The Medici state and the ghetto of Florence: the construction of an early modern Jewish community 9780804750783

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page xi)
Preface (page xv)
A Chronology of Select Events Related to the Ghettoization (page xxi)
Notes on Translation, Dates and Currency (page xxiii)
Introduction: Early Modern Boundaries and the Place of the Jews (page 1)
Part I: The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power
1. Residential Segregation: Religious and Political Contexts (page 51)
2. State-Building and the Status of the Jews (page 88)
3. Before the Ghetto: The Settlement and Connections of Jews in Tuscany (page 135)
Part II: The Construction of the Ghetto
4. Staging the Expulsion: The Proceedings Against the Jews (page 171)
5. Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto (page 201)
6. Populating the Ghetto (page 223)
Part III: A New Tuscan Commune and Religious Community
7. A New Tuscan Commune: Centralization and Semi-Autonomy in the Medici State (page 241)
8. Measuring Lengths and Distances in the Ghetto and City: Economic Parameters (page 292)
9. From Virilocal to Local: Marriage in the Florentine Ghetto (page 332)
10. The Developing Early Modern Jewish Community and the Continuing Redefinition of Jewishness (page 386)
Conclusion (page 407)
Abbreviations (page 415)
Notes (page 417)
Bibliography (page 565)
Index (page 591)

Citation preview

The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence

STANFORD SERIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE EDITED By Aron Rodrigue ana Steven J. Zipperstein

The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community Stefanie B. Siegmund

Published with the assistance of a subsidy from the University of Michigan Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2006 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Siegmund, Stefanie B. (Stefanie Beth) The Medici state and the ghetto of Florence : the construction of an early modern Jewish community / Stefanie B. Siegmund.

p. cm. — (Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8047-5078-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Jews—Italy—Florence—History. 2. Jewish ghettos—Italy—Florence—

History. 3. Florence (Italy)—Ethnic relations. I. Title. II. Series. DSI35.185F§74. 2006

323.1192'4.04551'09031 — dc22 20050154-.09

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Original Printing 2006 Last figure below indicates year of this printing:

I§ 14 13 1 I 10 OQ O08 OF 06

Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/13 Galliard

This book 1s dedicated to my mother

JOANNE H. SIEGMUND who has been, along with everything else,

my most patient and supportive listener and reader.

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Contents

Preface XV

Acknowledgments x1 A Chronology of Select Events Related to the Ghettoization xxi

Notes on Translation, Dates and Currency XXIl

the Jews I Introduction: Early Modern Boundaries and the Place of

Part I: The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power 1. Residential Segregation: Religious and Political Contexts 51

2. State-Building and the Status of the Jews 88

in Tuscany 135

3. Before the Ghetto: The Settlement and Connections of Jews

Part II: The Construction of the Ghetto 4. Staging the Expulsion: The Proceedings Against the Jews 171

s. Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto 201

6. Populating the Ghetto 223 Part III: A New Tuscan Commune and Religious Community

in the Medici State 241

7. A New Tuscan Commune: Centralization and Semi-Autonomy

viii Contents

Economic Parameters 292

8. Measuring Lengths and Distances in the Ghetto and City:

9. From Virilocal to Local: Marriage in the Florentine Ghetto 332 10. The Developing Early Modern Jewish Community and the

Continuing Redefinition of Jewishness 386

Conclusion 407

Notes 417 Bibliography 565 Index 591

Abbreviations A415

Maps and Figures

Maps 1. The world of Italian Jews in the late sixteenth century XXV1

of Tuscany, 1570 102

2. The Jewish population in the State of Florence, Grand-Duchy

Figures

September 26, 1570 47 2. The Ghetto of Florence in 1584 202 1. The Edict of Expulsion of the Jews of Tuscany,

3. Marginal notations in the records of the Nove Conservatori:

approval of a decision made in Cortona 264

4. Marginal notations in the records of the Nove Conservator1:

approval of a decision made in the ghetto 265

5. | Number of trips out of the ghetto taken by Jews, by age at

time of trip, 1573-86 301 time of trip, 1573-86 302

6. Number of men who took trips out of the ghetto, by age at 7. The new elite in the ghetto: correlation of governorship,

ghetto 334 membership in guilds and possession of a surname 319

8. Example of a travel permit given to Jews of the Florentine

9. The 1575 testament of Ginevra Blanis 390

Tables

1. Acquisition of Property for the Ghetto 207 2. Financing of the Purchase of the Ghetto Property 208 3. Ghetto Shops and Apartments Rented at Auction in April 1575 215 4. Hypothetical Ten-Year Projected Budget for the Ghetto, 1570s 219 5. The Population of the Jews in Florence and the Population of

Florence, 1552-1672 22.4.

6. ‘Taxes Paid by the Jews of the Ghetto to the State (Through

the Nove Conservator1), 1573-96 225

7. Population Multiplier: Men, Women and Children per

Jewish Male in Five Tuscan Towns, 1570 237 8. Jewish Governors in the Ghetto, 1572-86 255 9. 1572 Ordinances of the Florentine Ghetto 262 10. The Matriculation of Jews into the Florentine Guilds, 1571-1610 307

Term, 1572-86 316

11. Guild Membership of Jews Who Governed More than One

Acknowledgments

At a time when market forces propel most authors to produce volumes that are much shorter than this one, I am mindful of the individuals and institutions who have supported what has been a long project. I have many to thank for their financial support, and the heartening affirmation of the value of my work that I understood to come with it. For grants and fellowships that supported my research and writing at the dissertation stage: the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the

National Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli. Since the completion of the dissertation I had the opportunity to return to Italy several times and to immerse myself in new archival fonts and explore new fields of research: the University of Florida and the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation Fellowship provided me a year of research leave and the University of Michigan a semester of junior faculty “nurturing” leave. At Michigan, the Rackham Institute

of Graduate Studies, the Ludolph Junior Faculty Fund and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies supported my work with additional funds for research and travel to Italy; the Institute for the Humanities gave me a wonderful year during which I completed this manuscript and began a new project; and the University of Michigan’s Office of the Provost for Research generously provided a publication subsidy for this book. I am grateful as well to my members of my family, whose personal generosity to me and my family over the years directly supported my pursuit of knowledge: Herma

Levy Circus and Hilda B. Zeitlin, my great-aunts, and Rose and Marcus Siegmund, my grandparents, may their memories be for a blessing; and my parents Joanne H. Siegmund and Frederick Siegmund. The resources of the libraries and archives I have worked 1n are a constant

source of joy and amazement to me, and I am grateful for the intelligent assistance and courtesies extended to me by their professional staffs. In particular, I would like to thank the staffs of the following places where I made

xii Acknowledgments myself at home: the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Don Gilberto Aranci at the Archivio Storico della Curia

Arcivescovile di Firenze, the New York Public Library and its Jewish Division, and the libraries of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Columbia University, the University of Florida and the University of Michigan. I am especially grateful to the New York Public Library for the privilege of using the Wertheim Study for extended periods of time, and to the Comunita Ebraica di Firenze for entrusting me with free access to its historical archives, without which I could not have written Chapters Seven and Ten. For tech-

nical and scholarly support, I would like to thank the staff at Nota Bene. Nota Bene users from the early 1980s know how rewarding (and difficult and frustrating) it has been to stick with this brilliant multilingual word-processing and database software package. The use of Paradox, a multirelational database program, was also critical to my archival research. Finally, there is the intellectual support of my teachers, colleagues and students. Because I have not taken another opportunity to do so, I am happy

to acknowledge my gratitude to my teachers at Amherst College for the extraordinary experience and training they gave me in my undergraduate years there. I think particularly of Jerry Dennerline, Rick Griffiths, Fred Cheyette, Robert A. Gross and Frank Couvares. While at the Graduate School of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, I felt particularly for-

tunate to study with Paula Hyman, Ivan Marcus and Shaye J. D. Cohen; with Eugene FP. Rice at Columbia; and with John Boswell at Yale. Benjamin Gampel guided me at every turn during the dissertation stage of this project;

he is a wise historian, mentor and friend, and I am deeply grateful for his encouragement, advice and support. As for my entry into the specialization of Italian history: I do not think I would have made it through my first months in the archives without the prior training I had had in the study of paleography and codicology in courses with Menahem Schmelzer, Eugene F. Rice and Robert Somerville. And I remain ever grateful to two senior scholars who befriended me in the archives and helped me through that initiation, Tony Molho and Judith C. Brown. Judy Brown was not only a generous guide during my first summer in the Florentine archives, she was kind enough to read my dissertation chapter by chapter across the continent. Since then, I have been fortunate to receive comments from the following scholars who read an entire manuscript, some in its earliest and some in its last stages of development: Eugene F. Rice, Jack Wertheimer, Tom Gallante,

Valerie Kivelson, Dena Goodman, Diane Owen Hughes, Todd M. Endelman, Benjamin C. Ravid, Michael MacDonald and Scott Spector. Iam grateful to them for their suggestions, many of which have led me to very

Acknowledgments — xii substantial new research over the years. In addition, I thank a scholar, still anonymous to me, who in the process of reading my book manuscript, was extraordinarily generous in correcting errors and making queries about my

transcription and translation of a number of the Italian and Latin texts. Finally, I thank the Department of History at the University of Michigan. It is an exemplary intellectual community: serious and challenging, yet warm and encouraging of its junior faculty. I have been fortunate to be there. Those who know me know that as I have “almost finished” this book for the past nine years, I have accepted help. For teaching me a variety of cognitive, emotional, spiritual and practical strategies for getting safely to the end, I thank the following from the depths of my heart: Rena Fredman, Kesiah Scully, Elliot Ginsburg and the Pardes Hannah community, and Rena Seltzer. And finally, I thank my partner Karen Krop and our sons Daniel and Eli, for somehow tolerating the many years of commuting my professional and intellectual life has required, and for providing me with the most powerful of incentives to complete this project.

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Preface

In early July of 1570 the governors of twenty Tuscan towns received orders

from the Magistrato Supremo, the highest court in Cosimo de’ Medict’s state, to submit a tally of the Jews who lived in their jurisdictions. This was not an ordinary revenue-oriented census: the instructions did not require a report on the number of houses Jews owned, the amount of land, the number of their livestock. The intention was neither to impose nor to reevaluate a tax on the Jews, nor was it to confiscate their goods. The point was simply to locate Jews, to count the Jewish families and the mouths at each hearth.’ Perhaps there was a perception that their numbers had grown, that Jews had been coming in, crossing borders and entering the state. Although it ignored the barrels of wine and oil and sacks of grain, the census was thus, even in the most literal sense of the word, an “inventory.” Some of the Jews living in Tuscany at this tume were bankers who had been permitted by charter to live and lend in specific towns. These bankers were now accused of having violated their charters, and their banks were shut down. If the other Jews felt safe, assuming or hoping that the moneylenders were the main or sole target of the attack, they were quickly disillusioned. About two months later, on 26 September 1570, Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Florence and Siena, issued the edict that expelled the Jews from the many villages and towns where they lived in his state (see Figure 1). This order, however, set in motion not only an expulsion but also a population transfer. For the edict continued with an invitation: “any Jew who wants to

remain in the Florentine Dominion, to live and engage in trade or commerce or any business and to live with his family in this state—faculty and full license is given to him to live in the city of Florence in such streets and places and in that way and with those conditions and obligations that will be declared’? The Jews could leave the state or move to Florence, where certain streets would be designated for their domicile. The choice of expulsion or relocation to a ghetto was less stark and per-

xvi _— Preface

haps less violent than the choice of expulsion or conversion imposed on Jews in some Christian lands during the previous century. Jews in the diversely controlled states of the Holy Roman Empire had faced a series of local and

| regional expulsions in the fifteenth century and more in the sixteenth; larger, more contiguous Jewish populations were expelled when edicts were issued in Spain in 1492, in Navarre in 1498 and in the Kingdom of Naples in 1510 and more decisively in 1541. In Portugal all Jews, including large numbers of refugees from Spain, were forced to convert in 14.97.

' In contrast, though the forced transfer to the Florentine ghetto resulted in the expulsion of Jews from their homes in many towns and cities, it did not require their ejection from the state. It also did not force the Jews to convert or specifically offer them incentives to do so (beyond the ability they would presumably have had to remain in their homes). The act was nonetheless oppressive, socially disruptive and financially and undoubtedly personally devastating for most of the people affected—at a minimum, the 710

people identified and counted in the special census in July. The plan to relocate the Jews of Tuscany moved forward with only short delays. Ten months after the edict of expulsion, on 31 July 1571 a second edict set forth the details for the governance of the Jews in the ghetto, which had in the meantime been built near the old market in the center of Florence.* With these legal acts the Medici altered the relationship of the Jews to the

Christian population and polity and of the Jews to one another. For the ghettoization did not affect just the demographic settlement of the Jews and

| their status and place with reference to Christians. The imposition of the ghetto also affected the way status was determined among the Jews, the economic and political opportunities available to them, their gender roles, their social institutions. In short, ghettoization reshaped Jewish life in Tuscany. This book attempts to imagine and tell the story of the creation of a new

community known to contemporaries as “the ghetto of the Jews of Florence.” The chapters collectively address the reconstruction of a Jewish social

world: its demographic, geographic and institutional locations; the ways that the “otherness” of being a Jew was defined and understood by the majority. The ghettoization was cause or catalyst in these developments. But the first question I am asked by people who are just learning about the ghetto is not how it affected the Jews but why the Jews were ghettoized in the first place. What specific, time-contingent explanation is there for this event?

The inexhaustible volume of bureaucratic and diplomatic writing that survives from this era is humbling; the art and print media and other nonarchival sources such as legal theory and theology could also be studied in pursuit of an answer. Moreover, the search for specific causes or agents of

Preface = xvi change is often less rewarding than the effort to elucidate processes of change. Despite these inherent difficulties, it has seemed to me quite necessary to explore the reasons why the Jews were ghettoized, lest the reader imagine that the ghettoization of the Jews was predetermined by their “otherness.” That is, I am concerned not to lend my tacit support to a set of commonly held presuppositions about premodern Jewish alterity: the presumption of the “despisedness” of “the Jew”; the presumption that ghettos by and large formalized a separation between Jews and Christians that already existed naturally; the presumption of an inevitable and progressive persecution of Jews in the premodern world, and of their gradual march to reintegration and emancipation in the modern. These assumptions are not supported by

the documents I have had the opportunity to study in the archives of Tuscany.

My search for explanations of the ghettoization is not a hunt that ends with the satisfying catch of one specific cause or agent, although there are a number of eligible candidates. I will certainly name names, but in the end I will have made the larger argument that the ghettoization of the Jews in Tuscany is best understood in relation to the process of early modern statebuilding in the specific context of the Catholic Reformation. In the sixteenth-century Italian states, where the presence of heretics was a continuing concern and focus of political negotiation between local governors, local church officials and designated inquisitors from Rome, the possibility of tolerating Jews by ignoring them and having no particular policy

toward them became unsupportable. As the parish became a place where heretics could no longer reside or hide, the presence of Jews in the parish became anomalous.

Not considered heretics, Jews were “infidels” who had a long-standing right to practice their religion under canon and Roman law. The claim that the Jewish religion or specific Jewish texts were heretical had been investigated on several notable prior occasions of dramatic reorganization within

the church. Thus, in the midst of thirteenth-century activity against Christian heresies there was the famous Trial of the Talmud at Paris, which ended in the confiscation and burning of Jewish books in 1240, and also the

inquisition into the works of Maimonides in early thirteenth-century Montpellier’ In the mid-sixteenth-century environment of the Protestant Reformation in the German states, accusations against Jews and Jewish literature attended the rivalry and the process of differentiation of Protestant doctrines in the context of ongoing polemics against the Catholic Church.° It must be noted, however, that though in the sixteenth-century Catholic world the Roman and Venetian indices of prohibited books included Jewish

xviii _— Preface

works along with Christian and pagan, the courts of Inquisition only rarely and exceptionally brought charges of heresy against Jews.’ Protestants of all varieties — evangelical, Lutheran, Anabaptist and others more radical—were seen as an unassimilable threat by the Roman Inquisition and others who shared the concerns of the Catholic Church because they were so clearly

Christians turned heretic, preaching, teaching and publishing ideas that could turn other Catholics to the heresy.’ In the Italian states Lutheran and. other heretics could only be identified by the things they said and the books they purchased, owned or read. Inquisitorial proceedings were necessary to determine who they were. By mid-century there was no place left for those who read Luther’s Bible but prison—and they were not allowed to read it there. In contrast, a place was found for the Jews read the Hebrew Bible. And their location in that specific place, the ghetto, was possible because Jews,

unlike Protestants, could be “naturalized” That is, it was possible for Christians to imagine the Jewish population as (relatively) safely contained in a communal body and residential zone, because Christians accepted the definition of Jewishness as a status conferred naturally on Jews by their birth. In the late sixteenth-century Catholic states, people were not born

Protestant, they became it. Jewish religious difference, in contrast, was embodied in the Jews and understood to be an inherited condition. Despite

great interest in the conversion of Jews, and despite concerns about the unstable religious identities of New Christians, in comparison to Protestants Jews were seen as having a relatively stable or permanent set of identifiable attributes. In Tuscany this attribution was not often described in terms that

were racial, biological or physiognomic, but rather through a loose discourse that recognized religion and “nation”— an understanding of Jews that was in harmony with Jewish self-understanding. It is in this context that we

will come to understand the ghetto as an institution of the early modern Catholic state that defined and limited the boundaries of tolerance for individuals whose religion was not that of their rulers, imagining that it rendered them inert by making them a community. But the policy of the medieval church had always been to tolerate Jews, whether to the end that their servility would bear witness to the triumph and truth of Christianity, or to the end that they might be converted, or simply because they filled useful functions that allowed Christians to avoid sin. The “tolerance” of the ghettos was not a reluctant result of tolerance learned after decades of wars of religion, as in other parts of western Europe where Jews were allowed to settle, such as the Netherlands. What makes it remarkable is that it occurred in Catholic states whose authorities came to unequivocally

Preface xix reject the presence of non-Catholic western Christians. After attempts to reconcile evangelical Christian dissidents with the Catholic Church, especially from the late 1540s and thereon, persistent and generally successful efforts

were made to exclude heretics from the public conversation (spoken and written) about God by arrest, prosecution and censorship.? Jews, in contrast, were not to be arrested, though their Talmud and other rabbinic commentaries were burned, prohibited and censored.’° Instead, ghettoization would draw a sharp distinction between the heretic, whose presence was unacceptable, and the Jew, whose presence could be tolerably contained. And yet in Tuscany, although the policy can only be understood in the context of religion, the agents of the ghettoization were neither the papacy nor the inquisition. The ghettoization must be understood as an act of the state—the increasingly centralized and power-concentrating Medici state. In that state, I will argue, the great diversity of Jewish legal statuses, privileges and conditions assigned to Jews in the previous era became emblematic of the diverse and idiosyncratic legal statuses of people in the many communes,

cities, castles and feudal holdings that together made up the Medici state. These varying ranks and levels of status complicated the Medici government’s effort to administer and control its subjects; they were tied to the complex of hierarchies and social networks of patron-client relations and local autonomies that predated ducal rule and therefore seemed to threaten it. Cosimo broke down these relationships as he restructured the admuinistration of his state. The status of his subjects was formally simplified and systematized. And as part of that general reorganization, the Jews were relocat-

ed and reorganized. With the ghetto—the local, well-defined semiautonomous community—there came an end to the continual renegotiation of privileges and charters. Once the Jews were living within the ghetto, their right to remain there—and thus in the state—was never challenged. The Jews of the ghetto became its citizens, and by extension, true subjects of the State.

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A Chronology of Select Events Related to the Ghettoization

1516 Venetian ghetto established

1517 Martin Luther posts his Ninety-Five Theses , 1530 Sack of Rome 1530 Fall of (second and last) Republic of Florence; Alessandro de’ Medici made Duke 1536-37 The Holy Office of the Inquisition instituted in Portugal 1537 Alessandro assassinated, Cosimo elected and granted title of Duke by Charles V

1541 Jews expelled from the Kingdom of Naples (of the Two Sicilies) 154.2 Institution of the Roman Inquisition under Pope Paul TI (1534-49)

1547. Jews granted first banking privileges in Tuscany under Cosimo de’ Medici 1555 Election of Pope Paul IV (Gian Pietro Caraffa, 1555-59) 1555 Pope Paul IV’s bull Cum nimis absurdum, institution of Roman ghetto 1555-56 Ancona Affair— persecution of New Christian merchants 1557 Cosimo granted the conquered territory of Siena as an imperial fief 1559 Election of Pope Pius IV (Cardinal Giovanni Angelo de’ Medici, 1559-65)

1560 Establishment of a pontifical embassy in Florence 1561-62 Residence of Francesco de’ Medici in Madrid

1562 Death of (Cardinal) Giovanni de’ Medici and of Duchess Eleonora di Toledo

1563 Ferdinando de’ Medici made Cardinal (at age fourteen) 1563 Final Session of Council of Trent 1565 Marriage of Francesco de’ Medici to Giovanna d’Austria (d’Asburgo)

_ xxu Chronology 1566 Election of Pope Pius V (Antonio Michele Ghislieri, 1566-72) 1564. Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor (to 1576) 1566 Death of Suleyman the Magnificent; Selim II becomes next Ottoman Sultan (to 1574)

1567 Return of Archbishop Antonio Altoviti to residence in Florence 1569 26 February, Pius V’s bull Hebracorum gens, expelling Jews from papal territories except ghettos; 27 August, Pius V confers on Cosimo de’ Medici title of Grand Duke; 13 December, ceremonial reading in Florence of papal bull announcing new title.

1570 5 March, coronation of Cosimo in Rome; marriage of Cosimo to Camulla Martelli

1570 26 September, Edict of Expulsion for Jews of Tuscany 1571 31 July, Edict of Ghettoization for Jews of Tuscany; 19 December, Edict of Expulsion for Jews of Siena

1571 7 October, victory of Venetian, papal and Spanish naval coalition against Turks at Lepanto 1570-72 Azariah de’ Rossi of Ferrara writes the Light of the Eyes; deaths of Isaac Luria and Mosheh Cordovero (Kabbalists in Safed); births of Salamone de’ Rossi (the Jewish musician in Mantua) and of Leon Modena (rabbi in Venice and briefly in Florence)

1572 13 May, election of Pope Gregory XIII (Ugo Buoncampagni, 1572-85)

1572 August, St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Protestants in France 1572 9 December, Edict of Ghettoization for Jews of Siena 1574- Death of Cosimo I de’ Medici; Francesco de’ Medici becomes sovereign

1575 Francesco granted title of Grand Duke by Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II

1587 Death of Francesco; (ex-Cardinal) Ferdinando becomes Grand Duke

1591 The Livornino (privileges to Jewish merchants in Livorno)

Note on Translation, Dates and Currency

Translation, Transliteration and Names In the Italian documents on which most of this research is based, Jewish men and women of Tuscany are referred to in the plural as hebrei or ebret, or in the singular with the adjectives hebreo/ebreo (m.) and hebrea/ebrea (f£.). I

translate these words with the terms commonly used today: Jews, Jew, Jewish man, Jewish woman, avoiding the more obvious translation (“Hebrews, Hebrew, Hebress”) because of the antiquated and associated negative ring. Another term sometimes used in our texts is tudeo or judeo (or tudet/ judei, pl.). This term appears infrequently in the sources and also translates

as “Jew, but in an unmistakably negative tone. I have translated the word iudeo as “Jew,” using italics for emphasis. Where the word hebreo appears in

the same sentence and has already been translated, I have simply left the word iudeo untranslated (thus: “un hebreo, cioé, 1udeo” is translated as “a Jew, that is, a zudeo.”

In texts authored by Jews, Italian and Hebrew words are often combined. In some instances I have chosen to render transliterated Hebrew in boldface, in order to distinguish it from untranslated Italian. I have generally followed

the Library of Congress system in transliterating Hebrew. The names of individuals reflect the spellings found in the archives and have not been standardized, except in a few cases where the individual is already well known (for example, Francesco Vinta, Laudadio Blanis) or where one spelling dom-

inates in the appearance of his or her name in the text (for example, Benvegnita Abravanel). Ari exception to this rule is the tables, where standardization was necessary. biace names have generally been given their modern spelling as also shown on the maps, but when the place appears within a quotation or as part of a person’s name, the original spelling has been preserved (thus, Pontedera, but Giuseppe da Pontadera).

xxiv Note on Translation, Dates and Currency

Dates In the Florentine State in the period under consideration, the first day of the year was 25 March, so that it is normal for record books to have an entry from 23 March 1576 on one page and from 28 March 1577 on the next, following the Julian calendar. Florence did not change the first day of the year

to 1 January with the publication of the reformed Gregorian calendar in Rome in 1582. For specific references to events occurring during the weeks between 1 January and 24 March, I have given the date with a forward slash, e.g. 23 March 1576/77. Where I am discussing chronology more generally, I have converted dates to the now standard Gregorian calendric system.

Currency in Sixteenth-Century Florence The following key information draws on Carlo M. Cipolla, Money in Sixteenth-Century Florence (translated from La moneta a Firenze nel Cinquecento, 1987; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 17-31.

The real coins in use in the period discussed in this book were the gold scudo and, from June 1568, a silver coin worth 7 lire called a piastre, a ducato d’argento, a scudo d’argento, or a testone of 7 lire. The gold scudo in circulation after 1537 was valued at 7 lire, 12 soldi in 1571. There were 20 soldi per lira. The word (and symbols) for the fiorino, now an abstract money of

account, and the circulating scudo are confusingly interchanged in the accounts, especially in the records of notaries. There were three main systems of account with varying values for the so/do (fiorino a moneta, fiorino d’oro a moneta, and fiorini d’oro di 7 lire 10 soldi). Since my arguments in

this book do not depend on precise monetary values, where I refer to accounting I have simply cited the numbers as they appear in the original

| document and not attempted to standardize or translate the values.

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Introduction: Early Modern Boundaries and the Place of the Jews

In October 1570 Cosimo I de’ Medict issued an edict expelling the Jews from their homes in the cities and villages of his Florentine domain.! The order applied to some seven hundred Jewish men, women and children who lived in more than twenty towns of Tuscany. The edict specified that they would be allowed to move to a place that was “to be determined.” For a brief time, the new place of the Jews was neither named nor known outside a small circle of policymakers and bureaucrats of the Medici court. But like a banner that would soon be planted to announce dominion over a new territory, the text of the edict signaled the imminent redefinition of religious, communal and spatial boundaries in an early modern state. This book describes the ghettoization of the Jews in Florence, offering a new set of interpretations for the early use of residential segregation in the history of relations between a state and a minority group. The focus of my analysis is on the ghetto as the new place, with all that word conveys, that was assigned to the Jews of Tuscany and that gave location and shape to their new community. Geographically, the location assigned to the Jews in 1571 was a rebuilt section of the center of Florence, walled and gated, just north of the city’s Mercato Vecchio and west of the famous Baptistery, in part of

today’s large Piazza della Repubblica. This was, it should be noted, not a neighborhood in which Jews already resided, although there were some Jews living in other parts of the city of Florence. Within a year of the edict this area was Officially called the “ghetto” a term appropriated from Venice, where Jewish residence had already been restricted since 1516 to an enclosure in an area known for its foundry, or geto, on that site.’ The ghetto of Florence was never one of the most famous Italian or European ghettos, and it does not exist to be visited today.? However, with a population of over 60,000 in 1550, Florence was one of the twelve largest cities in Europe between 1500 and 1550.* Its ruler was an energetic, intelligent and

: ambitious man who worked brilliantly with urban and rural elite families to

2 Introduction successfully transform the unstable Duchy he was given as a young man in 1537 into a strong, large, politically stable Grand Duchy. The construction of a ghetto for the residence of the Jews in the middle of Cosimo I de’ Medici’s capital city is a largely unanalyzed event that begs to be explored and integrated with the urban history of Florence and the history

| of the development of the Medici state.® At the same time, the study of the creation of the Florentine ghetto allows us to develop a fuller understanding of the Italian ghetto and ghettoization than can be achieved by consideration of only the larger and already well-studied ghettos in Venice and Rome. This book examines the late sixteenth-century ghetto as a physical enclosure and as an institution. The ghettoization was not only an event that changed the political and economic status of the Jews; it was also the deliberate relocation of groups of people.° The chapters that follow will ask what it meant to the Medici state to relocate the Jews, and to the Jews to be relocated. Another goal of this book is to examine the ghettoization as a set of gendered processes. There is no separate chapter on Jewish women here. This project developed from my original quest to understand how ghettoization

might have affected women and non-elite men differently from the way scholars thought it had affected elite Jewish men and their cultural production. The answer unfolds in pieces in the work of each chapter, from the analysis of the gendered language the Medici government used to effect the physical, political and social reorganization of the Jews to the realignment of Jewish gender roles in the new ghetto to make them conform to contemporary urban Christian norms. This is also a study of a Jewish minority in a Christian state at a time when religious boundaries were being contested or defined and redefined throughout Christian Europe. As historians of France, the German territories, Spain and England have long recognized, there was a strong relationship between the process of state-building and confessional formation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, interconnected processes referred to as confessionalization.’ This scholarship has often focused on the toleration or nontoleration of religious minority groups and dissident voices, and recently on the sharing of urban space by some early modern religious groups — Catholic, Anabaptist, Lutheran and Calvinist— previously assumed to be incompatible. Perhaps because on the Italian peninsula all the states remained officially Catholic, “confessionalization” has not become a primary factor in discussion of the development of the early modern bureaucratic Tuscan state or in the Italian state-building process more generally. An important but largely separate body of literature exists on the Catholic Reformation and on the pene-

Early Modern Boundaries = 3 tration of and resistance to Protestant ideas; that is, recent scholarship on religious history has focused not on confessionalization but on Catholic reform efforts: the Council of Trent, the branches of the Inquisition, the Jesuit Order, sacred oratory, monastic enclosure, the institution of seminaries and schools. But there was a process in the Italian states of redefining Chris-

tian belief and behavior, and it was found not only in the elimination of heresy and clarification of doctrine but also in the establishing of harder, more visible boundaries between the two licit faiths — Catholic and Jewish.

Ghettoization—a policy supported and indeed initiated by the Medici state — played a critical role in this process, shaping the practice in Florence of each faith as well. This ss1dy suggests that the ghettoization of the Jews should be considered a part of a specifically Italian process of early modern

confessionalization—and of the state-building so intimately linked to it. Indeed, I will argue in later chapters, the state plays such an important role in defining the expression of Jewish religious and communal life that we might well find it useful to consider the ghettoization a process through which the Jews, too, are turned into a “confession.” To an extent, this book is also located in the related context of studies of the movement of Jews across Christian boundaries —in and out of “Christian

space.” In acknowledging this literature, I do not wish to suggest that I accept the paradigm that Christians lived in Christian space and Jews in Jewish space, a paradigm that has often framed the discussion in scholarship on the medieval and early modern world. Rather, I will argue here that as Chris-

tians’ attention to the definition of religious boundaries increased, so did their awareness of and concern about the blurring or violation of these boundaries. In any event, the making and breaking of religious boundaries is a theme that has occupied the recent attention of scholarship on Jews and on the image of Jews in early modern Europe. Some of this scholarship explores

the charge of duplicity, ambiguity and changeability made against New Christians (Marranos) by the inquisitorial courts of Spain, Venice and Rome and by individual Christian authors at the time. For Christians in early modern Europe, as for scholars now, attention often focused on Jews who moved

between Jewish and Christian identities, or on that troubling possibility. Studies have focused on once-Jewish converts who changed from one Chris-

tian confession to another; on the migration of Jews through “drift and defection” to baptism, as in England, or out of one territorial state and into another; and, finally, on the shifting political loyalties of Jews who moved

between the lands of Protestants and Catholics, or between lands of Catholics and Turks.® Similar themes are explored in studies about the

4. Introduction process of “return” of New Christians to a Jewish identity in Amsterdam and. the image and cultural roles of converts from Judaism to Christianity in German lands.’ In this broad context, the ghettoization of the Jews in Florence is an event which both symbolically and quite literally shifted and redefined the bound-

| aries between Jews and Christians. To understand this, it will be necessary to introduce the context of migration, expulsion and conversion in early modern Jewish historiography. But Jews did not only move in and out of states, or in and out of a fixed, easily defined and well-established identity as Jews. One of the arguments of this book is that in the process of ghettoization, the state of being a Jew—that is, the state of Jewishness itself—was to have its boundaries redefined, as they had been at other major historical junctures. In early modern Tuscany, ghettoization—an act of state—would reshape Jewish

society to conform to new contours that were determined by Christian expectations and early modern political strategies.

x

In recent surveys of Jewish history in early modern Europe, the sixteenth century is presented as a watershed period which sees both expulsions —the end of a long medieval development of distancing and rising hostility toward

Jews—and the reintroduction of Jews into western and central European states and the regions of their merchant and colonial empires. Among the last of the expulsions cited by Jonathan Israel, whose survey has done much to standardize this view, is the expulsion of the Jews from towns in Tuscany in 1570 and 1571.° These expulsions came, in the larger scheme presented by this eminent historian of the Dutch Republic, at the end of a century of expulsion

| and contraction." As true as it is that the Jews were expelled from the towns of Tuscany, this was only one scene in a more complex picture, for the Jews were also specifically invited to move to the capital city, Florence, to live

there. Many of the questions this book asks come from thinking about people and populations forced to leave their homes, about refugees and the new spaces, institutions and communities created in the course of these transfers or relocations. In the sixteenth century, well before early modern European rulers and their governments are thought to have expressed intense interest in defining precise physical boundary lines for their states, the state was understood largely in terms of its sovereignty, jurisdiction and administration. In such a world, we must wonder what purpose the state found in assigning to the Jews a fixed location and in making them a boundaried and walled community. For it must be stated at once that residence in a ghetto was not the norm for medieval Jews nor, specifically, for sixteenth-century Jews living in the

, Early Modern Boundaries 5 Italian states. Although there were many times and places in the medieval

world where canon law, itinerant preachers or municipal legislation demanded the residential segregation of Jews, the institution of the ghetto should not be understood mainly as a continuation or development in the medieval history of the persecution of the Jews by Christian rulers. The Jews of medieval and early modern Europe were indeed persecuted, and the expulsions and ghettoizations of the sixteenth century (and of later centuries) are part of that history. But the ghetto was something new. Robert Bonfil made the important point that the ghetto was one of many early modern paradoxes, one through which segregation mediated integration. “The reception of Jews into Christian society was transformed by means of the ghetto from being exceptional and unnatural into being unexceptional and natural” This study confirms that the ghetto was a distinctly early modern phenomenon in the Christian West, but adds new meaning to that label. The sixteenth-century policy of creating ghettos and moving Jews into them expresses or foreshadows a new interest in the potential of spatial control on the part of early modern states hitherto primarily accustomed to employ power by judicial, administrative and fiscal controls. In the ghetto, as perhaps in the convent and hospital and later in the prison, we will see the early modern state expand its claims over urban space, employing power in its reorganization of urban, religious and social space. In other words, in the ghetto the state is seen spatializing its expression of power. The Florentine city and state-capital had in the course of centuries past seen its magnates dominate and give order to its space with the use of processions and festivals, towers and palazzi. In the late sixteenth century, its ducal government broadened its ability to employ its power spatially by defining and controlling the personal mobility of some of its citizens and by setting the boundaries of their residential and social space.’* The citizens the state now reorganized and controlled were local Jews, whose religious deviation and unusual legal status—as we shall see in the chapters ahead— made them particularly vulnerable and useful to the state. Immediately before ghettoization, the Jews of Tuscany were not more than one half a percent of the population of either the state or the city of Florence. These Jews did not count among their number great international merchants with enormous net worth; they did not sustain a center for study led by great Kabbalists or particularly famous rabbinic scholars. Partly for this reason, the 1570 edict of ghettoization and the ghetto itself have attracted relatively little scholarly attention. This situation has been reinforced by the comments of Umberto Cassuto, eminent historian of the Jews of Renaissance Florence, who condemned the life of the Jews in the ghetto of Florence

6 Introduction as “obscure and miserable” and uninteresting, the ghetto a prison which stymied the previous participation of the Jews in the Renaissance and turned them inwards.’* Then, too, in contrast to the significant architectural remains of the ghettos of Rome and Venice (including the synagogues of Venice),

there is nothing left of the early modern ghetto of Florence to draw the attention of tourists or scholars, while the contemporary Jewish community is proudly established on the grounds of its beautiful nineteenth-century synagogue in another part of the city.!° But the ghettoization of the Jews in Florence is not just a moment of dislocation, trauma and response that deserves

to be studied and known. If we move beyond imagining it primarily as a moment in the continuing history of the persecution of the Jews, we find two important opportunities. On the one hand, there is the chance to consider what was specific and unique about that treatment of the religious minority. On the other hand, there is the chance to reveal how the persecution of the Jews was effected by identifiable people and institutions who employed specific ideas and language and used precisely chosen technologies

to achieve their purposes. I have chosen to read the expulsion order as a deliberate act of an early modern state and its rulers and administrative class. Looked at this way, the edict and the events it initiated and transformations it catalyzed serve as a base for exploring questions about religion, community, place and the state in early modern Europe. What will emerge is a new explanation for the specific origins of the Florentine ghetto, a way of considering the broader phenomenon of ghettoization that puts it into the context of other early modern developments in Jewish history and in early modern

European history, and an enriched understanding of the role that religion played in the development of the Medici state and that the state played in the social definition of a minority group.

a

Two stories are told in this book. One story narrates the ghettoization of the Jews in Florence, explaining it as a project of the Medici state in a period of growth, consolidation and transition. By the state, I mean here the rulers, advisors, administrators and aspiring bureaucrats of the Grand Duchy of Florence and Siena; and the laws, procedures and institutions they supported and used in their individual, collective and various efforts to govern, control or increase stability, wealth and status. The sources I have used in this study are largely products of this state— documents produced by state officials and clerks and preserved in the Florentine State Archives. In this context, I present the creation of the ghetto in Tuscany broadly as a response of an early modern state to the disintegration of the Western Christendom, as part of the process of the reworking of the relationships between religious affilia-

Early Modern Boundaries —_7 tion, communal boundaries and place. The first story is therefore about statecraft, and in particular the politically deliberate use of religion to advance goals of state-building and the legitimation of secular power. The second story narrates the ways that ghettoization affected the Jews of Tuscany socially, economically, religiously and politically. It also explores relationships and transformations— between Jews and Christians, between Jews and the bureaucratic duchy in which they lived and among Jews. These

relationships were worked out in spatial, religious and political language. They were expressed physically in fistfights, in marital unions and in the melodies of the psalms chanted in prayer. Largely determining those changes

and transforming the Jews of Tuscany into an organized community with political structure was the state, which designed, implemented and enforced the change. The second story, therefore, is an exploration of the way that states become involved in constructing and reconstructing, or reshaping, the social expression of the otherness of people who live as minorities in its midst: in this case, a group of mainly Italian-born, Italian-speaking Jews."® That is, this is a case study of the role played by the early modern state in giving new shape and definition to a minority group.

In attempting to understand the changing “place of the Jews,’ I mean in this book to examine the niche, social and political, that these particular Jews occupied as a minority among Christians. But I also refer to the location of this population in their new residence, the physical space and institution where they ended up in 1571. This chapter’s title might have referred to the “location” of the Jews, instead of the “place,” In location there is not only movement, and therefore change, but also deliberate action. The Jews were quite forcibly put into the physical and social space called the ghetto of the Jews of Florence; it was a deliberate act of state. The premises were then rented to the Jews, who were not allowed to own the property where they were being located. It is more than coincidence that the Latin verb “to rent” (locare, root of our noun relocation) expresses the early modern convergence of statal power as dominion over subjects and as possession of spatial territory. The ghetto was a walled, semi-autonomous community within the city. As

such, it invites reflection on several aspects of the development of Tuscany and of early modern states in general: the relationship of the state to spatial, or territorial, definition; the relationship of state, religion and community; and the spatiality, or locatedness, of “community” itself. More than a century before nation-states defined precise borders and assigned passports or citizenship based on birthplace and physical residence, early modern Jews were legally restricted to residence within clearly defined boundaries.'” Many stud-

8 Introduction | ies have pursued the history of medieval church and state policies to distinguish and marginalize the Jews, and the ghetto is sometimes seen as a logical extension of these efforts. While the literature is too vast to review here, I should like to make clear that this study seeks to understand a development that was new in the sixteenth century, and not inevitable. For in choosing to establish a ghetto, the Florentine government was expressing an interest not only in marking, labeling and stigmatizing the Jews as a group, as earlier laws had done for centuries, but also in marking out and defining a specific place in the city of Florence as their place. While my approach to the ghetto of Florence differs from previous analy-

ses of ghettos, it is nonetheless deeply informed by scholarship that has already addressed the question of why Jews were ghettoized and how they responded, especially in the two large and important ghettos that predate Florence, Venice (1516) and Rome (1555).!8 However, the creation of ghettos in the Italian states took place over a period of more than two centuries, during which time there were always some Jews living in Italian territories that had not yet forced them into ghettos, or never would do so. This study of the

Florentine ghetto should therefore not be construed as part of any seamless or continuous narrative of the development of anti-Semitism or of JewishChristian relations. In the early modern era, in the Italian states and in other parts of Europe, official responses to Jews included expulsion, violence, tolerance, invitation, privilege and ghettoization in no simple chronological progression. Local political and religious conditions ensured great variation in the status of Jews where they lived. But for what reason were ghettos built and Jews ghettoized? This important question is loaded with problematic assumptions. Let me offer an incorrect analogy for the purpose of comparison. Is a ghetto a structure like a bridge, in that the purpose of both is obvious? When we see that a bridge was built in early modern Europe, it might at first seem fair to assume that its purpose was to allow people to cross a river. If there was a river beneath it,

form and primary function seem clearly related. However, the historian might still choose to investigate the specific location of the bridge, its keepers and control, its intended, symbolic and actual impact on the flow of traffic, the urban landscape and the economy.’? Indeed, the bridge may have been entirely “unnecessary” if there were other bridges, or other ways of crossing the water. Superficially, the ghetto might seem the opposite of the bridge: like a moat, its urban equivalent, its wall was built to divide and separate, that is, to segregate Jews from Christians. But if the meaning of even

something so functional as a bridge is not as obvious as might first be thought, the meaning of a ghetto is truly enigmatic.

Early Modern Boundaries 9 Why separate Jews from Christians by making them reside in a special area? The ghetto was a structure, a symbol and a tool, and the meanings assigned to its construction and the uses to which it was put must be understood as historically contingent.”° We should therefore not expect one theory to satisfactorily explain the origin of all ghettos. Indeed, the symbolic images and uses of preexisting ghettos may have been sifted through and selectively adopted, adapted, or ignored by successive rulers who chose to make new use of this form of urban architecture. In 1570, when plans for the Florentine ghetto were drafted, there were ghettos in only three Italian cities: Venice, Rome and Ancona. The Venetians had established the first Italian ghetto without any direct papal involvement, but papal policy is generally considered the force behind subsequent ghettoizations. The Roman ghetto was established in 1555 by Pope Paul IV, along with that of Bologna and Ancona, fulfilling his bull Cum nimis absurdum.™ In April 1569 Pope Pius V expelled the Jews from the ghetto of Bologna and

the rest of the state outside of Rome and called upon Christian princes to segregate Jews from Christians in the bull Romanus pontifex. Although he was not necessarily responding to this papal bull, Cosimo I was the first to do so, creating ghettos in both Florence (in 1571) and in the administratively distinct territory of Siena (in 1572).?” The other Italian states did not follow immediately, but by the mid-eighteenth century most Italian Jews were living in ghettos and had developed there common social and political institutions that can be described, to an extent, as “ghetto life,” with its collection of cultural and social and spatial features.?¢ It is not only the history of this Jewish institution and the urban and reli-

gious history of Florence in which we are interested. The ghettoization of this minority group in Florence provides an extraordinary opportunity to observe and consider the politically deliberate construction of a population as a formally constituted and spatially bounded community. For while the segregation of the Jews must be understood in the context of previous medieval and early modern efforts to marginalize people for behaviors or conditions they exhibited or thoughts they expressed, no other group of people had ever before been treated in this particular way by a Florentine government. Scholars such as Joshua Trachtenberg, John Boswell, Richard I. Moore and David Nirenberg have galvanized the comparative study of attitudes and policies toward Jews and other groups in medieval and early modern Euro-

pean society, social groups who were identified, labeled as “other” and assigned negative attributes, whether as simply “foreign” or as impure, corrupting and dangerous.”* Once so stigmatized, the “discourse of violence”

10 ~—— Introduction

fully established, members of these groups were vulnerable to attack as individuals and as collectives. They were subjected to accusations, violence, seg-

regation, expulsion or, eventually, institutionalization for any number of stated reasons. This scholarship has drawn attention to interesting points of comparison in the legislation and policies produced by the church and by local Christian governments concerning a variety of nonconforming people: Jews and those considered heretics, sodomites, beggars, the “poor” and Gypsies, prostitutes, lepers and, where there were such, Muslims. A full review of

the treatment of all these groups in Florence is beyond the scope of this study, although in the chapters that follow some of the comparisons will be addressed. In the late medieval and early modern era, groups who met the most violent response were people who were believed to vilify or violate Christ, Christians and the Christian religious faith: Jews and those who were called heretics and witches were the main accused. Attacks on less clearly defined persons (sodomites, prostitutes, lepers) were motivated or explained in terms of the violation of religious norms as well. Jews stood out from all these categories because, unlike the others, they

were clearly self-identified as Jews who denied the Christian faith, and because they both considered themselves and were considered Jews not only by conviction but also by birth. It must also be noted that policies toward Jews were always informed by and often explicitly linked to traditions of Christian hostility toward Jews that had been developed over many centuries and diffused widely through the Christian world in iconography, literature and law. Negative images of Jews and knowledge of their supposed ritual murder of Christians and ritual desecration of the sanctified host were widely dispersed; this dispersion was facilitated in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-

turies by the extraordinary mobility of people including artists, printers, scholars, diplomats, soldiers, brides, clerics and pilgrims; and by the transcontinental trade in books, wood-cut prints and broadsheets, music and sacred art. The continuity and diffusion of anti-Jewish discourse and the fact that the hostility was based on a categorical difference of religion had consequences for Jews across the Christian world that affected more people and

were often far more violent than those experienced by most of the other groups to whom they have been compared. Nonetheless, to contextualize the ghettoization of the Jews it is important to consider parallels and differences in the way the Florentine government treated various groups. First, it is necessary to consider the background of two key aspects of the Medici policy of 1570 and 1571: expulsion and physical segregation. Both had historical precedents in Florence. Of all the Florentine subjects singled out as groups by legislation in previous centuries, only Jews

Early Modern Boundaries ss had previously faced an expulsion order. This had occurred when the Republic rejected them as well as other supporters of the Medici in 14.94, and again with the fall of the state in 1527. Groups of people known as “Egyptians” or “Zangari” (usually conflated with today’s Gypsies), who were sometimes granted permission to pass through the state, had not yet been subjected to an expulsion order, though they would be a few years after the ghettoization

of the Jews. In contrast to the Jews, they were not forced to settle permanently, but, if anything, to remain itinerant.”* Political exile of specific individuals and families was another strategy of exclusion (and ultimately reincorporation) that had a longer history in Florence and other Italian states.*° There is a relationship between political exile and excommunication: in both cases, the ones banned are ruled out of the defining community, and penal-

ties are threatened to any who communicate with them or enable them to communicate with others. The expulsion of Jews, and perhaps their ghettoization too, can be seen as a kind of exile-excommunication combination; we will return to this idea. As for segregation, physical and spatial enclosure or “containment” also predates the ghetto in Florence. It was a strategy that did not have to be learned from Venice or Rome. People were locked in debtors’ prison and in jail; violent criminals, thieves and others were routinely sent as prisoners to the galleys, to work in Livorno or at Porto Ferraio or on the island of Elba for years (if not until their death) in the mines, the shipyards and the naval fleet. People also lived within the legal and economic institution of slavery in Tuscany: slaves from the Crimea and elsewhere were commonly sold at markets in Venice, Pisa and Ancona through the end of the fifteenth century, and even after the closure of this trade route Turks and North Africans captured on ships were brought to Tuscany for sale, many of these men sent to the galleys and the women destined to become domestic slaves.”” But whether criminals imprisoned or innocents enslaved, these were individuals, and they were

not, to my knowledge, encouraged or allowed to organize as political and residential communities as were the Jews when they were moved to the ghetto. At the same time, the ghetto was neither jail nor slavery: a Jew could legally leave at any time, if he or she were willing to convert to Christianity or had the resources to move as a Jew to another state. A somewhat closer parallel to the use of the ghetto in Florentine history may be found in the way that the city controlled public space to enforce other hierarchies, especially the gender hierarchy, and did so in defense of the public moral health. Women cf both elite and laboring classes were effectively discouraged from appearing in the public streets, taverns and courts.’* Men were also affected by the enforcement of gender norms: a concerted cam-

12 Introduction paign in the later fifteenth century to ban sexual activity between men had largely driven it, too, out of the public eye and courts by the early sixteenth century in an effort to ensure that all men stayed at all times in the dominant position that they were expected to have with respect to women.” Less effective attempts had been made to require prostitutes to register, and to live in certain houses or streets or a certain distance away from churches and monasteries (a parallel to which we will return).°° In law they were never locked in a compound, and in practice their residence and work were never actually limited even to one quarter of the city. Nonetheless, the precedent was set: forced physical segregation and outright persecution—and the idea that Florentine streets could be kept masculine and morally pure and healthy—were on the books as legitimate and pious acts of government. It is, as I have already noted, beyond the scope of this book to make a full study of the many efforts of policymakers to segregate, control or stigmatize these various categories of Florentines or to examine all the similarities and differences in the treatment of the people who were fit into each of these social groups. We can, however, note one additional important distinction. In contrast to these other situations, the ghettoization produced —and seems to have been intended to produce —a semi-autonomous community of families in permanent, self-perpetuating residence in a spatially designated location. In contrast, it was not the intent of legislation pertaining to sodomy or prostitution to create organized communities (of sodomites or prostitutes) nor was it an assumption in the law that they—like Jews—already were bound to one another as a large family or political community. The men were to cease and desist; the women were to be controlled; lepers might be healed, or die; prisoners might finish their terms and be released, or die. The Jews of Tuscany, in contrast, were not told to cease practicing their religion, but were expected to move into the ghetto and live there as a self-governing community.*! The deliberate political organization of the Jews as a community is the subject of Chapter Seven. In this respect, despite some obvious contrasts, the most interesting com-

parison to the ghettoization of the Jews is that other important form of “enclosure” in the Florentine and other Italian states: the enclosure of women in their monastic communities.*” In 1563 the twenty-fifth and last ses-

sion of the Council of Trent reaffirmed and strengthened Pope Boniface VIIPs constitution Periculoso (1298), which ordered professed women religious of all orders to stay at all times within their monasteries and to keep all outsiders out. As part of its broad program, the Council thus attempted to halt the uncontrolled exchange of people and ideas through the doors and windows of women’s convents. But like the government of the Venetian

Early Modern Boundaries — 13 state, Cosimo I had subjected the female monastics in his state to enclosure reforms even before that, in 1545.33 The number of women who lived in monasteries in Tuscany and within the walls of Florence had grown to be much greater than the number of religious men, with much of that disproportionate growth occurring in the first half of the sixteenth century.** In the

new language of convent architecture, in the interventionist legislation of Cosimo I and finally in Tridentine rhetoric, female monastic enclosure claimed to protect women from the dangers posed to their honor by the presence of men and by the secular and material influences of the city.#° With their new walls, gates and sealed windows, the women inside were not only

safe but governed, since Cosimo’s reform ordered that his magistrates appoint a board of three men to oversee the administration of each convent. But if political (and economic) control over religious institutions and over women played a key role in this reform, so did the symbol of physical enclosure, the appearance of which was so important that in at least one important Florentine convent (Le Murate) the actual permeability of the walls—that is, the real presence of doors and windows—was disguised architecturally.*° The virtue of the city and of the state—the chaste, faithful, female Christian body and its male governors—was locked in to keep out not only real dangers but also all innuendo of dishonesty. In contrast to the convent, the ghetto was an enclosure of Jews who, by official Christian definitions, were faithless, or “perfidious.” We might perhaps see the ghetto as the symbolic inverse of the convent, for the enclosure of Jews was declared to protect not the Jews inside but the Christian body

outside. From a Christian doctrinal perspective, the Jews inside had no purity to protect, and so the permeability of the ghetto walls was not only permitted, it was planned and controlled. Although this was probably never translated into an architectural reality, monasteries were supposed to have only one door, like the lid of a holy vessel into which the consecrated wine

was poured. The nuns who had entered would remain pure inside, and should not come out, and, even more important, without written permission, no unprofessed persons should go within.*” In contrast, the edict of 1571, like the papal bull Cum nimis absurdum, explicitly noted that to the ghetto “there shall be one entrance, and one exit.”** It is almost as though the

ghetto were a digestive tract, a place wherein nothing could be pure or whole—all commerce being carnal—but through which one could pass. Christian men and women could come and go at will to shop by day in the Jewish shops. As we shall see in later chapters, economic opportunity and gender norms would determine that able-bodied adult Jewish men would very often be out of the ghetto by day, so that the ghetto could also have

14 Introduction been imagined as a feminized space, regularly invaded by Christian men—in sharp contrast to the chaste enclosure of the convent.

But this comparison of convent and ghetto describes these institutions mainly as legislation defined them, not as they functioned. Even if the Catholic Reformation offered women new ways to express themselves in popular piety, through their wills and more active participation in parish life, as one leading religious woman in Tuscany saw it, strict monastic enclosure limited the autonomy of the enclosed women and their access to wealth (and even to survival sustenance).*’ The similarity between the convent and the

ghetto, therefore, is that monastic enclosure, like ghettoization, should be seen as a nexus in the shifting and interwoven power relations of the church and state. In the convent, gender is the category used to define the people whose physical and spatial domination serves to demonstrate the power of a state speaking in the idiom of the church. In the ghetto the category is religion. And it is worth remembering that Cosimo’s reforms predated the action the Council of Trent took in 1563 to reinforce the late thirteenth-century periculosa: he was quick to identify and utilize technologies of the church.

Clearly, it is important to consider the ghetto not only in the context of the history of policies toward the Jews but also in the context of other efforts to segregate as groups individuals who shared a set of qualifying characteristics. In particular, I am interested in exploring the ghettoization as part of a history of the effort to attach people to place. This is not exactly the same as the also necessary analysis of how people become attached to specific places. The Jews who were made to live in the ghetto of Florence were not already

living in that area—they were brought there. The ghetto can therefore be studied as an early modern state’s experiment in the spatialization of power, the control of boundaries and of individual mobility. The early modern ghetto suggests many comparisons to later times and to the contemporary world where governments or local agencies influence the residential patterns, economic status and physical or social mobility of persons who are organized by a declared or apparent gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, race, linguistic or national origin, age or physical condition. Sixteenth-century Tuscany was a less violent place than many parts of the world today, where groups work especially forcefully to try to create “ethnically pure” or religiously homogeneous geographical states in regions that are inhabited by more than one ethnic and/or religious group. While I hope

that this early modern story will be of interest to readers who are thinking about the history of the construction of modern national and ethnic groups

Early Modern Boundaries _15 and other minorities, this book is not an exploration of a self-perceived “identity” or self-representation of the Jews. It is rather a case study in the social construction and reconstruction of minority communities. Spatiality is

one dimension of that construction. More broadly, I am interested in the way that state authority and other hegemonic forces, in the process of categorizing and defining social groups for their own purposes, not only determine the representation of those groups in the media of the time but also shape and influence the social organization and political, religious and cultural expression of those groups.

The Place of the Jews in Early Modern Europe Early modern Christian thinkers and high-ranking religious leaders in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries invested considerable effort in the attempt to identify some types of Jews and in discussion of where they could be found and where they should be allowed to live.*° This was true, as is well known, even in places such as Spain and England, where there were not supposed to be (m)any Jews, as well as in literature about the Americas, where the native peoples were said, by some, to be remnants of the ten lost tribes of Israel.*’ Before we discuss the relocation of Jews within Tuscany we will consider the place of Jews in early modern Europe more generally in order to fully appreciate the central role the ghetto would play in those states that chose to create them. The early modern period in European Jewish history is generally considered one of demographic expansion, numerical and geographical. Jews were able to settle in some places from which Jews had previously been expelled as

well as to establish themselves in other regions for the first time.** This expansion followed an extended period of medieval and late medieval contraction which was marked by the expulsions of Jews from English, French and German lands and which had culminated in the conversion to Christianity of large numbers of Iberian Jews in the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and the expulsion at the end of the fifteenth century of those who had not converted. For Jonathan Israel, whose widely read survey has familiarized European historians with this periodization, the period of expansion

begins c. 1570; for Reuven Bonfil, who included the arrival in western Europe of the first New Christians who left the Iberian Peninsula, the beginning of the period is earlier, c. 1492 or 1500. The decade of the 1530s has its own appeal, for with the institution of the Portuguese Inquisition a substan-

16 Introduction tial stream of New Christians came not only to the Portuguese colonies but

to northern Europe, the Italian states and the Ottoman empire, many of them reclaiming Jewish identity in the succeeding decades. Like most periodization efforts, this periodization is encumbered by difficulties. As we can see in the difference between Israel’s and Bonfil’s approach,

one question is whether the arrival of New Christians who lived secretly or unofficially as Jews should be seen as the beginning of the “expansion” and reintegration. Reintegration begins rather earlier if the New Christians are treated as Jews, for New Christians arrived in Bordeaux, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Antwerp, London and other cities long before Jews were officially tolerated there gua Jews. A second complication in the periodization is that the tolerance that allowed Jewish and New Christian merchants to settle in the sixteenth century, though presented with “mercantilist” reasoning, 1s not always clearly distinguishable from that economic, utilitarian tolerance that had been offered to Jewish merchants, moneylenders and doctors by medieval Christian municipal governments in the preceding five centuries. Whichever way it is looked at, the demographic shift is key to the periodization: in the sixteenth century Jews and New Christians of Jewish ancestry began to establish residence in places from which they had previously been expelled or prohibited, including parts of the Empire, the Low Countries, England and France. They settled in the colonized possessions of the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English, and—in numbers that were significant— they settled in many places in the Kingdoms of Poland and Lithuania along with Christian Germans and other foreign merchants, largely to be employed as a managerial and entrepreneurial class to develop (colonize) the land and supervise and enhance the productivity and taxation of its peasant population.* Early modern European Jewish history thus appears as a story that moves from expulsion to reintegration, from exclusion to inclusion. It was mercantilism in one form or another, most concur, that now justified the tolerance of Jews (along with Christian minorities) by some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Christians, whether these Jews were tolerated for their ties to a Mediterranean and Atlantic merchant diaspora or for their business skills, capital and connections on overland routes. Mercantilist tolerance was reinforced by the spread of other arguments for tolerance, political-philosophical theory that emerged in the early seventeenth century and especially out of the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation and the wars and political compromises that resulted not only in the eventual definition of confessions but also, in many places, in the toleration of people of more than one confession

Early Modern Boundaries 17 cohabiting the same city, despite the principle suggested by the famous phrase cuzus regio, evus religw of the Peace of Westphalia (1648).

This forward-driving story, however, is complicated by the fact that in the period of “reintroduction” or “reintegration,” Christian elites, intellectuals, theologians and rulers continued to exhibit a variety of attitudes to the presence of Jews in early modern European states. The expulsions from Castile and Aragon, Portugal and Navarre (1492-98) were not the last times that the policy of expulsion was put into effect; indeed, expulsion was still used not only for Jews (from Nuremberg, for example, in 1499, and Regensberg in 1519) but also for Moriscos, expelled from the city of Granada in 1569 and from Castile, Andalusia and Valencia in 1609-1; and for Lutherans, Calvinists, Phillipists, Anabaptists and Catholics who found themselves minorities in confessional states and ir: some of the less tolerant cities.*” Jews continued

to be expelled throughour the sixteenth century—from the Kingdom of Naples in 1541, from German principalities such as the ecclesiastical bishopric

of Wurzberg in the 1570s, from the Lutheran imperial city of Dortmund in 1595, from the papal states (1569), from the duchy of Milan (1595) and more locally from Italian cities such as Udine (1556) and Cividale (1571) in the Venetian Friuli. Jews also continued to be prohibited from taking up res1dence in many cities; in sixteenth-century Poland, so often referred to as the open frontier for Jewish settlement, Polish kings granted dozens of towns and cities the right to exclude Jewish residence in specific areas.” In German lands, Christian theologians and political figures discussed both the expulsion of the Jews and the possibility of another policy that had been pursued for both Jews and Muslims in Spain: forced conversion. Given this diversity it is no surprise that the Italian states provide their own complication to the expulsion/reintegration model for early modern European Jewish history. Key events in Italian Jewish history have, however, been accounted for in the model. For Jonathan Israel, Pope Paul I'V’s midsixteenth-century attack on the Jews and on the Talmud is part of the “near

destruction of Jewish religion, learning and life in western and central Europe,” and of the period of “drastic contraction of Jewish life” in (Germany) and Italy.°° Accordingly, the sixteenth-century ghettoization and expulsions of Jews from papal territory and other parts of the Italian peninsula (often under Spanish influence) are seen as a continuation of the late medieval period of exclusion. However, it is also well known that in the same sixteenth-century decades, some Italian states (including the papal, Venetian and Tuscan states) offered special invitations and privileges to Jewish merchants who had Levantine (Ottoman) trade connections or ties with the Por-

18 = Introduction tuguese mercantile network. These overtures to Jews are rightly seen as the “new” mercantilism and the tolerance it encouraged.*! Successive popes and even individual rulers were capable of acting in both “old” and “new” ways: in the early modern period there was chronological overlap in these Christian responses to the Jews.*2 What must be added to the currently used model of early modern Jewish history and its polarized policies of exclusion (expulsion/conversion) and mercantilist privileging is the third major response, ghettoization. In the Italian peninsula, ghettoization appears first in Venice (1516), then in Rome (1555), Florence (1571) and Siena (1572), and later elsewhere.** Heiko Oberman, taking into consideration the scholarship on both Venice and Rome, has suggested that ghettoization was an alternate form of expulsion, insofar as both had as their goal the separation of Jews and Christians. Moreover, for Oberman, focusing particularly on the sixteenth-century writings of Martin

Luther and Johannes Reuchlin and other “radical or fanatical” Christian thinkers, the early modern world was an intellectual battleground between those who would expel the Jews and those who would convert them. Either the conversion of the Jews or a regional or a citywide expulsion of the Jews could bring Christians closer to the ideal of living in a fully Christian community.5* To the extent that the ghetto removed Jews from the Christian polity, it too was a form of exclusion—and, as Kenneth Stow has argued, it was seen as such, within a generation, by Roman Jews who heard in the Italian word ghetto the Hebrew word get, divorce. The goal of exclusion overlapped (chronologically) and conflicted with mercantilist motivations and the growing influence of “raison d’état” in the governing policies of states. Scholars have understood the Venetian ghetto in just this light, a resolution of the tension between competing impulses to

: expel Jews for religious reasons and to tolerate them for economic reasons. Segregation on the outskirts of the city in a ghetto was, in Venice, a compromise between expulsion and full tolerance.*° The willingness to find such a balance may have been especially strong in the Italian states, where exposure to the works of Machiavelli spread somewhat more quickly than on the rest of the continent, and made an impact before the articulation and publication of serious Christian anti-Machiavellian responses began in the 1570s.°” Oberman’s argument that radical Christians were torn between the desire to convert and to expel the Jews also accommodates the specific origins of

the Roman ghetto. As Kenneth Stow has argued, the ghettoization of the Jews of Rome under Pope Paul IV (1555) was one step in a programmatic effort to convert the Jews. For Stow, the Roman ghetto’s function of excluding Jews from Christian society was ancillary to the ultimate papal purpose

Early Modern Boundaries —19

of the conversion of the Jews that would signal and catalyze the Second Coming. Jews were ghettoized, that is, in order to lead them to convert, which they would choose to do when they saw themselves as Christian theology saw them: as rejected, as slaves, as forgotten and out of God’s favor— an understanding the Jews would come to only when the (oppressive) phys-

ical circumstances of their lives reflected their (degraded and rejected) spiritual status.°? Stow and Oberman both regard the policy of ghettoization as reflecting a Christian desire to eliminate the presence of Jews, but Stow explains the ghetto not as an expulsion-substitute but as the tool and vessel for passage — through conversion—to this total Christian community, which will be not only perfect but also eschatologically transformative. The ways that Christians linked conversion, expulsion and tolerance were appreciated by early modern Jews such as Manasseh ben Israel, the seventeenth-century rabbi of Amsterdam who played to English millenarian aspirations when he argued for the readmission of Jews to England. Among his reasons that Jews should be admitted to England and “planted there as fruitful trees” (in his own age-of-transatlantic-exchange metaphor, in the English imperial idiom*’) we find the barely disguised hint that Jews exposed to the Christian religion might ultimately be converted, an outcome possible only if they are first allowed to settle in Christian lands. We can agree that while European Christians were still moving slowly toward a politics of religious toleration in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in some places they allowed Jews to live among them with a prac-

tical, mercantilist tolerance or in the hope that they would soon be converted. But while accepting these arguments for specific explanations of the situations in Venice and Rome, we must note that different purposes and functions have been assigned to the ghettos of these two cities: Venice, the mercantilist compromise with exclusion; Rome, the conversion-focused path to exclusion. For the ghetto, like an enforced dress-code (sartorial labeling), was at once sign, tool and ordering system that could be (and was) used for a variety of purposes. As an ordering system, the early modern ghetto was not, I would argue, a variant of the two main early modern Christian systemic responses to the Jews, exclusion and mercantilist tolerance. Rather, it was a third response altogether, a response that can most easily be understood in the context of the linkage of processes of confessionalization and state-building. But first, let us return to the idea that the ghettos of Venice and Rome served different functions. In considering a third case of “ghettoization,” that of Florence, we must look at the ghetto as a multifunctional tool. A close

parallel may be seen in tke badge called the segno (sign) that Jews were

20 = Introduction obliged to wear in 1567 (and had been compelled to wear sporadically in the Christian world since 1215, when the Fourth Lateran Council called upon Christian rulers to impose a sartorial sign of their Jewishness on the Jews). Observing this sign, according to the Florentine edict that required it, the Christian should be able to see “extrinsically” the inner perfidy of the Jew who wears it. This purpose is comparable to that given to the special habit

that was supposed to be worn by members of each (Christian) religious order “so that they may show by the suitability of their outward dress the interior uprightness of their characters”! In a provision of the Council of Trent, where this explanation appears, it was decreed that members of religious orders who did not wear the clerical dress ordered by their bishops would be punished severely for that dishonor to the religion. As with special clothing, so with the ghetto: the purpose and meaning of marking, like the purpose and meaning of segregating, is not self-evident and must be interpreted in a specific context. But in addition to the specific purpose for which it was used, we want to consider the distinctive form that the ghetto took. For the usefulness of the tool must have been recognized by those who chose to pick it up. And in the case of the ghetto, its visible and physical parameters were not coincidental but rather integral to its conceptualization, for ghettoization was a spatially coordinated process. Instead of putting the Jews in a ghetto in 1570, Cosimo could have maintained the status quo, choosing to mark the Jews again visually by renewing the segno or exaggerating the visibility of the marking. He could also have expelled the Jews or tried to convert them. As will become clear, the structure and institution of the ghetto were in the case of Florence used neither to accomplish a mercantilist compromise in the face of pressure to expel the

Jews, nor to bring them to Christianity. The larger question is why early modern states began to find it particularly useful to put people into controlled spaces, to link their status with their place in the city. For we must understand that status and place were not obviously linked earlier.© Before the ghetto, residence in the city was not determined by religion nor, as the maps produced by R. Burr Litchfield show, was the urban space of Florence carved up into a socioeconomic grid. Every quarter or neighborhood and often each street had occupants from a great range of occupations and sta-

tuses, a situation that highlights the importance of the patron-client relationships built by the urban patriciate and working classes.°? All this must eventually lead us to investigate the meaning of “place” and of “community” in the context of the early modern state: to consider the role

that attachment to place and localization of community played in shaping Jewish society and in the formation of early modern states. To understand

Early Modern Boundaries — 21

the ghettoization we will have to look at the driving concerns of the rulers and administrators of the developing Medici state on the eve of ghettoization.

Cosimo I, State-building and the Tuscan State The short period (1570-72) that saw the Jews expelled from their homes and forced to move into ghettos in Florence and Siena was a time of both consolidation of power in the hands of Tuscany’s first grand duke, Cosimo I de’ Medici (r. 1537-74) and transfer of power to Cosimo’s son Francesco, to whom he had already formally abdicated in 1564. Fortifications were still being built or reinforced on prominent hilltops around Florence to establish the dominance of Cosimo I, who had been lifted from one of the less prominent branches of the Medici family to rule Florence after the last republican government had fallen (1530) and the first Medici duke, Alessandro, had been assassinated (1537).°* After Cosimo was elected by the Florentine Senate in 1537 and then made duke by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, his main territorial expansion was the conquest of Siena and the French loyalists there in 1555. After that, Cosimo kept the territories of his expanded territorial state peaceful with the help of a large regional militia, garrisons of Spanish troops and a series of edicts such as those that made carrying weapons in the city an offense for most denizens of Florence. Thirty years into his reign, Florence was the stable, well-governed capital of an early modern state. Meanwhile, the Council of Trent wrapped up its

final sessions; Venice, Rome and Spain fought naval battles against the Turks; the Netherlands began to rise in revolt against Spanish rule; and everywhere in Europe Catholics and Protestants struggled for power and ter-

ritory, minds and souls. In Florence, the economic damage of a declining wool trade had been largely offset successfully by the rising silk industry. Although the greatest art and literary works of the Renaissance had already been canonized, they were not dusty; art, architecture, literature and feats of

engineering were patronized; scientists and translators sought Medici patents for their work. The court of Cosimo bustled with preparations for great theatrical productions for the weddings and births of the Medici family. Florence under Cosimo I is best known, however, as a seat of government; the hub of expanding statewide bureaucratic development; a court attended by foreign nobles, especially Spanish; and a participant in foreign diplomacy, gift-giving, espionage and intrigue, as revealed in the great volume of correspondence of the court, some of it in code.

22 Introduction The success of Cosimo I de’ Medici in establishing his rule, his place among the leaders of European states, and his dynasty 1s largely explained by the duke’s systematic efforts to build and streamline his bureaucracy. He successfully removed threats to his rule while engaging the remaining elites as dependent but fully invested participants in both the Florentine administra-

tion and the local governance of the communes.” Seen through the lens of the vast archival documentation they left historians to read, the prince, his advisors and his appointed and salaried officials seem to have operated with great rationality and with an orientation toward good governance. At the same time that the city-state reoriented itself around the (princely) court of the duke, the language of republicanism that he and his staff used helped legitimate their rule and diffuse opposition.®’ In bringing ducal monarchy to a state that had a long republican history, legitimacy mattered. The government put systems in place that intended to provide not only political stability but also economic stability, environmental conservation of rivers and forests, public safety and reasonably consistent procedures for justice. The process of state-building in Tuscany, like the process in other states, is

no longer seen as a center-driven, forceful domination that ensured an orderly or uninterrupted transformation. Attention has been paid to the urban and regional elites who participated in the process with their distinct but complimentary agendas. They played a critical role in creating a regional culture, the culture of a governing elite whose status and professional capacities were determined by their access to the notarial art, the language of the legal code and the language of bureaucratic organization and work.” Even this centralizing focus has lately been critiqued, for the regional elites did not only send their sons to the metropolis to be absorbed into the bureaucratic elite. As Giovanna Benadusi has argued, many remained in the provinces to become officers who directed the provincial militia, teaching generations of men obedience and allegiance to the state. Changing their marriage patterns, too, provincial notable men and women participated in the creation of a new regional elite and a proto-national culture, and thereby in the consolidation of a state.”°

Nonetheless, the direct intervention of Cosimo I de’ Medici and his advisors and professional bureaucrats in many aspects of the life of the state is remarkable. As Judith C. Brown has reminded us, Cosimo’s efforts to control and improve his state’s economy extended to the manipulation of guilds, the mint, the treasury and tax system, the road system and the silk and textile industries.”? The work of historians of the Medici state has shown that local oligarchies and patrician houses were gradually transformed into dependent

bureaucratic nobility, and that other relationships and networks that had

Early Modern Boundaries —_23

been important in the region in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were weakened and ultimately replaced.” Patron-client relationship networks, the local election of judges and officials, the autonomy of local guilds and their traditional fair days, and some rights and privileges of local communes were all disrupted in the process. Cosimo’s administrative reforms allowed him to send his appointed men out to the countryside to be chancellors and governors and judges and guild reformers (this will be discussed in Chapter Seven). When he did not choose these men himself, he retained the right to approve their appointments. He intervened directly in the economy of the state, proactively following policies intended to stimulate the cultivation of silk worms, for example, and to protect the nascent silk industry from many types of imported cloth. He regulated the notarial profession, which in turn defined the sales, deeds, marriages, emancipations and so many other normal events that defined the culture—and produced revenues— bringing the notaries under central control by requiring them to submit their protocols annually to a central archive in the ducal palace. The Nove Conservatori del Dominio, after its reformation, was responsible for approving all extraordinary expenditures in the towns of the dominion—and this centralized administrative board recorded its permissions in well-kept books. The statutes of the guilds were mostly reformulated and reissued between 1547 and 1580 by boards which included members appointed by the duke. In addition to these well-studied administrative technologies of state-development, there are the environmental and agricultural policies Cosimo attempted; the processions and festivals and weddings that highlighted the glory of the ducal name; and the awareness of the personal subjugation of the people to the duke, soon Grand Duke, that hovered above the city in the new fortresses he had built, and in castles and forts manned by new militia units throughout the territory.”* The flurry of publications and reissue of local statutes and ordinances in the towns of Tuscany in the 1540s and 1ssos may have been raised as a small defiant (or deluded) banner of independence as these cities began to react to the signs of their subjection to the ducal government.” Recent scholarship has called attention to the strategies that Cosimo pursued in building his state, establishing his title and his dynasty and his position among the states of Europe. The more often cited strategies he used to disarm and coopt potential resistance include exile; (selectively) disarming the populace; abducting dissidents into his “secret” prison when necessary; and the building of castles, fortresses and a dependent militia. In recent scholarship on other Italian states, we have learned about other, less obvi-

ously directed parts of the process of state-building. For example, the

24. Introduction destruction of a preexisting socio-political structure might facilitate or precondition the success of a newer political structure, although the masters of

: the new order may not have deliberately engineered the destruction of the older system. Two early modern Italian examples of the process may be cited: in his study of factions in the Friuli region of the Venetian state in the late six-

teenth century, Edward Muir found that the Venetian government only finally took a firmer hold on the region after dramatic events that permanently damaged the culture of vendetta, which had previously locked peasants and local nobles into a social and political organization that left little room for Venetian authority.” And in an important essay on the CounterReformation practices of the Catholic Church, John Bossy argued that kinship networks were deliberately weakened by the policies of a church hierarchy, articulated in the proceedings of the Council of Trent, which strove to make the parish (church members and pastor) the base and strongest sociopolitical unit.”° In Tuscany, too, policies weakened potentially threatening social factions

by attacking and disengaging pan-urban male social networks. It is by now well known that Cosimo coopted and made dependents of the regional elites and even of Florentine patricians by engaging them to be his notarial class, bureaucrats, magistrates and officers of the militia, and by making many rewards, offices and honors available to them. The success of the Medici in lining up their support had its expression in the urban geography, in the shifting residence of the patrician families who by 1632 occupied palaces that flanked the processional route used by the Medici between the Duomo and the Pitti Palace.””

One might reasonably object that Jews had little or nothing to do with this process. On the one hand, they were not a great threat in terms of factions and alliances; they had no subversive ties with France. They were excluded from the notariate— barred from matriculating into the Guild of Notaries and Judges—and from the militia. Even the wealthiest of the Jews were permanently excluded from office-holding and from the wealthiest and most prestigious guilds in Florence, and therefore from the main sources of status and wealth in the city. In other words, there was no need to dismantle Jewish social networks politically. Moreover, and for the same reasons, Jews were never in the patriciate and were not going to play a large role in the creation of a new bureaucratic class and culture that united the state.

On the other hand, the development of the early modern Medici state involved the reorganization of a social system which might otherwise have produced political threats to Medici rule, or which, unchanged, might have left the administration and indeed the entire state economically, politically or

Early Modern Boundaries — 25

militarily too weak to defend itself. The success of the Medici regime’s growth is related to the way it was able to reorganize the people of Tuscany, moving them to rearrange their social ties and bonds. This process impacted on social groups, including the Jews, each in its own way, sometimes reforming and defining the social groupings themselves. Ultimately, I will argue that the reorganization of the Jews into a ghettoized community was a fundamental and enabling part of the process of the reordering of the state as a whole. The process was begun even in the time of the Republic, in its own cen-

tralizing effort to govern from Florence. The continued centralization of power in the hands of the duke and bureaucratic government chipped away at the social ties that had bonded Tuscan men to one another across the city, as has been demonstrated in work on guilds, on confraternities, and on the repression of urban male sexuality. For, as Richard Trexler and others have shown, it is possible to see Renaissance Florence as more than a city of small, well-defined, overlapping, iocalized communities (and expressions of human relationships) such as the confraternity, the guild, the parish and the neighborhood. There is much support for the view that it was a population woven together by less localized institutions and social behaviors: pan-urban guilds, ritual expressions of Christianity, patronage, political office, age cohorts, friendship and sexual networks. These were institutional and cultural bonds that linked individuals and families together and balanced, or diffused, some of the tensions created by their association with the city’s divisive political factions of long-standing composition—factions capable of uniting enough men to produce assassination attempts or revolt.

The work Cosimo did to build his state continued a process that was begun before he came to power, by the republican government 1n the fifteenth century, and that was followed in its principles in early modern states throughout Europe. To centralize power without provoking great resistance among the newly subjected required skillful cooptation through the creation of new, dependent elites, as well as the sincere effort to provide justice, economic stability and peace.”* In Tuscany, patricians eager for investment cap1tal were drawn in particularly by the quest for favors, which were often loans at unofficially low rates of interest; they also competed for offices and titles.” When necessary, a heavy-handed approach was adopted: taking over after Cosimo’s death, Francesco cracked down on men who might threaten him

from on high and from below, curtailing activity at taverns and banning gatherings of “potential upper-class opponents.”®° There is still some debate concerning the extent to which, under Cosimo, the patrician class was striped of its power and given hereditary honor in its

26 Introduction place. His political and administrative reforms certainly allowed Cosimo to retain a few particularly important men who were very close to him— his secretaries Torelli and Vinta, his appointees to the Magistrato Supremo. But the Tuscan duke largely accomplished his goals by channeling both regional and Florentine elites into administrative positions where they operated the prodigious administration that he set in place. He and his appointed men created offices and institutions, military orders and banks so that all honor, status and monetary loans and rewards had their source in the Medici court.®! The positions were real and profitable, and men scrambled to make their careers as bureaucrats, collecting honors, perquisites and perhaps eventually wealth

or knighthood in the Order of St. Stephen and nobility. The privileges granted to members of the Council of 200, and the Senate of 48 chosen from there, were so high that these patrician families were effectively coopted as a dependent bureaucracy and as courtiers. Not puppets, they played a substantial role in the construction of the state, as did the provincial elites, who often chose not to move to Florence but stayed in the provinces, often climb-

ing into positions of statewide elite status by becoming officers of the regional militia.* But Cosimo could harness the energies and stoke the ambitions of his bureaucrats safely only because he had already overseen for half a century the weakening and reorganization of local governing bodies and of all urban social networks that might be manipulated in support of any insurgency or competitor. The duke had to become the sole source of status and authority, and he had to redirect the flow of resources (including goodwill) and remove all threats by either imposing exile or creating dependence. Cosimo had some smart political instincts. But while he and his ministers sometimes worked so energetically and systematically to produce administrative and legal reforms that it seems there must have been a master plan, these steps in state-building were not actually taken in planned sequence, were not all “necessary’ and were not even all initiated by Cosimo. For example, as Ronald Weissman argued in his study Ritual Brotherhood in Renasssance Florence (1982), Florentine men had in the fifteenth century participated widely in associations that bonded men across the divide of urban quarters and neigh-

| borhoods, across occupational status and across age cohorts. Cosimo was able to take advantage of the fact that these confraternities had been weakened by political and economic turmoil in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. The new confraternities of the mid- and later sixteenth century were generally occupational (class-based) or parish-focused, so that bonds between

men became more limited and structured. These associative categories

Early Modern Boundaries —_27 divided the population of the city in ways that made it less likely that any kin-

group or powerful family could build enough support to pose a threat to Medicean rule. The statutes of guilds and brotherhoods alike were revised, often with Medici-appointed guidance, to ensure that these organizations provided for the basic needs of their constituents— sick care, burial, dowries. And that too weakened vertical relationships within the neighborhoods— the sixteen gonfaloni whose importance in the fifteenth century has been so convincingly argued and elucidated by D. Kent and F. W. Kent and by Lauro Martines.** For as Weissman argued, in that their basic social and economic needs were being met, the laboring classes had less reason to support the elite families by seeking their patronage and protection. (The poorest Florentines were actually excluded from participation in the reformed guilds, ensuring that the class division did not lead quickly to alliances of the poor and working classes.) In another way, too, less often acknowledged, pan-urban social networks

were interrupted, allowing Cosimo to reinforce new, divisive social categories that enhanced his own authority. This process also began in the fifteenth century, when the Florentine republic and Savonarolan theocracy cracked down on the sexual activity of unmarried males in the city.** As Michael Rocke has convincingly demonstrated, it had been a long-standing feature of the culture of Florence for men, at least until they married late in their thirties, to form sexual relationships with other men and youth and not only with female prostitutes or underclass neighborhood women.® This sexuality was a basic part of the culture and economy of Florence: it was integral

to the client-patronage system; it was critical to the political definition of “youth” and “adult” and therefore also an important link between economic and political power structures.®° But it also, like ritual brotherhoods, created a social space for pan-urban, class-crossing social networking and bonding which we might reasonably call “community-building.””*” Therefore, when

the Officers of the Night had completed their decades-long police patrols and had finally forced male-to-male sexuality out of the accepted, public culture, they had also weakened an urban culture that fostered the development of social ties that transected class and kin networks and that also defied narrow age cohorts. The enforcement of sexual norms left men with a gender definition that reinforced both paternal and patriarchal authority and therefore buttressed not only the superiority of men over women but also, indirectly, the authority of both the church and the state.** The legislation passed

under Cosimo I reinforced this trend. Laws confirmed that men were responsible legally and financially for their wives, as masters were for their journeymen and fathers for their children. Sons and wives were excluded

28 Introduction from the honors—such as exemption from sumptuary code restrictions — that their fathers and husbands enjoyed.®? Cosimo’s dependent bureaucrats were to be male householders, husbands and fathers—the people with the presumedly greatest stake in the social and fiscal stability of the city, and equally large stake in the hierarchies of wealth, age and gender that served as its infrastructure. In sum, guilds, confraternities and sexual bonds had created a more stable social context, building communities of “shared experience” that united men across the otherwise divisive factional affiliations of fifteenth-century Florence.” For Weissman, the new hierarchical model that the city was adopting was missing the “peace”-making rituals that had bonded men into a social fabric (more or less). But it was in these /oci or networks of sociality that a new government might fear conspiracy or the foment of discontent.”! The reforms enacted under the Medici broke down these boundary-crossing (and gender-bending) relationships. Citywide confraternities were weakened and direct intervention by appointment of Medici appointees led to their reform, making them more exclusive. Horizontal ties among men of the same class were encouraged, vertical ties cut. Informed by strategists who were undoubtedly influenced by the works of the Florentine political thinker Niccolo Machiavelli, Cosimo encouraged the dissolution of all these previous social networks. But did he deliberately provide a new grid to which his subjects could attach themselves, lest they have in common only their subordination to him? Without minutes from his private strategizing sessions with his political advisors, we must be satisfied to note that new /oci for sociality and categories for social status did emerge, and the state used its administrative powers and rhetorical tools to support them. The social categories used by the Medicean administration to define, describe (and enforce) the building blocks of society were, above all, rank or “condition,” and gender. Even when elite families became interested in proving their nobility, a phenomenon mainly of the seventeenth century, the early modern state of Tuscany was built not on notions of race, “purity of blood” or nationality. In the sixteenth century it did not depend on a line forming a continuous territorial boundary supported by a state-sponsored cartography or set of references to natural barriers such as river, mountains or sea. Rather, the Medici state was built on a social geography, a landscape of statuses, some more elevated than others. It was an aggregate, a state of many small “populi” or local communities. In defining texts such as sumptuary legislation, people were categorized according to the jurisdictional regions into

Early Modern Boundaries — 29 which the state was divided: simply, they were residents of its cities, its contado (countryside), its distretto (outlying districts). Overlapping those distinctions, it divided the people by personal status: they were nobility, foreign nobility, cittadim, contadim. And these ranks were further cut across by gender lines: women were wives of nobility, wives of cittadin1, or their daughters; there were male or female contadini/e. These were politically nonthreatening ways of organizing a population: factions, family, kin-groups and their

clients and neighborhoods all disappear. Even the gonfaloni, the sixteen republican political-administrative divisions of the city, or districts, had lost valence. These units had originated in the fourteenth century as popular military societies whose membership was originally the entire adult male population (fifteen to seventy), excluding the magnates and their families.”” The gonfalom were the conduit for the collection of taxes and had an active political role in the fifteenth century, for offices in the commune were filled by men chosen through the machinery of the gonfaloni and their elections, know as “scrutinies.’”? Toward the end of the century the regular meetings of the men in each gonfalone were interrupted; in 1531-32 the office of gonfalomere was eliminated; and in a census of 1551 many families no longer resided in the gonfalom where they had for so long been registered.”* “It was inevitable,’ the Kents conclude, “that, when the republic was suppressed, the gonfaloniers of company and all but the names of their districts went with it?> The breakdown of old systems and the discouragement of new political communities is symbolically represented in the censuses of these decades, which variably record people according to the quartieri, the sestieri or the actual street on which they lived. In a process of state-building that required that communities and social

networks and social hierarchies be dissolved, subordinated, coopted and restructured, something had to be given back to the people lest the government be perceived as tyrannical. Protection from famine and plague, from marauding robbers, vagrants and armies was one critical part of the answer; fair court systems, prosecution of corrupt officials, and strict standards for the public peace played a role. But there was also an effort to build and support social networks — communities —that had less disruptive potential, and which were themselves closely linked to institutions that were supportive of or dependent on the Medicean regime. In this category we might put the reformed guilds and confraternities, the military order of St. Stephen, the convents and monasteries, and, above all, as we shall see, the parish. What

remains for us in this introduction is to consider how the ghetto linked images of “the state religion and community with place. For if while

30.~=—sdIntroduction

restructuring and reordering this state, new institutions, new loci of association and new communities were created, one of these was surely the ghetto of the Jews. And the ghetto, like the parish, was both a place and a designated community.

Religion, Territoriality and State-Building Tuscany, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, was a Catholic territory.

