characterized by a constant tendency toward marked dispersion, brought about chiefly by the complexity of the economic situation, whereas on the other hand, a contrary tendency came into play, driven by a complex set of social and cultural considerations. In the first phase of our period, this twofold tendency imposed a particularly intense dynamic profile on demographic distribution. Through the first quarter of the sixteenth century, more or less, one or two, occasionally three, families of Jewish moneylenders settled in scores of walled localities with one thousand, two thousand, up to five thousand inhabitants. These localities occupied an urban
space of no more than a few square kilometers. Even today in Italy one can visit localities in which a spatial distribution of this kind is still perfectly preserved: we have only to think of San Marino, Macerata, Lucca, Castelfranco Veneto, Montagnana, and so on.
More than five hundred places could be listed in which the presence of Jews in this period is recorded, although the documents almost never provide proof of continuous settlement. In most cases, it is impossible to determine even whether documents that mention the same name and come from two different places are evidence of two separate Jews with the same name or of the same person in two different places at two different times. This makes it impossible to produce any kind of an accurate demographic profile: one must make do with an approximation. However, the phenomenon in question brings out a characteristic trait of the Jewish minority in Italy during the first phase, until, that is, the Jews who were expelled from Spain made their appearance: the omnipresence of a few thousand persons who settled throughout an extremely vast territory. We will return later to the inevitable repercussions that this situation had on these people's perception of group identity. For the moment it can be taken as read, as a touchstone by which to assess the radical transformation that occurred in the second phase, which covers most of the sixteenth century.
Second Phase:
The Ghettos
The Influx of Iberian Refugees
In a certain sense, it would not be entirely mistaken to attribute the reversal of the trend to the appearance in Italy of the Jews expelled from Spain and Sicily. Not that their numbers were sufficient to cause a demographic revolution. On the contrary, they were more or less negligible, except perhaps temporarily at the beginning, when relatively large groups in transit to the Orient stopped off in Italy. In any case, even
in the years immediately after 1492, they never reached the astronomical figure of 100,000 souls sometimes cited in outdated studies. All things considered, the impression is that Italy did not turn out to be very attractive to the refugees. Indeed, contemporary sources even tend to suggest that the tragedy of the Spanish Jews went practically unnoticed in Italy.
Why? Were the Jews of Italy more reluctant than Jews elsewhere perhaps to welcome their unfortunate fellow worshipers? Not at all. The insistence of many historians upon the few pieces of evidence available to confirm this interpretation evidence whose significance has in any case been inadequately analyzed seems to reflect the persistence of ideological conditioning rather than neutral attention to the facts. For the majority of Italian Jews, who had themselves experienced the bitter taste of expatriation and expulsion, the Spanish exiles were precisely that, refugees, and nothing more: to be welcomed or rejected in precisely the same way as refugees from Nremberg or Regensburg. In fact, except for the sporadic instances already mentioned, in the absence of further testimony to the contrary, it does not appear that the Jewish communities in Italy ever even considered "the problem of the Spanish refugees."
The fact remains, however, that, unlike the Franco-German refugees of previous centuries, these fugitives did not choose Italy as their new homeland. Some of them probably found in Italy an atmosphere similar to that of the country they came from, in other words, potentially dangerous from more than one point of view. For years, a man of letters like Joseph Yavetz (14381539) existed in unjustified fear of the threat of the sword of Damocles, which he saw suspended over the heads of those who displayed cultural tendencies analogous to those of the "Averroistic" Spanish Jews, who had provoked the divine wrath: when nothing came of his prognostications, he left, disappointed, for the Orient. Others were doubtless attracted by the mythical El Dorado represented by the lands of the Great Turk. Once uprooted and on the move, it must have seemed natural to many of them not to let themselves be persuaded to remain in the lands of the Christians, by now to their eyes the symbol of the demon. The diffi-
culties presented by practical considerations, such as language and culture, clearly more readily resolved in Italy than in the Ottoman empire, were probably minimized by the fact that these people migrated en masse, bearing with them their own shards of an imaginary Spain.
However that may be, and the question deserves further study, fairly few Spanish exiles opted for Italy. The conversos from Portugal were probably even fewer. The latter settled in Italy in greater numbers after the introduction of the Inquisition into Portugal in 1536. Pope Paul III adhered to the opinion of his counselors, who considered forced baptism null and void, and he allowed the settlement of conversos in the territories of the State of the Church, particularly at Ancona, where the newcomers were expected to make a positive contribution to the development of the economy. The same went for Venice. True, Venice ordered the total expulsion of the Jewish conversos in 1550, but this was no more than an exceptional circumstance. Generally speaking, the Venetian Republic went to no trouble to investigate the backgrounds of people who, once they disembarked in Venice, openly professed the Jewish religion. The dukes of Ferrara were, it seems, the most liberal and tolerant. In this period in fact Ferrara became the most important center of the Spanish and Portuguese presence in Italy, as will be seen later. Others sought unsuccessfully to imitate the example of Ferrara: Emanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, for instance, attempted in 1572 to give a powerful stimulus to the Piedmontese economy by settling a certain number of Spanish refugees. The attempt failed for various reasons, such as the refugees' fear of the proximity of the duchy to the Spanish royal troops, and the geographical position of the region, unpropitious to large-scale trade because of its remoteness from the main routes of communication. The attempts of the grand dukes of Tuscany were more successful. Their most notable exploit was the successful settlement of the Jews in Pisa and Livorno. But this development lies outside the chronological limits, not only of the phase of Jewish settlement presently under discussion, but of this entire work. Thus, one may sum up by saying that, except for the cases of Ferrara, Ancona, and Venice, and one or two other cities, though
to a lesser degree, Jews of Spanish and Portuguese origin were not responsible for the aforementioned reversal of the topodemographic trend. In what sense, then, would it not be entirely mistaken to discern a relationship between the two events?
Actually, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews, whether or not they were conversos, were different from the Italian or German moneylenders dealt with so far. They were merchants and entrepreneurs with established business relations, usually reinforced by family connections, with the principal non-Italian cities, such as Amsterdam, Salonica, Constantinople, and Bursa. This is evidently the reason they tended to choose the large commercial centers. But it also explains why the attitude of the people in power toward them was quite different from that previously displayed toward the Italian or Franco-German Jews who preceded them. In fact, the basic economic difference naturally led to a modification of the reasons adduced to justify the invitation to the Jews to take up residence. The Jews themselves had already proved to be an economic force to reckon with: they were in a position to foster the development of commerce. Rulers therefore decided to integrate them into the local economy rather than continue to make use of them at the margins of society, where they had been relegated because of the despised roles they performed. This represented a radical change, and with it begins the second phase of the demographic configuration. A period of extreme geographic dispersion was followed by one of gradual but radical contraction and concentration. One no longer encounters, as one did previously, a few Jews scattered over many different localities. Entire regions were destined to remain completely devoid of Jews for centuries. In other areas, a gradual process of concentration began in the major cities. The settlement of Spanish and Portuguese Jewish merchants in the major Italian cities disposed to accept them was without a doubt one of the factors that led to the change, and in this sense it was paradigmatic. But there were certainly other factors involved.
The Radical Change of the Sixteenth Century
Setting aside all other factors, whose specific importance is still open to discussion, the major cause of the upheaval can be found in a series of expulsions that forced the communities of entire regions to take the path of exile. Driven out of Sicily in 1492 as a result of the decree expelling Jews from countries under Spanish dominion, the Jews were subsequently also exiled from the Kingdom of Naples in 1541. Then, in 1569, came their expulsion from the Papal States (with the exception of Rome and Ancona), and, in 1597, from the duchy of Milan. In the course of approximately sixty years, the Jews were driven to concentrate almost exclusively in the territories of Mantua (which also included Monferrato), Ferrara, and Venice, and, to a lesser degree, in Tuscany and Savoy. The attitude of relative tolerance which had characterized the initial phase of our period had given way to one of extreme intransigence. The expulsions were merely its most acute symptom. There followed another symptom, no less typical of the reversed trend: wherever the Jews were tolerated, even in the most liberal states, they were sealed off in ghettos. The latter phenomenon parallels the former, in that it too contributed to the contraction of the space available to the Jewish presence.