There were foreigners—Spaniards and Germans, mainly, and household slaves— but compared to Venice or Rome, the population was not culturally diverse. Only a very small percentage of Tuscans had contact with, or personal knowledge of, Lutheran or other Protestant ideas or followers. A larger proportion of the Tuscan population was Jewish, between 1 and 2 percent. One of the arguments I make in this book is that the presence of the seven hundred or so Jews in Tuscany allowed the Medici to use religion effectively as another tool in their state-building. That is, the creation of the ghetto of the Jews allowed the Medici state to use the Catholic religion— known simply as Cristianita in Florence—as a powerful unifying category. Although the church, the inquisitorial court, the diocesan visitations and the preachers of Florence have attracted scholarly attention, the role of religion has rarely been discussed as important to the process of state-building in this almost exclusively Catholic state. German historians have argued that the involved processes of “confessionalization” were deeply intertwined with the development of early modern states; in that, Lutheran, Calvinist and Catholic states had much in common.” In contrast, recent Italian historiography tends to divide itself into two rather separate subfields, one on the Catholic Reforma-

tion, and the other on state-building, with relatively few studies to link them.”” But a close study of ghettoization, I will argue, also sheds light on the process of confessionalization in Italy and on the way that process was linked to the development of the Medici state. Indeed, I will suggest that ghettoization should be understood as an element in the confessionalization of the Tuscan state. Following the lead of Benedict Anderson, many modern historians have pursued the processes by which modern nation states were imagined and constructed symbolically, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A state, at first defined in the early modern period as the realm subject to a certain governmental authority (jurisdictional sovereignty), eventually became a nation, a group of people who adopted and shared sufficient aspects of symbolic identity that they could feel a bond of “cultural unity.”

Early Modern Boundaries 31 One of the earlier processes that moved states from jurisdictional state sov-

ereignty to the more encompassing “national” identity was what Peter Sahlins has called the “territorialization” of the state, the definition of a state as contained by specific boundaries (preferably with contiguous boundaries,

and therefore conceptually distinct from the concept of empire), whose inhabitants were subject to a territorially defined sovereign. This process was largely begun, at least in France, in the seventeenth century and played out fully only in the eighteenth.” In the sixteenth century the rulers and bureaucrats of Tuscany governed a unit they referred to as “the state” (lo stato).”” From the way they used the term, we might define it as a political entity whose people had in common

mainly their relationship to the political ruler who had “dominion” over them—as well as a sense of obligation to protect them and govern them— and jurisdictional and fiscal authority over them through the officers, governmental bodies and instit.1tions over which he presided. In this book, I use the term the state as I think the edicts of the Magistrato Supremo intended it to be understood: the territcry known to be part of the ducal dominion and its population, subject to the authority of the duke and his administration. But the sense of belonging to a larger, greater community was not foreign to early modern people, who had as yet no formal “national identity.” The largest community, especially before the Protestant Reformation, but even after, was the church: church rituals, liturgy, sermons and art all imagined

and taught that Christians were one in the church. One main focus for the expression, reinforcement and contestation of this self-understanding was the

ritual celebration of the host (the Eucharist), which—whether viewed or ingested—was a coming together, a communion, which literally united Christians —in community—as one body in God.’ In this specific sense, Jews were never part of the larger community to which their Christian neigh-

bors belonged. And, though generally without using the same theological language of physical union with God, Jews for their part also understood and articulated in their daily prayers and scholarship that they were united in their relationship to God and to each other: they were the children of Israel (biblical progenitor and “he who struggles with God”), the house of Israel,

the holy people, the chosen people.!” The relationship was not just one of shared faith or biological descent: in some streams of the mystical tradition, increasingly well known in Italy in the sixteenth century, the souls that resided in the bodies of individuals were understood to be historically related to one another through a far-reaching and complex family tree.!°? For Chris-

tians and for Jews, then, a sense of commonality did not require personal contact, knowledge or geographic closeness to others in that largest commu-

32 ~=Introduction nity, Christian or Jewish. In the mid- and late sixteenth century, however, the

greater Christian community was fractured by the events of the Protestant Reformation, the ideas that spread in print media and by word of mouth, and to some extent by the new efforts of the hierarchical Catholic Church to control Christian beliefs and practices. The parish became a more important locus of Christian community, and, I will argue below and in chapters that follow, just as the breakdown of the universal church leads to a focus on parish and a localization of Christian communal identity, so the state’s program of ghettoization produced local Jewish communities and localized Jewish identities.

Catholic Reform and Medici State-building: The Parish as the Place of the Christians and Ghetto as the Place of the Jews In fifteenth-century Florence the parish was at once a constant presence in the urban landscape and a relatively unimportant institution from the perspective of the communal government.'°* Taxes were collected through the gonfaloni, the sixteen districts (each gonfalone could have more than one parish church). A century later the parish was of key importance to the functioning of not only the church but also the state. A brief digression into this

transformation is necessary in order to put in place the remaining links between the ghettoization and the importance of space in the construction of the early modern Tuscan state. It has been observed above that in early modern Europe notions of statehood did not rely on “territorial” considerations.’°* As Cosimo and his advi-

sors used the term, /o stato was not the public welfare, nor the patrician classes who had a stake in maintaining the public wealth, nor was it just the

| Medici regime. But neither was it a territory with clearly marked continuous boundaries that the ruler governed, despite the prodigious accomplishment of Elena Fasano Guarini in reconstructing the historically based boundaries that were accepted in practice.!°° The word stato was officially used most often, as Nicolai Rubinstein once pointed out was true for despots and monarchs,!°° as object, and not as subject. The state was first and foremost a set of towns and lands and islands over which the ruler had juridical and fiscal rights; it was a collection of his ports and gates and tax-collection rights, agents and policies. When in July 1570 Cosimo de’ Medici wanted to collect information about the Jews who lived in his state, he asked the local administrative officials (vicars, captains and podesta) to count them, each in his own

administrative region. None of these governors expressed doubts or con-

Early Modern Boundaries —33

cerns about the exact boundaries of his own jurisdiction, none expressed doubts as to whether or not a particular Jewish family was inside or outside the bounds. Administrative boundaries were defined adequately for such purposes; challenges to the authority of the duke or his agents tended to be framed in terms of privileges, status and law rather than by reference to territorial boundaries. The base administrative unit used in the great fiscal census of 1427-30, the catasto, was the populo, a term sometimes used as a synonym for parish. Was the dominion therefore seen as a collection of coterminous parishes? Parish churches were clearly social and urban landmarks: the Florentines in Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century Decameron referred routinely to people being in or living in one parish or another. But despite their ubiquity in the social landscape, parishes—the areas of residence associated with specific church buildings—were not used by the government of the city of Florence for political or administrative purposes, and the populo did not always coincide with an ecclesiastical parish. To the extent that a parish church did serve as a center for the conduct of political and economic activities, it was because it served as the official church of agonfalone and because of the substantial overlap of residence.!”” But the administrative grid was divorced from the parish system so

that in the fifteenth century within the city of Florence itself, where there were more than fifty parish churches, parishes were sometimes split in pieces even by the lines that divided the city into its four main quarters.” There were multiple systems for dividing the population and carving the state into territories for distinct administrative purposes. The major censuses of the city, for example, were arranged by quarters of the city and citizens became eligible to serve in certain rotating offices such as the Otto based on the quarter in which they lived. Military service, however, was arranged by Zonafalom. Each set of boundaries had its own history: for tax collection, for civil courts, for criminal courts and for the raising of local militia; no effort was made to simplify, rationalize or standardize these lines.!”

But there are signs of an incipient interest in defining, marking and bounding the state. The governors of the Florentine state (like those of Milan) had long expressed a clear interest in preventing people from crossing these borders uncontrolled, particularly for reasons related to the public health. The permanent Board of Health that was set up in Florence in 1527 carefully collected information on the incidence of plague and on mortality, sealed the gates in and out of Tuscan cities and prudently issued bans on

travel to or from infected neighboring or foreign cities and their territories.!!° Of course, both secular and religious leaders perceived a threat in unrestricted mobility, and in this respect, the interests of the state and of the

34. Introduction church converged as they pursued similar strategies in response to their perception of mobility-related threats to the physical, spiritual and fiscal health of the population. After all, plague was thought to be imported in the used clothing that entered the state as the merchandise of itinerant merchants or was carried in on the persons of traveling prostitutes; heretical ideas were introduced by books imported by book-dealers; guild secrets could be lost and competition created by the movement of artisans.

State-building interest in boundaries had economic, jurisdictional and political motivations. Neighboring states should not be allowed to encroach on the land, any more than subjects should be allowed to fish, hunt or har-

vest wood where they were not allowed. In the same year that Cosimo decided to make Jews live within a spatially defined ghetto, his Nine Conservators of the Dominion and Jurisdiction ordered that every April or May, “all the communities that have borders (are confinantt) with other states are obliged .. . to visit and recognize all the borders (confint),” to note any alterations that have been made and to file their report.'"! Several years later, in 1578, as part of its ongoing effort to control and improve transportation in the state, vital to the economy—which in turn required good management of roads and rivers—the Medici state made local communities responsible for maintaining annual reports on the conditions of the roads. This book-keeping both required and established a formal designation of each local commu-

nitys boundaries, at least as they pertained to maintenance of the roads found therein.!” The Catholic Church 1s in the foreground, for it was this great early modern bureaucracy and not a monarchy such as Spain or France that first sys-

tematically responded to the perceived threat of fluidity and mobility to become “territorially” defined. In this sense there was a Catholic “state” distinct from the papal state, for the administrative (and spiritual) reach of the Catholic Church was much larger than the regions directly subject to papal rule. The Council of Trent’s program attempted to ensure that each Christian soul received spiritual care (cura animas). It was a system that attempted to ensure that there were no hidden pockets of heresy or nonconformity in for-

mation. The Roman church in the sixteenth century addressed territorial concerns with a sense of great urgency, and the work focused on the relationship between clerical leadership and place— bishop and bishopric, pastor and parish. Under the leadership of the papacy from Paul III to Pius V, and closely observed by representatives of many European states, including Tuscany, the bishops who gathered at the Council of Trent advanced a program of reform and consolidation that emphasized the requirement of residency,

Early Modern Boundaries —_—35

that is, that bishops must reside in their diocese. These concerns were not new to the church, but rather of long-standing canonical status. Florentine synodal statutes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries repeatedly called for the “return to residence,’ forbidding absentee beneficiaries to hire vicars for their rectories.!!% The issue of residence was, however, rigorously and programmatically pursued anew by the Council of Trent. With the fragmentation of the church and the new policy to be known later as cuius regio, evus religio, people became more conscious of the relationship between territory and religion. For an anonymous sixteenth-century Florentine chronicler in this intellectual environment, the (pre-1567) nonresidence in Florence of its archbishop served to explain the fact that thousands of adult Christians had not received the sacrament of confirmation.'* Episcopal residence was necessary not only to eliminate corruption in the

sale and purchase of offices but also to ensure that bishops were able to knowledgeably oversee their parish priests and thereby ensure that the people were well served. It was seen as key to the ability of the higher officers of the church to retain control over Catholic territories. In this great hierarchical system, the papacy alone at top had access to the full written proceedings of the Council. Beneath, the branches of the hierar-

chy not only spread out but took shape territorially: archbishops, bishops, parish priests and under these, of course, the people, in the topographicdemographic units that were called populs. Also determined at Trent was the necessity of establishing diocesan seminaries to improve the education of the priests at the lowest level of the church hierarchy who were the key “mediaries” between the church and the people whose souls were in their charge.’ Although they might also benefit from preaching at a few prominent nonparochial churches in the city, all people were now to be firmly located in parishes, and the priests were held responsible for these souls, their baptism, sacraments and education.'!®

In the decades leading up to the ghettoization, Cosimo was a keen observer of the Council of Trent. One of the masterful moves of the program developed there was the systematization of the parochial structure, a reform effort intended to give bishops greater control over their diocese and over the parish priests who provided both the rents and the care of the souls there. The parish was not simply the neighborhood casually and informally associated with a church but rather a unit that, in the sixteenth century, played a very important role in the plans for the reformation of the church laid out in the Council of Trent. The reform efforts began earlier than Trent: as early as the fourteenth century, Florentine synodal statutes attempted to stop parishioners from receiving sacraments outside their home parish without permis-

36 Introduction sion.’!” But the Tridentine church went further in its effort to use the parish as an instrument for reaching all the people. As John Bossy put it: “to the ordinary population . .. what the Counter-Reformation really meant was the institution among them, by bishops empowered by the Council of Trent to enforce it, of a system of parochial conformity,’ including Mass (weekly and on holidays), baptism, marriage, extreme unction and burial, the Eucharist at least once a year, and penance—all to be administered to individuals by their local parish priest and none other.!!® A parish priest should know his entire flock, their comings and goings. To make this possible, the boundaries of the parish had to be fixed wherever they were not. The key text that defined the new role that the parish should (and would) play is an order from the Council of Trent stating that wherever there was no parish church or where the precise boundaries of a parish were not known, boundaries should be determined and assigned. To this effect, at the twentyfourth session, in 1563, the bishops commanded themselves to establish territorial order in their diocese: In cities or other places where parish churches have no fixed boundaries, and the rectors have no congregation of their own to serve but administer the sacraments to all who come to ask at random, the holy council bids bishops, for the good spiritual state of the souls entrusted to them, to divide the people into separate and clear parishes and to assign to each their own and permanent parish priest, who will be able to know them and from whom alone they may licitly receive the sacraments; ... And bishops must see that the same is done as soon as possible in cities and other places where there are no parish churches.1!?

The parish system was strengthened to enable the church to ensure that it reached every Christian and to control what message would be heard. Everyone would receive appropriate spiritual care and attention: not only the saving and necessary sacraments but also the teachings. The same session at the Council of Trent concluded that no one was allowed to preach without the

permission of the bishop, who, resident in his diocese, would assign only well-trained priests to the churches. “The bishop should carefully instruct the

people that each of them is under obligation to attend their parish church, when they can reasonably do so, to hear the word of God,’ which was to be preached on Sundays, solemn festival days and at least thrice weekly during the season of Fasts, Lent and Advent.!2° These reforms were largely accomplished by the 1620s in Rome, where the “parish topography” was reorganized and an annual parish census was added which was supposed to include special notation of the number in each parish who had taken communion and the numbers of religious, of prostitutes and of people cohabiting in a state of sin.’”' In their pastoral visits, which became

Early Modern Boundaries — 37 much more regular after the Council of Trent, the archbishops asked parish priests if they were keeping the required registries of communion, marriages, baptisms.'”* The entire Catholic world was to be mapped out hierarchically

on a grid, benefiting the parishioners who were to receive more honest, skilled and pious care, giving more control of everything related to the benefices of the church and the practice of local Christianity to the upper levels of the church hierarchy. This ideal structure was one that could be imitated even if it could not be realized perfectly within each diocese. And indeed, Cosimo’s governing style included strengthening local communities, each of which was presided over by a chancellor he had appointed. But Cosimo’s interest in the church and its parish structure went beyond its imitation as a political model. During the previous seventy years so many of the peace-making, community-building

institutions and social networks had been disrupted or dismantled so that there was great room (and need) in Florence for parish-based social institutions. Cosimo’s general support of the program of the Catholic Church in the 1560s, well documented by Arnaldo D’Addario, included his indirect support of the parish structure. As Ronald Weissman has argued, the increasing importance of the parish in Florence was not really a post-Tridentine phenomenon, but one related to the preceding decline in the membership, activity and autonomy of Renaissance confraternities.’?? Dennis Romano has shown that in fourteenth- and

fifteenth-century Venice, too, sacred community was located in the socialrank-bridging scuole, as well as in the monasteries and convents.!** As the confraternities were weakened under political, economic and demographic stresses in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, people turned to the parish churches for a more local and immediate source of communal support. While meeting real needs, the parish was a unit of social control for the church, and could be used by the state. Confraternities based on residence in a specific parish were explicitly encouraged and founded. Weissman makes the critical observation that the confraternities provided for the burial of members of parishes, as well as dowries and sick-care payments for members and family of members of the confraternities.!2° With their needs insured, ties were weakened between the working-class people and the potentially com-

peting or threatening elite families of Florence, all to the benefit of the Medici rulers, who indirectly— and sometimes not so indirectly— supported

this process. At least according to the ambassador from Venice in 1561, Cosimo was quite willing to use Catholic reform policies for his own political purposes: “The Prince even wishes to know from the parish priests the number of hosts distributed during communion, because he is accustomed

38 «© Introduction

to say that alterations and changes in religion bring with them the manifest danger of State, and therefore he remains warned.”!”° The Catholic Church was aligned with this program for its own reasons.

Fixing people to their parishes was an important part of the plan that

| emerged from the Council of Trent, for it allowed parish priests and their supervisors direct knowledge of and influence over the frequency with which individuals came in for confession and communion, heard sermons, attended parish schools. The parish was the base unit for the church’s reform efforts: to catechize the masses, to provide all with the necessary church sacraments and—utilizing the new knowledge of who was present for the sacraments,

masses and sermons and who was not—to prevent the spread of Protestantism or other forms of heresy, dissent or conflict with the “community,” which was now becoming synonymous with the parish. In the 1560s when the archbishops in Florence and Pisa and the bishops of Fiesole and Empoli made their pastoral visits, they seemed largely satisfied with the percentage of people who attended mass and other sacraments in their parishes.!?” Christian community—which was once all of Christendom — had been ruptured by the Protestant divide, and in its place the Christian communal life of individual parishes was given new strength. Cosimo or his ministers found it convenient to make use of the church’s administrative organization: when a list of Jews in Florence was made for Cosimo in 1567 to facilitate the enforcement of the newly ordered yellow badge, the Jews were listed according to the parishes in which they lived.!?8 But in the program of the Council of Trent, the definition of a parish was fundamentally territorial, demographic and spiritual: the souls who lived within bounds of a certain church, with whose care a parish priest was charged. As we have seen, the Council of Trent required that the territorial boundaries of parishes be drawn and determined. It was a spiritual topography. Following its principles to a logical conclusion, Jews could not be allowed to live in parishes any more than they could be considered part of the Christian community. There are hints that this was a contemporary concern. When after long decades of absence from his post Archbishop Altoviti went on his pastoral Visit In 1568-69, inquiring about the condition of the churches and attendance at mass, one of the questions he sought to answer in the parishes was whether there were any Jews living there. Tucked almost illegibly into the

comments on the absence of heresy, on the regular attendance of parishioners at communion, on the necessity of white-washing the walls of local church properties and on the need to purchase various holy objects are notes—usually just a sentence—recording the presence of Jews in the parish.’”? It may be that the new importance of the parish created a certain

Early Modern Boundaries 39 discomfort for Christians with the presence of Jews in the towns, cities and neighborhoods of Tuscany. As the focus of their communal activity came to be more parish-oriented and focused, the residence of Jews on streets now thought of as within parish boundaries was noteworthy. There is no evidence of widespread popular discontent with the presence of Jews. But the evidence suggests that the more that Christian community was localized, parochialized and confessional, the more it began to seem to some people that Jews could not (logically or spiritually) be considered part

of the community. The ghettoization of the Jews, otherwise difficult to explain, as we shall see, makes a great deal of sense in this broad context even

if we cannot (yet) identify evidence that proponents of ghettoization in the church and government specifically advanced and exploited the idea that Jews were out of place in the parishes. Although those who acted against the Jews had motivations that were often much less abstract and much less religious, the Jews were ultimately forced out of the parishes into their own space. In the context of the new parish-focused Christian community, and perhaps as part of the process that created 1t, Jews were encouraged or even pushed to create their own more formally defined community.

Organization of the Book and Some Comments on Methods and Sources This book has three parts. Part One explores the origins and the policy of ghettoization from the perspective of the rulers and administrators of the Medici state. It considers the religious and political context of the ghettoization; the historical agents within the government and church who instigated the decision to ghettoize the Jews and who profited from it; and the language (cultural discourse) available and used to facilitate the plan of ghettoization. This introduction and the three chapters of Part One set the Florentine ghetto in the larger context of the early modern Catholic world but also take as their task to explain why the event occurred exactly when it did and to identify the specific historical figures involved. The institution of the ghetto was a tool picked up and utilized by different individuals and agencies in Tuscany for different reasons, and these various “hands” must all be identified. The second part of the book focuses on the ghetto itself—the capital, laws, bricks and people that made it. Chapters Four, Five and Six interrupt the first part’s exploration of political, administrative and religious context with a nar-

ration of the events. Here, perhaps, the story will unfold more as it would

40 Introduction have been seen by a broader circle of people at the time: an expulsion order, propaganda and legal proceedings, reactions of Jews as individuals, the purchase of property, the building of the ghetto, the movement of Jews into that new place. In Part Two we move with the Jews of Tuscany (and with the eyes

of their overseers) into the ghetto—taking note of the Jews who did not move there—and examine the enclosure’s walls to take note of their permeability. These central chapters focus specifically on the events of three years, 1569 to 1571, and bring us to the ghetto on the most physical, material level with an analysis of the population of the ghetto and an account of the material construction of the ghetto— bricks laid and laborers paid. Chapter Four presents a chronological narrative and analysis of the public campaign staged to prepare support in the rest of the state for the expulsion of the Jews. Chapter Five looks at the physical and fiscal dimensions of the ghetto and discusses both the profit motive and the dimension of urban renewal. Chapter Six is a short study of the people who came to the ghetto, choosing to remain Jewish and become Florentines. Part Two thus also continues the explanation of the ghettoization by revealing the specific financial and administrative motivations of the state, its agencies and some prominent individuals.

The third part of the book turns from the external construction of the ghetto to examine its inner structure. The ghettoization was only in part an act of state: it was also a process in which the Jews themselves participated. With the third part of the book we move into the ghetto and explore the life of the community that developed there and the many ways that the inhabitants of the ghetto found to reinsert themselves into the life of the city and the state. These final chapters address the impact of the ghettoization on the Jews and their social and religious structure and organization. But it is also here that we have the distance and perspective to see the reintegration of the Jews into the Tuscan state. The chapters of Part Three describe the developing self-governance, economy, marriage and communal life of the ghetto, a

Jewish society restructured and in the process reintegrated into the early modern, post-Iridentine, bureaucratically ordered structure of the grand duchy of Tuscany. Chapter Seven examines the institutionalization of the Jews as a self-governing entity, complete with its own elite who were dependent on the favor and support of the central authorities. It becomes clear that the creation of the ghetto as a self-governing unit fit the overall administra-

| tive plan, order-making impulses and centralizing interests of the bureaucratic state. Comparing the ghetto with other “communities” in the state and Jewish communities elsewhere, the remaining chapters examine the reordering of Jewish society within the ghetto: the consolidation of a new economy and class structure; the impact of the ghettoization on marital and dotal pat-

Early Modern Boundaries = 41 terns and strategies; and, finally, the development of social and religious institutions in the ghetto in its first forty years, the time during which a ghetto-born generation matured, and the corresponding changes in gender norms and the relative status of Jewish men and women. In three parts, then, we will explore how the Jews fit into the Tuscan world in which they lived before ghettoization and the changes caused by the relocation and reorganization.

If I have represented the ghettoization of the Jews as a function of the state’s increasingly bureaucratic administration, I have done so in large part because the archival data permit us to see the Jews primarily through the eyes of government officials. Policymakers, notaries and clerks of various agencies wrote or elicited most of the surviving written record. This is therefore not a

study of how the Jews understood ghettoization, nor is it one that chiefly represents the Jews as they saw themselves. That said, it is not unimportant to see the Jews as the bureaucratic and ruling classes of Tuscany did, as persons to be governed. This, after all, is a different representation from the one familiar to us from the sermons of itinerant Christian preachers or the canons of upper-level officers of the church, who tended to present Jews as persons to be avoided, disparaged and demonized or converted and saved. The texts produced by clerks and administrators in the service of the state are characterized by their neutral, technical quality, which comes across as downright sympathetic to any reader who is predisposed to expect hostility. As for Jewish voices, there are few extant texts authored by Tuscan Jews who experienced the ghettoization. Betrothal and marriage contracts and testaments have been useful, though not unmediated, but there are not many of them. I have worked with the texts left behind by the ghetto’s new and evolving governing elite. The Tuscan Jewish families that had produced rabbinic scholars, Kabbalists and poets left Tuscany rather than settle in the ghetto in Florence; the literary elite of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—a now aged generation of scholars including Yehiel Nissim da Pisa and Laudadio Blanis—were not replaced. Indeed, between 1560 and 1610, references to the Jews of Florence are rare in the rabbinic responsa literature. As we will see in the Conclusion, it took some time before the new refugee community

in Florence engaged the professional services of rabbinic scholars. I have found and discussed a few previously unknown letters, but there are still no known Jewish account books, diaries or memoirs from the time to serve as a parallel to that famous source available to historians of the Christian magnates 1n the city. The archives of the state agencies of the Medici are, in contrast, a very rich

source for the history of the Jews. Information about the Jews both before

42 Introduction the ghetto and in the early ghetto period appears regularly in the records of the criminal court (Otto di Guardia e Balia), in the matriculation records of the guilds, in correspondence and deliberations of the ducal court and incidentally in most archival fonts, including the notarial registers.'*° Different sources are useful for the ghettoization itself and for the period after 1571. Extracted from their native or chosen locales, the Jews were organized by the state as a new administrative unit and, then, as such, reintegrated into the state. This reorganization resulted in a new archival source for their history: the books of the Nove Conservatori del Dominio e Iurisditione (Nine Conservators of the Dominion and Jurisdiction). This agency, which predated the ghettoization, now supervised all aspects of life in the ghetto that were of interest to the state —its taxation, sanitation, the maintenance of its property and public order, its self-governance—in short, the same concerns it had for the administration of all local communes and towns under its jurisdiction. This study depends heavily on material found in the books kept by the officers of the Nove, from 1571, when they began to oversee the ghetto, through 1611. In addition to the records of the Nove, the Otto, the guilds and documents such as betrothal contracts, testaments and inventories which were copied and notarized by licensed Florentine notaries, three extraordinary sources broaden our perspective on the ghettoization. The first source predates the ghetto by several years. In 1566 the Jews of Florence were interrogated by a papal inquisitor who was investigating the possible presence of a Marrano among them; the records from these interrogations have been preserved (Nunziatura Apostolica 842). Second is an extraordinary set of two volumes of papers from the Magistrato Supremo, the highest court in Tuscany, what was actually a secretive advisory council of four magistrates appointed by and working in close consultation with the duke.'3! These documents pertain almost exclusively to the Jews, their privileges and the proceedings against them in 1570, which were used to justify their expulsion. The

third major source I have used is a set of three account books kept by the Nove Conservatori which record the cost of purchasing property for the ghetto and the costs of its renovation and construction (see Chapter Five). In addition, incidental information from the correspondence of the Medici court and from other government agencies is sometimes brought in to give nuance to the events and the environment in which they occurred. In addition to the more obvious work of interpretation done in plain view in these chapters, some of my work is now quite invisible and should be exposed. In the first place, the research that resulted in the data upon which this book is built required scanning (personally, with my eyes, as archival

Early Modern Boundaries 43 scholars in the 1990s were accustomed to do) many hundreds of bound and unbound archival volumes to identify information about Jews contained in the texts. To do this, I had first to decide upon criteria of Jewishness: who was, who might be and who was almost definitely not a Jew. In my examination of archival sources I settled on a simple rule (and used a large multivariable-linked database to apply it): any person I found referred to as an ebreo or ebrea at least once in a Florentine archival source I considered a Jew, unless I found other documentation that the person had previously or subsequently converted to Christianity, in which case that person’s Jewish status was marked as complex and had to be contextualized. In addition, the children, parents and siblings of all those identified as Jews in this way were then counted as Jews even if their names appeared in a text without the label, unless evidence revealed that they had converted. I treated in this same way everyone who moved into the ghetto in 1571. Before adopting this rule, I paid special attention to Florentines who were not explicitly identified as Jews but whose names were biblical or otherwise popular among Jews (e.g. Giuseppe, Abramo, Isacco, Agnolo). Investigating references to such individuals (i.e., reading their testaments or other notarized deeds), I was able to determine that they were not Jews and this justified my reliance on the use of the signifier ebreo. This “tag; it seems, was only rarely omitted in documents, intentionally or casually. In most instances or proceedings where it was omitted, the Jewishness of the person in question had already been established (in preceding related court documents, for example) or was very well known to all parties concerned. However, it seems to me an inevitable methodological problem that there could have been people referred to even in the archival documents I handled whom I did not recognize as Jews because they themselves were not recognized and labeled as Jews by the authorities with whom they were dealing. This possibility of under-identification is particularly important with reference to Jewish women. The archives revealed the names of about five times more specifically identified Jewish men than Jewish women, and they provided more information about most individual men than about most individual women. This imbalance is of greatest concern in Chapter Six, where I discuss the population of the ghetto. If many Jewish women carried names that were not distinctively Jewish, and they were also not referred to in the sources as ebree, then it is possible that the Tuscan Jews who chose to not move to the ghetto could have included a larger number of women converting to Christianity than I have imagined. With this in mind, I have pursued the documentary trails of women with typically Jewish female names (such as Bella, Bruna, Ricca, Sarra and Stella) who are not referred to as Jews in

44. Introduction search of evidence that some of these might be converts or women who were in fact Jewish. In each case I pursued I was able to conclude that the women

were Christians who had no Jewish relatives. The fact that Jewish women appear less frequently than men in the sources I have been able to find is therefore probably explained by an ordinary reason familiar to all historians, and not a bias created by my methodology: fewer women than men had direct contact with the state agencies that left the written records on which this study draws. A focused history of Jewish women in Tuscany is not possible from extant sources; such a study might be easier to accomplish in Italian cities where Jews found a different use for notaries.'** But while sources do not permit the full reconstruction of the lives of particular Jewish women, they do allow us to ask critical questions about women, the family and the construction of gender roles in this period of social and political reorganization. Ghettoization, I will argue, affected Jewish men and women differently, and it had a notable impact on the family and on marriage patterns (Chapter Nine). But more broadly, we will investigate in what ways religious hierarchies and gender hierarchies were linked, and we will find that the deliberate reinforcement of one part of the system forced—or facilitated—a readjustment of the other. In the end, the image I have formed of the Jews of Florence may approx-

imate most closely the view of a very attentive state bureaucrat. I cannot know enough about the lives of those who managed to have no contact with the representatives of the state. Even with regard to the men, it is possible that I missed a few who lived in Florence, who passed so well that they were

never identified as Jews by their Christian companions or by government officials. Florence was home to and frequently visited by many of the “Spanish Nation,” and some of these had Jewish origins. Some may even have been

publicly identified as Jews when in other cities such as Venice, Ferrara or Ancona, or while in the Levant.!? Little can be learned about Jews who had no recorded relationship to other Jews in the city, who were not identifiable as Jews by contemporary Christians and who cannot be identified today from extant sources. Their experience is not described here, nor does this study follow the Jews who chose to convert as they passed into their new lives as Christians.144 This is, in the end, a study of the construction of a Jewish community, as seen and represented by those who built it, from the outside and from the inside.

Part I: The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power

FIG. I (pages 47-50). “Decree and general edict concerning the Jews who live in the Florentine dominion, 26 September 1570. Source: Insert after folio 93 of Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Magistrato Supremo 4312. Reproduced by permission of the Ministero per i Beni ¢ le Attivita Culturali; further reproduction or duplication is prohibited.

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One Residential Segregation: Religious and Political Contexts

For the first thirty years of his rule, Cosimo I had no specific policy toward Jews but treated questions concerning Jews in a way that, in comparison to the treatment of Jews elsewhere in Christendom at the time, can be called favorable. Jews had not always lived securely in Florence. After some decades during which a small population of Jews had flourished economically, intellectually and culturally in Florence, Jews had been formally expelled from the

city in 1494 (under Savonarola). This recurred with the expulsion of the Medici in 1527 that established the short-lived second republic (1527-30), and Alessandro de’ Medici, installed as duke in 1530, made no further policy on the presence of Jews before his assassination in 1537. The laws of the “last

republic” were not binding on Cosimo when he was in turn brought to power, elected by the Florentine Senate in 1537 and later that year granted the ducal title by Emperor Charles V. Cosimo’s command was tolerant and mercantilist: he allowed Jews to drift into Tuscany, and in some cases he invited them to settle or explicitly contracted with them to do so. Until 1567 the duke was not interested in “Jews” but rather in specific, individual Jews who frequented his court for business or pleasure or had commercial interests — by land or sea—that seemed to him worthy of encouragement. Cosimo not only tolerated both Jews and the practice of Jewish rites and customs; he specifically solicited some Jews and Jewish mercantile enterprise

to put down roots in the duchy, just as he encouraged the planting of Mulberry trees. It is well known that Cosimo had strong personal relations with at least one Jewish household, the Abravanel, a wealthy, aristocratic family of Jews of Spanish and Neapolitan origin. Cosimo granted banking charters to the widow Benvegnita (or Benvenida) Abravanel in 154.7, a few years after her

family settled in Ferrara following their expulsion with the other Jews who still lived in the Kingdom of Naples. He extended simular privileges to members of several Italian-born Jewish households, perhaps upon Abravanel’s rec-

ommendation.' Benvegnita, a personal friend of the duchess Eleonora di

52 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power Toledo, frequented the ducal court, and in 1559 her son and business-partner Iacob was granted the right to bear arms in Tuscany and to maintain four men at arms as well.” As we will see in later chapters, Jewish merchants and New Christian merchants also played a role in Cosimo’s efforts to develop his commercial net-

| work with the Ottoman Empire (competing with papal Ancona and with Venice), even before his son’s more famous promotion and inauguration of the port of Livorno in the last decade of the century.’ In the early 1550s Cosimo put Servadio Greco, a Jew from Damascus, at the head of a program intended to bring Levantine merchants to settle in Florence and Pisa. The three decades from 1537 to 1567 were, for Jews living in or moving to Tuscany,

a period of opportunity which resulted in a population growth—through natural increase and immigration —to over seven hundred Jews by 1570.

Political Context: The Grand-Ducal Title and Papal Authority After tolerating the presence of Jews in his state for the first thirty years of his

rule, why in the last years of that rule did Cosimo change his approach, expelling the Jews, closing their banks and forcing them to live in a ghetto? Whereas in the Introduction we sought to place the decision into the broadest historical context, we must also seek to understand the immediate causes of these developments. We might begin with the way Umberto Cassuto, the historian of the Jews of Renaissance Florence, presented the problem. For

Cassuto, Cosimo I was a rational, tolerant prince, a competent ruler and state-builder who was neither governed by prejudices nor susceptible to religious zeal. Cassuto’s explanation for the duke’s sudden move from favoring the Jews in his state to ghettoizing them was that the duke of Florence was politically motivated to ghettoize the Jews in order to maintain the support

of the papacy and other powerful European rulers during his efforts to obtain the title of Grand Duke.* Given the history of rapprochement between the Tuscan and papal states in the mid-sixteenth century and the fact that Cosimo’s title was granted to him by Pope Pius IV, it is indeed logical to seek an explanation of the ghettoization in the history of Cosimo’s relationship to the Catholic Church, and it is here that we will begin.

The rule of Cosimo I (1537-74) coincided with the emergence of the Catholic Reformation and the meetings of the Council of Trent (1545-63). In

twenty-five sessions of the Council of Trent, the proceedings of which Cosimo I formally accepted in a decree of 28 November 1564, the topic of the

Jews was not treated; the issues discussed pertained mainly to doctrine and

Residential Segregation _—53

clerical reform.* Nonetheless, church policy toward the Jews in the later six-

teenth century is generally seen as consistent with the overwhelmingly important program of the Catholic Reformation to bolster the strength of the church through conversion, catechism and clerical reform, and to prevent , the spread of Lutheran and other heresies. In 1555 Pope Paul IV (1555-59) — who as Cardinal Carafta had been one of the strongest voices of the Catholic Reformation movement— issued a bull that imposed a set of new restrictions on the Jews of the papal territories. Cum nimis absurdum commanded that in

all territories of the Roman Church the Jews were to be separated from Christians and made to live in enclosed quarters. Outside the papal territories, according to the bull, Christian princes should force Jews to wear a visible sign of their Jewishness (a blue hat was suggested) and should prohibit to them many types of social and economic interaction with Christians.° There was medieval precedent for this type of enforced segregation and

labeling, though much less than is often assumed, and most of it locally determined and applied. The effort to segregate Jews from Christians was generally framed in terms of a need to reduce the social, sexual and intellectual contact that Christians had with them and it had its earliest roots in the first centuries of Christianity when leaders were working to convince their followers to abstain from Jewish religious customs that were clearly considered attractive. As the Christianization of Europe proceeded, the focus of the

effort of Christian leaders to put distance between Jews and Christians shifted to support and perpetuate a religious and social hierarchy in which Jews would be seen as clearly inferior to Christians. This was articulated as the need to prevent Jews from serving as a stimulus for Christian heresy or canonical violation. The first legislation of broad consequence came from the Third Lateran Council of 1179, which threatened Christians who lived in the houses of Jews

with excommunication.’ This call for segregation was expanded into an effort by Christian leaders to visually distinguish Jews from Christians —just as they attempted to distinguish other groups seen for one reason or another as dangerous or contaminating. Canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 demanded that Jews and Saracens be distinguished from Christians in dress, though it did not specify how.’ “Distinguishing signs,” as the various badges, hats, ribbons and earrings Jews were forced to wear have been fittingly labeled, signified to Christians not only inferior status but danger, pollution and disease.’

Visual coding of a colored cap, hat, badge, ribbon or earrings was not infrequently required. In contrast, physical or spatial segregation was not a commonly attempted strategy, except in terms of the total segregation of

54 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power expulsion, which served a very different purpose. To be clear: legal restriction

to specific residential quarters was not a general or common feature of medieval Jewish life, and it can no longer be assumed that medieval Jews lived apart.!° There were places in the medieval Christian world where Jews were residentially segregated, by their own choice, by custom or by law. This was particularly true in regions where Muslim rule had preceded Christian, such as

Sicily and Spain, and perhaps in places where church leaders felt that the

population was particularly slow to adopt the Christian faith, such as Poland." Prior to the sixteenth century, however, and even into that century, Jews lived in forcibly enclosed, exclusively Jewish neighborhoods in only a few places in the Christian realm. Best known is Frankfurt’s Judengasse, a street to which Jews were required to move in 1462. In northern Italy, in the

French Piedmont, a code of law from 1430 required the Jews to live in a walled-in section of every town, called a judeasymus, which was to be locked at night.’? And in the second half of the fifteenth century, influenced by the anti-Jewish activities of Minorite preachers, a number of Italian cities, including Cesena and Spoleto, attempted to segregate their Jews." Far more often, Jews lived freely scattered about a town or they voluntarily congregated on streets or in quarters which were often primarily Jewish but were neither locked nor inhabited exclusively by the minority. This was

true in Sicily (under the Normans, Hohenstaufen and Aragonese), in medieval Poland and in other places as well, as is noted with increasing frequency in recent scholarship.'* Indeed, the assumption that medieval Jews lived in residentially segregated areas voluntarily to meet their own needs has been challenged by the contradictory evidence of the many archives that historians have explored in recent decades. In most medieval Italian republics and principalities where Jews lived they were able to rent or own houses wherever they chose. One preeminent Italian Jewish historian estimates that during the period 1200-1500 Jews probably lived in five hundred or more villages, towns and cities on the Italian peninsula.’* In the same time period, not many more than half a dozen instances of enforced residential segregation have been documented. The next major church council, the Fifth Lateran Council in 1512, did not refer to Jews. No papal bull was issued on the subject of Jewish residence until Paul IV’s Cum nimis absurdum became the first papal bull to demand full segregation. The full residential segregation of Jews became papal policy only in 1555, and therefore it may be said that in the Italian states, segregation was characteristic not of the medieval, but rather of the early modern period. The bull of 1555 did not demand that other rulers implement all the new

Residential Segregation _—55

and harsh restrictions on the Jews that were to be imposed on the Jews of the

papal states. While the pope proceeded quickly to enforce his bull in the papal territories and establish ghettos there (in Rome, Bologna, Ancona and smaller towns!°), Cosimo I, like most other rulers, ignored the new recommendations. There were no edicts issued in Florence, no moves made to segregate Jews and Christians. The only action Cosimo took against Jews 1n his territories during the first three decades of his rule was to give his verbal consent in September 1553 when the inquisitors of Pope Julius HI called upon Christian princes to collect and burn all copies of the Talmud, the central text of rabbinic study, which was said to contain anti-Christian and heretical passages.!” Even so, solicited by nervous Tuscan Jews for protection from the threatened entrance of papal inquisitors in 1557, the duke had the Pratica, his Privy Council, study the situation. The Pratica concluded that “there is no [need] to allow the inquisitors to enter the states of Your Excellency, except for cases of heresy.’!8 The implication was that Jews were, in principle, not considered heretics, and therefore they would be protected in Tuscany from harassment by the Inquisition. At this time, Cosimo’s highest-ranking officials and advisors, generally

committed to keeping the branches of the powerful Roman Church at a healthy distance, insisted on the duke’s right to govern his Jewish subjects without interference from the church. Lelio Torelli, the duke’s Prime Auditor, expressed this thought when he wrote in 1557 with reference to suggestions from Rome: “As regards making the Jews wear yellow hats, I don’t even want to talk about 1t—a ridiculous notion! And His Holiness [the pope] will have to let His Excellency [You, Cosimo] have [His Excellency’s] subjects dress and shoe themselves according to his own manner. Otherwise, this ‘reform’ of the church is just a mouse-chase”” It was not the duke’s manner in 1557 to compel his subjects to wear a specially colored hat or any other Jewish mark.”° Torelli’s comment reveals that while he did not consider the control of the Jews an important part of the Catholic reform agenda, the Jews were seen as pawns in a game that was played seriously, the stakes of which framed the definition of Medicean sovereignty. Medici policy toward the Jews was neither now (when favorable) nor later (when unfavorable) determined in relationship to any criteria other than statecraft. As late as 1566 the Jews of Florence still felt secure that they had the support of the duke against inquisitorial activity. This confidence can be seen in the story of Isaia Coen. Isaia was a Jewish used-goods-dealer who had been living in Florence for just a few years. It was his misfortune to be denounced

to the Roman inquisitor in Florence as an ex-Christian by a fellow-Jew

56 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power named Moise Buondi, a recent and rather scurrilous immigrant from Rome whose name appears frequently in Roman and Florentine notarial and criminal court records. According to the accusation, Isaia had stated in public that he had once been a Christian, but was now a good Jew. And, according to Moise, when another Jew present had commented that it would be best to pretend these words had never been heard, Isaia responded that “he was not concerned about it and had no fear, and that he had a privilege from the Illus-

trious Signor Duke that pardoned him of anything from the past, while expecting him to be a good Jew.” In response to Moise’s charge, the inquisitor in Florence called Isaia to appear before him. The accusations and accuser were not secret and anonymous, as they were in the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitorial courts. Isaia was asked to tell the truth about the words he had said in front of the house of Magister Alamanno Salviati in the presence of Moise Buondi and Lazzero di Isac. Both Moise and Lazzero had testified to the court that Isaia had said that he “had once been a Christian, but was now a good Jew.” To admit these words would have made Isaia a Marrano—that is, a yudaizing Christian— and therefore a heretic. But, as Isaia explained to the papal inquisitor, in the presence also of the vicar, the ambassador and a representative of the criminal court, he had never told Moise that he had once “been” a Christian. This, he insisted with a bravado that is impressive, was simply not what he had said. Rather, he claimed, he had “come to words with Moise,” who called him “Cristianaccio marranaccio”—the suffixes alone an insult and affront to his honor, as anyone would understand. He had responded: O Cristiano, 0 turco, 0 giudeo come vuol, fammi il peggio che tu puoi p[er]che son’ sotto un’ buon principe Call me Christian, Turk or Jew, see what damage you can do! For I am under [the protection of] a good prince!?

If Isaia had not time to think up his clever rhyme while standing in piazza, it may have come to him while he sat in jail, hopefully weighing the authority of the inquisitorial court against the power and protection of his duke and rehearsing his responses. Isaia’s witticism was an expression of the confidence Jewish merchants felt under the sheltering wings of their ruler—regardless of their origins, which may, for some, have been New Christian.”* Isaia was not alone in that sense of security, nor was his trust entirely misplaced. In Venice in 1570 it came out in the inquisitorial proceedings that a man named Abram Righetto had spent a great deal of time in Florence in the previous decade, during which time he claimed to have “lived as a Jew-*4 By

Residential Segregation —§7

his own admission, however, he was accustomed to eating, drinking and gambling among Christians at the Medici court and was known there by the name Enriques Nunes. According to his accusers, he was in fact also accustomed to go to church there and to consort with Christian women, who, according to our informant, “would certainly not have entertained him had they known he was a Jew-’ To all appearances, then, the Florentine duke was willing, in the 1550s and 1560s, to socialize with and do business with Jews, and also to ignore or even protect Jews whose questionable religious practices or past practices invited the suspicious inquiries of papal inquisitors.”* The change in the Tuscan ruler’s policy toward the Jews may, therefore, be conditioned by developments at the Council of Trent, but it occurred in the late 1560s in response to two important political developments: the election

of a new pope and the assumption of political power by Cosimo’s son Francesco.

While Cosimo I was duke, six men were elected to be popes in Rome.” We have seen that Cosimo was not swayed to anti-Jewish policies by the fourth of these, Pope Paul IV, and we have noted the sense Jews in Tuscany had that they were protected by Cosimo I as late as 1565, through the papacy of Pius IV (1559-65).?” That this protection had largely collapsed by 1570 is an

indicator of the changing relationship of the Medici ruler with the popes who succeeded each other during Cosimo’s stable rule. It was only during the office of Pius V, a pope (Antonio Ghislieri, 1566-72) who owed nothing to Cosimo, who took a harsher view toward both Jews and heretics than most of his predecessors and to whose desires Cosimo needed to be more attentive, that Tuscan Jews faced the newly restrictive policy of ghettoization.

Pius V reinstated the anti-Jewish legislation of Paul IV, which had been partially relaxed by Pius IV, with the bull Romanus pontifex (19 April 1566). This bull extended the provisions of Cum nimis absurdum to Jews beyond the geographic territory of the papacy and demanded its enforcement by all secular princes.”® Pius V successfully pressured the duke of Milan (subject of the

Spanish Habsburg emperor Philip IT) to take action: Jews were ordered to wear a distinguishing sign in the duchy of Milan and Jewish usury was prohibited there. In the Republic of Genoa, the Jews who had previously been banned from its capital were expelled in 1567.” Finally, Pius V on 26 February 1569 issued the bull Hebraeorum gens, which expelled all Jews from the papal states except for those who would come to live in the ghettos of Rome and Ancona. The edict was declared to be a response to the “inconvenience” or impropriety of Jewish residence among Christians, which was purported

to lead Christians to sin. Some of these Jews from the papal territories, including many from Perugia, crossed into the duchy of Florence.

58 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power A year and a half after Hebracorum gens, the grand-ducal government of

Florence and Siena approved for publication on 26 September 1570 the decree that initiated the expulsion of the Jews from Tuscany and their forced relocation. Florence was the first of the Italian states to ghettoize its Jewish

population subsequent to the publication of Cum nimis absurdum and Romanus pontifex.*' To Umberto Cassuto, the timing of these events suggested an explanation for Cosimo’s decision to ghettoize the Jews. Cassuto indicated (in 1918) that ghettoization should be seen as one of several steps Cosimo took to obtain and then hold the new and contested title of Grand Duke in the face of opposition from European rulers.** That Cosimo was committed to cultivating the support of Pope Pius V is supported and confirmed by the work of more recent historians. However, this political narrative, which we will presently review, is not sufficient to explain the timing of and motive for the creation of the ghetto.

Cosimo’s Quest for the Title of Grand Duke Cosimo I was driven in his later years by a quest for a powerful title that would give him more international status than his own ducal title, which he shared with other Italian princes and which did not clearly establish his rule as dynastic. His campaign for a higher title began after the conclusion of the Sienese war in 1557 with his allegiance to Philip II of Spain. The effort was initiated under Pope Pius IV, a relative of Cosimo’s (Gian Angelo de’ Medici, archbishop of Milan), whom Cosimo had helped gain the Holy Office on 24

December 1559.73 Although Cosimo held his ducal title from the Holy Roman Emperor, Pope Pius IV operated on the assumption that his papal privilege included the right to confer sovereignty. To deflect political opposition to making Cosimo a king, however, Pius IV shifted to a plan to give him the title of Archduke, and did not do it mainly because of Cosimo’s pref-

erence to avert the negative reaction of the other archdukes and of the emperor, Maximilian II. Before he died on 9 December 1565, Pius IV had started the process in his Curia to bestow on Cosimo the title Grand Duke (Gran Duca), to which, they hoped, other rulers would not object.** When, ultimately, the title was given to Cosimo, a storm of protest followed, with the ruling princes of other states complaining that Tuscany had never been a papal feudatory and that the pope therefore had no right to bestow any title on Cosimo.*° This reaction could certainly have been anticipated. With the election of Pius V in 1566, Cosimo is said by one historian to

Residential Segregation 59 have had to play a “politics of concession”; another documents the relationship between the two neighboring rulers as mutually beneficial.*° There is merit in both approaches so long as we understand that Cosimo was always

acting with confidence as a politically astute ruler and leader. Cosimo promised the new pope that he would assist in prosecuting heretics, and he allowed the papal Inquisition to establish itself in Tuscany.%” This included turning over, most notably, the Florentine-born Pietro Carnesecchi, whom Cosimo had protected from the Holy Office in 1546 and in 1557, and who had deliberately come to Florence to seek his protection in Florence in 1566. Ina dramatic reversal of his loyalties, Cosimo allowed Carnesecchi to be arrested

and deported to Rome, where he was tried and burned. The actions of Cosimo and his son Francesco, to whom he had formally abdicated ducal power in 1564, have been characterized as cautiously collaborative with the church throughout the 1560s under both Pius IV and Pius V. As Cosimo pursued his political goal, he cooperated with many aspects of the papal program and received numerous personal favors in reward.* In 1563 relations had improved to the extent that the Florentine archbishop Antonio Altoviti (or Altovitia) began to petition Cosimo’s ambassador in Rome to arrange a reconciliation that would let him take up residence in Florence, ending his Roman exile as an anti-Medicean ally.*° The archbishop’s return :n 1567 signaled Cosimo’s willingness to allow the

Roman Church to establish its powerful presence in Florence. It was a moment of some consequxuice for the future of the Jews of Florence. The occasion was marked not only by a solemn processional and festivities for the Christian faithful but by the reinstatement of the long-ignored badge or segno

(sign) for the Jews for the first time in the history of the duchy, just days before Altoviti’s grand entrance on 15 May 1567. In the context of this rela-

tionship, Pius V’s conferral on Cosimo I of the title of Grand Duke on 27 August 1569 has been seen as a reward for Cosimo’s loyalty and public commitment to Catholic piety. But if it is timing that suggests the argument, it is also timing that weakens it. Proposals to expel the Jews from Tuscany and ghettoize them in Florence had not yet been developed in August of 1569, when Pius V announced his decision to make Cosimo a grand duke.*' The papal bull of coronation was ceremoniously read in Florence on 13 December 1569, and Cosimo was crowned in Rome on 5 March 1570.* It is fair to say that since the ghettoization was called for by papal policy and was justified in the name of Christianity, the duke might have expected papal approval for his action. Cosimo

contributed loans and a contingent of soldiers to fight the Huguenots, and

60 ‘The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power he participated in the Mediterranean war against the Turks.** But despite the close sequence of events, the intense diplomacy between Florence and Rome has not revealed evidence that discussion of the Jews played any role in the negotiations pertaining to the grand-ducal title.** Cosimo was given his title in August 1569, and the earliest known explicit discussion of expulsion or

ghettoization in Florence is the draft of the order that initiated the ghettoization itself. This draft was penned in August of 1570, a year after Cosimo became grand duke.* The letters requesting a census of Jews which were sent out in July of 1570 are the first written evidence that something was afoot— eleven months after the pope formally granted Cosimo his new title.

The possibility that Cosimo and his advisors planned the ghettoization without much conversation with Rome, and not in fulfillment of any nego, tiation or promise, is supported by the way the news of the ghettoization was reported to Rome by the papal ambassador in Florence. During the months and weeks prior to Cosimo’s late September edict that expelled all Jewish residents from the towns of Tuscany, officers of his court were investigating the size of the Jewish population in Tuscany, closing Jewish banks and collecting information from Christian officials and villagers across the state. But in the

weekly and sometimes biweekly correspondence of Bernardino Brisegna (Brezegno), the papal ambassador in Florence, sent back to Rome from 17 July 1570 until 10 October 1570, there was no mention of Jews or their

, impending ghettoization.*° In 1570 the Nunzio was interested in affairs of state—the visits of royalty and dignitaries; births and marriages; important travel plans in the works; the publication of bulls and privileges. The first reference to the Jews in this correspondence occurs in a letter dated 10 October 1570, one week after the publication of the edict of expulsion. The edict and the ghettoization of the Jews of Tuscany seem almost to have come as a pleasant surprise. What follows is the complete section of this letter, which relays the contents of the edict quite precisely: I received the letter of Your Most Illustrious Holiness by means of the current [courier], and, informed of [your] receipt of mine, I kiss your most illustrious hands. What has occurred from then until now is that in his state visit, the Signor

| Prince has seen the great damage that his subjects suffer, not only from the usury of the Jews but also from their wicked and perfidious conversations with Christians, [and] he has provided by an edict, already published, that from here on no Jew may lend at usury; and he concedes only that within a certain time they might recoup that which they have loaned, commanding that all of them should go, at the end of the time, out of the Florentine state; and for those who would wish to come to Florence to work at other occupations he has permitted that they might come, not lending at usury in any manner; and to them he will give a place apart where they may live, as is contained in greater detail in the edict, of which I have sent a printed copy to Your Most Illustrious Holiness along with this.*”

Residential Segregation 61 The absence of any reference to special satisfaction with or disappointment in any of the details suggests that the ambassador and the papal secretary of state to whom he was writing had no particular knowledge of the edict in advance or of its contents, and that they had not been involved in prior discussions about it. Although Cosimo’s quest for the grand-ducal title does not explain the

Florentine ghettoization, it is fair to assume that the act was expected to enhance Cosimo’s new grand-ducal image and Francesco’s new princely portrait as powerful Christian rulers. In this respect, as we will have the occasion

to see, the political value of governance that conformed to contemporary Catholic criteria for piety must be considered important in the Medict’s decision to ghettoize the Jews.

Florence and the Ghettos of Venice and Rome Just as we cannot explain the Florentine ghettoization by simple reference to Cosimo’s quest for the grand-ducal title, so we cannot simply apply to the Tuscan situation the explanations that have been offered for the preceding ghettoizations in Venice (1516) and Rome (1555). It is instructive to consider these two ghettos, however, because the recognition that unique conditions led to each ghettoization gives pause to the structuralist temptation to pro-

ceed directly in search of a general theory of the meaning and function of ghettoization. The origin of the first Venetian ghetto has been the subject of a large literature, mainly because of the importance of the Venetian ghetto and Venetian Jews, but also because the word ghetto comes from the word for foundry in the Venetian dialect (geto).*® To summarize from the studies of Benjamin Ravid, a number of Jews who lived in Padua and Mestre, on the Venetian mainland, took refuge in Venice in 1509 after being displaced during the war of Mantuan Succession, in which Venice fought the League of Cambrai. Jews had previously not been permitted to live in Venice proper. Despite initial efforts to expel the refugees, some of whom were bankers, the government found it convenient to allow the Jews to stay and gave the Jewish bankers a five-year charter in 1513. This tolerance was based on the role that the Jews would fill by providing loans to the Christian needy, since Christians could not lend money at interest without sin; the Jews paid for it with substantial annual fees to the Venetian treasury. The Venetian Senate’s decision in 1516 to concentrate this new immigrant population of Jews in a specific and less central location and to restrict their

62 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power business and residence to that part of the city came in response to objections to the charter and discontent with the presence of Jews who were taking up residence at will throughout the city. On the one hand, there were senators who valued the (partly forced) economic contribution (fees, taxes on trade and forced loans at low rates of interest) of the Jewish bankers, used-gooddealers and visiting Levantine merchants in Venice and wished to tolerate them.* On the other hand, there were preachers who stoked anti-Jewish sentiment, sure that the presence of Jews would bring divine wrath on the city of Venice, or hoping that their expulsion could restore divine favor to the city.° The ghetto, distant, enclosed and strictly regulated, was seen as a compro-

mise. Even so, dissent over the presence of Jews continued in Venice in debates over the renewal of their charter in 1519-20 and right through to the end of the century.°! This economic-political explanation of the origins of the Venetian ghetto does not apply equally well to the situation of the Jews of Florence. In the first place, we have seen that the Venetian Senate decided that the Jewish

contribution to the Venetian economy was worth the dissatisfaction of preachers, individual Christian moneylenders and competing merchants. In , contrast, the ducal decision to ghettoize the Jews of Tuscany had little to do with either utilitarian or mercantilist thinking.*? This is not to say that no one benefited economically from the ghettoization. But the Jews who were relocated into the ghetto were not protected from expulsion for financial masons a’état as in Venice. The Jews who stayed in Florence and came to the ghetto were not bankers: indeed, moneylending was forbidden to them. They were not forced to make loans, and they were not, by and large, merchants with international trade connections. If there had been in Tuscany a general hostility to the Jews and desire to expel them from Christian society, a full expulsion from the state would have been possible without causing much more economic damage than that which was in fact caused by the closure of the Tuscan Jewish banks. In other words, if we wish to explain the toleration of Jews in Christian society by reference to their “utility.” we will have to explain the ghettoization in Florence with a utility that was not economic.*? However, there is more to be learned from comparison with the Venetian ghetto. The first ghetto in Venice, later called the ghetto nuovo, must also be considered in the context of the residence of merchant groups, known as “nations” and thought of as foreigners, who inhabited Venice and were also, to varying extents, segregated.** All these groups, notes Donatella Calabi, obtained a “reserved urban space” for their residence.*® It is particularly helpful to think about the ghetto as a place, a location. Ennio Concina makes the important point that for Venetian merchants and

Residential Segregation 63 colonists, having a specific location was a critical part of their understanding of settlement and so in Venice the ghetto “implies or produces a spatial form of identity-’>° It seems likely that the concept and institutional design of the Venetian ghetto (instituted in 1516) has its origins in the fundugs of Muslim trading ports as much as in the medieval church council canons that called for

segregation. Christian merchants in Venice may have been influenced by their experience with these closed compounds, which they called fondaci. The fundugs encompassed warehouses and customs offices and also provided the

residential space in which foreign Christian merchant traders and colonists were required to live in terminal port cities such as Alexandria and Izmir in the medieval Muslim and Ottoman world.*’ These structures were referred to in the report of a fifteenth-century Italian Jewish traveler named Meshullam ben Menahem of the Tuscan city of Volterra. And according to Obadiah da Bertinoro, yet another late fifteenth-century Italian Jewish traveler, in Alexandria Christian merchants were locked at night into their houses at the compound from the outside.** In smaller cities where there was no fundug, traders often maintained residence or were lodged in the quarters reserved for local dhimmi—native Jews and Christians.®* Similarly, in Venice Germans, Greeks, Persians and Turks lived in houses or compounds also called fondaci, a term associated more with the physical structure itself than with the residence of specific groups of foreigners. It makes sense, although it has not yet been clearly demonstrated or argued by Venetian or Jewish historians, that the model of the funduq was influential in the initial segregation of Jews in Venice.

It is possible, therefore, to locate the origins of the Venetian ghetto not only within the history of Jewish-Christian relations and persecution but also within a history of commercial privileges and state control over foreign com-

munities, thus opening the way to discussions of the historical shift to notions of nationality from notions of foreignness. This approach also opens up new perspectives for our understanding of Florence. As a specific explanation of the origins of the Florentine ghetto, however, this approach is less useful, for the “national” diversity in sixteenth-century Venice was not repli-

cated in Florence. Florence had resident foreign merchants as well as courtiers and foreign nobles who may have engaged in trade, but before the ghettoization of the Jews it had no urban history of segregating them residentially or of treating them as corporate entities. The influence of the funmdugq on the Medici’s decision to ghettoize the Jews

is less likely because Florentines had less personal experience with the Ottoman empire and culture and they would not have been as deeply influenced by the rules of that system. In the Medici state, especially before the

64 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power development of the port of Livorno, the commerce of the mercantile class was conducted much more with Europe than with the Levant. Ducal initiatives to bring in Portuguese New Christians in the 1540s and 1550s were therefore focused on members of that Portuguese diaspora who were coming from northern European cities or directly from the Iberian peninsula, not on merchants who were already established in the Ottoman empire.® In sum, the specific origins of the ghetto and the complex role it played in the cultural system of sixteenth-century Venice is not repeated in Florence. Florentine policymakers learned about residential segregation not from the Levant, but directly from Venice and Rome. Like the Venetians, they too adopted the form of the funduq, but they assigned to it a different cultural meaning from that which it had for the Ottomans, and probably also somewhat different meaning from what it had for Venetians. The specific function of segregation in the ghetto, or of the ghetto itself as an institution and physical structure, has generally not weighed heavily in the historiography. One exception to this trend is the work of Kenneth R. Stow, whose study of the function of the Roman ghetto plays an important role in his monumental analysis of papal policy toward the Jews in the sixteenth century. In Rome the conditions of ghetto life led to the Jewish population’s progressive impoverishment, overcrowding, environmentally conditioned illness and disease.© For Stow, this is not an accident: a primary objective and mission of the Roman ghetto was to make life miserable for the Jews living inside it in order to convert them.” In 1555 Pope Paul IV instituted the Roman ghetto, the second Italian ghetto. Stow’s convincing explanation is that the origins of this ghetto are

found neither in economics nor in politics but in mid-sixteenth-century Catholic thought. Pope Paul IV ghettoized the Jews of Rome as part of a concerted plan to encourage their conversion to Christianity. This plan bespoke an intense eschatological faith that included the twin beliefs that the conversion of the Jews was necessary to usher in the Second Coming of the Messiah and his Kingship on earth and that an increased rate of conversion was an indication of the imminence of this fruition. The breakup of the western church by the Protestant Reformation, the discovery of the New World and the growing menace of the Turks were the late-fifteenth- or sixteenthcentury developments that made this eschatology particularly compelling to many Christian theologians and jurists. For Pope Paul IV, the conversion of the Jews seems to have been a particularly urgent goal. The papal program identified by Stow was comprised of several elements put into effect by sixteenth-century popes, among which the Roman ghettoization appears to be central. The conversionary policy can be seen in the

Residential Segregation 65 preambles of papal declarations, with their earliest expression in the 1416 bull

of Benedict XIII, Ets doctoris, which ordered the burning of the Talmud in order to facilitate the conversion of the Jews. This attack on Jewish literature and religious practice was renewed vigorously in 1553 when the Talmud was

burned, which contemporary Christians hoped and Jews feared would weaken Jewish resistance to Christian conversionary efforts. A special house

for catechumens was built in Rome, and the Jews of the papal state were taxed to sustain it. This institution facilitated the process of conversion and ensured that conversion proceeded according to canon law in an effort to reduce the introduction into the Christian community of insincere converts or dangerously undereducated converts. The Jews were ghettoized (1555) and heavily taxed.® And finally, beginning in 1584, Jews in Rome were ordered to attend sermons by preachers trained in the effort to convert them.” Stow notes correctly that even in other states where ghettos were created,

the other elements of the program are often not found and that rulers who seem to have adopted parts of the papal program did not necessarily do so with the same eschatological motivation as the papacy.°” It is necessary to ask,

therefore, whether the ghettoization of the Jews in Florence should be seen as a part of this larger Catholic Reformation papal program, or as related to the eschatological passion identified by Stow. In Florence, Cosimo, toward the end of his life (and some would say, after the deaths of his wife and two of his children), appears to have wholeheartedly supported the platform of the Council of Trent. However, the goal of the Medici government in the institution of the ghetto was not to convert the Jews. Neither the edict of expulsion from the villages (1570) nor the edict of ghettoization with its long preamble (1571) refers to or alludes to the goal of conversion. Indeed, while the preface states that the segregation has as its goal to follow “the example of Rome and other cities” in eliminating the “dishonor to God and danger to the soul” caused by the intermingling of Jews and Christians, it is noteworthy that the edict is almost deliberately worded and phrased without allusion to the papal edict. That the impact of ghettoization on the Jews—the possibility that they might be converted—is not a motivating concern of the Medici 1s confirmed by their inattention to the other elements of the papal program. The Florentines did not imitate the casa dei catechumeni in Rome which predated the institution of the Roman ghetto and which was well established before the ghetto was built in Florence. A house for converts to the Catholic religion called the Casa Pia was eventually established by Jesuits in Florence, but only in 1636, a full sixty-five years after the establishment of the ghetto there.” Its

stated mission was to prevent the relapse of converts into faithlessness by

66 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power preparing them better for their conversion; it sought to prevent heresy and ~ the loss of souls, not to increase the rate of conversion.” As for pressure to convert, there was a tax on the Jews of the Florentine ghetto—2 scudi per male aged fifteen or older, and a collective tax of 30 scudi for the cost of the gatekeeper— but there is no comparison between these taxes and those on Roman Jews, which reduced that community to poverty and encouraged conversion to Christianity. As noted earlier, forced attendance at conversion-

, ary sermons was only instituted in Rome in 1584, about thirty years after ghettoization there. In any event, no policy of forced, regular attendance at such sermons was implemented in Florence during the period under study.”! What motivated Cosimo I to build a ghetto in Florence was not, then, the same desire that motivated Pope Paul IV: to convert the Jews or to oppress them to such an extent that they would wish to convert. The specific circumstances and historical context of the ghettos of Venice and Rome do not explain the Florentine ghettoization, but the recognition of their important differences spurs us to look for causes, catalysts, processes and agents which will be equally specific to Florence. They also encourage us to reflect more broadly on ghettoization—on its symbolic meanings, on its social function and on its usefulness to those whose power was evidenced and inscribed by the edicts and by the social reorganization that they set in place. To do that we will have to consider the deployment of urban space and architecture and the relocation of the people who were moved in and out of

it, and we will have to consider these aspects of ghettoization as related to the : development not only, or mainly, of the Catholic Reformation but also of the

increasingly bureaucratic and centralized power of an early modern state. First, however, we must reexamine the role of the church, for the role of the church must be distinguished from the specific goals of a pope or even a succession of popes.

The Role of the Church Although Cosimo did not segregate the Jews of Tuscany in order to obtain

papal concessions, and though the passion to convert the Jews was not expressed in his policies, the Medicean ghettoization was nevertheless in large part a response to the environment created by the events, reforms, poli-

cies and institutions of the Tridentine and immediately post-Iridentine church, the church of the Catholic Reformation.” Catholic Christianity was the dominant organizing and uniting principle in Italian states and statecraft: “Christianity” was opposed to “heresy”; Christians were opposed to “the

Residential Segregation 67 Turks”; and the Christian faith was opposed to the Jewish lack thereof. The defense of true Christianity was invoked to build political alliances, and the stamp of Christian piety softened the impression that might have been made by the increasingly heavy concentration of power in the hands of rulers of individual states. The strategically selective enforcement by early modern Christian rulers of specific aspects of canon law was historically specific and political in this era as in any. Secular enforcement of canon law may be considered apart from, and not as a barometer of, the expression of religious faith and personal piety that characterized daily life. When the secular arm of the church flexed its muscles, the gesture was deliberate, not casual. In the Florentine chronicle diary of Agostino Lapini, which covered a span of years from 1552 to 1596, 18 May 1567 was the day that “the Jews here in Florence began to wear an O, on the hat, in yellow.””4 The Jews did so in response to an edict which had been

published a week earlier in May and drafted in late April by Francesco Vinta.’* The new law stated that a sign or badge was to be worn by Jews: by

the men, a round yellow O on the hat or cloak; by the women, a yellow sleeve or cuff on their right arm.”° With this edict, it would seem, Cosimo I showed himself willing to lend the power of his arm to the church. The timing of this legislation is important: public notices about the segno were posted on the sixth of May; on the fourteenth of May a religious holiday was declared in honor of the grand entrance into the city of the archbishop, Altoviti, from Rome.” The notice informed the public that the archbishop would arrive the next day, the fifteenth of the month “con solenne pompa”: all shops were to be closed and business was to be suspended that morning in honor of the festivity. If Lapini noticed the yellow O on the hats of Jewish men only on the eighteenth of May, it might be that the Jews had kept out of the way of the religious procession the diarist observed during the declared festival. The history of the segvo is in many respects similar to that of segregation.

The church had intermittently demanded that Jews wear such a mark in Christian lands since the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.”” Jews and Christians alike had in certain periods been required to distinguish themselves in dress from Muslims in regions under Muslim dominion. Where the Jewishmark legislation was in effect, for Jewish men the sign was usually a special hat or badge of cloth, and the color varied: yellow, red, blue; Jewish women in some cities in the fifteenth century were required to wear earrings.” One recent interpretation of Jewish badge legislation in the fifteenth-century territory of Umbria, eastern neighbor of Tuscany, is that it reflected the concern of Minorite preachers about the frequency of sexual relations between Jews

68 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power and Christians. The evidence that Jews and Christians did indeed have sexual

contact and the widespread flouting of both the badge and of the bans on such sexual relations reveals the unwillingness of both Jews and Christians to

create or respect the social barrier intended by the badge.” It was, in any event, rare for the Jewish badge to be enforced well, or in a large territory, or for very long. In Tuscany, from Cosimo’s accession to power until 1567, Jews were not subject to any legislated distinguishing sign and they did not customarily wear any of the above-mentioned known symbols. Prima facie, the declaration that the Jews must wear the badge in Tuscany in 1567 might seem to indicate that the head of state had decided to enforce a rule from the body of church legislation, in deference to the imminent arrival of the archbishop. But given the history of Cosimo’s relationship with Rome, we should also understand the imposition of the segno on another level, as a visual declaration to the returning archbishop that the Jews of Florence were well-controlled subjects of the duke. In Foucault’s terms there was “a legislative power on one side, and an obedient subject on the other,’ the law-abiding Jews confirming the authority of the duke and his power over them with their own bodies.®° It was enough that Cosimo had allowed the pope to set up an apostolic inquisitorial court in Florence, and that now that city would again have a resident archbishop; there was no need to also give the church an immediate platform for its work of incremental control over the duke’s subjects. Indeed, wearing their yellow signs to demonstrate that they lived in

full compliance with canon law, the Jews were walking billboards for Cosimo’s assertion that the archbishop and pope need neither question his piety nor doubt the effectiveness of his rule. Thus, while the 1567 edict might look like the first sign of the new and harsh attitude to the Jews, that impression comes only with hindsight. For Cosimo and Vinta probably ordered it with deliberate ambiguity: a token of deference to the church, but employed to political advantage. My argument that the imposition of the segno was mainly political for Cosimo in 1567 is informed by the fact that the entire Jewish elite, aware of the humiliating and possibly dangerous consequences of labeling themselves with signs of their

otherness, was able to obtain exemption from this new discrimination. Indeed, the extensive list of Jewish bankers, merchants, professionals and their relatives and clients who were able to acquire patents exempting them from the segno in 1567 can be used to define the Tuscan Jewish elite at this time, several years prior to the ghettoization.*' For though the segno legislation claimed to apply to all Jews, the law itself provided an exemption for

, Jews who possessed banks and paid “certain taxes, a reference to the annual fees they paid for their banking charters.” All other Jews were subject—if

Residential Segregation 69 found without the segno—to a fine of 50 scudi, a large sum, half the dowry of a bride from a family of average Jewish shopkeepers.

The moneylenders and other members of the Jewish elite who took advantage of the loophole did not rely on the blanket exemption in the edict to protect themselves from arrest for refusal to wear the segno. Between 1567 and 1570 the duke responded positively to requests from individual Jews, issuing them letters of safe-conduct which explicitly affirmed their exemption from the requirement, ensuring that they could not be summarily arrested. The large number of exemptions betrays the real opinion of Cosimo and his administrators concerning strict adherence to canon law. In Cosimo’s court the patron-client relationship and the acceptance of payments for political and economic favors were equally weighted or even more fundamental principles of governance.® As a symbol of otherness, the segno carries meaning, of course, and different meanings may have been attributed to it by Cosimo and his advisors on the one hand and the magnates or patricians who sat in the Florentine Senate on the other. For Vinta, who had diligently researched the use of Jewish badges in Rome, in Venice and in the Florentine past, various types of hats, ribbons or badges would be acceptable, so long as “it might be seen clearly

that they [who wear the sign] are Jews.’ When Vinta’s proposal was brought before the forty-eight senators for discussion and a vote, they modified his words with a touch of hostility, noting that the segno should be worn in order that “it might be zmediately seen clearly that each one is of the false Jewish religion?® The badge was not only to signify the Jews’ Jewishness but their falsity. That is, it was supposed to be read in such a way as to elicit from Christians a negative reaction. It may have succeeded: only a few months later the government published a decree banning the verbal harassment of Jews.*°

Although surviving criminal court records for the intervening months do not permit the reconstruction of any acts of harassment against the Jews, the quiet influence of the church can be seen in the paperwork left behind by Medicean bureaucrats and clerks. In 1567 a list of Jewish households in Florence was prepared in order to tally up and track the Jews who would be required to wear the segno. The author and collector of this information is as yet anonymous, but the implementation of the seguo edict in 1567 was undertaken by officials who were attuned to the concerns of the church and most likely were assisted by the archiepiscopal vicar, Lodovico Martelli. In the marginalia of the list there is a note that a Christian serving woman who was a nurse for children in a Jewish household had been notified to cease working for her Jewish employer. Such service was in violation of canon law,

70 +The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power though no one in Tuscany in recent decades had raised this as a concern.*” This note, immaterial to the tally of Jews or to the segno, reveals the attentiveness of those charged with the task of identifying the Jews of Florence to the provision of canon law—concerns which were finally addressed in 1570 when all employment of Christians by Jews in Tuscany was officially forbidden.**

This careful attention to the presence of Christian servants in Jewish employ suggests that the interests of the church—and specifically the interests of the newly arrived or arriving resident archbishop and his staff—must be considered carefully as a motivating force behind the decision to ghettoize

the Jews. I have already referred to the fact that in his pastoral visits in 1567-69, the archbishop included in his records the information that there were Jews present in some of the parishes. Carlo Pitti, who organized and collected the “Proceedings against the Jews” for the Magistrato Supremo, included in that compendium a treatise composed by the archiepiscopal vicar, which he called a brief history of the Jews but was actually a primer in anti-Jewish slander.®’ It must be said, therefore, that Cosimo I himself maintained a careful distance from the church, asserting his independence even in the moment of officially enforcing a canon such as the segno. But some of the men associated with the ghettoization policy in Florence drew boldly on the language, feelings and faith-concerns of the Catholic Reformation and of long-standing anti-Jewish traditions. It is not sufficient, however, to note that there were men in official posi-

tions who held anti-Jewish attitudes, or to note that the energy of the Catholic Reformation was in the air. Anti-Jewish attitudes are not difficult to find among mid- and upper-level officials, often educated for careers in the church; the rapprochement with the papacy was a gradual process. But the cancellation of Jewish privileges, the imposition of the segno, the expulsion of

the Jews from the villages and the creation of the ghetto were radical acts approved and executed rather suddenly in 1570-71. To understand this abrupt change in policy requires that we look rather more closely at the local and international background of the events of 1570. It is possible that some part of Cosimo’s shift in attitude to the Jews can be attributed to the death in 1562 of his first wife, Eleonora di Toledo, whose relationship with Benvegnita Abravanel has been noted. We also know that

the election of Cardinal Antonio Ghislieri to the papacy in 1566 made the Medici court much more attentive to papal demands. It could no longer be stated that the Medici state should tolerate the Jews because the church did: in 1569, as we have seen, the Jews were expelled from the papal state, except

Residential Segregation 71 for those living in the ghettos of Rome and Ancona. Many of the refugees crossed the northern borders and tried to settle in the territory of Siena. In May of 1569 the governor of Siena wrote to Francesco’s secretary, expressing

his distaste for providing refuge to Jews whom the pope had expelled— apparently the policy (Cosimo’s) he thought himself obliged to follow. But the younger duke was in complete accord with the governor of Siena and

responded that “we are not infecting our States with their disease,” a metaphoric but emotionally and politically potent equation of the presumed contamination of the spirit and of the flesh.””

The official attitude toward Jewish settlement and the Jewish demographic pattern seems therefore to have changed by 1569, at which point Cosimo’s son Francesco I was in command following Cosimo’s formal, if restricted, abdication in 1564. According to Furio Diaz, Cosimo retained real control of political affairs after his abdication.”! But the personality of the

first-born son of Cosimo I is an important factor in understanding the change in attitude toward the Jews.

Anti-Jewish Influences on Francesco de’ Medici As seen above in the language of his comment to the governor of Siena, Francesco exhibited a strong anti-Jewish prejudice. Born in 1541, Francesco came into maturity during the papacy of Pope Paul IV, whose most hostile program against the Jews has been reviewed. Francesco’s prejudices were probably intensified or encouraged by his marriage in 1565 to Giovanna of Austria, the Habsburg sister of the new emperor Maximilian II (1564-76)

and daughter of Ferdinand I (King of Bohemia and Austria, and Holy Roman Emperor from 1556 to 1564). The Austrian cities controlled by Giovanna’s imperial father were glorified on the walls of the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio, portrayed there on murals painted by Bastiano Veronese, Giovanni Lombardi, Cesare Baglioni and Turino da Piemonte. Jews had been expelled from most of these cities in the fifteenth century. Giovanna

would probably have been aware of their expulsion from Prague by her father in 1557-59.”* In the empire where her father and brother had direct control, Jews were officially protected, but burgher sentiment against them was

high. Maximilian is known to have subscribed to these prejudices.”* Residential rights were privileges Jews had to fight to preserve and sometimes they lost. Expulsions of the Jews from Lower Austria and Moravia were ordered by Ferdinand I in 1543-46 and 1554, and by Maximilian IT in 156s,

72 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power even if not fully put into effect.** Giovanna might have recalled that her father had imposed a badge on the Jews in Austria in 1551, and that Jews in Vienna had been required to live in two specifically designated houses.”° More generally, the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire were the source and festering ground of a dense concentration of anti-Jewish myths, stereotypes, sentiments and attendant violence. Charges that Jews desecrated the Host (common from the late thirteenth century to the fifteenth century) gradually declined with the waning interest in the mystery of the Eucharist.” But the rumors, woodcuts, engravings, poems, ballads and other media that drove the allegations of Jewish ritual murder of Christian children and resultant attacks on Jews increased in frequency from the middle of the fifteenth century until their decline in the last decades of the sixteenth century.”” Anti-

Jewish sentiment in the German lands was repeatedly rechannelled, even with the success of the Protestant reformers in “disenchanting” the magical assumptions that provided essential support for the myth of ritual murder.”® If he was exposed to transalpine and specifically German anti-Jewish traditions, it is most likely, nevertheless, that Francesco had first picked up some of his anti-Jewish attitudes immediately prior to his accession to the duchy and his marriage to Giovanna, during his education in Spain. Iberian author-

ities, although their predecessors had expelled or converted all the Jews, maintained an intense interest through the Holy Office of the Inquisition in the supposed judaizing practices of the descendants of Jews who had been baptized. Never completely accepted as Christians, these were the New Christians, who were, when suspect, called Marranos. It was in the Iberian peninsula that Christian thinking about Jewish identity first became “racialized,” if we may use that term carefully without its nineteenth-century “scientific” import. The Jews were a “raza” or “razza” in the language of some Spaniards, and this conception of Jewishness became linked to statutes that referred to “limpieza di sangre” (purity of blood) to prohibit Christians of Jewish ancestry— baptized though they were—from public office and many honors. That is, despite church doctrine that baptism could make any person a Christian, baptized Jews and their baptized children were still seen decades later as being “of the Jewish race.” This particularly Spanish way of thinking could easily have been adopted by Francesco while

in Philip II’s new capital city of Madrid; other Tuscans abroad certainly picked it up and transmitted it to him in their correspondence. Thus, in one letter to Francesco dated 12 August 1569, the Tuscan ambassador in Madrid referred disparagingly to persons “who are of the race of Jews [di razza di Giudei|, though they may be baptized?” Spaniards, including Spanish abroad, were suspicious of New Christians

Residential Segregation _—_73

(and sometimes of all Portuguese, assuming them to be New Christians), and these suspicions were confirmed for them by the real presence of Jews who had in fact left behind their New Christian religion and returned to being Jews (especially in Venice and Ferrara or upon moving to the Ottoman Empire). There were also not a few who played a dangerous game, living and

presenting as either Christian or Jew, depending on the circumstances. I do not mean to argue that there was, in Florence, a crisis concerning judaizing New Christians. Though this is an enormously important issue in early modern European history in general, it was in fact not a great concern in Tuscany in the 1560s. Rather, I am suggesting that the religiously and racially charged anti-Jewish language and ideas that circulated around Francesco I de’ Medici during his years of education and early years as duke primed him, when he came to make real decisions, to view and treat the Jews

as a foreign, unwelcome element in his state. These anti-Jewish attitudes developed in the young ruler under the influence of the anti-Jewish rhetoric and policies of three dominant powers in his world to which he was directly exposed: the papacy, the Spanish court and the policies of his father-in-law and brother-in-law in the Holy Roman Empire. It is generally thought that after formally abdicating in favor of his son in 1564, Cosimo I remained deeply involved in the governance of his state. Nonetheless, Francesco was certainly engaged in politics and business of the state in 1569 and 1570 while his father busily campaigned for the grand-ducal title, received it in December of 1569 in Florence, traveled to Rome for the coronation in March 1570 and then remarried, wedding Camilla Martelli at the end of that month. Altliough it is difficult to assign specific responsibilities to Cosimo and Francesvo during the last years of Cosimo’s rule, it seems that the court’s new policy toward the Jews in 1570 should be associated with the accession of Francesco to the position of ruler—and in a different way, as we shall see later, also with the orderly transfer of authority from Cosimo to his heir.

Regional and International Context: Jews, Turks and Huguenots The question of the status of the Jews could not have been particularly pressing for Cosimo and Francesco during these years. Internally, famine and

poverty in the countryside were problems of major proportions. In the important Tuscan city of Prato in the winter of 1570, contemporaries noted the impoverishment and near-starvation of nuns in the convents, the ruin of

74. The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power the wool industry and the almost complete halt in business there. The harvest was going very poorly; the charitable loan-bank (the monte di pieta) was unable to pay its debts, the commune was unable to pay its taxes and the chancellor of the commune of Prato was requesting assistance of a bread subsidy for the city so that the poor would not just “fall dead in the streets”! With a somewhat brutal tone—his lack of sympathy recalls his attitude to the

poor Jewish refugees in Siena—Francesco rejected this request and responded on 14. March that if the Pratese would only administer their com-

mune well, they would not have to ask for help." Nonetheless, poverty, famine and disease were of great concern not only in Prato but throughout the state, and it was understood that there was a strong relationship between

these problems, as is revealed in a report that Cosimo commissioned in 1570.93

| Externally, the effort to secure acceptance of the grand-ducal title was paramount, and it was linked to the wars being waged in France against the Huguenots and in the Mediterranean against the Turks. The war against the Turks was a great focus of attention. Since the 1540s Venice had been at peace with the Turks, ignoring Charles V’s call to battle the infidel. Venice ruled its eastern possessions (Dalmatia, the Ionian islands, Crete, Corfu and Cyprus) and conducted a brisk commerce in the Mediterranean and with Ottoman cities.!°* But after 1566, with the death of Suleyman the Magnificent and the succession of Selim II as sultan, relations between the commercially interdependent and competitive naval empires deteriorated. In 1569 Selim II prepared to take Cyprus, a threat Venetians had felt brewing since 1567.'° In response to this threat, Venice, Spain and the Holy See allied in order to defend the island. Cosimo would not join formally in the resulting Venetian, Spanish and papal league, because the Venetians and Philip of Spain had

not yet recognized his right to the grand-ducal title. Instead, he worked directly with Rome, contributing ships from his naval fleet for the war effort.!°° The correspondence to the Medici court from representatives and ambassadors in foreign states refers daily to the naval preparations and news of the Turkish position; the war with the Turks was a major preoccupation in 1569 for Italian statesmen and was of great interest to the Florentine chroniclers.