It is not easy to identify the causes of the change in climate. They must be related to the whole complex of events that shook this century, so crucial and critical for the history of the West. At first glance it would appear that part of the responsibility must fall, on the one hand, on the anti-Jewish policies of the kings of Spain, who also ruled the kingdom of Naples and later the duchy of Milan, and, on the other hand, on the radical change in the papal attitude toward the Jews. After the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian peninsula, the attitude of the kings of Spain vis--vis the "Jewish question" does not require explanation. That of the popes, however, was not perfectly in line with the traditional policy of the Church toward the Jews, and it is not easy to analyze. No doubt one may point to the Holy See's growing difficulties in opposing the Protestant offensive and the consequent desirability of distracting attention
A narrow street in the Jewish quarter of Ferrara, where Jews were first confined
to a ghetto in 1626. Courtesy of Dr. Giulio Busi.
toward the Jewish problem. The Jews could provide a useful scapegoat, as well as a particularly vulnerable target for a weakened Catholic Church urgently in need of demonstrating its own orthodoxy and its devotion to the cause of Christianity. The vicars of Christ, however, had frequently found themselves in similar situations in the past without feeling compelled to turn to such an extreme policy. On the contrary, it might even be affirmed, without going too far, that the attitude of the Holy See over several centuries with regard to the Jews represented a stabilizing factor in comparison with the extreme fluctuations that took place in the attitudes of the leaders of secular states.
The Shift in Papal Policy
One must of course take into account the psychology and the personal tendencies of the individual popes, especially Paul IV (15551559), who played such an exceptionally important role in the period. In the sixteenth century, the folly or wisdom of a head of state could still be a critical factor in determining the course of history. In any case, we cannot separate the idiosyncrasies of the dramatis personae from the general context in which those idiosyncrasies might wither or flourish. From this point of view, Paul IV's policy toward the Jews is no exception. The decisions affecting the Jews made by the peremptory and choleric eighty-year-old patriarch cannot be isolated from the more generalized antisimoniac and reforming austerity cultivated by Paul IV in the face of the crisis of Catholicism. However, it would be a mistake to see in his approach to the "Jewish question" simply one more detail in papal policy, since his attitude toward the Jews was fed by a missionary fire so vigorous that it cannot be explained without reference to the man's idiosyncrasies. It appears that the various elements were complementary, and that for all practical purposes the Jewish component of Paul IV's zeal for reform, as well as his fundamentally anti-Jewish sentiments, were perfectly in keeping with the overall change in climate. In other words, the Pope's idiosyncracies functioned as the overt expression of this change, which was given a semblance of traditional continuity by a convenient collection of documents culled from the archives of the papal chancellery. As for the criteria to be used in describing the elements of the change and measuring its effectiveness, these, it seems, must be sought above all in the acceptance and reflection of papal policy in the policies of a number of other heads of state, including those to whom liberal tendencies might otherwise be attributed. A few facts and events will help to make the picture clearer.
As for Paul IV, the Jews did not have to wait for his elevation to the papal throne to discover his true sentiments. As head of the Inquisition prior to his election, the future pope Cardinal Caraffa had made no effort to keep them a secret. He had played a leading role in Julius III's decision
to order the bonfire of all extant copies of the Talmud in Campo de' Fiori in September 1553, on the eve, that is, of the year 5314 in the Jewish calendar, and to invite other Italian heads of state to follow his example. Throughout the fifties and sixties of the century, one bonfire followed another, providing a foretaste of the general acceptance outside of the Papal States of the future policies of Pope Paul IV. This was one of the cruelest blows to the culture of the tiny Jewish minority and its ability to resist the impact of disintegration, as will be seen later. While he was still a cardinal, Caraffa made no secret of his opinion of the Portuguese conversos, whom, notwithstanding their past, Pius III had authorized to settle freely in Ancona. If it had been up to the cardinal, he would have had them burnt alive, at least according to the report of an ambassador to the Holy See.44 The Jews of Italy had more than an inkling of disaster when, on 26 May 1555, Cardinal Caraffa ascended to the throne of Saint Peter. He kept his word as far as the conversos of Ancona were concerned. After first confiscating their goods, he sent to the stake all those who had not managed to flee in time. The episode underlined the weak position of the Jewish people. For a brief moment it looked as if there might be a vigorous international show of strength. At the solicitation of Doa Gracia Mendes Nasi, the Grand Sultan of the Turks intervened with the threat of reprisals. The overseas Jews threatened to impose an embargo on the port of Ancona and to transfer trade with the Levant to Pesaro. But nothing came of it. When the smoke from the auto-da-f cleared, the Jews did nothing but demonstrate their confusion and their inability to agree on a single course of action. Their polemics still provide fuel for academic discussions: who or what was responsible for the setback? The jealousy of the Italian Jews toward their wealthy Portuguese rivals? The intransigence of the rabbis of Constantinople, who saw in the decision of the Portuguese to settle in Catholic territory a challenge to the divine wrath that past experience ought to have convinced them to avoid? Or, more simply, the historical combination of events, which made the threat of an embargo absolutely ineffective? The issue remains open to this very day.