: In this environment, accusations of treachery and espionage flourished. In Florence the chronicler Giuliano de’ Ricci recorded that a great fire in the naval arsenal in Venice in September 1569 was an act of sabotage, set by a man from Lucca who worked for the sultan with the intent of weakening the Venetian navy in advance of an attack on Cyprus.'°” While any foreigner might be suspect, in Venice and Ferrara the Jewish and converso (judaizing

Residential Segregation —_75

New Christian) populations became a special target of attention, and particularly negative attention was directed toward resident merchants who were considered Turkish subjects, including Levantine Jews. The Venetian Senate now considered these Jews enemies of state, spies, traitors and conspira-

tors.!°8 An essential component of that myth was the connection of the Venetian Levantine Jews to Don Joseph Nasi, a wealthy Ottoman courtier and the nephew of Dofia Beatrice de Luna (already know as Gracia Nasi), who had in fact exerted her influence from Constantinople to attempt a merchant boycott on Ancona in 1555 after the papal attack on the converso community of that port city.’°? Nasi had lived as a Portuguese New Christian named Joao Miches in Venice, whence, after his infamous “abduction” of and marriage to a wealthy young New Christian relation in 1553, he had been sentenced contumaciously (along with a number of his servants and accomplices) to exile from Venice and the Venetian territories. A hefty price was set on his fugitive head.!!° He moved to the Ottoman empire, there to establish a Jewish persona (as Joseph Nasi) and to have Sultan Selim IT make him Duke of Naxos and the Archipelago in 1566.1? Joseph Nasi’s wealth and actual influence at the court of Selim I were dramatically exaggerated by Christian Venetians, who first revoked his banish-

ment in 1567, then reportedly blamed him for convincing the sultan to engage in the war for Cyprus. In any event, Levantine Jewish merchants in Venice who were Ottoman subjects as well as other Turks were arrested in the first week of March 1570 and their possessions were confiscated, partially liquidated and set aside toward the cost of their imprisonment.'!” The Levantine Jews remained imprisoned for more than a year and the Senate’s hostility overflowed toward non-Levantine Jews living in Venice. The Senate did not renew their contract, or condotta, in 1571; these Jews were threatened with the prospect of expulsion in 1573.'!8 The early March 1570 arrest of Levantine Jews as spies and Turkish subjects in Venice was a response to a different kind of “hidden enemies.” Unlike

Lutheran and Anabaptist heretics, judaizing New Christians and insincere “professional” converts (who made a mockery of Catholicism by traveling about “converting, receiving baptism and alms repeatedly), the Levantine Jews in Venice were easily identified and jailed.'** Interrogations to establish their guilt were not necessary. But the mistrust of these Jewish merchants was

not entirely unrelated to Venetian and papal consternation over the judaizing New Christians brought before the Inquisition. Religiously informed hostility toward Jews as faithless traitors seems to have found two particularly acceptable (rational) outlets or expressions in Venice: the suspicion of individuals who might move too freely between Jewish and Christian iden-

76 ‘The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power

tity on the one hand and, on the other, the suspicion of Jews who might move too easily between Venetian (Christian) and Ottoman (infidel) loyalty.*° As the mobility of gold and its unchangeability made it the symbol of power and security,'!° so the imagined (and partly true) mobility of Jews and other ‘Turkish subjects and their imagined changeability made them a symbol of danger, disorder and insecurity. As duke and head of state, Francesco was necessarily paying a great deal of attention to developments in Venice. Until this time Levantine Jewish merchants in Florence and Pisa had been welcomed; concerns about the presence

of suspect New Christians had been consistently ignored or suppressed. However, the increasingly belligerent attitudes of other governments toward Jews found an interested audience in the prince-regent. During these months Francesco received hostile reports about the perfidy of Jews in his mail, the diplomatic correspondence that kept early modern Italian rulers informed and advised. The letters the resident Florentine ambassador in Ferrara wrote to Francesco in 1569 show clearly that anti-Jewish rhetoric was familiar to the

prince-regent, who, as we have seen, had already been exposed to other defamatory images of Jews then serviceable in parts of the wider Christian world. There was little risk that the duke found these comments offensive.1!” Bernardo Canigiani was in the habit of sending between five and eight letters per month in 1570 to report on events in Ferrara. His political news was

interspersed with remarks about the weather, his own health and an occasional reference to the contents of some of his tastier meals. In the month of March 1569/70, every letter he sent included some reference to “Marranos” or Jews, always embedded in the larger context of the war with the Turk: 3 March: Sunday we heard the sermon of the Compagnia [Society for Jesus], where there was announced a most severe ban of excommunication against any-

one with knowledge of Jews who were (previously) Christians who does not reveal them to the Inquisitor. 118

13 March: The Venetians have already 200 vessels lined up, and have sent people to Cyprus in all haste, intending to take them by storm; and there have appeared up here in the piazza many [of those] Marranos and Levantine Jews that infect this land. 19

In his ostensibly offhand comments, Canigiani made the connection between the danger Jews (supposedly) posed because they were Turkish subjects and the danger they (supposedly) posed because they were heretics—

baptized as Christians but living as Jews. The metaphor of infection he employed was applied routinely to Jews and Lutheran heretics by those who hated them—indeed, we have already seen Francesco use it himself in 1569 with reference to Jews seeking refuge in Siena. The Jews Canigiani saw in

Residential Segregation 77 the piazza may have been in flight from Venice, where people presumed to be Turkish subjects had just been arrested. Alternatively, they may simply have been local residents of Ferrara who caught his eye, his attention having been focused on Jews by the sermon he had heard the previous week. It was not only the Jews of Venice who were on the move: some Jews of Ferrara must have been trying to arrange passage out of Italy, and Jews who had

been expelled from the papal state were also in transit, mostly to the

Ottoman empire, by ship. |

Ferrara was not the refuge for Jews and New Christians it had been in earlier decades. Iacob Abravanel had somehow been accused of being a Mar-

rano, despite his family’s long aristocratic history and connections—as Jews—to Christian rulers. Abram Righetto (Henriches Nugnes), extradited from Ferrara to Venice, was just beginning his ordeal with the Venetian Inquisition.!?° On 23 March (1569/70) the ambassador related—in the middle of a passage about a terrible snow storm and the itinerary of ambassador Guerrini—the most recent change in the status of the Jews: “Monday past they finally gave the segno to the Jews. It is to be on the rim of the hat, where the chancellors wear the crosses, a hand’s breadth of yellow ribbon—similar to that of the public prostitutes in Florence—which can be readily covered up.”!?! The Jews of Ferrara had not been forced to wear the mark in the sixteenth century until “finally” at this moment.’”* Francesco’s informant was dissatisfied and scandalized by the privileged status of the Jews and conversos in Ferrara: “but the obligation to wear [the segno| does not apply to more than 12 or 15 percent of those that are here, and they are the most knavish, while the rest remain very privileged?’*3 He referred in two other letters (17 March and 1 May) to the permission Jews had in Ferrara to lend at 30 percent interest, claiming that it resulted in a drain of wealth from the city. His tone is annoyed, disdainful and disgusted—he apparently does not approve of the casual approach of the duke of Ferrara in this matter. Canigiani insistently associated Jews with Turks, with Marranism and Christian heresy and with the fear of depleted coffers. In the spring of 1570 Francesco received this stream of reports on the encroachment of “the Turk,

the wealth and privilege of the Jews, their deceitfulness and usury, their “infection” and “knavishness” and the presence among them of re-judaized Christians, who as Christian heretics invited the intervention of the papal Inquisition. Correspondence from Venice, Rome and beyond is likely to reveal additional anti-Jewish propaganda and slander to which Francesco was exposed. If Francesco did not himself initiate the actions against the Jews of Tuscany, he was at least well prepared by his trusted ambassadors and advisors to agree to the plan.

78 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power In the years immediately before the Medici’s decision to create the ghetto, they were also receiving reports from ambassadors about the less than toler-

ant way other minority religious groups were being treated in the great European states. In October 1568, for example, Ambassador Seristori in Rome wrote to the duke with information from a courier in France, where, by edict of the king and parliament, all citizens were commanded to live “Catholically, according to the Roman Church.” Huguenots were prohibited their sermons and every other act of religion under penalty of life and confiscation of their goods.!** A few months later Cosimo was promising to send

funds and troops to help support the pope in his campaign against the Huguenots. The papal policy of intolerance toward the heresy of Huguenots in France and of a range of heretics in Venice and other Italian states, including the Florentine Carnesecchi, may have eventually influenced the Medici. Protestant heretics in the Venetian territories, for example, sometimes held views strikingly similar to those maintained by Jews: they variously rejected the sanctity of celibacy, the authority of the institutional papal church and its exclusive

right to translate the Bible, the doctrine of transubstantiation and even the divinity of Jesus.!*° But despite the similarities, Christian heretics posed a threat to Catholic leaders and states that Jews, strictly speaking, did not. It was possible to allow Jews to practice their religion freely because Jews almost always accepted the unacceptability of active proselytization.!”° Jewish patricians and rabbis understood the risks they faced if they disparaged Christianity publicly. Jewish self-censorship was institutionalized

most explicitly in the printing of Hebrew books. When Hebrew became a language of Christian humanist scholarship in the late Renaissance, dis-

paraging views of Christianity once buried in Hebrew literature were exposed to Christian eyes. One result, referred to earlier, was the burning in 1553 of manuscript and printed editions of the Talmud, the study of which books Jews considered a protected rite and custom, and the inclusion of the Talmud on indices of prohibited books in 1554. and 1555 and later.!?” In a self-

described “general assembly” of Jewish magnates in Ferrara in 1554, with attendees from Venice, Rome, Mantua, Bologna, Ferrara, Rovigo and other locations, the first ordinance agreed upon by Italian Jewish magnates and rabbis, some self-appointed and others chosen as representatives, was to subject all future Hebrew publications to a process of prepublication censorship. Their approach was to require that every book obtain the approval of at least three rabbis before it went to press, and to forbid Jews to purchase Hebrew books published in violation of these procedures.!”8

Residential Segregation 79 Except for the burning: «:f the Talmud, the practice of the Jewish religion was tolerated wherever a Jewish presence was allowed. In the Catholic Italian

states rulers assumed that with sufficient emotional and social distance between Jews and Christians—to be ensured by the education of Christians in condemnation of, fear of and disdain for Jews— ordinary contact of Jews and Christians posed no threat to the Christian faith. It might be necessary to force Jews to wear a badge, to restrict their social and professional interactions with Christians or even to require them to live separately in order to reinforce the stigma, lest any Christian forget that the Jews were an accursed people on account of the stubborn wrong-mindedness of their religion. The fear that is stated explicitly is that the Jews, by their “continuous conversation and assiduous familiarity, might draw the souls of simple Christians into their empty superstitions and abhorrent perfidy.”!? We might even imagine here just a hint of the fear that too much conversation with Jews might turn doubting Catholics not just to superstition and perfidy but to the Protestant camp.}30

Protestant writing, however, was seen as a direct threat to the Catholic Church, its hierarchy, beliefs, sacraments and institutions, even though the ideas expressed therein had much in common with indigenous Catholic Reform concerns. Christian heretics could not be tolerated and forced to live in a neighborhood, as Jews could. It did seem possible, however, to arrest the spread of their ideas by controlling and banning the texts in which the ideas

were expressed. It was the lists of censored and prohibited books that enabled the Holy Office to identify people as heretics, often small groups who read banned texts together. Of course, individuals who held heretical ideas but had not spread them to a larger cell could be stigmatized 1n order to

silence them; this approach of the Inquisition was made famous by Carlo Ginzburg’s study of the miller Menocchio. But whereas an individual freethinker or heretic might be silenced or removed, Lutheran, Anabaptist, antiTrinitarian and other challenging ideas that found their way to cities—or emerged there—seemed to pose a more serious threat, and larger circles of foreigners might become implicated once the inquisitorial process was initiated — especially if it included torture.

On to July 1570 one such group of men was arrested in Siena and held there on charges of heresy by the papal inquisitor.'*? The men were still in jail on 27 July 1570; two had confessed to having possessed a Lutheran Bible (and

of having burned it to hide the evidence), and the others, though they had not confessed, were convicted of having been a part of the reading circle. These nine men included one Jew, “Abraam the Jew, against whom there is

80 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power sufficient evidence that he agrees with the heresies of Vinaldo and the other Germans,’ a reference to a jeweler in Pisa who was “convicted and confessed as a heretic and Huguenot.”!*? Although I have not seen other cases of Jews arrested as Lutheran heretics,

I would note that in the report of the arrest, the presence of a Jew in this company is not submitted as unusual. Why might a Jew have been found in this crowd? Whether he was a German Jew (an acquaintance of the other Germans) or an Italian Jew, if he could read Hebrew, his skill may have been prized by his Christian companions. If he did not read Hebrew he may, like

: the Christians with whom he was arrested, have wanted to read the Bible in a vernacular translation. There were no Italian-Jewish translations in print before 1571, and in Yiddish there were at the time only some of the books of the Bible, in paraphrase.’ And if Abraam the Jew could not read any language and could only listen, his best access, like that of Christians, would have been a “Lutheran Bible” such as this group possessed, whether it was the Italian translation of the Vulgate made by Brucioli, and banned, or the equally banned translation that Martin Luther had made directly from the Hebrew.'** In any event, Abraam was arrested and confined along with the other suspected heretics. Abraam’s presence in the group did not trigger an investigation of other Jews in Siena as heretics. Neither the papal inquisitors nor the officers of Cosimo’s state were interested in understanding the relationship between the religion of the Jews and the heretical religious ideas of Luther and the Huguenots. It was July 1570: in Cosimo’s Tuscan territory the census was already under way—and the collection of evidence against the Jews. But the edict against the Jews did not charge that Jews would contaminate the Catholic faith. Abraam was an anomaly. ‘To the extent that Jews were seen or portrayed by church or state authorities as threatening to the Catholic faith, it was almost never as Huguenots or Lutherans. Neither were Florentine rulers or bureaucrats particularly concerned about the presence of people suspected of being New Christians. Was there, then, a threat posed by ordinary Jews in Tuscany that had to be alleviated by the imposition of the segno, the closure of banks and the ghettoiza-

tion? Or were these acts not in fact “responses” to a threat? In part, the changes in Medicean policy toward the Jews may be attributed to the new involvement of Francesco. In part, we can see the cumulative impact of “vio-

lent discourses”—of suspicion and hostility and intolerance directed at heretics, at New Christians and, by association, at Jews: the aspersion and suggestion that Jews are dangerous or untrustworthy. But finally, I will argue

that the strongest threat the Jews posed was not only imagined but also

Residential Segregation 81 invented, deliberately, and that this fabrication served to enhance and legitimize Medici rule at a crucial moment in the history of that dynasty.

The Verbal Framing of the Ghettoization and the Rhetoric of Confusion Two edicts served contemporaries as a public guide to the expulsion and ghettoization and as a framework for them. The first (October 1570) was brief and to the point and started the process. The second, lengthier edict (July 1571) established the new ghetto community and presented to the public a fully developed explanation of the events of the year past. These edicts deserve to be read carefully. Specific individuals and agencies pursued many

particular interests, profits and strategies as they developed the program against the Jews, but the ghettoization must be seen as it was construed by the state, for it was above all, from start to finish, an official action of the state. Why, then, according to the official accounts, were the Jews to be removed to a ghetto? The 1570 edict’s first task was to lay the responsibility for the coming expulsion squarely on those being expelled, the Jews, deflecting any doubt and all attention away from those responsible for the decision. Approved by the Magistrato Supremo on 26 September 1570 and published and posted on 3 October, the edict opened with a reference to the “many transgressions” of Jewish bankers in the state. (See Figure 1.) Second, it referred to the broad danger that Jews (as a monolithic entity) posed to the Grand Duchy’s Christian subjects. Because of the constant con-

tact of Christians with Jews, the edict declared, especially when Jews employed them as servants, Christians in the state were put at risk of deviating from the Catholic religion (deviarsi dalla Cattolica Religione). Therefore, the edict continued—as though it were obvious that rules of logic had been followed—the banking privileges of Jews who had them were revoked and annulled, and expulsion was ordered for “all Jews and [those] of the Jewish

sect, both those who had permission to lend as well as those others who engage in commerce or in any craft or are without occupation [and] who nonetheless live in the Florentine Dominion?” In its introduction the edict thus alluded to two sets of Jewish crimes: violations of the banking charters issued to Jews by the duke himself, and violations against the church. That is, the first edict presented the Jews as threats to and violators of both the political and the religious integrity of the state,

82 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power the Christian state that depended on the rule of law and the purity of its faith. The two sources of authority and security were simply stacked together. The edict of 1570 served primarily to initiate the process and to detail the two sets of violations with which the Jews were charged, as well as the procedures for the closing of the banks and the penalties for failure to do so. The banking activities of the Jews and the accusations against them will be discussed in full in Chapter Four. For now, we are interested in the public mean-

ing of the ghettoization as it was fully expressed only later in what I have referred to as the second edict, the proclamation (dando) of a set of rules (an ordinazione) published on 31 July 1571. This well-crafted document, preceded

by a long preface, not only prescribed the ghetto’s operation but also justified and interpreted it. The state’s representation of the Jews and of its own act of ghettoization is critical for an understanding of the function of that act, for the ghettoization was a public act, a process and event in which the public was implicated. Let us consider how the state wanted its Christian subjects to read the ghettoization. In Florence, as throughout medieval and early modern society, social and status categories were visually coded so that at first sight one would easily distinguish a peasant from a citizen, a soldier from a monk, a widow from a married woman. Custom, if not economic possibility or law, ensured that all were distinguished by their dress. Some people were less quick to adopt or accept an informal dress code that would identify them to others, resisting that categorization. A dress code might only be codified in sumptuary legislation if it became important to the legislating class, gender or religion to more clearly define its rank against others. When custom failed to safeguard the visibility (and desired stability) of the social order, a government might revise its sumptuary legislation or impose a specific visual symbol on people who shared a specific characteristic that it wanted to use as a label for their categorization.}*°

In line with centuries of church rhetoric, but presented as though it were a corollary to the ghettoization, the bando of 31 July 1571 decreed that the Jews were not easily recognized. Indeed, it stated “that it is practically impossible”

to know them from Christians. To remedy the situation the Jews were required to wear a special identifying mark, the segno (sign). As we have noted, the Jewish badge legislation was rarely enforced well or in a large ter-

ritory or for very long. However, Pope Paul IV had reinforced the idea in 1555, and in Tuscany such a law had been imposed only four years earlier in 1567.9” How could it have been necessary to renew the legislation so soon? In 1567, as we have seen, the badge was imposed immediately prior to the arrival in the city of Archbishop Altoviti. It had been required of “each and

Residential Segregation 83 every person of the Jewish, or verily Judaic, faith and religion, females just as

males, of every age, nation, grade and condition who may live or be in the city, contado or district of Florence.”!* While the primary objective was to mark Jews as the religious “other” they were, this imposition of the segno, so described, reveals in addition an effort to reduce the appearance of Jewish diversity, of differences among Jews. The sego legislation recognized Jewish diversity and overrode it, allowing only the distinction of two sexes, which were in fact enforced with variant markings. The purpose of the segno was therefore not only to identify Jews and to mark and broadcast their subordination and Cosimo’s good Christian rule, as suggested earlier. The segno also came to signify the sameness of the Jews— their sameness as Jews. Four years later in the legislation of 1571, the new segno was presented as a

corollary to the enclosure of the Jews in the ghetto. Any Jew found outside the ghetto after hours was to be fined ro scudi, and, the edict continued in the very same sentence, within ten days of the publication of the ordinance every Jew was to begin wearing the segno. This was necessary, the edict stated in its heavy and obscure language, “because an intolerable Jewish license has

been so far introduced in recent times, and such abominable confusion [abominevole confusione|, in that on account of the similitude or even identicality [or, identity] of dress, it is practically impossible, with human judgment, to discern Jews from Christians; which often causes detestable inconveniences [or, improprieties] and nefarious excesses.”!8” To end this state of “confusion,” Jewish men were ordered to wear berets or caps made entirely of yellow cloth under penalty of 50 scudi. Exceptions were eliminated, exemptions nullified. This was therefore not a reissuance but a magnification of the segno legislation of 1567, which had ordered men to wear a yellow circle of cloth on the hat or cloak.'*® Jewish women were again ordered, as they had been in 1567, to wear a yellow sleeve or cuff on the right arm of their outer garment; the segno of both 1567 and 1571 deliberately distinguished the Jewish male (ebreo) from the Jewish female (ebrea). The yellow signification had as its self-proclaimed purpose “that the Jews, as much

one as the other sex, should be able to be recognized by anyone, in any place?#? According to this second edict, the Jews were responsible for causing a state of “confusion” This problem was symbolized by the supposed difficulty

Christians had in identifying Jews, which led to inappropriate “mixing” (which is the meaning of the Latin root of the word confustone). The connection made here between the ghetto and the segno, of course, was that Jews should be recognizable to Christians not only in their residence but even when outside it. The insertion of the segno legislation into the mid-

84. The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power dle of the ghetto ordinance directed the reader to understand that the ghetto, too, was a response to the confusion that the unsignified Jewish presence created. While the confusion referred to is obviously symbolic, it is possible that Christians were able to recognize Jews in their midst only with some effort before 1571. The Jews of Tuscany were people of diverse origin, and therefore their physical features did not identify them in any obvious way as Jews. Although I know of no representations of contemporary Tuscan Jews by late sixteenth-century Christian artists, an extraordinary archival source tells us

how government clerks saw Jews. Consider, for example, “Zaccheria di Michele hebreo, forty-seven years old, of chestnut-colored beard and proportionate [in] stature.’!** The Jews who had been expelled, ghettoized in Florence and forced to wear the segno were recorded, nine years later (in 1580), as having black, brown, chestnut, red and gray hair. Some were said to be short, such as “Gemma, wife of Gabriello, sixteen years, of short stature and thin” and some were tall, such as “Lustra, wife of Moyse, twenty-four years old, thin, large stature.’!? Some of the men and women were seen as fat, some as thin.'** Like Christians, the men generally wore beards, whether “red and curly” or “sparse and black”’!** Most of the Jews described were said

to be of average, medium or proportionate height or stature (statura medtocre, statura giusta), the tall and short, fat and thin canceling each other out. Even ten years after Jews had been required to wear the segno, a decade after they had moved into the ghetto — officially labeled, signified and stigmatized—they were still seen as quite average and unremarkable people by the clerk or clerks who recorded their features in order to issue them the temporary travel passports on which these descriptions appeared.!* Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine that Christians could not identify the Jews in their midst and that this situation led to any real “confusion”? Many of the adult Jews in Tuscany in 1570 had not been born there and must have spoken Italian with a variety of non-Tuscan accents and dialects.!*” On their first encounter, a Christian might have mistaken a Jew for a foreign Chris-

tian, perhaps a German or a Mantuan or a Spaniard. A mistake might be made by a Christian who was him- or herself a foreigner and unable to discern dialects, as happened in Thomas Cohen’s “case of the mysterious rope carrier” in Rome, where a Christian from Sicily, new to Rome, found himself tricked into believing that a pair of Jewish pranksters from the Roman ghetto were Roman police with the authority to arrest him.'** But a local Christian would not have made such a mistake about a Jew who had moved into a Tuscan town and established residence there, for Jews were indeed “other” in the most fundamental aspect: their religious life. Except for the

Residential Segregation _—85

rare Spanish or Portuguese converso living in both worlds, Jews did not attend church services or take the sacraments.'* They observed a different day of rest—“il sabato” (Saturday) was their Sabbath, not “il Domenico,” the day of the Lord recognized by Christians. And towns were small. The very fact that Jews are easily identified in the archival documents proves that they were recognizable as Jews, at least to the courtroom clerks and notaries and

guild officials who almost always recorded their names with the suffix “ebreo” or “ebrea.” Peasants and villagers interviewed on the eve of ghettoization about the Jews in their towns had no trouble identifying the Jews who lived there. The Jews of Tuscany presented themselves to the world as different, as Jewish. They appear to have made no effort to “pass,” or they would not have clung to the very distinctive set of names they favored, including Moise, Sala-

mone, Laudadio, Sabatino and Abramo—names which were most unusual for Christians in Tuscany at the time.°® Two of the most common Jewish names found in archival sources of sixteenth-century Tuscany were Iacob and Iosef. Some individuals with these names were occasionally recorded as Iacoppo and Giuseppe (following the same usage as Christians), but they more often appear spelled out in the Jewish versions, which were based on a Hebrew pronunciation.’*! Jewish women’s names were less distinctive, but they were known more commonly than Christian women by biblical names such as Miriamma, Rachel, Sarra or Ricca (from Rebecca). Other than these names, they almost always carried names which had no strong Christian association, such as Bruna, Dolce, Gentile, Laura, Allegra, Chiaretta, Benvegnita, Diamante and Stella. (There is no evidence that Jewish women always had both a Jewish and a secular name, and it is not obvious that ordinary Jewish men did.) But if ordinary Christians were not “confused” in their ability to identify Jews as such, to the Christian public, or at least to the ears of those trained in the language of legislation on the Jews, the reference to the confusion caused by Jews may have had a different resonance. The problem, as it seems to have been perceived by those who influenced the rhetoric used in the state’s edicts and policies, was that Christians were not identifying the Jews correctly. What

this meant was that they were not seeing them and responding to them as a despised “other.” This was a religious concern, addressed now by the state, and it is seen in the preface of the edict, which borrows the concept, though not the exact words, from centuries of church writings: “Knowing . . . how easily the Jews .. . , through their continuous conversation and assiduous familiarity, are able to pull simple Christian men into their truly superstitious and execrable perfidy,’ and wanting to limit this as far as possible, “therefore

86 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power it is solemnly provided and established and ordained” that all the Jews must move into the ghetto and . . . wear the segno.'°? According to the logic implicit in this rhetoric, if the Jews were properly and fully seen as Jews, Christians would not be led astray— intellectually, religiously, socially, sexually—by them. On the other hand, it should be noted that the “problem” had to be solved not only by labeling the Jews visually or by signifying their Jewishness on their bodies but by locating their physical bodies spatially—and within an architectural structure. In choosing to relocate the Jews into the ghetto instead of only assigning the segno or expelling them altogether (as was done elsewhere), the state indicated to the observing public that the Jews had been in the wrong place, out of place. As was made clear regularly in the palazzi that rose above the streets and in the perfection of the representation of perspective, in the fortresses that rose above the city and in the religious, state or funereal processions that moved through the Piazza Signoria or lit up the night, there was power in orderliness, in division, in linearity. The hierarchy of power relations that was inherent in the social order was expressed sartorially, artistically, architecturally, militarily, administratively and also, and pervasively, spatially.'*? As a family’s palazzo both contained the family and displayed that family’s status, now the ghetto would contain the Jews and display their status. The ghetto was a space that could be ordered, the Jews a group of people ordered in(to) it. This argument 1s not one that relies on “social anxiety theory” to explain the ghettoization as a response to pervasive social anxiety about Jews or confusion caused by Jews.’** Rather, the argument here is that the state could profit from the apparent production of “order” by first identifying and publicly signifying a source of disorder or confusion. “Disorder,” as I am using the term, refers to an absence or perceived weakness of visually, legally or otherwise clearly defined categories (“order”). This kind of “disorder” is thus

closely related to “confusion” and does not imply “unrest” or the direct threat or presupposition of violence, rebellion or revolt.!** The disorder identified (and therefore the order to be established) could be spatial as well as social, religious or political. The Jews, living scattered in the towns of Tuscany, were now dishonorably branded as a source of confusion, their residential pattern the cause of religious and spatial disorder. The Medici were able to make strategic use of this rhetoric of confusion and disorder because the Jews in Tuscany were a vulnerable minority. In the next two chapters we will see what truth there was in the claim that the Jews of Tuscany created a social or religious disturbance. It did not matter very

much in terms of the outcome. But it is important to note that the accusa-

Residential Segregation 87 tion against them was not that they had murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, or that they had poisoned wells or otherwise created plague or that they had abused the sacramental Host and made a mockery of the Christian God—the three main discourses of violence used against the Jews 1n late medieval Christendom.'*° Indeed, while one of the chief instigators of the ghettoization was ready

enough to cite the “history” of just such abuses, the grand duke and his supreme magistrates were uninterested in the propagation of the accusations. Carlo Pitti, as we have seen, included in the file he prepared for the Magistrato Supremo a treatise by Lodovico Martelli which dramatically rehearsed these slanderous stories, but the edicts ultimately published by the Magistrato Supremo under grand-ducal supervision and with the approval of the Senate all refrained from even the hint of groundless and provocative accusations. The Medici state was a rational agency, and its actions, though violent, were not designed to incite popular violence toward the Jews. On the contrary, its political acts were undertaken to enhance the Medici dynasty’s own mythic image as a just government, one that moved effortlessly into the place of the republic that stood before it and that distanced itself successfully from associations with despotism and tyranny. In the formal edicts as in the sculpture that adorned its courts, the Medici had to be—like Florence— David and not Goliath, Judith and not Holofernes; pursuers of Justice, not persecutors of the weak.!®”

_ At the same time, as I will argue more fully in later chapters, the Medici regime strategically and programmatically pursued the ghettoization largely as part of its administrative reorganization. In the process, it exerted power and strengthened its authority over each of the many semi-independent towns and cities and castles that were required to enact the new policy. The

categorizing tool was relizion; the administrative boxes into which the people were sorted, however, were, perhaps for the first time, spatially located and fixed.

The state’s confidence that by ghettoizing the Jews it could represent itself as both protector of Christians and producer of order does suggest that the Jews were particularly vulnerable to being labeled as a source of disorder and confusion in the late 1560s. The next chapter will examine what kernel of truth made that representation credible and allowed the state to use ghettoization to capitalize on that supposition of disorder by declaring its elimination.

Two State-Building and the Status of the Jews

We have seen that the decision to ghettoize the Jews was not a response to

the actions of Jewish protagonists. With the relocation of the Jews in a ghetto, Cosimo created a nexus of religion and space, a merger of religious order and spatial order. This chapter will look more closely at this development in the history of power in the sixteenth century. We will then explore | how the representation of the Jews as disruptive of religious and spatial order and their subsequent reorganization (the ghettoization) could have been politically useful to the state. My purpose is to explain how the new anti-Jewish rhetoric of the Medici government resonated with the knowledge (true or false) Christians in Tuscany already had of Jews (real or imagined). In the claim of “confusion” was there some kernel of truth about the Jews? In this analysis we will begin to see the Jews as protagonists, for this chapter presents an explanation of the ghettoization that considers as factors the demographic growth and migration of the Jews of Tuscany and their active partic-

ipation in many sectors of the economic and social world they chose to inhabit.

ea) Alongside the secular and civic humanist culture that was critical to the emergence of the Italian renaissance states, and often infused through it, rel1gion was fundamental in the lives of late medieval and early modern people and in their self-categorization and categorization of others. For Christians, being Christian was the unarticulated norm, being Jewish the signified,

deviant status. Christians did not refer to other Christians as Christians unless their piety or doctrinal orthodoxy was being questioned, praised or confirmed, but almost any written reference to a Jewish person in a Chris-

| tian-authored text included the identifier “ebreo” or “ebrea? which called attention to that person’s otherness.

There was thus a special awareness of Jews as outsiders in a religious sense. As we have seen, the idea presented in the language of the edicts of

State-Building and Status 89 1570 and 1571 and in the grammar of the ghettoization itself was that a Jewish

presence dispersed throughout Christendom was inherently disruptive of order. This claim may have resonated richly for Christians in Tuscany. Christians might consider Jews to be at odds with their society even if their own daily or occasional contacts with Jews were not characterized by active suspicion or hostility, and even if the Jews were not itinerant or newcomers but long-established residents. ‘The fabric of Christian society was woven with threads of its religion: its religious calendar, art, festivals, processions and saints, and, perhaps above all, its sense of community. Communal affiliation was expressed socially in rituals and embodied in Christian individuals, ini-

tially through the sacrament of baptism and then repeatedly through the sacrament of the communion of the host, which symbolically and physically conjoined Christians with one another and with Christ as one body.’ Jews did not participate in these activities and were by definition not part of the Christian community. These facts necessarily made them seem outsiders, or marginal, and, though not necessarily hated or mistrusted, correspondingly vulnerable to the accusation that they were a threat to the majority in one way or another. An example of this assumption of otherness may be seen in a 1562 reform of the statutes of the Silk Guild in Florence. Jews who were accustomed to peddle their wares in the countryside were singled out for attention in the statute: “And any Jew who, as occasionally happens, should practice in the said city the craft of velettaio [veil-maker], selling and buying to the houses and monasteries, without maintaining a resident shop; they are required to and must open a shop, and be matriculated in the said guild”

The freedom of itinerant merchants made them suspect to the guild; attached to places, specific store-fronts or booths, the new guild members would in theory become accountable to the guild, controllable. However,

these unmatriculated Jewish artisan-peddlers might simply have been referred to as “veil-makers” instead of as “Jews,” since the statute did not

intend to permit nonmatriculated Christian veil-makers to peddle their wares. The otherness of the Jews—an operating norm of Christian society— explains the guild’s reference to the problematic itinerant veil-makers as Jewish veil-makers; it was noticed and noted that they were Jews. Jews sometimes used mobility to good effect as itinerant merchants, offering services or selling goods in places beyond the reach of settled artisans, merchants and fairs. Sometimes they permanently relocated to places that offered a better economic or political environment. At other times, of course, the Jews’ “mobility” was forcibly imposed upon them by expulsion. More subtly, mobility was sometimes projected onto Jews in a manner that exag-

90 ~The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power gerated their actual mobility, or denied the long-standing, even centurieslong residence of Jews in a particular city or region. Jews were savvy to these arguments and sometimes used them for their own purposes. A case in point is Agnolo di Laudadio da Rieti, a banker-merchant of Pisa whose bank was closed and goods were confiscated early in the spring of 1570. Agnolo had no knowledge of the expulsion and ghettoization that lay ahead, but he correctly understood that the attack on his bank was related to his status as a Jew. He did not know that his cause was lost, and that after the closure of his bank plans would be put into place, apparently by Carlo Pitti, to revive the monte di pieta of Pisa with a large cash influx and new regulations.’ Indeed, the cash deposit that came to the monte di pieta in Pisa from the duke’s coffers in November 1570 was 15,000 scudi—just a bit less than the 20,000 scudi Agnolo’s assets were worth one month earlier in

October 1570.4 However, in letters he sent in an elegant Italian script to Francesco, Agnolo appealed to the prince for protection for his own family and possessions by distancing himself and a few other long-established Jewish residents of the state from what he claimed were a group of less established Jews. These other Jews were only refugees, temporary residents, and,

he suggested more darkly, he could personally assure the duke that they would not be permitted to remain in Tuscany.° In his petition to Francesco de’ Medici, Agnolo di Laudadio, certainly one of the wealthiest Jews in Tuscany, set out this interpretation of the unexpected closure of his bank: it was a response of Pisan officials to the presence of the refugees — poor and itinerant, “foreigners raised with little civility.” He contrasted their mobility (that they had just arrived and were now on their way out) with the ancient roots and stability of his own small cadre of Jews, “we others who were born and raised in Your Most Felicitous state,’ which, in Agnolo’s argument, entitled them to enjoy rights and privileges.° The Jewish banker attempted to shift the focus of the attack to Jews who he thought should be more vulnerable than he, but the discourse he tapped was not at the time a specifically anti-Jewish discourse, but rather an anti-foreigner theme. It was not only Jews whose mobility could be seen in a negative light or as a challenge. In an effort to prevent the loss to competitors of their specialized recipes and techniques of production, manuals and skills, guilds also attempted to prevent any past, present or future guild member from ever leaving the city where he or she had worked. To protect the Silk Guild, for example, its statutes in 1580 declared that regardless of status, no one who had ever or would ever engage in any of the dozen specific crafts governed by the guild should ever be allowed to leave the state without permission of the guild officers. Those who would disregard the statute had a

State-Building and Status 91 bounty on their head and were subject to confiscation of all their goods; to make it perfectly clear, “they can be killed by any person whosoever, not only

without prejudice but even with a reward-’’ Guilds imagined that people who were unattached to place posed a threat that could be resolved by attaching them to places. The threat that mobility posed to institutional control was understood, and the people and things that were seen as most threatening were frequently most mobile: soldiers, spies, immigrant prostitutes, sea-pirates, diseases and heretical ideas and books.

If in general mobility was both feared and valued, then the control of people’s mobility was a clear expression of power. Agnolo da Rieti hoped to regain his status by removing a set of lower status Jews from the picture. But from the state’s perspective all the Jews were a minority who could be made to move or made to stay in one place. They were this easily uprooted from their homes because they were not so fully part of any village or parish community that the authorities need fear a violent reaction to their mistreatment. Neither was there any fear that they would be able to make political or military alliances with foreign rulers. As a vulnerable minority, the Jews were among the first groups to experience this new expression of state power in Tuscany, the power inherent in the ability to move people (“transfer” a population from one location to another) and to restrict or control their mobulity.

AF In the late sixteenth century, officials most actively involved in the development of the grand-ducal state and of the post-Iridentine church paid new attention to the definition of the spaces where people lived, gathered or could be counted. For the church, as we have seen, the spatial unit was the parish, the boundaries of which had to be established in order that church leaders might responsibly oversee the souls in their charge. Cosimo I was not as focused on the demarcation of territorial boundaries as the church or as monarchs would be a century later, but he was dedicated to the expansion and rationalization of his political authority, administration and jurisdiction. Good administration meant maintenance of roads, rivers and bridges; it required control over the people, carts and goods which crossed over them, the waters and fish which passed under them and the trees, forests, game, farms and villages on their banks. Better control of roads and rivers offered more control over pestilence, agriculture and sericulture, trade and population growth, and, ultimately, the fiscal condition and political stability of the state.

All these matters of state could be handled more readily if the territory were divided systematically into consistent units. The parish was an especially

92 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power useful base unit because it served the local population well as a substitute for socioeconomic networks that had more threatening political potential. The overlapping administrative units of the state were larger than parishes, but in

his own systematization efforts Cosimo supported rather than resisted or negated the systemization efforts of the Catholic Church. We should not imagine that it was only the most powerful authorities, ducal and papal, who understood the importance of territorial control and mobility. As we have just seen, the guild officials, operating at a lower level of state government, had this concern. In the late sixteenth century people generally organized themselves in ways that expressed both hierarchy and community, not only with the visual codes of dress but in spatial terms. Power, order and hierarchical relationships were represented spatially and architecturally in convents, confraternal chapels, palazzi and fortresses; they were marked in the order of dignitaries participating in processions; they were expressed in struggles over symbols such as bridges and walls, and in the gendering of public spaces. It seems obvious, then, that Cosimo, Francesco and their advisers might have chosen to use spatial reorganization to display and assert their control of the state. But to appreciate the potential value of doing so by ghettoizing the Jews, which required a shift in policy, we must first better understand what the place of Jews had been, in Tuscany and in Christendom more broadly. Historians disagree about the quality of relations between ordinary Jews and Christians in the medieval and early modern world; it is a particularly thorny field of inquiry. There is general agreement, however, that Jews and Christians saw one another as “other” in terms of their faith. Given this oth-

erness and a certain degree of related social distance, Jews in central and northern Italy lived in relative peace and quiet, despite the centuries-long diffusion in Christian written and visual culture of the mistrust of Jews as deicides and as stubborn, blind or devilish resisters to the truth of Christianity and despite the increasingly frequent episodes of violence against Jews north of the Alps.® As one historian reads the situation in nearby Umbria, the peace between Jews and Christians was stabilized by ritualized expressions of anger and disdain toward Jews, passions deliberately evoked by religious leaders

and actors as part of the annual cycle of the experiencing the Passion and Redemption of Christ. These passions were “safely” channeled into ritualized activities such as stone-throwing or mocking the Jews which the Jews and municipal governments tolerated as necessary to maintain an equilibrium in the relationship of Jews and Christians.”

The level of violence against Jews was much more muted in the Italian states than in other parts of Europe at the same time. We might consider this

State-Building and Status 93 tolerance in the context of the wide diffusion in the Tuscan language of the story of the three rings and the tolerant attitude or even cultural relativism that this story may have teught. The story itself had a long history, but it made its most important ¢»pearance for Christians and Jews in Europe in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, written just after the pestilence of 1348-49, first printed in the 1480s and republished many times before the ghettoization of the Jews of Florence. As Italians would have read or heard it from Neofile’s tale (First Day, Third Story), Melchizedek the Jew was once pressed to tell Saladin which of the three faiths was superior. The Jew responded with the story of a king who had three sons whom he cherished, but only one precious signet ring. Unwilling to choose one of the three sons on to whom to pass his ring, he had two identical copies of the ring made. Giving the three rings to his three sons, he allowed each son to think that he was the chosen son and heir, the favored one. In Jewish, Christian and Muslim narrations, including the Decameron, the story of the three rings is always presented as a parable about the three reli-

gions.!° Each audience might assume that its own religion (son) in fact received the true ring and the other two religions the false copy: it is the cleverness of Melchizedek’s story, not the truth of his religion, that saves him in Boccaccio’s setting. But regardless of the bias of the framework in which the story was put, the story itself taught tolerance and suggested cultural relativism. The three rings—or monotheistic religions—were after all so similar that once fashioned, even the king-father and maker of them all could not tell

which one was the original. Though never pressed to do it, the sons must logically admit that they do not know which of them has the true ring— although this should hardly matter since they all share equally in the king’s favor.

The parable of the three rings appeared in multiple printings of Boccaccio’s popular book, which, written in the vernacular, eventually attracted the attention of post-Iridentine censors. While the book, irreverent and coarse, was never banned in its entirety, the story of the three rings was removed in editions published in Venice 1n 1573 and 1580 and was rewritten in an edition

of 1590. But the story had its own life, circulating after the censorship and showing up in the thinking of individuals such as Menocchio, the miller condemned for his unorthodox religious views.'! Menocchio, when interrogated

in 1584, did not even mention the outer shell of the story as set in the Decameron; he spoke only of the inner core of the story as his truth. At least within some sectors of Christian society in the fourteenth century and late sixteenth century and, I imagine, in many circles in the centuries between, a certain tolerance of people with different religious beliefs mixed casually with

94 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power Christians’ belief in the superiority of their own religion in its uncorrupted

form. This tolerance accepted and embraced the desire to convert the unfaithful and took pleasure in that accomplishment. It also nurtured a sense of humor about the difficulty of doing so, expressed in the Decameron in the

First Day, Second Story conversion of the Jew Abraham. And finally, it offered up a small, tempered measure of doubt about the wisdom or necessity of making the effort to do so. Under specific conditions, the quiet coexistence of Jews and Christians was interrupted. In the 1470s a wave of actions against Jews in northern Italy was driven by the religious reform efforts and provocations of traveling men-

dicant friars, mostly Franciscan, whose preaching program included the

| denunciation of usury, a call to expel Jews and the promotion of monti di pieta, Christian charitable loan-banks.!* Fra Bernardino da Feltre’s sermons, including those in Florence in 1488 and 14-93, contained such material, leading to rioting against the Jewish bank called “la Vacca,” so that city officials forcibly removed the preacher from the city to prevent further incitement.

Anti-Jewish and anti-usury sentiment continued to be stoked in Florence until the leaders of the republic under Savonarola finally established their charitable loan-bank in April of 1496 and put a permanent end to Jewish banking in Florence.'4 Physical violence against Jews was more limited in scope, the major incidence occurring during the 1470s’ wave, in the northern city of Trent in 1475, where the German influence played a large role in the proceedings of a ritualmurder accusation.’* The violence committed against the Jews in Trent (who were accused of ritually murdering a boy later beatified as Simon of Trent) was perpetuated by the creation of a pilgrimage shrine in Trent and the distribution of woodcut flyers and a broadsheet poem.’° But the accusation was not widely imitated, and the preaching and the anti-usury movement did not develop into a long-lasting popular wave of persecution such as the ritualmurder and host-desecration accusations that led to arrests and attacks on so many Jews in the Holy Roman Empire in the same period.’” It should also be noted that anti-Jewish images and stereotypes were not an important feature in the art or print culture of fifteenth- or sixteenth-century Renaissance Italy. The religious art that worshipers in Florence would have used to focus their attention in prayer did not depict Jews at the scene of the Crucifixion, for example, with a set of visual symbols of enemy status to parallel the red

hair, bulging eyes, darker skin, profile view, stooped posture or hose of mixed colors used in the religious art of the Northern Renaissance.!® This said, the ghettoization of the Jews in Tuscany did depend on the otherness of the Jews and their vulnerability as a minority in a Christian state. It could not

State-Building and Status — 95

have occurred without the assumption of Christians that the Christian faith was true and the Jewish faith false. We must understand, however, that the Medici decision to ghettoize the Jews was neither the continuation nor the renewal of any generalized anti-Jewish activity or sentiment in Tuscany. As a policy and an action, ghettoization was not an expression of popular antiJewish sentiment. The claim of the Tuscan expulsion edict that Jews were sowing confusion could have simply been an effort to harness a generalized Christian discomfort with the existence of Jews and the survival of their supposedly false faith. It seems likely to me, however, that it would have been more convincing and therefore more politically useful to the Medici rulers if the rhetoric had been in some way related to the actual presence of Jews in Tuscany. We must therefore understand who the Jews of Tuscany were, where they lived, how they

had arrived there and what their legal status was. This broader picture will help us understand why policymakers in Tuscany might have believed (or thought the idea credible) that the Jews were so far out of place that locating them in a new place might be considered a move that could enhance the honor and power of the Medici regime.

The Status of the Jews Before Ghettoization In Chapter One we noted that the edict of 3 October 1570 explained the expulsion of Jewish bankers as a just response to violations of their banking charters. The expulsion of the rest of the Jews was explained as a response to the supposed threat Jews posed to Christians who might be led astray from the correct practices of the Christian faith. Thinking first about those Jews who were bankers, we might ask why people should be expelled from their homes on the grounds that they had violated the terms of a business contract (assuming they had). Was this the measured action of a just sovereign, or were greedy local officials pursuing less honorable agendas? Agnolo di Laudadio, the Jewish banker of Pisa mentioned earlier, raised a similar concern before he knew that he and the other Jews were to be expelled, when his bank was closed and goods sequestered without due warning and without his having the opportunity to defend himself before justice. The duke must understand, Agnolo wrote in an urgent letter to Francesco, that “the merchants are shouting [that] one cannot have faith in the (bank)notes that are used, seeing that the laws of the fair are being changed and that some are being condemned without being able to defend themselves from those who have an interest in their [assets]! Did the duke not realize that other mer-

96 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power chants in Pisa might become alarmed and, losing faith in the administration of justice, might abandon Pisa? The duke should take command, Agnolo

suggested, lest his unscrupulous officials ruin his good name. , The edict’s position that expulsion is a response to the violation of contracts expresses the dukes’ concern to appear just and presumes a great deal about the status of Jews living in the Christian world in general and in Tuscany. Was the presence of Jews in Tuscany legally dependent on their adherence to terms of the banking charters? And how many of the Jews of Tuscany were bankers? The question of banking transgressions will be reserved for chapter four, after we have a better sense of who the Jews of Tuscany were.

Tolerance and Utility, Privilege and Permit: The Presence of Jews in Tuscany On the one hand, the church had taught since its early days that a “remnant” of Jews had been allowed to survive: to serve as “witness”— to remind Chris-

tians of the crucifixion of Christ—and to remind Christians, seeing the unhappy lot of the Jews, of the damaging effect of the perfidious failure to accept Christ.” In Renaissance Humanist circles, the value of Jews as witnesses was also found in their knowledge of the Hebrew language, an expertise sought out by Christian would-be Hebraists and Kabbalists. On the other hand, there was also the view that a remnant of Jews had been saved in order that they might convert en masse at a later date and herald the final coming of Christ.?* In contrast to the theological and teleological interpretation, the Jewish presence in any given Christian city or state was generally explained (when necessary) in one of two ways: either as an expression of Christian tolerance or as a utilitarian concession to worldly needs such as the need for moneylenders and doctors, among whose numbers Jews often figured prominently.”” Indeed, it is well established that Jewish pawnbrokers and doctors were often the first Jews specifically invited and permitted to live in Italian cities and towns, and there is some support for the argument that Jews deliberately entered occupations which made them “useful” to the Christian governing classes or rulers, even if their “utility,” like the utility of prostitutes and brothels, was disparaged by the same municipal leaders who contracted for their presence.”* Under these basic terms, the presence of Jews in Christian lands was always subject to the pleasure of Christian governments or rulers who might declare at any time, in spite of the Christian doctrinal position, that Jewish residents were more criminal than witness, or more dangerous than useful.

State-Building and Status 97

Jews in Tuscany: Legal Status in the Books and on the Ground Scholarship on Jews in premodern Europe, including sixteenth-century Italy, has generally assumed that Jews settled in a city or territory by invitation or

legal charter.*4 This interpretation of Jewish settlement is informed and deeply influenced by the existence of the texts that granted Jews permission

to settle in a given town or area. Jews and governments alike preserved copies of these valuable privileges, so this form of documentation was one of the most accessible sources used by earlier generations of Jewish historians. Since Roman law clearly stated the rights of Jews to observe their religion but did not clearly address the right of individuals to move from one place to another, Christian governments were often inarticulate on this latter subject. The legal record as well as later historians tend to assume that unless Jews had lived in a locale continuously since the Roman empire, current residents must be there by special permission. It is also generally accepted that the earliest Jewish settlements in northern Italy were small cells or colonies at whose nuclei were the bankers who received these contracts. (Rome, in contrast, had a larger population earlier on, whose roots were both ancient and swelled by immigration in the early sixteenth century.**) While the presence of nonbanking Jews in many places has been noted and documented, it is still generally thought that Jewish soci-

ety and culture was characterized, supported and determined by the bankers.° These small settlements, it is argued, became or gave way to larger Jewish communities in the cities of the Italian states north of Rome in the first half of the sixteenth century.’” Although it is clear that under crisis conditions, such as expulsion, Jews had no choice (besides conversion) but to keep moving and try to settle wherever they could, it is generally thought that Jews under less pressure did not move to a new territory or return to one

from which they had been expelled without the formal permission that ensured their protection. It seems consistent with this model that no more than a few scattered Jewish individuals are documented in Florence until 1437, after the government of the republic had authorized (in 1430) the residence of Jews who would lend money at the then low rate of no more than 20 percent.”8 The “invitation” took the form, common in the fifteenth century, of a charter or contract known in Italian as a condotta. In this case, it was granted to one Jew who was allowed to bring along three associates, their families and necessary personal and professional staff for the four families up to a maximum of sixty Jews.??,

These bankers were an urban elite, not part of the Florentine patriciate but

98 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power clients of the Medici and patrons in their own right, supporting the scholarly, literary, artistic and musical activity of other Jews, as well as providing work for clerks, servants and religious functionaries. The number of Jews in Florence and the neighboring cities in the fifteenth century was never large, but this small population enjoyed a period during which Jewish creativity—especially in Kabbalah, literature and philosophy—flourished.*° While specific families came and went, Jewish bankers maintained residence in Florence and nearby cities for almost a century. In 1527, when the

Medici family lost control of Florence and was expelled, there was what seemed to be a final, complete abrogation and annulment of Jewish privileges in Florence after several incomplete attempts (1477, 1491, 1493).3! A blanket cancellation of all Jewish banking concessions and term-limited charters was now specifically ordered, and the privileged Jews were to be expelled within the year.*? All the important families of Jewish bankers who had lived in Tuscany were affected: the da Pisa, the da Rieti, the da San Miniato and the da Camerino families relocated primarily in Bologna, Fano and Siena.* Jewish bankers were never invited to return to Florence. They were, however, allowed to settle in other parts of Tuscany much as Jews had made their way into the central and northern Italian states for centuries: following the

medieval model, they negotiated for and obtained charters. Whereas medieval Jews in France, Germany and Spain sometimes negotiated as a con-

sortium or community to obtain a charter, in Tuscany individual Jews or partnerships obtained all the banking charters granted in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The charters granted to these Jewish moneylenders stipulated the conditions under which they were to be allowed to operate their pawnshops or banks, including the rate at which interest could be taken.*4 The first new banking charters in Tuscany were issued in 1547, valid for a period of five, ten or fifteen years, and, in theory and practice, renewable. The bankers paid an annual fee for each concession, but they were also exempted from many types of taxes and given a variety of protections. These charters were, of course, privileges. Christians and Jews who did

not hold charters could not legally lend money at interest. Moneylending was seen as a necessary evil, but Jewish usury was considered a lesser evil than

Christian usury, which was a sin. The great and wealthy Christian banking families of Florence—the Strozzi, the Medici and others— overcame those restrictions by manipulating exchange rates instead of charging interest. They had their own guild of “bankers” from which authorized moneylenders and pawnbrokers were excluded.*° Because the condotte granted Jews the right to live and lend money in a given area, the nonrenewal or annulment of a charter was tantamount to expulsion for Jews who were dependent on moneylend-

State-Building and Status 99 ing as their sole source of income. However, as Michele Luzzati has noted, the privileged Jews were not exclusively involved in banking: some were doctors and many were merchants. Banking charters were sometimes a cover, tacitly understood and accepted by Christians, for Jewish economic diversification and geographical spread.*° Some Jews took advantage of the duke’s willingness to charter them as moneylenders and then virtually ignored that charter, pursuing other activities that wove them into the local and regional economies. During the rule of Cosimo I, some of the original Florentine Jewish families and other Jewish bankers were allowed to settle in cities in Tuscany. Cosimo’s decision to permit at least one of these families of Jewish bankers may have been influenced by his wife, the duchess Eleanora of Toledo. While living in Naples before her marriage to Cosimo in 1539, and before the Jews were expelled from that city in 1541, Eleanora had a relationship with Dofia Benvegnita Abravanel. Benvegnita was the daughter of a Jewish nobleman who served as financier at the court of the Portuguese viceroy in Naples. According to Abravanel family tradition, she had been Eleonora’s tutor or governess.?” When her husband Samuel died a few years after the exiled family had taken refuge under the protection of the Este in Ferrara, Benvegnita apparently called upon Eleonora, now duchess of Florence. She and her son Iacob were together granted the Tuscan banking charter in 1547.33 At about the same time charters were also granted to the da Rieti family and to the widow Fiametta da Pisa and her sons.*? It may be that Cosimo I was willing to grant banking privileges to Jews because of the potential economic stimulus that credit could bring.*” More

certainly, he understood the necessity of providing creditors who would make small loans at a reasonable rate.*! Jewish bankers set up shops in places where there were not yet monti di pieta and in a few where there were, coex-

isting with them there as elsewhere.*? Cosimo thus officially allowed the resettlement of Jews in the territory for the first time in twenty years. None of these bankers were granted the privilege of doing business in Florence but

they were granted permission by the duke to open branches in at least a dozen towns, including Pisa, Arezzo, Prato, Empoli, Pescia, San Miniato, Colle, Cortona, Borgo San Sepulcro, Castrocaro, Borgo S. Laurenzia and San Giovanni (see Map 2).*%

The thesis that the settlement of Jews in Tuscany depended on the settlement of the bankers seems at first to be supported by the branch structure of the sixteenth-century banks whose charters were held by only a few families. These families did not have residences in all the places where their firms were permitted to open offices; indeed, not all of the Jews who were granted char-

100. ~=—— The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power

ters moved to Tuscany. For example, Benvegnita Abravanel, though she received permission to open branches of her bank in Tuscany, remained in Ferrara. Her son and business partner Iacob was at the head of a large household in Florence in 1562, but the family’s various banks were managed by

agents, several of whom attempted to remain on site after the Abravanel charters expired.** Generally, wherever banking offices (sportelli, or negotie)

were opened, the bankers were allowed to hire Jewish ministers and agents to run them. It has been argued that it was these men, their wives, their children and relatives who began to populate the towns.** And indeed, the settlement of young adult Jews in Tuscany in the 1550s seems to have set off a small baby boom in the mid 1550s to early 1560s.*°

It is most interesting, therefore, that when we look more closely at the demographic data we find that the repopulation of Tuscany by Jews in the sixteenth century did not depend to the expected degree on the presence of Jewish bankers. The problem may be seen at once if we consider Florence

itself. Here Jews had never been permitted to lend money since 1527; nonetheless, a census of 1562 identified at least thirty-nine men, women and children as members of Jewish households, and the census of 1570 found eighty-six.*” Since in 1570 the Jews who lived in Florence were not bankers, the decision to ghettoize them (and other Jews) cannot be directly linked to the decision to nullify Jewish banking charters or to root out Jewish usurers. Moving out from Florence, we must reevaluate Jewish settlement in Tuscany as a whole. Did it conform to the two-fold (and somewhat self-contradictory) paradigm described above in which Jews were tolerated in theory in Christian lands under both canon and Roman law, while in practice their status depended on charters provided to them because of their “utility”?

Jewish Banks and Bankers in Tuscany on the Eve of Ghettoization When a formal count was made of the Jews in Florence in 1570, eighty-six Jewish individuals were identified. None of these were licensed to operate or work at a Jewish bank in Florence. These Jews cannot be identified as descendants of Jews who had lived in Florence prior to 1527: the adults among them were not native Florentines.** We are not speaking of a stable, historic popu-

lation, but of relatively recently arrived Florentine Jews who were not moneylenders. The situation in Florence is echoed in the rest of the state, where 712 Jews

were counted in twenty-one towns in 1570. Utilizing letters of exemption

State-Building and Status _tor from the segno which had been imposed in 1567, Michele Luzzati estimated : that one fifth of the Jewish families in Tuscany in 1570 were bankers.*” These

letters should not have been necessary for bankers, who were already exempted by the text of the segno legislation itself. However, they sought the extra protection, as did other Jews who were not bankers; apparently their status as bankers did not immunize the Jews from harassment by local officials who might arrest them, or from trouble with their debtors or creditors. They were particularly vulnerable while traveling away from home, when they might be arrested under pretext of not wearing the badge. The letters of exemption from wearing the segno covered between 160 and 180 individual Jews— bankers and members of their families, factors, ministers and agents, along with other Jews who were able to obtain the privilege. In total this represents about one quarter of the Jews living in the Florentine state in 1570. This number, however, is a better indicator of the size of the Jewish elite (relative to Jews who were not able to obtain exemptions) in Tuscany—and especially in Pisa and a few other cities—than of the size of the banking population. This elite includes nonbanking Jews who held special status or who were related to Jews who had court connections. Among them was Ventura di Moise da Perugia, a prominent Jewish exile from Venice of whom we shall hear more later, who had established a connection with Cosimo I.5° Combining information from the letters of exemption with data given in the census of Jewish households conducted 1n 1570, it is possible to arrive at a more precise estimate of the proportion of the population involved in banking. Of the Jewish lending establishments legally chartered to Jews since 1547, six remained open in 1566: at Anghiari, a bank of the Abravanel; at Empoli, at Pescia (with a booth that could be set up at Prato on market days only) and

at San Giovanni, banks conceded to the heirs of Abramo da Pisa; at Pisa, where the da Rieti were still installed (they also banked in Siena); and finally,

at Monterchi, where the privilege was held by Agnolo di Vitale da Camerino.*! The decline in the number of Jewish banks reflects the deteriorating conditions for Jewish moneylending in Tuscany in the 1560s, as the bankers were forced to drop their rates from 30 percent to 20 percent. In a few cases, the banks originally chartered at 30 percent closed and a different family of bankers, willing to take their place at the lower rate, renegotiated for privileges. In other, smaller centers, no new bank had been chartered after the expiration of the first charter. In addition to these banks, there was some additional Jewish moneylending activity in Tuscany in the 1560s. Salamone di Isac had been banking in Bibbiena since 1567.°* In Pomerance (or Ripomerance), Sabato di Salamone de Monteulmo was allowed to open a bank in 1558.°* Research has not yet

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State-Building and Status — 103 turned up charters for other Jews who loaned money to Christians, legally or illegally: in the 1550s and 1560s in Monte San Savino, the doctors Samuel and Laudadio de Blanis engaged in banking as well as in their medical profession.** In Pontedera, Manuello di Ioseph of the da Empoli, or Alpelinghi (in Hebrew, Alpelink), family, was called a banker in 1567, but was not lending in 1570.°° Davit di Iacob da Poppi was accused of illegally lending money in Poppi 1559 and 1560, and was still living there in 1570.°° Despite this apparently abundant evidence of Jewish banking in Tuscany, including moneylending not documented as officially permitted, the cumu-

lative data show that the great majority of Jews and, especially, of Jewish households, were not engaged in moneylending. There were Jewish bankers, or Jews who had other occupations but also lent money, in only eleven of the twenty-one towns where Jews were known to live in 1570 (including Prato).°” There was an official ducal charter granting the Jews the right to bank, and therefore to live, in only seven (one third) of the twenty-one places where Jews actually lived (see Map 2).°® These facts require us to revise the tradi-

tional settlement narrative and any explanation of the ghettoization that might be based on the supposed activities of Jewish bankers. Using information from the census of 1570, it is also possible to establish how many Jews lived in each banking household in towns where there were bankers, except for Pisa and Colle, where the Jewish population was listed only in the aggregate. The analysis reveals that of 128 Jewish households in Tuscany in 1570, excluding the Jews of Pisa and Colle, at most 16 (12.5 percent

of the households) were headed by a Jew who was involved primarily in banking.®? Of the 608 Jews in these 128 households, at most 97 (16 percent) lived in banking households. The fact that about 13 percent of the households were banking households but 16 percent of the Jews lived in them reflects the well-known pattern that wealthier households—whether Christian or Jewish—were larger than less wealthy households (and this would be even more obvious if we had not counted the Jewish tailors in Florence as individual households). In 1570, of course, the Jews were expelled from all the towns in Tuscany, even though there were Jewish moneylenders living in fewer than half those that had Jewish populations. The expulsion affected not only Jewish bankers, or families who might be considered “dependent” on them, but all Jews. If the state had been interested in ending the practice of Jewish usury (for religious reasons) or 1n eliminating Jewish bankers (in order to give their business to other creditors), it could have simply expelled the Jewish bankers. It did not need to make a ghetto or to expel Jews who had other crafts and professions. But we have learned that Jewish bankers were not the majority of

104 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power Jews; is it not possible that this fact in and of itself was part of what led the state to ponder the presence and status of the Jews? Some might prefer to

either empower or blame the Jews by imagining that their own banking activities had landed them in trouble, or else that it had nothing to do with the Jews at all and only with latent Christian anti-Jewish attitudes. However, I would argue that this expulsion of the Jews can best be understood in the context of the presence of Jews in the state, but not because of their activities. More specifically, it must be understood in the context of the presence of Jews who were not moneylenders.

The ghettoization order would affect over seven hundred Jews who, despite the expulsions of Jews from Tuscany in 14.97 and 1527, were found in over twenty towns in Tuscany by 1570. Half the towns with Jewish populations had no Jewish moneylenders, even though there had never been a for-

mal invitation to other types of Jews to settle there. Even in towns where there were authorized Jewish moneylenders, they were outnumbered by Jews who were not bankers. If the basis for Jewish residence in Christian lands was their “utility,” institutionalized in charters the very existence of which reified the need for Jews to obtain permission for residence (anywhere), on what basis were the rest of the Jews living in Tuscany?

The Merchant Jews of Florence While bankers received their invitations in the form of individually negotiated charters, or condotte, there was another group of Jews who were granted a different type of admission to the Tuscan state. In 1551 Cosimo I issued a general invitation to merchants of diverse origins, “Greeks, Turks, Moors, Jews, Egyptians, Armenians and Persians” to come do business and live in Florence and in the rest of the state. The purpose of this invitation was to enhance commerce: neither the included Jews nor any others were given permission to operate banks or lend money in Florence; indeed, they were forbidden to do so. For decades, Jews who wanted to live in Tuscany and local officials who supported them would refer back to this invitation. This new type of charter, clearly mercantilist in approach, was becoming increasingly popular in the commercially competitive early modern states.© In the 154.0s and 1550s, Florentine merchants in such thriving European ports as Antwerp and Flanders became aware of and impressed by the wealth and

trading connections of the Portuguese Nation, as the descendants of the forced converts in Portugal called themselves. Expelled or self-exiled under threat of inquisitorial proceedings, in the course of the sixteenth century (and

State-Building and Status —105

in the seventeenth century) these New Christians settled in southwestern France, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Hamburg and London and, rather separately, in Constantinople and Salonika and throughout the eastern Mediterranean parts of the Ottoman empire.” It was during the 1540s and 15sos that the

New Christian Dofia Beatrice de Luna moved from Portugal with her nephew, her sister and their daughters, together with their phenomenal mercantile wealth. Her journey took her through Antwerp, Venice and Ferrara before she ultimately settled, as an openly professing Jew known as Dona Gracia, in Constantinople. The correspondence of the court during these decades suggests that Florentine merchants and statesmen had a number of secretive contacts with people referred to in the texts variably as Spanish Jews, New Christians, Portuguese, Lusitanians, Marranos and Levantines. The plots of many of these stories have never been told: there are ships with interesting cargoes, pirates and mutinies, captives and spies; some of the correspondence is written in secret numerical code. Cosimo’s plans for the economic development of his state included, in mid-century, efforts to attract to Pisa and the Florentine duchy Portuguese merchants, including specific individuals in Flanders of whom he had been made aware. These efforts included the issuance of privileges to “Lusitanians” (Portuguese) in 1549. The 1549 charter to the Portuguese merchants went to great lengths to assure them that they would have immunity from the kind of dangerous accusation and persecution that Portuguese New Christians had faced in Portugal since the establishment of the Inquisition there in 1537.°? The promise of immunity from prosecution for blasphemy or heresy or other matters of the faith cannot be construed as permission for the Portuguese to live as Jews once in Tuscany. The assumption

was that they were and would remain Christians. Indeed, despite the assumption of some scholars that Portuguese New Christians are cryptoJews (referred to in the Italian sources as marrani, Marranos), the research on the Portuguese who immigrated to Tuscany in the 15sos has not yielded evidence that any of them were living as crypto-Jews or openly as Jews.™ In 1551, however, Cosimo reached out explicitly to Jewish Levantine merchants, many of whom also had Iberian origins. The privilege of 1551 was one of Cosimo’s efforts to foster trade relations with the Ottoman empire, though perhaps not a direct response to a petition of Iacob Abravanel as Cassuto thought.© The privilege gave the merchants

the right to build and freely worship in mosques and synagogues, and assured them that they would be under no pressure to convert to Christianity. The utmost level of protection of life and property was promised, including the right of the merchants to leave the state with all their property should

106 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power war develop between the state and “il gran S[igno]re Turco” The merchants were “immune, free and exempt” from all taxes and imposts of every kind except for port customs (yabelle delle porte et dogane). The document was clearly modeled on a similar set of privileges given by the pope to merchants

of various origins in Ancona, and it was an effort to attract international trade in competition with Ancona and Venice. Although there were no specific limitations on the Jews (Hebrei) who were to be included in this open privilege, given the context of the “Greeks, Turks, Moors, Jews, Egyptians, Armenians and Persians” to whom it was issued, it is clear that Jewish merchants with international, overseas connections were intended. Cassuto argued that the charter was primarily directed at attracting Levantine Jews (that is, Jews of presumably Eastern origin who had mercantile connections to Levantine markets®’). This is possible: Cosimo would very likely have preferred not to deliberately call attention to his invitation to Jews, but rather to insert them into a general invitation to foreign merchants. In any event, a Jew named Servadio Greco of Damascus was appointed to coordinate the arrival and trade of all the newly invited merchants—not just Jewish merchants—and was granted privileges above and

beyond those of the other merchants. The invitation did not notably increase the volume of trade between Florence and the Levant.°’ It led to the establishment of only a small number of Jewish merchants of Levantine or Ponentine (Portuguese and Spanish) origin in permanent residence in Florence, these merchants apparently preferring to settle in the already thriving ports of Ancona, Pesaro and especially Venice. Florence was an attractive capital city and an important center for banking and the production of woolens and silks, but it did not have its own seaport or flourishing overseas trade routes. In contrast, Jewish merchants of Portuguese and North African origin did build large communities in Livorno and Pisa after similar privileges were issued for those Tuscan cities in 1591 and 1593.”

The slow arrival of Jewish merchants in Florence was not only due to the absence of a true port. Despite the assurances of the duke, the Jewish merchants he hoped to attract in the 1550s and 1560s had good reason to be wary of settling in Catholic countries. Many of these merchants, based in Syria, Turkey and other parts of the eastern Mediterranean, were New Christians of Spanish or Portuguese origin, who had lived on the Iberian peninsula until their departure in recent decades to return to Judaism either in full or in part. Others were the children of exiles or refugees from the forced conversions of 1391 Or the expulsions in Castile and Aragon, Navarre and the Kingdom of

Naples between 1492 and 1497. Having taken sanctuary in the Ottoman

State-Building and Status —_107 Empire, in northern African cities and in free northern European cities, these Jews and New Christians had international connections through family that opened new avenues to them and enhanced their effectiveness as merchants. However, their status in Catholic countries was deeply complicated not only by their questionable religious status or identity (which might appear to be neither consistently Jewish nor consistently Catholic) but also by the very fact that some of them, novy living as Jews, had been born to baptized parents or had themselves been baptized. State policies with regard to “New Christians” who returned to Judaism swayed dramatically depending on the policies of the current pope and on relations between pope and prince. Thus the invitation of 1551 was written in the knowledge that Pope Paul III’s papal concession of 21 February 1547 had extended the already extensive rights possessed by Turks, Jews and other ifi-

deles in Ancona to explicitly include persons of the Kingdom of Portugal “also if of the Jewish origin, now called New Christians.’ The charter was understood to protect these merchants from inquiry into their religious practices, short of heresy, and has been said to reflect the papal opinion at the time that because forced conversion was invalid, forced converts who reverted to Judaism were not to be treated as heretics. Although the words of the charter do not state that New Christians are allowed to live as Jews, Popes Paul IIT and Julius III, according to Simonsohn, “openly tolerated their reversion to Judaism?” But the Jewish/New Christian community of Ancona was devastated only a few years later by the reversal of this policy by

the new pope, Paul IV, which led to the burning of twenty-five people accused of being Marranos—and now considered heretics—in 1556.” Aware of this situation, members of this merchant diaspora did not rush

to settle in Italian cities. When they did, they did not necessarily identify themselves as Jews in their contacts with the various clerks, administrators and notaries upon whom we rely for our data, and they may even have chosen to avoid contact with local Jews. Individual Levantine. or Portuguese merchants may have escaped their notice and ours, passing as Christians or living the more ambiguous life of a Marrano without drawing attention to themselves. One such person is known to us only because of Venetian antiTurkish surveillance activities, which led to the arrest in 1570 of a man named

Abram or Abraam Righetto, reported to be a Marrano, living as a Jew in Venice. Evidence collected included the testimony that he had been known well at the court of Florence as a Christian named Henriques (Henrigo, Henrico) Nugnes.”* Working from Florentine archival data alone, we would

have had no reason to consider Nugnes in Florence anything other than Christian, since his name does not arise in the context of other Florentine

108 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power Jews. But whereas one man could pass or be allowed to pass, groups drew attention. A group of Portuguese merchants lived together in one house in Florence, and people noticed that they did not attend church. We read on the 1567 list of Jews in Florence who should be required to wear the segno that there was in the Populo di San Michele Bertoldi “a house on the Piazza de glagli that is said to be [inhabited by] Portuguese, but they do not bring themselves to the Church, nor take sacraments, and it is said that they are Marranos, and they are five in number.”” The number of Jewish merchants who arrived in response to the privilege of 1551 1s accordingly quite modest. There were about twenty Jews living in recognizably Levantine or Ponentine merchant households in 1567, of a total of ninety-seven Jews present in the city at that time.”° There were fewer still

| in Florence in 1570, and they had no noticeable presence in Tuscany as a whole, except for a small number in Pisa.”” Nonetheless, the 1549 and 1551 privileges gave this small cadre of Portuguese merchants and Levantine Jewish merchants a protected status that they relied on, and some other members of the Iberian and Jewish diaspora may also have depended on this status, even if they were not engaged in long-distance trade. In the last chapter I introduced Isaia Coen, accused by another Jew in 1566 of being a Marrano. When Isaia responded, “Call me Christian, Turk or Jew, see what damage you can do, for I am under the protection of a good prince,’ he seems to have been relying on or even alluding to the protection implicit in the 1551 privileges, that Levantines would be allowed to settle in Florence without inquiry into their religious status or current practice.”* Although he did eventually find it necessary to convince the inquisitorial court that he had in fact been

born as a Jew and not baptized (he found witnesses to testify that he had been born to Jewish parents in Smyrna), he seems to have at first assumed that as a Levantine Jew he would be protected by the duke. The small number of Levantine merchants should be distinguished from the larger population of Jews of Spanish or possibly Portuguese origin who lived in ‘Tuscany, but who were not recent arrivals from the Levant and had no active mercantile connections there, since these were not living in Tuscany under specific terms or privileges. Our useful informant is once again the Roman Jew Moise Buondi, who came before the papal inquisitor and nuncio in Florence in 1566 to denounce Isaia Coen. According to the notarial tran-

script of the interview, the inquisitor first began to ask Moise how many “Marranos” there were in Florence. Midway through the question he corrected himself, thinking perhaps to receive a more complete answer, and asked instead (the scribe crossed out the word marrant) how many “Spanish

Jews” there were. Moise Buondi—though eager to ingratiate himself—

State-Building and Status 109 named only three: Isaia Coen, the accused; Daniel Baroch; and Ioseph Achias.” At the very same time, the records of the guilds and the censuses show that there were a number of other Jews of Iberian origin living in Florence with whom Moise, who had been living there for several years, would most likely have been acquainted.®? Buondi’s response when he was asked for

the names of Spanish Jews indicates that he differentiated between Jews of Spanish origin whom he considered Italian, on the one hand, and Jews of Iberian origin from the Levant, on the other.®! He called only the latter “Spagnuoli, adding quite maliciously that in his opinion “they are a// Marranos.”

Moise’s opinion was not in fact very important to the papal inquisitor in Florence, but the accusation that these Jews were Marranos was potentially very dangerous. Moise’s hostility to the foreign merchant Jews was probably in part a reaction to Levantine superiority.** Not only were the Levantine Jews generally wealthier, they were protected and privileged and had, since 1551, a legitimate, legal, official place in Florentine society. They were, how-

ever, fewer than one quarter of the Jews present in Florence and a much smaller percentage of the Jews in Tuscany in general. Most of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews in Tuscany had been living on the Italian peninsula for almost a century or more, and they were generally thought of, by Christians and Jews alike, as “Italian” Only recent Levantine arrivals were considered suspiciously “Spanish” or “Marrano,” and only recently arrived long-distance Jewish merchants were considered privileged. In sum, there were formally two officially legitimated avenues for Jewish entry into and residence in the Tuscan state after the expulsion of 1527, combining the typical medieval and the newer, early modern type of “invited” set-

tlement for Jews in Christian Europe. There were Jewish bankers who obtained charters, and there were Levantine merchants who received privileges. But these two groups do not account for all the Jews in Tuscany in 1570; indeed, they do not even account for half the population.

Jews Without Borders Who, then, were the rest of the Jews of Tuscany? Some, like Moise Buondi, were poor Jews who had come from Rome and other parts of Italy to Florence. Others settled in small towns throughout the state. For example, there were eight small Jewish households in Castrocaro, none of them involved in banking.®? In Pieve a Santo Stefano there were nineteen Jews in four households headed by three tailors and a saddlepack-maker. Jews such as these did

110 ~=—S- The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power

not seek to obtain privileges or permission to settle. In Foiano there were four Jewish households, none of whom were bankers, and there were Jewish households in 1570 in Castiglione, Cortona, Foiano, Pontedera, Poppi and

Volterra, but no Jewish bankers in any of these places. | The lists submitted to the governments from the various podesta and other officials did not consistently identify the occupations of the Jews who were not bankers. Only in a few cases was the occupation recorded: five Jews were listed as servants to other Jews; seventeen heads-of-household were listed as tailors. There was one innkeeper, a woman; there were several medical doctors; one family produced wool or woolen cloth. Matriculation records from the guilds, however, show Jews entering a number of additional crafts and trades in Tuscany beginning in the 1530s."* The Jews of Tuscany may well have been as diverse in their occupations as Jews were in the nearby region of Umbria, where Jews of the period 1340-1550 worked at a stunningly wide

variety of artisan crafts and professions: there were stationers and bookbinders, iron mongers, mattress-makers, carters, tanners, a goldsmith, a gun-

powder-maker, a dance-master and even three Jews enrolled in a guild of painters.®°

In hindsight, these other Tuscan Jews were clearly a category apart. They were neither bankers nor merchants with overseas connections or potential. They therefore should not have had the status of either of the two legally established types of Jews formally permitted to settle in Tuscany. However, in the 1550s, when Jews trickled into the state from various places as individuals and in small family groups, the policy of Cosimo I was one of tolerance, and Jews were not sorted and marked like so many wheels of cheese. Not all communities under Cosimo’s control were as accepting of new Jewish immigrants. The community of Arezzo in 1557 asked for the duke’s permission to expel a number of Jews who had arrived from the Castello, fleeing oppressive taxes in that papal territory. Arezzo also sought permission to ban the future settlement of Jews. The duke’s council, the Pratica Segreta, advised him that there was no reason to grant this request, which he consequently denied.®° It was a short, unapologetic response, and under this new political entity, the duchy, towns could not disagree with policy. Cosimo’s letter to Arezzo, while deferring grandly to the wise judgment of the Aretines, explained first, that the policy of the church was to tolerate

the Jews, and second, that both the ducal treasury and the local Aretines would benefit from the presence of the Jews, who would be renting property and buying local goods.*’ It is important to see here that Cosimo was not working under a false assumption that all Jews were bankers or important merchants. In an understated third point the letter noted that none of these

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Jews was to be allowed to lend at usury, that being a concession already granted to Don Iacob (Abravanel).®* In other words, Cosimo did not require all Jews to be bankers or even manufacturers in order to treat them as legitimate subjects of his dominion. Population growth from economically active individuals was good enough. From the early 1530s through the 1560s, therefore, Jews moved to many towns and quietly integrated themselves without very much contact with the central government.

There was some contact. The preserved correspondence of the Medici court includes copies of petitions that arrived at court for every kind of favor

that a subject might have hoped to receive from Cosimo (and later from Francesco) or from his magistrates. While we can see that bureaucratization and systematization were proceeding apace, in many ways this process relied on and reinforced the more obvious and time-tested culture of patronage. Many people in Tuscany related to the duke as clients more than as subjects, and they expressed their loyalty to their patron-prince when they sent in letters requesting the assistance of His Most Serene Highness: monetary assistance, a recommendation for a position for a son or nephew, a letter of recommendation for a marriage arrangement, the gift of a dowry or of a horse. Jews were among those who occasionally sent petitions directly to the dukes, most often looking for exemptions from taxes, sumptuary laws or guild regulations. Don Iacob Abravanel, “humble servant of Your Excellency,’ for example, sent supplication to the duke in 1559 “that he and four servants might be allowed to bear arms by day and by night in Florence and everywhere in your felicitious state.” This privilege, granted to him by Lelio Torelli, gave Abravanel a right that was denied not only to most Jews but to most ordinary Christians. Another Jew who obtained permission to carry arms and be accompanied by armed servants was the Levantine customs head broker, Servadio Greco.®’ Less extraordinary Jews also petitioned the court. One was Isac del Cano (alias Calo), a used-clothing-dealer who had recently moved to Florence from Rome. In 1565 he petitioned the court for a safeconduct (salvacondotta) to protect him from his Roman creditors. In his letter apprising the duke of the matter, Francesco Vinta reminded the duke that he had already granted a general privilege “in favor of numerous foreigners, Turks, Jews etc. that they should come live in Your Most Happy State, which grants them, among other things, security for all the debts they have with foreigners—that is those who are not your subjects.”’? One Jewish merchant family successfully obtained the same privileges as the chartered Jewish bankers by writing an indignant petition to the duke, explaining that they

| had been dishonored by the fact that Jewish usurers (!) have been granted favors that they, good Jews who were not usurers (!) had not been granted.

112 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power In response, in 1550 Cosimo granted to Pace, Elia and Ventura of the Leucci family of perfume-merchants in Pisa all the privileges afforded to any other Jew who had a bank in Pisa, thereby preserving their status as members of the Jewish elite in Pisa and ensuring that they would not be seen by Jews or Christians in Pisa as having the “normal” status of unprivileged Jews. That their right to live as residents in Pisa did not depend on these privileges was

confirmed by the clear reference to their continual residence in that city, “antiquamente et da lungo tempo” (anciently and for a long time).”! Jews were certainly not afraid to call attention to their own presence; they were not attempting to disappear into the countryside. Emanuel di Ioseph hebreo of Empoli in Pontedera, for example, sought privileges for himself, his brothers and his sons 1n 1556 to produce and sell woolens with the same immunities and regulations as the merchants of Montopoli.”” The people of this town, located on the route between the two larger cities of Empoli and Pontedera where the family had settled, must have attempted to exclude the

competition of this nonresident family. But, considering that the said Emanuello (1.e., Emanuel) and his sons and brothers “were born and originate in the said land of Montopoli,” the duke promised the full set of exemptions to whoever in the family was willing to actually move to Montopolli and live there.” It is interesting that in this case the exemption from taxes was granted to Emanuello “to the end that he will be able to honestly sustain his family and, inspired by the light of grace, some day recognize our true faith-”** The “conversion clause” seen here was not commonly included in the privileges granted to Tuscan Jews, so the fact that Emanuel did later convert to Christianity suggests that he may have already had a Christian friend and benefactor at the time he sent his petition to the duke. In any event, his still-

Jewish wife, his brothers and most of his children remained in the woolens business long after his conversion—and they were still living in Empoli and Pontedera. Because the court kept copies of petitions and supplications that Jews and others submitted, we learn that except for the bankers and merchants of nonItalian origin, Jews who entered the Tuscan state must have done so without seeking specific permission for residency. When Jews sought privileges, charters or safe-conducts they were looking for just that: special privileges, usually of a fiscal nature. One more example may seal this point: a safe-conduct

granted in 1559 to two Jewish merchants, brothers who wanted to make a substantial investment in developing their markets in Tuscany while they lived elsewhere and occasionally entered the state to conduct business. From the perspective of the duke and his advisors, the concession and point of the privilege, beyond protection from the harassment of local officials, was that

State-Buiulding and Status —113

these merchants would trade freely, paying taxes but without being required to join any guild or respect its regulations.”° Otherwise, it seems that the statutes of the specific cities where Jews lived in Tuscany did not forbid or exclude the residence of Jews, and the duke seems to have had no objection

to increasing his population with immigrants from outside the Christian faith.” To conclude, the Medici correspondence shows that individual Jews, like Christians, did petition the court for special privileges. Jews got recommendations to the court by using their business relationships and friendships and perhaps sometimes took advantage of the interest of a well-placed individual who hoped to win a soul through conversion. But even these special petitions confirm the presence of Jews who were not chartered. These Jews were not subject to the authority of chartered Jews and in most cases had no particular status under the law. Elite Jews like the Leucci crafted their petitions in the discourse of honor and virtue and claimed status based on their familial antiquity. Some of them sought higher status by trying to associate themselves with the high-status bankers, even using an anti-usury discourse to do so. Others played the patronage system to obtain privileges and exemptions by emphasizing their direct and personal subordination to the duke as his subjects or clients. Ultimately, this approach worked for the da Rieti and Leucci families of Pisa, which were eventually able to obtain exemptions from the requirement of living in the ghetto in Florence.” The strategy may have backfired for the Jews as a whole when the duke decided that the Jews were easily removed from the local communities and jurisdictions in which they lived.

A Change in the Policy toward the Jews in 1569 The expulsion of the Jews from the papal territories in 1569 introduced several new pressures on the status quo, in part because of the flow of Jews into the Tuscan state. The general atmosphere at court, meanwhile, was chillier toward the Jewish presence in Tuscany, in large part due to the personal attitudes of Duke Francesco. In Chapter One I argued that Francesco was clearly aware of the accusation that New Christians were actually Marranos and that he was aware of moves being taken against those suspected of being Marranos in Venice, Ferrara and Spain. The documentary evidence does not reveal a similar concern among Florentine patricians or people as a whole. What the

archives do provide, however, are documents that record a discomfort at once less personal and more integral to the operation of the state: the grow-

114 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power ing unease of some state-appointed officials. It is not a fear or hatred of Jews that is revealed, nor a particular desire on the part of most state officials to convert them, nor a concern about the presence of Marranos. Rather, we can see hints of an uneasy awareness of the small but critical increase in the flow of Jewish immigrants and the lack of any clear state policy regarding their status. We see, moreover, the insecurity of local officials negotiating their own place during a transitional political regime and in the face of the changing relationship between the Roman curia and the Tuscan state.

An example of this malaise was seen in the May 1569 correspondence referred to earlier between the regent duke Francesco de’ Medici and the governor of Siena: the governor opposed the integration of Jews expelled from the papal states, and Francesco responded in the same spirit with instructions

that Jews were not to be permitted to settle there.** The next month Cosimo’s son and the local official of the Tuscan city of Volterra had a longer

exchange of letters.”” The captain (capitano) of this ancient town to the southwest of Florence, Luigi Martelli, sent a letter to Francesco to ask for instructions regarding the status of certain Jews who had recently arrived. The twenty or twenty-four Jews who had recently arrived, the captain of Volterra wrote, were “wool-workers, shoemakers and the like” who “were going around searching for a place to live [habitation] where they could, with their crafts, raise and nourish their children”!”° As he presented the situation

to the duke, he had informed these refugees from the papal state that they could not stay in Volterra without obtaining permission from the duke, and he had told them to consider whether they wanted to attempt to do so or would move on. In response, Martelli informed Francesco, a few days later they had shown him a copy of a privilege granted by His Excellency “Your Father” (Duke Cosimo I) in 1551 that had allowed Jews (Hebret) to settle in Tuscany. Nonetheless, Martelli concluded, he wished to know the duke’s mind on this matter of accepting Jews who had been chased out by the pope.?} Francesco responded promptly—and very briefly—that those privileges applied only to “Levantines,” and not to “those [Jews] who live in Italy’— here interpreting the 1551 privileges to exclude their application to the Jews in

question.’ But Martelli wrote back asking for clarification, apparently not satisfied with the duke’s answer because it did not state explicitly whether the Jews should be allowed to remain in town or should be sent away. Agreeing that the privileges of 1551 referred only to Levantines, he asked for further instruction regarding the refugees, whom he now described in greater detail: they were two families, one with nine members and one with ten. He again made a specific point of noting their occupations (mercatuolo and calzatolo)

State-Building and Status —_115

and their peninsular provenance: one “comes from Sez[ze], {in the] campagna of Rome, of which he is a native” and the other “comes from Terracina and is a native of Gaeta.” These, all “chased out” recently from the papal state, had been brought to Volterra by another Jew, head of a household of five, who was a native of Montefuscoli in the Kingdom of Naples and had lived in the city about five years as a used-clothes-dealer.'°’ With evident irritation, the duke now responded a second time that the license of 1551 did not extend to other Jews and added shortly: “we do not understand what other declaration you want from us.”!* Martelli’s letters express an ambivalence about the Jews. On the one hand, he provides details about the Jews that might be intended to elicit a princely display of compassion: the size of the families, their occupation, their desire to nourish their children. On the other hand, he judiciously records his own doubt that these Jews should be allowed to stay in “this Your city, which in

truth does not seem to me to be a place for them.”!” The captain wanted either explicit instruction to throw the Jews out or explicit permission to allow them to stay.’°° The answer that these particular Jews were not included in the privileges of 1551 did not tell Martelli what their status was since it was possible that Jews were allowed to settle in Tuscany without special privileges.

The governor’s decision to correspond with the ducal court—and thus engage in a small and not very successful negotiation of his own authority in Volterra—was provoked not by the presence of the Jews, and certainly not by any confusione or inability to identify them as Jews, but rather by a lack of

clarity on how to treat them. Clearly, Martelli did not consider himself authorized to make the decision in the first instance, probably because he understood that relations between the pope and the duke were involved. He had not been in Volterra five years earlier, when the other family of Jews had apparently been able to settle there unquestioned, perhaps because before 1569 Cosimo was known to be tolerant of Jews and local governors had not needed to consult Florence every time a Jew came to town. The privilege of 1551, had, in fact, referred only to “Hebrei,’ assuming that they were merchants but not finding it necessary to specify the exclusion of more ordinary Jews. And it is remarkatlec that the Jews themselves— ordinary artisans— knew of the 1551 privilege and attempted to use it, fostering the myth of the relationship of the Jews to the prince. But in the years after 1564, Francesco began to play a much more active role in governing the state. Officials appointed by one or other of the two Medici princes already had to struggle with the complicated tensions related to local governing autonomy in the shadow of increasingly effective central-

116 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power ized rule from Florence. Perhaps it eventually struck policymakers in Florence— Cosimo’s advisors Lelio Torelli and Francesco Vinta and others rising

to power with Francesco—as unacceptably messy that each case had to be negotiated individually, that there was no statewide Jewish policy. In 1569, after the expulsion of the Jews from the papal territories, local officials in Tuscany attempted to work the system carefully. Those who governed and administered the towns in the southern and eastern regions of the Florentine and Sienese states did not know whether Cosimo and Francesco were willing to accept as refugees people scorned by the pope, nor did they know that the pope had not actually requested that Cosimo seal his borders to Jews. They were, on the other hand, aware that an expulsion had taken place and that the response to Jewish immigration might now be an indicator of political relations between the two states. Indeed, it might even have been a source of contention between the grand duke Cosimo and his son the duke Francesco, The presence of even one Jew might be a very delicate matter for a town. Under the circumstances, discretion was required, as may be seen in the petition sent to Florence by the priors of Chiusi concerning the situation of a Jew from their town on the border region between Siena and Rome.!””