This does not alter the fact that the pope's choices show him to have
had very clear ideas on the subject of the "Jewish question." The Ancona affair, however unfortunate, played only a minor role in the general context of the revolution unleashed by the policies of Paul IV, which were to turn the condition of the Italian Jews upside down. Less than two months after his ascent to the papacy, on 14 July 1555, the pope published the bull Cum nimis absurdum , which marked the complete reversal of traditional policy with regard to the Jews and the beginning of a revolution in their condition wherever they might be, not only in the territories under papal government. Many of the ordinances specified in the fifteen articles of the bull would be later adopted by other Italian authorities, according to a pattern determined in part by their personal idiosycrasies, as well as by socioeconomic circumstances, but which nonetheless demonstrates considerable overall uniformity.
"It is profoundly absurd and intolerable," thundered the pope in the programmatic preamble to the bull, "that the Jews, who are bound by their guilt to perpetual servitude, should show themselves ungrateful toward Christians; and, with the pretext that Christian piety welcomes them by permitting them to dwell among Christians, they repay this favor with scorn, attempting to dominate the very people whose servants they should be." On the contrary, he insisted, "considering that the Church tolerates the Jews in order that they may bear witness to the truth of the Christian faith," until the day comes when they acknowledge the error of their ways and accept the light of the Catholic religion, "they must show themselves to be the servants of Christians who are the true free men in Jesus Christ and in God." The Jews were condemned to live in a quarter set apart from the Christians; not to possess real estate and to sell immediately any property they might own; to wear the yellow insignia, the badge of infamy. From now on they were compelled to respect implicitly the ancient prohibition that forbade them to employ nursemaids or other Christian servants, or to have themselves referred to deferentially by poor Christians, to work publicly on Sundays or other Christian holidays, to engage in commerce (other than in secondhand commodities, the notorious "strazzaria" or rag trade), to dispense medical care to Christians, to have any relations with Christians, to gamble,
eat, converse, or bathe in their company. Even moneylending was more strictly regulated and moralized, so as not to encourage Jewish cheating: the moneylenders had to keep their books in Italian, calculate the date according to a thirty-day calendar, and so on and so forth.
All this was certainly neither unheard of nor unprecedented. The precedent for most of the provisions in Paul IV's bull is to be found in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Under the direction of Pope Innocent III, that council had decreed, among other things, the ineligibility of Jews for public office, the imposition of the badge, the ban on appearing in public during Holy Week, the responsibility of Christians to limit the potential economic activity of Jews, and that of rulers in particular to create favorable conditions for the practical observance of this proviso. And what cannot be found in the deliberations of that particular synod can be found without much difficulty in the texts of other scattered papal promulgations or conciliar decisions. This did not prevent the massive reappearance of all these measures, for the most part long forgotten, coming as a profound shock to the Jews. Evidence of the shock is provided by a number of contemporary literary sources. How is it to be accounted for? Probably because the new experience brought them to the painful realization that this was no passing madness but the expression of a general reversal of policy, for which the Holy See was able to supply the ideological cement of a long-standing tradition, as well as the paradigm for its implementation. This awareness was definitively confirmed when they realized that this time they were not going to be able to commute the new papal dispositions into additional fiscal burdens.
The Institution of the Ghettos
Perhaps the most obvious of these restrictive provisos, inasmuch as its effect had an immediate impact at the level of the civic space, was the institution of the ghettothe most typical of the structural changes occurring in the attitude toward the Jews. In a sense, the institution of the ghetto became the symbol of the new Jewish condition. In
Above and next page: Paintings by Franz Roesler of the Roman Ghetto, established in 1555. Its gates and
walls were removed only in 1846. Courtesy of Umberto Nahon Museum of the Italian Synagogue, Jerusalem.
this case too the precedent was set by earlier regimes in earlier times, and, even in the sixteenth century, the Holy See was not the first to revive the idea. This time it was Venice, the holder, incidentally, of the copyright on the term "ghetto," which led the way. In Venice the Jews had been confined within Cannareggio, on the extreme edge of the urban space, since 1516, a good forty years before the bull Cum nimis absurdum , when the air in the rest of Italy for the Jews was considerably more breathable than at midcentury. This circumstance may help us to grasp, in part at
least, the essentially ambivalent character of a measure that our modern sensibility automatically tends to see as a symbol of oppression, not to say discrimination.