The priors of Chiusi [or Chiuschi] wrote to Duke Francesco with a , request on behalf of a certain Prospero d’Isach ebreo, “an artisan who knows how to make silk caps and hats and similar items and keeps cloth in his shop

which is most rare in his profession; and because he received orders to depart, he resolved to move and go to live at Cithona.”!°8 The understatement of the reason for Prospero’s move to Cetona was an important discretion, since Prospero’s expulsion from Chiusi must have been related at least indirectly to the fact that Francesco himself, as we saw in the previous chapters, had not one month earlier clarified for the governor of Siena that Jewish refugees from the papal expulsion were not to be given refuge.’ The priors do not actually say how long Prospero d’Isach had lived in their town, but it seems that they were asking for a privilege concerning a Jew who had just been expelled by Francesco’s own appointed governor, Federigo! Why the Marquis permitted Prospero to settle in his fief (Cetona, la Rocca) is not clear, but the priors continued to state that, with permission of the duke, they were thinking “voluntarily and with much benevolence [voluntiere e con molta amorevolenzza|” that Prospero could be permitted “to come often to Chiusi, to favor us with his craft and virtuosity [arte e virtu sua|” so that he could keep at his craft in Chiusi even though he could no longer be domiciled there familiarly. The letter had opened with the comment that foreign talent had always been welcomed and encouraged in Chiusi and that the

, city’s reputation depended heavily on it. The implication was that they would

State-Building and Status 117 be very sorry to lose this artisan, whose Jewish status was not referred to other than in his name.!!° The request for a permanent safe-conduct pass for Prospero is a bit unusual, and seems designed to help Prospero maintain his economic presence (and perhaps an unofficial residence?) in Chiusi, while protecting him from arrest. From their letter we also learn that these priors had never been accustomed to seek permission to allow Jews like Prospero to settle in Chiusi, but had simply considered him a foreign artisan who had been welcomed for his talents, skills and craft.1!' There is also no evidence that Prospero sought per-

mission to move to Cetona when forced to leave Chiusi, although he may have done so.

Some towns were being instructed to expel their Jews; others had a decade earlier been told to receive them; some town officials had been accus-

tomed to making these decisions autonomously and now, doubting their authority, sought to elicit instructions or to obtain privileges for Jews who had not previously needed them. There was not yet any formal policy in June 1569, and Francesco’s letters to Volterra left the captain of Volterra to deal

with its Jews as he saw fit. But the central government did take action to eliminate this potential source of conflict with subject communities. Within a year and a half a statewide policy had been devised.’ In summary, in late sixteenth-century Tuscany there were three groups of

Jews: (1) bankers and their dependents, (2) merchants privileged by Cosimo | in 1551, who were called “Levantine” by Francesco and (3) other Jews whose

presence was for the most part not formally justified by any legality. In the 1560s the third group, the Jews who were theoretically unaccounted for, outnumbered the two other groups. With hindsight, it might be said that the de facto residence of these Jews throughout the state with their uncertain legal status complicated the previously operative paradigm for Jewish residence in Christendom. But this is not to say that the Medici state was threatened in any way by these Jews or that the ghettoization was a response to any actual problem caused by the Jews or to any anxiety individual Tuscans may have felt with regard to Jews. Rather, as I explained in the Introduction, the Medici government was busy constructing new social categories and employing them to rebuild social dependencies, hierarchies and networks in the state that were ultimately supportive of its own authority. The state was not being built on “national iden-

tity” and not on race, but rather on the political dependence of elites— bureaucratic, military and feudal—and on the unifying hierarchies of gender (male-governed families, local communities and convents) and, finally, reli-

gion (Christian as opposed to Jewish). While as we have seen some local

118 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power (Christian) governors and individual Jews engaged a discourse about foreygnness, Jews were not distinguished as different from other foreigners (for better or for worse). Some foreigners were nobility; some Jews were native citizens. This diversity was not useful to the central administration’s effort to

manage the state with easily understood hierarchical categories. It was becoming interested in treating the Jews as a category apart. And this was not so easy to do if every Jew had a different status under the law.

State and Status My argument that the status of Jews could have been seen as confusing and their presence as creating confusion needs some further clarification. What exactly was the status of Jews who were not covered by privileges or charters? Was it really as ambiguous as I have suggested?!** And besides, it should not be thought that the legal status of all other subjects in the duchy was simple and clear.

The Medici state in the sixteenth century was not a state in which the people “imagined” themselves to be a community in national terms or in racial terms. The state was a duchy; people’s social and political relationships were still built in the contexts of towns, cities, guilds, parishes, confraternities and families. For most individuals the relationship to the duke and his administration was jurisdictional and fiscal; on the higher social levels it was also perhaps that of client to patron. But older networks (e.g., patron-client

and pan-urban) had been weakened and new networks were being supported: regional elites were being brought into the bureaucracy and militia; the energies of working-class men and women were channeled into parishes and parish-based fraternities; powerful cultural forces conveyed local Tuscan women into the homes of husbands and behind the walls of convents. In this context, where did Jews fit and how were they seen? The legislation of 1567 regarding the segno and the ghettoization edicts of 1570 and 1571 referred to the people I have been calling “Jews” by a variety of Italian terms. They are “la setta et falsa religione hebrea [the Jewish sect and false religion], and “hebrei o vero iudei [Jews, or verily Iudei|?"'* The edict that initiated their expulsion from Tuscany and their ghettoization was titled “Decree and

General Edict concerning the Jews who at present live in the Florentine Dominion”!?* (see Figure 1). But the text referred to them more precisely, using the general legal formula for inclusivity to state that “nessuno hebreo di qual si voglia provincia, stato, grado, o conditione” (no Jew of whatsoever provenance, state, level or position), regardless of specific privileges, was

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henceforth allowed to engage in moneylending."'° Moreover, with regard to “tutti li hebrei et d’ella setta hebrea” (all Jews and those of the Jewish sect) — whether they had “permission to lend money as well as those others who are engaged in commerce or in one of the guilds, or have no occupation”—all these were commanded to “be gone and, leaving their habitations, to have transferred themselves out of the Florentine dominion?!” The terms used in the edict recognize that the present status of Jews in Tuscany was complicated, characterized by the diversity of their regional origin and stratified by economic rank. While the set of terms used for Jewish-

ness by these Italians do not include any with the racial overtones found already in Spain, the Medici administration was also aware, as mentioned earlier, of that way of thinking about the Jews.’'® The proliferation of terms used not only expressed but also reified the confusion that the edict claimed

to come to eliminate. Indeed, the language may even come to teach the reader of the edict that there is confusion—for what other practical distinction could have been intended by the Christian, sixteenth-century authors in their reference to both “Jews” and “those the Jewish sect”? We should consider these edicts as primary agents of the ducal public relations system, rather than as orders to the Jews to move to the ghetto. The printing press was an agent in which Cosimo had taken a political interest: he had employed a printer from 1547 to 1563, he had agreed to the collection and destruction of books of the Talmud in 1555 and he had permitted two more general public book burnings in 1559.1!” The edicts were to be read, and

in this case they contributed to the Medicis propagandistic efforts to strengthen the state by giving their subjects some sense of commonality beyond their obedience to and protection by their prince. This commonality was not based on citizenship or nationality. In the late sixteenth century, laws emanating from the Florentine government and the terminology employed by Florentine guilds generally referred to subjects of the duke as citizens, foreigners and contadini/contadine (rural non-nobles). These were operative legal and cultural categories. Legal and administrative texts of the period do not refer to “Tuscans,’ and “Italian” was still mainly a linguistic or cultural designation that seems to have been used as a regional reference, most often by non-Italian-speaking travelers. Citizens were cittadini of specific cities, not of the Grand Duchy of Florence and Siena, or of Tuscany. The newly emergent quality of “Tuscanness” [Toscanita] that existed as a matter of cultural capital and pride was limited to Florentine courtier circles at this time.’”° But within the Tuscan state, the subjects of Cosimo and Francesco could share in the status of not-being Jews. This commonality was more effectively established by making the Jews a simpler category and a more usable “other” The govern-

120 ‘The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power ment therefore set out to impose a uniform(ity) on the Jews, that is, to make

the Jews dissimilar to Christians by making them more similar to one another. The texts it employed to enforce this change recognized the actual diversity of Tuscan Jewry and rejected it as unacceptable. In sum, by 1570 a large majority of the Jews living in Tuscany were without any special status. They were not living within the parameters that Christian theology and mercantilist rationalization had described; they had broken rank by settling down without even seeking special permission or privileges. Whether or not this provoked any historically elusive “anxiety,” it did, in any event, open a new channel for the expression of and use of power—a way for the state to create a sense that order had been established. Whether or not ordinary Christians had been uncomfortable with the Jewish presence, the public was told that there was a problem and that the government was in the process of fixing it. It was true, however, that the Jews were crossing boundaries, literally and figuratively, and that for many purposes their status was not easily defined in the complicated local laws of the day. In legislation that depended heavily on social categorization, such as sumptuary legislation and taxation, one’s status as Christian or Jew was not the salient one from a civil perspective before 1567. In this body of law, Jews who were neither bankers nor foreign merchants appear to be neither fully differentiated from nor clearly identified with other noncitizen subjects of the contado or distretto,'*! and some were considered citizens of the cities in which they resided.!?”

The Status of Jews in the Statutes If a state policy regarding the Jews existed, it should be discernible in the sumptuary law, guild membership and statutes, and in the way Jews were treated by tax officials, notaries and other clerks who were most familiar with current usage of the codes. But aside from an occasional mention of Jews in

the statutes of guilds, published under the aegis of the state, the only state legislation regarding the Jews from 1534 until 1570 was the rule of 1567 that

| required the Jews to wear the segno and an order two months later to stop the harassment of the Jews that reportedly followed the imposition of this badge.’?? The invisibility of the Jews before 1567 despite their documented presence in Tuscany is particularly noticeable in the sumptuary code, versions of which were published in 1562 and 1568, which established limits on luxurious clothing and ornamentation and expenditures for members of various groups in Tuscan society.!*4

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Sumptuary Legislation and the Status of the Jews Sumptuary law established a broad and general ban applicable to all per-

sons in the city of Florence against ornamenting themselves (and their mounts) with precious stones and metals, brocade, furs and perfumes. The sections of the code amplified the limitations on some groups and detailed specific exemptions from or modifications of the law for others. There is no mention of Jews: the primary and interrelated categories are class (that 1s, rank or status), age and gerder (not simply sex, since marital status was rele-

vant only for women ard age only for men). The sumptuary laws were adjusted separately for certain subcategories of women: (1) married Florentine noblewomen; (2) unmarried daughters of Florentine nobles;}*° and (3) contadine (non-noble, rural women “who work the land or in other ways”). Males are subdivided into three groups, but not according to marital status: (4) Florentine men, including nobles; (5) Florentine boys, under the age of twelve; and (6) contadini (rural men “who work the land or at crafts”). An additional category comprises female prostitutes, courtesans and “femmine di partito””!”° To complete the picture, certain groups were altogether exempt

from the sumptuary restrictions: foreigners, certain high-ranking titled nobles, individuals salaried by the court, members of the military and religious orders, doctors and citizens over the age of forty-five.!?” The classification of these groups tells us more about the social structure

the law-makers wanted to support in Tuscany than about the visibility of these groups or the self-identification of individuals as members of these or other groups. Unlike prostitutes, who were not only required to wear a special sign but were also subject to a special section in the sumptuary law, Jews were not treated as a category of persons whose costume required regulation.

The law did not consider Jewish status, perhaps because there were not a great many Jews in the state. But there were not so many more foreign nobles or prostitutes, whose dress codes were addressed. The Jews’ invisibility in the statutes is not “negative evidence” from which we can learn nothing: when we read the statutes, as though with the ultraviolet lamp necessary for flood-washed documents in the archives, we may see where the Jews fit in between the lines and how they managed to live there for decades until their presence was exposed. To an extent, Jews might have been “covered” by the existing legislation, integrated into its various categories. If so, most Jews would have been seen as part of that unmentioned, general population which was simply subject to the sumptuary code with no particular modifications: the artisans and workers and shopkeepers of all sorts, citizens and noncitizens alike, who populated the city.

122 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power Interpreting the law this way we would imagine that—at least until 1567 when some Jews were forced to wear the segno—Jews might have dressed as their socioeconomic counterparts did. In a few instances they might therefore be exempt from the sumptuary restrictions altogether. A few exceptional Jews—Donna Benvegnita Abravanel and Don Iacob Abravanel, for example—were honored as nobles by the duke and probably dressed as such.'”8

| Doctors were also fully exempt, as were foreigners, and these statuses were presumably available to Jews.!*? Thus Jews invited in 1551 as Levantine merchants may have followed the code for foreigners.'*° In addition, there were

a number of Jewish doctors in Tuscany in these decades, and a few Jews, inhabitants of Pisa, clearly held the title “citizen” which may have meant that with all citizens over the age of forty-five they were exempt from the restrictions. We should remember, however, that in terms of their social status many

, Jews had no real Christian counterparts since they were denied a part in the political system that Christians of the same economic level might have played.

For exemptions from sumptuary restrictions were also given to Christians who held appointments to the court or other public offices or were capitant, vicari and podesta of the cities of the Dominion. In effect, it seems that most older men of the (Christian) Florentine elite would be exempted if not as citizens or doctors then as government officials, or members of the court or of a religious or military order. By contrast, only a very few Jews—a few Levantine merchants, citizens over forty-five years of age and doctors—could have attained the privilege of exemption from the sumptuary laws. Certainly, the legislation of 1567 and 1571 complained that Jews were indis-

tinguishable from Christians. Neither the documents nor the art of the period allows us to compare the actual dress habits of Jews and Christians in late sixteenth-century Florence. Regardless, the issue here is that the sumptuary law code, a major piece of state legislation, left ambiguous the status of the Jews. By its silence, it allowed the Jews to assume rank according to criteria other than religion. Jewishness was not yet a category used routinely by the state. In examining the secular sumptuary legislation, we noted that “foreigners” were exempted from all restrictions. In the religiously framed ducal edict requiring Jews to wear the segno in 1567, Jews of all “nations” were subjected to the law.'*! These provocative references to national identity in sixteenthcentury Florence pique our interest in how the state constructed Jewish identity. On the one hand, Jews were seen as subcategories of various nationalities; on the other hand, they were clearly seen as a religious sect or “false

faith” The governor of Volterra, however, seems to have focused on the

State-Building and Status — 123

peninsular (Italian) provenance of the Jews who had arrived in Volterra in order to distinguish them from Levantine Jews, an interesting focus in a century long before “Italian” national identity was widely adopted by Christians. The segno established the Jew as “other,” as an object to be scorned and despised by Christians; but were Jews as a whole considered foreign? Guild Statutes and the Status of the Jews Perhaps the best way to investigate this question is to consider the meaning of “foreignness” in the guilds, which paid substantial attention to the mobility of skilled artisans whose arrival might help the guild and whose departure might threaten it. The twelve Florentine guilds were “reformed” by the duke in the mid-sixteenth century, restructured and subjected to a

rewriting and occasional further revisions of their statutes by officials appointed by the duke. These guilds governed almost every economic sector in the city—every type of craft, commerce and profession—with a few exceptions that comprised large numbers of domestic servants and prostitutes. In Florence, unlike some other Italian and European cities, Jews were not uni-

formly excluded from these guilds, and there were no separate Jewish guilds, 8?

In the second half of the sixteenth century, dozens of Jewish men and a few Jewish women matriculated into four of the Florentine guilds: the Wool Guild, the Silk Guild, the Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants (or pharmacists) and the Linen Guild.!*? These artisans and merchants are identifiable as Jews because they are almost always listed with the signifier “ebreo” or “ebrea” as part of their name.'** There is also evidence of Jews in the local guilds of Tuscany outside Florence. In Empoli, for example, the presence of a Jew in the Furrier and Tanners’ Guild and two more (one a woman) in the Merchants’ Guild has been noted.1*°

Guild enrollments show that some guilds did not admit Jews even though they did not explicitly exclude them from admission in their statutes.}%° Like Christian women, Jews were excluded from the most powerful guilds including the Calimala, the Cambio and the Fabbricanti, which was associated with the cathedral.!%” The exclusion of Jews from guilds is sometimes explained by the requirement of an oath to be taken on the Chris-

tian Bible, but the guilds which did admit Jews to membership required many types of activities which Jews would have wanted to avoid, including

contributions for mass and candles on dozens of saints’ days each year. Rather, the exclusion of Jews from a guild, like the exclusion of women, was a measure of control that articulated, legitimated and ensured the higher sta-

124 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power

tus of Christian men. Jews and women were not admitted into the very important Guild of Judges and Notaries, in which membership was required of all officers of state including guild officers, judges, secretaries and public notaries. They were thus effectively excluded from the bureaucratic elite, the statewide class of men whose daily work was to administer and develop the state, its policies and its procedures. In the guilds that did accept Jews, their precise status often appears to be confused. Not only did different guilds have different policies; within one guild, official policy and practice sometimes differed. Thus, for example, when the officers of the Silk Guild stated unequivocally in 1562 that Jewish veil-makers must open shops and matriculate in the guild if they wanted to sell their veils to the monasteries, the Jews were invited to matriculate as foreygners: “they are required to and must open a shop, and be matriculated ... as foreigners [forestier1], with the vote of the Council; and they shall come, this having been done, as subjects [sottoposts| into the said Guild and to the said supervisors and other magistrates of the said Guild under the penalty of 100 lire to be applied as above-”!# On the one hand, the statutes of the Silk Guild clearly established that Jews were to be admitted as foreigners. On the other, no Jews were admitted into this Florentine guild in the decade from the year that followed the publication of this reform in its statutes until the ghetto period.!*? And after 1573, when Jews did first enter the guild, they were not registered as foreigners and rather paid exactly the same fees as local Christians.’*? Jews who matriculated, like Christians, were also fully exempted from fees when sponsored by a family member who was already a guild member, and they paid half the fee

if they provided proof that they had been apprenticed in Florence for six years.

The discrepancy between the formal expectation that Jews were foreigners and the practice of admitting and charging them as locals raises the possibility that Jews were considered foreigners by governmental or guild policy, but not by the ordinary guild members who served as officials and collected the matriculation fees. In sixteenth-century Tuscany a “foreigner” was someone who was not born locally or had not lived in the city a prescribed num-

| ber of years. It is worthwhile to continue this examination of guild matriculation fees because the brief digression from the ghettoization will help us establish whether the same standard definition of a foreigner was applied to Jews, or whether they were considered essentially “foreign” regardless of where they had been born or how long they had lived in a given place. In another prestigious guild, the Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants, the matriculation fee for the foreigner was double that for the local-born.

State-Building and Status —125 Jewish doctors and various types of merchants admitted into the guild from 1525 to 1550 were explicitly called foreigners; “tanquam forrestierius, each matriculant paid twelve florins as a one-time entrance fee, as much as a manual laborer could earn in a year. But after 1550 only some Jewish matriculants paid the double fee. The fee paid by these Jews as foreigners was exactly that paid by Christians who were foreigners and also by converted ex-Jews.'*! But the status of foreigner was not applied arbitrarily to all Jews.‘# Once admitted, the relatives of a Jewish guild member were granted the same privileges

as the relatives of a Christian guild member. Thus, for example, the Jew Iacob di Giuseppe was admitted into the Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants as a foreigner in 1525 —and indeed he was a recently arrived Spanish Jew who carried the surname Alpelinc (which became Alpelinghi). Three of his sons were admitted without a fee in 154.9, having been born in Empoli

and having lived there all their lives. It seems reasonable to conclude that the guilds admitting Jews did not treat them as a distinctly foreign group. They did not impose the status of “foreigner” on individual Jews because they were Jews, but rather because they were not locals. Guilds that accepted Jews as members did not make them pay more than Christians for the benefit of matriculation. It is also noteworthy that the phrasing of the entries in the books is exactly the same for Jews and non-Jews, and there is no separate section in these roll-books for Jews. They were, however, kept out of positions of leadership in the guild, and they undoubtedly excluded themselves from many guild activities that had a religious character.'** It seems, then, that the statutes in the reform of the Silk Guild from 1562 discussed earlier which required Jews to matriculate as foreigners were based on an assumption that the Jews in question were in fact foreigners as Florentines understood the word: people not born in Florence or otherwise naturalized. And this was largely true, or at least consistent with our demographic analysis. The Jews living in Florence in 1562 were mostly a humble group of fairly recent immigrants from other parts of Italy, together with a few merchants from the Levant. That Jews admitted to that guild from 1573 and on were treated, nonetheless, as nonforeigners, suggests that the ghettoization

served to naturalize the Jews. For the purpose of guild membership, once Jews were living in the ghetto, they had the same status as locally born Florentines. A survey of the guild statutes and membership lists shows, however, that the guilds had no consistent policy with regard to Jews—or foreigners, or women, for that matter—but rather that they maintained their own individual policies, written or unwritten. Jews were not perceived as so problematic

126 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power or so different as to require any special rules governing their participation in the guilds into which they were admitted. This is particularly noteworthy because Cosimo had appointed his own men to assist in the revision of the statutes of the guilds, which has been seen as part of his overall success in strengthening the economy, building a dependent elite and controlling the institutions that might otherwise serve as loci for dissent or rebellion. Guild statutes do not explain whether Jews are exempted from responsibilities that assume a Christian identity, such as the obligation to make contributions of money or candles for the observance of various Christian holy days and celebrations, or the commitment to close shops on those days. The absence of any reference to the role Jews were to play in the myriad aspects of guild life might be regarded as evidence either of the guild’s lack of interest in a small minority group or of a preference to render Jews invisible. How the Jews negotiated their membership once in the guilds is a subject for further study, but the status of Jews in the guilds is consistent with the

picture of Tuscany that emerges from the sumptuary legislation. We can imagine an environment in which Jews were able to live and work, though excluded from the highest ranking occupations, statuses and offices; an environment that tolerated a degree of ambiguity and unarticulated legal status for the Jews, where Jews were seen as fitting into other actively used social categories, such as foreigner/citizen or family (children and relatives) of a

previously admitted guild member. In sum, in the guilds, which under Cosimo are considered almost a branch of the government, Jews were not treated en bloc; their regional and class distinctions were honored.

Jews and the Question of Communal Taxation Prior to Ghettoization It may surprise readers familiar with Jewish history that, in contrast to other Italian states, Jews in Florence and in the Florentine dominion before ghettoization were not taxed collectively. Neither were they subject, even as individuals, to any special Jewish taxes or fees.!* It is true that, prior to 1571, Jews who were bankers and those who were invited to come to the state in 15§1 as Levantine merchants were deliberately exempted from every imagin-

able tax, as they ensured in the charters they negotiated with the duke. Instead, these Jews paid special fees specific to their occupation: merchants paid customs dues and bankers paid license-fees (an indirect income tax on their borrowers) for the exclusive right to lend money and collect interest in a specified region.'*° ‘The other Jews in the state, however, were treated by the system as ordinary inhabitants.

State-Building and Status =—_127

Under Cosimo Is rule the state drew its revenues from three types of tax: a direct tax called the decima (tenth) on income from land and possessions; a head tax on individuals aged fifteen to sixty called the estimo delle teste; and, most important, various indirect taxes, called gabelle.'*” The main indirect taxes, all with their origins in the fourteenth-century republican era, were on salt and on “contracts.” For example, there was a gabella placed on contracts concerning exchanges of property—sales and certain types of gifts; there were graduated taxes on the exchange of the dowry when a woman was wed

or entered into a convent, and on the return of a dowry to a widow; and there were taxes based on detailed inventories in all cases of inheritance.'*°

The statutes of the gabella neither excluded nor modified the rules for Jews, foreigners or any other group, including the (Christian) religious communities. The universality of this application was stated explicitly in statutes of 1566 regarding the dowry: a gabella had to be paid on a dowry promised to or received by each man who married, “each and every Florentine citizen and everyone listed in the books of the Decima of Florentine Citizens, and every other person of whatsoever status [qualita] or condition,’ though the rates were different for residents of the city, contado and disretto.!*? Customs taxes on international commerce were expected to provide large profits: Jewish merchants were therefore not additionally required to pay an annual fee or fixed tax as were the other privileged Jews in this society, the bankers.

The charters negotiated between Jewish moneylenders and the state in 1547 and thereafter required the Jewish titularies to pay a fixed annual fee and

exempted them from paying any other tax. Thus, for example, the da Rieti contracted to pay an annual and exclusive tax of sixty florins for their right to live and run a bank at Colle.’ It is unclear whether ministers, agents and servants of the banks and their families also enjoyed this protection from gabelle, and presumably decime and estime taxes, but Jews who were not associated with bankers did in fact pay a variety of taxes. References to various types of taxes paid by Jews who were not bankers

or Levantine merchants and were therefore not exempt from taxation are found scattered throughout recent studies that draw on archival sources. No systematic study has been made of the taxation of any segment of the Florentine population during this period, so evidence that Jews normally paid taxes is found primarily in the accusation that they (occasionally) failed to pay what they owed.!*! The following examples of taxes paid by Jews should therefore be seen not as exceptional but as indicative of the general expecta-

tion and practice that Jews regularly paid the various taxes that existed. , In Florence in 1529 the executor of a Jewish estate was prohibited from leaving before he paid the required taxes on the estate.’** In Arezzo in the

128 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power I5sos and 1560s customs officials fined several Jews for tax fraud (“frode dazaria”), from which we may infer that they were not exempt from taxes.'°4 In Empoli, where Jews were settled continuously from 1527 to 1570, there is evidence of Jews paying various gabelle. For example, when Laudadio di Moise bought a house in Empoli in 1564, he paid 44 lire and 17 soldi to satisfy the gabella on contracts.'** In 1568 Daniello di Moise, a brother of Laudadio, paid just a bit less— 6 scudi—in gabella on the dowry he received upon

marrying his first cousin, Consola the daughter of Manuello.!** None of these individuals were bankers or Levantine merchants. That Jews are not mentioned in the tax codes and paid taxes as individuals, and not, as was often the case elsewhere, collectively, is understandable considering that the only Jews ever technically and officially invited to live in the duchy of Florence were bankers and Levantines exempted from ordinary taxes by their privileges. (Indeed, in the fifteenth century on several occassions the Signoria had attempted to enforce the rule that only Jews who were in Florence as bankers, their families, their and staff were allowed to live in

Florence.'*°) But with no laws exempting other Jews from taxation, local officials treated them as they did local Christians, and the Jews did not seek to be treated differently. As with the sumptuary legislation and in the guilds, we see that prior to ghettoization the state and the law had no special attitude and assigned no

special place to those Jews who were neither bankers nor Levantine merchants. It was not the fact that they were Jews that determined the clothes they could wear, the matriculation fees they would pay or their accountability to tax collectors. Indeed, insofar as they participated in the economy and in activities governed by state laws, there was little difference in the way Jews

and Christians were treated. This too was the “similitude” that the state began, in the late 1560s, to call confusion, in large part for the purpose of political propaganda.

E> There was therefore, I have argued, a kernel of truth to the charge of the edict of 31 July 1571 that the Jews were (inappropriately) “similar” to Christians, in that they were a not-so-easily categorized group of people. There were not only an increasingly noticed number of Jews living outside the theoretically and legally established rubrics; Jewish status was altogether too diverse and complex. If there was confusion it was because the legal and social status of Jews in Tuscany was not only complicated, but—much more destabilizing —it was indeterminate. In truth, the presence in Tuscany of a great variety of types of Jews would have complicated the simple but powerful Christian notion of the Jew as “other;’ in relation to whom the Christian

State-Building and Status —_129

was self-defined. It was a challenge to centuries of church doctrine and pop-

ular religious, dramatic and literary traditions of western Christendom in which the Jew variously served as an abstract representation of the blind, the unfaithful, the un-Christian, the sinful—a source of danger and contamination.)°” Although I wish mainly to argue that the ghettoization of the Jews presented an opportunity to the rulers and government officials to either profit or bolster the Medici regime, these rulers and officials were Christians, nour-

ished and educated in a pious and religious Catholic environment. For a church official or state administrator who had deeply absorbed or adopted this binary and hierarchical view of the world, or for an advisor or bureaucrat who wanted to employ it, Tews in Tuscany were an anomaly. The segno and

the ghetto were tools that might remove this confusion by “locating” the Jews in a Christian social order. But at the same time, the rhetoric that presented the ghettoization as necessary suggests on a more theoretical model that the paradigms that had “allowed” Jewish settlement in the Christian state had been stretched to their limit in the late sixteenth century.’°* The Jews were “out of place” and it was necessary to build a new structure to con-

tain them, to draft a new image of “the Jew” with simpler, starker strokes. That is, in its very literalizing and material manner, the state constructed the ghetto in an effort to reconstruct and to re-present, the Jews—as a people with one low and restricted status, as a group with a designated place in Christian society. The evidence of Jewish socioeconomic status and status under sumptuary

and tax law has demonstrated that prior to ghettoization Jews were not treated, officially or normally, as a group with a well-defined legal status or in any obvious way as a collective with fewer rights or greater obligations than Christians. One effort to establish a more uniform status for the Jews was attempted, but half-heartedly, in 1567, with the imposition of the segno. The declaration of the segno in 1567 on the occasion of the entrance of the archbishop was the first “sign” of the state’s interest in reducing the visibility of Jewish diversity. After 1567, Jews were supposed to be marked, with yellow circles for men and yellow sleeves for women, as members of a group. The Jews were subject—if found without the segno—to a fine of 50 scudi, a large sum, half the dowry of a bride from the family of an average Jewish shopkeeper. But although the segno legislation claimed to apply to all Jews, the law provided an exemp«ion for Jews who possessed banks and paid “certain taxes,” a reference to the annual fees they paid for the charters.!*° The exemption was good, but not good enough. Even the moneylenders did not rely on the blanket exemption in the law to protect themselves from

1330 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power arrest for refusal to wear the segno. Aware of the damaging and possibly dangerous consequences of wearing the colored mark of their Jewishness, mem-

bers of the Jewish elite took steps to obtain the privilege of not being marked. As we saw earlier in this chapter, between 1567 and 1570 following the edict, one fourth to one fifth of the Jews in Tuscany managed to get their names on letters of safe-conduct from the duke that granted them permission to travel about and conduct business without wearing the segno.’© In 1567, only four years before the grand duke would arbitrarily annul all Jewish privileges and expel the Jews from the countryside, the bankers’ status was still firmly established as exceptional.! While Christians observed some Jews wearing the badge in 1567 on the occasion of the return of the archbishop, because the elite could avoid it, the yellow signifier was only partly successful as a semiotic tool. The fact that the status of Jews was not determined solely by their religion was now more visible instead of less, since Jews were using use their exemption from the segno to mark their own rank in a social hierarchy. The visibility of social differences among Jews weakened the efficacy of the segno, stripping it of its function to mark the Jew as Other. “Otherness” in its fullest sense required that differences among Jews be invisible to Chris-

tians—that is, their own stratification should not be readily apparent. The Medici’s answer in 1570 and 1571 was to cancel the exemptions, revoke all Jew-

ish banking privileges and create the ghetto. When the segno was reimposed in 1571, all the previous exemptions to members of the Jewish elite were annulled. Exceptionally wealthy Jews could and did leave the state, so that the Jews who remained were equally marked, relocated and restricted.!© In their residence and on their outerwear, they were now all equally “the Jews of the Ghetto” Beginning in 1567, then, and culminating with the expulsion of 1570/71, there was shift in state policy on the Jews who until then had been allowed to live dispersed among Christians, laying claim to a set of social statuses, some with charters and privileges and some without specific permission. Jews now were to have no place in Christian society except the one determined for them by the state. And the grand duke and prince who made that decision? They were merciful, for they chose not to expel the Jews, but to

pardon them, protect them from prosecution for their alleged crimes and allow them all to live in the capital city, in a special, permanent place. The pious result of this action was that the “stubborn-necked” Jews should be shown the good example of Christ, and the act was memorialized in a Latin inscription (of unknown date) above the entrance to the ghetto:

State-Building and Status —131 Cosimo Medici, Grand Duke of Etruria and Prince Francesco Most Serene utmost in piety to all therefore have desired that the Jews should be in this place, segregated from the society of Christians but not, however, expelled.1°

In this chapter we have seen that the ghettoization must be understood

in the context of the increasing diversity of the Jewish population in sixteenth-century Tuscany. Two categories of Jews had at first received permission to live and work in Tuscany: moneylenders and merchants who had commerce with the Levant. But in the course of the sixteenth century, many Jews migrated into the state without seeking or receiving permission to do so. Other than an occasional reference to the church’s long-standing policy of “tolerance” toward the Jews, the duke and his administrators built no theoretical framework to support or justify the presence of this third group of Jews in Tuscany who filled no specific economic niche and served no critical economic function. The Jews were therefore vulnerable in the late 1560s when papal policy became less tolerant at the same time that a difficult

transition had to be made in Florence: from duchy to grand duchy, and from Cosimo I to his son Francesco—the first explicitly hereditary transition. When Francesco responded to the papal initiative to ghettoize the Jews, he departed from Cosimo’s earlier policy of tolerance that had allowed a Jewish population to migrate into Tuscany without requiring a firm legal or religious or even economic framework to justify and interpret its presence. Yet the authority of the Medici was in large part Christian, and, under Christian rule, Jews could never take their right of residence for granted; the local government always reserved the prerogative to require that a Jewish presence be accounted for. The Jewish presence in Tuscany was defined as a source of dis-

order and confusion when Cosimo, an astute observer of the Council of Trent and religious trends in his own society, chose to adopt some of the tools of the church for his own purposes. Ghettoization can therefore be seen as a politically expedient response to the apparently successful but unauthorized economic and demographic integration of Jews in Tuscany. In short, partly because of the sixteenth-century confidence of Italian Jews in their own ability to negotiate successful relationships with Christian neighbors, merchants, peasants and local officials,

132 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power dissonances were heard in the relationship between the theoretical status of Jewish men and women in a Christian-dominated world on the one hand and the observable, sociodemographic profile of the Jews in Tuscany on the other. While such discrepancies may not have been unique to this time and place and may not have perturbed most Tuscans, they were noted by the practical men who were employed by Cosimo de’ Medici to oversee and administer the efficient reorganization of his state. What is more, in the late sixteenth century the bureaucrats and the clergy were paying particular attention to the coordinates of population and space. In the course of the development of the far-reaching, well-organized hierarchical administrations of both state and church, the ghetto —a spatial-demographic unit—was used to reinforce and line up more neatly two of the social and legal categories that were fundamental to all other hierarchies: religion and gender. Whereas for a few decades it seemed that small numbers of Jews had successfully integrated various social categories and simply played their parts in the social fabric, they were now seen—or portrayed—as dangerous, creating confusion and chaos. By labeling the Jewish presence a problem and then producing the ghetto as a solution, the state administration seems to have attempted to harness the language of “social anxiety” about order and thus to abet the transition from Cosimo’s rule to Francesco’s, to gain or maintain support for the legitimacy of Cosimo’s claim to the grand-ducal title and to justify the ongoing consolidation of power in the offices of his state administration. All this occurred in the context of the reforms of the Council of Trent and resonated richly with the new emphasis on the geographically defined parish as a religious community. The ghettoization of the Jews was deliberate, and the ghetto’s location in Tuscany was central to the consolidation of the Medici regime as a Catholic state. The ghetto “located” the Jewish minority in relation to the city and state; more important than where it was, was the fact that it provided a location for the Jews. The location of the Jews was at once inside the state and outside the Christian community—which was the more strongly defined once the Jews were removed. Collectively, late sixteenth-century Christians were no longer part of a united Christian world. But Cosimo and Francesco presented themselves, at the end of Cosimo’s rule, as pious Christian rulers of a Christian (Catholic) state. Christian community was coterminous with the parish; with the state and city carved up into parish-communities, Jews could not be allowed to live within a parish. Their very presence prevented that parish from being a Christian community. In the urban geography of Florence by the end of Cosimo’s rule, only two places stood outside this

State-Building and Status —_133

Christian geography: the ghetto of the Jews and the ducal palace. Like the Jews, the ducal palace would not be contained within a parish, because the Medici grand duke would not subject himself and his residence to a grid that, ultimately, functioned as a map for papal authority. The state’s edict imposing ghettoization entailed a legal, administrative and physical reorganization of the Jews’ relationship to the state, to Christian subjects of the state and to one another. In its act of expulsion of the Jews from their homes and the creation of the ghetto in Florence, the state treated its Jewish residents as a category of persons separate and distinct from all

other residents. |

Before the changes of 1567—70 described above, nobility, citizenship, foreignness, marital status, age and gender were categorizing tools that were as

} clear and useful to the state as nationality and race were obscure, or undeveloped. Religion, though employed to keep Jews out of some higher-status occupations and offices, was not as important an organizing principle as we might have assumed. In the wake of the Council of Trent, however, and contemporaneously with the arrival of the archbishop to take up his residence in Florence, religion was elevated to be a primary category of identification in the ‘Tuscan state. Statuses that Jews held, based on occupation, provenance, age, educational achievement and gender—which had tied Jews to the communities in which they lived —were demoted and subsumed. Individual Jews maintained their differences, but the state dramatically emphasized the Jews’ difference from Christians and therefore their sameness as Jews. Symbolically and functionally, the ghetto walls and laws grouped together individuals who had until then been known and seen as bankers, doctors, merchants and artisans, as locally born or as foreign-born. Socioeconomic status and provenance were eclipsed as the state made religion a primary category of identification. By exaggerating the presence of Jews, highlighting it with yellow tags and building a monument to that presence in the center of the city, the Medici moved to incorporate the Christianity of the Catholic Reformation into their state-building project. For all the social networks and hierarchies that had been dismantled in the process of building the ducal state, a sense of community and social harmony had to be replaced. The parish system was the rack of brick-moulds in which these social bricks would be baked. Christianity was the shining glaze that would coat these tiles and

whose hues would give them uniformity and recognizability. One empty mould was saved for the Jews, and set aside. The set of rules established for the ghetto in the edict of July 1571 spoke for the first time of, and to, a united universita dell: ebrvei..°* The “universita” was

134. The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power a product of a shift in the state’s approach to the Jews. The ghettoization thus

functioned to redefine the people called bebrei, to make their Jewishness define them in a way that completely dominated any other social affiliations, rank or occupational associations these individuals may have had. Or so it seems, or so the government would have had it seem. Chapter Three, therefore, must take us back even closer to the Jews themselves, to ask what their Jewishness had consisted of prior to this state intervention.

Three Before the Ghetto: The Settlement and Connections of Jews in ‘Tuscany

We have seen that before 1570 the Jews of the ducal territories were not treated by the government as a unit, community or corporation. It might be assumed, however, that the Jews themselves were already a community, so that the actions of the state only reaffirmed or strengthened a preexisting social order. This chapter considers the pre-ghetto social life of Tuscan Jews in order to set the ground for the argument of later chapters that the state’s policy of ghettoization had the effect of producing a Jewish community. By this I mean that ghettoization determined a set of Jews who were not previously a set, and it catalyzed changes that led this set of individual Jews to live lives that were increasingly organized by interactions with other Jews in an array of physically and socially determined and delimited spaces and institutions. My argument challenges an image of the Jewish past that is deeply rooted in historiographical tradition and popular imagination. That Jews in the premodern Christian world lived as part of a Jewish community and that they lived in “communities” are axioms of past and current historical scholarship on Jews, related to the assumption of Jewish “otherness.” The implications of my argument are broad for the reader who will suspend this assumption of

Jewish otherness and imagine ghettoization as something other than a moment in the history of anti-Semitism or of Christian-Jewish relations. ‘The reader is invited instead to consider this analysis as a case study in the way early modern state policy shaped both contemporary and historical under-

standings of people who were collectively assigned the status of minority groups or subalterns.

136 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power

Historiographical Context: The Presentation of Jews as Communities That Jews in medieval Europe were “communities” was axiomatic for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish historians whose scholarship set the groundwork for social historians of recent decades.’ The criteria for this assessment of Jewish diasporic national identity were political and jurisdictional, conforming in large measure to still-current understandings of the rise of nation-states in western and southern Europe. Political sovereignty and jurisdictional authority are considered definitive of statehood in the medieval and early modern period, whereas strongly territorialized notions of the nation did not emerge in Europe until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” In other words, the “communities” imagined here are organized groups of Jews who voluntarily accepted Jewish law and Jewish leadership (usually some combination of rabbinic and lay) as organizing principles.

, For various reasons, including the fact that the full observance of rabbinic law requires some degree of social organization and the double assumption that Jewish life did not exist without the observance of rabbinic law and that this law could not be observed without interpretation by local religious leaders, medieval and early modern Jews are represented almost universally as liv-

ing in “communities, or as at least in relationship to a nearby Jewish com-

munity. But what was a community? Jewish historians have allowed themselves to use the term casually, without strict definition, but alluding to self-government or social institutions.* An increase in the number and complexity of institutions has been cited as evidence of progressive stages of communal development, so that “communal” history is often synonymous with or fundamentally tied to and seen through the lens of institutional history.® European historians also tend to use the term casually, but differently, usually with reference to a population contained by physical (territorial) boundaries. The word is taken as a synonym, for example, of “the village’—even when the subject of research is the formation of the boundaries that challenged the construction of social and religious groupings. In short, the word community has not been subject to the same piercing critique as the word identity.° Nonetheless, scholarship of recent decades has challenged static, essentialist concepts of premodern Jewish identity and self-consciousness that undergird the assumption of premodern Jewish communal organization.” The evidence this scholarship has presented has chipped away at the commonly used model of a diaspora of Jewish communities in various stages of

Before the Ghetto 137 organic growth, organized according to the religious, political and gender norms prescribed in rabbinic texts.® Beneath are revealed the more plastic, subtle contours of Jewishness, seen as a historically contingent way of life, a focus of social affiliation and a malleable language and cultural system for cosmic and self-understanding, as well as a flexible label or signifier used by non-Jews for various purposes of their own. What we wish to do, therefore, is consider the Jews of Tuscany without presumptions about their communal life in order to best see the impact of ghettoization on them. As a first step to understanding the nature of Jewish society before the ghetto, it is necessary to address the question of self-government and religious leadership. It will not be sufficient in this chapter to demonstrate that Jews had or did not have self-government, which is only one possible social expression of “community.” But to begin our search, we must start at the beginning: were the Jews of Florence or Tuscany organized or led by any self-government or lay or rabbinic leadership before ghettoization?

The Absence of Jewish Self-Government in Tuscany Before the Ghetto The history of self-government and communal regulation of the Jewish people has long been emphasized by historians.’ It was a history contempo-

rary Jews could use, one not focused on their historical victimization by Christians; its long-lasting influence can be explained by its usefulness over the centuries for rabbinic, emancipatory, nationalist and diaspora-affirming agendas. This historiography was supportive of the premise that Jews always strove to attain jurisdictional auttonomy—ceither in order to live as fully as possible in conformity with Jewish law or in order to be as autonomous as

possible. The principle of the historical unity of the Jewish people has depended greatly on the image of organic Jewish communities, all linked together by a commitment to Torah and to mutual aid, guided by the interpreters of that Torah, the rabbis, in dialogue with their lay leaders. It should be noted, too, that for medieval churchmen who wrote many of the texts upon which historians at first depended for their images of medieval Jews, the Jews were always outside the Christian community. They were not seen as rogue individuals, but collectively, as a blinded, fallen or vanquished figure: Synagoga was iconographically paralleled to the church, Ecclesia— and thus the Jews, like the church, were represented as one, a community apart.!° It might even be argued that medieval church doctrine, medieval rabbis and other self-interested elite men, religious and nationalist historians of

138 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power various intellectual traditions and today’s professionalized Jewish communal

leaders have collaborated in the reinforcement of the myth that Jews have always, whenever possible, organized themselves as self-contained communities and a corresponding set of “communal” leaders. In many or perhaps even most places where medieval Jews lived, there were indeed organized Jewish communities. There were also men who called

themselves leaders and served as such, with or without the support of the majority of the Jews in the area. Perhaps the most extraordinarily well-devel-

oped (and well-studied) medieval Jewish communal organization in the Christian world before 1492 was in the Iberian peninsula, where Jews had lived continuously for many hundreds of years (from the period of Muslim control and before) in numbers far exceeding the Jewish populations in the kingdoms of England, France, the Holy Roman Empire and the Italian states.’' In places where the Jews were given political structure and definition, such as in pre-expulsion Spain, the formal, collective, institutionalized existence of Jewish communities is indisputable: these communities had their own tax collection and courts which applied Jewish law and authority to impose both monetary and corporal punishments.’ Indeed, the fact that royal privileges were granted to communities of Jews (aljamas) has encouraged scholars to generalize that Jews everywhere in the medieval Christian world lived on the basis of communal charters and the self-government these charters enabled. Sometimes, however, and perhaps frequently, the presumption that Jewish populations can be called communities obscures a less well-organized and less well-defined Jewish social structure. As I have argued in greater detail elsewhere, historians have posited the presence of a “Jewish community” because of references in a Jewish text to a kahal, even though that word was and is variably used to mean “the men of a place” and the “board of elders”? In Florence a Jewish community was presumed to exist because of an honorific epistolary or rabbinic reference to individual Jewish scholars or economically leading men as “heads,” or “leaders.” Indeed, the primary evidence that the Jews of Florence were an organized community in the fifteenth century was the appearance in documents of the word capi, which was interpreted to mean “heads” of the community. In these fifteenth-century docu-

ments the word capi, where it occurred, actually referred specifically to “heads” of associations of Jewish bankers licensed to operate banks in the city.'* These were consortia (compagnie) of specifically named bankers who were the Jews invited to live in Florence and granted term-limited charters called capitoli, similar to the condotte or charters granted to Jews elsewhere. (After their permits to lend at interest in Florence were revoked in 14.94 and

Before the Ghetto —=139

1527, Jewish banking was never reauthorized in the city, where a monte di pieta was established in response to Mendicant preaching in 14.96.'°) Unlike the royal charters of Aragon and other medieval principalities, the fifteenth-century charters obtained by the Jews in Florence were not “communal” In short, the capi were not the appointed, elected or even acknowledged leaders of a more general association of Jews. Indeed, before ghettoization there were never men elected by Jews or appointed by non-Jews as heads or leaders of a Jewish community of Florence. The privileges the fifteenth-century Jewish bankers obtained did, however, include permission for them to bring a number of family and staff to

reside in the territory, and these Jews were in theory dependent on the bankers to whom the charters had been granted. It is also true that the Florentine republic attempted to treat each consortium as though it were identical with the Jewish population as a whole, since only one charter was granted at a time in Florence, and since an occasional effort was made to exclude Jews from Florence who were not under the patronage of the chartered bankers. But to call the bankers the heads of “the Jewish community” would be to elide the privileges of individual Jews with those of an imagined Jewish community of Florence. The bankers, even though called cap: (and in a contemporary Hebrew letter, rashim), were not leading a local, organized community but using and projecting a language that was at once self-aggrandizing and aligned with the oligarchic assumptions of those leading (socioeconomically dominant) Christians in the Florentine republic in the fifteenth century.'” According to a provision of 14.63, four banks were allowed to be serviced by families and staff, to a maximum of seventy persons.'* This cap on the Jewish population of Florence was not enforced, as we can see from the charter of 1481. This set of privileges authorized seventeen men and their families and associates to operate four banks for ten years, stipulating that each of the four banks should nominate as consuls men who were among those included in the capitulum and therefore exempted from the segno (the signifying cloth badge).!° Indeed, the very first law of the Florentine republic regarding Jews in general was an order of 27 May 1439 that applied a segno under penalty of

100 florins to all Jews (men, women, children) in the territory except those possessed of capitoli.2° That the Jews included in the charters were to be exempted from the segno is an important detail: it reminds us that the consortia of bankers and their protected dependents were never synonymous with the Jewish population of Florence as a whole.” This demography must shape our understanding of the provisions in the fifteenth-century charters that seem to have endowed the Jewish bankers

1440 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power with a measure of authority. The banking charters allowed, from 1448, that the bankers could “constitute among themselves consuls and officials” to punish any one who did not observe their capitula, even by imposing monetary fines.”” They were to be treated as citizens in both civil and criminal law, but they were also granted special rights, including permission to follow burial customs according to “their own laws, a phrase which, I have argued elsewhere, simply means “as Jews.”*? Were these consuls and officials a Jewish

self-government? The charters did in a sense provide for the creation of a Jewish governing elite, even if the only Jews subject to its authority were the

Jews specifically privileged to live in the city by association with the bankers.** The banking consortia were in that respect like the city’s guilds, allowed to enforce the regulations that applied to all members of their actual occupation or profession. The parallel would be complete only if the bankers’ authority was exer-

cised over Jews of all occupations in the city, and not only over those engaged in moneylending and specifically referred to in the charters. However, there is no record of any leadership activity of the bankers, no evidence

that they ever devised communal ordinances for the Jews of Florence or made any effort to establish courts of Jewish law or provide panels of Jewish arbitrators.”> The issue of courts of law is important for those who expect to see Jews living in accordance with Jewish law. In the first capitula of 1437 the Jews were promised that they would be treated as citizens in civil and criminal law, without reference to any special court or judge. The court called the

Otto di Custodia was assigned to ensure that the provisions of the charter were honored, however, and the Jews soon began to use this Florentine court of four rotating judges for all types of cases, criminal and civil, including civil cases between Jews.”° Although Jews of the various Italian states were never granted the right to maintain formal law courts, some negotiated condotte that allowed them to force their co-religionists to come before Jewish arbiters, and in some orga-

nized communities leaders issued regulations to attempt to prevent Jews from seeking justice in any other kind of court. As Bonfil explains, these were efforts of Jews to live according to their own laws by utilizing the accepted

process of arbitration, to “build a system of internal jurisdiction over their co-religionists by in some way transforming arbitration into a compulsory procedure.””’ Perhaps some Jews who came before the Otto brought arguments based on Jewish law or the results of arbitration to the court. The absence of a Jewish court in Florence is not, consequently, to be taken as evidence of the nonobservance of Jewish laws, and since arbitration was necessarily ad hoc and unofficial, we can expect no institutional record of its use in

Before the Ghetto 141 matters between Jews. However, arbitration is evidenced in the records of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florentine notaries. Disputes between Christians and Jews and between Jews were settled by compromise before arbiters, sometimes Jewish and sometimes Christian, and then, in order to make them enforceable, the agreements were brought to official notaries. Even when the parties to a dispute were all Jewish, Christian arbiters were (at least sometimes) chosen.”® Therefore, despite rabbinic opinion that arbitrators should be scholars or turn to rabbis for clarification,” there is no reason to presume that in Tuscany Christian arbitrators (or Jewish arbitrators or, for that matter, the Jewish parties to the conflict) were well informed about Jewish law or attempted to be governed by it. The regular appearance of Jews in Florentine courts and the evidence of their use of arbitration and the notariate allows us to imagine a Jewish past that was not organized and directed by Jewish religious scholars and judges or lay leaders. It is possible that ordinances or records of a Jewish court or self-government in Florence from some moment in the fifteenth or early sixteenth century are lost or missing. In 1524, in Rome, Daniel da Pisa, a Jew with family

in Tuscany, wrote a very elaborate constitution for the governance of the Jews of Rome, and his was probably not the first effort at such a constitution.*° In any event, in the absence of evidence we cannot call the Jews of fif-

teenth-century Florence a community using the traditional criteria of selfgovernmental or judiciary activity. There is one place where the silence of the documentary record is telling and suggests clearly that the larger Jewish populations of Florence and of Tuscany had not organized themselves into a community with leaders. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there were a number of gatherings of Jewish patricians that have been called regional or intra-regional synods of Jewish leaders.*! The men who gathered—many of them rabbinic scholars, doctors and bankers—were at least at first self-appointed, as is acknowledged in these introductory words from the ordinances first passed at Bologna in 1416: “therefore have we, the undersigned, agreed and selected general commissioners in the communities of Rome, Padua, Ferrara, Bologna and the districts of Romagna and Toscana, whose duty it shall be to guard the interests of the communities during the coming ten years.”3? Twenty-two men signed the document, among them two from the region of Tuscany: one from Siena and one from Pisa. They commissioned and empowered themselves with this charter. It is noteworthy that they made their charter valid for ten years, like so many of the condotte Jews negotiated as bankers and as doctors with city governments. The gathering of these commissioners and their interregional efforts were not easily sustained, but the self-appointed leaders

142 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power surely believed that they and “the communities” in general were in danger, across the political borders that individuated the Italian principalities. Proponents of the view that medieval Jews made strong attempts to maintain a Jewish communal infrastructure even in the politically fragmented Italian peninsula have noted that a decade after this gathering, a synod took place in Florence.** Evidence for a meeting in 1429 appears in the concluding chapter of a treatise and critique of moneylending practices written in 1559 in Hebrew by the Pisan Jewish scholar Yehiel Nissim da Pisa.*° Lest his

reader imagine that his concern about the ethics of moneylending was historically unfounded, his rules an “invention,” Yehiel stated that he had before him a treatise written more than a century earlier in which many great men expressed similar concerns: It seems to me that the old days were better than these, for the heavens and the earth are my witnesses that I have in my hands an old document upon which are inscribed several decisions and decrees which were drawn up in the city of Florence in the year 1429. At that time, all of the leaders of the communities from every region of Italy gathered there and representatives were sent there, and their names are inscribed on the borders of that document, may their names be remembered for good. . . . Amongst the other decrees which they made are those concerned with interest. In order that all may see that I have not invented these matters, I will copy the language of the decision letter for letter as follows.*°

With this introduction, Yehiel invoked a time when Jewish leaders united to confront illicit or unethical banking practices. He did not include in his text

the names of those leaders or the decrees he supposedly had before him, except for one long statement against certain practices that he, of course, also opposed. The practice of forgery and skill at detection of forgery among humanists in Yehiel’s generation invites a measure of scepticism about Yehiel’s “old doc-

ument.” There seems to have been a meeting of some Jews in Florence in 14.28/29; perhaps a family from Pisa or Siena had moved to the city, a decade

before the first Jews were granted permission to open a bank there.?” The authority and weight the (supposed) decrees lent his own argument against the usurious practices he condemned was important to Yehiel. But perhaps equally important here is Yehiel’s production of historical memory, his memorialization of a gathering in the honored past of the (nameless) Jewish leaders and representatives who issued ordinances in Florence. In the absence of any official Jewish authority which might have censured the Jewish behavior he found problematic, Yehiel took on the leadership role in his capacity as scholar, and to do so invoked the past—not the distant, classical rabbinic past, but a gathering that would have occurred during the height of the preMedicean republican government of Florence. For during Yehiel’s lifetime

Before the Ghetto 143 there were no “representatives” of any Jewish community in Tuscany, only prominent families that competed with one another, sometimes sharply, and less prominent families that were satisfied to be treated “as citizens.”3* Just a few years earlier, at the famous synod of Ferrara in June of 1554. the long list of signatories had included “representatives” of the “communities” from Rome, Mantua, Bologna, Reggio, Modena and Romagna. Toscana (Tuscany) was not mentioned, and Florence, Siena and Pisa did not appear on the list as communities or as cities that sent representatives 1554.°? There were organized Italian Jewish communities in 1554, clearly; but the Jews of Florence and the other cities of Tuscany were not among them. For a century and a half they—unable or uninterested—had not followed the purportedly natural impulse to politically organize themselves as a Jewish community. We will return to see this mode of relation to the oligarchic republic and then duchy in which they lived in Chapter Four’s discussion of the response of the Jews of Tuscany to the proczedings against them which began 1n 1570. In sum, for the century and a half prior to the ghettoization of the Jews in Florence, there is no evidence of any formal Jewish institutions or governance, elected or appointed. The Jews were not chartered or privileged as a corporate entity. The Jewish bankers, however, were considered “leaders” by the republican, Christian leaders who granted them privileged status in the fifteenth-century commune of Florence. And these bankers and the bankers of the sixteenth century, who were the most educated and wealthy Jews, undoubtedly considered themselves leaders, referred to themselves as such and occasionally took measures to control, patronize or assist other Jews. In addition, they may have worked together with other Jews in neighboring and even distant Italian states, sharing concerns over their fate as Jews in a region deeply affected by changing papal policies toward Jews, by the activi-

ties of individual charismatic mendicant preachers and by the Christian pietist movements that occasionally surged in popularity. The Absence of Rabbis and Jewish Officials in Tuscany

One reason it is hard to imagine Jews in the premodern world without Jewish self-government of some sort is that Jewish law, continuously interpreted by rabbinical scholars, lays claim to regulate fundamental aspects of life of most propertied Jews: marriage, divorce, widowhood and the corresponding disposition of dowries and inheritances. The case of marriage is particularly significant because the regulation of marriage and reproduction has been considered fundamental to the definition of Jews and to Jewish communal life. Rabbis alone had the competence to interpret that body of

144. The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power law, to issue divorce papers, to perform the ceremony of the release from the

levirate and to respond to problems that might arise with broken engagements, abandoned wives and the like. This general understanding was invigorated by spectacular cases such as the otherwise baffling flurry of very public rabbinic activity over the broken engagement of the daughter a highprofile Jewish family in Venice in the mid-sixteenth century. Italian Jewish families must often have suffered broken engagements and other normal family trials and tribulations without the involvement of rabbis. However, the high status of the Venetian doctor whose honor was damaged in the “Tamari-Venturozzo affair” provided an important occasion for members of the rabbinic elite, peninsular and overseas, to raise their voices in debate and thus assert both their relevance and their communality.”

But the Jews of Florence had no specific rabbi to serve them or guide them in these situations. At the cultural height of the humanistic Renaissance in fifteenth-century Florence, when Jewish religious, philosophical and Kabbalistic culture had also thrived, “the community of Florence did not have, or at least did not have continuously, even one established rabbi,” according to Cassuto.*! Florentine court records show Jews both being brought to and

appealing to the (non-Jewish) court for a broad spectrum of crimes and problems, including several concerning marriage. Certain wealthy families such as the da Rieti and da Pisa also patronized Jewish scholars or maintained them in their homes as tutors. For matters such as particularly com: plicated or controversial divorces, individuals could and occasionally did correspond with important nonlocal rabbinic scholars such as Joseph Colon in Mantua.” But such cases were rare; for the most part, the Jews of Tuscany relied on the skills and knowledge, customs and laws to which they had more immediate access. It should be understood that for religious worship, even on the Sabbath and holy days, for daily activities and even for marriage, the mediation of a rabbi was required by neither Jewish law nor custom. Even though the role

of rabbis was becoming more sacral in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the way rabbis obtained their titles more formal, there was nothing akin in Jewish life to the Christian sacraments, nothing which required performance by a rabbi.** We should therefore not expect to find Jewish community organized in sixteenth-century Italy around the physical presence or person of a rabbi, especially before the Jewish population was well organized in other ways and created the office of “community rabbi.’** Florence, in

both the fifteenth and the sixteenth century, was in this respect like other places such as Mantua, Venice and Ancona where there was no official or communally engaged rabbinical authority.* Moreover, there does not seem

Before the Ghetto =145 to have been, in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, any local rabbi in Florence or Tuscany whose written legal opinions were sufficiently influential as to have been referred to by later rabbis or preserved.*° It now makes sense that no one in Florence carried a title or epithet suggesting political or religious leadership of or employment by an organized

Jewish community.*” No male Jewish householder in Florence brought before the court to testify at the inquisitional proceedings against Isaia Coen in 1566 was described as an officer of any sort or bore a title suggesting such a function.* A list of Jews present in Florence a year later in 1567 is marked by the same silence, although other interesting details about the Jews are noted— some had Christian servants, some were musicians who had no fixed

home, some were merchants who lived primarily in another city and so forth.” Again, in July of 1570, when the Magistrato Supremo wanted to collect the names of Jews throughout its territory, it did not turn the task over to a Jewish official, or committee — because it could not. Rather, it sent letters to the grand duke’s men in the dominion, his mayors and podesta.°° Then, when the government wanted an announcement relayed to the Jews in their synagogue in the new ghetto in 1571, it chose three local Florentine Jews, none of whom possessed any honorific title.>! There was apparently no obvious choice to play emissary, no head of the community or representative already recognized by the officers of the Nove Conservatori who would now oversee the ghetto. Finally, a month later three different Jews were chosen for another announcement, suggesting that the choice of the first three had been arbitrary, or at least unrelated to their status among other Jews. Indeed, the ghettoization and creation of Jewish self-government would give the Medici a tool that had not existed in 1570: a class of Jewish “leaders; dependent on

Medici favor for their status like all other bureaucratic climbers and appointed men. The Unmediated Relationship of the Jews and the Duke Individual Jews and male and female heads of Jewish households in Tuscany before the ghetto institutionalized them had a direct, unmediated relationship with the duke, with local administrators and with the full scope of the laws of the state. Their relationship to the duke was personal: they sent him petitions for favors, privileges and exceptions. Individual Jews wrote letters to the court requesting safe-conducts, exemption from taxes, protection from specific court proceedings and exemption from the newly imposed segno, just as Christians sent supplications seeking safe-conducts, exemption from the gabvella and the salt tax, and other favors such as charitable aid, inter-

1446 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power vention in a court case or permission to legitimate a natural son or to adopt a son-in-law as a son.® In this important aspect the Jews of Tuscany were both most like and most unlike the average citizens (cittadim) and countrypeople (contadinz) of the state. The duke’s access to the Jews of his state, like his access to his Christian subjects, was channeled through local authorities who governed the towns, cities and castles where they lived—and whose appointments Cosimo began to control in the 1ssos. Like some Christians, elite Jews attempted to circumvent these authorities and find direct access to the ultimate source of favors and protections. Indeed, the privileges that individual Jews received directly from the duke or assumed on the basis of those granted to Levantine merchants in 1551 could be seen as impinging on the rights of guilds or other corporate bodies. For example, the Silk Guild in Pisa complained to the duke that certain Jews in Pisa were doing business in a way that violated Pisan guild statutes. The duke’s secretary defended the Jews’ exemption from the guild statute in question, confirming the direct and prior relationship between the court and these particular Jews.*? Precisely because Jews were found in so many places, subject to local authorities but under a variety of conditions, and because they were not organized among themselves, it was more difficult for the duke to have any Jewish policy or make any effort to reach the Jews at once as a group in any way more immediate than a general edict. Even to enforce a general edict concerning the Jews, the state would need to extend its arm in every direction. It would have to engage the officials of every place where Jews lived, rather than one specific appointed official or representative of a community—as it would when it wanted to impose a new law on a “comunita” such as Pescia or Prato.** As individuals who were neither living in one place nor accessible to manipulation and control (the agency of power) through one administrative point of contact, the Jews really would not have seemed a “community” to the Medici and the bureaucrats of the state in the 1560s. And, using these politically based definitions—so relevant to the history of the emergence of states and to the struggle for power between center and periphery and for the same reason so central to Jewish historiography— it must be said that there was no “Jewish community” of Tuscany or of Florence prior to 1570.

Community: Broadening the Definition The fact that the Jews of Florence were not chartered by the government as a whole and had no externally imposed or supported political structure or

Before the Ghetto 147 designated rabbinic leaders in the pre-ghetto period only partially addresses the question of their interrelatedness as community. One fundamental limi-

tation of this approach is that even were there is evidence of community thought of in these terms— assemblies, councils or confraternities, for example—that evidence would describe the experience of men more than that of women. Christian women are known to have participated in some confrater-

nities from as early as the fourteenth century, and to have organized their own consororities as well, not to mention their coresidence in convents and participation in less formal religious institutions. In contrast, the written records of medieval Jewish institutions reflect an almost exclusively male participation.** If women did not participate in formal communal institutions,

should we say that women were not “part” of a Jewish community defined in reference to those institutions, but only the wives and daughters of its members? We see, therefore, that self-governing institutions alone would have inadequately described the social networks in which the Jews of Tuscany participated, and their absence is only a reminder of the importance of other forms of sociality and communal subjectivity. Few sources give us access to the emotions and self-perceptions of Jews in sixteenth-century Tuscany. We can, however, consider the more easily evidenced social expressions of their loyalties and the associative bonds that linked them as individuals and families into a larger unit or units. How did activities of daily life in a neighborhood, or in confraternities, or in other shared spaces and religious or other ritual activities based on gender, age cohort or social class build or cut across social

and geographic barriers? What kinds of social units were bounded and defined? Pursuing a few of these definitions of community based on social criteria, we will see that the Jews who lived in Tuscany did indeed belong in some ways to a “Jewish community” or perhaps to Jewish communities prior to ghettoization, but not to a community limited locally to Florence or Tuscany, and not to a community that was defined by organized institutions.

Fy The Jewish community to which the Jews of Tuscany belonged prior to ghettoization was defined not by the political reach of the duchy but by a broader set of regional and cultural boundaries. Most Jews were part of a network of central and northern Italian Jewish families who saw each other as potentially allied through marriage.*° More broadly, even without institutions or all-encompassing networks, Jews living in Tuscany (but not “the Jews of Tuscany”) may be considered part of a larger Jewish community based on their shared membership in a minority religion, their inevitable consciousness of “sameness” in contrast to the “otherness” of non-Jews, and

148 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power their awareness or shared experience of being seen as “other” and discriminated against by the Christian government in many arenas of life. The Jews in Florence or in Tuscany might be considered part of a Jewish “community,” before ghettoization, in the sense implied by Jacob Katz when he noted in his historical-sociological analysis of the Jews of Poland, Lithuania, Bohemia and Germany in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries that “Jewish communities everywhere shared a common faith, national tradition, and hope for future redemption, and [that] these shared values marked the Jews off clearly from their gentile neighbors.”®” The sense of belonging to a national, religious and historic Jewish community (liturgically spoken of in familial language: the Children of Israel, House of Israel; in the Talmudic and midrashic literature also Kelal Yisrael, or Keneset Yisrael**) is, however, to be distin-

guished from belonging to a specific, localized community (which Katz refers to as a kebila). The kinship and oneness of all Israel, all who wish to spend their days eternally in the house of the Lord, their God and Father— this is the family and communal sense produced in meditation upon or recitation of the daily, Sabbath and holy day liturgy and occasional blessings in Hebrew (or other languages) that Jewish men and women had available to

them through their own oral tradition and in their printed prayerbooks, copies of the Passover Haggadah and other rabbinic texts. Recent scholarship looks at historical communities broadly, considering kinship networks, the neighborhood, and the importance of ritual in maintaining social bonds by moving people emotionally to moments in which they experience unity.®® These approaches have addressed the experience of men more successfully than that of women. In convents and in less formally institutionalized settings when they were permitted, Christian women made holy communities that took them beyond the family life they might have experienced as married women, even if they were not necessarily cut off from those families.°° For urban patrician women of Venice who did not enter convents, it was the combination of “shared life experiences” and social con-

tact both within a neighborhood or parish and throughout the city that binds them together on multiple levels as both micro- and macro-communities of women.” Attention to life experience is critical for us as well, for the

configuration of gender and patterns in marital and household structure meant that Jewish women and Jewish men experienced their relationship to a broader Jewish society differently. For Jewishly educated men much more than for women, relationships with other Jews were forged and maintained through the activities of reading, writing and studying. With their highly skilled art of Hebrew letter-writing, the study of rabbinic texts, the composition of rabbinic responsa and

Before the Ghetto 149 participation in communal prayer services, Jewish men and boys had opportunities to build networks that were intellectual and amicable and might also link business and familial ties into a web. These opportunities were pursued by some elite Jews in the northern and central Italian states during periods of stay at Jewish boarding schools and yeshivot, sometimes in preparation for advanced study at the medical schools that accepted Jews, Padua, Perugia and Siena.” The friendships and correspondence-relationships of young Jewish men from Tuscany who were able to pursue such studies would not have been restricted to a Florentine or Tuscan realm. As any reader of the autobiography of Leon Modena, a very mobile rabbi of Venice, knows, the besteducated and wealthiest Jewish families of the Italian states formed a large network from Rome to Venice and everywhere between, moving and visiting, marrying and making other contracts.°? Marriage, of course, wove both men and women of Italian Jewish elites together socially and economically and as family. For the men, however, these ties were reinforced religiously, intellectually and occupat:c:.ally more than for women. In the later sixteenth century, as the presence of Jewish merchants of Spanish or Portuguese and Levantine origin increased and developed commercial and social relationships with Italian-born Jews, Italian Jews were more frequently and strongly linked to Jews in the Ottoman Empire and to the New Christian (Marrano,

or Portuguese) diaspora in its main centers in the West: Amsterdam, Antwerp and Flanders. There was even one major effort, spearheaded by Dofia Gracia Nasi, to organize this merchant diaspora politically in order to effect a boycott of the port of Ancona in response to the attack in 1556 on the

Portuguese merchants of that port (the so-called “Ancona Affair”) during which twenty-four men and one woman were burned to death as heretics after a reversal in papal policy on the acceptability of New Christians’ reverting to Judaism if their original conversion to Christianity had been forced. Jewish kinship or peoplehood can therefore be easily pointed to, whether we are looking at the way it was expressed and defined by the boundaries necessary for endogamy or in the political-economic effort to influence papal policies that affected Jews. The broad community we see in these large networks is obviously of a different order from the kebilah, a local community. For the Jewish historical sociologist Jacob Katz, “the formation of a kehila

was a social act intended to articulate the religious and cultural ties that linked individual Jews to one another?””® But even if there was no political or institutional articulation of it, what “social acts” connected the Jews of Tuscany not only to other Jews in general but specifically to Jews who lived in Florence or to the other Tuscan cities?®° To what extent were Jews, not only

the elite men but also the women and non-elite men, associated with each

130 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power other locally within Florence, within their Tuscan villages or within Tuscany

as a region and state? That they were not part of the Christian community was as clear as the fact that they buried themselves apart from Christians.° But in what ways did they live in the social context of a local Jewish community?

Social acts are visible within, and create, social spaces. In the next section we will consider the physical and social spaces of the city where Jews had contact with one another and examine two specific ways that Jews were spatially and religiously associated in the pre-ghetto period. Jews prayed, at least on some occasions, in groups; Jews bought or rented housing. This chapter will therefore consider Jewish sociality and two socially constructed spaces that take us beyond the question of institutional framework: the place of residence and the place of religious worship.

Residential Considerations

For historians who study a population that shares one religion and is | bounded geographically as a village, the existence of a “community” can be considered self-evident, and analysis may concern the finer characteristics of the constellation of forces that play among the villagers and between them and exterior concentrations of power.® In early modern Catholic and Protestant towns and villages in the sixteenth century, attendance at church services —mass or communion— became a focal point in the creation and main-

tenance of “sacral community.” For example, David Sabean has demonstrated that in the Protestant duchy of Wiirttemberg individuals who did not participate in the communion ritual were seen as, and understood themselves to be, outsiders and potentially dangerous to the Christian com-

munity.” The point was made earlier by John Bossy for early modern Catholic Italy, where Tridentine reform increased the authority of bishops over their diocese and of parish priests over their parishioners. The Christian

“community, after the territorial breakdown of the catholic (universal) church in the sixteenth century, became more local, more spatial—that is, parochial— coterminous with villages or specific parishes. At least, there was a concerted effort by bishops to make that the case.”1 As Bossy argued, “to the ordinary population . . . what the Counter-Reformation really meant was the institution among them . . . of a system of parochial conformity.” Ties of kinship were to be replaced with the specific community of parochial unity, communication and relationship to a specific priest who baptized, confessed, married and buried his parishioners.

Before the Ghetto —ISI Both before and after these reforms, whether Christian faith, holy days, rituals and knowledge made Christians one universal community or many interrelated and interdependent religious communities, Jews were outsiders. They had ways of being connected to Christians (for example, as womenneighbors who gossiped together with the mediation of a shared set of grocer-women; as men who visited some of the same prostitutes that Christian men visited). If we accept, however, that Jews would have been outsiders at least religiously in the cities, towns or villages where they lived, must they then necessarily have formed their own communities within those villages or cities—as a neighborhood, or enclave, for example? Before the ghetto there were no specific restrictions on where Jews might live in the city of Florence or, it seems, in most of the towns of Tuscany where they chose to reside. It has often been assumed that Jews nonetheless voluntarily chose to live near each other on the same street or in a quarter.”* In the medieval period Jews often did prefer to live in an enclosed and even locked neighborhood for their own security, before any policy of state forced them to do so. New archival data, however, show clearly that Jewish residential patterns in sixteenth-century Florence and the towns of Tuscany do

not conform to this pattern. ,

An extraordinary archival document tells us almost exactly where the Jews

of Florence lived in 1567. This document is a list made for the purpose of identifying all Jews in the city in order to enforce a new law requiring that Jews wear the segno.”* The most striking element of the list is the fact that the

Jews are registered according to the thirteen parishes in which they live. According to this detailed account, there were ninety-seven Jews present in the city of Florence in 1567, of whom ninety-three were considered long-term

or permanent residents.” There were eleven Jews in the Populo di San Christofano nel Corso delli Adimasi; a family of four Jews in Santa Maria Hipotecosa; a family of seven living in San Simone; three more Jews in San Piero Maggiore; seventeen in San Romeo; eight in Santo Stefano a Ponte; a complex co-fraternal household of fourteen Jews in San Leo; four in San Donato fra Vecchietti; four in Santa Trinita; two small family units totaling five Jews in San Michele in Palchetto; a household of seven in “qual fonda””®; a small nuclear unit of four in Santa Maria Nuova; a solo Jewish musician in

Santa Margherita at the Corte de Donati; and finally, in the Populo di San Michele Bertoldi, a house “in which there are said to be five Marranos” and the family of Isaac the harpsichord player “which has no fixed position but stays sometimes in one of these Jewish houses and sometimes in another.””” These ninety-odd Jewish residents neither lived near one another nor congregated voluntarily into a Jewish neighborhood or quarter. Their distribu-

152 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power tion in the city reminds us of R. Burr Litchfield’s demonstration that in Florence, Christians of all social classes lived in all quarters, the wealthy very close to the poor. That is, up through the mid-sixteenth century, the political

organization of the city did not require a strictly ordered relationship between place of residence and personal status. Litchfield’s graphic analysis of residential distribution in the city reveals some occupational clustering, but otherwise a rather even distribution of workers, artisans, shopkeepers, merchants and patrician families.”* That Jews, too, before ghettoization, found their place in many parts of the city, confirms our understanding that the political organization of the city of Florence did not yet require a strictly ordered relationship between place of residence and religious affiliation.

The same pattern of dispersal seems to be true for Jews in the smaller towns of Tuscany. It is possible to determine that in at least two of these, Empoli and Prato, Jews lived contemporaneously on different streets and even in different quarters of the city.” The addresses of the houses of these Jews were not included in the important census of 1570 which anticipated the expulsion.®° However, street addresses are sometimes revealed in notarial records, for when Jews employed notaries to draft their legal transactions,

they might bring the notary into their home. Thus the notary Honofrius olim Niccoli de Milanesi of Prato completed one document with the note that he had written it in the da Pisa house in Populo Santo Stephano on “Via nuncupato Il Borgo al Corno-” Borgo al Corno is today Via Garibaldi, which leads directly to the piazza of Prato’s main cathedral, Santo Stefano. The house of a second Jew in Prato, Sabato son of Master Amadeus of Coreggio, was in Populo Sancti Gregorii, a different parish.®? Given the common presupposition that premodern Jews had strong communal bonds and distanced themselves from Christians, the evidence of this urban distribution raises the question of why the Jews did not congregate in one quarter. Were they trying to avoid notice, to “lay low,” to avoid advertising their presence too obviously to Christians or to the government? Might they have feared that living in a neighborhood would have created an unacceptably visible communal presence and attract attention to what might even appear to be an unlawful gathering?*? In the fifteenth century there were occasional efforts to control—and ban— gatherings that were seen as potentially seditious. The Signoria was aware of and concerned about the political maneuvers that could be organized once people were meeting regularly and in private. A law of 1419 disbanded confraternities: “Item, no person, lay or clerical of whatever dignity, status, quality or eminence may allow any company to assemble in his house,’®? From 14.94 to 1537, under conditions of fre-

quent changes of government and political crises, confraternities in Florence

Before the Ghetto _153

were regularly closed by decree. Such suppressions were, according to Ronald Weissman, short lived and usually not enforced; it was easier and more effective to coopt than to suppress the city’s many Christian confrater-

nities.6* The Jewish banking elite might have thought that the Signoria would consider the Jews as a whole a confraternity—especially given the “slippage” of the terms compagnia and confraternita. When the Signoria or Medici suppressed the meetings of confraternities,

they were attempting to control institutions that already existed and that posed a specific political threat, for these fraternities, as Weissman has shown, brought men together from across the city and across divisions of occupation

and status. Jews, who did not belong to these Christian groups, posed no political threat to the republic or duchy, though they may have avoided large assemblies as a matter of precaution. It would require a great leap of imagination to think that they “hid” their numbers by choosing to live dispersed throughout the city, or hid their organizational structure by keeping it out of the eyes of the state. While it might have been a good strategy, there is no evidence to support the idea. Instead, we should remember that the search to explain the Jews’ residential choice in the city of Florence is built on the presumption that Jews “naturally” live in the aggregate and that anything other than this norm requires an explanation, such as a fear of Christian Jew-hatred. This is a set of presumptions I reject. It is not surprising to me that Jews lived spread throughout the city rather than adjacent to one another. Immigrant families and individuals found their way into the city, each with their own links, connections, ties, history and relationship to occupational groups or specific guild members, to already resident Jews or Christian patrician families, to acquaintances or employers.

Jewish Sociality and Gendered Community But while Jews did not generally live on the same street or even in one neighborhood, individual Jews who were not part of a familial household generally did live in close contact with other Jews. The absence of an organized.

Jewish community, or a fixed Jewish neighborhood, did not preclude a strong tendency for Jews to associate with one another. Jews generally lived in clusters, familial or otherwise. Thus, in the census of 1567, the only Jew

who did not live in a house with other Jews was Marcello, “a youth of twenty-five years, player [musician] at the Court of the Donati” in the Populo di Santa Margherita. According to the census of 1570, of 104. discrete

154 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power Jewish households in Tuscany,” which averaged over five persons each, only eight Jews, all men, lived alone, three of them in Florence.*”

Aside from these eight individuals, Jews who did not live with family members in Tuscany nonetheless lived with or close by other Jews. Some of the unmarried and childless men in the census of 1567 worked in the houses of other Jews as tutors, servants and musicians. Jewish households included biologically unrelated members: the Florentine house of Lazzero Raben, a merchant of used clothing, was home not only to his family of six but to a

tutor for his children, to another boy, taught by the same tutor, and to another used-clothing-dealer, either a partner or a boarder. While some individual Jews were absorbed into larger households, others found alternative ways to live in Jewish company. In Florence in 1570 one such group were boarders in the house of the Jewish innkeeper Donna Racchel, “who keeps boarding rooms, [where] there are three mouths on a permanent basis and almost every day she has [in addition] two or three foreigners.”** Racchel may also have provided her guests with cooked meals. By

operating her boarding house, she thus enabled her semi-permanent and transient boarders—mostly Levantine and foreign Italian Jewish merchants—to live Jewishly while in Florence. In 1567 a Donna Rachella, undoubtedly the same woman, was already keeping this lodging house in the Populo di Santa Trinita®’; she had with her at that time a daughter and two boarders. In the same year there was another house that domiciled a group of Portuguese, five men said to be Marranos.”? Another group of Jews who had gathered together by 1570 were about a “dozen young Jewish tailors,’ who were said to live “in that [work]shop of Christian tailors,” a reference to a small industry, whose (Christian) owner provided housing on the premises. These Jewish tailors, our census informs us in a note, “live in their rooms Jewishly [bebraichamente]-””' Bachelors, they were not all new arrivals in 1570, despite the fact that they are not mentioned as a group in the census of 1567. They seem to have arrived (or come of age)

during the previous decade or two and are mostly identifiable among the matriculants of the Linen Guild from 1560 to 1570. Seventeen Jews entered the guild in that decade, only four of whom were householders at the time of the census in 1570.” The remaining thirteen matriculants correspond (more or less) to the dozen tailors present in Florence in 1570.

It is notable that of the seventeen men who matriculated during the course of the decade, fourteen remained unmarried and domiciled as bachelors in rented rooms. While it is true that Florentine men married at a late age, it is also true that there was no population of poor or working unmarried Jewish women in Florence to match—and marry—this group of men.

Before the Ghetto —_—155

The censuses of 1567 and 1570 show that the unmarried women or girls of marriageable age in Florence in those years were from families of a higher social rank than the tailors.”* Although Florence was not, in the mid- or late sixteenth century, a vibrant Jewish cultural center, Jewish men came to Florence to take advantage of its economic opportunities. Once in the city, these Jewish men lived outside of

familial households. As unmarried men, however, though unattached to larger households, both the tailors and the visiting merchants nonetheless associated with other Jews. Indeed, outside the household structure, they were already linked together spatially (residentially), occupationally and rel1giously. In Florence they lived together, clustered professionally, and—we shall soon see— prayed together, creating micro-communities. The social ties that linked Jews to one another were different for men and women. Men were much more likely than women, in the pre-ghetto period, to be connected to other Jews (mainly males) through extra- or nonfamilial connections, while women were associated mainly with other Jews mainly

through family ties and household function. As we have already seen, the eight Jews who lived alone in 1570 were men, and to their number we must add the half dozen boarders in Donna Racchel’s house and the dozen tailors.

Living in their rooms in one large house, dormitory style, working at the same trade, these men could well be seen as small communities. Unlike Christian women, who could live in a variety of communal, mainly female settings in Florence and its environs, Jewish women had few residential alternatives to the patriarchal household. Unmarried women were somewhat more likely than unmarried men, after the death of their fathers, to be supported in the homes of relatives or to find employment as servants in the homes of wealthier Jews. The census of 1570 reveals that in the twenty-five households of the five towns whose Jewish populations were given in detail, there were nine adult unmarried or widowed females who lived in the house-

holds as servants or dependent relatives, compared to only three adult males.** Women were living in familial households, even if that family was not their own. The result of this micro-demographic analysis is that Jews associated with other Jews, but in a variety of residential settings. The primary setting was the household, which encompassed almost all women. But the small population of Florentine Jews and of Jews throughout Tuscany was comprised of nuclear families, multigenerational households, confraternal households, at least one consororal household, other variously extended households and clusters of single men and a few individual men on their own. While living alone was not uncommon for men in the city of Florence, for

156 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power Jewish men it suggests an active degree of disassociation from other Jews. Only three Jews were identified as living alone in Florence in 1570, one a foreigner who spent time in Ancona and the Levant and the other two relatively recent immigrants: Moise Buondi from Rome and Ventura of Perugia from Venice.”° Though Buondi had lived with a family of four in 1567 (including a wife and two sons, one legitimate and one natural), he was alone by 1570. He may have alienated himself in the wake of the events of 1566, when he made

the accusation against Isaia Coen discussed earlier; he was also regularly involved in violence and quarrels. Ventura of Perugia had taken refuge in Florence after a scandal led to his flight from Venice, where in 1560 he had been

denounced to Venetian authorities by an angry father-in-law who accused him of living outside the ghetto and possessing forbidden books. Ventura left Venice, his newly betrothed Tamar Tamari, her very angry family and a contentious financial mess, initiating the above-mentioned “Tamari-Venturozzo affair’”° In 1565 Ventura returned to Venice, where a Jewish arbitration eventually resulted in the issuance of the long-withheld divorce, Ventura’s declaration that it had been forced from him and was therefore invalid, the excom-

munication of Ventura by the Levantine Jewish community and finally a denunciation to the Venetian Inquisition and board of censors that led to Ventura’s formal banishment from Venice. The turmoil continued in Mantua

and involved a spectacular flurry of late sixteenth-century rabbinic correspondence and activity, which when it finally quieted down seems to have left Ventura, apparently alone, in Florence. In a certain sense, then, it seems possible to identify a few Jews who lived as if “outside” the Jewish social networks that did exist, distancing themselves or socially ostracized by other Jews, though not by any formal institution. The kind of sociality that Jews in Tuscany experienced was shaped by gender expectations and their accompanying educational, economic and marital patterns. Unmarried adult men living outside of familial households had opportunities to establish extra-familial ties to their co-religionists —a key factor in the development of “community”— because of the greater ease with which they could move about on the streets, travel together, become associates in a craft or trade. It may even be that Jewish men who studied rabbinic texts not

only developed relationships with their fellow students but felt a stronger cultural kinship with Jewish men as a whole, imagining them to be engaged in the same transhistoric tradition and intellectual dialogue. But women were not only missing these opportunities to experience connectedness to com-

munity. They also experienced fracture in their lives more than most men did, because of the prevalent marriage pattern. In societies where it was the norm for brides to be sent to live in the house

Before the Ghetto —157 of the husband’s family, marriage generated continuity in men’s lives, and discontinuity in the lives of women. In Italy wealthy Jewish families often sent their daughters long distances to join new husbands, so that there was fracture not only with the bride’s family but possibly even with her local culture and spoken dialect.”” Men therefore may have not only built a stronger web with a larger Jewish community but also maintained a more continuous sense of attachment to place, or local community, while women most often had to adopt and adapt to a new one. On the other hand, we have seen that in Tuscany many of the Jewish men were themselves newcomers. And yet women were even more dislocated from their natal homes than men. In the five towns where all the members of the household are listed, the householders are named and all other residents in each household are identified in relation to that head (that is: his wife, his children, his brother, her children etc.). These data show that it was more common for a woman to move as wife into her husband’s preexisting household than for a man to move as husband into his wife’s preexisting household, confirming the hypothesis that Jewish women in Tuscany suffered more dislocation through marriage than men.®* Among twenty-five fully described pre-ghetto households, there was only one in which a son-in-law (of the head) was present, and one case of a brother-in-law.” That is, there were only two men who moved into the home of a woman and her parent(s).!°? Women more often moved into households to join their husbands. There are two women listed as daughters-in-law of the head of the household.’*! In two other households women were listed as sisters-in-law of the

head of the household; obviously, it was common for brothers to live together and bring wives to join them where they lived.!© There are three additional households in which a male householder lists as a member /is mother or father or both, so that we know his link to them was unbroken or reinstated as they aged.’ In contrast, there is not one household in which a female householder lives with her parents or in which a male’s household includes his wife’s parents. Moreover, considering also other towns in Tuscany, it is clear that there are many houses in which brothers lived together with their respective families, but only one identifiable household composed

of sisters.'°* Clearly, then, the marital pattern in this particular society required that women uproot themselves more than men. For Jewish women, who experienced dislocation due to marriage even more often than men and who were less likely to develop intellectual and social ties to Jews through the study of Jewish texts or through activities with other Jews, it was mainly familial ties and their own specifically religious practices that served to attach them to the Jewish people beyond the families

158 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power into which they were born and were married. It is likely that they experienced and expressed their membership in a trans-historic community by preparing special foods for Sabbath and holidays, by maintaining musical and lyrical traditions, perhaps by passing down from generation to generation specific items in their trousseaux and a traditional knowledge of special rituals and prayers relevant to their lives as women. However, women had fewer opportunities than men did to spend time with other Jews of their own sex while living in this household-focused society, excepting their mothers and daughters, sisters-in-law and mothers-in-law.!® Italian Jewish men, especially those in the elite classes, had more opportunity to travel, study, live and work with unrelated Jewish men, whether during their adolescent years in Jewish boarding schools, or while studying at one of the medical schools, or through their employment and the access they had to public social space in the city, or in prayer wherever men gathered. In conclusion, marital and economic patterns led to gender differences in

the household-based pre-ghetto society, where men both maintained stronger vertical familial continuity and had a greater variety of horizontal (nonfamilial) ties to other Jews than did women. Women’s relationship to family and local community seems to have been less continuous, but women were more completely encompassed—or institutionalized —within familial households than men. If the way that Jewishness was experienced was gendered before ghettoization, the ways that ghettoization affected the Jews would also differ for men and women, as we shall see in the chapters that follow this.

The Jews of Tuscany: A Religious Community? Another obvious way that Jews in a given area were associated was in prayer. Many sixteenth-century Italian cities had Jewish populations that supported

communal synagogues. There were not only the beautiful synagogues of Venice and of Rome but also of other cities which had a strong tradition of Jewish communal organization such as Verona, Padua, Ferrara and Perugia.'°° The tradition calls men to prayer three times daily, and to more exten-

sive prayer, study and ritual on the Sabbath and holidays. Prayer, if conducted with a minyan or quorum of ten Jewish men, had the distinctly gendered potential quality (in the tradition of Jewish religious law) of being perfected and whole: there are important differences in the way prayers are said with or without the mmyan. Educated Jewish men therefore preferred

Before the Ghetto —159 to live where a minyan could be gathered, and preferred to pray in a minyan whenever possible. In the Tuscan towns where Jews lived in the 1540s through 1560s, however, as in northern Italian towns generally, there was not always a resident quorum of ten Jewish men for “public” prayer. In these places, prayer and

study were conducted as they had been for centuries in northern Italian towns, primarily within the homes of individual families.!°’ The participation of a rabbi was, after all, not essential to the experience, nor were there many environmental requirements, although Jews who had no prayer books, no one competent to lead the service or no access to a Torah scroll would have been hard-pressed to consider themselves as having fulfilled their religious obligations. In fact, prayer books were commonly owned, especially since they were available in print in the sixteenth century, and we may probably assume safely that any communally organized synagogue or household wealthy enough to have a chapel in its home had a Torah scroll. But though the wills of Jewish men and women give us a good sense of the objects that adorned and sanctified these small chapels, it is impossible to describe the typical experience of prayer engaged in by women or men, especially when the place of worship was a room or space inside one family’s house.!% In the Tuscan towns from which the Jews were expelled chapels were created within the homes of the wealthier families. In the larger centers of Pisa, Prato and Siena the houses of the da Pisa and da Rieti families were centers of Jewish learning and prayer. These were families in which banking and rabbinic scholarship were twin occupations, family wealth supporting the studies of the more scholarly members. In the other towns in which Jews lived, less is known about the conduct of Jewish prayer and education. There were no separate buildings for worship or for schooling. Assuming that the Jews of Tuscany educated their children the way other Italian Jews did, the education was taking place in homes, though not necessarily in the homes of the children’s own parents.’ None of the twenty-five Jewish households whose

full composition is known from the census of 1570 included a tutor or recorded the tell-tale presence of nonrelated children, suggesting that none of the homes in those five towns housed a boarding school.1!° For the most part, the Jews of Tuscany, like Jews elsewhere, were able to maintain the essential aspects of Jewish observance without organizing communally or hiring salaried professionals. Professional Jewish functionaries served the Jews of Tuscany as called upon and needed. A number of the families we know from the census of 1570 sent for the services of a professional circumciser, the mohel Yehiel Nissim da Pisa, to bring their sons ritually into

160 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power the covenant between God and Israel.!!! In addition to Yehiel Nissim of Pisa,

the rabbi who wrote the treatise on moneylending, other itinerant professionals may have been occasionally employed by Jews in Tuscany. Skilled members of the family undoubtedly performed many religiously regulated tasks themselves and with the help of neighbors and hired hands. Reliable information about Jewish ritual life in Tuscany comes from reports the Magistrato Supremo collected from local officials in 1570 as part of the campaign against the Jews that was a prelude to the expulsion and ghettoization. The court ordered the governors of each town to collect evi-

dence of Jewish employment of Christians that violated the laws of the church. In the testimonies collected, which did not incriminate the Christian servants of violating canon law, Christians who had been employed by Jews made declarations that reveal many of the Jewish laws and customs that the Jews of Tuscany observed. Christian servants testified they had helped the Jews haul water and make fires on the Sabbath, work that Jews could not perform on the Sabbath."” In

Empoli the Jewish widow Dorina (alias Delvora) hired male and female Christians for work in her house as well as in her small woolens industry.'?* She and Mattasia Sforno, another prominent householder in Empoli, both

also employed local Christians to help them make unleavened bread (azimelle, which in Hebrew are matsot) for the week-long Passover holiday." It seems likely that they were engaged not only in baking for their families but also in the production for sale or charitable distribution of the matsot to other Jews 1n the area. I have not been able to determine where Jews in sixteenth-century Tuscany obtained the meat and cheese they ate, or bought or baked their bread,

or where they buried their dead.''° Although we lack specific information that there was a Jewish butcher, or kosher-slaughterer (shohet), we need not imagine the Jews eating non-kosher meat or no meat at all. The issuance of licenses by rabbis to kosher-slaughterers was a sixteenth-century innovation. Such licenses were granted in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Mantua to women who had obtained training in the laws and practice of shehitah

and commonly slaughtered poultry for their own use and also for sale to other Jews, and the evidence suggests that women had long been considered competent to slaughter the birds they kept in their own yards.'"* Toaff finds

that in Umbria, too, “during the late Middle Ages every Jewish family included someone able to slaughter chickens, capons and pigeons in the approved fashion.”!!” And in Spanish and Italian cities it was not uncommon

to find that there was either a Jewish slaughterer allowed to work in the municipal butchery, or that Jews had their own slaughterhouse, or even that

Before the Ghetto — 161

a Christian butcher was trained in the method of kosher-slaughter and that Jews bought their meat from him. It seems likely that there were a sufficient number of Jews in Tuscany who

considered themselves knowledgeable enough to slaughter fowl and other livestock for their own needs, whether at a Christian abattoir or on their own property, or that Jews trusted Christian butchers who did it in accordance with local understanding of Jewish law. We know, too, that some Italian Jews drank wine made by Christians (a controversial matter in Jewish law), while others produced their own wine (and sometimes sold it to Christians).!!8 As

, for bakeries and cemeteries, Jews even in the highly organized Jewish communities of medieval Aragon did not always have a place of their own to bake the staff of life, nor did they always own a final resting ground." It is possible that Jews may have simply buried their dead on their own private prop-

erty; occasional evidence shows Jews attempting to transport their dead some distance to a place where there was an established Jewish cemetery. For example, in 1579 a Jew of Lucca wrote to Pisan authorities to receive permission to transport his dead son from Lucca to the cemetery of the Jews outside the gate to Lucca of the city of Pisa.!?? In addition to the testimony of the Christian servants, evidence of the religious activities of Jews in Tuscany is found in the inventory taken of some Jewish households in 1570, when they were arrested by local authorities who

had caught the scent of profit in the edict of expulsion. Although by September 1570 all the Jews of Tuscany had been formally “forgiven” all their crimes and granted immunity from further harassment, a few Jews ended up in jail and their possessions were sequestered and held pending the “investigation” of their supposed crimes and the satisfaction of their debts. Among these possessions, two bags of “books and other writings” were confiscated from the shop in the house of Salamone and Giuseppe di Moise da Empoli, Dorina’s sons, and sequestered, along with all their other property.'?! These details suggest that the house of the widow and heirs of Moise was a center of Jewish study, prayer and ritual life in Empoli, but not the only one. The inventory of the property of the Jews of Empoli found books in another house there as well: in the study (serittow) of Agnolino hebreo were “forty large Hebrew books.”!”?

The absence of organized communal institutions does not mean that wealthier Jews failed to fulfill their religious obligation to provide for the needs of poor Jews, nor does it mean that there was no learning or leadership. Scattered throughout Tuscany, Jewish families arranged the provision of their own special foods, rituals, prayers and education, whether they cooperated, depended on the assistance of wealthier Jews or compromised with

162 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power the traditions and laws to manage their own needs. But not even the most powerful families had any state-supported authority or “communal” mandate to impose their will on other Jews. The Jews were not organized by the state, and they had not subjected themselves to any coercive self-organization.

If the household in general and some specific households in particular were the focus of Jewish life in Tuscan villages before the ghetto, we might expect the situation to be different in the city of Florence, where the Jewish population was several times the size of these small settlements, and where, as we have already seen, there were numerous unmarried adult Jewish men. We have seen that they did not have a salaried rabbi, but did they pray together? Did they pool their wealth to support a kosher butcher, a baker, a teacher or any other “communal” functionary? Did they maintain or build a mikveh (ritual bathhouse), a synagogue or a school? In the fifteenth century, when the population may have been larger than the ninety-seven Jews identified in 1567 and much more productive in arts

and letters, the social and religious life and education of Jews in Florence took place primarily within each household. The rare references to a synagogue in 1456 and to a communal Hebrew-grammar school in the same time

period suggest short-lived experiments, not permanent institutions.’ In any event, whatever institutions of education, socialization and mutual aid may have existed then did not survive. There was no communal school in Florence in the decades prior to ghettoization. A list of Jews in Florence in 1567 shows one tutor, a man of about sixty years called Magistro (or Maestro)

Agnolo who was retained in residence to teach the children of Lazzero Rabben and his wife. The couple was raising four children of their own, young boys and older girls aged four to sixteen, and a fifth child, a six-yearold boy who was not clearly a relative.!** Servadio di Liuccio, who bore the epithet “maestro della scuola” in 1573 in the ghetto,!° was not a householder in the census of 1570 nor mentioned by name in either the Florentine list of 1567 or the 1570 census. He may have been brought to Florence after 1571, or in 1570 he may have been employed as a tutor in one of the larger households in Tuscany.'*° Before the ghetto, families arranged for the education of their children as best they could, individually. The provision of dowries, before the ghetto, was also almost exclusively a

familial concern. A silk-manufacturer named Ginevra d’Agnolo Blanis, granddaughter of the doctor, Laudadio Blanis, left provisions in her testament in 1575 “for the education of poor boys” and for dowries for poor girls.!?” [See Figure 9.] These funds were to be disbursed directly from her estate, not through a society or fund that served these purposes, as we would expect if any such societies had already been set up. If there were no specific

Before the Ghetto 163 communal funds for schooling or for the provision of dowries to which Ginevra promised her contributions in 1575, there were certainly none five years earlier, before the ghetto, when there were far fewer poor boys and girls in the city. But in the same testament, Ginevra Blanis left a bequest to the “compagnia della misericordia delli hebrei di Firenze.” This is the earliest mention of a Jewish confraternal organization or charitable society in Florence; it may have been created in the ghetto, or it may predate the ghetto. The members of such societies (generally called Gemilut hasadim in Hebrew) washed the dead, dug the graves and arranged the processions for burials. At the time that Stefano Bonsignori made his map in 1584, a Jewish cemetery was found between the Via della Giustizia and the Via delle Poverine (now Via de’ Malcontenti and Via Tripoli). But Ginevra’s will is our first mention of the society, and its members’ first written records are a set of regulations from 1610 that make no reference to any earlier stage in the life of the society. 128

The historical record’s silence on the existence of communal institutions and facilities is not proof that they did not exist, since Jews might have had such institutions but deliberately and successfully chosen to suppress any public representation of th.-mselves as a large, organized community. It is, however, a much simpler and more likely explanation that the Jews were not politically or institutionally organized as a community. The Jews of Florence were as capable of meeting their religious needs informally as were the Jews in the small towns of Tuscany. For example, it is possible that there was an old ritual bathhouse that had survived, but the Jewish women of Florence might have immersed themselves in their river or made do in nonritual bathhouses, just as Jewish women did throughout the Mediterranean in the late medieval period.’”’ As for holy day services, burials and other special events,

lack of formal organization surely did not stop them from arranging to gather informally or travel to be with family elsewhere whenever an occasion required the participation of more than one household.

Rabbis in Pre-Ghetto Florence We have also noted that the Jews of Florence did not support the services of a professional rabbi at any time before the institution of the ghetto.!%° For the period after 1527, Cassuto has uncertain evidence of only one rabbi present in Florence: Shelomo ben Shemuel from Monte dell?’Olmo (or Monteulmo, today Pausula in the province of Macerata), whose son Sabato was a banker in Pomerance in 1558.!3! But this does not mean that there was no one in Florence or nearby who had rabbinic knowledge and skills. There were, in

164 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power fact, a number of individuals—not only in Pisa and Siena but even in Florence—who may have had rabbinic training. Many Jews whose names appear in the archival sources are referred to as “m", “mg® or “m°? which could

have referred to the status of “m[agist]ro, or “m[aest]ro” This term, whether in its Latinate or Italian form, was a title of honor used both for guild masters and for men who had studied at university. In a Jewish context

the term of respect also connoted a level (but not the highest level) of achievement in rabbinic study. Consequently, when a Jew is referred to as “m'°” (the most common form) it is not always clear what the title means. The word rabbi, however, was also used in the language of Tuscany, and its meaning 1s clear. Living in Florence on the eve of ghettoization was a Jew referred to in some sources as Salamone di Rabi Benedetto. In the record of his matriculation into the Linen Guild in 1565, Salamone is also called the son of M"° Benedetto. In this case, we know that M® related to his standing as a master of Jewish law, for the father was not a member of the guild to which

Salamone was matriculating. This Rabi Benedetto is not identifiable, however, from the census data of 1567 or 1570, and was definitely not the head of a household in Florence. No other householder was called a rabbi.'*? Among the Jews of Florence before ghettoization the place of greatest

| honor was held by a Jew who almost certainly had a rabbinic education. The now elderly physician Laudadio di Moise Blanis—listed on the census simply as Dottor Blanis—carried a title of tremendous importance, connoting that he not only studied at university but had delivered public lectures and was awarded the highest rank given, Doctor, which, if he were not a Jew, would have meant that he was eligible for a teaching post at a university. It is

noteworthy that Blanis’s name is not found among the letters exempting Jews from wearing the segno when in 1567 Cosimo ordered that the Jews wear

the distinguishing sign. It is possible that while bankers had to buy their exemptions, Blanis’s status as a doctor was sufficient to exempt him from this indignity.19?

Rabbinical and medical training were generally undertaken together by Jewish men in Italy, and it now seems likely that Laudadio di Moise Blanis, a banker in Rome and Perugia before his arrival in Florence, where he lived with a large household in 1567, was in his earlier years not only a banker and physician but also a Kabbalistically oriented rabbinic scholar.!** However, he

left no collected responsa or sermons, and very little correspondence.!* By the time he moved to Tuscany in his later years he seems to have been known primarily as an educated and esteemed doctor. Despite his high status and the fact that many Jewish physicians in Italy were also rabbinic scholars, we do

Before the Ghetto — 165 not have evidence that Laudadio Blanis served actively as a rabbinic judge or respondent to legal queries.

In addition to the Blanis household, there was another Jewish home in Florence whose members might have included rabbis or employed religious teachers: the joint household of the brothers Lazzero and Moise d’Isac Rabben. Rabben, it should be noted, was a surname, not a rabbinical title: Moise Rabben managed a bank in Arezzo with his son-in-law, Sabato di Amadio. (Moise’s brother, Lazzaro, also used the surname Rabben, as did the two brothers’ sons in years to come.) Some archival texts refer to these brothers as “m°,” which as we have already noted, when it does not refer to guild status (as it does not here), might imply either rabbinical or university training or both. In summary, we may assume that many of the men of the wealthier families had received some training in Jewish law and literature, but there was no one who held an elected or paid position of rabbi in the city of Florence or for the territory of Tuscany as a whole.

Synagogues in Pre-Ghetto Florence Regardless of the presence or absence of a rabbi, we might want to consider the Jews of a given location a united religious community if they cooperated to support religious institutions such as a synagogue, ritual bathhouse (mikveh) and a slaughterhouse. As we have seen, there is no evidence regarding the latter two institutions before the ghetto, although if they were like Jews elsewhere they found ways to maintain their distinctively Jewish customs regardless. On the other hand, the archives reveal evidence not of one synagogue in Florence but rather of at least two places where Jews gathered for public prayer in the 1560s, and possibly of as many as four. When the parish-by-parish census of Jews was taken in 1567, the census-taker noted two synagogues. One was in the house of Lazzero Rabben in the Populo di San Christofano nel Corso delli Adimasi, where, as we have already noted, a rabbinic scholar was in residence as a teacher for five children. In this house, we are told, they have “the synagogue where the other Jews of Florence and beyond come together.”!4° Lazzero Rabben was a rigattiere, a dealer in used clothing. His was not a high-status profession as it has been traditionally defined, but he was a married, forty-year-old man with a house, a large family, a resident tutor and various Christian servants and employees. But the same census noted that in another household “they make the synagogue,” in the home of Dottor LaudaDio, the doctor, aged sixty years, and Stella his wife, who were raising three grandchildren, Laura, Ioseph and Sala-

166 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power mone.'*” Laudadio Blanis, recently arrived from Perugia, had a very high social status as a doctor. Did he maintain his status by keeping his distance from the local Jews? Did these two important Jewish households divide a community, competing with one another for status and control, or simply conduct services in their own homes, as they had done wherever they had lived before their move to Florence? I think the answer is that neither of these families or any other was “head” of or controlled a Jewish community in Florence. Prayer was conducted in space that was neither “public” nor “private”; like Jewishness itself, it was associated with specific households, ethnic origins and religious rites. Where one prayed depended on many variables. Only two years later, in 1569, there was a conventicle referred to as the “synagogue in the house of Giovachino,” that is, a synagogue primarily known for its location in a specific house. It may simply have been an oversight that no mention was made of the place where Giovachino had prayed in 1567 with his large household, which was even larger than that of Lazzero Rabben or Laudadio Blanis.!*8 At the other end of the spectrum, there was in 1566 a place known from another source as the “scuola spagnuola”; whether it was a separate building Or a room in someone’s house, it was not associated with any individual, but rather with the Spanish rite used by the people who prayed there or by the fact that Jews of Spanish origin prayed there.!*? In the “scuola spagnuola” some Jews appear to have used bilingual prayer books, with “Christian letters,” at least for reading psalms.“ The informant

Moise Buondi interpreted the use of the vernacular as evidence that these Jews did not know Hebrew and therefore — like Isaia Coen—were all Marranos, brought up as Christians. Was this a synagogue of ex-New Christians? In defense of all Spanish and Portuguese Jews, the university-educated doctor Laudadio Blanis argued against such a conclusion, stating to the inquisitorial court that it was perfectly acceptable according to Jewish law and tra-

dition for Jews to recite hymns and psalms in their own (vernacular) language.'*! Moise Buondi, a Jew of Roman origin, was apparently not accustomed to seeing prayer books in the vernacular where he prayed, at a place he and others referred to as simply “la sinagoga”

We cannot draw conclusions about the specific spaces to which the “scuola spagnuola” and a “sinagoga” refer, but they are apparently different from the sanctuaries used by the Blanis family and the Rabben family. Perhaps the scuola spagnola was the house in which the five Portuguese merchants lived in 1567. Moise Buondi’s “sinagoga” may perhaps be identified with the synagogue in Giovachino’s house, for he was one of four Jewish

Before the Ghetto 167 householders absolved by the judges of the criminal court from charges against them for violence they had committed in that synagogue against a fellow Jew. One day in September 1569, on Rosh Hodesh (the New Moon) just a week after the holiday of Simhat Torah, a certain Jew named Lione, “being

in the synagogue in the house of the said Giovacchino, [Mose di Violino, Giovachino Romano, Sabato Romano and Abram Barroches Levantino] threw him out of the synagogue with blows and kicks, and the said Mose bit him.,”!42 The attack would have led to fines had the men drawn blood or used

weapons; as it was, the case was dismissed without penalty for insufficient evidence (per difetto di provt).

This incident suggests that the religious and social connections between Jews in Florence were complicated, but not determined, by ethnic origin. Mose was the same used-clothing-dealer (Moise) from Rome who, hostile to “Spanish” Jews, had a few years earlier informed the inquisitor that Abram Barroches was Spanish, though he was generally considered Levantine.'* Now he and Abram Barroches stood side by side ejecting Lione from the synagogue in Giovachino’s house, which may have followed the Italian or the Spanish rite. The only Giovachino who had a house in Florence in 1567 or 1570 was Giovachino di Donato Levi; in other sources he is called Levita. He is usually referred to as a “Padovano,” a Paduan—here, we recall, he 1s called a Roman. Where he was from before Padua and Rome we do not know, but he was not a Levantine merchant.!* The men who were in Giovachino’s synagogue thus included at least two Jews of Roman origin and one Levantine. Despite the existence of at least two synagogues in Florence, it cannot be assumed that Italian Jews and Jews of Spanish or Levantine origin prayed separately.!* From just the years 1567 to 1569, then, we know of synagogues in the house of Lazzaro Rabben, Moise Blanis and Giovachino Levi, as well as a Spanish synagogue in what was probably a fourth location. Whether there were two, three, four or more places where Jewish men gathered in prayer in any given year— and wherever

women prayed—it is clear the Jews of Florence were not united in prayer until the ghettoization.*° In sum, connected to each other as members of the Jewish faith, and excluded in many ways from the social and religious institutions, activities and discourses that bonded their Catholic neighbors, the Jews of Florence before ghettoization were not, however, specifically united as one local religious community. But neither were they divided by national or ethnic origin into two, three or more subcommunities. There were connections among these Jews: marriages, business partnerships, friendships and animosities.

168 The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power But the network reached beyond the bounds of specific villages and cities and outside the Tuscan state, and nothing specifically bonded the Jews of the Tuscan state. Rather than referring to the Jews of pre-ghetto Florence, or of Tuscany as a whole, as a “community,” then, we might call them a constellation, another,

perhaps more descriptive metaphor. Although they had no boundaries of their own that contained them, we have described the clusters of Jews who lived within the borders of the state. And though there were hundreds of Jews, a few bright lights stood out, key individuals to whom others were drawn. They formed households and relationships based on a complex of fac-

tors including ethnic origin, immediate provenance, age, gender, occupational and educational status and personal friendship and enmity. But like most images, this image too is flawed, for it dissociates these Jewish households from the geographic contexts in which they were set: the village, the town, the castle, the neighborhood. For the Jews were also threads woven into a larger social and economic and even religious fabric. In the next chapter we turn to the administrative and physical process of ghettoization, an act of state that would rip apart the warp and woof that had woven these Jews into their worlds, unraveling all aspects of their relationships to one another and to their Christian neighbors.

Part II: The Construction of the Ghetto

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Four Staging the Expulsion: The Proceedings Against the Jews hoy me misero che disgratia e la mia, 0, che male ho fatto alle persone che habino da cercare nuovi occasions dt farm privar

della gratia sua —Agnolo di Laudadio Hebreo to Francesco de’? Medici,

: Pisa, 20 October 1570, Mediceo del Principato 554, 1ssr In the absence of any written policy that permitted the Jews to live in Tuscany other than the individual privileges and charters he had himself issued, the duke might have simply expelled the Jews from his state or forced them to move into a ghetto. He did not do so. Instead, he and his supreme council of magistrates engineered an investigation into Jewish activities. ‘Testimony was collected, guilt was assigned. The process, which served the ongoing needs of public legitimation of Medici rule, had many performative elements. It was a state-sponsored production, although the stage was not the courtyard of the Pitti Palace. There were street-performances to be enacted in local village markets; there were dialogues and interrogations in court rooms; messengers galloped in and out of scenes with letters from the palace, from the judge, from mayor and governor. The final scene had a new backdrop —the gate and walls of the ghetto. This chapter tells the story of the staging of the investigation and ghettoization. Today it may read as a farce and a tragedy; to some among its Christian audience at the time, it was probably sacred drama; then and now it was a power play.

KF Had the duke wanted to expel the Jews from his territory, he could have

arranged for his council, with approval of the Senate, to issue an edict expelling them at any time.’ Indeed, this is exactly what happened to resident Gypsies when they were expelled in March 1573.” But the Jewish bankers held

charters from the duke granting them permission to live and work where they were. The duke preferred to prove that the charters had been violated by the Jews than to revoke the charters arbitrarily. On the other hand, as we saw earlier, the majority of Jews in Tuscany were not dependent on banking charters. Even if it could have been proven that the charters had been abrogated by Jewish transgressions, the expulsion of all other Jews did not automatically follow.

172 The Construction of the Ghetto If the ghettoization may be seen as a performance staged by the state, the self-legitimizing function of the performance will be found in the claim that it effectively produced or enhanced public order. Rulers and elites engage in self-legitimation with monumentalism, mystification, promises or demonstrations of peace-and-prosperity; Cosimo did it with the promise of law and order. Benefit could accrue from this production of order and the protection of Christianity, but this mode of self-legitimation required that the duke and his administration make a concerted effort to represent their acts against the Jews as legally justified—law and order together, not order alone. Despotism could still alarm the people of the city that imagined itself as David van-

quishing the tyrant Goliath, and as Judith outwitting the more powerful Holofernes. But how could the expulsion of the Jews be presented as lawful, if most of the Jews in Tuscany were neither residing there under the protection of any laws nor in violation of any ban on Jewish residence? While we cannot hear the discussions that undoubtedly took place on this subject, the preamble to the expulsion edict of 1570 shows that Cosimo or his advisors were concerned about it. The edict finessed the problem brilliantly by assuming and invoking a (fictive) contract between all Jews and the state—not just between specific bankers and the state—in order to then claim, retroactively, that that contract had been broken.’ Never stated explicitly, the argument is expressed in the body and dynamic of the text of this edict. The preamble to the edict of 26 September 1570, published on 3 October, may be divided into two sections: one on the (supposed) violation of charters, the other on a violation of the bounds of Christian tolerance.* The first section concerns the bankers. It declares that the subjects of the grand duke

| have brought many complaints, by spoken and written word, against the Jews who were granted license to lend in the territories of Pescia, Prato, Empoli and San Giovanni. Although these were a few specific people, their names are not mentioned, which encourages the reader or listener to hear that it 1s Jews who are accused, not specific individuals. According to claims that had been made, the edict stated, “the Jews” have transgressed their charters (capitoli et conventiont). The specific violations cited are (1) that the Jews have made loans on days prohibited by their charters, that is, on Christian festival and holy days; and (2) that they have taken greater usury (higher — interest) than they were allowed, counting two months when the pledge was only held for one, and appropriating the pledges of poor contadini rather than selling them at auction as they are supposed to, along with other abuses

such as not returning pledges but keeping them for their own use. After this technical recitation of transgressions of laws, charters and stipu-

Staging the Expulsion —173 lations, the preamble shifts its focus. Jewish lenders and now also their servants and agents are secondarily accused of committing fraud against widows and the poor. The reader’s attention is moved from the specific legal transgression of charters to a more general accusation of dishonesty and immorality. All these transgressions, the preamble states, are manifestly evident in the testimonies “examined, public and private.” This is a reference to the collection of evidence and interviews conducted during the summer of 1570, to which we will return. The second section of the preamble completes the shift that was introduced with the reference to widows and paupers. Now we read not of the behavior of specific bankers, nor of bankers in general, nor even of bankers with their servants and agents. It is the behavior of Jews in general that is being judged: What is even more important and displeasing to His Highness than the nonobservance of capitol: and the above-stated transgressions [is that not only these Jewish bankers and their agents and ministers but] also many others who do not have permission to lend, but live in the Florentine Dominion, have retained in their houses familiarly and retain at their service Christian women of every age as nurses

and wetnurses to give milk to their children, and they have been accustomed to and continue to have continuous domestic discourse with these people, who could easily, with the example of the perfidious Judaic sect, be led to deviate from the Catholic Religion and fall into notable errors against the Canons of the Highest Pontificate and the sacred councils.°

Not only the privileged bankers, or their servants and employees, the preamble declares, but, “even more important and displeasing,” other Jews too are

a threat. And it is the integrity of the Holy Church herself that 1s endangered—a danger located specifically in the threat to the spiritual (and possibly corporal) integrity of Christian women, who are vulnerable to fall into unmentioned errors and deviations because of their contact with Jews who are said to employ them as servants, nurses and wetnurses. The main purpose of the charges listed in the preface was to legitimate the expulsion edict that followed it.° Villagers surely did not know that, as one major jurist had written, “Jews, by law, are de Populo Romano et de eodem corpore civitatis. Therefore one must have cause to expel them.”” But they might nonetheless have wondered how secure they were in their own homes if their Jewish neighbors could so easily be expelled. By citing both their infractions of the law and their threat to Christianity, the state anticipated and addressed

on two levels, legal and religious, any doubt its subjects might have had about the right of the prince to expel the Jews. When we examine how the preamble unfolds, we can see that for all the impact of Counter-Reformation politics and ideas on Florentine officials, the

174. The Construction of the Ghetto most important link between the Florentine ghettoization and the church is

that through ghettoization the Medici brought religious categories of thought directly into the heart of the policy and administration of their state.

The ghettoization and the edicts that established, interpreted and represented it employed fundamentally Christian concepts to explain the presence of Jews in Tuscany as the result of Christian “tolerance” (in Tuscany) and of princely grace. Whereas presumably Christians had an unquestionable right to live where they were, Jews did not. The prince could turn his grace away

from the Jews if they did not respect the conditions of their tolerance; punishment or expulsion by the state was thus a legitimate response to the sins of any part of the collective Jewish whole. And so he did, but not by simply revoking the charters of the bankers and expelling the other Jews; he had. his magistrates open proceedings against the Jews in general, to prove them guilty of wrongdoing.

The Proceedings While Jews who were bankers were chartered and thus posed a specific legal challenge to a government that wished to annul those charters, we have seen that the majority of the Jews present in Tuscany had no more specific right to live there— but perhaps no less right—than any other noncitizen subject of the state. Jews were living mostly in towns like Pieve Santo Stefano, Colle, Castrocaro, Poppi— places where there was no chartered banker— and even the Jews who lived in towns where there were bankers were not governed or protected or salaried by the bankers. Yet apparently, the state was unable to produce any law or claim that the Jews had settled illegally. In order to justify the expulsion of ail the Jews, the state had to broaden the accusations. Because it would become impossible to prove or even make charges against every individual Jew or Jewish household, it would be necessary to generalize about the crimes of “the Jews.” This is what the edict of 3

October 1570 did. The government did not trump up accusations of Jews murdering Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes, although individuals who sought the expulsion of the Jews did not shy from that approach.® It simply turned to canon law and instigated a search for violations. The argument was not articulated, but it explained the presence of Jews in Tuscany as a conditional presence: the Jews had been tolerated (it being the policy of the church to tolerate Jews) for as long as they had respected the

laws of the church. Because “they” had not done so, they were now to be

Staging the Expulsion _175 expelled.’ That is, the government justified its decision to expel/ghettoize the Jews by declaring that the (implicit) conditions upon which Jewish settlement depended had been violated. The argument was double-barreled: violations of charters, crossing the limits of Christian tolerance. The collection of evidence and testimony to prove what had already been decided for political and probably financial reasons was the commission of the duke’s privy council, the Magistrato Supremo. The magistrates delegated

this responsibility to Carlo Pitti, a member of a little-known branch of a famous Florentine patrician family who played a prominent role in the ghettoization, as we shall see. Along with its other work, in the summer of 1570 the Magistrato Supremo collected evidence and otherwise prepared its case. The October 1570 edict was presented to the public as policy decision based on the report of this commission, submitted by Carlo Pitti. But the collection of evidence and the “use” of the report is our most revealing story, one which exposes the thoughts and actions of all the actors. On 30 June and 7 July 1570 letters were sent from Florence to the leading officials in towns where Jews were known or thought to reside.!° In the letters that were sent to cities where Jews held banking charters, the Jews were charged with transgressing their capitoli..' The bankers accused had their lending activities suspended, they were ordered to appear before the magis-

trates in Florence, they were forbidden to leave the state and they were required to submit the names of guarantors for any fines which might be imposed on them.” Individual Jewish bankers at this point did not know what lay ahead. They might have thought that they faced local anti-Jewish sentiment, competition from those with a stake in the monti di pieta or even competition from other Jewish bankers. After all, banking families in Tuscany had a history of competition with one another and it was not extraordinary for one banker to lose a contract and have another one take his or her place, perhaps lending at a

lower rate or making an interest-free loan to the town in return.’ Indeed, Leone d’Abramo da Pisa seems to have suspected such a move on the part of an unknown competitor, as we see from a letter written in his defense and signed by more than fifty Christians, in which they state that they “prefer this

Jew to any other-”!* While I have not attempted to reconstruct the fate of each and every banker and banking agent, especially given the partial destruction of the records of the criminal courts for parts of the years 1570 and 1571, evidence suggests that the closures of the banks led to the seizure of substantial Jewish assets and pledges, as well as to claims on Jews by Christians that led to the arrest and imprisonment of individual Jews. There does not seem to have been an orchestrated set of arrests of bankers or confiscations of their

176 The Construction of the Ghetto goods; each town handled the events differently, some by the very orderly process set forth in the edict. But the letters of 30 June and 7 July to the officials of all the towns and cities were in fact concerned with the nonbanking Jews as well as with the bankers. The vicars, capitani and podesta who received the letters were ordered to conduct a census of the Jews in their jurisdiction, counting the

number of famigle and the number of bocche (individuals; literally, “mouths”). Some towns that had no Jewish bankers received the order to conduct a census of their Jewish inhabitants somewhat later in July and August.’° Unlike censuses conducted by the state for the purpose of taxation or for grain rationing, the government requested only a head-count, not a material inventory. Neither the total patrimony, nor the amount of grain each family possessed, nor the number of cattle and horses it owned was sought.!° The census was a population study—and provided the data needed

| to organize a population transfer.!” The Defense of the Jews From 19 to 24 July the bankers appeared in person before the officers of the Magistrato Supremo to plead their innocence to the charges that had been made against them in the letters sent out on 30 June and 7 July.!* On the first

day, Leone di Abramo da Pisa hebreo, referred to always as “one of the patrons of the bank of Pescia, Empoli and San Giovanni,” responded to the charges against him and his brothers in the presence of his guarantor, Magis-

ter Simone di Laudadio da Rieti hebreo.!? On the same day, Matassia di Davit da Sforno hebreo, agent and minister of the da Pisa bank at Empoli, was called in, as was Sabato d’Amaddio da Careggio hebreo, the bank’s agent in Prato on market days.” The next day, 20 July, the court heard the defense of the second da Pisa partner, Lione’s brother Laudadio di Abramo da Pisa hebreo, and the other agents and ministers of their branches in San Giovanni

(Davit di Raffaello da Reggio hebreo) and in Pescia (Emanuel di Davit Sforno,”! and Ioseph di Leone da Fano hebreo on 22 July).?? The appearances

in court were completed on 22 and 24 July with Samuel di Manuel de SantAngelo hebreo, the patron of the bank at Monterchi, and with his minister and agent, Agnolo di Vitale hebreo—the only Jewish bankers tried who were not agents of the da Pisa family.”* Agnolo di Laudadio da Rieti of Pisa was the only Jewish banker who did

not appear. His banking privileges had been revoked outright rather than suspended pending the investigation.’* Rieti’s charter had been granted upon

Staging the Expulsion —177

the “pleasure” (a beneplacito) of the prince. The banker in Pisa could not mount a defense at the court of the Magistrato Supremo, for he had not actually been accused of any wrong-doing. His reaction to the closure of his bank (and ultimately to the plight of all the Jews) is recorded in an exchange of letters he had with the duke, beginning with a direct appeal to Francesco,

to whom he had been granted an introduction by the Marquis of Montino before the actions against the Jews of Tuscany had begun.”°

On 27 July Agnolo hebreo wrote to Francesco asking to be allowed to come to court to show the duke three crystal vases of extraordinary beauty.”° Agnolo’s letters to the duke always mixed business with business: in March a few months earlier he had spent the first half of one letter offering to procure for Francesco an unusual natural formation, a column of ice (or perhaps a stalactite?), while the second half revealed his petition against some mercantile encroachment of recently arrived Jewish merchants.’’ In his second letter, Agnolo now attempted to persuade the duke that the three crystal vases were exactly the kind of thing he would wish to have in his collections. But he acknowledged the politics of his petition: granting him an audience and receiving the gifts would be a sign Agnolo could use to show the world that he was still in the duke’s favor even though his bank had been shut down.”8 If Francesco would agree, Agnolo would be able to explain the closure of the bank as a policy decision, ‘sut one which did not mean his own demise in Tuscany. Already a merchai:t banker and procurer of fine objects, he would concentrate his efforts on procurement for his ducal patron.

In addition, he suggested in obscure and inelegant language, perhaps reflecting the difficulty of writing a letter of criticism to one’s lord and patron, he recommended “these poor Jews,” refugees from persecution, to the prince. In the same sentence he assured his patron that these Jews would not stay permanently in the state, but would soon go.”” Agnolo also made it absolutely clear that there were five or six families of Jews who were in a dif-

ferent category, “born and raised with every civility and honor,’ and peti-

tioned that the damage that had been done to their status under the law should be corrected. In this letter it is not clear which Jewish refugees he was

thinking of, but it seems that he is aware that the status of Jews is being attacked, not just his own bank. When he had a column of ice to offer, he asked the duke to tell him what price it was worth. The circumstances being now entirely different, no price was mentioned for the crystal vases. Agnolo may have sent his letter to the wrong Medici patron, for Francesco ignored his petition for mercy and an assurance of security, and responded that unless the vases were truly unusual and large, he already had enough.*° The door was not entirely closed, but almost.

178 The Construction of the Ghetto On 8 September Agnolo sent another letter to the duke, explaining that | he had been unable to bring the vases to him because he was detained 1n Pisa by the consuls. He had been fined 800 scudi and had not been allowed to offer a defense. By now, of course, he knew that he was not the only one in trouble. The statewide attack on the Jews was fully under way, although not the edict of expulsion. In this letter Agnolo dispenses with most of the humility and flattery of the first letter. Indignant and outraged, he rails against the abuse and warns of the damage it will do to commerce in Pisa, where merchants will lose faith in due process. In closing he offers his services and humble servitude with all his heart to the prince, who, he also offers, must surely not be fully aware of the events in Pisa.*? Agnolo, as he wrote to the duke in exasperation, had not been allowed to

defend himself. But each of the other nine Jews appeared before the court and was sworn in “according to the style and custom of the said Jews.” One after the other, in their separate testimonies, the bankers denied transgressing their capitoli. Each presented a defense, recorded by a scribe in the third

person, in response to what appears to have been a standardized set of charges regarding transgressions of the banking charters. That is, the bankers’ statements follow a fixed pattern, which suggests that they came prepared with a response to each charge in letters they had received of which we have

no copy, or possibly responded on the spot to a set of questions posed to

. them in person.** The subjects with regard to which they defended themselves were, in order: lending on Christian religious festival days; the rates of interest they charged; lending on other days specifically prohibited to them

by their capitoli; taking sacred objects, such as chalices and crucifixes, as pledges; the operation of banks in locations other than those specified by licenses; the procedure used in the valuation of pledges and the restitution of pledges. One of the nine bankers also made a statement concerning his employment of Christian servants.** The transcripts show, as Carlo Pitti duly noted in his own summaries of the testimony, that the bankers denied all the charges against them. The one exception was the banker at Monterchi, Agnolo di Vitale hebreo, who admitted he had operated his bank on Christian holy days.*®* In his report Pitti declined to mention that when this Jew “confessed,” he did so in the context of what he had considered a safe explanation. For although Agnolo admitted

to the magistrates that he had given loans on Christian holy days, he explained that he had done so with the express permission of the vicar of Monterchi, that he had given only very small loans (10 soldi to 1 giulio) and that he had given them only to poor people who actually needed bread.*° There is no evidence of Jews attempting to organize and help each other,

Staging the Expulsion —_—179

but it is not surprising that they undertook to defend themselves as individuals. It is more noteworthy that Christians, including the officials of most of the towns, helped the Jews in their self-defense.*” Iacopo di Lotto, the vicar of Monterchi just mentioned, for example, later defended Agnolo di Vitale, confirming what the Jewish banker had asserted by informing the Magistrato Supremo that he personally had granted permission to the Jews to open the bank on Christian holidays. He did so, he explained, out of compassion for the Christian poor, who could not afford to lose a day’s wages and had no other opportunity to come to the Jews on business.*°

It was not only officials who came to the defense of Jews. Leone d’Abramo da Pisa had little trouble rounding up his supporters. Immediately upon receiving notification of the charges against him, Leone circulated a let-

ter, and twenty-six men of Pescia, “homini delli primi,’ each signed their name below the text, dated 2 July 1570.°” Another (different) twenty-seven men from Pescia signed a second copy of the same testimonial: We the subscribed do make true and undoubted testimony that Leone da Pisa and brothers and their ministers, bankers in our land of Pescia have always dealt with us civilly [cépilmente} and as righteous men [uomini da bene] and that we have continuously received from them service and favors [accommodation: servitio ¢ commodt|. So much so that we could not in any way complain of them, but rather [must] praise them; so much so that we would desire them more than other Jews; this being the truth, the present [text] is signed in our hand.”

It is fair to assume that this letter, written “in the name of God” (Al nome AI ddio) rather than in nomine Iesu Christi, and submitted in two identical copies, was written by Leone da Pisa himself. Did he pay these fifty-three men to sign his letter, or perhaps cancel debts they owed him? Were bribes necessary to galvanize their support? For that matter, did Iacopo di Lotto of Monterchi have a vested interest in helping Agnolo di Vitale? Historians and readers who presume a generalized hostility between Jews and Christians or a pervasively anti-Jewish atmosphere in the premodern world might postulate an economic explanation here, even if little evidence exists to support it. And though we have not uncovered evidence for these two specific cases, it is certainly possible that there were financial reasons for townspeople to defend moneylenders. We recall that Leone da Pisa’s letter suggests that he was concerned about being replaced by another, unknown Jewish moneylender. But while Jews might have feared being replaced by other Jewish bankers, local Christians may have feared a period in which there would be no ready credit available to them at all. In some of the communities where there were Jewish pawnshops, such as Pescia and Empoli, there was no other source of credit—no local monte di pieta. This may have

180 The Construction of the Ghetto provided a strong motivation to town-dwellers to try to keep their Jewish bankers.*! The townspeople of Empoli and Pescia could not yet have known

that monti di pieta, giving loans at only 5 percent, would be successfully installed in their cities soon after the expulsion of the Jews.*” Though there were Christian bankers in Florence, they charged rates of interest much higher than the 15 or 20 percent allowed to the Jews; moreover, they were not local, not readily accessible to the townspeople and contadinz. The people and priors of the towns and villages valued the local presence of their Jewish bankers. Just months before the charges were laid, on the third of May 1570,

the community of Monterchi had appointed Samuel d’Emanuele as their local banker for a nine-year term on condition that he grant an interest-free loan of 50 scudi to the community.** Learning of the charges brought against

him, the four priors of Monterchi sent a letter to Cosimo submitting that Samuel had always obeyed the laws of his capitoli.4 But as we consider the evidence from more towns in Tuscany, economic arguments to explain the defense of the Jewish bankers weaken, as does the presumption that Jewish-Christian relations were hostile and based only on

“utility.” Pescia and Monterchi were not the only towns that mobilized to keep their Jewish lenders; governors and citizens of every town in which a Jewish banker resided acted similarly, whether spontaneously or at the request of their local banker.* In some of these places it is impossible to argue that Christians defended Jews because they had no other source of credit. Branches of the monte di pieta predated 1570 in Volterra, Arezzo, Pisa, Prato and even Montevarchi.*°

Moreover, despite the fact that the people may have had good financial reasons to protect the bankers, not one of the dozens of letters to the duke or the magistrates cited the threat to their town’s economic well-being as an

argument in favor of the Jews. The letters sent to the court in support of many of the Jews went far beyond even the neutral claim that the Jews should be allowed to stay since they had not transgressed their capitol. Indeed, many focused on the good character of the (Jewish) individuals accused.

In a letter dated the first of August 1570 on behalf of Sabato hebreo da Coreggio, a banker in Prato, two Christian Pratesi protested: he has not in any way done wrong to any person. We have also heard him praised by many people as a just person, and reasonable in all his transactions; nor do we think that he has ever transgressed his capitol4, but rather was kind and would count [in such a way as] to take less [interest] than was his due, having always had great compassion on the poor in their time of need; and taking from them every sort and type of goods, miserable as they might be, as pledges.*”

Staging the Expulsion —181

In addition to those eloquent words, statements in favor of Sabato da Coreggio of Prato were sent to the court by eleven more men, all signing in their own hand.* And in addition to the letters described above for Leone d’Abramo da Pisa of Pescia, sixteen men of Pescia signed a letter dated 8 July

in which they said that Manuello di Davit Sforno (a banker there) was known “as a person who is just and honest and respected.” Two complaints were collected by the magistrate and notarized later in August: the borrowers reported that Manuello had claimed their pledges were “lost” or “stolen,” and they had never been able to redeem or retrieve them.°? More positive tes-

timony about Manuello was provided in an interview conducted on 3 August: a Christian villager, a butcher, who knew Manuello stated that he had sometimes carried letters for him, “and he used to say to me ‘I want to pay you, but I did not want anything from him, only that once in a while he should accommodate me with 4 or 6 scudi, and he used to lend them to me

gratis”! Two letters also arrived relating stories about the honesty of Manuello’s father, Davit Sforno, who was so honest that (according to both stories) he personally returned money given to him in excess of what was owed him when he discovered the overpayment, though the borrower himself had not noticed the mistake.°? The same honesty was attributed to Davit Sforno’s other son, Matassia, the banker at Empoli; local Christian men and the officials of Empoli sent numerous letters on his behalf to the court.°? Lazero di Pier da Empoli, a non-Jew, submitted in his own hand a statement of the banker’s righteous-

ness: once his father had borrowed 25 scudi from Matassia, who shortly thereafter came and found him at his house to return to him 2 scudi which had been miscounted by error. Matassia was a righteous man, or “man of goodness” (homo da bene), declared the author of the letter, “this being the truth, it having been told to me many times by my father.”*+ Matassia’s good name was defended by several sets of men from Empoli, dozens of whom signed their names, stating, as always, that they had read and agreed with everything written above. One petition with fifteen names subscribed was submitted by the chancellor of the city of Empoli, Guglielmo di Bastiano da Volterra.*°

Letters came in support of Davit di Raffaelo da Reggio, too: thirteen men of San Giovanni declared his honesty.*° A solitary letter, signed by only one man, accused Davit, “enemy of Christ,” of having taken interest at 30 percent six years earlier, taking advantage of a local woman.*’ But the vast majority of material that arrived at the Magistrato Supremo in the month of July was favorable to the Jews.

Despite the townspeople’s need for reasonable pledge-based loans, it

182 The Construction of the Ghetto seems believable that they respected and even honored at least some of the Jews they knew. Even if we imagine (which I do not) that they were concerned only about their credit, and not about the fate of the individual Jews, it is striking that they used the language of honor to defend the Jews. In the eyes of Tuscan townspeople there was no inherent incompatibility between a man’s identity as a Jew and his good character. An incidental reference to a Jew in the records of the criminal court supports the emerging picture of respectful relationships between Jewish and Christian townspeople in Tuscany before ghettoization. Our knowledge of the presence of the Jew is incidental to the story, which concerns two Christian men from Montevarchi whose case had been promoted from their local court in the Podesteria of San Giovanni to the Otto di Guardia e Balia. Here they were sentenced to be fined and strapped for bearing arms illegally,

though not because they bore arms but rather because they used them. “Messer Bartolomeo [di Cristofano di Lorenzo Bindi], taking a jaunt on the new road leading out of Montevarchi, was attacked by the said M."Alessandro [di Giovanfrancesco Catani] who clobbered him with [his] cane .. . and, M." Lione hebreo putting himself between them, for the moment nothing else followed.” A little later “the same day, the said Messer Bartolomeo, armed with a dagger, attacked the said Maestro Alessandro, who was taking a jaunt along the Arno, and drove at him twice with his dagger, without hurting him, as is recorded in the Libro di Querele 327.”5° Alessandro was fined for the beating with the cane and for carrying arms, and Bartolomeo was fined for bearing arms. Lione the Jew, who played the role of the good neighbor who intervenes, provided the pause that allowed the players to separate before blood was drawn. The interruption permitted a change of scenery for the second and third acts of the event (or its telling), the restoration of honor to Bartolomeo on the banks of the Arno and the reassertion of peace and harmony in the city of Montevarchi and in the state of Tuscany through the payment to the court of fines for the violation of the prohibition against arms.°? There is no hint of surprise, not the slightest crack in this narrative to lead

us to think that that there was anything unusual about the fact that Lione hebreo literally stepped in to break up a quarrel between two Christians, one of whom was armed with a heavy stick. One or both of the two feuding par-

ties may well have known Lione personally, for a Lione Hebreo lived in Montevarchi in 1570 with a large household including his mother, an aunt, his wife and five small children. But if he was not known to the Christians, he was probably allowed to play his role because of his costume; that 1s, his outfit undoubtedly reflected his social standing. He—like one of the two Christian men—was referred to as M” (Magistro or Maestro) in the court

Staging the Expulsion —_183

record, and this reflects the first impression he would have made on the two local men if they did not both know him personally. It was in any case either his ability to function as an intervening neighbor or his rank, and not his Jewish identity, that mattered to all concerned. Jews and Christians who were of similar socioeconomic status very likely had social as well as business relationships.°! Take, for example, the comments of a Christian doctor in San Giovanni. In a letter supporting Davitte,

the banker there (Davit Sforno), the doctor commented in passing that though on several occasions he had happened to be in Davitte’s house during a Christian holiday, he had never seen Davitte’s bank open.® It is possible that on those occasions the Christian doctor was making professional house calls to Davit’s modest household of six: himself, his wife, a son, two daughters and a Jewish female servant (there was no Jewish doctor living in San Giovanni at the time). But it is just as likely that the doctor was not working on his holiday but socializing. The two educated and relatively prosperous men probably had much more in common than they had with the rest of the village. In any event, the doctor was not afraid to commit to writing that he had had contact with Jews that was unrelated to their moneylending occupation—and on Christian holidays, no less. It was also not unthinkable to contemporaries that men and women of the two religions could have nonmercenary relationships. It is well known that Jewish men were among those who paid prostitutes for sex.°? But whereas the rhetoric of church sermons or polemic and anti-Jewish legislation knew only of errors, “carnal commerce” or “sexual mixing, villagers spoke of love.®* The one hostile witness who was found to speak against Lione da Pisa claimed that Lione’s wife had “become enamored” of a local Christian doctor, and that Lione had had to move his wife to a different town—from Prato

to Pescia.® Even if the story was a total fiction, and even though the teller obviously assumed that the relationship between Jew and Christian was illicit, the language of the accusation assumed the possibility of a love relationship between a respected Jewish woman and a Christian man, a relationship that could be imagined only in a world in which Jews and Christians first had meaningful social contact.

Declaration of Open Season: The Attack on the Jews Is Broadened While Jewish bankers continued to defend themselves, gathering letters and petitions from the local Christians in testimony of their honest character and

184 The Construction of the Ghetto business practices, a second set of letters was sent out, in the last week of July and in August, to the various vicars, capitani and podesta of the state. The first

set of letters had requested the census and had ordered the prohibition of moneylending, pending the results of the accusations of charter violations. Now, in August, additional towns that did not have Jewish bankers received

the order to conduct a census of their Jewish inhabitants. The purpose of this second dispatch was to elicit two sets of additional information about the Jews in the state. Letters were sent to towns where Jews lived, not only to towns that had Jewish loan-banks. Where there were Jewish loan-banks, the rectors were now asked specifically to determine whether the Jews had taken holy objects as pledges or opened their shops on Sundays or other Christian

holy days or festivals. (We should note that allowing Jews to open their shops on Christian festival and holy days was considered damaging to the Christian faith. Christians were not allowed to open their own shops on fes-

tival days, although communal statutes were necessary to enforce this piety.°’) They were instructed to post public notices in the market, on the local market day, inviting the public to bring forward within ten days any claims or complaints they might have against the local Jewish moneylender. The rectors were also commanded to gather the names of Christian servants, male and female, and wetnurses who had been or were currently employed by the Jews. Thus on 27 July the Magistrato Supremo began its search for evidence that corroborated its charges of violations by Jews against the laws of the church, complementing its continuing collection of evidence that the Jews had violated their charters.© With this new focus, turning to look for transgressions of canon law, the Magistrato Supremo set the stage for the expulsion of all the Jews, establishing that their presence was acceptable only as long as they lived within the limits of the tolerance of the church. In each town where there were Jewish bankers, the local officials were charged to post or announce the invitation to accuse the Jews. Carlo Pitti signed the letters that were sent. It was to be done on market day, in a public place. The people were to be instructed either to bring their claims to the

local magistrates or to submit them directly to Florence. With this pronouncement the state invited and sanctioned a general attack on the Jewish

bankers. The chronology reveals, of course, that the decision to expel the Jews of Tuscany was not made in response to local opposition to the presence of Jewish bankers, or to a wave of popular anti-Jewish sentiment. The letters of 27 July were sent out because there was so far very little testimony that Jews had violated their charters. Carlo Pitti’s first draft recommending the expulsion

Staging the Expulsion _185 of the Jews from Tuscany was dated 8 August, before most of the responses to the 27 July letters had been received. Evidence against the Jews had to be sought out. ‘To ensure the success of the project, in the first week of August Carlo Pitti personally “examined” local Christians under oath.”” During these interviews, he was receptive to any information that might be used against the Jews, whether it might concern their banking or relations with Christians. On 1 August he interviewed Francesco di Girolamo Dragoni da Prato, taking a statement mostly about Leone da Pisa and his brothers, whose bank in Prato was supposed to be operated only on Mondays, the day of the local market. Francesco testified

that he had heard it said that they lent not only on Monday but on every other day also, except Saturday, “il sabato””! According to Francesco, the Jews in Prato also constantly amused themselves among Christians, playing cards and Daddi (a game of dice) with them, eating, drinking and sparring. A Jew named Lustro, he added, had a female Christian servant.”” On 3 August Pitti heard testimony against Davit hebreo in San Giovanni from Piero di Biagio di Francesco da San Giovanni, who testified under oath 1n the offices of the Nove in Florence. According to this witness, Davit made loans on Sundays and holidays, had a Christian servant-woman and more than one wetnurse working for him and generally abused poor women by overcharging them and refusing to return their pledges.”

On the second and third of August a number of Christians, mostly women, who worked for Jews in Pescia were questioned.”* The interviews were kept brief. Informatica on two subjects was sought: the type of service the Christians performed for the Jews, and whether they had ever seen the Jews lending on Christian holidays or Sundays. The questions indicate that

the Magistrato Supremo was turning its attention to canon law, which it treated as parallel to and congruent with the law of the state, making no move, however, to turn the questioning over to the papal Inquisition or to alarm the witnesses who were being questioned. Meanwhile, the Magistrato Supremo began to receive letters from Pescia, Empoli, San Giovanni, Prato and Monterchi in response to the 27 July circular.” Given that open season on the Jews had been declared, tempting all Christians to “remember” their grievances and come forward with them, the invitation was surprisingly unsuccessful in unearthing accusations against the Jewish bankers. The main exception was Pescia, where almost a dozen complaints were registered with the vicar in person, under oath, from 5 to 21 August, when he forwarded them to the Florentine magistrates.”° The majority of the charges were brought against Manuello hebreo, the banker in Pescia who was an agent of the da Pisa family bank.’”” Laudadio, head of that

186 The Construction of the Ghetto bank, was also accused of tricking some borrowers into paying interest for an

extra month.”* In contrast, the vicar of the Castello of Empoli wrote promptly on 30 July to say that he had already had the 27 July bulletin announced publicly, but he never sent a summary of the response of the pub-

lic, suggesting that there was none.” The order was also announced in the markets of Montevarchi, Castelfranco, Figline and San Giovanni between the

fifth and tenth of August, producing only one complaint against one Jew. The podesta of Prato wrote on 11 August to say that he had posted the bulletin

in the market, and “ten days have now passed and no one has yet appeared to say anything”*? And on 20 August 1570 Iacopo di Lotto, the vicar of Mon-

terchi, wrote to say that although it had been ten days since he had posted the notice inviting the people to register their claims against the Jew who lends money, no one had come forward with any complaint whatsoever.” As August progressed and word of the proceedings against the Jews spread, accusations did begin to flow and retractions of earlier testimony in favor of the Jews were made. But the collection of grievances against the bankers was only half the goal of the 27 July letter. The officials of the five towns where Jews had banks (Empoli, Pescia, San Giovanni, Prato and Mon-

terchi) were also, as we have noted, commanded to collect data on the employment of Christian servants by the Jews in their jurisdiction.

In the collection of letters and testimony preserved in Magistrato Supremo 4450 there is a great irony: the very source created in order to justify the expulsion reveals the daily, normal relations between Jews and Christians, ordinarily so elusive. Evidence that Jews employed Christian servants was collected by the Magistrato Supremo to show that the Jews were in violation of canon law and therefore responsible for disrupting the required. order of relations between Jews and Christians. Ironically, the testimony

| about and by these employees demonstrates that Jews had found a way to live in these Tuscan towns by maintaining a respectful distance in their relationship with their neighbors. There is even some evidence of the intimacy that struck the church as so threatening, though certainly not of a situation in which Jews and Christians had become “indistinguishable,’ as declared in the preambles to the legislation that established the segno and the ghetto. The

Christians interviewed were of course aware of exactly which of their employers and neighbors were Jews. In all five towns there were Jews who had employed Christian servants.*

It was common practice among the Jewish elite to hire Christian men and women to carry water and tend the fire in Jewish homes on the Jewish Sabbath and holidays, and also to hire local women to do their laundry and other housework. It was less common for Jews to keep Christian servants as full-

Staging the Expulsion —_187 time salaried employees, and even more rare (but not unknown) for such servants to live in the homes of their employers. There is no sign of slaves in these Jewish households. Christian wetnurses were hired in the wealthiest families: sometimes they came to the house to nurse the baby and sometimes the Jewish family sent its child to live with the wetnurse and paid her by the month, as was the norm with wetnurses employed by the Christian elite in Florence.®

Canon law did not altogether forbid Christians to work for Jews. What was prohibited, and this was reiterated by the recent papal bulls, was contact that was prolonged, regular or intimate or too clearly positioned the Christian in a status of inferiority vis-a-vis the Jew. The 1555 bull Cum nimis absurdum forbade Jews of the papal states to have “nurses or maids or other Christian servants of either sex, or to have their infants breast-fed or nourished by

Christian women.”*° Distinguishing between other laborers and true servants, the Florentine magistrates were most interested in obtaining evidence that Christian servants lived in Jewish houses. Correspondingly, some of the letters sent by local officials, and most of the testimonies of Christians interviewed, emphasize that the servants were local residents paid by the Jews for the work done, and not on a regular salary. Thus the vicar of Monterchi distinguishes between “servants” and contadine who have occasionally done laundry for the Jews when he writes: I find, Magnificent Signori, that since I have been here, these Jews have never held servants male or female, nor Christian nursemaids, but if they have had someone launder their clothes for them, they have been peasant women of this vicariate, at

so much by the weight of the clothes, by whom they were paid each time they laundered, and similarly [there have been] some who carried water for them and were paid each time for their efforts.®”

Very protective of his people, the vicar of Monterchi did not list their names. Other officials were more diligent: the vicar of San Giovanni reported, regarding the “Jew who lends at usury,’ that he has for a servant (serva) Francesca di M? lena Sorda (paying her salary and expenses), and that

“he has sent a son to be nursed out of his house by a nursemaid in Montevarchi, paying [her] by the month”®* He also has (tene, keeps) a laborer (poderino), trom whom he gets services “as do other padroni from their laborers.” In addition, the vicar notes, there are certain poor women who perform

domestic chores for the Jew on Saturdays, receiving a reward (premio) for their services.®

A separate, more complete list of these people clarifies that the banker in question was Davit da Reggio in San Giovanni.”” The wetnurse, named Betta

di Giusto Bonegi, lived in Figline and nursed Raffaello, son of Magister

188 The Construction of the Ghetto Davitte ebreo, in 1561.7! A servant named Gena, daughter of Monna Lena di Monna Cremenza, lived in Davit’s household for six years before her sister Francescha (sic) came to work there for two years. There were several others who worked for them, whose names he did not know. The census from San Giovanni notes that Davit’s household included his wife, a son, two daughters and a female servant; all in all six mouths to feed.” Since the census counted only Jews, we must assume that the live-in servant

was Jewish, and that she either replaced the young Christian women who had worked there or worked alongside them. Nonetheless, there is a chance that a live-in Christian servant-woman or girl has been counted as a member of the Jewish household. There is a certain lack of attention to the religious identity of Jewish household servants, as though, in the mind of the Christian official who was doing the categorization, their status as servants obfuscated their Jewish identity. Another example of this occurs when the podesta of Prato reports that the Jewish bankers in Prato have “an old German” (um tedescho vechw) as their servant, and “some Christian women who work sometimes in their house doing their laundry and other necessary chores.”?? We are left wondering whether the old German might not be a Jew from Germany,

considering that Ashkenazi Jews were also called, and called themselves, Tedeschi. Again we note that some categories of identification, such as foreign provenance, struck Tuscans as more notable than religion. Truly diligent research was conducted in Empoli, where the names and exact terms of employment were listed for a number of Christians who worked in the household headed by Matassia di Davit Sforno.”* Matassia, according to the census of Jews in Empoli, had a large household of eleven, and only one nonfamily member among them, a male Jewish servant or clerk, referred to as a “garzone.” It stood to reason, with such a large household, that he employed many servants, and, unlike some other wealthy bankers such as Fiammeta da Pisa, he seems to have made no effort to employ only Jewish servants.”> Indeed, in 1570, of the 25 Jewish households

whose full composition we can determine, only four retained Jewish servants, two males (garzoni) and four females (serve).”° Like the other Jewish employers, Mattasia had maintained long-term rela-

tionships with the Christians he hired. We learn of the (unnamed) wife of Betto Scamatino, who came daily to Matassia’s house to nurse the “puttino,” who was a year and a half old the summer of the investigation.”’” There was an eighteen-year-old girl named Caterina da Vinci who had, according to the report, worked for him six years.”® There were also occasional day-workers, all of them men. Niccolo di Giuliano di Mugello reported that about a year earlier he had twice carried water for the washing, and was paid. Bastiano di

Staging the Expulsion _189 Girolamo da Empoli said that on three occasions about a year earlier he had carried water, and was paid, and that he had also helped dig a well, for which he had not been paid correctly, since Matassia had been unsatisfied with the results.”” Giovani Maniardi legnaiuolo, a carpenter, or wood-worker, said he worked for Matassia hebreo a few times in the bank and house and was paid,

while Giano di Palazzo claimed to have served the Jew in and out of the bank, “doing everything for him” for about three years.

The podesta of Empoli did not stop with the list of servants who had worked for the banker, but included 1n his list, in a separate section, “others who serve particular Jews.” It is striking, however, that the only other Jew he mentions is “una hebrea detta M? Dorina”—a Jewish woman called Mona Dorina, or sometimes Delvora.'” Dorina was the head of an important Jewish household, of a family so rooted in Empoli that it called itself da Empoli.

She was the widow of Moise, the son of Giuseppe di Iacob Alpelinc, or Alpelingo, a Spanish Jew who had settled in Empoli in the 1520s, if not ear-

lier.!°! Giuseppe, then Moise and his brothers, and now Dorina, were involved in the production of wool or woolens. Dorina had produced and sold woolen cloth in Empoli for many years

and was no longer always thought of by locals as the widow of Moise. Though she was a prominent person among the Jews of Empoli, she was not a banker, and not of sufficient stature to have been exempted from the segno in 1567. In the summer of 1570, according to the census, her household consisted of only four—herself, two sons and a daughter—her other adult children having already moved out.! The list of servants who worked for her over the years gives us a glimpse of her busy and productive household and

shop. The Christians who worked for her had done so for years—one of them for twelve years. One pair of employees was a married couple. In addi-

tion to the young girls she had working in her house, Dorina paid a full salary and a part-time salary to two young men, brothers, and a third man “who said he had been with the said Mona Dorina hebrea for about three years in the Arte della Lana, a reference to the craft, or production, of woolen cloth, rather than to the merchandising end of the business.!° Dorina and her family were going to be expelled from Empoli even though they were not bankers, even though they were natives of Empoli and

even though their industry provided work for Christians and stimulated commerce. Theoretically, they and other nonbanking Jews would be expelled because of violations of canon law. But in the testimonies of July of 1570, there is little sense that the officials or the servants themselves feared to admit to having worked for the Jews.'°* The Christians who were interrogated in Pescia were clearly aware that living in the Jews’ homes and being salaried

190 The Construction of the Ghetto was problematic. They all pointed out that they worked only occasionally, being paid by the job, by the day; one woman even noted that she was paid by the weight of the laundry she washed.!” But, they sometimes added, they were paid well.!% Again, it is impossible to read into such gratuitously positive comments any hint of animosity. Our data might under-represent the use of Christian servants, since Christians might have hidden the true nature of their employment by Jews for fear of implicating themselves in irregularities concerning canon law. The vicars and podesta, too, might have coincidentally helped the Jews in order to avoid submitting the names of Christians who had lived in Jewish households, although this was clearly not done to protect Dorina’s servants in Empoli. But the evidence suggests that this type of self-censorship was not a concern of all the local people, who probably did not know what exactly canon law forbade. Consider for example the testimony of Lorenza, wife of Bastiano di Paulo Moro, who lived in Pescia:!©” Q. [She was asked] What is her occupation? A. [She answered] I wash clothes for a few people. Q. Is there any house where she works more especially? A. I work in two or three houses, among others in the house of these Jews [ebret], for whom I wash clothes, and they pay me each time. Q. Whether she ever eats with the said Jews or in their house? A. I have sometimes eaten a piece of bread and drunk a glass of wine.

Did Lorenza know that eating with Jews was prohibited to Christians, and did she therefore deliberately not comment on where she took this refreshment, and in whose company? Or did she have negligible contact with whoever it was in the household that gave her the bread and wine, in which case she responded simply and fully? Agnolo di Vitale hebreo in Monterchi

also admitted to giving his occasional hired hands something to eat, “as a courtesy.”!°8 And, as mentioned earlier, the vicar of Monterchi had not hesi-

tated to admit that he had authorized loan-banking on Christian holidays. The people, Jews and Christians, employer, employed and government official alike, seem to have trusted that their actions were honorable. There is no sense from their testimony that these Christians thought that the boundaries between Jew and Christian were threatened, or that the presence of Jews in their cities was in and of itself transgressive.

What we find in the collected list of servants is that there were some infractions: a few servants lived in Jewish households, others lived in their own homes but worked for the same Jewish household for years. There was probably some socializing, and Christians did eat in Jewish houses, although not, to our knowledge, in the company of the Jews.

Staging the Expulsion —191 Carlo Pitti was not all that far off in that part of his letter of 8 August 1570 where he summarized the infractions against canon law: They have engaged in many practices and conversations with Christians, and have taken female and male servants and Christian wetnurses, and have played, eaten and spent time together [with Christians], all of which is prohibited by the sacred

canons under penalty of excommunication; and one supposes that most of the Christians do it because of either their ignorance or their poverty, not to mention that they become enamored and [commit] sins of the flesh.!°?

While exaggerated to upset pious Christian ears, all this may have been true, a description of the normal interaction between Jews and Christians. However, these activities were not ordinarily seen as dangerous or sacrilegious or

treated as deeply disturbing. Specific infractions of canon law were not proven by the Magistrato Supremo to be the norm, nor even common, and the infractions testified to were committed in the households of the bankers and of one nonbanking household, that of Dorina, the woolens-manufac-

turer in Empoli.'!° No one raised any complaints against the other Jews, notable or humble, such as Doctor Blanis in Florence and his household of nine, or the otherwise unknown Gabriello di Isache, with his small family of three in Castiglione. No accusations were even hinted at against Mona Viola

di Raffaello and the other person in her household in Poppi, probably a child; or against the six families in Cortona; or against Millone and Prospero, brothers, both tailors in Pieve a Santo Stefano, and the nine members of their families; or against the three hundred or so other Jews— extended families, small nuclear families and rnen and women living in every combination and alone—who had made thei: homes in Tuscan cities and small towns. In sort, no crimes or transgressions of any sort were ascribed to the majority of the Jews in Tuscany. Though the edict of expulsion would justify the expulsion with reference to violations of the canons of the church and not just of the banking charters, no serious effort was ever made to elicit evidence to incriminate Jews who were not bankers. The decision to expel and ghettoize the Jews was not made on the basis of the analysis of the testimony, which, quantitatively and linguistically, is overwhelmingly favorable to the Jews. The expulsion cannot be seen as a response to rising local anti-Jewish sentiment. It must be seen as a decision made from above, for political and economic reasons, and justified by skillful blending of traditional Christian anti-Jewish rhetoric and state-

craft. The court did not deceive itself into thinking it had real evidence of serious crimes, and it did not fool the duke. A month after the edict of expulsion, which claimed to be a response to the many accusations of crimes, the Jews were granted a general absolution from all accusations."!! Their guilt

192 The Construction of the Ghetto was never proven, and it was not insisted upon, but the expulsion and ghettoization had been ordered and publicly justified and the edict would not be reversed. The expulsion and ghettoization could have occurred whether the state was able to prove that the Jews had committed crimes or not, and whether

they had committed them or had not. But it must be noted for the record that historians have too often accepted without critical analysis the condem-

nations of sixteenth-century anti-Jewish legislation and have interpreted them to mean that if the Jews were not always guilty as charged, they were in

any event a “despised” minority.” In fact, the documentary evidence provided by the very “court” whose goal it was to condemn the Jews demonstrates the difficulty it experienced obtaining evidence against them from the

villagers. Even if Christians protected the Jews in self-interest, their testimonies are almost devoid of hostile or prejudiced comments about or references to the Jews. The documents unfold a picture of a government attempting to justify a decision to expel or ghettoize the Jews ex post facto. The fact that justification of the program was considered necessary suggests that there was concern to protect the grand-ducal image. Perhaps we might say that the edict served to establish or reinforce the image of the prince as a just and law-abiding ruler.

Clearly, the government made an effort to present its decisions as having been made by due process of the courts, by magistrates who examined evidence, and not by fiat.

: That the government felt compelled to search for justification also suggests that it dared not simply expel or ghettoize the Jews with no rationale. Such action might have appeared tyrannical to the other subjects of the grand duchy, who might wonder whether they had any more protection against such an action than a Jew, who could, in some cases, be a native or a citizen.'}5 Relations with the cities and towns of the state— indeed, with its subjects in general— demanded that there be “legal” reasons for the treatment of

the Jews. Contracts should not simply be annulled, people—including Jews—should not simply be expelled.1* Cosimo and Francesco would hardly have feared accusations of despo-

tism, or of spineless capitulation to pressure from the pope, however, had there been widespread anti-Jewish sentiment at the time of the decision, or had the Jews been seen as essentially foreign. As we have seen, such sentiment is not evidenced in the majority of documents collected by the Magistrato Supremo in the summer of 1570, upon which the decision to ghettoize the Jews was allegedly, but not actually, made. Anti-Jewish prejudice did, nonetheless, play a large part in the ghettoization process. It allowed the

Staging the Expulsion —_—193

bureaucrats who handled the proceedings to misrepresent the results of the investigation. The prime mover against the Jews was Carlo Pitti.

Carlo Pitti: Bureaucratic Climber and Secret Enemy of the Jews of Tuscany—A Personality and a Profit Motive for the Ghettoization A professional bureaucrat, Carlo Pitti was a relentlessly cold and calculating social climber who was the most important single agent responsible for the ghettoization of the Jews. Personally, Pitti’s life looks like that of other men of his rank. He married at about age thirty-three in 1557 to a woman named Elisabet, daughter of Ioannis Petri Angeli de Rossis, who came with the substantial dowry of 1450 florins. He had five grown children when he wrote one unusually long draft of his will in 1583.""° He must have worked his way up the ranks in the Medici court and government, because by 1570 he had been appointed chancellor (soprassindaco) of the Nove Conservatori, the Nine Conservators of the Florentine Dominion and Jurisdiction, an agency established by Cosimo I to supervise the administration of all the subject territories. The chancellor of the Nove Conservatori reported daily to the duke.1!° Pitti’s was an appointed, nonrevolving position, and therefore he was more valuable to the dukes (and more independently powerful) than any of the nine elected conservators who served six-month terms in a rotation system originally intended to protect fledgling communal governments from corruption. In 1575 Carlo Pitti would be granted status of senator, and he was still (or again) soprassindaco of the Nove in 1579.'!” The diarist Bastiano Arditi

could refer to him as “a very poor man, but today come up in rank,’ holding the office of Treasurer or Supervisor ( provedditore) of Customs in 1578.18 His

public policy and personality were judged harshly by two contemporaries who wrote chronicles, Giuliano de’ Ricci and the afore-mentioned Arditi.!?” In contrast to the many pious provisions in his will—or perhaps motivating them — Carlo Pitti’s style of charity did not extend to the children of the poor and hopeless in his city. He was practical but heartless: as a senator he rec-

ommended that older children living at the foundling hospital (the Innocenti) be relocated in service or sent out to the street to cut expenses. !”° Pitti’s approach to the Jews was similar, in that he also saw them as dispensable and an opportunity to improve his balance sheets.

It was in his capacity as chancellor of the Nove Conservatori, familiar with the administration of the state, that Carlo Pitti did his work for the Magistrato Supremo in 1570, coordinating its investigation against the Jews. Pitti made the ghettoization of the Jews an essential rung in his climb up the

194 The Construction of the Ghetto ladder of offices and appointments in the Medici state. He may have been carrying out orders from above, but he seems to have been motivated by his own virulent anti-Jewish prejudice, which is stronger than that of senior and previous key members of Cosimo’s advisory circle. Put in charge of orchestrating and conducting the proceedings against the Jews, he worked to collect evidence of the crimes of the Jews throughout July and August of 1570. He collected copies of the letters he wrote and responses he received, testimony from officials all across the state and from humble contadimi. His collection included a great deal of “background” material: copies of the decisions made to expel the Jews from Florence in 1494 and 1527, lists of canons

from the church. Pitti even went so far as to recopy by hand the Table of Interest (La Tabula della Salute), a table first printed in 1494 that was intended to show the frighteningly large fortune a (Jewish) banker would hypothetically gain by lending s0 scudi at 30 percent, compounding the interest for a hundred years.!*! All these documents would be presented to the grand duke in a bound volume as the findings of the commission on the Jews labeled Processt contro gli Ebrei, now known in the Florentine State Archives as Magistrato Supremo 4450. In doing so, Pitti expressed his confidence that after the search for evidence to support the accusations of crimes, the Medici rulers would not actually be reading the scrawled contents of the dozens of letters written in favor of the Jews. In the second week of August Pitti submitted a first draft of his report on the findings of the proceedings of the Magistrato Supremo against the Jews. No matter that the testimonies from Christians in responses to the letter of 27 July had only begun to arrive. His personal recommendation was “to send them all away, just as they were chased out of the State of the Church everywhere but Rome and Ancona, where they are all living in places separated and locked at night . . . [thus they could be locked up in some place in Florence]... but it would be better to send them all away.”!’? Carlo Pitti’s proposal in August directly echoed a proposal that introduced an anti-Jewish treatise by the vicar-leutenant of the archdiocese of Florence, Lodovico Martelli, which Carlo Pitti had also included as supporting evidence in his collected papers.!** The geneaology of the treatise is still unstudied; Pitti might have asked Martelli to assist by drafting a history of the Jews, or he might have taken his lead from the vicar-lieutenant. Martelli’s elevenpoint brief is a study in Christian anti-Jewish hate-mongering and propaganda. In frighteningly lucid, even elegant Italian prose, Martelli explains repeatedly what “History” teaches: that the Jews mutilate and abuse Christian effigies and sacraments; that they not only mutilate their own male children (in circumcision) but kill Christian children; that they poison Christian

Staging the Expulsion —_195

wells; that they break canon law by mixing sexually with Christians and by

taking usury; that they provide a black market for objects stolen from churches; that they make it impossible for Christians to observe canon law; that they continually curse Christ and Christians in their prayers. Whether Martelli copied this litany from one particular published anti-Jewish source or distilled his information from several, what he produced was a catalogue of hateful rumors and Jewish stereotypes that were not commonly found in

print or visual sources in most of the sixteenth-century Italian-speaking world,!*4

In Martelli’s treatise, Carlo Pitti would have read that in Trent in 1475 the Jews crucified a boy named Simone when they were making azzim1 (unleavened bread, or matsah). This took place, according to Martelli, in the house ofa certain Samuelle, “where, so as not to be heard, it was done with a towel tied around his throat—limb by limb they tore him apart, and while doing this they sang their hymns-”!”° The episode refers to the well-studied occurrence in Trent in which five Jewish households were tortured and ultimately

destroyed after a young Christian boy was found dead. This occurred just days after the great mendicant orator Bernardino da Feltre had visited the city and preached his Easter sermons, including one that raged against Jews.'”° A century later Martelli’s lurid version of the famous incident at Trent differed slightly from those that had circulated as poems and woodcuts, evidence that in some (probably ecclesiastical) circles anti-Jewish narra-

tives took on a life of their own. But it was important to Martelli that his

readers not think that the ritual-murder of a Christian child had happened : only once in Italian lands—which they may well have thought. Effective antiJewish discourse requires that Christians believe that all Jews are suspect, that the murder of a Christian child is essential to the practice of the Jewish reli-

gion. Therefore in his treatise Martelli noted with peculiar brevity that the same thing had happened in 1287 to a boy named Ridolfo, “the story of which would take too long to tell,’ and that 1t had happened again, “very recently, in a nearby town???”

Given his talent for prose fiction, if Martelli had had time to relate the “crimes and abuses” of the Jews of contemporary Tuscany in detail, a gripping account of Jewish life in the pre-ghetto era might have resulted. In the absence of his version of the events, we accept, cautiously, the testimony of the men and women who were the actual neighbors of the Jews, evidence provided by Carlo Pitti. But while Pitti included Martelli’s treatise in his collected papers for the Magistrato Supremo and the dukes, it should be noted that he presented ghettoization as an acceptable alternative to expulsion. As he would reveal a few years later in his thinking on the expense of raising

196 The Construction of the Ghetto foundlings, piety need not preclude practicality. For the chancellor of the Nove, there would be a number of ways to profit from the ghettoization of the Jews. The archives are likely to reveal further support for the identification of Carlo Pitti as villain, and for the anti-Jewish attitudes of well-placed men of the church like the Archbishop’s vicar. Patronage at the Medici court and in

the church, the development of careers and the marriage alliances of elite families brought together officials of state who were practical state-builders, rationalist bureaucrats and religious ideologues. Sometimes these qualities appeared in the same person, as they did in Carlo Pitti, who enjoyed the patronage of Francesco de’ Medici. In 1571 Francesco wrote a letter to Nofn

| Camaiani recommending that Nofri’s son Lelio, who was positioned at the Medici court, could do no better than to be married to a daughter of his man, Carlo Pitti.!7° Even so, the religious hostility of these individuals to Jews is not sufficient to explain the ghettoization, not even in conjunction with the desire of the duke to curry favor with the pope or the Holy Roman Emperor. The politi-

cal and religious and personality-based motives presented thus far in my explanation of the ghettoization are all compatible, all part of the larger pic-

ture. There was one additional important element we must discuss: the financial incentive, or profit motive. It was important to my argument earlier to explain that the people and officials of the towns involved in this event who defended the Jews did so with sentiments that went beyond greed or financial motivation. But this caution should not blind us to the likelihood that for their part, some of those who urged and supported the action against the Jews did have immediate monetary rewards in sight. Carlo Pitti stood to benefit most obviously through his connections to the charitable loan-bank of Florence, the monte di pieta, which was also overseen by the Nove of which Pitti had become chancellor. Through his position Pitti managed, at some point between 1564 and 1574, to obtain an enormous loan of 5,000 scudi at the low rate of 614 percent, a rate officially reserved for loans

of less than 25 scudi.’”” Loans of this size were extraordinary and mostly given to members of the Medici family. Pitti had apparently accrued favors, as well he might, overseeing the expulsion of propertied Jewish moneylenders and the distribution of confiscated funds and “gifts.” We can see traces of this activity: in November 1570, 15,000 scudi were deposited into the monte di pieta of Pisa.'*° Where did this money come from so conveniently in the same year that the Jewish loan-banks were being eliminated and with them access to credit for many in the city of Pisa? One month earlier the Jewish banker Agnolo di Laudadio da Rieti had written a

Staging the Expulsion —197

letter to Francesco in whicn he rather too casually revealed that he had recently received his share of the estate his father left him, 13,000 scudi, his two brothers having received equal amounts. His total assets, he noted, were 20,000 scudi, but he and his brothers had ten daughters between them—all of whom would need dowries. All of this was known to the fiscal magistrates, he noted, because they had taken his record-books.!*! Written just two weeks after the publication of the Edict of Expulsion, his letter expresses relief for some consideration the duke must have shown him: I have learned from my son of the good mind that your Most Serene Highness has shown to me, of which, although I never mistrusted it, for all that, having seen the

General Edict and not finding myself excluded, I was continuously sorrowful, beweeping my bad fate, that my service had not been pleasing to you. Now I am in good measure reassured and I kiss your hands and thank you. . . . Never doubt, Your Highness, that as I said to you when last I spoke to you, again I affirm that I will always remain in your felicitous state as long as I may stay here honorably, and even though I have been called and sought after by other princes, for all that and the great love I carry for you, I would never have the heart to serve others. ... Do not be suspicious of the fact that I keep a son in Ferrara, for I don’t do it for my convenience as much as for yours, it being a very convenient place from which to go to Venice and to Milan, where those most rare things turn up that I try to provide in your service.1*”

Nonetheless, he petitions his lord for continued protection, especially of his assets, from his enemies who harass him. Offers of crystal vases made only months earlier fade into a very remote past, now that the severity of the plan for the Jews has been revealed. ‘To state (in writing!) what he was actually worth was to simply open up his chest for Francesco to do with as he saw fit, hoping for mercy (and perhaps to cover up additional assets?). It is most likely not a coincidence that within a month Francesco sent 15,000 scudi to the Pisan loan-bank “to take care of the poor” (and to replace the Jewish loan-banks). It also seems not coincidental that this large infusion convinced the Chancellor of Pisa that it was necessary that someone should rewrite the regulations of the bank. Carlo Pitti was assigned to the task.'*? Pitti had positioned himself very well. He was also, as we shall see in the next chapter, responsible for the purchase and reconstruction of the ghetto properties, all

undoubtedly part of his effort to improve his own status. A man with no noble or ecclesiastical title and little property, he made the fate of the Jews his own province. In each of the towns from which Jewish bankers were expelled, high-ranking officials or local merchants who had debts to Jews may have stood to benefit personally from the expulsion of the Jewish moneylenders. The debts of the bankers were not, however, “forgiven” or taken over by the state: the

- 198 The Construction of the Ghetto Jews were allowed to collect their loans or sell the pledges at auction, as permitted to them by their capitoli.134

Others may have anticipated profit from the establishment of monti di pieta in those (few) places that would lose their Jewish bankers. The history of the monte di pieta in these years has not yet been fully explored, but at least one local branch (in Empoli) was established almost immediately to replace the Jewish bank. The state-run charitable banks were a source of income to the staff hired to run them and a source of very cheap credit not only to the poor but to those who had to be granted favors. The fiscal argument may have had other dimensions, connected with plans for the urban renewal of the capital city. The government’s investment of substantial sums in purchasing run-down property, renovating it and then renting it to a group of artisans and merchants was one more step 1n a series of public works projects undertaken to improve the city’s economic and physical infrastructure. This approach may help us understand better why the Jews were brought to the ghetto rather than simply expelled from the state. Like the enforced planting of Mulberry trees with which to feed silk worms, the construction of the new fish market, the silk market, the fortresses and the archives, the relocation was ordered and the ghetto erected to satisfy a complex of needs and ambitions entirely apart from those identified by the

authors of the edicts of ghettoization. This aspect of the decision will be explored in the next chapter.

Conclusions Despite the political, economic, religious and urban-renewal factors that may explain the new policy toward the Jews, we are left with the important conclusion and paradox that the Jews were not expelled from their communities

because of their failure to live harmoniously with Christians. On the contrary, it seems that they were extracted from these communities because of their success. Hundreds of Jews—most of them not bankers —were living in Tuscany without special charters, without exemption from ordinary taxes, without permission to lend money. Others had managed to obtain, one by one, exactly such exemptions and privileges. They had moved in, in the absence of laws preventing them from doing so, in the absence of a blanket policy. Willing and able to accept certain limitations, they were living as a minority among (and sometimes with) Christians. Although they were identifiably Jewish to their neighbors in their separate religious behavior, their

Staging the Expulsion = 199 status was determined by factors in addition to their Jewishness: education, wealth, length of residence in the area, personal integrity. Subjects of various semi-autonomous towns and cities of the Florentine dominion were not confused by this state of affairs: their meaningful social categories were intact, and they interacted with their Jewish neighbors in a variety of untroubling ways. But from the perspective of the central administration, strong local identities and independent local communities were a potential threat. The grand-ducal government held together and controlled its dominion with its appointed officers and judges, its oversight of local statutes, expenditures and guilds. It was building a state in which central administration and religion were a powerful team and could unite people more effectively and less dangerously than affinities based on lineage, place of origin, economic status, education or any other indicator of identity. The plan to expel the Jews from the villages and put them into a ghetto would work for the Medici government on many levels, at relatively small cost. To effect the plan, however, it was useful to exaggerate the otherness of the Jews, to proclaim that they were creating disorder and confusion and that, in addition, they were abusing their privileges. Some evidence could be collected against individual Jews who may have violated provisions of either banking charters or of canon law. Then came the quick generalization, from a Jew to The Jews.

In bringing the focus on Christian community and Jewish otherness explicitly into its statecraft, the state dramatically described its jurisdiction

over the Jews, removing any potential for that commanding role to be claimed by the papacy and its institutional—and inquisitional— network. Florence had accepted the return to residence of the archbishop; it had seen the installation of an apostolic court; it was willing to send money to Rome to help fight the Turks and the Huguenots. But the Medici state set limits too: in the realm of its jurisdiction it would not allow the Catholic Church to control Jews, who had historically always been subjects— if not property—

of the secular rulers, and pawns in the power plays of secular and religious leaders.'> So State trumped Church, preemptively sweeping a large group of pawns off the playing field in one grand move. In other words, the action of ghettoization may look like the one urged by Pope Paul IV and Pope Pius [V (in 1555 and 1569), but it was undertaken with very different purposes in mind, one of which was to strengthen the authority of the state through the judicious use of power, and perhaps even to draw limits on the church’s domain within Florence. It was a sophisticated inversion, a political move that contributed to the success of the Medici in Florence in the period of

200 ‘The Construction of the Ghetto transition from duchy to grand duchy and from Cosimo to Francesco. In 1569 Cosimo tolerated the ceremonial formal expression of feudal submission

to the pope in order to receive from him the grand-ducal crown; in 1570 he

brought the state into the age of Counter-Reformation Catholic piety through a demonstration of his own religious authority and independence. The ghettoization was articulated, planned and effected from start to finish by agents of the state, acting on behalf of law and justice, expressing the will of the Florentine Senate, Magistrato Supremo and Grand Duke. And when

completed, it (and therefore Florence’s only non-Catholic population) would be administered and controlled by Florentine government administrators, not by the church. The expulsion edicts and the propaganda that accompanied the proceedings of the Magistrato Supremo functioned to make Jewishness the defining element of the identity of the Jews in Tuscany. This done, their ties to local communities could be dissolved. On the other hand, paradoxically, once the Jews were gathered together and established as a separate community, their religion would once again become only one aspect of their identity in the eyes of the state, which would treat the Jewish ghetto—administratively—as though it were just another of the many semi-autonomous communities in the Tuscan state, as we shall see in Chapter Seven. But before the transformation to local community, the ghetto had to be built and the Jews moved into it.