As was already pointed out, Venice had been until then one of the Italian cities that had constantly denied Jews permission to settle officially. So, before it became a symbol of the desire to segregate the Jews, the institution of the ghetto in Venice marked the abandonment of the tradtional policy of excluding Jews from the city. In a certain sense, the institution of the Venetian ghetto was a compromise solution, designed to normalize the situation created when, during the war of 1509, the Jews had been given extraordinary permission to take refuge in the city. This did not represent a deterioration in the status of the Jews, but rather the
opposite. The Venetian ghetto represented a kind of middle ground between unconditional acceptance, which was unthinkable, and expulsion, which would have meant a return to the status quo ante , which was equally undesirable. In Rome, however, the institution of the ghetto represented a definite deterioration in the conditions of Jewish life. And yet, if we look at it in the light of the Venetian attitude, even the Roman development can be seen to lend itself to a not entirely negative interpretation. When he formally revived the stipulations of the Fourth Lateran Council, without abandoning the traditional Christian theological conception according to which the presence of the Jews was necessary as a testimonium veritatis , Paul IV was asserting that the Venetian solution was consistent with his own. Though in the opposite direction, the institution of the ghetto in Rome was just as much of a compromise solution as it was in Venice. In the palpably anti-Jewish climate that had developed in Rome, the institution of the ghetto, understood as an alternative to out-and-out expulsion, undeniably changed the status quo ante , but it indicated at the same time that the pope had opted, at least for the moment, to preserve the presence of the Jews in the State of the Church.
One may be tempted to dismiss all of this as self-evident and banal. True enough, if we think of this compromise between the total rejection of the Jews and their unconditional acceptance merely in terms of a semantic dialectic, and especially if we think only in terms of the policy of Paul IV and the fact that not that many years later the Jews were in fact expelled from the Papal States. Still, despite the bull's emphasis on the continuity with medieval attitudes, the institution of the ghetto did represent a revolution. As a historical phenomenon it was not typical of the medieval Jewish condition but rather of the period between the Middle Ages and the Modern Period. Readily perceptible at the level of events, a new historical phenomenon seems to have been set in motion. Most ghettos were instituted in Italy at a later period than that which concerns us here. The sequence seems to be fraught with significance: Venice 1516; Rome 1555; Florence 1571; Siena 1571; Mirandola 1602; Verona 1602; Padua 1603; Mantua 1612; Rovigo 1613; Ferrara 1624; Modena 1638; Urbino, Pesaro, Senigallia 1634; Este 1666; Reggio Emilia 1670; Cone-
gliano Veneto 1675; Turin 1679; Casale Monferrato 1724; Vercelli 1725; Acqui 1731; Moncalvo 1732; Finale 1736; Correggio 1779. On the eve of the French Revolution, ghettos were still being created! Is one to discern in this sequence a progressive deterioration of the situation of the Jews? The opposite is the truth. The overall attitude toward the Jews was in fact far more liberal during the period of the ghettos than it had been before. Accusations of ritual murder disappeared almost completely and the frequency of attacks and pogroms declined markedly, as did the tendency to expel the Jews. The series of expulsions stopped at more or less the same time the series of confinements in ghettos began, a symptom that should not be allowed to pass unobserved.