Five Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto

Political, administrative and religious motives converged and led to the decision to ghettoize the Jews, but the ghetto itself was also a financially self-justifying proposition. The creation of a ghetto in Florence was undertaken by the grand-ducal government as a public works project and as an investment. It was built, owned and administered by the state. The construction of the ghetto employed workers to turn a run-down, disreputable area in the heart of the city into a solid commercial neighborhood that also served as an architectural and religious symbol of the power and piety of the grand duke. The project was, in addition, to become a profitable rental property with a guaranteed and self-perpetuating tenant population.’ The success of this project reflects the competence of the grand-ducal government, the executive, fiscal

and administrative branches of which were now well coordinated after a series of administrative and political reforms in the previous three decades.”

Location and the Association of Jews and Prostitutes The purchase of the various properties that would become the ghetto was entrusted by the grand duke to Carlo Pitti in his capacity as soprassindaco, or chancellor, of the Nove.’ The site of the sixteenth-century ghetto is seen on Stefano Bonsignori’s 1584. prospective of the city [see Figure 2]. The original ghetto, expanded in the seventeenth century and demolished in 1888, occupied the northern part of what is now the great, largely empty Piazza della Repubblica. In Roman times it had been the forum, and in the fifteenth century notable families had built their palazzi there. The ghetto’s exact location

is confirmed in records of the property purchased, which show that the buildings were between via de’ Succhelinai on the east and via de’ Rigattieri, also called “Straccaiuoli,’ to the west, a street already known in 1571 as the center of used-clothing-dealers and their workshops.

BLOCKED IMAGE AT THE REQUEST OF THE PUBLISHER

FIG. 2. The Ghetto of Florence in 1584, located between the Mercato Vecchio and the Duomo of Santa Maria del Fiore. Arrows indicate (A) the Baptistery, (B) the gate at Piazza Succhelinai, (C) the gate ac the Mercato Vecchio and (D) the Mercato Vecchio. Source: Detail from Map of Florence, Stefano Buonsignoni, Florence 1584. Scala / Art Resource, NY. Museo di Firenze com’era, Florence, Italy.

Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto —.203 The ghetto was located near the piazza of the Mercato Vecchio (the Old Market).* The southernmost buildings and one of its two gates faced the large piazza where Vasari’s Loggia del Pesce (an arcade for the fish market, now in Piazza dei Ciompi) had just been completed. In addition to its two large water wells, the Mercato was adorned in its southeastern corner by a large granite column to which prisoners of the criminal court were tied for public punishments, on top of which was placed the Donatello statue of Abundance, the Dovizia, now lost.° Nearby, the Piazza del Fraschato, left intact, became the main piazza within the ghetto. The ghetto’s second original gate was on via de’ Succhellinai (today via Roma) on the easternmost row of buildings. The street to the north of the ghetto may have been called Chiasso de’ Buoi: it and a number of buildings were destroyed when the ghetto was enlarged in the early seventeenth century, at which time a third gate was added, leading to the Piazza dell’Ohio.° Bounded by the market, the baptistery and Duomo, and the great church and convent of Santa Maria Novella, the property the Medici regime chose was especially attractive because it was unprofitable to its current owners, not heavily populated, and therefore available for purchase at a low price. Before it was transformed into the ghetto, one of its buildings was in use as a stable’

and part of another had four rooms used by a dueling school (schuola di scherma).* But what has more often been noted is that the property chosen for the site of the ghetto was a place, according to the contemporary diarist Lapini, that had been occupied by public prostitutes “for a very long time.” The presence in this general part of the city of women who were registered with the government as prostitutes is well documented. In the fifteenth century there was a public bordello established near or in the Mercato Vecchio, served almost entirely by foreign women from north of the Alps.'° In his late nineteenth-century portrait of the ghetto, Giuseppe Conti refers to tax records from the fifteenth century that show that shops in this area were rented to prostitutes and courtesans by members of great families: Pecori, Brunelleschi and (Bernardo) de’ Medici." In 1547 official streets of residence near the Mercato Vecchio were established for prostitutes for the first time.'” By 1568 a bordello was leased to a consortium of three distinguished landlords,!* probably the same houses that lodged two dozen prostitutes in 1562, according to a census of that year.'* Nonetheless, the notion that Jews were moved in “where the prostitutes were” reflects an association in the mind of

some contemporary (and many later) Christians that is stronger than the actual concentration of prostitutes in that area would warrant. For in Florence there was no one “red-light” district; indeed, there were streets where

204. The Construction of the Ghetto prostitutes were authorized to live and work in all four of the city’s main quarters.!> Wherever the ghetto had been built, it might have been said that prostitutes lived there. What is significant, then, is not the spatial association of Jews and prostitutes so much as the cultural association of the two. The link was already found in the texts of contemporary Christian authors and was further reified in the description of the future premises of the ghetto as a site of prostitu-

tion. The association of prostitutes and Jews falls into a long tradition in western Christian literary and legal usage and its municipal legislation. In this tradition, both groups were seen as undesirable, corrupting influences whose

presence it was nonetheless necessary to tolerate.’° The church urged that both Jews and prostitutes be marked to signify their low status, and local governments often took steps to do so. In late sixteenth-century Florence, women who voluntarily registered or were officially identified as prostitutes were addressed as a category (meretrict) in the comprehensive sumptuary law; they were taxed (according to three levels of wealth); and they were additionally required by the Department of Public Honor (the Onesta) to wear a yellow ribbon as a sign, or segno.'” When Jewish men and women were assigned their segno in 1567, it was also yellow. The effort to make some women easily identifiable as pros-

titutes, and to further deprive them, through sumptuary legislation, of the ordinary visual expressions of female honor may have been a strategy that replaced earlier efforts to eliminate prostitution or establish complete control

over the presence of prostitutes in the city, and if so, it was a strategy that would itself ultimately be replaced by criminalization.'® In the fourteenth century and until 1415, Florence and other cities had attempted to expel prostitutes and to control them by requiring them to reside in one or a few specific locations.” Under Cosimo I and Francesco the state pursued instead a

policy of registering them and taxing their trade, stigmatizing their dress, restricting their residence and brothels in Florence to about a dozen streets in the four quarters of the city and elsewhere to specifically designated locations, and regulating their mobility at night.?° The identification and distancing—visually, legally and physically—of both prostitutes and Jews strengthened the majority’s identity as honorable—and chaste— Christians. In late sixteenth-century Florence, when the state chose to oblige both groups to wear the color yellow, it both expressed the Christian tradition that associated the two groups and also encouraged that mental association. The conflation surfaced in the writing of contemporary Christian Florentines. Lapini makes the association casually in his chron-

Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto —205 icle when he writes that: “From January 1570 [1.e., 1571] the Signor Principe of Florence, Francesco de’ Medici, began to wall-in the place where the Jews lived, having first bought houses, store-rooms, brothels and shops and other

buildings where there had been public prostitutes and the most abject women for a very long time.” But the association of Jews and prostitutes turns threatening in the boldly anti-Medicean diary of Bastiano Arditi, in whose writing the relationship of Jews and prostitutes becomes a virtual equation. Here, a strong motif hints that Jews and unchaste women threaten to corrupt the city, specifically endangering the city’s health and honor.

Arditi refers to Florentine Jews only three times in his chronicle of the years 1574-79. First, he notes that the Jews were to have been expelled from the city owing to the fear of the spread of plague that had been reported in other parts of Italy, but that they had been allowed to remain because Bianca,

“prostitute and woman of the Duke,’ favored certain Jewish women, who advised her on ointments and unguents.”” Thus, in this first reference, Arditi informs the reader that the Jews are associated with plague, that a “prosti-

tute” endangers the public health because of her association with Jewish women and, the reader must conclude, that the ability of the grand duke, Francesco, to govern 1s compromised by his relationship with a woman.

The second reference to Jews confirms their association with plague: Arditi records a pronouncement from March 1576/77 that no Jew would be allowed to enter the city of Florence because of plague that had been discovered in Lombardy.” Finally, in his third reference, Arditi expounds at length on the frequency with which Jewish men, who live in the ghetto with their wives and children, are accustomed to going to “the baptized prostitutes and dealing with them carnally [usare carnalmente con quelle|” while making their rounds with the

second-hand goods they s'l. For such offenses, he says, Jews used to be burned; now they are allowed to have relations with Christian women with impunity because “madonna Bianca the Venetian, carnal friend of the duke [amicha del ducha carnale], is served by the Jews, from whose women she draws secrets for beautifying the flesh [/e charne]””4 The world described by Arditi in these three passages is contaminated by threats: encroaching plague, vain and seductive Christian women, manipulative Jewish women, adulterous Jewish men, ineffectual and corrupt political leadership. Only the dangerous “others” are identified: the assumption of the threat to chaste, healthy, masculine, Christian Florence is unarticulated and understood. The threats are closely related to each other, reinforced linguistically through the constantly shifting application of the word carne, which

206 ‘The Construction of the Ghetto was commonly used to mean a blood-relative (such as a brother, fratello carnale), but which Arditi uses for flesh, face and sexual partnership. Arditi sees and presents Jews and prostitutes as inverters of right order,

where he associates order with the indisputably and universally preferred absence of disease. There is disorder when power is in the wrong hands, too: according to Arditi, Jews have the power to forestall their own expulsion.

This power is inappropriate in a Christian state; Arditi exaggerated its deviance by calling it effeminate, for the specific Jews who possess the power, by his account, are female. The danger of feminine power is reiterated with

reference to the danger that women, represented by Bianca Cappello, are seduced by the vanity of the flesh, and they in turn, especially mistresses and prostitutes, seduce men, rendering men (both the Senate and the duke) corruptible. Ultimately, however, the link that binds the Jews and prostitutes in

Arditi’s text is their association with the most potent symbol of fear and decay in this era, the plague. And behind it all was the illusion of order and

control that was so particularly important to men of the governing class. Trexler has asked, rhetorically, “which was to be the primal sign of an ordered society? Differences of gender . . . or class?”?> To gender we must add reli-

gion; linked together they were more openly utilized than the class order they ultimately also supported. Just as Jews and prostitutes could be used to signify religious and gender disorder, disease and the threat of pollution and confusion within Christianity, and to produce fear of these, so the symbolic control of Jews and prostitutes could be used to allay these fears. It is not only that the real bodies of these people who defied the norms of Christianity and of chaste and subordinate femininity could be controlled: power in this instance derived from the embodiment of these concerns in the first place in the person of the Jew and the Prostitute. By essentializing these two types and employing similar language and tools for their regulation, the governors of the state gave themselves specific, identifiable, located bodies to control. The government took advantage of the cultural association of Jews and prostitutes and found ways

to profit from the perceived need to control both.?° Thus prostitutes and. Jews were color-coded, given restricted residence and taxed.?” From the early fifteenth century on, no effort was made to end the practice of prostitution, which the state and church considered a preferred alternative to the homosexual activity they considered inevitable in a society where men so often married only after the age of thirty.”8 Similarly, Jews were not permanently

expelled; the public statement and symbol that their threat had been disarmed was the ghetto.

Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto —_ 207

The Purchase and Financing of the Ghetto Property While the cultural association of Jews and prostitutes may help us understand the meaning of literary references to the ghetto as built on the site of public brothels, this descriptive detail also points to a more practical explanation for how the place was chosen. The Jews were moved into the area north of the Mercato Vecchio not because it was associated with prostitutes but because the property value and rental intake of this ill-reputed area of dilapidated palazzi was low. Plans and negotiations for the purchase of the properties must have been conducted throughout the fall of 1570, because the deals were closed between 17 January and 7 February 1571. The records of the

purchase for the property and for payments for the construction of the ghetto are preserved in three account books of the Nove.”? These extraordinary records make it possible to reconstruct much of this major operation, materially and financially. The acquisitions made by the duke from nine main proprietors were valued at a total of 2,753 florins and four lire (see Table 1).° The properties belonged to a church and members of eight old patrician families.™ These were not the same families who had owned the property a century and a half earlier, and the buildings were no longer the residential palaces of important patrician families they had once been.*” Ownership of the build-

ings had been fragmented over the centuries so that only one of the purchases (from Iacopo Donzello) was a house, while most lots sold were individually noted rooms, shops, towers, courtyards and even entrance halls and corridors. Under such circumstances, where shares in the palazzi and houses had been sold, inherited and received as dowries for centuries, the buildings had deteriorated and rental income had dropped.* TABLE 1. Acquisition of Property for the Ghetto

Della Tosa Chiarissimo de’ Medici et702 co. 600

Proprietors who sold property for the ghetto Value (in florins)

Piero di Papa Pollacciolo, Giovanni di Val di Marina et co. 493 Iacopo d’Andrea Alessandrini (three Donzello members) 250 200

Fiametta and Alesandra De Nerli 160

Simone d’Agniolo d’Ardinelli100 158 Lorenzo Manouelli Compagnia di San Zanobi 90

Total value of property 2,753 3696, 2-6; Nove 3697, Iif—Isr; sce note 31.

208 ‘The Construction of the Ghetto TABLE 2. Financing of the Purchase of the Ghetto Property

Medici accounts Private Owners debits: fl. 2,753 from Grand Duke for _ ss, Ss credits: fl. 2,753 for sale of purchase of properties properties credit: fl. 2,753, noted as a transfer from debit: | 2,753 deposit to the monte

Grand Duke to the monte di pieta di pieta The government chose to buy all this property rather than attempt to coerce all the Christian landlords to expel their current tenants and accept the Jews as tenants.** The Medici never actually disbursed the properties’ cost of 2,753 florins to the individual sellers. Rather, the former owners were either encouraged or required to loan the proceeds of each sale back to the government immediately. The exact value of each property transaction was recorded as a deposit from the grand duke into the state-administered monte di pieta,

the charitable loan-bank of Florence.** The money “paid” out was thus immediately borrowed back, as seen in Table 2.

Transferring funds this way between branches of the government has already been identified as a hallmark of Cosimo’s fiscal control over the state.

The monte di pieta in particular had by the late 1560s “become so much an organ not only of patronage but of state finance that it behaved like a ducal bank-’%° Table 2 shows this virtual equation or merger in the book-keeping of the Medici accounts and those of the monte di pieta.

As Carol Bresnahan Menning has shown, the function of the charitable loan institution had by the late sixteenth century broadened substantially since its establishment in Florence in 1494. Its original mission was to supply small subsistence loans of less than two florins to the poor at a very low rate of interest so that borrowers would not have to turn to usurious Jewish or Christian moneylenders.*’ Therefore, at first the monte di pieta gave no interest to those who provided it with loans, but only the satisfaction that they had fulfilled a civic duty and the religious obligation of charity. The monte had been used as a savings bank by some, but under these terms it faced a constant shortage of capital. To relieve this shortage, under Cosimo I the monte began for the first time in 1539 to give interest to depositors.** The influx of capital assured the availability of loans to the poor, but at the same time Cosimo began to use for his own purposes the monte’s funds, now constantly replenished by investors for whom a secure § percent interest was attractive. While the monte continued to give only small loans of less than two florins to ordinary

Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto — 209 applicants — requiring them to deposit pledges and collecting 5 percent interest—it now issued hundreds of much larger loans, authorized by the duke, at

the same rate of interest to members of the middle, patrician and noble classes. Through the monte di pieta Cosimo used the extension of large loans

at low rates to provide favors to friends and clients as he built his state through patronage. These large loans threatened to deplete the bank’s resources, so that the officers of the monte, as well as most other officers in the state, were on the constant lookout for new sources of capital and income (deposits to the monte) to balance the outflow.

The Florentines who sold their property to the state for the purpose of financing the purchase of that same property made loans of the proceeds to the monte di pieta. They were given accounts with the monte that earned them 5 percent interest annually on the loans. Thus, in financing the ghetto, the property-owners, the Nove Conservatori, the monte and the Medici were brought together by Carlo Pitti in a marriage that was profitable to all parties. Guardian of the needy poor, the monte was credited with a substantial deposit of capital. Caretaker of the state’s possessions, the Nove obtained a block of property without any outlay of cash for the purchase. The state got another boost to keep its charitable loan-bank alive. And the matchmaker, Carlo Pitti, appears to have been rewarded with a loan for two years of the extraordinarily large sum of 5,000 scudi from the monte di pieta at the rate of

6.33 percent, much lower than he could have obtained from private bankers.* (Of 249 large loans from 1564 to 1574, Carlo Pitti’s was one of only seventeen granted for sums greater than 4,000 scudi, and nine of those were made to members of the Medici family itself.*") Since there was no outlay of cash for the purchase of the ghetto real estate,

its financing required only that the monte di pieta be able to pay the 5 percent interest to its new creditors, until such time as they might request to withdraw their capital. The 5 percent interest that the monte now owed on the 2,754. florins, calculated at a flat rate with no reinvestment of interest, was 964 lire, or just over 137 florins per year. While 5 percent interest would not have been considered a good return for money invested in international commerce or speculation, it 1s not unlikely that it matched or surpassed the rental income that the landlords had previously received from their property. If the

project were to be profitable, however, the ghettoization of the Jews would have to produce enough income to more than cover the interest on these loans and other expenses incurred. The property was purchased, business was concluded, the books were balanced and it was time to make a ghetto for the Jews.

210 ‘The Construction of the Ghetto

The Construction of the Ghetto For more than a year, beginning in February 1571, the property the state had purchased remained a busy construction site. Renovation could easily be arranged now that the properties belonged to one well-funded owner. The design of the ghetto has been attributed since the early eighteenth century to the duke’s architect Bernardo Buontalenti, who designed many of the capital’s military installations as well as celebratory spectacles.* Whether or not Buontalenti was the architect, the scope of the work involved, as evidenced by the records of payments made to the construction workers, was grand. As in the case of most large projects,** the government chose not to hire a

contractor for the work but to employ the laborers and artisans it needed directly, as wage labor. All expenditures for the work were authorized by Giulio de Nobili, the treasurer and secretary (provveditore e cameraio) of the Nove.** An overseer of the project was appointed, Antonio Gherardini: he was paid ro florins when the project was completed for having “solicited” the construction and for having kept records of the materials used.** The only other bureaucratic employees paid for their services were Messer Girolamo Marzopini, “Governor of His Highness’ possessions,” who received 51 florins

for unspecified duties, and Luigi Pitti, who received to florins for having kept the various account books (which he did in a very neat and consistent hand with good quality ink).*° Construction lasted over a year, before the end of which the Jews of Tuscany had moved into the ghetto. Workers were paid weekly.*” The first payday was Saturday, 10 February 1570/71, and the last was 28 February 1571/2.** Five of the nine payroll accounts that were paid the first week belonged to kilnmen or brickmakers, fornaciai.” These five brickmakers continued to set, bake and deliver bricks, mortar, plaster and ceramic pipes and tiles from their kilns outside the city for months, some of them through September.*° Within one month of the first efforts in February 1570/71, the labor force included muratori (translated as “wallers” by Richard Goldthwaite), carpenters, stonecutters, sawyers and also unskilled laborers who carted and hauled

loads of bricks, wood, earth and plaster both to and from the site.*! The intensity and steady schedule of the construction of the ghetto may be judged from the number of accounts paid each week to the workers over the course of the year. Both the number of workers and the total weekly expense to the government peaked in April 1571 and remained high through August

1571, and during that time there were always more than fifteen men or accounts on the payroll.°* Work slowed gradually but was continuous

Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto —. 211

through the summer, through the Jewish holidays in September and October and into the winter.*? The ghetto was defined by the wall that enclosed it, into which were built two gates. As their name suggests, muratort were employed primarily in building walls; however, the “wall” that enclosed the ghetto was not a solid wall. Rather, spaces between buildings were filled in so that all the buildings on the perimeter of the ghetto were connected. An account book preserved from 1588 that registers income from the “ghetto esterno” shows that shops and apartments in this outer ring of buildings were rented by the state to non-Jews.** These rental units were considered, for fiscal purposes, part of the ghetto, since they were owned by the state. Apparently the buildings on the ghetto’s perimeter were subdivided internally so that apartments that exited and looked out into the ghetto were rented to Jews, whereas apartments on the “outside” of the ghetto (ghetto esterno) could be rented to Christians.°° A person standing in the Mercato Vecchio would therefore not have seen the ghetto as a solid and obtrusive wall.

From an outside perspective, the ghetto looked like an ordinary if dense row of buildings; only when one approached or entered its gates would its differences be known. The ghetto thus had two aspects: one face that turned inward to the Jewish shops and vendors, children playing and women in the stoops and at the well; the other, outer face was inconspicuously integrated into the bustle of the city. The facade of the ghetto was as symbolic and purposeful as that of Cosimo’s grander architectural projects. The Jews were to be brought to Florence, but their presence underplayed. They were to be segregated, but their home should neither invite attack nor overwhelm Florentines with oppressive, military features. The ghetto was a creation of, and representation of, an increasingly centralized state; as such, it was designed to be seen as simultaneously powerful, functional and unobtrusive. As landlord, the state made certain capital improvements in its investment, infrastructural improvements to the city which benefited the arriving tenants. The city had commercial and health concerns to attend to; it was motivated both to create a solvent community in the ghetto and to prevent the outbreak of disease. Indeed, the willingness to grant the Jews several postponements of their expulsion from their Tuscan homes in 1571 may prob-

ably be explained by the simple fact that the ghetto was not yet ready for their arrival.°° The most important work undertaken to ready the ghetto for its new pop-

ulation was a modernization of the sewage system. When the work was done, the Jews in the ghetto may have had better plumbing and access to

212 The Construction of the Ghetto | well-water than many other working- and middle-class people in the city. The first of the well-diggers (votapozzi, or vuotapozz1) who attempted to do this

work was hired in May 1571 but lasted only a few weeks until he was replaced.°’ The job was perhaps too complicated for him: numerous cesspools had to be made, trenches dug and pipes set in, apparently in order to create a leach field to properly distribute the drainage. The new well-digger, whose services were retained from July until the following February also

had some trouble, hiring extra day labor to adjust or replace and reset cesspools, sewers and pipes more than once.*8 Better housing in Florence had had latrines since the fifteenth century.*?

Waste was conducted down and out of the house into depositaries called pozzt nert, and communal statutes from the fourteenth century required that these be emptied outside the city walls or into the river Arno (in which people bathed and fished) but not into the streets.’ For the architects of the ghetto, as for the Medici government in general, sewage and sanitation were high priorities. The overseer specifically assigned the carpenters on the site to install sixty wooden latrine benches (predelle da necessari), for which work they were paid in October.®' From the brief descriptions of the work done on

the sewage system constructed for the ghetto, it 1s difficult to determine whether the latrines emptied directly into the new sewage system or whether people still carried away their pozzi neri to be dumped, the underground system being reserved for drainage from the streets.

Throughout the city the poor drew water from public wells, and the ghetto was no exception. (This was probably a good thing, since it was standard for pipes to be sealed with lead.°*) Waste water was conducted away, but no new system was installed to bring fresh water into the ghetto buildings. It is possible that some of the old palazzi in the ghetto had internal wells, since the wealthiest fourteenth- and fifteenth-century homes in Florence had been built with them. There were almost certainly still some of the even more common rain basins (acquai) that brought water down from the roofs into the interior rooms.™ In any event, the workers in the ghetto prepared several new water basins.© The great water-well in the piazza, if it did not predate the ghetto, may have been blasted in May. Water was drawn by a traditional pulley system; by 1595 residents were tying melons to one end of the chain in order to more easily draw water. The Jewish governors of the ghetto forbade all residents of the ghetto to put melons in the well, stating their concern that the water could become “infected” and adding sarcastically that the whole community would be inconvenienced, “[if] some strong handsome youth with this fine manner of drawing water should break the chain.”®’ The great well in the piazza was a focal point in the daily life of the ghetto.

Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto —213

While all this work was being completed, Jews were moving into the ghetto. The work week for the Christian carpenters and bricklayers and other workers was Monday to Saturday, payday.® The refugees moved in amidst the noise, the dust, the partially patched and plastered walls, the half-tiled roofs. As the diarist Lapini noted, “as of May 1571 the said Jews began to return and live there, even while it was still being walled up” This suggests

that some of the local Florentine Jews were living in the area before the ghetto was built. The majority who moved in, however, were refugees from Tuscany and many did not actually move in until late in the summer of 1571.

The Ghetto as a Rental Property and the Impact on Jewish Households In the absence of any local Jewish Florentine communal organization, there was no Jewish committee set up to try to avert the ghettoization decree, as there would be in Padua in 1602.”° There was also no committee to help the Jews make the move and transition into the Florentine ghetto. Unlike the Jews of some other, later ghettos, the Florentine Jews were not invited to help choose the location of the ghetto or to plan its construction.”’ Nor was the allocation of the space within it discussed with or turned over to Jewish representatives or committees as it would later be in Mantua, for example.” Rather, the state required that the Jews rent their apartments in the ghetto

directly from the office of the Nove Conservatori. Officers of the Nove conducted an auction in which bids were placed for each unit in the ghetto, and they granted a lease to the individual whose bid was highest. ‘The record of one such auction, held in 1575, has survived.”* The auction is worth con-

sidering here for the information it reveals about the profitability of the ghetto. Two representatives of tne Nove Conservatori came to the ghetto on the night of 22 April and again on 27 April and conducted or observed the auction, which was held “at the sound of the trumpet and by torch light” in the presence of the Jews in their synagogue.’* On these two dramatic occasions, the Jews bid for fifteen apartments which had become available. Each apartment carried a two-year lease, and rent had to be paid bimonthly. New regulations announced that in light of abuses already common, “selling” the lease and subletting were strictly forbidden, and no one was allowed to bid for anyone else except a family member. Women who were householders were present and made their own bids. Jews who already had an apartment under lease were allowed to bid for these “new” rooms in exchange for the apart-

214 The Construction of the Ghetto ments they were already renting or if they could show that they did not have enough space therein for their families.”° The rooms in the ghetto were rented to the Jews as apartments comprising a number of rooms that bore a distinct nomenclature: sale (large halls), camere (chambers), stanze (other functionally nonspecialized rooms), soffite (garrets), balconies, hallways and ground-floor shops and store-fronts. It is not clear from the records whether in 1571 buildings had been demolished and built anew or only repaired and modified, and the account books do not provide enough information to reconstruct the actual design or layout of the

apartments. The records of the auction, however, show that the ghetto’s apartments were divided into units, referred to administratively by door numbers. They were neither rooms along a hall, such as might be found in a monastery, nor self-contained houses. The ghetto was an institution, but the

fundamental unit in the ghetto was now the apartment, hiding from our sight the size, shape and composition of the “household” that lived within it. Indeed, from the new perspective of the state administrators, in the ghetto the Jews were not organized by famiglia or hearth, the household that had been so clearly identifiable to and counted by the governors of each Tuscan

town in 1570.” In all future censuses taken by the state, the Jews of the Ghetto would be listed as a single unit, the individuality and complexity of their domestic relationships obscured. In the spring of 1575 all the apartments rented at auction that did not have a shop included a large hall, which may have served multiple functions for these new apartment households. The most expensive of the apartments had three or four rooms; a few of the wealthiest families in the ghetto may have occupied more space than that.”” The rents of the apartments and shops whose leases were sold at auction in 1575 are shown in Table 3. The total annual rent derived from these fifteen apartments was 1,983 lire 10 soldi, or more than 283 scudi in rent per year. This partial rent from the ghetto was already more than twice the 137 florins, or scudi, that were due in annual interest to the Florentines who had sold the property to the duke and loaned

, the proceeds to the monte di pieta. Table 3 shows that of the fifteen units, seven included shops which com-

manded a much higher average rent (171 lire 5 soldi) than those without shops (average rent 98 lire, or 14 scudi). Because we have no record of the rents for the rest of the ghetto, we cannot determine what the total annual rental income from the ghetto was; however, the enumeration of the apartments strongly suggests that there were seventy-five units. The numbers were assigned to specific apartments: every time an apartment appears more than once in the record-keeping, it is referred to by its number—we have a record

Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto — 215 TABLE 3. Ghetto Shops and Apartments Rented at Auction in April 1575

59 Y palio 84. 141 66 Y None 70 71 62 Y 2, stanze 14.0 199.10 65YY2 None 105213.10 IIO 61 stanze 14.0

Apt. no. Shop? Other rooms Opening bid Winning bid

60 terreno 14.0 204.15 63 Y Y palio, 3 stanze, soffita 140 259

71 N N sala, sala, 2r camera 70 71 73 camere — 85 74. N sala, 2 camere 84. 85 75 N sala, 33camere 126 129.10 72 N sala, stanze 84. 94.10 68 N sala, 2 camere, terrazo 112 112 69 N sala, 1 camera 56 80 70 N sala, 3 camere 126 127.15 SOURCE: Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Nove Conservatori del Dominio e della Iursidizione Fiorentina 16, 30r—-V, 341-V.

NOTE: Average rent per unit, 1983.5 + 15 = 132.3 lire (or 18.9 scudi). All rents are in lire and soldi. (The opening bids were set in scudi, and the winning bids were recorded in either scudi or lire and soldi. All values have been translated to lire here for consistency.) The table lists the units in the order in which they were rented over a two day auction on 22 April (units 59-61) and 26 April (units 71-70).

of numbers 59 to 75. For example, Mona Fiorina bid 13.5 scudi for “number 72” in April, and in May was required to submit the name of a guarantor for the rent of “number 72.” (She presented her brother, Agnolo di Moise.) It is reasonable to assume that apartments numbered 1-58 existed. We may assume, then, that there were seventy-five units in the ghetto in 1575, a few of which may have been primarily commercial spaces (such as no. 65 and no. 66). We know the rent drawn from fifteen of these; if the remaining 60 were all rented at the rock bottom rent of 71 lire, the annual income collected from ghetto rents would have been over 6,243 lire, or almost 892 scudi.” In reality, the total rental income was probably higher. The construction of the ghetto seems therefore to have been a smart fiscal move. The annual profit the state drew in rent from its investment was 6.5 times higher than the profit to those who sold their property and invested in the monte di pieta. Moreover, the government was probably able to collect these rents from the Jews. When the auction was conducted in 1575, the min-

isters officiating, Baccio Salamoni and Benedetto Forlini, set an opening price. In the case of more than half the units being auctioned (see Table 3), there was competitive bidding among the Jews, which there would not have been if the rents were beyond the means of those competing. Thus, for example, “when the candle was extinguished” for apartment 63, signifying the end of the bidding, Lazzaro d’Isac Raben ebreo had promised to pay an annual

216 The Construction of the Ghetto rent of 37 scudi for a shop that had four rooms adjoined on the floor above it and in the back. The auctioneer had begun the bidding at 20 scudi, but com-

petition among the Jews drove the rent high for the desirable apartment.” The bidding was much less competitive on the second day of the auction: the

winning bids on 26 April were much closer to the opening bids than they were on 22 April.®° The wealthier Jews, who could afford to, had apparently already competed for the best available shops and apartments. Those who

bid for the remaining apartments were either not able to compete or had agreed among themselves to avoid escalating the rents. The Nove did not exploit the Jews by charging them extraordinarily high rents. Of course, many of the Jews who now rented in the ghetto had been home-owners previously. They had been forced to vacate and sell or abandon

their properties, and for them renting was certainly more expensive than maintaining the homes they had owned and lost.®! But were the rents charged in the ghetto higher than rents elsewhere in the city? The detailed analysis by Pietro Battara of a 1561 census of shops in Florence enables us to compare the rents in the ghetto with the rents of shops throughout the city.*®

(It should be noted that the census registered shops, whereas the rents for shops in the ghetto usually included other rooms.) Of the fifteen rentals we know of from 1575, seven included a bottega among other rooms. Only two of

the rentals were for a shop alone: number 66 commanded a rent of 71 lire (10.1 florins) from Iacobbe di Miele Romano, and number 65 went to Simone di Prospero da Sezzo for 110 lire (15.7 florins).°?

Battara has shown that shops in Florence rented for anywhere from 1 to 108 florins per year.** Looking at shops owned by people whose occupations were similar to those of the Jews, we see that average rents for artisans and dealers in second-hand goods were 12.07 florins, for linen- and silk-industryrelated shops, 20.28 and 22.68 florins respectively.®> Iacobbe di Miele was a

hat- and cap-maker (capellaw) in the ghetto and was matriculated into the Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants in December 1575, just a few months after he rented this shop.®° His rent of 10.1 florins and the 15.7 florins paid by Simone di Prospero both fall comfortably below the average rents of other small-scale artisans and merchants in Florence.*’ The rents paid by these Jewish shopkeepers also fall perfectly into the range of rents for the quarter of

Santa Maria Novella, where the ghetto was located. Of the 428 shops counted in the census of 1562, just over 10 percent paid 30 or more florins in

annual rent and only ten shops carried a rent of more than 40 florins. The majority of rents were clustered around 6, 8, 10 and 20 florins, 260 of the 428 shops (60%) falling within that range.*8

Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto —.217 It would seem clear, therefore, that the Nove Conservatori did not set an arbitrarily high rent for the shops it rented to the Jews. Although the evidence is less certain, it is also possible to show that the Jews paid as fair a rent for their domestic quarters as they did for their shops. A rough estimate of the average rent of individual rooms in the ghetto—very rough, considering that the rooms were of differing sizes and had unequal access to light and ventilation— suggests that a room rented for 25—45 lire, less than half the rent of a shop. A householder who rented a typical apartment of one large room and two or three smaller rooms was paying 12-17 scudi per year for his or her household’s rent. To put these rents into perspective, it would be useful to know the income of the Jews living in the ghetto, whose occupations ranged from the humblest needle-crafts and rag picking to the used-clothing trade and silk production. The average income of employed Jews in the ghetto can only be roughly estimated from the known wages and incomes of people with a variety of other occupations. The wages of three classes of laborers — bricklayers, agricultural workers and silk-workers—have been studied by Giuseppe Parenti.8? He found that bricklayers in the period 1570-1600 were being paid

between 30 and 40 soldi per day, while agricultural workers in the same period were paid only from 10 to 20 soldi per day.” If they worked half the days of the year, these workers would have earned anywhere from 13 scudi (the lowest paid agricultural worker) to 52 scudi (the highest paid construction worker) per year. Similar salaries were earned by skilled workers in the textile industries such as silk-spinners and weavers who were matriculated into the guild as membri minori and not allowed to have their own shops or hire employees.”! Other types of work brought somewhat higher incomes. The gatekeeper and custodian of the ghetto, as we have seen, was assigned an annual salary of 30 scudi. Clerks in business firms earned 30-80 scudi; government officials might earn 100 or 150.7” Wealthy people had better ways to produce income, investing their money in real estate, banks, trade and industry, and, so long as they were Christian citizens, by being appointed to multiple positions in the government from which they received emoluments. The Jews in the ghetto were not a wealthy group. According to their status in the guilds, most of the Jewish men in the ghetto fell into the lower ranks of membership, and if their incomes were comparable to those of other artisans, they probably earned between 20 and 40 scudi.”* Families could have drawn on more than one income, though we not know whether Jewish women or children in the ghetto produced earned income.”* We may assume

218 The Construction of the Ghetto that those who had shops earned somewhat more, engaging in both commercial and artisan work, but they also paid correspondingly higher rents for the shops they needed. It seems reasonable to conclude that the average rent a Jewish lease-holder paid (14 scudi for an apartment without a shop) may have cost about half or a third of his or her annual income. The construction

of the ghetto, borrowed from models already found in Venice and Rome, allowed the state to relocate the Jews to a place more “convenient” from the religious and administrative perspective, and more politically useful. That said, it was also an opportunity to collect from them a steady rental income and to increase commercial activity in a central but disreputable area in the city.° We must not lose sight of the effect of this policy on the families who were uprooted by it. Almost half the individuals who rented the apartments in 1575 are identifiable among the heads of households in the census of 1570 as Jews

who had owned houses in the pre-ghetto period. Though their rents were not arbitrarily high, the fact that they were not allowed to own property was a severe disability and drain on their resources.

Those who had owned houses now generally rented the larger apartments: Ioseph d’Orso had been one of the most important Jewish householders in Perugia at the time of the Jews’ expulsion from the papal territories in 1569; after his brief sojourn in Florence before ghettoization, he now

rented one of the larger four room apartments, no. 70.”° Lazzaro d’Isac Raben had been living in Florence with his brother Moise in a household of eleven; he now rented the most expensive of the units on our list—a shop, three rooms and a garret, no. 63.7” Racchela di Salamone Spagnuola is almost certainly the same Dona Racchel who kept five or six guests as lodgers in her

“rooms” in Florence up until 1570.”* Now she was reduced to renting an apartment of two rooms, one large and one small, no. 71.” Three other large rooms in the ghetto were called “communal rooms” in the ghetto regulations of 1572, and their rent must have been paid for with communal funds.’

We will consider at a later point how the Jews used the ghetto’s space, constructing its spatial-social meaning. For now, we return to the state and its employees who constructed the physical entity. On the last day of July 1571 the edict was approved that required the Jews

to reside in the ghetto, set its hours and established its general guidelines. Jews found living outside the ghetto were now subject to fines, yet the work continued. On 13 August, four Jews were given notice in the ghetto’s piazza of the 31 July decree and they were ordered to make it known to the other Jews.!°! The gates of the ghetto were now supposed to be closed at the sound

Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto —.219 TABLE 4. Hypothetical Ten-Year Projected Budget for the Ghetto, 1570s

Purchase of the property 2,754 fl.

Total expense of the construction 4.,367 fl. § percent interest on the purchase price, not compounded, for first 1,377 fl. ten years

Total cost over ten years 8,498 fl. Rental income from the ghetto, lowest-rent estimate for ten years 8,571 fl. Rental income from the ghetto, average-rent estimate for ten years 14,143 fl. SOURCES: Sources cited for Tables 1 and 3; Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Nove Conservatori del Dominio e della Iursidizione Fiorentina 3698, 1. NOTES: This imagined budget is based on numbers explained in this chapter. All figures are rounded to the nearest florin. The lowest-rent estimate assumes that all seventy-five units were rented at the low rent of 80 lire per year. The average-rent estimate assumes that all seventy-five units were rented at 132 lire (18.9 scudi), which was the average rent of the fifteen units whose rents are known (see Table 3). A high estimate based on the highest rents in our sample would be distorted due to the high number of shops included in the sample.

of the Campana, the bell rung at night to signify the prohibition of carrying arms.!°2 However, there were not yet any gates to lock, or if they were, they were temporary. The wood for the gates was cut and brought to the site on

the first of September. It was chestnut wood, much more solid than the wood of fir trees that had been used for other construction on the site. The master carpenter Iacopo di Graziadio was paid in November for making the “two gates for the safeguarding of this ghetto?! The iron smiths and locksmiths had completed a large work order of door locks, bolts and keys and other hardware by the first week of November.’ The work of building the ghetto came to a close in the winter. Through January, plaster was still being applied to walls, and whitewash; roofs were

being tiled, and some parts of the ghetto were being paved.'® The total expenditure for the construction of the ghetto, excluding the price of the purchase of the property, was totaled in February 1571/72 at just under 4,367 florins.!°° When all the expenses were paid, the rents collected from the Jews

began to reimburse the government for its investment. Table 4 presents a hypothetical budget that night have been projected by the planners of the ghetto. If the rents were successfully collected, they not only paid the 5 percent interest the monte di pieta owned on its accounts to the previous owners of the ghetto property, but paid off, within ten years, the entire cost of the purchase and construction of the ghetto. The decision to ghettoize the Jews was not only economically sound, it was calculated for profit. While the figures for the income from the ghetto in Table 4 are rough estimates of potential income, they are probably similar to the figures used by the enterprising planners who convinced the grand duke

220 ‘The Construction of the Ghetto to build the ghetto in the first place. After ten years the rent collected from the Jews was pure profit, less only interest payments from the monte and possibly expenses incurred by the state for maintenance and repair.'°” The Jews were required to live in the ghetto as tenants for almost two hundred years, until they were finally allowed to buy the property in 1750. A few months after most of the Jews had moved 1n, the crowning touches were put on the ghetto. In February of 1571/72 a stone-worker (scarpellino) was paid 12 florins for a Medici coat of arms which he attached above the gate

of the ghetto.’° Another craftsman was paid for gilding it in gold,’ and a second artist, also a stone-worker, was paid 21 florins and 1¥% lire for having

adorned the shield with “several thrones, chevrons, boats and other pietra (carving, or stone-work) made by him-’!!® The Medici shield, symbol of imperial power and wealth with its references to the nautical strength that Cosimo strove to increase, was hung above the gate at Piazza Suchellinai. It seems likely that the new gate in the Mercato Vecchio was adorned with another public symbol and expression of authority, but one associated more with the city’s commercial and administrative order: a clock.’”! The ghetto regulations of July 1571 state explicitly that the duties of the custodian of the

ghetto gates, whose salary of 30 scudi would be paid by the Jews, include tending “the clock” (Vorivuolo).''* Although mechanical clocks had been found in Florence since 1352, when a clock first struck the hour at the Palazzo Vecchio,"'’ large public clocks were still rare in the sixteenth century, expensive to make and expensive to keep in repair.'!* The 1561 census of Florentine shops records that there were only two clock-makers (oriwoli) in the city.!* It

makes sense that the clock referred to in the ghetto regulations was not a clock im the ghetto, but a clock that faced the Mercato Vecchio, for all mer-

| chants and visitors to see. It was efficient for the same employee to attend both the gates and the clock tower, and it was convenient to the government that his salary would be paid by the Jews. The clock, like the ghetto itself, signified that everyone and everything was in its proper and predictable place at the appropriate time, that the machinery of the state was in perfect working order. The placement of the two symbols, shield and clock, symbolizes the

Medici’s concern to balance its display of power with respect for the autonomous, rational, commercial life of the city. The adornment completed, the ghetto stood as a solidly constructed sym-

bol that the state was in order as signorial rule was passed on, for the first time in Florentine history, as a hereditary right from one Medici to the next. The whole project was accomplished in under three years and with a good expectation of profitable, long-lasting gain. Whether or not the decision to

Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto — 221

build the ghetto was based on careful financial calculations, it was a financially intelligent enterprise. The rents alone—without surpassing rents elsewhere in the city—could pay off the appreciated cost of the property and labor of construction within a decade. The accounts kept by the Nove Conservatori of the purchase, renovation and rental of the ghetto properties have revealed that the Jews were neither moved into a slum—they were at least given new wells and drainage—nor charged excessively high rents. Although the forced transfer was violently disruptive to their lives and oppressive to future generations of Jews, we should

understand from these new data that this ghettoization and perhaps others were not necessarily undertaken with the purpose of pressuring the Jews of Florence to convert to Christianity, although that may have been the papal plan in ghettoizing the Jews of Rome.*!® Rather, the Medici bureaucracy intended to keep the Jews as tenants for the long duration. And in the end, the building of the ghetto was a remarkably efficient state-capitalistic enterprise that took advantage of the Jews’ vulnerability, making them, in essence, a captive population that paid to inhabit a show-space of ducal power and Christian piety. Viewing the construction of the ghetto as a capitalist venture in urban renewal renders other, more ideological explanations of the decision to ghettoize the Jews in Florence less essential. But I see these various explanations as many parts of the story which cannot be easily distinguished and isolated because with time they have been mixed together and baked like so many bricks. At most we can identify the various components and describe their functions. For the ghetto served numerous functions: it fulfilled new Tridentine norms for rigorous pursuit of Catholic Reform in every parish; it met the papal call to separate Jews from Christians; it produced income that could be used in the context of ducal patronage; it offered new administrative posts and emoluments to ambitious individuals; and it improved a dis-

reputable part of town close to the important Mercato Vecchio and the offices and residence of the archbishop. All the while, it served a political function of justification and legitimation of Medici rule; it promoted publicly as an act of piety and even mercy and tolerance that established order; and it did all this for the state at a time of political transition and persistently expanding and centralizing activity. Turning from the construction metaphor to the artistic: the cultural, religious, financial and political explanations for the decision to establish the ghetto of the Jews multiply as the sources are investigated, but all are part of the mural that must be painted to illustrate that space.

222 The Construction of the Ghetto AF I do not think that the Medici and their advisors had any particular interest in how the creation of the ghetto would affect the Jews themselves. There were no explicitly stated goals for the impact on the Jews beyond that they should be more easily identified and distanced from Christians. But for the Jews, ghettoization was not just a move from one town to another, nor was it a merely symbolic statement of princely prerogative over property and persons. The ghetto would begin as a physical construction, and the relocation

of the Jews into that space would initiate a transformation in both how Christians saw Jews and how the state negotiated with them. The Jews of Florence were referred to now by administrators in the collective form as “the Jews of the ghetto.” Within the walls of their new confines, the Jews would also become a corporate entity, a group newly defined not only by its religion and minority status but also by where it lived. The Jewishness of these Jews would be forged by the experience of this new residential location, this urbanization, this segregation, this political incorporation and communalization.

Six Populating the Ghetto

Colloquially today, in discussions that are not about the socioeconomic-legal and cultural matrix that traps minorities in inner-city poverty, a “ghettoized” group is one that the speaker or author judges to be shut off from the larger

society beyond, isolated or turned inward. Italian Jewish historians have engaged this image and have produced much more nuanced discussions about the extent to which and ways in which Jews who were historically ghettoized in the physical, institutional sense were so closed off. They have also addressed the broader question of whether other premodern Jewish individuals and communities—in and out of physical ghettos—were any more or less engaged with the majority cultures by which they were surrounded.' An important part of the backdrop for this conversation is the image that, in many cities, ghettoization of the Jews meant the literal closing

off of one or two streets on which Jews already lived, where they already formed a community. The remaining chapters of this book present the ghetto in a different light, calling attention to the fact that the Florentine ghetto was

a new corporate entity: enclosed, yes, but a creation and not a turning inwards of a pre-existing community. Our first set of spotlights will illuminate the size and characteristics of the population of the new ghetto (for a more detailed explanation of the methods used, see the appendix to this chapter). Of all the Jews of Tuscany who were expelled from their homes and permitted to move to the ghetto, how many did? And what happened to the rest? According to one state-sponsored census, the number of Tuscans in 1562 was 560,354, of whom 59,216 (10.57 percent) lived in the city of Florence.” Jews were not dramatically more concentrated in the capital city: the official count of Jews in Tuscany in the summer of 1570 identified 710, of whom 86 (12.11 percent) lived more or less permanently in Florence.’ In 1622, the next time the state conducted a statewide

census, the Florentine population was counted at 66,056 (an 11.6 percent increase) while the number of Jews living in Florence had increased more

224. The Construction of the Ghetto TABLE 5. The Population of the Jews in Florence and the Population of Florence, 1552-1672

Year Jews Florence Sources*® 1552 — 59,191 Misc. Med. 324 1562 — 59,216 Misc. Med. 224. 1567 93 or 974 MGS 4450, 1738

1570 86 MGS 4450, 173r

1622 4.95 66,056 BNE Cod. II, 1, 240, 41, 135;

— — BNE Fondo Palatino, Cod. EB., 15,2 1630 4.28 Strozz., I, 24, 112V—13r 1632 390 BNE Fondo Palatino, Cod. EB, 15

1642 4.99/54.9° Strozz., I, 24., 114V—Isr

1661 513 Strozz., I, 24, 130v—31r 1663 54.6 Strozz., I, 24, 132V—33r

1672 $72 Strozz., 1, 24, 1424 1672 4.504 ACEF Box E 25.1

NOTES: For the data for 1622, Giuseppe Pardi, “Disegno della storia demografica di Firenze,” Archivio Storico Italiano 74. 202-3, citing BNF Cod. E.B., XV, 2, is skeptical of its value, and cites it incorrectly as dating to 1633. But see also Codex II, 1, 24.0, 4r and 13r, “Descrizione dell’anime della citta e contado di , Firenze 1622.” For the data for 1630: after the plague of 1628-30, the population had declined and was counted at 428; Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Strozziane, Serie I, n. XXIV, 112v—-13r, “Ristretto della descrizione della citta di Firenze fatta Panno 1630 per la Quaranta d’ordine di S.A.” See also Pardi, ibid., 204. “For the abbeviations of sources, see the list of abbreviations, p. 4.15. 6 For 1567 the lower number excludes four Jews who are in Florence but are said to live elsewhere: two who were ordinarily in Bologna and one married couple from Arezzo. ‘The subtotals and the totals given in this census record do not equate. 4This number counts Jews in the ghetto, excluding all who lived outside the ghetto.

than fivefold to 495 (see Table 5). How do those 495 Jews correspond to the survivors of the original 710 Jews of Tuscany on the eve of ghettoization? What roles did death, exile or emigration, conversion or resistance to orders play in response to the edict of expulsion? Since there are no census data for the first years of the ghetto or indeed for its first generation, we will use numbers that can be arrived at by an approximation of standard demographic methods, comparing them with contemporary estimates. The close interest taken by the state in its subjects left a doc-

umentary trail allowing a fairly close reconstruction of the way the population transfer proceeded in 1570/71 and of the size of the population that formed the new community of the ghetto. The size of the ghetto’s population was of interest to the office of the Nove Conservatori, which administered the ghetto, organized the rental of its apartments and collected its taxes. The edict of 31 July 1571 imposed a new head tax of 2 scudi for each male Jew who had attained fifteen years. In one

respect this tax was unusual, for Christian men within the city of Florence were not subject to a per capita tax. However, the age-based criterion for the taxation of the men of the ghetto followed standard contemporary demo-

Populating the Ghetto 225 TABLE 6. Taxes Paid by the Jews of the Ghetto to the State (Through the Nove Conservator), 1573-96

Payment Payment Year scudi lire, soldi Year scudi lire, soldi 1§73 150 3.10 1582 133 — 1§74150 3.10 1583 130 — 1575 150 3.10 1586 122 114. — — 1576 162 — 1588 1577 162 1.15 — 1589 118 — 1578 150 1590 66 — 1579 130 1.15 1594 106 — 1580 140 — 1§96 122 — 1581 IOI —

SOURCE: Archivio della Comunita Ebraica di Firenze, Box A 13.1 (folder 1): “Notta di Pagam[en]ti delli Testi delli anni Passati conforme al n[ost]ro lib[r]o si trova scritto di receuti [sic] di detti pagamenn” (“Record of the Payments of the Head [Tax] of Years Past, as found written according to our Book of Receipts of these payments”). NOTES: A marginal note to left of 1579 reads: “questan[n]Jo si Comin[cia]no a pag{a]re al scrittoio” [this year they begin making payments to the secretary]. A marginal note by the year 1590 notes “si trova rice[vJuta solamente 66,” reflecting the unusually low tax paid that year. The folio is paginated no. 78. The list is not signed or dated. The reverse of the page on which this text appears and the next page are blank, so the list was either complete, suggesting that it was written shortly after 1596, or it was incomplete and interrupted. The paper, ink and handwriting are consistent with a late sixteenth- or early seventeenthcentury date.

graphic methods. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century government bureaucrats divided the population at age 12, 15, 17 and 18 in their various laws and for various purposes. Censuses taken by the state in 1632, 1642 and 1661 recorded separate numbers in the population for males and females age under fifteen and above fifteen (adults).* In any event, it does not seem to be the case that the Nove ever actually counted adult male Jews. Rather, the agency was Satisfied with a rough estimate of the men in the ghetto and judged that there were seventy-five men over the age of fifteen in the ghetto. The two-scudi tax “per Jewish man” levied on the ghetto in 1573, 1574. and 1575 was 150 scudi (see Table 6).°

The Nove’s estimate in 1573 of seventy-five taxable Jews in the ghetto seems tied to the subdivision of the ghetto property into seventy-five rental units, as noted in the previous chapter. The officers of the Nove presumably calculated that every rental unit would have to pay a tax of 2 scudi—as if every rental unit were a household unit headed by one adult male. The estimate of seventy-five adult men in 1573 1s a starting place for our investigation into the size of the population, but not a very useful guide to household composition in the ghetto. On the one hand, immediately before the ghettoization there were more than a dozen Jewish bachelors in Florence. Were they forgotten, or included among the seventy-five? On the

226 The Construction of the Ghetto other hand, some of the seventy-five units were rented as “stores” and other

| commercial space, and it is hard to tell whether they all also served as living quarters. Nonetheless, if we imagine with the Nove that there were seventyfive households in seventy-five ghetto apartments, and that households in the ghetto were, on average, the same size as pre-ghetto households, we can estimate the size of the ghetto population using what is known as a “household multiplier,” the average number of individuals per household. The average hearth size for Tuscan Jews in 1570 was 4.7 or 5.1 (depending on the criteria used; see the appendix to this chapter), so seventy-five households would have comprised between 352 and 382 Jews living in the ghetto in 1573. An alternative method of estimating the population is a “population multiplier” (see appendix). With this method we determine an adult-male-to-

total population ratio in the period before the ghetto, using the census of 1570, and then apply it to the number of men in the ghetto, which can be counted within a reasonable margin of error. To allow for comparison with the Nove’s estimate of seventy-five men, I have chosen to be consistent with their definitions, identifying males as adult at fifteen years in the year 1573. Using multiple archival sources, I have counted and identified by name

what must be almost the entire adult male population of the ghetto during the 1570s. In order to include only Jews who were at least fifteen in 1573, information was integrated from four Florentine archival sources of the period 1571-76: the matriculation rolls of three guilds into which Jews were admitted, the annually approved lists of Jews chosen to govern the ghetto, the records of licenses granted to Jews that allowed them to take trips out of the city of Florence and the records of the auction of rooms in the ghetto in 1575 discussed above.®

During the six years, there were twenty-seven Jewish men matriculated into guilds (and also two Jewish women).’ There were at least thirty-one men elected to govern the ghetto.® Seventeen men (and two women) are recorded as proprietary-lessors in 1575, and at least sixty-one clearly identifiable men (and four women) were granted permits for trips. These numbers suggest that the Nove’s assessment of seventy-five men | aged fifteen or older present in the ghetto in 1571-75 was an underestimate. The above-mentioned four overlapping lists allow us to count at least ninetyfive men in the ghetto in the period 1571-76, and perhaps as many as 105 Jew-

ish men.’ It is unlikely that my search of these four archival sources turned up every Jewish man, given that we should not expect that every man in the ghetto was either a guild member, a governor, or lease-holder or followed official procedures to obtain a license for a trip. There are poorly identified Jews such as “Isac hebreo” or “Iacob hebreo” who appear in other archival

Populating the Ghetto —227 fonts, such as the criminal court records I have studied, but these can generally not be counted for lack of further detail about their identities. Consequently, in addition to the approximately one hundred names on the list, we should imagine a small group of more marginal individuals—and a proportionate number of women and children with them—whose lower socioeconomic status meant that they had less contact with government and guild administrators on whose records we have relied.’ As a base figure for this calculation, however, we may rely on the estimate of one hundred men aged. fifteen of older in the ghetto in 1573. To calculate the total population, an appropriate multiplier must be now determined. A general multiplier has been established for the Tuscan population as a whole and for some communities in Tuscany using the tax assessment data called the catasto: there were an average of 3.7 rural Tuscans for every man aged fifteen and above in 1427.") We can calculate a more accurate multiplier for Tuscan Jews in 1570 from the census data for 134 Jews in five towns on the eve of the expulsion.” The sample is small and the ratios dif-

fered dramatically depending on each family’s stage in the life-cycle. Nonetheless, the resulting ratios show that for every Jewish man, there were on average between 3.05—3.72 men, women and children in the population, including Jewish servants (see appendix, ‘Table 7). We might note that the ratio of men to women and children is somewhat lower than that of the general Tuscan rural population a century and a half earlier, which might reflect

the relatively high urbanization of the Jews (not in Florence, but in the largest towns of Tuscany) and the relatively low number of unmarried women. If the expulsion from Tuscany affected men, women and children equally, the ratio of adult men to men, women and children for the ghetto’s population should approximate that found in the pre-ghetto population and we can

make our second estimate of the population of the ghetto of Florence.’ Using the population multiplier based on a count of 100 adult males, in 1573 there would have been between 305 and 372 Jews. Thus two similar estimates have been derived, 352—82 from the household multiplier based on seventyfive households, and 305-72 from the population multiplier, based on an estimate of 100 males over the age of fifteen at the onset of ghettoization. A number of factors suggest that these two sets of figures may misrepresent the true number of Jews who moved into the ghetto in 1571/72. First of

all, we do not know the number of households in the ghetto, but only that there were seventy-five units for rent and that the Nove estimated seventyfive adult men. Moreover, we do not know how “households” reorganized. themselves in this new physical and social environment, and cannot assume

228 The Construction of the Ghetto that the average size of a household (used in the household multiplier method) was still 5.1. On the one hand, banking households were consistently larger than nonbanking households, and most of the bankers, as we shall see, did not come to the ghetto of Florence.!* On the other hand, households tended to become fuller in times of economic limitation.!° In addition, when we use the population multiplier, we must consider that in response to the expulsion edict of 1570, a portion of the Jews of Tuscany chose to leave the state rather than come to the ghetto. Young and unmarried men (and not only the banking elite) may have been more likely to leave the state than female heads of household and households with older people and small children who would have had no choice but to move to Florence (or possibly, convert). The population multiplier obtained from the stable populations in the Tuscan towns might therefore underestimate the first generation of Jewish refugees in the ghetto, inflated with full families, widows and children. Given these considerations, a conservative estimate for the initial Jewish population of the ghetto is that there were a minimum of 370 Jews and probably not more than 410.'°

These numbers suggest that at least three and possibly as many as four Jewish refugees arrived for each of the eighty-six local Florentine Jews, thus outnumbering the Florentines, who, as we saw in Chapter Three, were not an organized community in 1570. The Jews who comprised the ghetto community, therefore, were not simply Florentine Jews who had been compelled to move into a ghetto, nor were they the old Jewish population of Tuscany. They were a new community whose profile must now be considered. There had been 710 Jews in the Florentine Dominion (excluding the state of Siena); now there were about 400. The Jews of Tuscany had responded in three ways to the Decree Concerning the Jews of 26 September 1570. Two courses of action were suggested by the text of the edict: they could leave the territory altogether or, if they wanted to remain in the state “to have and do business, trade or craft and to live [each] with his family,” they could move to the city of Florence, to live in the area and with the conditions to be des-

ignated, that is, in the ghetto.’” The third option, not referred to in the | decree, was to convert, as we shall see. A very few Jews may have managed to remain in Tuscany and ignore the edict, or to establish residence in Florence while maintaining some links to their town of origin. The Jews who left the territory were disproportionately comprised of families of bankers. Luzzati interpreted this decision on the part of the two main banking families, the da Pisa and the da Rieti: “they felt themselves to be part of a true and proper aristocracy and probably did not accept being closed into the ghettos of Florence or Siena together with the descendants of their

Populating the Ghetto —.229 ancient ministers and servants.”!? Leveling all Jews to one low status was, I have argued, an essential part of the Christian ideology that lay behind the history of signifying and segregating Jews, and it follows naturally that elite Jews would resist ghettoization as they had always resisted wearing the segno. But the bankers also left Tuscany because, unlike Jewish merchants and artisans, they would otherwise permanently lose their livelihood. After the banks of the da Pisa and da Rieti in Pisa, Prato, Empoli, Pescia and San Giovanni were formally closed in 1571, it took several years for members of these families to resettle themselves. Agnolo di Laudadio da Rieti, the banker who lived with his wife and family in Pisa in 1570, was present in Pisa in March 1572. The family was officially granted the exceptional authorization on 20 October 1573 to live in Pisa, and was found there in August of 1574. and in July 1575.7” Members of the family were, at least temporarily, resident in Florence: Agnolo’s three sons Raffaello, Dattero and Dattolo obtained permits from the Florentine authorities in 1575 to leave the Florentine ghetto and return to Siena, where their ancestors had lived for centuries.?! These three

young men clearly counted on a future outside of Florence: they did not enter into the Florentine guilds or participate in the self-government of the new Jewish community. When their father died in 1576, the sons obtained a

confirmation of their right to live in Pisa, with their wives and families,

which included an exemption from wearing the segno.?* Although they could now choose to live in Florence, Pisa or Siena, the da Rueti were still not permitted to reopen their banks anywhere in Tuscany. In the end, a large part of this elite family, including two of Agnolo’s sons, a daughter and their staff, moved out of Tuscany to Ferrara, where they were allowed to engage in moneylending. Ferrara had earlier welcomed the Abra-

vanel family from Naples and a great number of Jewish and converso refugees; the city was still ruled by the Este, and it would not institute a ghetto until 1624, after becoming part of the papal domain in 1598.78

The da Pisa family made a quicker and more complete departure from Tuscany. They sold their property in and outside Pisa shortly after 1570.7* The sons of Fiametta and her deceased husband Abramo— Leone, Mose and Lau-

dadio—moved from Pisa and Prato to Mantua.” Their relative Vitale (Yehiel) Nissim di Simone, who had circumcised many of the boys who moved as young men into the ghetto of Florence, moved to Ferrara, where he died in 1574..7°

As a whole, the banking stratum of Tuscan Jewry rejected Florence and its ghetto. In addition to the da Pisa and da Rieti, eight Jewish households were identified by the government as bankers when it took action against them in the summer of 1570. They lived in six towns: Anghiari, Empoli, Monterchi,

230 The Construction of the Ghetto Pescia, Prato and San Giovanni.’” Most of them must have left Tuscany; we do not find any of their names among the ranks of officers of the Florentine ghetto during its first decade, nor are they found among the matriculants into Florentine guilds in the five years after ghettoization. Their names do not appear on the permits that were necessary for Jews who wanted to travel, even for members of the elite. There is uncertain evidence that two of the eight at most may have moved into the ghetto.** The wealthiest bankers were gone within five years, and the Jews who had been their agents and ministers, if present, were marginal to public life in the ghetto.

The Tuscan Jewish elite had included, in addition to the bankers, two especially privileged mercantile families: the Leucci family and the Alpelinghi family, also known as the da Empoli. The Leucci were perfume- and spice-

merchants who had been granted Pisan citizenship. Expelled, they came to live in Florence, perhaps hoping to maintain their trade with Pisan clients and eventually to return to Pisa. Ventura di Leuccio Leucci continued to rent space in Pisa, where he erected two booths to engage in his business as a perfume-merchant during the fair.2? Unlike the bankers, however, the men established themselves in the Florentine guilds: Abramo di Ventura di Leuccio Leucci and his brother Gratiadio di Ventura matriculated into the Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants in 1573. Gratiadio also entered the Silk Guild, where his father Ventura joined him in 1575.%° Gratiadio and his brothers, the sons of Ventura Leucci, were still living in Florence in 1588, when they petitioned successfully to return to the city where

“they were born and raised, they and their ancestors for two hundred years, in order to set up a perfume shop there and do other mercantile business.”?! The brothers were granted this permission in May 1588, with the conditions that they could not employ Christians in their house or engage in moneylending and that they were not exempted from wearing the segno.** As of 1595 this family had perfume shops in both Pisa and Florence.*?

With the bankers gone or uninvolved, the new elite of the ghetto was made up of old elite mercantile families such as the Leucci and da Empoli and small-scale merchants and artisans who became important in the ghetto. The bankers left, unprepared to become merchants. But banking households had accounted for only 100 to 150 Jews. If the ghetto had 370-410 Jews in its first decade, and there were 710 Tuscan Jews in 1570, part of the population (a group of at least 150, at most 240) is still “missing” having evaded either ghettoization or documentation. Although I am unable to track these Jews

down systematically, a few comments should be made concerning the options they had. A small number of the untraced Jews may have moved quickly in 1570 or

Populating the Ghetto —_ 231

1571 into the semi-autonomous state of Siena, only to be ghettoized in the city of Siena or expelled from that state a few months later.** Other Jews came first to the ghetto of Florence and then, a few years later, moved to Siena. It was not necessary to obtain permission to move into the ghetto of Siena: the proclamation (Bando) of 19 December 1571 concerning the Jews of Siena and its Dominion specified not only that Jews who had been living in the state of Siena would have to move into the city (into the place that would

be determined) but also that no Jew could in the future move into the state except into the city of Siena (other than to pass through and do business).*° Although both ghettos were instituted by order of the grand duke, once the ghetto of Florence had been established, permission was, however, required to leave the ghetto of Florence, even to go to Siena. In addition to the exit visas granted to the da Rieti family for Siena and Ferrara, permission to emigrate was granted to ten Jews from Florence, all in 1575—76.*°

Others among the “missing” Jews who did not come to the ghetto of Florence converted to Christianity, which allowed them to remain where they were. In the absence of any record-keeping list of Jews who were baptized at that time, conclusions concerning their numbers are tentative. Ex-Jewish status 1s signified in Christian-authored documents, where a convert is consistently referred to as an “ebreo gia” (ex-Jew, or once-Jew) or “oggi fatto cristiano” (today a Christian, or “today having been made a Christian”). The children of converts were sometimes called the sons and daughters of the “ebreo gia,” but where the converted parent is not referred to, there is no signification of the Jewish origin. It cannot be said that the expulsion order induced a large wave of conversions throughout the Jewish population of Tuscany or that it induced local parishioners or church officials to engage in the illicit abductions and forced baptisms that occasionally did occur in Tuscany, as elsewhere, and tore Jewish families apart.*” Jews had been converting as individuals, and sometimes with other family members, ever since they had settled in central and northern Italy.4® One of towns affected by the expulsion, Volterra, had experienced a crisis less than a century earlier. Following the anti-Jewish activities of the Minorite preacher Fra Timoteo, the institution of a charitable loan-bank, the degradation over a period of years of their status from “temporary citizen” to “foreigner” and the loss of their banking privileges, some members of the Jewish banking family da Volterra left the city, and others converted, “volun-

tarily”? (The converts included three children of Rabbi Meshullam of Volterra, the traveler to Egypt and the Levant whose diary was mentioned in reference to the fundugs of Alexandria.*’) Voluntary conversion was not, therefore, a new response to economic and social persecution.* In line with

232 The Construction of the Ghetto this history, there seems to have been a small peak in the number of conversions that took place in Tuscany between 1570 and 1572. The splash of baptismal waters always had a ripple effect, and it can be observed as it worked its way through one family to whom we have already been introduced, the descendants of Giuseppe Alpelinc, or Alpelingo, who had settled in Empoli (and who eventually became known as the Alpelinghi). One son, Emanuelle or Manuelle, had moved to Pontedera, while another, Moise, had remained in Empoli, where his widow Dorina was a wool pro-

ducer in 1570. Just before 14 July 1569, the original settler’s grandson Giuseppe di Manuelle dal Pontadera, a third-generation Tuscan Jew, was baptized. Giuseppe, who took the name of his sponsor, Thomaso de Medici, converted of his own free will—or perhaps expecting to achieve it through a pursuant legal emancipation.” He was about nineteen years old at the time: he had been circumcised by Yehiel Nissim da Pisa in 1550. Having moved to Florence, he turned to the court of the Otto di Guardia e Balia in an effort to obtain from his parents his share (/a rata) of the famil-

ial estate. This, he argued, he was entitled to while they still lived, even against their will, as provided in a bull of Pope Paul TI that constituted the rights of converts.*# Sons did not usually receive their share of the patrimony until the father died, and in 1570 his father Emanuelle still lived in Pontedera with a household of twelve, including Giuseppe’s mother Ricca. Receipt of

the patrimony normally required the approval (by gift) of the father or his death; by converting Giuseppe thus hoped to emancipate himself, at least financially.**

Giuseppe’s conversion predated the expulsion edict, but his conversion and the conversion of others in the 1560s may have preconditioned additional Jews to choose conversion when the expulsion edict came in 1570. Whatever their initial response to Giuseppe’s conversion may have been, Giuseppe’s father Emanuelle and his brother Lazzaro both followed his decision to convert sometime between 1570 and 1572, almost certainly in response to their impending expulsion from Pontedera.* The conversion of these two Jews must have been motivated at least in part by powerful economic considerations that outweighed their religious loyalty now that the family and patrimony were already split.* The impact of conversion was far-reaching and particularly damaging to women who were financially tied to or dependent on a Jewish man who chose to convert. Consider the case of Ricca, the mother of our convert Giuseppe/Thomaso (and of his converted brother Lazzaro) and the wife of Emanuelle Alpelingo. In mid-October 1573—after the conversion of her two sons and husband—two Florentine Jews submitted a bond to have Ricca

Populating the Ghetto —.233 released from jail.*” Referred to both as a “widow” (vedova) and as “once the wife [or, past-wife, donna gia| of Manuello di Iosefte dal Pontadera,” Ricca

had been imprisoned by the vicar of Vicopisano. Ricca had not converted. Her arrest was warranted by her illegal presence (as a Jew) in Pontedera, and she was sentenced to a fine on 4 November 1573: Whereas Mona Ricca, widowed Jewess, past-wife of Emanuello Jew, several months ago came to live in the ghetto of Florence in the house of a daughter of hers; that last August she left the said ghetto without license of her superiors and went to Pontedera to recuperate her dowry, where she stayed until the beginning of the following October, which is neither permitted nor allowed, under penalty of 10 scudi each time that one leaves or is found outside the ghetto without the required license, as provisioned in the decree to that effect made 31 July 1573;* therefore, it is observed and obtained, that Mona Riccha is condemned to pay 10 scudi in gold.*

After her arrest and release, Ricca obtained the necessary license from the Nove Conservatori and went back to Pontedera to try again to recover her dowry. She was granted a license on 8 January to go to Pontedera and stay

there through the month; on 21 January she received an extension to stay there for the month of February, and on 27 February another to remain there through the end of March.*° This text raises a number of questions that sharpen our focus on the impact of the ghettoization but also connect our inquiry to other aspects of the history of Jewish-Christian relations. When Ricca traveled to Pontedera, did she stay with her converted sons? Was she properly divorced by her husband Emanuelle when he converted? Had he in fact since died? The uncer-

tainty about Ricca’s personal status as widow or divorcee is rooted in the problematics of cultural translation. Because divorce was not permitted to Catholics, the Italian language in the sixteenth century had no commonly used words to express two concepts easily found in the Hebrew language

that might have described the personal status of a woman such as Ricca, | which depended on Emanuelle’s acts after his conversion. According to Jewish law she fell into one of two categories, statutory conditions to which Jewish women were commonlv subject in Jewish law: the divorced woman (the gerushah) and the legally-s‘ill-married but deserted woman (the ‘agunah). When Ricca applied to the offices of the Nove Conservatori for her permit, she may have told the authorities only that she had to go to Pontedera to col-

lect her dowry. They may have recorded her as a “widow, once-wife of Emanuello” without knowing or being able to distinguish verbally whether she was a true widow, legally divorced or an ‘agunah because her husband had converted. Ricca would have tried to recoup her dowry from her converted husband whether he was dead or alive, and would have had trouble

234. The Construction of the Ghetto getting it from him in either case, especially since the two sons had also converted. We do not know whether she moved to the ghetto “to live with one of her daughters” before or after her husband converted, before or after he died.°! What we do know is that her preference was to move to the ghetto with her daughter rather than to remain in Pontedera by becoming a Chris-

tian. The documents do not reveal whether the months she spent trying to collect her dowry from the estate ended with her success and return to Flo-

| rence, her death or her conversion in Pontedera. Although the conversion of the Jews was not even referred to in the edict of expulsion, the state did reward at least a few Jews who converted to Christianity, perhaps Jews who had previously depended on other Jews for either their employment, business, patronage or charitable support. The once-Jewish Magistro Felice converted in Prato in or slightly before April 1571, just before he would have been expelled had he remained a Jew. A declaration of

Christian charity was made on his behalf: for his conversion, Felice was granted a regular stipend in grain, oil and wine, plus some cash.** The stipend, to be granted to him quarterly, was to last his lifetime, during his continued status as a “good Christian.’ The declaration made no reference to

his family, and indeed, the food and wine they allotted him was almost exactly the assumed annual ration for one adult: four bushels (staiz) of grain

and two barrels of pure and unadulterated (stiletto) red wine every three months, seven lire and, every year, two bundles of kindling wood (casuati dt fascine) and one dry bushel (#ogg10) of local charcoal every October for the

rest of his life. The conversion of Felice quite clearly pleased church and local authorities a great deal, probably because of his high status. While the university-trained convert was provided a life stipend of necessary staples, more ordinary Jews

who converted were given land to farm from which they might support themselves. A group of eight Jews of Cortona who converted before the expulsion were each granted 12 stiora (about 6300 square meters, Or 1.6 acres)

of unbroken land by the magistrates of the city, with the approval of the grand duke.** In Foiano, one of the four Jewish households converted: Ventura, head of a household of four in 1570, was still there in 1572, now called

“Domenico,” and was having some trouble collecting the stipend of grain that had been promised him to help him support his young children. In sum, conversion was the immediate response of a minority of Tuscan Jews to the edict of expulsion. Firm evidence of Jews who converted between 1570 and 1573 includes only the two men (Emanuelle and his son Lazzaro) from Pontedera, and possibly other members of their families; one man from

Prato; eight Jews from Cortona; three or four in Foiano. I suspect that

Populating the Ghetto 235 research into the local archives of the towns of Tuscany will reveal the names of a few more converts, perhaps even other small groups of converts. Given the obvious potential to gain converts from among the Jews dur-

ing this crisis, it is noteworthy that the state did not focus on providing a strong economic incentive for conversion, positive or negative. Of course, Jews who converted could avoid the dislocation that would damage all Jews who owned property or were invested in local industry, crafts or commerce. However, there was no incentive for the wealthiest Jews, the bankers, to con-

vert: they were not given the option of staying in Tuscany as Christian moneylenders. All other Jews were welcomed, by the text of the edict, to engage in “any commerce or craft” in Florence (although not every guild admitted Jews). It was the intention of the state not to restrict the Jews economically, but rather to re-district them.

Summary: The Response of the Population to the Edict of Ghettoization The Jewish population of Florence in 1573 was four to five times larger than it was in 1570. There had been over 700 in Tuscany in 1570: in 1573, at least 370 of these were in Florence, possibly 410. The rest comprise two definable

groups: emigrants and converts. About one hundred to one hundred and fifty Jews from banking households left Tuscany, if not immediately then within a few years. A minimum of 2 percent of the total population (15 of 700) converted, possibly many more than that (up to 20 percent of Jews of specific towns such as Cortona and Foiano). The other unaccounted Jews— families of merchants, artisans, tailors and servants—dispersed. They moved. to Siena and cities outside the Tuscan state; they “disappeared” into Tuscan towns that did not enforce the expulsion edict; and they came to the Florentine ghetto to live unrecorded, or irregularly recorded lives. The ghetto was a community built and populated quickly and artificially rather than through a natural process of economic and demographic growth. Its population comprised refugees from over twenty towns. The soctal and political turmoil that must inevitably accompany such an event demanded the immediate attention not only of the state but also of those Jews who had access to power and privilege and of those who wanted 1t. It is a unique characteristic of the Florentine ghetto that this group was not to be led by the traditional banking elite who thought of themselves as nobility. Indeed, it is an irony that in the grand duchy of Florence, a republican city built on the fortunes of (Christian) banker-merchants who had once excluded the nobility

236 The Construction of the Ghetto from their government, a new self-governing community would be created within the city walls, this time without the participation of the previously prominent elite of Jewish bankers.

Appendix: The Population of the Ghetto Tivo Techniques for the Calculation of the Initial Ghetto Population The Household Multiplier Technique. The household multiplier technique is possible when two numbers are available: the average number of people per household, and a number of households. A household multiplier for the Jews of Tuscany in 1570 immediately before ghettoization was derived by Michele Luzzati, on the basis of nineteen of the twenty-two towns (522 Jews in 103 hearths) where Jews were counted.*° Luzzati’s figures show that he chose to exclude from consideration the twelve Florentine tailors as well as the Florentine inn where five or six boarders resided. He concluded that the average hearth size for Tuscan Jews was 5.07.°” If we add in the twelve tailors as twelve separate households and the inn as one household, we would have $4.0 Jews in 116 hearths, for an average of 4.66. By either estimate the average Jewish hearth was markedly smaller than the 6.14 calculated for the population in 1552 of just the Florentine contado (the countryside around the city) ,

and smaller even than the 5.66 from the city of Florence alone, which excludes institutions and “artificial households.’*®

The Population Multiplier Technique. The population multiplier method is possible when two numbers are available: a count of adult Jewish men (age A and above) in the population, and a reliable “population multiplier?” which

represents the total number of men, women and children that may be expected for every such man. The appropriate multiplier—the ratio between the number of males of a certain age and the total population—varies in different social environments depending on the age structure of the population at hand and the balance of the sexes. Where a multiplier can be established in one community, the number of men (aged A or more) can readily be used to predict the total size of a population in a very similar community. Any age can be chosen for the cutoff: since consistency is the key issue, the accuracy of the ages is less important than consistency in the use of culturally assigned age-designations.

In our case, a multiplier based on a man-to-population ratio might be more reliable than one based on a household average: the age-structure and

Populating the Ghetto —.237 TABLE 7. Population Multiplier: Men, Women and Children per Jewish Male in Five Tuscan Towns, 1570

Town Total Men’ Women and Minors Multiplier

Empoli 4333 12/19? 3.58-2.26 Monterchi 12/13 24. 20 2..7§-2.54.

Ripomerance 6 San Giovanni 33127 2 26IO 4.71

Volterra 13 3 IO 4.33 All towns 134. 36/44 90 3.72--3.05 “The second figure in this column is the maximum number of men assuming that all males not referred to as children or infants but of undetermined age were over age fifteen. 4] know the ages of some of the young men listed only as “figliuoli maschi” in Empoli from other sources and have been able to list them in this row as men: two of Dorina’s sons in her house were Laudadio and Giuseppe di Moise, thirty-five and thirty-two years, respectively, in 1580 (Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Nove Conservatori del Dominio e della Iursidizione Fiorentina 18, 61v, 145r, 29V).

sex-ratio of the population in the ghetto should not have been dramatically different in 1573 than in Tuscany in 1570, whereas the breakup of large households and selective entrance into the ghetto could be expected to have a serious impact on the household average.

To obtain the count of adult Jewish men, data from a period of six years were studied. A Jewish male is presumed to be a “man” in 1573 (that is, following the categorization by the state, over the age of fifteen) if by 1576 he had been either matriculated into a guild or elected as a governor, chancellor or sindaco of the ghetto, or he had rented an apartment in the ghetto in his own name, or he had on his own received a permit to travel out of the city, alone. Several assumptions were made in the preparation of these lists which justify the very small risk that men whose names appear in 1575 or 1576 might have been younger than 15 in 1573: (1) males younger than eighteen years old were not chosen as governors, (2) boys were almost never matriculated into

the guild before age eighteen and (3) Jewish boys younger than eighteen almost never traveled alone out of the ghetto on trips of more than three days. Five of the towns that responded to the census of Jews in Tuscany in 1570

submitted detailed lists of the Jews in each household: Empoli, Monterchi, Ripomerance, San Giovanni and Volterra.*? (See Table 7.) The lists detailed the relationship of each member of the household to its head. On these lists, the ages of children were given only occasionally: because the head-count was not taken for the purpose of taxation, no request had been made for ages. Since many homes were bi- or tri-generational, the age of the “child” of the head of household cannot be assumed. This complicates our effort to establish a multiplier based on the presence of Jewish men.

238 The Construction of the Ghetto Nonetheless, for these five towns, children were referred to variously as fighuoli/e (sons/daughters), figli/e grandi/e (big or grown sons and daughters), fighuoh piccioli (small or young sons and daughters), mipote (grandchil-

dren, nieces, nephews) and bambini or putti (little children or toddlers, infants). Their sex was almost always noted. The officials who described these families used a vocabulary that reflects the actual chronological ages of the young people and not only their legal or marital status. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, government bureaucrats who took censuses were accustomed to categorizing people as over and

under the age of fifteen. This is evident both in the decision to tax Jewish males from age fifteen and in the comprehensive censuses taken by the state in 1632, 1642 and 1661, which recorded separate numbers in the population for males and females age under fifteen and older.” I assume therefore that sons labeled “grand” are probably at least fifteen years old. In order to count the number of men and derive a ratio of men to the population, I have considered as “men” all males who were heads of households, married, or grown (“grandi”). I have treated as minors all children called “piccioli,’ as well as all those explicitly identified as mipote, bambini and putti.

Part III: A New Tuscan Commune and Religious Community

BLANK PAGE

Seven A New Tuscan Commune: Centralization and Semi-Autonomy in the Medici State

It was less than two years from the time the first edict ordered the expulsion of the Jews in the fall of 1570 until the ghetto was built, filled with people and constituted as an administrative unit in the state, governed by statutes that were approved in the summer of 1572. In some other Italian states ghettoization was a prolonged process that took many years or even decades to accom-

plish after initial proposals.’ I understand the efficiency of the Medici gov- , ernment in this project as related to the way that ghettoization fit so neatly into Cosimo’s larger project and accomplishment in reorganizing the administration of his state. The establishment of the ghetto relied on, grew logically from and contributed to this reorganization. The success of Cosimo I de’ Medici and the relatively smooth transition of power from him to his son Francesco I depended on the stability of the great bureaucratic machine that Cosimo created between 154.0 and 1565. We should recall that in 1569 Cosimo was made grand duke by the pope, but foreign rulers objected that he was a vassal not of the pope, but of the Holy Roman Emperor, who had made him duke in the first place (in 1537). When in 1575 the Holy Roman Emperor officially approved the title of Grand Duke for Cosimo’s son and heir Francesco, the successful transition of the regime was complete.” This success may be considered an external manifestation of the internal growth and strength of the state. Salaried employees filled a vast, well-organized hierarchy of offices in a set of agencies at the tops of which were seated appointed officials who reported either directly to Cosimo or Francesco or to their closest advisors. As the government developed, a wider range of concerns was brought under its umbrella, and new legislation and new agencies were created to administer them. Ever watchful of the natural resources of the state and their relationship to economic markets, public health and the environment, the central government gained direct control over previously local concerns such as the repair of streets and bridges and the management of forests and rivers.? Officials expressed an intensified

242 Commune and Community interest in cartography, the better to administer policies concerning roads, rivers and bridges. In the late 1570s local communities were even required to

submit annual reports on the condition of their roads, which activity required them to determine their own territorial boundaries.* The people of the state were of course also a resource. The subjugation of the Tuscan people should not be exaggerated or taken out of context: it has already been well argued that the people of Tuscany, like the people of other early modern states, were not passive participants in the creation of the state as an entity, and that the state was not built on a seamless progression of subjugation and exploitation.® Nonetheless, the ghettoization of the Jews, which

brought the Jews under the direct supervision of centrally located and directed agencies, should be seen in the context of broadening state powers. Ultimately the Medici’s management of their resources both depended on and gave them better control over the population. In this case the Jews were “controlled,” not because they were a valuable resource in economic terms (as some medieval Jews were, in their status as servi camerae),° but rather because the rationalizing logic of the bureaucratic state preferred that the people of the state belong to discrete communities or corporations that could be governed and directed by the state. Exception was made for subjects of the duke who lived in fiefs where power over the population was mediated through client nobility who traditionally had had, or were now given, jurisdictional authority over their vassals.’ But exception was no longer to be made for a few hundred individual Jews and Jewish families scattered across the dominion, incompletely subject to local authorities, sometimes waving copies of privileges and often blurring jurisdictional boundaries with their appeals to the Otto di Guardia e Balia and their supplications to the ducal court. Historians have described the development of Jewish self-government and other communal institutions as a process that began in Jewish communities when their populations were large enough to support that growth. As Bonfil put it, “community organization was achieved as the result of an organic process of development, through mechanisms that were set in motion whenever the number of co-religionists seemed sufficient to justify the creation of structured collective institutions.”’ In his view, only the resistance of the state or, in papal lands, the church, prevented the organized Jewish communities from achieving full “semi-autonomy” by withholding from them the ability to enforce their laws and norms by using the powerful tool of excommunication (various levels of erem—ranging from exclusion from recognition as a qualifying member of the minyan to a total ban on social communication and economic relationship with other members of the community).? This is an interesting observation since when we consider the semi-autonomy of a

A New Tuscan Commune 243 city or town subject to the authority of a state such as the Venetian republic or the duchy of Ferrara or Florence, we do not usually expect to find that state employing excommunication, a social-spiritual tool that was used by ecclesiastical authorities,’” but rather corporal punishment, fines, imprisonment or exile. This in turn raises an interesting question about the community created in the ghetto of Florence. Was it a “religious community, like a parish or monastery, or was it a semi-autonomous commune like many others in Tuscany, if one deliberately created rather than conquered?

By focusing on the first few decades of the history of the Florentine ghetto, we will be able to address these questions while considering the history of Jewish communal organization from another angle. In contrast to some Jewish communities where population growth occurred gradually over a period of time and was accompanied by growth in the number of social

institutions, in the Florentine ghetto the Jewish population was gathered quickly, by forced transfer. Renata Segre has shown, in her studies of the Jews of Piedmont in the seventeenth century, that ghettoization there intensified the importance of a pre-existing Jewish self-government.!! Here we will see a Jewish government not only not hindered by the state—and not bolstered by the state as in Piedmont— but instead actually established by the state.

In the case of the formative years of the ghetto, therefore, we have an opportunity to consider the influence of the state on the formation of Jewish

community, beginning with its communal leadership. In this chapter we must explore why the Medici state supported Jewish semi-autonomy and to what extent, but we must also seek to understand how the Jews of Tuscany responded to the opportunity to act as a self-governing community. Ultimately, like that of any externally imposed regime, the strength of the ghetto government would depend on the nature of its continuing relationship to its patron-state, on its ability to establish its own hegemony or authority within the ghetto and on its ability to create an obedient or supportive community

around it. In this respect the ghetto had much in common with the communes and towns everywhere in Tuscany, semi-autonomous communities that collectively formed the Tuscan state. As we observe the formation of a semi-autonomous community in Tuscany in the 1570s, we will see the Medici regime at work creating exactly the

mix of autonomy, dependence and subjugation that its bureaucracy demanded, with no need to compromise with, defer to or adjust for preexisting structures. In the creation of the ghetto, then, we can identify the governing principles and agencies most essential to the internal administration of the Florentine state. And by looking for the kind of resistance this plan

244. Commune and Community ! encountered and the ways it was modified within the new community, we will have a better understanding of the work involved in both the formation of early modern states and in the creation and maintenance of organized semi-autonomous communities.

The Establishment of the Administrative Unit The first expression of the state’s intent to treat the ghetto as a community for administrative purposes came in the edict of 31 July 1571. As noted earlier, this edict contained a brief set of regulations for the new ghetto, into which

most of the Jews had already moved.” The rules expressed a concern about “order,” which was mainly to be established through a differentiation of Christians and Jews in the city, a differentiation that organized Jewish-Christian relations temporally, spatially and administratively. First the hours of the ghetto’s closure were established: “It being intended that once the Campana has been rung—which 1s ordinarily at the hour of nightfall, assigned to be rung for the prohibition of arms— it is not permitted to any of the said Jews, for any reason whatsoever, to exit or be found outside of the said appointed place, under penalty of 10 scudi in gold for each and every time that the rule is transgressed.” The explanation that the bell’s ordinary purpose was to warn of the curfew on arms in the city was not casual verbosity. The reference to the double duty the bell would serve expressed the thought that Jews, like

weapons, were more dangerous when their presence was concealed or cloaked in darkness. They were permitted free movement about the city by daylight, since the ghetto was not to be sealed off from the commercial activity of the city, but, as with weapons, there were restrictions. To ensure the segregation and visible differentiation of Jews and Christians by day, the edict restated that the Jews must wear distinguishing clothing (or pay the enormous penalty of 50 scudi). Combined with that differentiation was the distinguishing head-tax of 2 scudi for each Jewish man aged fifteen or older, about which we will have more to say. The stated goal was thus to eliminate the disorder and confused relationship between Jews and Christians by segregation and taxation. Just as the losing party in a court case was fined for all the court expenses, and as inmates of the Otto’s prison Le Stinche were obliged to pay for their own daily bread,

so the Jews were expected to pay to maintain the new order. The edict required in its third section that they pay an annual salary of 30 scudi to a “custodian of the gates,” and that “said Universita must make election of one

A New Tuscan Commune = 245 or more guarantors” for the collection of the taxes and the custodian’s salary. How the several hundred Jews should collect the required sums and appoint the guarantors was not addressed. The statement authorized the guarantors,

if they were unable to collect the sums, to fine “ten men of the ghetto” to ensure the collection, but the wording was too vague to have been instructive.

The chaos that might result within the ghetto was not the immediate concern of the government, although chaos might have been expected with the arrival of approximately four hundred Jews from over a dozen towns over a period of six months, people who would have to compete for living space, work space, income, power and status. The presumption seems to have been that the Jews would establish their own governing procedures and hierarchy. Despite this lack of instruction or regulation on how the ghetto should be internally organized, we can see from this first skeletal set of rules that the state treated the ghetto from the outset as an administrative unit apart from the city of Florence within which it was physically situated. The new relationship between the state and the Jews is exemplified in the fact that the state now made its dictates known to the Jews for the first time through Jewish spokesmen. On 13 August 1571 the Magistrato Supremo summoned four Jews and ordered them to make an announcement in the synagogue of the ghetto to inform the other Jews of the decree of 31 July. Shortly thereafter, as Jews continued to arrive in the city, a supplemental decree concerning the segno was deemed necessary or, perhaps (in so far as it protected Jews from some harassment), was granted. Jews just arriving in Florence were given a two-day grace period during which to obtain and begin wearing the segno before becoming subject to the 50-scudi fine. This decree also had to be made public in the ghetto, and on 18 September four other Jews were instructed to announce it.

The eight men chosen by the Magistrato Supremo to make these two announcements and be responsible for their enforcement were Florentine Jews, with the exception of two members of the da Empoli family. The choice confirms that the Jews did not yet have an official political leadership, and it heralds the self-governance that would emerge. The four men chosen in August were Michele di Donato, Raffaello di Cypriano (alias Cipriano), Sperandino and Salamone di Moyse.'? Michele di Donato Levi, sometimes called Levita, of Paduan origin, was the head of a household of four in Florence in 1570 and had been a member of the Linen Guild in the city since late 1564.’* Raffaello di Abramo Cipriano also headed a Florentine household of

four in 1570, at which time he was a young man of about twenty-one.

246 Commune and Community Sperandino seems to have matriculated into the Linen Guild as a used-clothing-dealer less than a year later; he was probably one of the twelve or so bachelor “tailors” listed in the Florentine census.!° Salamone, on the other hand,

was the teenaged son of Dorina, the widow of Moise (or Moyse) di Giuseppe da Empoli; he had been living in Empoli with his widowed mother and some of his siblings in 1570."” In September as noted, the magistrates chose a second group of four men

to do their business.!® One was the well-established Florentine Abram d’Isach Romano, often called Tedescho, a single householder and a member of the Linen Guild since 1569.!? Another was an important householder from Pontedera, Iacob di Giuseppe da Empoli, an uncle of the above-mentioned Salamone and head of a household of eight in Pontedera, who had matriculated into the Merchant Guild in 1549 and into the Wool Guild in 1561.7° The background of the other two men, Leone di Iacob da Pesaro and Gioello di Lustro da Veroli, is not easily established.” The two different groups of men chosen in August and September were referred to simply by name, with no titles or signified status, and we might imagine them jockeying for position, hopeful that any connection to the state bureaucracy might help them obtain

a better apartment in the ghetto, permission to have a shop outside the ghetto or even a salaried office.

The Beginning of Self-Governance Meanwhile, an unknown number of Jews, perhaps some of these eight or other householders who had suffered the smallest degree of economic damage and dislocation in the expulsion, moved ahead to bring some order to the ghetto internally. These Jews appealed to the government in the summer of 1571 in the traditional manner, through supplication, sending to the grand duke a set of eight rules for the Jews of the ghetto. This set of capitolt, which may correctly be called a first effort at a communal charter for the Jews of Florence, was approved by the grand duke through his first secretary, Lelio Torelli, after passing the desk of Carlo Pitti.”* The quickly produced document was not a carefully planned strategy for the integration and functioning of the ghetto, and it reveals the Jews’ lack of political experience and prior

organization. However, it reflects what must have been the most pressing concerns of the local Florentine Jews and of those refugees who had a big enough stake in the future of the ghetto to become politically engaged. The first of the eight sections attempts to impose order at the site where

A New Tuscan Commune 247 the Florentine and Tuscan Jews had to confront their new communal existence regularly, the new synagogue of the ghetto: “First, that when the Jews are in the synagogue to pray the service, that as soon as it has begun everyone must be quiet and not talk, under penalty of 1 scudo, to be applied half to His Highness’s chambers and the other half to the chest for the poor” When the Medici regime gathered the Jews into one place, it gave them boundaries for their residence, exactly located, like the new boundaries of each church parish in the city, and closed, like the doors and gates of the reformed monas-

teries. In such a bound community there could be only one synagogue allowed. It was as though the ghetto were a parish that could have but one church; the limitation to one synagogue was an explicit provision of the bull that created the Roman ghetto, whereas in Florence it was simply assumed. This forced unity led to situations where the synagogue, already naturally an important social space, would become the location for many struggles, some violent. Months before any self-government or other institution had been set up, the synagogue was the key site for the negotiation of power in the ghetto, for this is where the Jews were already struggling to function as one religious community.”* For the early years of the ghetto we cannot know who acted as

the public prayer leader, who chanted from the Torah, where men and women sat, or who, if anyone, gave sermons on Sabbaths and during the holy days of that autumn. However, the silence that was called for in the first rule of the 1571 capitol: was intended to prevent “talk” Whether this meant gossip, the sound of independently conducted or paced prayer or the deliberate “interruption of prayer” that was customary among Italian Jews who wished to voice a complaint publicly,’* the noise of disunity and disobedience was considered a problem by the unnamed Jews who wrote this ordinance in August 1571.

Fines imposed for disquiet were to be divided between the coffers of the state and a “chest for the poor,” a provision that ensured the participation of the state in enforcement of affairs that might otherwise seem entirely “internal” to the new community. Thus the very first of the new capitoli shows that by August 1571 the ghetto was already functioning as an administrative unit, a religious unit and a social-economic unit. Ironically, at least some group in the ghetto, attempting to establish themselves as leaders, now shared with

the government the goal of bringing the Jews together and disciplining them. The second clause in the petition submitted by the Jewish leaders made a vague gesture in the direction of political organization, which the state’s

248 Commune and Community edicts had not yet addressed. Someone had to have the authority to fine the disruptive in the synagogue; someone had to be empowered to distribute the alms that were collected. Item, that there must be two overseers of the said Universita, and they may not refuse office, under penalty of 3 scudi to be applied as above; these overseers together with three other men or more, who shall be elders and most respected [veccht e piu reputatt|, shall have authority to apportion funds for the costs that are incurred daily for the needs of the said Universita, and no one may refuse to pay

that which will be imposed under penalty of [paying a] double [fine], to be applied as above.

The leadership qualifications specified —age and public reputation—suggest that in the summer of 1571 the older men had gathered to address some of the needs of the population in the ghetto, but they also manifest the novelty of self-governance to the Jews in Florence. This simple formula for self-

governance by “two overseers” and “three other men or more,’ with its assumption of consensus on who would be considered “elders and most respected” reveals that in the first year of the ghettoization, the Jews of Florence did not have or did not acknowledge in their midst factions or sub-

communities who needed representation. This formula for an oligarchic leadership stands in marked contrast to the leadership of many other Italian Jewish communities since the fifteenth century, in which at least some decisions were made in the context of public assemblies or by councils and officials elected by them.”* In older, more complex communities that had such voting bodies, the rules governing the composition of communal leadership were correspondingly more sophisticated, reflecting subdivisions within those communities. Thus, for example, in 1524, Daniel da Pisa had written a set of thirty-six lengthy and detailed capitol: for the Jews of Rome, according to which the Roman Jews still lived after their ghettoization in 1555. This document was a political charter for the Jews of Rome, approved in a bull of Pope Clement VII, which organized the com-

| munity into an assembly (congrega) of sixty men, a council of twenty and various members and officers of the Jewish government whose election was determined by the capitoli.2° The community was divided into “Italian” Jews and Jews “from across the mountains,” and every committee and council had representatives of each group. Thus the internal political structure of the Jews of Rome (which predated the Roman ghetto but was preserved in it) allied on the one hand, as newcomers, Jews from Germany and France with those

from Spain and Portugal; and on the other Jews from all parts of Italy and Sicily. In Mantua, too, where the majority of Jews were Italian and a minority Ashkenazic (German and French), an ethnic split was encoded in the reg-

A New 'TuscanCommune 249 ulations for communal officers and tax collectors as early as the second half of the sixteenth century.’” The Jews of the Florentine ghetto might have been aware of the Roman regulations: the author of the Roman charter was a member of the distinguished da Pisa family, and Jews from Rome had moved to Florence in the past decades. But although we have already seen in earlier chapters that there were “Italian” Jews of Tuscan and Roman origin, Levantine Jews and Jews originally of Spanish or Portuguese origin, the first communal ordinance of the Florentine ghetto did not use or establish ethnic classifications. Unofficially, the Jews followed the priorities set by example of the administration of the city of Florence. In the determination of who might sit in the various councils of the state, the Senate and the magistracies and the courts, citizenship was paramount; length of residence in the city, wealth and age followed; and all depended on successful client-patron relationships.”* For the Jews of

the ghetto, there were no explicit wealth- or length-of-residency-based restrictions or even specific age requirements for participation in the government. The only explicit requirement was that they should be vecch1, elders. It was taken for granted that the governors would be male. The remaining six regulations set penalties for the most obviously prob-

lematic behaviors: interference with a competitor’s sale “with gestures or words” after a negotiation had begun; quarreling; throwing garbage out of windows; blocking the gated entrances to the ghetto with merchandise; peddling wares on Sunday and Easter and other Christian holidays. This rule was clearly an attempt to maintain good relations with Christian authorities, as too was the last of the regulations, which forbade any foreign Jew to stay in the ghetto for more than three days if he had no family or business to attend to in Florence.

Relationship of the Ghetto Government to the Nine Conservators of the Dominion and Jurisdiction In 1571 the authors of the first set of regulations were most likely a small group of men who claimed for themselves the status of honored elders.” The state approved their rudimentary plan, but only temporarily. Just one year

later the Magistrato Supremo transferred partial authority over the ghetto from the criminal court (the Otto di Guardia e Balia, which had previously had civil and criminal jurisdiction over the Jews in Tuscany) to the Nove Conservatori del Dominio e della Iurisditione, the agency that already had authority over the ghetto property.

250 Commune and Community The Nove’s control over the ghetto was clarified and publicized on 30 July 1572, when the Nove approved their own set of capitoli for the Jews in the ghetto.*° The preliminary rules of August 1571 were replaced with a more

elaborate set of regulations that reflected the interests of the state and the new composition of the ghetto as a commune, referred to now as a Universita. The first order of business in the new regulations was to set the relationship between the ghetto and the state. The preamble clarified, concerning the Jews, “that their universita and comunanza, residing in the place appointed, which is called the Ghetto, is under the care and government and orders of this Magistrate and to the justice of this Magistrate, equally for civil matters as for criminal transgressions and matters, except for those cases that are reserved for the Magistrate of the Otto as stated below.?#? The new blueprint that followed put an end to the system of supplications by Jews to the duke, in line with one of Cosimo I’s goals in reorganizing the admunistration of his state. One of the reforms effected in the 1560s had been

the discouragement of supplications to the duke as the court of highest appeal. The rationalization of the court system established which crimes petitioners could take on appeal from lower local courts to the Otto and which of these from the Otto to the duke. Hand in hand with centralizing tendencies, central authorities in the end thus had Jess direct contact with the people and local penal jurisdiction than before. The ducal court efficiently reserved its time and resources for the cases (and favors and patronage) it considered

most important.** But Jews still sent petitions to the duke for favors and exemption, and not only to appeal death sentences or to judge cases involving large sums of money. In a parallel move, then, the subordination of the Jews to the Nove, under their own self-government, resulted in less direct contact between individual Jews and the grand-ducal court. The Jews were now subject not only as individuals to the Otto, where criminal cases would continue to be tried, but also collectively, as the Universita of the Jews of the

Ghetto, to the Nove Conservatori, the agency that had overseen the construction of the ghetto. But why should the ghetto have been placed under the care of the Nove Conservatori? What precedent was there for the Nove to oversee Jewish affairs? A proper answer requires that we return briefly to the history of the development of the state under Cosimo I. The centralizing tendency of the Medici regime is impressive in its ready adaptation of a wide variety of strategies: direct surveillance and policing, routinization of the collection of per-

sonal data (such as in the new requirement that notaries submit copies of their ledgers every year to the state archives) and the strengthening of corporate bodies, whose leaders could be either directly appointed or brought into

A New Tuscan Commune —_251

the service of the state through the expectation of honors, favors, rewards or other gratification of self-interest. It is for this reason that I referred in the Introduction to the Medici state in the sixteenth and early seventeenth cen-

tury as a state defined by its administrative authority (akin to what Peter Sahlins called “jurisdictional authority”*?). Clearly, there were many overlapping organizing grids for administrative

contact with the people. The Medici-driven revision of guild statutes in the mid- and late sixteenth century suggests that the guilds were the most important point of contact between the government and the citizens of Florence. Beginning in the 1560s, cooperation with the church hierarchy helped give the government access to the people through the parishes and confraternities. The districts into which the state was carved for the recruitment and training of militia made another important grid.** But for the many towns and communes of the larger territory the point of contact with the central government was the Nove Conservatori del Dominio e Iurisditione.** The Nove, along with the Capitani di Parte Guelfa, was one of two main administrative agencies. The two agencies shared responsibilities, but there was one distinction: “the Nove held jurisdiction within a walled place of community,” while the Parte exercised jurisdiction around and outside walled places and communities.*° It is consistent with the administrative organization of the state therefore that the Nove had authority over the ghetto, enclosed as it was within its own set of walls. The Nove was created in 1560 from two earlier magistracies and entrusted with the responsibility of evaluating and approving the expenditures of the various communities of the state on the basis of reports sent to it by its own investigating team of officials, agents, engineers and visitors.*” In 1569, for

example, the newly appointed governor Giovanbatista Tedaldi sent the prince regent, Francesco, a three-page report on the status of Pistoia, drawing on his two months’ observation there of the condition of the walls, gates, people, finances, stores and supplies. Most revealing is his statement toward the end of the letter: “I found that all the Pistolesi, citizens and the others alike, are very obedient:”*8

In sum, the Nove was a centralizing organ created to regulate and control all the cities, towns and monasteries in the dominion.* In the ghetto, as in other places subject to the Nove, elections, regulations, requests to impose taxes, all matters of importance now had to be approved by the Nove, who also authorized their enforcement. Comparison with other cities and regions administered by the Nove helpfully destablilizes and enables us to rethink previous historical understandings of ghettoization. Subject communities in Tuscany contributed to the

252 Commune and Community state economy with their taxes, their production, their labor and their markets. Pescia, for example, paid a per capita tax (providing revenue for Pescia’s administration and for payments to the ducal government) that was roughly

equal to the 2-scudi per capita tax collected by Florence from the Jews.” Prato also paid taxes to Florence but was privileged (in 1543) to collect the taxes itself (gabelle and Decima) and turn over a fixed annual tax of 1,200 scudi to Florence and of 200 scudi to the Capitani di Parte.*t The ghetto had its own contributions in addition to all of these: the rental income and half the income from fines that would be collected for any rule the governors of the ghetto wished to enforce. The ghetto was, in other words, administratively organized to become a self-supporting, self-governing town with a positive economic relationship to the state. Like the other subject cities of the Tuscan state, the ghetto was granted a large measure of autonomy. The eighteen capitoli of July 1572 required that “they shall deputize and elect” ten Jews to serve each year “as officials and heads” of the universita for one-year terms.*” The ten were then required to appoint two of their own as supervisors (soprastanti). The ten officials and the two supervisors were obligated to see to it that all the capitol: which had been or would be approved by the Nove were enforced, as well as to carry out any orders given to them by the Nove. They were expected to meet all needs of the community and were therefore given the right to impose ordinary and extraordinary (i.e., regular and occasional) taxes on the community. They were required to appoint a cashier or treasurer (camerlingo) for a one-year term who must have two guarantors to ensure that at the end of his term the

treasurer submitted an account to the Nove; if the ten governors allowed him not to have guarantors, they were to be held responsible for his account-

ing. Finally, they were instructed to choose a simdaco, an informant and enforcer whose office will be discussed further below.

None of these provisions would surprise a student of the Tuscan state under Cosimo I. These officers had their parallels in the other communes administered by the Nove; the role of the Nove was to oversee the activities of the local government—whether it was called the Ghetto, the Comune di

Arbiano or the Community and Men of the Villa di Tavola Contado di Prato.** Even more important is the one position that is not specified in the capitol of 1572, the cancelliere (chancellor or secretary). The existence of this position is assumed in the capitoli— governors took office by taking an oath (raising the hand) for their chancellor— but the procedure for appointing the chancellor is not specified. This strongly suggests that the chancellor was appointed, and possibly salaried, by the grand duke, just as were chancellors in the other communes and cities of the state.**

A New Tuscan Commune 253 Chancellors were primarily responsible for communication with the Nove. The chancellors are said to have ratified or “ragato” the decisions (partite) of the governors of the ghetto —the verb rogato is generally translated as “notarized” because it is most commonly used in Florence with reference to

the activity of public, licensed notaries (see Figures 3-4). Jews were not admitted into the Guild of Judges and Notaries in Florence, which was for Jews the technical barrier to their entering positions in the government or lower bureaucracy, but chancellors of the ghetto were treated as though they were public notaries in this regard, for convenience.*° The Florentine Jew Raffaello di Cipriano served as chancellor for many years, from 1572 to at least 1586.*” After Raffaello di Cipriano, the chancellors of the ghetto in our period were Leon di Pesaro (1593 to at least 1595), David or Davitte Bettarbo (1600 to at least 1602) and Isacche Gallico (1606 to at least 1612).*8

The Election of Governors As noted above, the regulations of 1572 specified that ten governors were to be elected. How this was to be accomplished was not specified, but they were chosen from among the men of the ghetto and were routinely referred to in the margins of the registers of the Nove as elected “representatives,” “deputies” and “governors” of the ghetto. Once the Jews “elected” their governors, the Nove had the right to ratify the election, and there is no evidence that they ever rejected an elected slate. Either the slate was actually chosen by the Nove or the Nove allowed the Jews to choose their own representatives. The latter is probably the case. Evidence from 1584. shows that the custom by then was that outgoing governors elected the incoming governors every year, although they may have been chosen by a meeting of a larger part of the community.*” Indeed, as we shall see, as the Jewish governors sought over the decades to establish and justify their own command, they took steps to

broaden the participation of the men of the ghetto by instituting general councils, and in the early 1600s they preferred to call their own community a “republic.”*°

Two points may be established regarding the influence of the governors in the ghetto. First, the composition of the board represents the concentration of power in the hands of a few families, mostly Florentine in origin. Second, the governors were not merely puppets of the state but rather were possessed of a degree of political power in the ghetto and had the support of the government in enforcing their will, even when their actions had no direct benefit to the state.

254 | Commune and Community In the first years of the ghetto the ten governors were disproportionately Florentine in origin. Refugees from Tuscany outnumbered Florentine Jews four or five to one in the ghetto, but men who had been Florentine heads-ofhousehold prior to ghettoization dominated the new self-government. (In the first year, seven of the ten men were Jews who had lived in Florence prior

| to ghettoization.*!) They filled more than half the slate in each of the first five elections for which there is a record (1572, 1573, 1574, 1575, 1578). In these five

years, during which ten men were chosen for each one-year term, twentyseven men occupied the fifty positions (average 1.85 terms each). About one third of the men in the ghetto served at least once. However, while thirteen of the twenty-seven served only once, fourteen served a total of thirty-seven terms, averaging 2.64 terms each in the course of the five years. As may be seen in Table 8, at least eight of the core group of governors were living in Florence before ghettoization. Participation in the government was therefore controlled by a small set of men who had been householders in Florence before the ghetto, plus a few additional men of the most important

Tuscan families. There was no formal definition of “citizenship” in the ghetto, and none of the Jews had been born in the ghetto or had yet lived there for the decades that were customarily necessary to obtain the status of citizen.®” Nonetheless, the status of the governors was similar to that held by citizens in the city of Florence and other cities of the dominion, who alone filled positions in their respective governments. Christian administrators of the Nove Conservatori used language that suggests the parallel of the ghetto and a city (citta)—which could have citizens (cit, or cittadint) —when they allowed the ten governing Jews to elect “two of their cvs” to be sindaci one after the other, instead of one for the full-year term.°* The Florentine authorities, on the other hand, may have been referring to the general body rather than to a particular set of Jews in the ghetto. In any event, their use of this normalizing language is consistent with the other data that show the extent to which the ghetto, once created, had an administrative meaning and logic quite divorced from its meaning on the plane of religious faith, religious politics and ontological search for order. An important reform occurred in 1579 or 1580, when the self-government was concentrated in the leadership of four governors each year instead of the original ten.** In the shift from ten to four governors, there was a clear consolidation of power in the hands of a small group of men who rotated into government, on the average, every other year. Owing to the loss of the relevant record-book, we do not know whether the Jews requested this change or whether it was a reform imposed by the Nove.® The number of governors was changed to three men at some point between 1596 and 1600, but the

A New Tuscan Commune 255 TABLE 8. Jewish Governors in the Ghetto, 1572-86 No. of

terms, No. of terms,

Governor 1570 residence 1§72~78 1580-86 (or relative)

Abram Baroch (Baroccas) Florence 3 O Abram d’Isach Tedescho Florence 3 2 Iacob di M. Laudadio Blanis Monte S.Savino* 2 O Iacobbe di Miel Romano (Rome?) 3 I

Isacche d’Elia Calo Florence 3 o (son Daniel served 2 terms)

Laudadio de Brandes/Blanis Florence 3 fe)

Laudadio di Moise Alpelingo _Pescia 3 0 (brother Iacob served 1

Lazzero d’Isach Rabbene Florence’ 3 term) 3 Lione [d’Isach] Ansiglia ? (Poppi) 3 3 Lione di Raffaello di Iair Monte San Savino 3 fe)

Lazzaro da Pescia Pescia 2 O Michele di Donato Levi Florence 3 o (brother Giovachino served 3 terms)

Sabatino di Bondi4 Florence 2 OF 3 2 OF 3

Sabbatuccio di Pellegrino’ Florence 2 2 Benedetto CastigliaOo O II Davitte di Falcone Vitale di Salamone da Cascia fe 3

SOURCE: Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households,” appendixes 1 and 4. NOTE: From 1572 to 1578 ten men were elected each term. From 1580 to 1586 four men were elected each term. This table includes men who were elected more than once in 1572-78 or at least once in 1580-86. *But his father Laudadio lived in Florence. Tn 1570 Lazzero was apparently living with his brother Moise Rabben, whose household is listed in the census. In testimony by Raffael Simonis de Cibrano hebreus flor[entiJe habitan’ (= Raffaello da Cipriano) dated 16 October 1566 before the papal nunciate (Nunziatura 842, unpaginated), there is reference to the “house of Lazzaro Raben,” and in 1567 (Riformagione 10) Lazzero, forty years old, had been head of his own household in Florence. * Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Magistrato Supremo 4450, 136r has a Lione di Isac hebreo with a household of five in Poppi. 4 The governors are listed as Sabatino di Bondi (alt. Buondi, served 1572, 1575, 1580, 1588, 1590), as Sabatino di Beniamin Bondi (served 1578, 1583, 1600, 1601, 1607) and once as Sabatino di Sabato Bondi (served 1584.). In 1570 there is a Sabatino de Bondi in Florence, and male heads of household named Sabato in Foiano and in Pomerance. Four men with similar names matriculated into guilds between 1561 and 1572:

Sabbatino di Michele Buondi, Sabatino di Bunedi and Sabatino di Buondi di Beniamin, and Sabato di Sabato di Bondi, but individuals did matriculate into more than one guild or into one guild for more than one profession. The alternation of the Bondis on the governing board suggests either that there were two men (probably not three) or that two variants of one man’s name (Sabatino di Bondi) were presented to the Nove in order to maintain the appearance of an alternation (Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households,” appendixes 3 and 4). *He is not listed as a householder in Florence, but is living there from at least 17 February 1569/70; see Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Otto di Guardia e di Balia del Principato 114, 314-v-1sr.

elimination of the fourth position was not a significant change in the way the community governed itself.°° The result was already that the governance of

the ghetto was in the hands of a clearly discernible elite. With four men appointed each year for the seven years from 1580 to 1586, there were twentyeight terms, but only fourteen men served as governors.

256 Commune and Community As may be seen in Table 8, the men who served more than once in this period had also served more than once in 1572-78 or were close relatives of men who had. As in the period 1572-78, at least half the governors and almost all those who served more than one term were of Florentine origin. With one exception, no one served more than one term in 1580-86 unless he had himself already served at least two times in 1572-80, or unless his father or brother

had served two terms during that period. The only exception to this continuity in the leadership of the ghetto during the first decade and a half was the doctor Vitale. A medical doctor, he may have come to Florence to replace the physician Magistro Laudadio Blanis, who died in the mid- or late 1570s.°” Although it was unusual for the governors to serve for three years without a break, Vitale enjoyed the status of governor in the Jewish community in 1580, 1581 and 1582.°° His abrupt disappearance from the list of governors is consistent with a date of about 1583 for his conversion to Christianity (along with his three sons, also all doctors), an event memorialized in an introduction to the series of sermons he published in 1588 to convince the rest of the Jewish community to convert, as well as in the diary of Lapini.°? From Table 8 we see also that men who dominated the ghetto in 1580 to 1586 were all, with the exception of the newly arrived doctor, members of the families that had dominated in the first six years. Leone d’Isach Ansiglia and

the da Empoli, also called Alpelinghi, were the only new arrivals who had secured for themselves a place in the governing elite of the ghetto. A consideration of the few original Florentine householders who did not become governors in the ghetto supports the assertion that the governors were selected by the Jews and not appointed by the Nove. Of the fourteen male heads of household counted in Florence in 1570, at most five did not serve as governors.” Three of these five—Ventura da Perugia, Leonello Sala and Moise di Buondi—were clearly exceptional: their profiles help explain their absence from the list of governors.®! If they did not serve as governors, it was very likely because, although Florentine householders in 1570, they were seen as outsiders by the other Jews because of their extraordinarily lofty or particularly poor reputations. Ventura da Perugia, the most infamous of the three, had been involved in a dispute so famous that the Tuscan Jews could not have been ignorant of it.°? This Ventura was mentioned earlier as a nonbanker who obtained elite exemption from the segno in 1567 and as one of only three Jewish men whose

| home residence was not in a Jewish social context in Florence before the ghettoization. In 1560, while living in Venice, Samuel ben Moses Ventura of Perugia had become formally engaged to Tamar, daughter of the official doctor of the Venetian Republic, Joseph ha-Cohen Tamari. After a falling-out

A New Tuscan Commune 257 between Ventura (also called Samuel Venturozzo) and his bride’s father, the marriage was not completed. However, according to Jewish law, the young woman nonetheless needed to obtain a writ of divorce from Ventura before she would be able to marry any other man. First refusing to grant a divorce and finally writing it, Ventura then obtained a ruling from Moses Provenzali, a rabbi of Mantua, that the divorce was invalid because it had been obtained from him under duress. This set off a wave of excommunications among the

rabbis in Italy and occasioned the penning of two treatises. Exiled from Venice by the Senate (under the influence of Tamari), Ventura succeeded in obtaining an invitation from Cosimo I in Florence to study at the Studio in Pisa, where he matriculated in 1566. He may have been appointed conservator of Hebrew manuscripts at the Laurentian library in Florence.® Between 1567 and 1570, at the behest of Ventura di Moise, a large network of his relatives was granted safe-conducts and exemptions from the segno by the duke.“ Despite the apparent presence in Tuscany of so much family, Ventura was found to be living alone, in Florence, in the census of Jews in 1570. It seems likely, given his extraordinary connection to the court, that Ventura never moved into the ghetto. Whether for that reason or because of his alienation by the Jewish community, he never became one of its leaders. Second among the Florentine householders who did not join the ranks of its governing elite was Leonello Sala. In 1571 he was imprisoned for an attack on Mona Betta di Bastiano the shoemaker, a Christian woman.© We do not know the circumstances of the case, but we do know that Leonello Sala never became a governor whereas Jews who attacked other Jews, even with knives and daggers, did become governors. Whether the Jews had free choice in their elections or not, the Nove had to confirm their slate, and the fact that he had attacked a Christian woman made Sala a poor candidate for office. It may have been the same man, again arrested and in jail in May 1575, whose behavior pushed the Jewish governors to seek permission from the Nove for his expulsion from the city of Florence as an “homo di malavita?® The third pre-ghetto Florentine householder who never became a governor was Moise Buondi, the informant who in 1567 had turned to the papal inquisitors in Florence to accuse Isaia Coen of being a Marrano. During the subsequent investigation, a number of his fellow Jews described him as a troublesome, offensive person. One of his ex-partners in the used-clothing business said he was impossible to work with.” After slandering Isaia Coen, Moise never restored his reputation. From 1566 through 1575 he was involved in ongoing violent quarrels with other Jews in the ghetto.” And although in 1567 he had lived with a wife and two sons—one legitimate and one natural—by 1570 he, like Ventura di Moise, lived alone.”!

258 Commune and Community The Formation of a New Governing Elite With the ghetto and its self-government came a new opportunity for status and a new measure of social standing that might carry some weight with both Jews and Christians. At the same time, there was the possibility of being marked in a new way with inferiority, deprivation of status and subjugation within the Jewish community. Some men who had had no leadership role before were able to assume one, though their status as head of household was their only obvious qualification. Other men were cut off. Women who had been heads of household could not be governors; their status as head of heads of household lost much of its importance once the new level of authority in the ghetto was established. Other men who may have expected to be

treated as important based solely on the high status of their fathers and grandfathers—rabbis and physicians—found that new criteria were now applied. The ghettoization was a shock to the status of the “traditional elite” of bankers, doctors and rabbis, for the state reorganized the Jews in such a way that they had no choice but to produce a new elite whose status would

be determined by the state and its bureaucratic agencies and authorities rather than by criteria of honor, lineage, reputation, wealth and learning that

had prevailed among Jews and were glorified in the humanist culture of republican Florence. Some of the difficulties caused by the transition are hinted at in the story of the descendants of the Perugian doctor Laudadio de Blanis, who served as a governor until 1575, probably not long before he became ill or died.” After his death, Laudadio’s descendants are conspicuously missing from the roster of governors during the years 1580-86, in the second phase of government.

His son Jacob, who had been living in the Tuscan village of Monte San Savino in 1571, served as a governor in 1573 and 1578 but not again. The absence of Iacob or any of his close relatives from the leadership for an entire decade, despite their attested presence in the city, indicates that Laudadio’s descendants faced some obstacles in establishing themselves in the new order. Laudadio Blanis had been predeceased by two of his sons who were doctors of medicine, David and Agnolo.” A third son, Salvatore, seems not to

have moved to Florence, but if he did, he kept a low profile. It was Iacob, Laudadio’s main heir, who expected to take his father’s place. However, now that the eminent and long-lived doctor was gone, respect was not accorded automatically to his heir. Iacob had not gone to medical school and was not a rabbinic scholar. He was involved in several instances of violence and abuse, fighting with his dead brother’s son, his nephew Laudadio d’Agnolo.”* In

A New Tuscan Commune 259 1580 he so offended the governors of the ghetto that he was put under a ban, with the approval of the Nove, which forbade anyone in the ghetto to talk to him for eight days. This humiliation and exclusion may have prompted Jacob to leave the ghetto permanently, for he does not appear again in our sources.

The de Blanis men finally regained status in the Florentine community a decade later, in the Perugian doctor’s grandson, Laudadio, Iacob’s nephew. Laudadio may have been away from Florence on business from 1580 to 1589, or more likely studying, perhaps supported financially by his sister Ginevra

Blanis, the silk-manufacturer in the ghetto. Their close relationship is suggested by the fact that Ginevra chose Laudadio’s young son Agnolo as her own heir in the event that she should die without progeny.”> Now a married man of about thirty-seven years and out of his uncle Iacob’s shadow, Laudadio was elected to govern in 1589 and began a long career of leadership in the

ghetto, apparently based on earned respect and not only on the name he shared with his distinguished grandfather.”

As questions of status were settled in the ghetto, age emerged as an important factor in determining rank, following provenance and lineage. There are sixteen governors from the period 1571-11 whose ages are reported in permits from the year 1580. The age at which they first took office can be

determined: all sixteen were at least twenty-five years old, only four took office younger than or at age thirty, three took office while in their thirties, the rest in their forties.”” Men who belonged to better established, wealthier families were able to become governors at an earlier age than men from other families: most men from less important families did not achieve that status until at least forty years of age.”* The data do not reveal the role that marital status played; the reason wealthier men took governing roles at earlier ages may be that they were able to marry earlier and that marriage was an unspoken requirement of office. Although serving in the ghetto government was an important mark of status for individual Jews and Jewish families in the ghetto, it was not a first step to the same type of lucrative bureaucratic career that was available to Christian officials. The Florentine government under the Medici regime continued the tradition of drawing on a large part of its citizenship to staff the many rotating positions as officers and judges in the government. There was also a bureaucratic class that was more or less permanent, moving between

appointed positions, and, most critical, the inner circle of advisors who worked closely with and reported to the ruler. Men of the Florentine patriciate and provincial elites strove to make their way up into these positions, and their integration into state government was critical to the stability and suc-

260 Commune and Community cess of the administration of the state. Office was a stepping-stone to a financially rewarding and honorable career. Not so for Jews in the ghetto. Even

for the chancellors of the ghetto, men who were well enough educated to serve as secretary and liaison with the Nove, there was no next step up the bureaucratic ladder. Jews could not hold office outside the ghetto. While from our position it seems that the leadership was essentially limited to a small group we can call a governing class, for the inhabitants of the ghetto at the time the election of officers annually was either a source of con-

flict or a great annoyance. A peculiarly simple-minded attempt to reduce these tensions was made toward the end of the period under study, in 1608, in the form of a decision to set up a predetermined roster of governors for the next twelve years, using all eighteen men who were considered eligible for office: We the deputies, having observed and come to believe that the greater part of disputes, arguments and discordances that arise in this Universita follow and arise in the making of the governors, since some want to be [governors] and when they are not, they want things done their way; and others seek to avoid [becoming gov-

ernors], whence much confusion is born, and the government of this republic remains divided, and in disrepair, and it remains in the hands of one or two [men]; therefore we have judged and established among ourselves that it would be good to set up [lit., make] the said governors for twelve years, and because we find that in the congregation there are eighteen persons [sic], so we make them [governors] for six years, that is, three each year in this manner: there shall be six teams [dulletint| of three men each . . . and when the six years have been completed it shall recommence from the beginning.”

It is striking that these men imagined that they would all be alive for the next twelve years, and that no younger men should in that period of time earn a place in the government. When two of the eighteen had already died by 1611 and four others were not at hand, the Jews asked the Nove to abrogate the new arrangement and allow them to return to the earlier system of elections.®°

Although it is understandable in any community that some men preferred not to serve as governors while others contrived to dominate, this attempt to reorganize the ghetto’s governance deserves further analysis. Once again, the effort to reform the government seems to have been initiated by the Jews and not by the state. This raises the question of the degree to which the government of the ghetto was autonomous. To what extent were the elected officers servants of the state, and to what extent were they able to shape the develop-

ment of their community? And whatever the level of autonomy, was the ghetto distinctively Jewish in its organization?

A New TuscanCommune 261 Communal Autonomy: The Tuscan Model and Its Limitations Among their powers and obligations, the governors were most notably able to write laws and make decisions for the ghetto which, when approved, carried the full authority of the grand-ducal government. The capitol: approved by the Nove were first drafted by the Jews, in Italian, and submitted to the

chancellor of the Nove who edited them. Editing meant changing the spelling and grammatical inconsistencies, errors or linguistic idiosyncrasies of the Jewish text and sometimes changing the text or adding some sections (which presumably had been discussed with the Jewish representatives). The final copy prepared by the Nove was written into the record-books of that

agency and then sent back to the Jews, who re-copied it into their own records, sometimes less than perfectly.*! The first set of capitoli (1572) was drafted, as its preamble stated, “partly by

word of the said Magistrate [i.e., of the Nove] and partly through the petition of the Universita.” In addition to establishing the shape of the self-government, the set of rules treated several areas of ghetto life, especially the maintenance of public order and sanitation. These were matters that directly concerned the Nove not only in their capacity as guardians of the property of the ghetto but also as the state agency with jurisdiction over the activities of all judges, notaries and other public officials across the state and with power of approval for all communal decisions regarding administration, public works, bridges, streets and state revenues.*? Fifteen of the eighteen capitoli of 1572 concerned the governing hierarchy and the maintenance of the ghetto property (which belonged to the state) and of public order and sanitation, and, finally the surveillance of the ghetto population, representing the interests primarily of the state and of any local government. A topical summary of these rules is presented in Table 9. The fines carried and the rules that were revisions of the initial regulations of 1571 are marked accordingly. Enforcement of the ghetto rules fell heavily on the shoulders of the sindaco. This Jewish officer in the ghetto held a position that

was not unique to the ghetto but was part of a neighborhood-based system, according to John Brackett, created by Cosimo in about 1550 to better manage his city. Sindaci were “neither policemen nor informers, but unsalaried minor public officials with the responsibilities of both”—not a privileged

class but ordinary people whose knowledge of the neighborhood was good.** A Venetian ambassador to Florence, greatly impressed by the peace and tranquility produced t+ the duke’s rigorous and fearsome rule over his subjects, may have been referring to these men when in his 1561 report he

262 Commune and Community TABLE 9. 1572 Ordinances of the Florentine Ghetto Comparison

Topical summary of the legislation Fines tO 1571

1. The governing structure — Rev. of and

2. Public order: quiet in the synagogue rscudo Rev. of ist 3. Public order: measures to calm economic competition 3 scudi Rev. of 3rd among Jewish vendors in ghetto

4. Maintenance of property 2scudi Rev. of sth 5. Public order: rules for behavior in public spaces of the 4scudi Rev. of 4th ghetto

6. Public order: no peddling on Christian holy days or Sundays 4scudi _ Rev. of 7th

7, Public order/surveillance: newcomers to Ghetto to be 4 scudi Rev. of 8th reported after three days

8. Public order/surveillance: the Ten are required to appoint a 5 scudi New : sindaco who will report all transgressions to the Nove and the Otto, respectively; failing to report them, will pay the same penalties

9. Spatial organization in the ghetto: only women and 5 scudi New children may work in common rooms

10. Maintenance/sanitation: sinadaco responsible to have the 2 scudi New Piazza cleaned every Friday and authorized to collect from shopkeepers for that purpose

11, Maintenance/sanitation: obligation of families to clean Y scudo New rooms and of sindaco to empty waste-bins and his right to sell contents

12. Surveillance: sindaco obliged to report newcomers I scudo New 13. Surveillance: new arrivals require permission of the Nove — New 14. Public order: Ten and sindaco not to be abused, verbally or 4 scudi New bodily

15. Ten authorized to collect pledges made in synagogue 25% extra New with penalty for unpaid pledges

16. Maintenance of ghetto property: no one on the roofs I scudo New 17. Surveillance: sindaco to report transgressions and receive a Y% of fines New percentage of fines collected

18. Public order: Chancellor of ghetto is authorized as recorder — New of public writ, as if a public notary SOURCE: Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Nove Conservatori del Dominio ¢ della Iursidizione Fiorentina 13, 11sv—18r, “ordinationi et cap’li circa li Hebrei habitanti nel Ghetto di Firenze,” approved 30 July 1572. NOTE: Boldface signifies three regulations that addressed concerns specific to Jewish life in the ghetto, discussed in the text.

described the much-feared, expensive and socially ruinous network of spies set up both at home and abroad by Cosimo, who, in order to know and to understand in detail the mood of his city and his state, has

constituted an infinite number of a certain kind of man, from whom everyone flees as if from plague, because they have already been uncovered and are called the spies of the duke, who report to the duke everything that people are talking about and [all] that is being said about him in the houses, in the churches, in the monasteries, in the streets and in the piazze . . . and the terror of the spies has resulted in this end, that everyone is afraid of his companion, that he might be spying on him in order to win favor with the duke.54

A New Tuscan Commune 263 In any event, in 1572 the Nove were given the right to oversee the legitimacy

of the election of simdaci in the ghetto. It is consistent with our understanding of the ghetto as part of the administrative reorganization and systematization of the population of the state that the ghetto should be given a complete set of officers as both a commune—with governors and chancellor—and as a neighborhood within the city. In general, the fines that applied to infractions of the ghetto regulations were divided into four parts: one half was to be paid to the camera (ducal treasury); One quarter to the informant, who was usually the sindaco; and one quarter to the collection box for poor Jews. The quarter-fine incentive to inform on co-religionists was a revision from the 1571 capitol, which had allo-

cated half the fine to the camera and a full half to the poor-fund. However, the new position of stdaco in the ghetto was not easily filled: the particularly unpleasant duties included reporting all Jews who arrived in the ghetto to the magistrates and instructing the Jews to present themselves to the author-

ities.

As outlined in the capitoli of July 1572, the ten governors (the Ten) were ordered to choose a sindaco “at the beginning of their [term] of office?’ which started in August. It was a one-year position, like that held by the Ten themselves. It was apparently difficult to convince anyone to take the job, which involved a great many financial risks as well as the social risk inherent in the obligation of turning Jewish malefactors over to the state’s police. In October 1573, the ten governors of the ghetto were warned that they had not yet chosen a sindaco (whether there had been one elected in 1572 is not clear);

they were ordered to make the appointment within fifteen days, under penalty of a so-scudi fine. The governors responded with a request that they be allowed to fill the position with two Jews who would serve consecu-

tive six-month terms.®” This request granted, two of the ten governors accepted the position for that period (1573-74).°8 The ghetto’s place as one commune among many in the state is exhibited in the margins of the record-books of the Nove Conservatori, where a brief phrase identified the contents of each entry, which may have been a quarter of a page in length or several pages. Elections, taxes and decisions (partite)

were approved, the marginal notation clarifying for ready reference what kind of decision was recorded there. The equal treatment of the ghetto and other communes may be seen in the comparison of Figure 3 and Figure 4, two entries from one record-book: the approval of an election in the community of Cortona and of an election in the Ghetto.” The similarity is not just superficial. Many of the rules of 1572 had their parallel in the regulations of other cities and communes, places from which

BLOCKED IMAGE AT THE REQUEST OF THE PUBLISHER

FIG. 3. Marginal notations in the records of the Nove: approval of a communal decision made in Cortona. Source: Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Nove Conservatori del Dominio e della Iursidizione Fiorentina 23, 122v, dated 10 July 1585. Reproduced by permission of the Ministero per 1 Beni ¢ le Attivita Culturali; further reproduction or duplication is prohibited.

BLOCKED IMAGE AT THE REQUEST OF THE PUBLISHER

FIG. 4. Marginal notations in the records of the Nove: approval of a communal decision made in the ghetto. Source: Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Nove Conservatori del Dominio e della Iursidizione Fiorentina 23, 168r, dated 31 August 1585. Reproduced by permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali; further reproduction or duplication is prohibited.

266 Commune and Community the Jews had just been expelled. Penalties for injurious words or offense against officers, for example, were not only necessary in the ghetto but in Arezzo.” And although Jews of the ghetto may not have had to contend with residents allowing their pigs to roam wild, as did the people of Empoli (a problem also in fifteenth-century Padua, made famous by Petrarca’s letter of political advice to the Lord of Carrara),?' both the Jewish governors in the ghetto and the Empolesi set fines against residents who threw dirty water or

other filth out their windows by day or by night.”* The same statutes of Empoli, approved in 1560, required the residents, in weekly preparation for the Christian holy day, to clean their streets and portals every Saturday on the eve of every festival, and to carry away the debris.”? Similarly, reflecting their distinct calendar, Jews of the ghetto established that the same should be done for the main piazza every Friday (before the evening of the Sabbath), in addition to the requirement that shopkeepers sweep up debris from in front of their own shops every morning.” It should be noted that the cities under Florentine dominion had a long tradition of local statutes. In Arezzo, for example, the statutes ranged from a ban on catching fish in the river between St. Michael’s day in September and the Calends of May (months when the fish were migrating to the sea) to legislation on the bearing of arms and on prostitution, on sodomy and adultery, on disrespect toward parents and on the restitution of dowries.”° Although they built on statutory law from an era of independence prior to Florentine hegemony, these statutes were confirmed insofar as they did not conflict with laws of the church or laws issued by the Magistrato Supremo. It is quite important to understand, then, that the Jews granted governing authority in the ghetto had no similar body of statutory law to bring forward for confirmation by the Nove Conservatori. Rabbinic law was a vast corpus of material, composed by rabbinic scholars in many lands for at least the previous millennium, and it was also a traditional method of study. Although

there had been some monumental codification efforts, such as the late twelfth century Mishneh torah of Maimonides, which was of primary importance to Italian Jewish rabbis, Jewish law and regional customs had not been culled and codified into a discrete set of laws that could be presented by Tuscan Jews to a secular government even under the most supportive conditions of semi-autonomy. The enormously important late sixteenth-century codification of the rabbinic scholar and Kabbalist Joseph Caro, of Ottoman Safed, had only just been published (Venice, 1565), and it would be several generations before this new code, with the Polish rabbi Moses Isserles’s additions (Cracow, 1570), was considered authoritative, although it was found in Jewish libraries in Mantua within decades.”° It is perhaps equally or more impor-

A New Tuscan Commune 267 tant to note that rabbinic scholars had not yet attempted any translation of Jewish law into Italian.”” The Jews of the ghetto of Florence consequently did not submit a large body of statutes for approval to the Nove detailing the rules for their community on matters such as dowry, inheritance, adultery or other relevant topics for Jews such as divorce. The Nove did not specifically grant the governors the right to govern according to laws which they had not approved, but, as I have argued elsewhere, probably assumed that Jews had the right to live according to Jewish law even where it differed from Florentine statutory law.”®

The Specifically Jewish Concerns of the Ghetto Government

For the Nove Conservatori, the ghetto was a unit that could be administered effectively like a small town. In this respect, it was different from a neighborhood in Florence, which had no administrative basis other than the parish. Parish priests could not be engaged to enforce rules related to sanitation the way the sindaco could (which may explain why Cosimo assigned sindact to work the Florentine neighborhoods, but it has not been demonstrated that he was able to require “neighborhoods” or parishes to appoint sindact). It is important to note, therefore, that in the 1572 capitol, in addition to rules for maintaining order, property and sanitation, three of the rules the Nove confirmed reflected concerns that had no direct relevance to the state but were of immediate importance to the Jewish governors (see Table 9). The three chapters addressing specific concerns of the Jewish governors

dealt with (1) prayer and noise in the synagogue, (2) the gendered spatial organization of the ghetto and (3) the collection of offerings to be used for charitable or other pious purposes (tsedakah). These laws did not arise as con-

cerns of the state or in anticipation of trouble from the Florentine government. For example, the noise addressed in the second chapter was noise inside the synagogue: the governors were not worried that that noise might be heard outside and considered an affront to Christian ears:” Chapter Two: When the Jews, as [the] men, so too [the] women, shall be gathered together and shall be in their synagogue to say their service, as soon as it has begun it shall be required of them to hold the silence, and it shall not be permitted to anyone to talk with anyone else under penalty of 1 scudo in gold for each and every time . . . to be applied half to the camera, one quarter to the accuser, and one quarter to the poor-box of the said Universita.100

The main provision of this capitolo had been included in the very first chapter of the ghetto ordinance of 1571, which also attempted to silence noise

268 Commune and Community during prayers. But the wording was different: the rule of 1571 (cited earlier)

had stated that “when the Jews [/ebrei] are in the synagogue . . . everyone [agn’uno| must be quiet and not talk.” In the earlier version the masculine singular form of the pronoun “everyone” was used; in the revised text of 1572

the order refers explicitly to women, not content to consider the masculine pronoun generic. “The Jews, as the men, so too the women,’ must be silent.

| In the intervening year since the first set of capitol1, the unanticipated presence—and audibility—of women at public prayer services had caught the governors’ attention. The main point of the ordinance was to establish order by imposing silence, and with that silence submission to the leadership and a positive expression of communality in the (new) synagogue. The revision that was made to acknowledge the presence of women suggests that women’s presence in the new communal synagogue was probably noticed more by the local Florentine men, who may have been accustomed to gather in prayer with other men in small minyans of men, than by the newly arrived Jewish men. As noted earlier, seven of the first ten governors were already living in Florence prior to ghettoization, a city in which there were, in the 1560s, as many as four or five clusters of men who met in various spaces to pray. The Jews who now joined them in prayer in the synagogue had been living in Tuscan villages where prayer and ritual celebrations were probably more often conducted in a household setting, and certainly most often conducted within a private home. Women in settings where there was no formal minyan of ten adult Jewish men are likely to have been more equal participants in the services, and it seems likely that they were accustomed to participate audibly, in chant, in song and probably, like the men, in chat. The ninth capitolo gives us a second look at the specific interests of the governors in 1572: Chapter Nine: That it shall not be permitted to anyone in the said Universita to engage in a craft or any work, or to occupy with any business, any part of the three common rooms, except that it shall be permitted to the women and girls to go into the said rooms and stay there to work; and that it is not permitted to anyone to put garbage or any other filth into those common rooms under penalty to the scofflaw of any part of the abovesaid, in the amount of half a scudo for each occurrence, to be applied as above.!°1

The organization of space within the ghetto was of concern to the Nove only insofar as it involved illegal renovations of the property or a sanitation threat to the city. The reservation of three rooms to create a gathering space for women satisfied not a need of the state, but a social, material and possibly economic need of the women in the ghetto. Women who had had to aban-

A New TuscanCommune 269 don houses in the towns of Tuscany no longer had large kitchens and work spaces in which to gather, set up their looms, cook and tend to children. They appear to have claimed these rooms as their space— perhaps even to have convinced the governors to pay rent for them as “common rooms.” Now the governors defended the women’s right to use the space without interference. The appropriation or reservation of large rooms in the ghetto as common spaces, and particularly as spaces for women and girls, evidences a resourceful response to one of the direct effects of ghettoization on the daily life of Jewish women and children. The third noteworthy regulation is number fifteen, in which the Nove empowered the Ten to enforce the collection of pledges that were made for donations, probably in return for honors in the synagogue (as is still customary in some Jewish communities today): Chapter Fifteen: That all the offerings that are made in the synagogue must be paid infallibly, and that one who has made an pledge and failed to disburse it in good time may be held to pay! a quarter more than the pledge made; and the Ten are held responsible to have it all collected.103

In this case the Nove did not direct the governors to submit any portion of the money they collected to the state’s coffers; money offered in a Jewish reli-

gious context, even if it needed to be collected with force, was not to be siphoned off to the state.

The inclusion of these three regulations so early in the history of the ghetto’s capitol is evidence that by 1571 and 1572 the ghetto’s Jewish leadership was already involved in their composition. We can see that in its first years, the Jewish governors’ leadership in the ghetto depended on the Nove,

who bolstered their authority when they allowed the governors to submit social, environmental, economic and religious regulations for approval even though some of these did not directly benefit the state. And yet these rules served the state, for by allowing the governors to penalize those who transgressed them, the magistrates of the Nove Conservatori established from the outset that the Jewish governors were their formal representatives in the ghetto, leaders with a certain status whose concerns would be supported. The cultivation of a dependent governing class was a basic element in the Medicean political strategy. The powers and opportunities granted to that very small part of the Florentine bureaucratic elite living in the ghetto were minimal, but nonetheless part of a system through which state policies could be effected. The ten representatives of the ghetto, approved by and working with the

Nove, were the only Jewish governing body in the ghetto. There was no other governing institution in the ghetto that issued “internal” regulations;

270 Commune and Community there were no councils or committees parallel to the state-supported system, no “General Assembly” and “Small Assembly.’ Many, perhaps most, large Jewish communities in Italy in the sixteenth century had such institutions.! But in Florence, because the ghetto was designed by the grand-ducal government, its government was composed of the officers that the Nove Conservatori needed in order to treat the ghetto like any other subject commune

in the state: a chancellor and a governing council. Finding that the Nove allowed and supported their efforts to control internal issues such as prayer and finances, the Jewish governors of the ghetto donned their mantle willingly, until resistance from other members of the community forced them to begin to modify the model of leadership that was given them in 1572. The governors conducted business concerning which there is no extant record: the capitol of 1572 refer to a treasurer (camerlingo) —not specified by

the Nove but obviously chosen by the governors to oversee communal expenses. By 1578 there were officers appointed as synagogue functionaries, as tax assessors within the ghetto and as secretaries of the community, but no records of their appointments or activities are extant.!°° Indeed, it was the

custom of the governors of the community to occasionally burn their old record-books, reportedly to “make space” for newer books in the limited storage facilities of the ghetto. Almost all their sixteenth-century books and records were lost or deliberately destroyed, so our knowledge is limited

largely to those actions they took for which they sought government approval.!° That there were no governing bodies other than the representatives to the Nove does not mean that individuals in the ghetto had no other authorities to whom they turned—traditions, rabbis or books. For divorces and other problems requiring an expert opinion, such as the permissibility or forbiddenness of a certain act or food, the Florentine Jews may, in the absence of a hired communal rabbi, have turned to rabbinical scholars or experts of their choosing—within the community or by correspondence.'*” There is evidence

that the Jews turned frequently to arbitration and to public (Christian) notaries and state courts to contract engagements and marriages and to resolve disputes over inheritance. Indeed, it is possible that the Florentine Jews used arbitration and public notaries to conduct almost all their legal matters, but for now it remains something of a mystery where they turned for specifically Jewish problems that had no parallel in the Christian realm such as divorce and release from levirate marriage —and how often.?” Within decades, the governors would use the threat of internal social and

religious sanctions to control behavior in the ghetto, with and sometimes even without obtaining from the Nove the approval to do so. The ghetto

A New Tuscan Commune —=_. 271

would eventually become a community whose members were regulated internally as well as externally; but not until a full generation after ghettoization would they develop most of the institutions that historians have looked

for in a “traditional” Jewish society. The emergence of these institutions, which is discussed in the last chapter of this book, depended on the participation in the self-government of a larger group of men, who imagined themselves to be, and called themselves, “the community,’ to the exclusion of younger men, poorer men and all women. Nonetheless, in the first decades the governors in the ghetto depended heavily on the support of the state, and the state supported their authority in the ghetto, whether the specific actions the governors wished to take benefited the state or not. For example, in one instance the Nove were willing to allow the Jewish governors to expel Lionello from the ghetto, and thus from

the city, rather than send him to forced labor as ordered by the Otto di Guardia e Balia.! It might be seen as more surprising that they did not refuse a request of the governors to impose on the Jews of the ghetto a tax of

50 scudi to raise money to buy a Jewish slave from his Christian owner." When on 13 May 1575 the Jews purchased Abraham Baba, a Jewish Levantine slave (““hebreo levantino schiavo”) from a Christian nobleman named Dominus Alphonsus Aragona de Appiano at the cost of 100 florins and 50 more for expenses, in order to set him free, they fulfilled their religious obligation to redeem Jewish captives.!"! The state might have refused to allow the gover-

nors to tax the community for this purpose, preferring that the little wealth the Jews had remain in the ghetto, available for taxation and commerce.

Instead, they supported the right of the governors to tax the people, as though they understood that allowing them to rescue the slave would increase the authority of the governors by giving its reach a religious dimension. It was in the state’s best interests to strengthen the Jewish deputies, for strong local leadership was the least abrasive, and probably least expensive, way to ensure economic and political order in the ghetto. The Nove continued its policy of approving laws for the residents of the ghetto that dealt with

behavior related to or regulated by religious practice even after the state began to allow Christian clergy to actively proselytize in the ghetto."!* For example, in 1609 the Nove approved a rule that forbade anyone to change

the prayers or sing them other than in the Italian manner as found in the “recently reprinted” prayer book, the “Magazzor Bolognesi” (that is, the Mahzor of Bologna).!*4 Another law the Nove approved in 1609 forbade the Jews to go on the (Jewish) Sabbath and festival days “to drink and eat at hostels or taverns [grecaiuoli] . . . or to have wine brought in from outside the

272 Commune and Community ghetto on the day of the Sabbath, under penalty of 1 scudo” for each violation.'!* The magistrates of the Nove were not concerned here about canon law, which sought to separate Jews and Christians, or they might have forbidden Jews to visit these taverns at any time. The Nove, rather, was simply affirming the governors’ authority over all aspects of life in the ghetto. The Nove’s willingness to support this merger of religious and secular authority in the ghetto helps explain why no rabbi was hired by the first generation in the ghetto community.!® The mid-sixteenth-century development

of the institution of communal rabbi in Italy (and indeed, in the world) occurred in part because lay leaders in Jewish communities needed to appeal to religious authority to support their use of the sanction of excommunication to enforce communal ordinances,!!° Where a local Jewish population credited more than one rabbi or (ad hoc) rabbinic court with decision-making authority, unity was difficult to achieve and conflict likely. The first contracts given to rabbis are found in Jewish communities such as Verona that

were home to rabbinic academies, that included in their population many who were well educated in Jewish law and that had already formed Jewish communal governments.'’” Florence, however, had state support for its communal ordinances and did not need the powerful threat of excommunication. Thus the Jews of the ghetto were, as a collective, able to regulate the behaviors that seemed important to communal leaders through the communal legislation. In the process, the state not only protected the general principle that Jews be allowed to observe their laws and rites, it also supported the hold of Jewish law, halakhah, over the residents of the ghetto, to the extent that the capitoli advanced by the governors were based on it. The governors of the ghetto in Florence did not hide from the state such problems as disorder, gambling, conflict and generally irreligious and disrespectful behavior in the ghetto. It would be anachronistic to think that Jewish leaders would have worried that disclosing the (ordinary) sins of the Jews

posed any danger to the community, since contemporary anti-Jewish discourse focused on the supposed sins of Jews toward Christians, not their general morality or immorality. On the other hand, one might suppose that the governors were concerned lest the revelation of such weaknesses become an invitation to the government or to church officials to make a more aggres-

sive effort to proselytize in the ghetto, or to weaken the authority of the ghetto’s leadership. Yet, apparently with the sense that their authority was fully supported, four of the thirty-eight capitoli of 1609 referred explicitly to

discord among the inhabitants of the ghetto and the need to foster the “peace.”!!® The governors of the ghetto did not even hesitate to include a fine on taking the name of God in vain, “which is a very serious error and sin~” It

A New Tuscan Commune 273 was a sin so serious, they said, that if a person were accused of it ten times, he would no longer be allowed to pay the fine. All the Jews would be forbidden to talk to him, and he would be deprived of privileges in the synagogue, until and unless the governors chose to forgive him, at their pleasure. This was essentially a ban, a threat of excommunication or herem. Were these governors so certain of their status in the ghetto and of the loyalty of the Jews to their faith tradition that they did not consider it a risk to expose their internal problems to the state in this way? As surely as they used the word peccato to describe the act of blaspheming God’s name in their

capitol of 1609, they must have known that such blasphemy could have brought the Holy Inquisition through their gates. This generation perhaps still remembered that the betrayal of Isaia Coen 1n 1567 by Moise Buondi had

not led to an inquisitorial campaign against the Jews in Florence. But there were outsiders interested in the Jews of Florence: the Jesuits and the offices of the Archbishop, not uninterested in making converts from among the Jews. The governors did try to keep the actual resolution of disputes away from gentile courts, as we have seen, but despite their enclosure in the ghetto, the special taxes, the segno they had to wear and the limitations on their occupational choices, their behavior does not suggest a fear that the government would interfere in their communal life in unexpected or unwelcome ways. In their experience— especially in their privileged position as governors—the ghetto had been treated as one of the state’s semi-autonomous communities ever since its creation in 1571. Indeed, perhaps their focus on morality in the ghetto in the capitols they submitted to the Nove should be seen as an expression of their full acculturation to the norms of religious and civic leadership in the post-Iridentine state.”

The Ghetto as One of Many Semi-Autonomous Tuscan Communes As we have already suggested in this chapter, the degree of autonomy of the self-government in the ghetto should be compared not mainly to that of Jewish communities in other Italian states, but rather to that of other semi-independent communities within the Tuscan state. Many towns and communities in Tuscany had to receive the approval of the Nove in order to pass new capitol, impose a new tax, sell property at auction, hire a new teacher, give charity for a special case or set aside funds for a public works project. The Nove exercised control over important decisions made even in the cities and towns with large populations and long histories of independence before their

274. Commune and Community subjugation to Florence. Instances of approval for these decisions and expenditures are numerous, but for illustrative purposes we may cite a few.'?° For

example, the Nove allowed the city of Arezzo to repave its streets and approved the decision of the city of Livorno to hire a physician with a threeyear contract.!*) In Empoli in 1586, the Nove denied the city’s request for authorization to spend 50 scudi to repair the communal clock: the Nove preferred that Empoli spend that money on repairing the streets!!? The somewhat higher level of autonomy preserved by Pescia, which had submitted to Florentine rule in 1339, was characterized by corporate identity,

self-governing functions, limited jurisdictional autonomy, the right to impose taxes (and the obligation to collect taxes for Florence) and responsi-

bility for the routine maintenance and administration of the city.’’? The ghetto, created rather than conquered, shared with Pescia and other subject cities all these elements except their limited jurisdictional autonomy (there was no formal court of law in the ghetto for the first five decades of its existence),!74

The parallel treatment of the ghetto and other communities may be observed graphically in the margins of the journal books of the Nove, where notations summarize each day’s business. “Permission was granted to the representatives” of any number of communes in just the same way that “permission was granted to the representatives of the ghetto of the Jews of Florence.” A comparison of the phrasing of the notations as seen in Figure 3 and 4 and in longer passages in many other examples reveals that it was identical

whether the matter concerned the ghetto, the community of Cortona, the commune of Arbiano, the Villa di Tavola or another administrative unit in the dominion.’*> The language of the magistrates’ office was formulaic, expressing the successful integration of the Jews, who, prior to ghettoization, had been an anomalous group of individuals who fit only awkwardly into the administrative system of the state. Indeed, from the administrative perspective the ghetto was one of the Tuscan towns subject to the Nove. Even the specific structure of the Jewish government bore a striking resemblance, especially after 1580, to that of other ~ cities in the dominion, such as Empoli (except that the state had not formally recognized a general council in the ghetto).!”° Its representatives were treated basically the way representatives of other towns were. So, too, it must have appeared to the elected and appointed Jewish officials in the ghetto, though not necessarily to others in the ghetto who were less privileged and less entrenched in the system. At all times the governors’ personal and familial interests were tied to the interests of the state, whether

because they were held financially responsible for infractions of state-

A New Tuscan Commune — 275

approved laws committed by members of their community or because they profited materially from their position as governors. The governors of the ghetto, in fact, were paid salaries by at least 1582.!2” They were allowed to impose taxes on the ghetto, usually of 30 or 40 scudi a year, to pay expenses associated with their governance and communal needs such as the rent for the synagogue.’”8 Other fees, such as the small collections for sweeping the main piazza regularly, were collected by the sindaco. Though the governors were not assigned the collection of the regular per capita tax, they probably assisted in the effort to collect it equitably from the population.’”’ They also controlled the distribution of charity from the communal collection box. The Nove did occasionally interfere in the administration of the ghetto, particularly when it was politically expedient to do so publicly. For example, in August 1575, according to the diarist Lapini, at a time when plague was spreading in Italy, there was discussion in the duke’s council of expelling the Jews from the dominion. Duke Francesco’s paramour Bianca Capello averted the expulsion, as Lapini told the tale, because she favored “certain Jewish women.” On 12 August, snstead of being expelled, the Jews were “only warned to keep more clean the place where they lived, called the Ghetto?” But the Jews were not actually treated differently from others who were thought

to endanger the city, for the sentence continues that “so it was also dispatched that throughout the city where the poor lived, such as at Biliemme, Camaldoli and such places, that they should remove the garbage from the streets and that they [must] empty the sewers and keep them clean?”!*° Lapini’s entry about the Jews is confirmed, at least in part, by the records of the Nove. Sanitation was supposed to be the responsibility of the Jewish sindaco, but on this occasion the Nove chose to fine the Jews directly for failure to keep the ghetto clean, passing over the heads of their self-government. Despite the fact that the governors did not report any such transgression, on 25 August the Nove applied a fine of half a scudo to each of twenty-five Jews—including many of the governors—for not having kept the ghetto “clean and neat.”!4! The concern about sanitation in the ghetto is thus corroborated, though not the attempt to expel the Jews or the explanation of

their supposed release from that order under the corrupt influence of women.

Resistance to the Authority of the Governors The self-government of the ghetto, comprising a minority of Jewish men, was an imposition on the Jews as a whole and changed the way authority and

276 Commune and Community power were distributed and structured in their relationships. It was not accomplished without resistance, and that resistance, over time, led in turn to several modifications of the system of self-governance. The men chosen to govern the ghetto may have been elected by a council of heads of households, appointed by the magistrates of the Nove or selected by the chancellor of the ghetto, who was himself appointed by the Nove or the duke. The role they played or status they derived from their position led to conflict and a degree of unpopularity in the ghetto, especially with men who were not, and not to become, members of the ghetto’s ruling class. The July 1572 revision of the ghetto regulations stated “that it shall not be permitted to anyone to mock or jeer or otherwise insult in any way any of the said Ten or the Sindaco, under penalty of 4 scudi in gold”!*? One of the activities referred to, making bird-calls, seems to have been particularly insulting

| to the status of the governors, implying as it did that they were fair targets for the hunt.!*? Indeed, in each set of capitoli that was approved after those of 1571 (1572, 1578, 1609) it was necessary to include a similar clause that penalized anyone who insulted or otherwise offended one of the governors of the ghetto. By 1578 there was a general crisis of authority in the ghetto, and that year

the Nove approved the addition of six paragraphs to the ghetto ordinances.'#* Whereas the statutes of 1572 were the joint effort of the magistrates and Jewish representative, the additions of 1578 came at the explicit request of the Ten. Five of the six paragraphs were measures to bolster the authority of the governors and appointed officials in the ghetto.'*°

Assuming that the new prohibitions refer to behavior that was not only

threatening to the governors but also being practiced, the picture’ that emerges is one of governors who were being insulted and abused,'*° and who consequently refused office, refused to attend meetings and were absent or abstained from voting.!*’ In addition, other Jews in the ghetto were uncooperative: they were refusing to be appointed to serve various necessary functions in the ghetto, such as operating the synagogue and serving as tax assessors.!%8 Critically, the Jews were not paying fines the governors imposed on them—and the governors had no police at their command.!*”

3 With the passage of the new set of regulations, the state now amplified the ghetto governors’ authority. If the Jewish representatives were not treated with respect in the ghetto, the ghetto would pose a threat to the city in that it would be unable to depend on the governors to enforce public order, sanitation and public welfare.!*° The state did not want or intend to assume direct control over these matters, so it strengthened its Jewish deputies, who

A New Tuscan Commune 277 in turn were now supported by the enforcing arms of both the Nove and the Otto di Guardia. The sindaci did not hesitate to report instances of violence and criminal behavior to the Otto, as they were required. Jews appeared regularly before the criminal court for cases in which they fought or quarreled with other Jews (and less frequently with Christians), and often we learn that it was the

governors who instigated the investigation, or that the denunciation had been initiated by the sindaco, the chancellor or another Jewish informant.'*!

The governors made no pretense of being able to control violence in the ghetto; they were quite willing to turn the offenders over to the criminal court. In contrast, although the stmdaco was required to report all transgressions of the capitoli to the Nove, relatively few transgressions and fines are registered in its journals. It seems that the stvdaci were selective in reporting incidents that occurred, since they would be required to forfeit half of each fine to the state. With regard to violations of ghetto regulations, the governors might have preferred to keep the fines they collected for communal needs; indeed, it would have been better for the community to back its governors in

collecting fines without resistance, in this way allowing the governors to omit sending a report to the magistrates of the Nove. The governors may, then, have tried to collect fines without informing the Nove they were doing so, thus avoiding the forfeit of half to the state. If so, they risked being severely penalized if found out. Any time they faced resistance or direct opposition from a Jew in the ghetto they would have had to

turn to the Nove for help collecting the fine. This helps explain why the transgressions that are reported to the Nove are usually instances of a Jew who has challenged or abused the governors.'*” The most efficacious way to avoid turning half the fines over to the state was not to rely on the state’s coercive power in the first place. Such compe-

tence has often been used as the measure of a premodern Jewish community’s “autonomy.” In the highly autonomous Jewish community of Mantua, for example, the governors were completely dependent on the effective application of religious and socioeconomic sanctions, since they were not permitted to use fines or corporal punishment to enforce their laws. In Mantua the

state explicitly permitted the governors, along with the rabbis, to use the threat of excommunication to ensure compliance.'*4 In order for a Jewish community to rely on religious sanctions to enforce any standard of behavior— assuming the secular authorities would allow it—

there had to be leaders, whether lay, rabbinic or some combination of the

278 Commune and Community two, whose authority to impose such sanctions was not seriously challenged within the community.'** In Florence the governors did not command this level of respect in the first decades of the ghetto; in any event, the use of fines was undoubtedly seen both by them and by the state authorities as more efficacious and useful. The governors may have collected fines (corresponding in full, in part or not at all to the official fines) and reported only the most serious infractions to the Nove. In cases where their authority and public honor as governors was jeopardized by men who insulted them publicly, the governors turned to the state for assistance in collecting the fines or, as we

shall see, sought permission to have them placed under a ban or even expelled. In 1609, when a long set of thirty-eight capitoli replaced the ones in effect

since 1572, the fine was increased and the language updated: “Sixth: that respect and reverence must be shown to the deputies and governors of the ghetto, that they should not be reviled, nor made fools of, nor jeered at, under penalty of 6 scudi.”!* These rules— both their wording and the size of the penalties—are reminiscent of the laws passed by the state in 1567 to pro-

tect Jews from the mocking and taunting of Christians, a law passed just months after the imposition of the segno, suggesting that the segno successfully elicited the negative response it was originally designed to elicit.!*° Similar laws were also present in the statutes of many Florentine guilds, protecting elected guild representatives (and all members) against verbal abuse and physical menace from other members.’*” Personal insults were a serious offense in early modern society, on a continuum with other acts of violence, and in Florence physical violence was sometimes expected, even required, as a response to certain insults.!* In the 1570s many Jews in the ghetto were arrested for fights, quarrels and assaults. The ghetto, like the city, and perhaps more so, was a violent place.!” However, the fact that only a few men were arrested for even verbal abuse of the governors qua governors suggests that the governors made effective use of their authority. They lost little time before arresting someone in accordance with their new power to punish. In mid-August 1572 Davit di Iacob da Poppi was fined 4 scudi, or 28 lire, for violation of the thirteenth capitolo, that is, for insulting the governors of the ghetto.!°° The following February the Nove ordered that Isach da Fabbriano should be paid his due as informant, one quarter of the fine.**! The incident had occurred on 12 August 1572, when Davitte da Poppi ebreo “in the synagogue of the said ghetto after the end of their prayer service, said in public, that the factors and supervisors of the ghetto had informed on him.”!>? An important householder in Poppi before ghettoization, Davit had been in and out of jail in 1571, having had trouble

A New Tuscan Commune =. 279 with his creditors. Although we do not know for sure what Davit was referring to, it seems likely that he was angry at having been excluded from the first slate of governors, whose names had been submitted to the Nove for approval on 13 July.

Insulting a governor was dangerous as well as expensive. Less important or less wealthy Jews who insulted the governors might be thrown in jail, as 1s attested by the incarceration on 30 May 1575 of Leandro di Davit da Sulmonita hebreo and Isaia di Sabbato da Pilastrina (1.e., Palestrina) hebreo for insulting the deputies in the public piazza.’ The defamation was not always made in a face-to-face confrontation: Sabatuccio di Pellegrino collected one quarter of a fine for deprecatory remarks about the governors he claimed to have overheard from three men who were relaxing at night outside his shop in the ghetto.!** An insult against the governors as a group was clearly an insubordinate and punishable offense, but individual governors also had to be protected— while in office— against personal attacks. Neither a fine nor incarceration satisfied the governors who were insulted by Iacob, son of the doctor Laudadio Blanis. On 23 December 1580 he was fined 4 scudi for abusing the governors of the ghetto, and six days later the governors secured permission from the Nove to issue a ban against him.!*° For eight days no Jew was allowed to talk to Iacob.!°° It was attested that he had used “insolent and injurious words against the four governors of the said ghetto, as per the testimony of these governors, signed by the[ir] Chancellor”!>” This Iacob di Magistro Laudadio Blanis, who served as a governor after the death of his father, had been involved in several violent conflicts with men of important families since his arrival in Florence.!°* He was frequently in court with claims that he had been assaulted, and the men he fought with or was attacked by were men of similar age and economic status. In May 1573 Iacob di Raffaello da Citerna attacked him with a knife, wounding Lacob Blanis in the head with a “stab to the flesh, and [drawing] blood,”!? In 1575 he accused Liuccio di Lione da Piazza of an assault, claiming that Liuccio had pulled his beard? later that year he was accosted by his own nephew Laudadio di Agnolo.’*! He had had Simone di Salamone thrown in jail and was later required to pay Simone’s jail fees, when it was decided that the arrest

had been unjustified. Finally, in 1580, his powerful father gone, lacob got himself in trouble with the governors in office. There is no evidence that Iacob had ever had a quarrel with Daniel Calo, Davitte Falcone or Sabatino Buondi, three of the four governors that year. It seems likely that his invective was directed primarily at the newcomer that year, Vitale di Salamone da Cascina Medico, the

280 Commune and Community doctor who walked into the ghetto and took his place high in the hierarchy, not only replacing Iacob’s father as doctor but also taking away any hope Jacob might have had of filling his father’s place as a leader.’ The men who attacked the governors generally did not belong to the governing elite, though they may have belonged to prominent or well-established families.1°* Manuello di Buondi affronted the doctor Vitale (still governor two years after Iacob had slandered him) and possibly in a separate incident also affronted Vitale’s colleague in office, Sabato di Pellegrino. Manuello was fined 4 scudi twice for having said “villainies and used injuri-

ous words” against the two men in August 1582.'° Manuello was never elected governor in our period (1572-1612), suffering perhaps for being the son of Moise Buondi. In 1585 Salamone di Sabato da Viterbo was fined 4 scudi for his “impertinent and injurious words” against the then chancellor.1© He too never had been elected and never would be. The insults that the disenfranchised used were threatening even, or perhaps especially, to very wealthy, powerful men.'°” One such power-broker was losef d’Orso Tedesco, also known as Iosef or Giuseppe Ursi. A Perugian, he had arranged a marriage for his daughter Iudit to Gratiadio, the son of Ventura di Leuccio Leucci, the perfume-merchant, who was then living in Florence.!© Ursi had recently been elected as a governor in the ghetto of Florence for the first time in 1575 when he was insulted by Abramo di Salamone da Mantova in a dispute concerning the construction of a communal bath, which seems to be the ghetto’s first ritual mikveh.'© The criminal court was willing to banish Abramo ten mules from Florence for a year when they heard the particular nature of the offense, and when Abramo returned he found himself harassed by Ursi and others in the ghetto.’ Abramo’s insults were summarized by the notary who kept the logs of the criminal court, perhaps because they were more vivid and memorable than those spewed by more timid men. He had called Iosef “a shameful man and a sodomite and [said | that he had used and slept with his daughter, and other nasty things as recorded in the Libro di Querele.”!”’ Incest and sodomy were

of course religiously prohibited, but the insults also took specific aim at Urst’s honor, which in Medicean Florence meant his self-restraint, a prerequisite to good governing.'”” He was accused of misdirecting his power and control; that 1s to say, he was accused, by reference to the sodomitical domination of other men and the incestuous corruption of his own daughter, of abusing his power. One whose power was corrupt had no authority to govern.

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Republican Ideology, Kehilah Kedoshah (Holy Community) The frequency with which the governors of the ghetto were being insulted suggests that their work governing the community was not entirely appreciated by their co-religionists. Respect for or fear of the governors, as we have seen, would have helped them control the ghetto without sending half of every fine to the state. The 4-scudi fine (later increased to 6) for insulting an officer of the ghetto was the steepest fine in the ghetto, and in every case we have cited its collection was reported to the state—a sizable financial transfer from the ghetto (if we think of 1t as an economic community) to the ducal administration. There are signs that in the 1590s the governors began actively seeking the support of a broader segment of the community, perhaps with the goal of increasing the independence of the ghetto from the central administration. It is not clear what role the first chancellor of the ghetto, Raffaello di Cipriano (1572-86 or later) played, beyond that of secretary and liaison to the Nove, but the shift to a more indzpendent governing style in the ghetto is associated with the term of a new chancellor, Leon da Pesaro (1593 until before 1600).'”? The four governors wrote a set of twelve new regulations for the ghetto in 1595.'”* Their original intention, as they stated explicitly in the preamble of this text, was to obtain approval of these laws from the Nove and the grand duke (“God save him and maintain him in a happy state”). Partic-

ularly interesting is the ninth chapter, which referred to a ban, “already posted with the consent of all the greater part of the community-”!”° This is the earliest extant documentation of the community operating as a coercive force alongside the state-affirmed governors, using tools of the Jewish legal and religious tradition and using the Hebrew language in the draft of the capitol: to refer to these key concepts —humrw (the ban) and kahal (the community).'”° Here we have evidence that a ban—which intended to stop Jews from taking claims to secular court—had been issued within the Jewish community, apparently without support of the Nove. But the issuance of a ban, even with the endorsement of the majority of the community, was not yet an effective means of controlling the Jews in the ghetto. They attempted to buttress it by inserting a reference to it into the capitols. The capitol of 1595 were probably never submitted to the Nove, and they were almost certainly not confirmed by them.!”” The ghetto’s governors had no choice but to use religious bans to inhibit some activities; in particular, they seem to have decided to try to keep Jews away from the state’s courts. This is our first evidence that there was a strong enough system of arbitration

282 Commune and Community available to the Jews in the ghetto that the governors imagined it possible to keep the Jews of Florence out of “gentile courts” entirely. In the absence of officially sanctioned Jewish courts, the way that Jewish leaders of communities throughout northern and central Italy worked to confirm and brace the authority of Jewish law and its interpreters in matters of civil law was to convince Jews to turn to arbitration, provided by arbiters trained in Jewish law, passing communal ordinances against recourse to gentile courts.’”* This was an effort Jewish leaders in the ghetto of Florence could not expect the state to

. support publicly, for the state intended its own courts to have jurisdiction over Jewish matters, both civil and criminal, and this discretion may explain why the governors did not submit the provision to the Nove for approval. In 1598 a ban was issued in the ghetto by the council “of this Holy Congregation/Community, together with the consent of the greater part of the same Holy Community, that whosoever dares to go to arbitration among the Gentiles [1.e., whoever has recourse to secular courts] shall fall under the Jewish

Ban?” The authorities were not pleased by the increasingly autonomous activities in the ghetto. In March 1600/1601, the three governors of the ghetto were warned not to make any unauthorized innovations.'*? Nonethe-

less, the governors continued to turn to what they now termed the “holy community” for support, rather than simply issuing rules and bans in their own names. The next set of capitoli that was given to the Nove for approval (in 1609) was not simply signed by the governors and the chancellor, as earlier sets had been. Its preamble stated that the “deputies of the republic of the Italian Jews [ebrei italiani] of this city of Florence and with them the men of the Council of this republic (gli huomini del Consiglio di essa repubblica)” had gathered to discuss the many problems in the ghetto. By “communal consensus,’ the pre-

amble continued, it had been decided to give the deputies the authority to make a new set of laws for the republic, and to ask the Nove to approve them.!®! This larger council of the Jews of the ghetto was now also formally defined and limited in the capitol: of 1609. As has been mentioned above, it was composed of the eighteen men in the ghetto who were considered eligi-

ble for office, still without any attempt to regularize the membership by establishing conditions of age, marital status or length of residence in the ghetto. 1°

It is significant that this assembly worked together with the governors whose elections were still approved annually by the state. Within the first four decades of their incorporation, the Jews of the ghetto reworked the government they were first given from a set of state-appointees, to a limited gov-

erning elite of the most important householders, to a cooperation between

A New Tuscan Commune — 283

the governors and a larger assembly or council. Utilizing the language of republicanism, and claiming to have reached “consensus,” deputies and the council represented themselves as the voice of the whole community (which they were not, if by community we mean the adult population of the ghetto). By the third decade of the seventeenth century, the council, referring to its members as the “community,” regularly took action to guide and control the

larger population of the ghetto community. Sometimes it did not seek the approval of the Nove, as when in or around 1622 “all the men of the community” (fourteen men) voted to approve a six-month ban against any Jew, male or female of any age or status, who went to eat or drink at a tavern, hostel, hotel, boarding house or anywhere else within a mile of the city.'* The strengthening of the internal authority of the Jewish government in

the ghetto was not automatic, natural or seamless. Some in the ghetto resented the governors, as we have seen, especially young men who were not elected. The governors at first focused on punishing those who challenged them, issuing fines, bans and orders of expulsion against those who insulted or threatened them. However, they soon attempted to broaden their backing in the community, to depend less heavily on force. In 1609 a meeting of the congregation was called at which the governors asked for a mandate to submit new capitoli to the Nove for approval. The new rules—really a communal charter— provided for regular meetings of the community “every fifteen days, even if there is no occasion, but to maintain the peace and union of the said congregation . . . and more often as needed.”!** Finally, they attempted

to reform their statutes so as to include the whole “congregation,” on a schedule, into the government. They created a virtual myth of democracy in the ghetto: the governors identified eighteen specific men as “the men of the

congregation” in 1609, though there were obviously more than eighteen adult men in the ghetto (and indeed 495 Jews would be counted in a census of 1622).}8°

In the thirty-odd years since the creation of the ghetto, the governing class had learned to broaden its base of support. The number of opportunities for men to participate in governing was increased; a language of inclusivity was cultivated; an effort was made to achieve authority within the ghetto rather than to rely only on the strong-arm tactics made available to them by the sup-

portive state government. The Jews of the Florentine ghetto, having been reduced to one fundamental status there—as Jews—had no strictly defined class structure. Although there were families with greater and lesser access to wealth and status, there was no group of bankers who were inherently privi-

| leged; there were no citizens, no foreigners. As a result of ghettoization, Jewish men lost status in comparison to Christians, and now also lost, or chose,

284. | Commune and Community for the sake of political harmony, to abandon, some of the more obvious ways of establishing hierarchy in the ghetto. One hierarchy in the Jewish population, however, was intensified. The new “community” and its “repub-

lican” government were formally limited to, and representative of, men. Women in the Florentine ghetto were excluded from political activity, and since such activity was organized for the first time there, the Jewish women of the ghetto experienced a decline in status relative to that of their maternal Tuscan forbears.

The Impact of “Self-Government” on Women in the Ghetto The only requirement for the eligibility of governors in the ghetto, according to the rules the state imposed on the Jews in 1572, was that they should be ten men.!86 Women, therefore, were categorically excluded—an important point even though women had no expectation of being allowed into the government and had never held elective office in medieval Jewish or Italian communities.

In the ghetto, through a combination of education, wealth, a good marriage, age or reputation, any man could become a governor, at least in principle. The governors were not all members of a preexisting social elite. In practice, individual Jewish men were unable to break into the ranks of the Jewish governing elite, and their resentment has been documented. Nonetheless, in the ghetto the authority to govern was gendered; it was an attribute of Jewish men. Women were ineligible for this form of power which was newly granted to the men of their same socioeconomic status in the ghetto. Therefore it may be said that when the state sanctioned Jewish self-government, it elevated the status of Jewish men relative to that of Jewish women, for women were now subject categorically to a governing body of Jewish men. This was not the case in Tuscany prior to ghettoization, nor can it be said, as though it were the same thing (which it is not), that Jewish women in Tuscany would have previously been subject to a body of Jewish law written and interpreted by Jewish men: they were not.!®” The elite of any society may be said to include both men and women, insofar as women benefit from the status carried by their fathers and husbands. In the pre-ghetto period, however, there were also Jewish women whose status was represented by Christian clerks, court officials and notaries as categorically independent of their relationship to specific men. They were legally and financially independent and had a name to present to the world—

. and to the rulers and administrators of that world—that stood on its own.

A New Tuscan Commune — 285

The names of some of the most prominent of these women appear in the archival records of the 1550s and 1560s, evidence of their unmediated relationship to state authority at that time.!*8 Most powerful was Benvegnita Abravanel, the banker.’®? Charters granted in 1547 for moneylending at Cortona, Borgo di San Sepulchro, Castrocaro,

Borgo di San Lorenzo and San Giovanni are referred to in the margins of Magistrato Supremo 4449 as “Capitolt del’Hebrea, even though technically the charter was granted to both Benvegnita and her son, Iacopo or Iacob.'”° But she was not the only important Jewish woman active in Tuscany in this period, and it is not clear that she lived in the state. Fiametta, the widow of the banker Abram da Pisa, was a woman who commanded the highest level of respect from Medicean officials. As the daughter of a banker and the widow of a banker, Fiametta controlled a substantial estate. It is revealing that although her three sons were banking partners and held banking charters in their own names, they did not appeal independently to the duke for exemption from the segno in 1567. Exemptions and safe-conducts were granted in response to Fiametta’s petition, and not only to her own large, extended household, including its nine servants. There is an extraordinary attention paid to her status as head of household. Thus her sons and their wives are exempted, and these women, Portia and Isabella, are not only noted as the wives of her sons but also, redundantly, as her daugh-

ters-in-law.!”! It is even more striking that when a patent was granted to Isach da Fano Hebreo and his dependents, he was deliberately called the brother of Donna Fiammetta (fratello di Donna Fiammetta), and when a separate patent was given by Francesco to Abramo di Isach di Fano, he was specifically called her son-in-law (genero di Donna Fiametta da Pisa; he could also have been referred to as her nephew since he must have married one of Fiametta’s daughters, becoming Fiametta’s son-in-law).!? Both her brother and her brother’s son received the patent through Fiametta’s grace, despite their belonging to the prominent da Fano family (from which she also came). In other words, everyone granted an exemption was identified in relation to this woman.