In my opinion, it is not in the least farfetched to believe that in the long run the institution of ghettos did not imply a simple progressive deterioration in the Jewish condition. Rather, following a circuitous route, the mental disposition of the Christian population toward the Jews began to be oriented in the opposite direction. In other words, the Jewish Other was no longer seen as someone to be acculturated, someone whose diversity must be eradicated, someone to be rejected should the attempt at acculturation fail. The Jewish Other could now be accepted without a prior commitment to acculturate him whatever the cost. (This did not mean, of course, giving up the Christian mission altogether.) Of course this acceptance took place on the only terms on which the mentality of the time could accommodate the Jew segregation. Segregation was a necessity, given the lack of mental health of the Jews, which showed itself in an inability to identify with the majority, healthy precisely because it was the majority and because it was Christian. From this point of view, as Michel Foucault might have put it, the institution of the ghetto may be considered homologous with many other expressions of the change that took place in the Western mentality during the phase of transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern Period. A halfway house between acceptance and expulsion, the ghetto made its first appearance as a historically relevant phenomenon, characterized by distinctive features proper to the period that was ending and other features proper to the one that was beginning, on the very threshold of the modern age. It
was a solution that represented a compromise between the tendency to welcome Jews practically unconditionally everywhere, characteristic of the period prior to the second half of the sixteenth century, and the tendency to expel them, characteristic of the period following the Council of Trent. The ghetto represented the latest expression of the millenary tradition of ambivalence toward the Jews: keeping them separate without actually rejecting them, accepting them only provided they were kept segregated.
The historical significance of the new process is underscored by the fact that this solution did not succeed in imposing itself in the same way as it would have done in the preceding period. The Jewish moneylenders were no longer as necessary as they had once been, and therefore arguments for their presence could be countered with even more telling arguments. The socioeconomic need for the Jews vis--vis the poor diminished as the Monti di Piet were being transformed into modern credit institutions. According to the logic of the medieval mentality, the idea that one must rid oneself of the agents of the devil the moment they were no longer needed ought to have made itself felt immediately. But this is not what happened. The Jews remained in the cities of Italy, which tolerated them, even when they were no longer "necessary," at least in the sense in which they had been necessary in the fifteenth century. Their situation, nevertheless, obviously became somewhat more precarious. Throughout the period of transition into the modern era, the threat of expulsion seemed to hang over their heads. Not having yet developed mental categories altogether different from those of the preceding period, the Jews tried to avert this threat with the same old arguments. Simone Luzzatto (15821663), for instance, in that jewel of impassioned oratory that is his famous Discourse on the Jews of Venice , fell back on the old formula of the necessity of the Jews for the local economy. Luzzato in fact proposed to "demonstrate that the said [Jewish] nation was anything but a useless member of the common people of the said City [Venice]."45 He therefore devoted long chapters of his work to sketching a positive portrait of his coreligionists and to an account "of the profits and advantages contributed by the [Jewish] Nation" to the Most Serene Republic
(chapter 8). Luzzatto did not neglect to mention of course "the establishment of three Banks for the poor, set up by the Hebrews" (chapter 9). But the main emphasis fell squarely on the activities of the merchants. An entire chapter was devoted to demonstrating the truth of the proposition that "the Hebrews are marvelously suited to business" (chapter 4). In short, showing keen sensitivity to the new categories of the merchant economy, and remarkable historical and political insight, this Jewish rabbi simply substituted the term "merchant" for the term "moneylender." Realizing that the golden age of Jewish necessity was over and done with forever, he tried to pass their usefulness off as necessity. For all that, this discourse was not an anachronism. Rather, it was the expression of a world view that saw the changed historical circumstances as likely to provide Jews with an opening for their integration into the economic fabric instead of the role of despised service on the margins of society which had been reserved for them until now.
With the passage of time, the Jews returned to many minor centers from which they had previously been expelled. This return, however, was frequently ephemeral. And above all it never assumed the extremely widespread character it had had in the preceding phase of our history. Given that the opportunities for engaging in profitable activities based on the traffic in money were now considerably reduced, the Jews no longer felt, as they once had, the incentive to turn their backs on the big cities and give their preference to the lesser centers. They preferred to concentrate their presence in those of the major cities in which it was still possible to take up residence, the number of which was even less than in the preceding phase.
The institution of the ghetto led to the crystallization of the Jewish presence within the city's topography. The residential quarters of the powerful gradually moved out of the city center, in several instances following the tendency of the rulers to remove the center of secular power from the spatial orbit of the cathedrals and the bishops (such, for example, was the case in Ferrara). The Jews, however, had originally preferred to take up residence close to the market places, in the center of the city. Their dwellings were located along the main thoroughfares leading to the
gates, along which the peasants from the contado, potential clients for the moneylenders, were obliged to pass whenever they came to town to buy or sell. The tendency toward urban decentralization thus had the effect of reinforcing the attachment of the Jews to the heart of the various cities: these were zones, incidentally, whose market value was constantly declining. In most cases, the institution of the ghetto "tied" the Jews, so to speak, to these quarters. In most Italian cities, the ghetto is paradoxically located at the very center, right around the corner from the cathedral, as a rule close to the market. A rapid glace at the maps of the principal Italian cities permits us to affirm that this was practically a general rule. The noteworthy exception, which nonetheless confirms the rule, was of course Venice. In the city on the lagoon, where, for the reasons already seen, the position of the ghetto was not determined by a prior Jewish presence, it was easy to plan the segregation of the Jews "logically," away from the center. In any case, the topographical distribution of the Jewish presence in the cities of Italy remained until very recently precisely as it was between the end of the sixteenth century and the first few decades of the seventeenth. Thus, the ghetto of Mantua can still be located only a stone's throw from the central Via dell'Orso, that of Ferrara right behind the cathedral, that of Padua between what is today Via Roma and Piazza delle Erbe, and so on.
In this new demographic arrangement, everything had to go back to the beginning in the most difficult circumstances. The condition of inferiority was considerably worse than in the preceding period. Above all it frequently became necessary to change professions, abandoning moneylending for commerce. Moneylending became impractical without the capital investments that only the biggest moneylenders possessed. Many Jews of Italian or German origin who had chosen to leave behind the lesser centers and settle in the more populous cities no doubt continued to struggle to make a profit in the money trade, the field of their expertise. But conditions were no longer as favorable for this kind of activity as they had been in the past. Even if they had not chosen to give up moneylending and seek other ways of earning a living, they would have been forced to do so anyway, because they certainly could not hope to replace
the wealthier lenders, who had cornered the market some time previously. For most of them, trade was the most immediate alternative. Unable to compete with the great merchants, they had to make do with small trade, especially in secondhand objects, though they were also prepared to try their hands at other professions. To the demographic transformation was added a no less far-reaching change in the socioeconomic profile of the Jewish minority in Italy. We will return to this in more detail in the next chapter.
The radical transformation of economic opportunities served as a major incentive to abandon the small centers for the large cities. The variety of choices offered by big cities obviously made them more attractive than a small locality. The natural attraction of centers with an established Jewish community must have provided an additional incentive that was by no means negligible. On top of all these factors, which are part of the logic informing the choice of emigrants in all times and places, one should probably add the change in safety conditions within the cities. The increasing use of artillery fire had made it unsafe to live in the smaller centers, which could not afford fortifications strong enough to withstand attacks by the powerful new weaponry. One may therefore suppose that there ensued a tendency to "go into shelter" in the big cities, which meant living differently and perhaps more poorly, but certainly in conditions of greater security. Given, on the one hand, the fact that it was no longer as easy as it had once been, because of the general change in attitude toward the Jews and the success of the Monti di Piet, to earn a living as a moneylender in a small center; and given, on the other hand, the ever more precarious security conditions in the small centers, one might just as well change professions and seek one's fortune in a large city, where, if nothing else, it was also easier to pursue a "Jewish lifestyle."
It is quite likely that there is a connection, albeit on an unconscious level, between the new tendency on the part of the Jews to congregate in the larger cities and seek a place in the economic fabric of commercial enterprise, and the change, apparently unforeseen, in the policy of the Holy See regarding authorizations to open consumer loan banks. Be-
tween the end of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth, in fact, thousands of such authorizations were issued. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Did it represent an attempt to curb the tendency toward concentration and integration by now under way? Or was it a paradoxically conservative gesture on the part of the Holy See? The question deserves to be studied in the light of the historical context, which was certainly different from that of the preceding century.
To conclude, the topographical distribution of the Jews in Italy presents itself, at the end of our period, as radically different from what it was at the beginning. Sicily and Southern Italy were without Jews, as was Central Italy, with the exception of Rome and Ancona, which had populations of a few thousand Jews. The remainder by now resided chiefly in the regions of Northern Italy: in Venice, where there dwelt a Jewish population of approximately 2,500, concentrated in a restricted area that was permitted to develop only in a vertical direction; in Mantua, where, when the ghetto was instituted in 1612, there were 2,325 Jews out of a total population of approximately 50,000; in Ferrara, a city for which no full-length study exists, and for which the data is therefore imprecise; in Verona, Padua, Casale Monferrato, Florence, Modena, and Parma, all centers with Jewish populations numbering in the hundreds; and finally, in a number of other localities, whose Jewish communities were even smaller.
Continues...
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