Another example of a woman whose relationship to the state seems to have been unmediated was Fiorina, wife of Daniello di Abram da Citerna. Fiorina and her two daughters were exempted from the yellow sleeve without any mention that her husband was exempted from the yellow badge, or of his whereabouts.’ In addition, numerous women received the exemption without reference even to the existence of husbands or fathers, though, like many men, they made their petition to the duke through the well-positioned Ventura di Moise da Perugia. Such a one was Dona Gentile, the aunt of

286 | Commune and Community Magister Lione di Abramo, who was not clearly a relative of Ventura; the rest are all described as relatives, not of Ventura, but rather of his mother, Ricca, who thus appears to have used her son’s placement to expand the network of privilege to her family and friends.” Widowed heads of households, unmarried adult daughters and possibly married women engaged in production and commerce. Dorina, for example,

the widow of Moise da Empoli, owned and managed a wool-production industry and shop for years.!° One of Dorina’s sons was referred to as “Lauda dio di Mona Dorina hebreo” though it was more usual to call a man his father’s son, even when his father was deceased.!°° Dorina was a widow, and this was the primary factor—economically speaking—in her prominence, but her deceased husband was no longer relevant to her status in the eyes of others. Before the creation of the Jewish government and “community,” critical decisions were made within the context of the individual household. Wealth, education and connections to the court had meant that there could be (and were) Jewish women who were far more powerful than the vast majority of lower-status Jewish men in their local Tuscan communities. But the ghettoization changed this, for now the Jews of the ghetto communicated with

the state primarily through the official (male) representatives. Men may always have had more status than women within Jewish society, but before the ghetto, the imbalance of power produced by social and economic norms of both Judaism and the general culture was not infrequently offset for individual women. In 1572 the state created among the Jews a male governing elite, adding political and legal weight to tip the scale further. Now in the ghetto a distinct elite of Jews ruled, and women were not counted within it.197

Women’s exclusion from the new governance can be defined in and of itself as a relative loss of status, but women may also have been disempowered specifically by the men who ruled the ghetto. For example, the men ruled in 1595 that “no person either man or woman” would be allowed to open up shops in the morning before congregants in the synagogue had reached a certain point in their morning prayers.'”* Since the rule did not require that men come to prayers, the attendance (or nonattendance) of men was not the problem that motivated it. Rather, the rule seems to address what the men saw as unfair competition by shopkeepers who were opening the shops early in the morning, and drawing the first customers or having first access to newly available merchandise. These might have been men: there was certainly an interest here in ensuring that piety did not cause economic hardship. But considering that for men attendance at public prayers

A New Tuscan Commune 287 was an important element in their public life—they were included in the minyan and women were not—and considering that women are not referred to in the language of the vast majority of the capitol, it seems that female shopkeepers were the main competition. The traditional independence of Jewish women in Tuscany did not disappear overnight when they moved into the ghetto. There is even a hint that the native Florentine Jewish men who wrote the first set of ghetto rules in 1571 were surprised by the degree to which incoming Tuscan Jewish women were seen—and heard— outside of their homes. As we noted earlier, the rule of 1571 that “when the Jews are in their synagogue to say the service” they

must keep quiet was reworded in 1572 to read that this quiet must be observed “when the Jews, as the men so the women, are gathered and present in their synagogue.” In the life-span of the generation that had moved there (1.e., those who lived there c. 1571-1612), Jewish governors in the ghetto did not submit for approval to the Nove laws that restricted women’s movements or appearance in public, restrictions which appeared in other ghettos in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.’ However, it is not possible yet to say whether this should be understood as evidence that a particularly independent generation of Jewish women successfully asserted themselves in the early decades, or as evidence that the men of the ghetto did not (yet) feel a need to restrict women who had frankly been shocked into silence and submission. We can observe the strategies of just a few women in the ghetto to maintain status in the elite, even though they could not join it as governors. In the first years after ghettoization, two women who had been raised into the elite took steps to secure their place by entering into Florentine guilds. Ginevra di Magistro Agnolo Blanis entered guilds to which men in her family— but not her husband —already belonged: first the Linen Guild in 1573, and then the Silk Guild in 1574.2°° She was then positioned to bring her husband, Agnolo

di Moise di Elia da Perugia, into the Linen Guild.” Similarly, Sarra, the daughter of Agnolo di Zaccharia of San Miniato, “haberdasher [mercaia] and veil-maker in the ghetto,’ matriculated into her father’s Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants in 1575, independently of the man she had married 1n 1570 who was not in that guild.?”

A very few women may have circulated independently of men in the courts and other male-dominated public spaces, such as Regina, a widow who obtained a special license from the Nove to pursue a Christian debtor in the courts.”°? There is also evidence of at least two women, both come into adulthood in the pre-ghetto period, who served as procurators—legal representatives—for their husbands. Aleggra [sic] had been the vera et legittima

288 | Commune and Community procuratrice of her husband Dominus Sabatus quondam Amadei de’ Corregio in Prato in 1571, and in 1574 Speranza was temporarily replaced as the “procuratrice, actrice’ factrice” of her husband Lazzerus Rabbenus q[{uondam] Isac Rabbeni filius Hebreus ferrariensis, with whom we are familiar as Lazzero Rabben of Florence.”

Despite these exceptions and others which may be discovered in the archives, women were effectively ghettoized more than men, who joined the guilds in large numbers and spent much more of their time traveling out of the city (see Figure s).°° Only in the first few years after ghettoization were Jewish women found traveling outside of the city unaccompanied by Jewish men.7°° One was Ricca, mentioned in earlier chapters, who spent much of 1574 in Pontedera trying to recoup her dowry. Another was Sarra, who was granted permission, also in 1574, to go away for a month “for a change of air and to be able to cure herself”; her husband, Graziadio Finzi, was permitted to visit her at his pleasure.”°’ The last record that is preserved of a woman traveling on her own tells us that Dona Fiorina, a widow and the sister-inlaw of Ginevra d’Agnolo Blanis, was granted permission to go to Colle for a month on business in 1575.7°8 From August 1575 until 1586 there is no record of a Jewish woman applying for a permit to travel outside of Florence on her own. Individual women found a measure of economic success, independence and mobility (their status in the ghetto will be discussed at greater length in the remaining chapters). Nonetheless, it must be contemplated that the creation of a semi-autonomous Jewish community came at the expense of the autonomy of individual Jewish men who found themselves unable to join the governing elite, and much more dramatically, of women as a class. The Jews as a whole had not previously been organized as a political entity; Jewish women had not previously been subject to a council of Jewish men who were authorized by the state to make laws, collect taxes, impose fines, expel individuals and otherwise control the Jewish population.”” The Jewish governors’ continued reliance on the state’s coercive threat more than thirty years into the ghetto’s history reveals that the governors of the early ghetto did not at first have the authority to control public behavior by threat of social and religious sanctions. The self-government, established by order of the state and directly responsible to it, was the first institution in the ghetto. It was an administrative and political structure inserted into the Jewish population to support the physical ghetto that had been built around them. But the Jews in the ghetto were not immediately a community. The state gave the population a political and administrative identity, similar to that of a town, and the growth of communal identity and voluntary institu-

A New Tuscan Commune 289 tions in the ghetto developed gradually alongside the state-sponsored selfgovernment. In preceding chapters we have seen that the state mandated, built and populated the ghetto, giving the Jews a corporate identity in linguistic, legal, geographic and demographic terms. This identity was inseparable from its externally imposed structures, its mural and administrative frameworks. The Jews who now lived within the walls became a community as they developed

the relationships and institutions that bonded them and supported them internally. First and foremost among these institutions was the Jewish government in the ghetto. Jewish self-government was not “added” to a previous Jewish social structure; it transformed it. In the pre-ghetto period, individual households had been largely autonomous. They related directly to the state and its agencies.

Female heads of households and other women of independent wealth or high status had enjoyed a great deal of mobility, decision-making power and access to privilege. Among the Jews in Tuscany social and economic rank

were often stronger indicators of status and autonomy than gender. This changed dramatically when Jews were given “autonomy” as a community, for the Jews who controlled the community, governed it, established its budget, wrote its by-laws and punished its dissidents were a small group of men. In

the transformation from a household-based society to a self-governing ghetto community, therefore, a new elite emerged. But this was not an elite of men and women of the wealthiest families of ancient lineage, whose status depended on a personal relationship to the ruler and who sat at the center of their own webs of patronage and dependence. The status of the new

elite was based, at least in large part, on their status as governors in the ghetto, a shadow of the bureaucratic class that operated most levels of the administration of the state. Under these new conditions, Jewish women had less autonomy, not more.

Conclusions It was a strategy of early modern state formation to embrace, court and sometimes create elites (bureaucratic, professional or noble) through whom state policies could be effected. Along side this strategy, which Cosimo I employed well, was another, which was to strengthen and play a direct, if quiet, role in the governance of corporate units within the state—be they social, religious, professional or territorially determined. The value to the state of working though corporate bodies is particularly

290 Commune and Community clear in the case of the Jews. For given all that has been said, the Medici court in the 1560s was still a court of patronage. Supplications and ambassadors flowed steadily into the court; favors flowed back out in cash and on paper and as gifts. Every interaction and relationship seems to reveal the interrelationship between patronage, the bureaucracy and the bureaucratic culture. For example, for his service as a loyal bureaucrat, Carlo Pitti received not only the loans from the monte di pieta noted earlier but, just as important in

Florentine society, a formal letter from Francesco de’ Medici that recommended a daughter of Carlo Pitti to Nofri Camaiani as a suitable marriage choice for his son Lelio.”!° Before ghettoization, individual Jews sent their supplications to Cosimo for a variety of financial favors and jurisdictional requests. But in terms of the development of state power, Cosimo and Francesco had little to gain, especially in the increasingly pious politics of the

era after the conclusion of the Council of Trent, from extending favors to | individual Jews whose resources were, after all, relatively small. Favors were wasted on Jews who were no political threat in the first place, and who could not serve the state in the militia, in the state bureaucracy or as a governing elite in any of the towns they inhabited. Indeed, after the completion of the ghettoization Jews largely stopped using supplication to approach the grand-

ducal court, and worked instead through their own representatives to the Nove, allowing the state to negotiate and express its power over the entire Jewish population through regular channels—the approval of regulations and annual slates of governors, selective enforcement of fines and penalties, the occasional shake-up and arrest. Many factors led to the Medici decision to ghettoize the Jews and justified it once it was made, as we have seen in the preceding chapters. This chapter brings a kind of closure to the question. Jews were turned into a community in the sense of the word as it was understood in late Renaissance Tuscany—a political and administrative unit. The Jews were given semi-autonomy like any other commune in the state. It is noteworthy that the state did not grant semi-autonomous political authority to the Jewish community of the ghetto of Florence as an acknowledgment that Jews had a “right” to govern themselves according to their own laws, even though their own traditions told them that they did. Really, the semi-autonomy of the Jews was conceived of simply as a parallel to the way

: that other subject communities governed themselves for the good of the state as a whole. This approach worked administratively, and it also facilitated the program of the Council of Trent. Now every parish had people of only one religion, and the same could be said of every commune in the state (except Florence itself).

A New Tuscan Commune — 291

The fact is, however, that the Jews of the ghetto took advantage of the opportunity afforded them to be a semi-autonomous community. A group of men made themselves a governing elite, and as such they found ways to

| assert leadership and authority in the ghetto by expanding the range of their legislative concern to encompass religious matters that in any other town might have been the purview of the parish priest or bishop and not the town council. Under these conditions, the semi-autonomous government of the Jews became progressively interested in and capable of bringing Jewish reli-

| gious tradition, learning and law into consideration as they governed. This was accomplished only over time as the new leadership consolidated and as the governors learned to manipulate and placate a larger segment of the community, employing distinctively Jewish governing techniques. All the while, this new self-government shaped the development of the ghetto, representing the ghetto to the Medicean government as one more subject commune, and, largely, rendering it so. The state made the Jews live in a walled community as though in a subject commune, and it helped create a governing elite. It made them live in a religiously segregated zone as though in a parish, and it helped create a relt-

giously united community of worshipers. Indeed, Jews became what the rulers of this Christian state wanted the Jews to be—a religious community. It is not a coincidence that the papal bull Cum nimis absurdum and the edict of the Florentine ghettoization allowed only one synagogue in the ghetto: a parish could have only one church. It was only a matter of time before this community would seek to professionalize its religious leadership as well. By the early 1600s most of the institutions that historians expect to see in an Italian Jewish community are in evidence: a general council, a religious confraternity, communally hired rabbis. A new generation had come of age, Jews who had arrived in Florence as children in 1571 or creatures of the intermarriage of the Jewish refugees who came to the ghetto.*!! These developments will be considered in the final chapter. Before that, we must turn in the next chapter to the processes of amalgamation— driven by economic, social and religious needs—that produced the economic and familial relationships and associations that in turn encouraged the development of those communal institutions.

Eight Measuring Lengths and Distance: Economic and Other Parameters of the Ghetto

Historians tend to be divided in their opinions about the quality of ordinary relationships and daily encounters between Jews and Christians in the premodern world. Some imagine that the relationship must have been economic in nature and shaped by a fundamental suspicion born of their religious difference and nurtured by their traditions. Others are convinced, as I am, some would say optimistically or wishfully, by evidence that despite their respective traditions and available discourses of mutual hostility and superi-

ority, individuals of the two religions were able to relate to one another in ways that were sociable, respectful and amicable. It is undisputed, however, that as institutions, both Jewish law and the church, and those who acted on their behalf, worked consistently from late antiquity into the early modern period to discourage the development of any close relationship between Jews and Christians that was not economic. Church leaders also regularly raised the alarm against economic relationships wherein the religion of the Jews

might seem dominant over the Christian religion or in which Jews had higher status than individual Christians. It is also well known that in medieval Christian lands Jews often found

their niche in the economic and political structure of the realm by develop- | ing and maintaining a close relationship with the ruling powers, a strategy they often adopted because the rulers offered them shelter from the hostility of church leaders or local burghers. In the medieval Iberian kingdoms and in early modern Poland and Lithuania, Jews sometimes served as official tax col-

lectors, or leased and operated monopolies that produced income for the state or for specific nobles. In medieval England and France and in the Italian cities, Christian populations were often taxed indirectly through the Jews, whose profits from moneylending were heavily taxed and occasionally confiscated. Jews—who were generally dependent on these rulers for protection

and justice and may have had few other economic options—nonetheless

Economic Parameters 293 accepted and played these roles, eliciting suspicion and resentment, and

sometimes acts of physical violence.!

From 1547 until 1570 the Jewish bankers in Tuscany had just this sort of financial relationship with the duke and state. In the banking charters they negotiated with the duke, they made sure to protect themselves from being held responsible, as Jews, for the crimes of any of their associates or servants.” The vulnerability of the Jews was ultimately related to the fact that their presence was contractual (an economic agreement), for the ghettoization edicts in Tuscany were largely justified by religious language that claimed that Jews were violating the Christian-Jewish economic hierarchy. We have already seen that the Jews who were monceylenders were a minority, and that the majority of Jews in Tuscany prior to 1570 were involved in silk and wool production, commerce, crafts and the professions. But with the closure of the banks and the ghettoization, there was a (semi-)voluntary emigration of the elite out of the state. The Jewish banking elite was, quite simply, gone. This chapter considers the economic impact of the ghettoization on the Jews and on Jewish-Christian relations. Specifically, it is important to know whether ghettoization in fact realigned the hierarchy so that Christians were (all and always) on top. But we should also like to understand the economic activity of the population of the ghetto. Were the Jews integrated into the economy of the city in the same way as residents of other neighborhoods or parishes? Did the immigrant Jews merge with the underclass sectors of the economy of Florence, or form their own? Or was the ghetto a city in microcosm, with its own economic hierarchy and class structure? At the heart of these questions looms the larger question whether the ghettoization succeeded in its religiously based goal, stated in the edicts and in the architectural design, of segregating Jews and Christians. The motivation for the segregation of Jews and Christians had changed over the centuries, but one important theme in the development of canon law was the attempt to prohibit Jews from hiring Christians. Jews, the theologians and popes proclaimed, must be the servants of the Christians, and not the opposite. Their social position should be a sign of their disfavored

status in God’s eyes and should serve the end that Jews, in “servile fear, exhibit always the shame of their guilt and respect the honor of the Christian faith?’ It was “iniquitous that the children of the free woman should serve the children of the maid-servant,” repeated Pope Paul IV, alluding to the tra-

ditional Christian interpretation of the story of Sarah and Hagar in which

, Sarah is equated with the church and the free woman.* Again drawing on

294. Commune and Community canon law precedent, Paul IV specifically ordered in his bull Cum nimis absurdum of 1555 that the Jews should not “have nurses or serving women or any other Christians serving them, of whatever sex; nor shall they have their children wet-nursed or reared by Christian women.” For most of his reign these particular concerns of the church did not drive the policies of Cosimo I de’ Medici. Before 1570 he never prohibited Jews from employing Christians. But it should not be said that he ignored canon law. In a safe-conduct and mercantile privilege Cosimo granted in 1559 to Isaac and Isaia, sons of Abramo da Pisa, for example, the Jews were permit-

ted to “hold their synagogue and do their customary ceremonies in such manner as they are tolerated by the holy Christian church.”° The charters he gave Jewish bankers in Tuscany in the 154.0s—6os guarded the core symbols and vessels of the church with more energy, however, than they enforced the social hierarchy between individual Christians and Jews or the chastity or bodily wholeness of Christian women. The charters were not general charters for Jewish life in Tuscany, they were privileges for bankers, and so they

focused on protecting Christians and Christian faith from damages that could be caused specifically by the moneylending occupation of the Jews. Thus they specified that Jews were not allowed to open shop on Sundays and other Christian holy days, which were listed, and that Jews were not allowed to receive sacred objects from Christians as pledges.’ But although canon law also prohibited Jews from employing Christians, the charters made no specific reference to that prohibition. Nonetheless, when the Magistrato Supremo set about in the summer of 1570 to collect its evidence against the Jews, it focused heavily, as we saw earlier, on the Jews’ employment of Christian servants, day laborers, wetnurses

and laundresses. The results, summarized in the edict against the Jews in 1570, were that they have retained in their houses familiarly and keep in their service women of every age, and Christian wetnurses [et balie et nutrice| to give milk to their children, and they have such continuous and domestic conversation with these persons, that the[se Christian servants] might easily, with the example [before them] of the Judaic sect and perfidy, deviate from the Catholic religion to both weaken the divine cult and to fall into notable errors against the canons of the pontiffs most high and the sacred councils.®

The edict banned Jews from lending money; the prohibition on the employment of Christian women was left unarticulated, since it was presumed to preexist in canon law. Three years later, in 1573, a conference of bishops gathered in Florence, pursuant to the mandate of the Council of Trent. It was the second synod over which the Florentine archbishop Altoviti presided, but the first and only

Economic Parameters 205 episcopal synod in Florence in the sixteenth century that produced canons on the Jews.’ The first session of the synod was held on 4 April 1573, and among the fifty-odd canons it produced, the eighth was “De Iudaeis” (“Concerning the Jews”).!° This rubric of two short paragraphs aimed to segregate Jews and Christians in ways left unaddressed to date by the edicts and statutes that governed the new ghetto. The idea was that “in commerce, business and in

all other actions, the Judaic corruption [should] be restrained within the bounds permitted by the Church?! Since the return of the archbishop in 1567, the church had been a much more powerful presence in Florence than in Cosimo’s earlier years, a shift reinforced by the personality of Francesco I, his marriage to Giovanna of Austria and the fact that his brother Ferdinando had been made a cardinal. Nonetheless, there had been no merger of church and state powers in Florence, and so despite the heading of this rubric, the synod could not actually mandate economic policy or Jewish policy except insofar as it directly protected the Christian faith from heresy or sacrilege. The body of the first chapter stated that Jews should not be allowed to do any business on Christian holy days, or to leave their assigned residence on holy days or for three days before Easter.’” But more revealing is the second chapter, in which Christians were forbidden to employ any Jew in service—as midwife, nurse or teacher— in order that they should net become dependent on the Jews, and thus effectively in their service. Christians were also instructed to refrain from Jewish medicines, foods and drinks which might put them in a position of dependence; moreover, they were forbidden to socialize with Jews in any way under threat of excommunication.’9 The rules of this second chapter differ remarkably from the fourth rule of Cum nimis absurdum, cited just above, which stated that Jews should not hire Christians as wetnurses or as servants in any capacity. The employment of women as wetnurses was normative practice for Christians of the Florentine elite, merchant and artisan-class families, despite the preference for mother’s milk advocated by what Klapisch-Zuber aptly called the “medico-moral literary heritage.”* The ability to hire nurses for their children was an important sign of status for husbands and for their wives, who were freed from the depleting, demanding job. The salaried wetnurse was always lower on the social scale than the family for whose child’s nurture she was hired. The church therefore objected on principle to Jews’ employment of Christian

wetnurses. But while both the traditional canons and the synod of 1573 intended to separate Jews and Christians, the complete reversal of subject and object in the canon of 1573 indicates an important permutation in the concerns of the church. In 1573 the archbishop of Florence and attendants at

296 | Commune and Community

. the synod were not troubled by the specter of Jews employing Christians, which would be an unwelcome sign of elevated Jewish status, but by the pos-

sibility of Christians employing Jews. )

The Jewish bankers and merchant families who had been accustomed to employ Christians were gone; the remaining Jews in the ghetto were struggling economically, if they were not all impoverished. As the Jewish refugees arrived in Florence, it was much more likely that they sought to be employed by Christians than that they sought to employ Christians, even though that had not yet been forbidden. The displaced Jews of Tuscany included servants and employees who had worked in the wealthier Jewish households, at least

: a few abandoned wives or new widows and some young men and women coming of age just as their expected employers were exiled or bankrupted. Christians must not employ these Jews, the synod ruled, whether as midWives, nurses, teachers or in any other service. The new attention in 1573 to the hire of Jewish women probably reflects the church’s generalized fear of sexual encounters between Jews and Christians and specific interest in boundaries that are embodied, the transgression

of which violated religious and religiously understood gender hierarchies. The canon of the 1573 synod may also have reflected a social reality that while many Jewish men quickly joined the preexisting nucleus of Jewish tailors and

used-clothing-dealers and peddlers, some Jewish women sought the same kind of work that poor Christian women did, as servants and wetnurses. But

the text may also be understood without recourse to this unverifiable assumption. After all, the canon produced by this synod was a reworking of a canon on Jews that was readily available. But it was a rather brilliant reversal of the traditional canon, for instead of suggesting an anxious concern

about the high status and insubordination of the Jews, it subtly but triumphantly declared, in print, that the Jews were now subjected servants. And this was the very trajectory that had been planned for them by the church in papal Rome in the conversionist program it was pursuing there, of which the papal ghettoization bull of 1555 was part.!° The new canon declared the low

status of the Jews, proclaimed that they were now at the bottom of the social hierarchy in the city.

In the previous chapter I argued that the ghetto segregated the Jews administratively and at the same time reintegrated them into the state as a commune. This chapter, in three parts, continues to explore the parallel of the

ghetto and the Tuscan commune by considering the extent to which the ghetto was an economic unit. Were the Jews of the ghetto as separated from the city economically and socially as they were spatially and administratively? Part I of the chapter will discuss the relationship of the Jews in the ghetto to

Economic Parameters 297 the city of Florence: the extent of their exposure to the city, their participation

in the guilds and their place in the social structure of Florence. Part I considers the definition of status and class structure within the ghetto, while Part III explores the nature of the economic relationship of Jews in the ghetto.

I. The Distance Between the Ghetto and the City of Florence Although we have compared the ghetto to a small subject commune, there are limits to the usefulness of the analogy. For example, the cities and communes had their own police, civil courts and lower-level criminal courts. The ghetto had none of these. Again, both the towns and the ghetto had gates which were locked at night, but whereas the towns possessed the keys to their own gates, the ghetto did not. Equally important, one should not infer from the analogy that the ghetto was a “closed” society. The subject communes of the Florentine state had commercial, political, intellectual and cultural interactions with the capital city, as well as demographic interchange; so did the ghetto.'° The Permeability of the Ghetto Walls

Though the ghetto was physically and administratively segregated from the city, its people were not isolated from the city economically, nor were they cut off socially from the Christian world of Florence and Tuscany. The ghetto was locked only at night. No permission was needed for Jews to leave it or for Christians to enter it. During the hours of daylight there was constant traffic through the gates of the ghetto into the adjoining Mercato Vecchio, creating a congestion that prompted the governors of the ghetto to rule repeatedly “that no one who has clothes to sell should dare stand in the gateways by which one enters the ghetto, or within ten arms’ widths, so as to impede in any way the people who are trying to enter and exit-”!” Moreover, they ordered, the Jews—men and women—should not have workbenches or tables of any size in the streets outside the thresholds of their shops, “in order that the loads of charcoal and wood might pass through,” and the poles on which they display clothes must not extend out of the shops into the street more than half an arm’s width.!®

The purpose was, of course, to make it easier for Christians and visitors to get inside the ghetto to shop. Competition for business was stiff, and a new

occupation grew out of it: boys and young men specialized in bringing clients in from the street to a particular shop, hoping to receive a commission

298 Commune and Community for their efforts. By 1595 the disorder of so many youth competing with one another for customers led the governors of the ghetto to propose that only those enrolled on official lists who paid a required fee should be allowed to act as middlemen. To enforce the policy, shopkeepers were to be penalized for using unauthorized brokers.’” While most of the Jewish shops were located in the ghetto, the work of many Jewish men took them outside the ghetto daily. The many rigathen (traders in second-hand goods) and velettas (veil-makers) spent most of their time in the city and its surrounding villages, peddling their wares to regular customers, to monasteries, at village markets and at the large fairs. The Florentine economy revolved around the production of and trade in cloth, and

the Jews appear to have played a large role in the reconditioning of both scrap and used materials, by means of skills and networks that Jews may first have developed across the Italian states as a corollary to the refurbishing and sale of unredeemed objects given to Jewish moneylenders as pledges. Recent research suggests that convents played a large role in the state’s economy, too. Peddlers such as Jews may have played a part in their success by creating markets for and distributing some of their products, such as medicinal herbs valuable to apothecaries, perfumers and doctors. There were also non-Jewish rigattieri, but the occupation was characteris-

tically Jewish to Christian eyes—and mistrusted. Statutes of the Guild of Rigattieri in 1578 were an attempt to close a market in cuttings and trimmings from the carefully measured silk cloth parceled out to shirt-makers and other tailors and seamstresses. “Jewish and other second-hand-dealers,” according to the guild, illegally bought leftover trim from these workers after they had

cut out the garments, and by providing a market for these scraps of cloth encouraged them to use less fabric than they ought in cutting out the garments, damaging the final product and therefore the guild.” Whether or not Jewish rygattieri were more involved in this black market in cloth cuttings than their Christian counterparts, as we are asked to believe by the statute, it is certain that the occupation of 7jgattiere led Jewish men to interact regularly with Christians outside the ghetto. Many Jews of the ghetto attended regional markets and fairs, especially that of Pistoia, and they took trips to conduct business and for personal pur_ poses, visiting Tuscan cities such as Prato and Pisa. Jews were required to

obtain licenze, licenses or permits for trips, and a record of each permit is found in the journals of the office of the Nove, which administered the ghetto and issued the licenses.”? The Florentine travel permits record the movement of Jews in and out of the gates of the city itself and are therefore different from the passes that were

Economic Parameters 299 issued in Venice to permit Jews to leave the ghetto after dark to attend to business or pleasure in the city.” The Florentine permits also differ from safeconducts, salve-condotte, which were granted to foreigners (including Jews

from outside of Tuscany) who needed to travel through the state: they are not extraordinary papers allowing some group or individual to travel freely with a protected status. In addition, these permits differed from the “certificates of health” that the Florentine Board of Health would only begin to require of travelers who wished to lodge in the Tuscan state after November 1579.73 Rather, these were formulaic licenses issued bureaucratically, without special petition and without a health examination. The archives contain a record of the permits for eleven years out of a four-

teen-year period, 1573-86 (the data are missing for the other three years).4 The first license issued was given to Gratiadio di Ventura on 19 December 1573, two years after the ghetto’s gates were first locked.** The Jewish chan-

cellor of the ghetto had been commanded on that very day by the Nove to announce in the synagogue that henceforth no Jew who wanted to leave the ghetto for longer than three days would be permitted to do so without a license issued by the Nove.” The licenses were granted for trips of varying lengths. In total, in the records preserved, there are forty-two permits for four days (1575-80), eighteen permits for ten days (1575-78), forty-one permits for fifteen days (1573-86), twenty-six permits for one month (1574-85) and eleven permits for trips of various other lengths, the longest of which was for three months. Florentine Jews were allowed to be outside the ghetto not only during the day but also, as we learn from these permits, for periods of up to three days at a time without permit or penalty. Of this mobility and exposure to the larger world beyond the walls we have no quantitative record. We must assume, therefore, that the walls of the ghetto were even more permeable than this unusual archival source implies. One hundred and thirty-eight travel permits were granted in eleven years of the fourteen-year period, and an additional seven permits granted Jews permission to either emigrate out of the state or to move to the ghetto that had been built in Siena. These permits were issued to individuals and to groups, so the 138 permits actually correspond to 348 individual departures of Jews from the city over the eleven-year period. Those trips were taken by between 175 and 194 discrete individuals. Each year Jews took an average of thirty-five trips lasting four or more days.?’ What we learn from these data is that approximately half of the 370-430 Jews who lived in the ghetto in the 1570s and 1580s had some extended exposure to life outside the ghetto at least once from 1573 to 1586. The more than

300 Commune and Community 175 Jews included thirty-eight women and children. Whoever could afford lodging and travel for four or more days could afford the fee for the permit. Fees were charged for all licenses and permits written by state authorities, and these permits probably cost less than 1 lira.”®

The Nove issued travel permits to Jews as an ordinary part of its daily business. This is evidenced in the organization of the Nove’s journals, where licenses to Jews to travel appear interspersed among all the other business of

the agency, and it is confirmed by the fact that the ghetto residents could obtain permits any day of the week that the office was open. This they did, sometimes on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.”” From one government official’s perspective, the sale of travel permits to Jews was similar to the sale of grain by the state to the local communities. In 1575 responsibility was given to Buonacorso Buonaccorsi for both jobs, “to give license to the communes

to sell their grain in the quantity and manner as shall be ordered by Carlo Pitti each time, and similarly to give license to the Jews living in the ghetto of Florence to go out of Florence for that number of days and for such reasons ... all in accordance with his [Pitti’s] word.’%° Something may be learned from this coincidence: the purpose was not to make it impossible for Jews to travel any more than it was to prevent towns from letting their people buy

grain. The profit was not only in the fees and price control but also in the control of movement and in the power inherent in controlling a critical resource— grain or mobility itself.

The time Jews spent outside the ghetto was even greater than appears from this source, which captures only the trips that lasted more than three days (and presumably two nights) and therefore required a permit. Daily travel by the poorest Jews who earned a living as scavengers and peddlers in the local area is unrepresented by this historical record. All those who did travel for lengthy periods, however, were required to obtain permits, regardless of status, age or sex, and without these permits they had little protection from harassment or arrest while on the road. Of the total 348 trips, 44 were taken by 38 women and girls, while the remaining 304 trips were taken by an estimated 137-56 men and boys. Women and girls, therefore, took 12 percent of the trips. It is striking that 38 Jewish women and girls were not only out of the ghetto but out of the city on extended trips during that ten-year period. Without this source, we might well have assumed that only a very few of the most wealthy women would

have had reason or opportunity to spend time so far away from the ghetto and neighborhood in which they lived. On the other hand, assuming basically even numbers of men and women in the ghetto, a man was almost four times as likely as a woman to go on a

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trip at least once over the ten-year period. The data do not allow ustocompare the mobility of women before ghettoization and after, but it is clear that

following ghettoization, Jewish women traveled away from Florence less __ |

than Jewish men, and in that respect were more “ghettoized” than men. Even | the small number of women who did travel each went on half as many trips

a as the men who traveled; the average number of trips per female traveler was

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— Almost all the men in the ghetto’s first generation found an opportunity 7 to travel out of Florence at least once, but a small group of men made fre-

| quent trips into the Florentine contado that lasted more than three days.21___ _ This group—including several members of the da Empoli/Alpelinghi family — from Empoli and Pontedera— spent a great deal of time on the road.3? More

trips were taken by men in their twenties than by males of any other age, as may be seen in Figure 5, which presents a record of all known trips taken dur-

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115. There is a substantial literature on these practices among Italian Jews,

468 Notes to Chapter 3: Before the Ghetto although uniformity of practice cannot be assumed. For a good introduction to the issues related to these quotidian activities, focusing on meat and wine, see Toaff, Love, Work, and Death, 61-83. 116. My study of the texts leads me to differ here with the conclusion reached by Bonfil (“The Historian’s Perception”) that the licenses granted to Jewish women to

porge and slaughter were exceptional and granted only to widows living in places where there was no man available to do the work (some of the relevant texts are reprinted in English translation in Adelman, “Religious Practice among Italian Jewish Women”). I hope to return to this subject in the future. 117. ‘Toaff, Love, Work, and Death, 68. 118. Ibid., 72-81. 119. Assis, The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry, 230, 232. However, Assis suggests

that the Jews were unable to set up their own bakeries because of resistance from Christian bakers for whom Jewish bakeries represented unwelcome competition. He notes that the Jews were allowed to use special ovens for Passover, but were required to compensate the Christian bakers for the lost business that week. 120. Sanita 48, 147v-48r. For examples in the Crown of Aragon, see Assis, The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry, 232-33.

121. Guerrini, Empoli, 160. The inventory of the houses of Empoli cited by Guerrini, preserved in the archives of Empoli, does not include a list of the actual books, which are referred to only as “2 sachi di libri et altre scriptur’” ASE, Podesta 197, unpaginated pages at the back of the volume. 122. Ibid., “40 libri grandi hebraici.” 123. Cassuto, Gh ebret a Firenze, 42-43. 124. Riformagioni to, 2or: “Lazzero Rabeno fa il Rigattier1 huomo di 40 anni ha moglie et quattro figli, cioe Laura, d’eta di 16 anni, Principia di 13 anm, Alex[and]ro

danni dieci, Angelino di eta di quattro anni, M.ro Agnolo di eta di 60 anni che Insegna a figli di detta lazzero et a Samuel figl{io] di Lello hebreo d’anni sei.” 125. Nove 14, 322r. 126. In fifteenth-century Umbria the title “maestro della scuola” was generally given to the rabbi, where scola or scuola was the word used for synagogue (Toaff, Love, Work, and Death, 89). However, among Florentine Christians the word scuola clearly

meant school, and I am currently of the opinion that Servadio di Liuccio was a schoolmaster, not a communal rabbi. 127. The emergence of communal funds will be discussed in Chapter Ten. 128. See Chapter Ten. 129. Amskveh was built in the ghetto in 1575; see Chapter Ten. 130. In his broad search of rabbinic literature and unedited manuscripts from the fifteenth and sixteenth century, Cassuto found no reference to a hired rabbi until 1611 (“I pit antichi capitoli,” 208). Bonfil’s research has not revised that finding (Rabbis ana Jewish Communities, 102).

131. Cassutto, Gh ebret a Firenze, 359-60. The evidence Cassuto cited does not confirm that Shelomo lived in Florence permanently or was employed there as a rabbi, but only that he was active during the 1550s and 1560s in Tuscany. 132. For discussion of the first hired rabbis in Florence, see Chapter Ten. 133. The honor afforded to Jewish doctors by Christians is suggested by the fact that the first and primary and often only descriptor attached to Blanis’s name is “dot-

Notes to Chapter 3: Before the Ghetto 469 tor” or “dottor physico.” It is also possible that he had not yet moved to Tuscany from Perugia. 134. On Blanis, see Toaff, “Maestro Laudadio de Blanis.’ Toaff argues here that he is the author of a kabbalistic work of which there are no extant copies. Evidence from Hebrew letters (Boksenboim, ed., Letters of Jewish Teachers), shows that Laudadio corresponded in the 1550s with other Jews.

135. References to Laudadio Blanis in the recent literature and collected source materials on Italian Jewry peztain mostly to his business transactions. He was in Rome in the 1540s and then Perugia in the early 1550s. Although Toaff (see above) argues from the letters that Blanis is the Kabbalist Jehuda Blanes, the documents consistently refer to him a physician and a banker, never as a rabbi. One misunderstanding in the literature is Cassuto’s conclusion that a Laudadio de Blanis who had a seat of honor in the Florentine synagogue in 1608 was this same doctor; in fact, it was his grandson. We should also correct Bonfil’s assumption that the name Laudadio had a Hebrew equivalent in “Mehallalel”; the grandfathers Hebrew name was Yehudah (Rabbis and Jewish Communities, 170).

136. “Hanno in detta Casa la sinagoga dove concorreno gli altri giudei di Firenze et di fuori” Riformagioni 10, 20r 137. Ibid., 221, “et qui fanno la sinagoga.” 138. OGP 114, 42v, dated 9 November 1569: a “querela” (a violent dispute) took place in the “sinagoga nella casa di giovachino romano.” In 1567 Giovanchino was living in the Populo San Leo “Nella casa delli heredi di raffaelli Rinatori, dove e dipinto il [c]rociffisso de Vecchietti? along with a large number of kin: his wife and two children, his brother, his brother’s wife and their two children and the brothers’ mother, their sister-in-law and her three children, as well as a servant (Riformagioni 10, 21Vv). 139. Nunz. 842, unpaginated, testimony of Moises de Bondi Romano on 9 September 1566.

140. Ibid., testimony of Isac Calo/Caro: “R[isposta]: che ha questo inditio oltre le altre cose che ha dco’ che ha visto nella squola leggere e [sic] psalm de lettera xpiana”; in a testimony on the same day, Isac testified that he had heard Moise Buondi say that Isaia Coen/Cohen had a book that had both Christian and Hebrew letters (“Rfisposta]: che ha inteso dire da moise buondi che tiene un libro de l[ette]re xpiane et hebree”). 141. Nunz. 842, testimony of Magistro Laudadio de Blanes doctore hebreo, unpaginated, dated 16 October 1566: “d[e]c[t]o test® hav’ [in]teso dire da tutti hi hebrei che vanno nella squola che e lor lecito leggere i salmi di davit 0 altra cosa in lingua spagnuola perche la legsi: loro no’glielo vieta” Blanis thus interpreted Moise’s reference to “Christian letters” 2s Spanish, where the inquisitors might have assumed Moise meant that Jews were praying from Latin prayer books. 142. OGP 114, 61v, dated 9 November 1569.

143. Over a three-year period there are references to Moise di Emanuello di Buondi, Moise di Buondi hebreo a Ricci, Moise di Violino and Moise di Violino a Ricci. “Ricci di violino” is the (curled, carved) scroll of a violin; but since Moise appears also in Roman sources, it is likely that Ricci refers to the small town near Rome (or, as my helpful anonymous reader suggests, Arricia). In any event, the names and incidents are so cross-linked that it seems certain that they refer to the same man. Isaia Coen was acquitted with the help of testimony (Nunz. 842, unpagi-

470 Notes to Chapter 3: Before the Ghetto . nated, testimony on 16 October 1566 of “Simon Iacob de ferrara hebreus ad p[raese|ns

florentie habitans”) that Moise Buondi was “an enemy of the Spanish Hebrew nation,” including, specifically, Abram Baroccas.

144. Giovachino would have been thirty-two or thirty-three years old in 1568 (Nove 18, 174r). He was the head of a household of five in 1570 and was matriculated into the Linen Guild in 1565 (see Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households,” appendices 1 and 3). That he was not Levantine is proved by the arrest and imprisonment of his daughter Bruna in 1568 for not wearing a correctly fashioned segno that had been

} imposed on Jewish women, a yellow sleeve on the right arm of her outer garment (OGP 109, 209v, dated 17 May 1568 and 212v, dated 18 May 1568). Bruna, who was

already married at the time, apparently to her uncle Donato, could not have been more than fifteen years old. She was released (OGP 109, 2321, dated 26 May 1568) in response to a special supplication for clemency made to the duke; if the family had been Levantine, she would have been exempted by the privilege of 1551. 145. On the unexpected mixing of Jews of different ethnic origins in the synagogues of Rome, which were known by names that referred explicitly to regional origin (German, Spanish, Provengal etc.), see Stow, “Ethnic Rivalry or Melting Pot.” Many Spanish Jews who lived in Tuscany came directly to the Italian peninsula or spent decades on the island of Sicily or elsewhere in the Kingdom of Naples (as did the famous Abravanel family). These families sometimes italianized their Spanish last names, or dropped them. A good example of this may be seen in the transition of the family Alpelinc to the Alpelinghi to the da Empoli. Often, we can see different individuals in the same family, or even the same individual, using different versions of a name, depending on the circumstances and influenced by the variable pronunciation of the Spanish “r” and “Il” Thus members of one Jewish family appear as Del Cano,

Castaro, Castalho and Calo, even in the same documents; members of another important family of Spanish origin are referred to as de Blanes, de Brandes, Branisi and Blanis. 146. The unification of public prayer in the ghetto is discussed in Chapter Ten.

Chapter 4: Staging the Expulsion 1. Cassuto imagined, concerning the nonbanking Jews, that the duke “si poteva ad ogni momento, con un semplice decreto, vietar loro di dimorare in qualunque localita dello Stato fiorentino” (Gli ebret a Firenze, 107).

2. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 8: 96-97. On another occasion, Cosimo had granted a Gypsy clan headed by its captain Ludovico Scaramuccia safe-conduct for limited residence: Pratica Segreta 187, 45v-4.6r (15 May 1563). 3. Unlike other cases of historical invention by the state, this is not a case in which

the state actually forged a document. I read the invention as a logical implication of the edict: if the Jews are to be expelled because they have broken a contract, the reader (contemporary or present) is expected to understand that a contract had existed. 4. The edict is published in Cantini, Legislazione toscana 7: 253-55 and found in identical copies in MGS 4450, 3r ff and in MGS 4449, 98r—-10ov. The text was for-

mally approved on 26 September. Earlier drafts, dated 8 August (MGS 4450, 140r—41v) and 13 August (MGS 4450, 8r-1or), were written by Carlo Pitti and presented as a letter to the grand duke. 5. MGS 4450, 3v; MGS 4449, 99r; Cantini, Legislazione toscana 7: 254.

Notes to Chapter 4: Staging the Expulsion 471 6. Jews appear in court frequently, but in the three years prior to ghettoization, only a tiny fraction of the cases brought before the court involved any of the nine Jewish loan-bankers. If Jews were involved in violations of canon law, they would have been brought before the Nunziatura Apostolica (court of the papal embassy), as was Isaia Coen in 1566. The extant records are partial, but my examination of the books confirms the impression gained from Prosperi, “L’inquisizione fiorentina;’ that Isaia was the only Jew accused before this ecclesiastical court of appeals in the years of its tenure in Florence. However, as noted by Prosperi, other volumes from this font exist in Brussels and have not yet been examined. 7. Whether princes are allowed to expel Jews is a topical section in De Susannis’s massive legal compendium De Judaeis. Some legists argued yes, because the Jews are servi, or because Jews are a source of malice to Christians; but many said no, it is the

obligation of the prince to tolerate them and try to win them to Christ unless they pose a specific threat or danger. The quotation from De Susannis is from Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy, 84, citing De Judaess I, 7, 5.

8. See below, discussion of the inclusion of an anti-Jewish treatise written by Lodovico Martelli in the documents collected by Carlo Pitti. 9. In his letter to the governor of Arezzo discussed in Chapter One, Cosimo actually did articulate the policy that Jews were allowed to reside in his state “because” they were tolerated by the church at least once before. 10, [ have seen not the letters, but rather the journal entry that letters were sent and the responses to the letters. Some letters were sent to jurisdictions where there were no Jewish bankers: Monte San Savino, for example (see response MGS 4450, 121~22), and Castro Caro (ibid., 120r). u1. Inthe case of the da Rieti, however, the privileges were simply revoked, with-

out accusation of wrong-doing. The letter revoking the privileges (MGS 4449, 94v-951, dated 30 June 1570; MGS 4450, 89r—v dated 4 July 1570) is printed in Cassuto, Gli ebret a Firenze, appendix, 392-93, doc. 38. This action was justified by the fact that the privileges had been granted at the pleasure (“a beneplacito”) of the duke. 12. Proceedings against the bankers were initiated on 7 July 1570: they were given eight days notice to appear before the court of the Magistrato Supremo. MGS 4449, 96r-v, 971; published in Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 393-95. 13. On this important subject, see Cooperman, “A Rivalry of Bankers.” It should

be noted, however, that the da Rieti, da Pisa and da Fano are connected through intermarriage (and less likely to injure each other financially—see next note) and the Abravanel are not living in Tuscany. 14. MGS 4450, 49r—-s2r (discussed below) contains two copies of a statement of testimony in his favor, dated 2 July 1570. At this point the da Rieti and the da Pisa had good enough relations to serve as each other’s guarantors (mallevadort; see ibid., 36v). 15. Letters dated 27 July were sent to Castiglione (see the response of the podesta, Gianozzo Belacci, MGS 4450, 137r) and to the vicar of Casetino (see his response for Jews in Poppi and Bibbiena, MGS 4450, 135-36). The request went to the podesta of Foiano and to Pieve Santo Stefano on 22 August (see the responses from late August in MGS 4450, 133, 125r); and probably in late August to the capitano of Cortona (see the response dated 2 September, MGS 4450, 126r). 16. When censuses were made in order to prepare for anything other than a head or hearth tax, these possessions were registered, even by Jews. For example, in the cat-

472 Notes to Chapter 4: Staging the Expulsion asto of 1427-30, Jews reported from Pisa, Pescia, Pistoia, Castiglione Fiorentina, Volterra, Arezzo, Montepulciano and San Miniato (Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles, 141-48, esp. 144-47). In our period, in 6 July 1569, a law required every head of a militia household in the Romagna Fiorentina to report on the number of bocche and its stores of grain, chesnuts and fodder for the purposes of rationing. Similar orders for other regions follow throughout July and August 1569; “il sistema annonario . . . era in osservanza in tutto lo Stato di Toscana” (Cantini, Legislazione toscana 7: 95).

17. Cassuto surmised that the Magistrato Supremo must have been already thinking about ghettoization when this census was conducted (Gi ebret a Firenze, 107). 18. The statements of defense made by the bankers are copied into MGS 4450 on ff. 12-41. Before the first testimony of a Jewish banker Lione di Abramo da Pisa hebreo on 19 July (36r—36v) is the heading “Constituto personalmente al mag[nifi|co M[esser] [crossed out: lone di| Fran[ces|co Vintha [sic] di comess[ion]e delli molto mag[nifi]ci s[igno]ri Consig[lie]ri.” This statement is either abbreviated or omitted on the copies of the other testimonies, but it seems safe to assume that Vinta was present all week. It is not clear from the documentation where exactly the hearings were held. 19. MGS 4450, 36r—36v. 20. Ibid., 37r-40Vv. 21. Ibid.: Davit, 24r—25r; Emanuel, 26r—27v; Laudadio, 28r—2or. 22. Ibid., 18r—r9v. 23. Ibid., 20r—21r; for Agnolo di Vitale, see 1ar—-141.

24. Acopy of the letter to the rector of Pisa concerning the revocation of Rieti’s charter is found in MGS 4449, 94v—95v (edited in Cassuto, Gli ebret a Firenze, 392~93) and in MGS 4450, o1v. On 20 June 1570 Rieti was given six months to close and finish his transactions.

25. A first letter of introduction for Agnolo was sent by I! Montino, and the favorable response to Agnolo (dated 10 January 1569/70) is found in MP 234, 164Vv. This is a copy in the register. of a letter sent to Agnolo, who is called there Ag’lo da volterra Hebreo banchiere in Pesero: “I! Marchese Montino ci ha parlato molto affettuosamente sopra vostre belle parti et intorno al vostro desiderio. Haremo piacere di vedervi et Pudirvi p[erJo sempre che lo possiate far con co[m]modita vostra venitevene da noi liberamente che lo potete fare et ci sara molto grato. Da Firenze.” Early in February 1569/70 Agnolo received a second letter from II Montino to bring with

: him on making his audience at court; MP 546, 46or. 26. MP 550, 201r (was 143). The letter of Agnolo di Laudadio hebreo in Pisa ts addressed on the back to the Gran Principe di Toscana (Francesco) and dated 27 July 1§70.

27. The reference is to a “colonna d’aqua gelato cavuta da una montagna di singular bellezza si per Partificio che in essa la natura ha operato nel lungo tempo di mano in mano che aqua cadendo in essa si congelava e si per la grandezza e per la grossezza sua per essere di braccia si lunga e grossa circa advia.” Letter of Agnolo da Rieti to Francesco Medici, from Pisa, 2 March 1569 (1570), MP 54.6, 654 r-v. 28. Ibid., “La prego co[n] ogni humilta s’aricordi della mia supplica e mi concedi

, quelle gratie che li dimando si per vivere piu quieto e sicuro come ancora p[er] mostrare al mondo che sono restato nella gratia sua bench[e] habbi serrato il banco del presto?”

Notes to Chapter 4: Staging the Expulsion = 473 29. “Apresso si p[er] le grate offerte ch[e] m’ha fatto p[er] sua cortesia posso disporre di Lei in qualche cosa no[n] mancaro prigarla che li siano raccomandati questi poveri hebrei che nel felicis[sim]o stato suo sono rifuggiti non per habitare— ma p[er] fugeire la tempesta della p[er|secutione ch[e] han[n]o hauto, quantunq[ue] pochi siano, assicurandola ch[e] come si allarga niente questo cattivo tempo delle lor miserie tutti se n’andaran[n]o ne li daran[n]o piu fastidio e quella sia sopra di me ch[e] cosi sara la verita, ne vogli p[er] si poco tempo—che ci hanno da stare e per si pochi che ci sono rinovare qualche legge che alPultimo tornasse In dispregio e dis’>honor n[{ost]ro che siamo cing[ue] o sei casate In tutto lo stato suo nati e allevati co[n] ogni civilta e honore; mostri la liberalita del?animo suo con li miseri e afflitti accio ch[e] da dio ne sia ristorato si come preghiamo tutti co[n] ogni devotione e con q.o me li offero e raccom[and]o Di pisa alli xxvii di luglio 1570.” 30. MP 237, 27v. Letter of Francesco de’ Medici to Agnolo hebreo in Pisa, 4 August 1570, “se li tre vasi di cristallo che scrivete con la vostra de 22 haver provisti sono ordinarii, non occore pigliate briga de mandarceli qua, perche ne abbiamo abastanza, ma quando sia qualche pezzo straordinario, et grande” 31. MP 553, 14 [old numeration 12]: “Ser.o Gra’ Principe. P[er] un altra mia avisai a v[ost]ra Alt{ezza] Ser[enissim]a come ero ritenuto qui in pisa ad instantia delli sig[no]ri consoli e che p[er] questo non ero potuto venire a basciarli le mani e farli riverentia. Hora li dico come li detti consoli mi han[n]o condan[n]ato In [scudi] ottocento senza che Io me sia potuto difendere ne giustificarmi ne dir le mie ragioni e che piu mai nYhanno detto ne fatto intendere p[er]che mi condannano, anzi contanta rigidezza e furia In .x. giorni m’han[n]o sententiato condan{[n ato e astretto a pagare ch[e] non ho potuto parlare ne dire dio m/aiuti. il Sig{no]r Com[messari]o sene stupisce li Dottori ne restano admirati poi ch[e] si amette li difese nelli gravi casi criminali li mercanti exclamano vedendo alterare le leggi della fiera poi ch[e] non si da fede alle scritte che in essa si fan[n]o e ch[e] altrui habia da esser conden[n]ato senza poter defendersi da chi ci ha interesso: Hora V[ostra] Alt[ezza] vede quanto torto riceve un suo servitore ta[n]to affettionato onde li e neces[sari]o ricorrere allei accio ch[e] no[n] patischi ch[e] riccevi questo dan[n]o e voglia haverlo In qualche consideratione accio ch[e] possa piu animosamente perseverare nella servitu sua aspettando dallei Gra[tia] et favor[e], pregandola no[n] ci lasci inpreda di q[uest]1 magistrati n[ost]ri nemici li quali cercheran[n]o sempre metterci in disgra[tia] sua tutto il giorno molesta[n]|doci ¢ perseg[ui|tandoci si lei co[n] la Sua solita cleme[n]tia non piglia le difese nfost]re che essendo noi me[m]bro debile no[n] habiamo p[er] noi altro ch[e] dio e V. Altezza et co[n] tutto il cuore mili offero e raccom[and]o. Di Pisa alli otto di 7mbre 1570. Signed: D[1] V. Alt. Ser.a minimo servitore. Angnolo [sic] di laudadio Heb.o 32. The phrase in MGS 4450 1s variably “con suo giuramento datoli supra [or super] calamo secondo lo stile et modo di detti hebrei” (e.g. ibid., rar) or “per mezzo di suo giuramento datoli in forma et secondo lo stile delli hebrei” (e.g. ibid., 18r). Premodern Jews were generally required to swear and take oaths on the Hebrew Bible, but in this case we do not know whether this was a special Jewish oath (on which there is a large literature) or a general oath sworn over the Hebrew, instead of the Christian, Bible. 33. No torture or pressure was applied to elicit confessions. The testimony of only one of the nine bankers, Lione d’Abramo da Pisa, does not follow this standardized order of responses. Lione generally denied all charges and asked permission,

474. Notes to Chapter 4: Staging the Expulsion which was granted, to defend himself in writing. His testimony was taken on the first

day the court heard the bankers; it is possible that after his testimony the court decided to control and speed the proceedings by interrogating the remaining bankers according to one set of questions rather than allowing them to make free statements. 34. ‘Testimony of Agnolo di Vitale hebreo, MGS 4-450, 13rv, discussed below. His statement is problematic: if the letters sent on 30 June and 5 July did not refer to Christian servants, why did only he and no one else mention it? If the defense is a set of responses to questions asked by the court, why did they ask only Agnolo? A few weeks later (27 July) they sent out a new letter to the vicars and podesta secking information On servants, this idea having perhaps arisen from Agnolo’s testimony. 35. Letter of Carlo Pitti to the grand duke, 8 August 1570, MGS 4450, 1401-4 IV. This letter reappears in a later, revised draft in the same work, 8r—1or.

36. MGS 4450, 12r-v. Agnolo di Vitale, known from other sources as da Camerino, was the minister of Samuel di Manuel, the patron of the bank at Monterchi, who also defended the loans made on festival days as made only when the vicar granted him permission (MGS 4450, 2or). Both Jews noted that lending on these otherwise “forbidden days” was specifically permitted to them by the charter as well as approved by the vicar. 37. ‘Two case studies of local anti-Jewish accusations in Europe are Shatzmiller, Shylock Reconsidered and Hsia, Trent 1475. In contrast to the devastating results of the inquisition conducted by church officicals in Trent, Jewish moneylenders (Shatzmiller argues elegantly and convincingly) had a very good chance of obtaining justice before the courts, which demanded that Christians honor contracts and oaths they made to Jews. But in Tuscany there was neither inquisition nor trial, as we shall see. 38. “Quanto allo havere prestato i{n| giorno festivo trovo che da qualche an[n]o in qua han[n]o prestato co[n]tinuamente exceptuato che le pasque e da poi che 10 sono qua han[n]o prestato il giorno delle feste co[n] mia lice[n]|tia p[er]che e stata tanta la gran carestia che 1 poveri no[n] potevano venire a perdere una opera di-” Letter of Iacopo di Lotto, vicar of Monterchi, 20 August 1570. MGS 4-450, 225 r-v. 39. Leone did not live in Pescia in 1570, but in Prato, so these are not testimonies of neighbors, but of clients. 40. MGS 4450, 49r. “Noi qui ap[p|ie sottoscritti facciamo vera et indubitata Fede che Leone da Pisa et Fr[ate]lli et loro ministri prestatori nella n[ost]ra Terra di Pescia $1 Sono sempre con noi portati civilmenti et d@’huomini da bene et da essi habiamo di continuo ricevuto servitio et comodi. Talmenti che di loro non ci possiamo in modo alcuno dolere anzi laudare Talmenti che desideriamo piu tosto loro che altri hebrei sicome sendo cio’ la verita sara la p[rese|nte di n[ost]ra mano affirmato” The two copies of the letters with all the signatures are in MGS 4450, 49r—sov and s1r—s2r.

41. For the argument that Jewish moneylending persisted into the nineteenth century because of the general failure of the monti di pieta, see Poliakov, Jewish Bankers, 14.6-59.

42. For Pescia, see Menning, Charity and State, 238-39, who notes that a proposal was made in 1570 for a new monte di pieta in Pescia, setting interest for loans at § percent. For Empoli, see Guerrini, Empoli 2: 542, 552-53. The duke allowed the commu-

nity of Empoli to contract with the Nove Conservatori to erect a monte di pieta and made a loan of 5,500 scudi to the new bank in October 1571 to start it off. The capitol of the charitable loan-bank were given to Empoli by the Nove in January, and its ministers were at that time appointed by the duke.

_ Notes to Chapter 4: Staging the Expulsion = 475 43. MGS 4450, 86r-v. 44. MGS 4450, 87r—-v: he “and his ministers have always operated the bank well and legally according to the ordine of the Capituli” 45. The support was not long-lasting and total in Pescia: Manuello di Davit Sforno would soon come under a sweeping attack (see below). 46. Menning, Charity and State, 238-39; Veronese, 201-3. The monte di pieta of Florence had had a representative in Empoli in the 1560s, but its own distinct local monte was established in late 1570, after the expulsion edict. 47. MGS 4450, 8or: “ne 1: nissun alt[r]o modo fatto mai torto a persona. Anzi sentitolo lodare a molti p[er] persona giusta et Ragionevole in tutti suoi negotij, ne pensiamo che habbi mai trasgredito gli suoi capitoli ma piu tosto usar cortesia e contentarse pigliar meno del suo dovere havendo semp[re] havuto gra[nd] Remession a poveri nella staggion penuriosa, e pigliar da loro di ogni sorta e qualita di Robba p[er] miserabili che fussero i pegni. E tenendo noi detto sabato p[er] tale e vedutone Alcuni sperienze, no[n] habiamo [sic] volsuto ma[n]care di fargli la p[resen]te fede sottoscritta di nfost|ra p[ro]p[ri]a mano di soprascritto.” 48. MGS 4450, 811r—v, 82r, 831r—v, 84-r.

49. MGS 4450, 76r: “chome [sic] p[er]sona et giusta et dabbene et honorata”” A

marginal comment says that the letter was produced (for the Magistrates) by Emanuello on the twentieth day of July 1570. 50. Testimony of Bartolomeo di pagolo bertini da Pescia, 11 August, MGS 4450, 212r; testimony of Iac[op]o di Giuliano di paschino da Pescia, 17 August, MGS 4450, 2121r-V.

st. MGS 4450, 210Vv.

52. MGS 4450, 69r, 7or. 53. All the statements are favorable and both verbally and conceptually independent of one another. See MGS 4450, 55r—-s6v, 58-59, 60, 61. All the letters date from July 1570.

54. MGS 4450, 6ar. |

55. MGS 4450, ssr—s6v, dated 27 July 1570. 56. MGS 4450, 671r-68v, dated 31 July 1570.

57. Letter from Francesco di Bartolomeo da San Giovanni dated 21 July, MGS 4450, 177-78V.

58. OGP 114, 275r-v: “Item simi? modo et forma veduto la inquisitione formata

contro M[aest]ro Alessandro di Giovanfran[cesc]o Catani da Montevarchi et M{esser] Bar[tolome]o di Cristofano di L[oren]zo Bindi di d[e]c[t]o luogho dove in sus[ten]za se conteneva il di 17 di 9mbre [novembre] prossimo passato andando d[e]c[t]o mg. Bar[tolome]o a spasso per la via nuova fuora di monte varchi esse[r] stato affrontato dal d[e]c[t]o m[aest]ro Alessandro et percosso con un bastone. .. et intromettendosi infra di loro mg. Lione hebreo per al hora non essere seguita altro . .

. di poi il medesimo giorno il d[e]c[t]o M. Bar[tolome]o armato di pugnale haven{do]affrontato dc. M{aest]ro Alex[andr]o che andava a spasso lungho arno et havergli minato dua pugnalate senza ferirlo come al libro di querele no. 327” s9. OGP 114, 275r—-v, dated 13 February 1569/70.

60. MGS 4450, t1or. There is also a Lione ebreo in Monterchi, which should however not be confused with Montevarchi. Both cities are about 30 km from Arezzo. Lione’s household was the only Jewish household from Montevarchi in the report that came from San Giovanni.

476 Notes to Chapter 4: Staging the Expulsion 61. That relations between Jews and Christians were friendlier than most scholarship has allowed has also been argued by Elaine G. Rosenthal for the fifteenth century in her unpublished paper “Paradoxical Relations: Jews and Christians in Early

Modern Florence;’ delivered at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Stanford, March 1992. I thank her for sharing with me a copy of her paper.

62. MGS 4450, 69r. The letter is written by the doctor (medico) Alessandro di Gio[vanni] Franc[esc]o Catassi [or Catani] da Montevarchi, and dated the first of August: “et piu volte m’é occorso andare in casa d[e]c[t]o mg. Davitte in giorno di festa ne mai ho visto in decti giorni il banco aperto.” Two witnesses signed the letter.

63. Toaff, Love, Work, and Death. Florentine criminal court records include a number of cases of Jewish men visiting brothels; most of the cases turn up only because of the involvement of the Jew in other crimes, such as those of the fifteenthcentury Joseph Manni (ASF Atti del Podesta, 4489, 21r-22v, in Brucker, ed., The Soctety of Renaissance Florence, 246-47).

64. See Chapter Five below, for a discussion of the association in Christian culture of Jews and prosititutes. Canon law and papal bulls prohibited not only the exchange of money for sex between Jews and Christians but sexual contact itself. The

first grand-ducal edict against sex between Jews and Christians I have found is a “Bando sopra la proibizione del commercio carnale tra i Cristiani e Ebrei ottenuto nel Supremo Magistrato il di 16 Giugno dell’anno 1679”; a copy is in ACEF Box D.3.1, Decreti Governati Secoli XVI-XX. The prohibition concerns both “cristiane e hebree meretrici e donne di mala vita.”

65. MGS 4450, 179v: “che la moglie di ms [messer] Leone hebreo era in{n]Jamorata di uno x’ano [Christiano] che ¢ doctor giovane pratese senza d[ire] il norme et che percio & forsa dubitando che la non li dessi de denari o della gioia Leone la levo di prato & la mando a Pescia dove hoggi la si truova.” 66. Most of the responses of the vicars and podesta to the Magistrato Supremo refer to a letter dated 27 July, which they received 31 July or a few days thereafter; others were sent in late August (see note 15 above). Mail was much slower to the remote regions of the state: the vicar of Poppi noted that he received the 27 July letter on 12 August (MGS 4450, 135r). 67. In Pescia, the Nove approved local statutes on this subject on 29 July 1560; ASF Comunita autonome e soggette 304, 30r. 68. Some of the charters of the bankers include prohibitions that are found in canon law. The point, however, is that in the expulsion edict, Jews will be accused of violating canon law, not only their charters. 69. From a letter of the vicar of Pescia dated 22 August 1570 we learn that the letters of 27 July “to go investigating about the grievances made by the said Jews” were signed by Carlo Pitti (MGS 4450, 209r). 70. These interviews with townspeople from Prato, Pescia and San Giovanni, especially women and a few men who worked for the Jews, are preserved in the Magistrato Supremo’s “Proceedings against the Jews” (MGS 4450). 71. In Italian, “il sabato” refers to the day after Friday (for Jews, the sabbath coincided with 7d sabato, although beginning at sunset on Friday, while for Christians, the sabbath was i! domenico, the Lord’s day). While I translate the word, when used by a Christian, as Saturday, I wonder whether the word sabato itself may have increased the appreciation of Christian Italian-speakers of Jewish religious observance —including the prohibition of handling money on the Sabbath.

Notes to Chapter 4: Staging the Expulsion = 477 72, MGS 4450, 179r-Vv. 73. MGS 4450, 1781r-v. 74. MGS 4450, 210rE—12Vv.

75. There are also three letters from Pisa written by Christians with claims against Agnolo hebreo [da Rieti] (MGS 4450, 203-7), but there is no letter from the officials in Pisa. 76. The letter from Pescia (with the list of servants and a statement about posting the 27 July dando) is in MGS 4450, 226r. A summary of the infractions of the banking capitoli by Manuello di Davit Sforno is found on 239r—-4or. 77. This was Manuello, or Emanuello di Davit Sforno, the agent of the da Pisa. The official letter from Pescia in response to the circular from 27 July was signed on 22 August 1570 by Carlo Martini, vicar of Pescia (MGS 4450, 209r—v), and was accompanied by sworn statements of about ten people (213-18) against the Jewish pawnbrokers. Letters from Pescia in favor of the da Pisa which declared the honesty of both the da Pisa and their ministers notwithstanding, among the bankers, Emanuello di Davit Sforno had a truly bad reputation. Letters dated 30 June through 2 July 1570 accused him of dishonesty (190r, 191r). Other borrowers joined the bandwagon late in August and in September (201r—2v). 78. MGS 4450, 213r-v, testimony of 5 August 1570. 79. MGS 4450, 1928, letter of Luigi Sostegni, dated 30 July 1570. 80. The letter from the podesta is MGS 4450, 182r, dated 12 August 1570. He says he instructed the public to send their grievances to the Magistrato Supremo, but there are no letters or testimony from these towns post-dating the announcements of 3-10

August except for one individual’s claim against Davitte hebreo, dated 4 August (MGS 4450, 186r), concerning a jacket that had been submitted as a pledge. 81. MGS 4450, 1841: “sono adesso passati 1 giorni dieci e nessuno a[n]cora e co[m]parso a dir cosa alcu[n]a”” The announcement was made on 31 July, a market day, and the podesta refers to the notification sent to him dated 27 July to anyone who feels he has been “aggravato in cosa alcuna da essi hebrei.” 82. MGS 4450, 2251r-v.

83. There is no evidence that this letter was ever sent to Pisa. It appears from some of the responses that the governors were commissioned to investigate whether any of the Jewish bankers had Christian “servi, serve or balie” However, the governors seem to have assumed that the magistrates would be interested in Christian servants employed by any Jews. In several cases, such as that of Monterchi, the vicar fails to mention the name of the Jewish employer and the names of the Christian employees (225r).

84. The lists of Christian servants who have been employed by Jews as servants or wetnurses are found in MGS 4450: San Giovanni, 182r, 188r; Prato, 184r; Pescia, 226r; Empoli, 193r-94r; Monterchi. 225. 85. These were the practices of the wealthiest Jewish families. The governors were not asked to provide information about the employment of Christians by other Jews, and we only learn a few details by chance (see below). 86. “nutrices seu ancillas aut alios utriosque sexus servientes christianos habere, vel eorum infantes per mulieres christianas lactari aut nutriri facere”; Bullarium 4: part 1a, 121-322, as cited by Colorni, Gi ebrei nel sistema del dirito comune, 37-38. 87. Letter of Ser Iacopo di Lotto, 20 August 1570, Monterchi. MGS 4450, 225r:

“Trovo Mag[nifici] Sig[nori] che detti Ebrei da poi che sono qua no[n] han{n]Jo

478 Notes to Chapter 4: Staging the Expulsion tenuto ne servi ne serve ne Balie Cristiani ma si bene han[n]Jo hauto [sic] chi ha inbianchato loro i pan[n]i che sono state co[n]tadine di questo vicariato a un tanto il pezo del pano dai quali sono stati pagati volta per volta che hano inbiancato e cosi alcuno il quale li ha portato loro della aqua et sono stati pagati volta per volta di sua fatica””

88. MGS 4450, 182r, letter dated 12 August 1570: “Ha fatto allatarre fuora di casa

a una balia in montevarchi un figl[iuol]o pagandoli se[con]do il mese” (I have retained the superscripted name M?lena here as in the text because it is not clear from the manuscript whether her name should be transcribed as Monna Lena or as Maddalena.)

89. Ibid. 90. The list, in MGS 4450, 188r, is written in a second hand, not signed, and dated 8 August. It is not clear why the vicar chose to refer to some of the Christians in his written report and not to others. 91. Davit di Raffaello, the banker in San Giovanni, was of the Finzi family, the } brother of Zaccaria. There is no record of his presence in Tuscany after 1571, when he appointed a lawyer to handle business in his absence (NM 547 of the notary Piero Renzi of San Giovanni, 121-14).

92. “Davit hebreo co[n] la moglie un fig[liuo]lo dua fig[liuo]le et la serva in t[u|t[t]o bocche sei boc. 6” (MGS 4450, tor). 93. MGS 4450, 1841, letter from the podesta of Prato dated 11 August 1570, with respect to the 27 July directive for a report on “serve, servitori e balie” employed by the Jews: “hanno in casa a loro spese e salario un tedescho vechio che se ne servono per cuoco e per servitor e certe do[n]ne cristiane Praticano alle volti in case loro a farli bucate et altri servitii et necessarii”’ 94. MGS 4450, 1931r—Vv, 1944.

95. Fiametta da Pisa had four female and five male Jewish servants in her employ in 1567, when she was granted exemptions from the obligation to wear the segno for eighteen Jews (including “quattro serve and cinque servidori,” MGS 4449, 85r, dated 20 June 1567).

96. There was “una fanciulla serva” “una serva” “un’altra donna vecchia” and “un garzone,.’ in Monterchi (MGS 4-450, 108r); there was “un garzone” in Empoli (MGS 4450, 1osr) and “una serva” in San Giovanni (MGS 4450, ro9r). 97. MGS 4450, 193r. 98. Ibid. She was given a salary of 8 lire and clothes and (that being very little) had “nothing other than her clothes.” 99. MGS 4450, 193Vv.

100. MGS 4450,193v. Delvora is the Italian spelling of the biblical name (and judge) Deborah. Dorina may therefore have had the Hebrew name Devorah, or she

| may have been called Delvora in the context of Jewish prayer. She has also been referred to mistakenly as Fiorina in various recent studies, but I believe that name may reflect a misreading of Dorina in manuscripts difficult to decipher. 101. This family appears frequently in the literature on the Jews of Tuscany; see Luzzati, La casa delVebreo, indice dei nomi, s.v. Alpilinc. Between 1540 and 1556 the mohel Yehiel Nissim da Pisa circumcised nine sons of the four brothers, all sons of

Giuseppe: Moise (Dorina’s husband) and Abraham, both in Empoli; Emanuel (or Immanuel) in Pontedera; and Iacob in Pisa (Sonne, pp. 217-19). The earliest reference

Notes to Chapter 4: Staging the Expulsion 479 I have found to the family in Tuscany is the matriculation in 1524 of Giuseppe di Iacob into the Guild of Doctors and Spice Merchants of Empoli (see Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households, appendix 3). 102. MGS 4450, 1osr, “Nota delle famiglie e bocche di giudei che si trovavano in Empoli” She and her husband, Mosheh Alpelink, had four sons circumcised by Yehiel Nissim of Pisa: Yosef, Daniel, Yosef and Shlomo (Sonne, 217-19). Since her mature family included four boys named Laudadio, Daniel, Giuseppe and Salamone, it is likely that the first-born son was renamed Laudadio before the third son was born. Two adult sons, Salamone and Giuseppe, were living in a house in Empoli in 1570 (ASE Podesta 197, unpaginated), so they must have been in her house, since they are not listed separately on the census in MGS 4450.

103. “Caterina da cascina (sta p[er] serva) di eta di 12 0 13 Anni cor [sic] una hebrea detta m[on]a dorina et vi e stata seco circa Anni 5 et u[n]a altra ne tene circa 2 ani [sic] sono il marito a mo[n]te lupo a Dom|[eni]co stovigliaio, che era stata seco Anni 12. Meo di betto di nese di eta di Anni 16 sta con detta hebrea e vi stato Anni 7 gli da di sal{ari]o [scudi] 9% Pano senza altro et collui vi sta un altro suo fratello co[n] {scudi] 2 Pano. Domenicho di benedetto dice essere stato co[n] detto [sic] m[on]a dorina heb[r]ea circa Anni 3 AlParte della lana—e de circa u[{n]o An[n]o si p[ar]ti dallei. Lino di Matteo bologniesi d’empoli Aiuto 3 anni un giorno p[er] volta al detto Matassia ebreo a fare Pazimelle e cosi a m* dorina di moise hebreo aiuto” The list is signed by Luigi Sostegni, podesta of Empoli, MGS 4450, 193v-94r. 104. Except for the vicar of Monterchi, discussed above. 105. And not by the hour.

106. Testimony from the interrogation on 2 August 1570 of a man who works occasionally for a Jewish household, especially on the Sabbath, “pero mi pagan bene” (MGS 4450, 2I0r). 107. ‘lestimony of 2 August 1570, MGS 4450, 210r. 108. ‘Testimony of Agnolo di Vitale hebreo, 24 July 1570, MGS 4450, 13Vv. 109. “Hanno tenuto assai pratiche et conversationi co[n] christiani et tenute serve et servitori et balie christiane giuocato, mangiato et spassatosi insieme il che tutto e prohibito dai sacri canoni sotto pena di scomunica, et si crede che li piu de Christiani lo faccino 0 pfer] ignoranza 6 p[er] poverta lassando di dire si innamoramenti et peccati di carne” (MGS 4.450, 9r, 140v—41r). Note that this sounds familiar because Pitti is using testimony he took earlier from a Christian in Prato about Leone ebreo, cited above. 110. There was also one nonbanking household in Prato, headed by a Jew named Lustro, which employed a female Christian servant (as mentioned above), but violations were not specified (MGS 4.450, 179r-v). 1. MGS 4449, 1o1r—v; reproduced in Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 395-96. 112. Menning, Charity and State, 4, 13; Brackett, Criminal Justice, 41. 113. On the citizenship of Jews, see above in Chapter Two. 114. Apparently, the Jews were seen as sufficiently similar to other Tuscan subjects that their expulsion without cause would create a disturbance. The people of each subjected locality in the Florentine dominion had been independent within historical memory: they struggled with dominance, oligarchy, patronage and corruption; blatant despotism would not have played well. us. Testament of Carlo Pitti, NM 2177, 14:v—-27r, dated 13 March 1582/83.

480 Notes to Chapter 4: Staging the Expulsion 116. Brackett, “The Florentine Onesta”” 11. 117. De’ Ricci, Chronaca 1: 391Vv, 451r (167, 288). Carlo di Alessandro Pitti, born 1522, is mentioned a number of times in the Chronaca. Ricci records his name in a list of senators (Tomo Secondo, f. 2r) and his death on 22 May 1586 “di dispiacere et di fame.”

118. Arditi, Diario, 134: “Carlo Pitti, uomo poverissimo, ma oggi venuto a grado [alternatively translated as ‘having made the grade’].” Pitti and four other men are depicted in most unflattering terms as the five new ministers appointed to impiously and cruelly abuse their fellow citizens. 119. See previous two notes. 120. D’Addario, Aspetts della Controriforma, 309 and note tos there. 121. Cassuto, Gli ebret a Firenze, 68-73, discussed the original printing of this chart and treatise by the monk Marco da Monte Santa Maria in 1494; see now V. Meneghin, Bernardino da Feltre e I Monti di Pieta (Vicenza, 1974), 175-81, cited by Veronese, 202, n. 15. Parts of it were also published by Ciardini (Banchtert, 92-98 and xci-c). See also Menning, Charity and State, 24, 43-44. The chart was copied into MGS 4450 without attribution to its source. 122, MGS 4450, 9r: “ma meglio sarebbe mandarli via tutti’ 123. MGS 4450, 1sor—sav, dated 7 July 1570. 124. A full analysis of the literary sources for Martelli’s treatise is a promising subject for future research. Anti-Jewish material in Italy surges in the 1470s. Where antiJewish iconography is presented, as it was for political purposes in the Roverella altarpiece at Ferrara, the imagery is complex and theological. The fact of circumcision was one important element; see Campbell, Cosme Tura of Ferrara, 121. On the 1470s, see Fioravanti, “Polemiche antijudaiche.” For the apparently rare instances of artistic representation in the Italian states of the Host Desecration, see the discussion of the predella of Paolo Uccello in Urbino and an Italian dramatic work in Rubin, Gentile Tales, 148-49 and 172-73. 125. The accusation of the murder of Simone in Trent in 1475 and the devastating trial of the Jewish community there has been the subject of a detailed study by Hsia, Trent 1475; for the more general context, see Hsia, Myth of Ritual Murder.

126. See also, for the broader political context of the reception of Bernardino’s sermons in northern Italy, “he Roverella, the Jews and the Image of Ecclesiastical Statehood,” a study by Campbell on anti-Jewish pictorial rhetoric in his Cosme Tura of Ferrara, 99-129. 127. MGS 4450, ISI. 128. MP 236a, sv, Letter to Nofri Camaiani, 19 May 1571, which concludes “noi lodevemo molto la convintione con il Pitti [es]sendo la famiglia nobiliss[im]a, la fanciulla ben creata, di buona forma et il p[ad]re a noi et a sua Altezza accetti[ssi]mo da

esser doppio p[ad]re a lelio per molti anni le disegnat’ di maritarlo in paese accio possa continuar la servitu con noi non a pare che possiate migliorar?? Monsignor Onofrio Camaiani, later proposto of Prato, is of the family of the very prominent Pietro Camaiani (d. 1579) who had been in the service of Cosimo de’ Medici at the Council of ‘Trent, then bishop in Fiesole (1552-66) and special papal legate in Spain in 1566 (D’Addario, Apsetti della Controriforma, 248; Raspini, “Elenco dei vescovi di Fiesole;” 5O-SI).

129. Menning, Charity and State, appendix A, 301. Only thirteen loans were

Notes to Chapter 4: Staging the Expulsion 481 larger than the one made to Carlo Pitti during the decade 1564-74, most of them made to members of the Medici family (see table 12 of the appendix). 130. MP 554, 313r. 131. MP 554, 155.

132. MP 554, 15sr: “Ho inteso dal mio figliuolo la buona mente che V[ostr]a Alt[ezza] Ser[enissim]a ha dimostrato verso di mi, della quale benche Io mai me diffidassi co[n] tutto cio visto il bando Generale e no[n] trovandomici excluso, stavo continuam|[ente] adolorato, piangendo la mia mala sorte che la mia servitu non Li fusse stata grata. Hora mi sono alquanto q[uiJetato e le bascio li mani ¢ la ringratio . .. No[n] dubiti gia mai v. Alt. . . che come li dissi ultimamente che li parlai, di nuovo

li raftermo che sempre staro nello stato suo Feliciss[im]o quando impero ci potro stare honoratamente, e, quantu[n]que io fussi chiamato e desiderato da altri principi, co’tutto cio e tanto amore ch[e] porto allei che mai saro [in] animo di servire altri in q[uan]|to vedera co[s]ti offitti p[er]severan’o nelPantica mia servitu. Ne pigli suspetto per tenere un mio figliuolo in Ferrara, impero che non ce lo tengo piu per comodo mio che pfer] servitio di V[ostro] Alt{ezza] essendo il luoco comodo di poter andar a Venetia e a Milano dove capitorno quelle piu rare cose che per servitio suo cerco di providere-’ 133. MP 554, 313r: “Alli giorni passati, quando V[ostra] A[ltezza] per sua benignita depositd su’! Monte di questa sua Citta di Pisa scudi quindicimila per aiuto de poveri, fu necessario per buona governa de detta Monte dare alcuni nuovi ordini.. . et ne fu lassato il disegno in mano di M. Carlo Pitti” 134. Under the circumstances it was certainly not easy for the bankers to recoup their loans. However, the Magistrato Supremo protected this right, as may be seen in the letter from the Magistrato Supremo to the podesta in Pescia commanding that the people of Pescia proceed with the election of an overseer for the auction of the pledges still held by the brothers da Pisa, MGS 1077, 37v—38r. 135. On the ecclesiastical and royal doctrines of the status of Jews as servi camerae, see Baron, “Medieval Nationalism and Jewish Serfdom” and “Plenitude of Apostolic Powers’ and Medieval ‘Jewish Serfdom” (in Hebrew). For the sixteenth-century chal-

lenge of some ecclesiastics to secular rulers’ exclusive domain over Jews, see Hsia, Myth of Ritual Murder, 113-15, on the question of forced baptism.

Chapter 5: Constructing the Ghetto 1. Alberto Boralevi suggested the potential of analyzing the ghetto from the perspective of urban planning in his “Prime note sulPistituzione del ghetto” I am grateful to Dr. Dora Liscia Bemporad for helping me obtain a copy of this article, to which she refers in her article “La scuola italiana e la scuola levantina?’ 5, note 6.

2. On the political and administrative reorganization under Cosimo I, see Anzilotti, La costituzione interna; D’Addario, “Burocrazia, economia e finanze”; and Fasano Guarini, Lo stato medsceo di Cosimo I and the synthesis by Diaz, Il granducato di Toscana: I Medict. Brown, In the Shadow of Florence and Litchfield, Emergence of a Bureaucracy were particularly important to the development of the present study.

3. Nove 3696, ur (dated 17 January 1570/71) and the following pages list and describe the properties bought by the “prince of Tuscany” (principe di toschana) for the ghetto “per quella di suo comessione in voce Carlo Pitti” On Carlo Pitti, see Chapter

Four, notes 117-18 above. Giulio de’ Nobili, who was then provveditore, became

482 Notes to Chapter 5: Constructing the Ghetto soprassindaco on Pitti’s death in 1586, while remaining provveditore (Ricci, Cronaca 2: 32K).

4. Aplan of the ghetto drawn in 1721 indicates that a covered (vaulted) passageway led from this gate to the main piazza of the ghetto; see ASF Possessioni, vol. 26, n. 670, c. I. By 1721 the ghetto had been expanded, probably under Cosimo ITI, who was grand duke 1670-1723. Cassuto (Gili ebrei a Firenze, 116) did not cite a source for his statement that the ghetto was enlarged by Cosimo III, but Carocci, I] ghetto di Firenze, 30-31 says that apartments were expropriated by Cosimo III in 1704 to erect the New Ghetto, when this piazza became known as that of old ghetto (Piazza del Ghetto Vecchio). By 1888, when detailed plans of the zone were drawn prior to its complete demolition, the piazza was called Piazza della Fonte, reflecting its main feature, a large well that is visible on the map drawn by Bonsignori (see Figure 2). §. Conti, Firenze vecchia, 416. The Loggia del Pesce (western end of the Mercato), wells and column are all visible on Bonsignori’s plan (Figure 2). On the history and fate of Donatello’s statue, see David G. Wilkins, “Donatello’s Lost Dovizia for the Mercato Vecchio: Wealth and Charity as Florentine Civic Virtues” in Art Bulletin 65 (1983): 401-23. 6. Cassuto, Gh ebret a Firenze, 116. 7. Nove 3697, I1v—I2r. 8. Nove 3697, 141r-V.

9. Lapini, Diario, 171; see the text in note 21 below. The association of the ghetto

and prostitutes is seen also in the contemporaneous diary of Bastiano Arditi (discussed below), in the nineteenth-century description of the ghetto by Carocci (cited above) and, more recently, by Fanelli, Firenze architettura e citta 1: 291. 10. Brackett, “The Florentine Onesta? 286-87; Conti, Firenze vecchia, 430. i. Conti, Firenze vecchia, 433. 12. Brackett, “The Florentine Onesta; 291. Brackett also cites the names of the streets authorized in 1560 (291, note 79), but these do not include names known to us from the property that became the ghetto. For an overview of legislation on prostitutes (from 1561-1607), see now Stoppioni, “DelPordine pubblico: Meretrici, giochi,

brutture e illuminazione notturna, in Pratilli and Zangheri, eds., La legislazione medicen 4.: 190-93.

13. Brackett, “The Florentine Onesta,’ 287, note 64. 14. MM 224, 1071, in the quarter of San Giovanni: “Dodici meretrici in una casa

di Chiarissimo di Bernardino; Dodici meretrici in una casa in Francesco di Bernardino” Battara cites ASF Miscellanea Medicea 314bis for this same census data (Battara, La populazione di Firenze, 19, note 1).

1s. Brackett, “The Florentine Onesta;’ 291 and note 79 there, 296; Battara, La popolaztone di Firenze, 17-18. Battara notes, however, that most of the listed 79 segnowearing prostitutes were living in Via de Pilastri, in Borgo Ogni Santi (far from the Mercato Vecchio and its brothels) and in the “Albergo di M. Jacopo de Medici”

16. On the “necessity” of both Jews and prostitutes to urban society, see above, Chapter Two, note 23. On the history of the toleration and regulation of prostitutes in Florence, see Brackett, “The Florentine Onesta,” esp. 273~77 and Trexler, “Florentine Prostitution.” 17. Brackett, “The Florentine Onesta, 292. The yellow ribbon reference comes from a case mid-century concerning the famous courtesan and author Tullia D’Ara-

Notes to Chapter 5: Constructing the Ghetto —_ 483 gona, 295, but the yellow ribbon was reintroduced 1n 1577 (ibid., 296). Yellow had not

been the only color used to mark the prostitutes: in 1511 streetwalkers had been obliged to wear a red, green or yellow veil, and that legislation had been renewed in 1527 and 1558 (Brackett, “The Florentine Onesta,’ 289).

18. Brackett, ibid., 296 and passim. Sumptuary legislation from 1577 for prostitutes specified that they were not allowed to wear pearls, closing off their neck from their bosom, which, Brackett argues, denied them a fundamental expression of female honor. Jewish women were not subject to this law. 19. Ibid., 288. 20. See Chapter Two, notes 21 and 121 above. An example of such regulations for a subject city may be seen in the statutes of Arezzo, Statuti 26, section titled Riforme e statuti delle citta di Arezzo e Cortine, del 1565 n. 4.6, 202v, which requires prostitutes “stare, comorari vel habitare non possit extra postribulum modo aliquo” and that brothels be at a “loca solita che ordinata ac deputata” by officials. The Medici state continued to regulate prostitutes; new rules issued in 1579/80 (Cantini, Legislazione toscana 9: 327ff) attempted to control what streets they lived on, what clothes they wore, what times of day they could ride in carriages or make appearances in public

etc. Courtesans, women who sold sex to a higher class of men and successfully avoided registration with the Onesta as prostitutes, were consequently able to live unregulated on better streets and charge a higher rate for their service (Brackett, “The Florentine Onesta,” passim). Similarly, wealthy Jews in Florence attempted to obtain permission to live outside the ghetto; on their later experience, see Sciloni, “Noterelle sul ‘Fuorighetto-” 21. Lapini, Diario, 171: “Di gennaio 1570 il signor principe di Firenze Francesco

de’ Medici comincio a far murare il luogo dove abitano gli giudei, avendo primo compero case, magazzini e postribuli e botteghe et altre abitazioni dove erono state le pubbliche meretrice e meccaniche, grandissimo tempo.” The section continues: “E vi fe’ fare tutte Pabitazioni e botteghe che al presente si veggono in piazza giudea: che in su detta piazza di qua e di la erono le botteguzze, e stanzuzze delle meccanichissime

meretrice, e si levorno ¢ si murorno le stanze che vi sono; che spese detto signor Principe parecchi migliaja di scudi. E si serrono ogni sera, e pit tardi e pia buon ora secondo i tempi” (I have translated meccaniche according to the editorial note). 22. Lapini, Diario, 42 (Cantagalli edition, 62). His references to Bianca Capello, the famous mistress of Cosimo’s son, Duke Francesco, are generally disapproving. This detail appears to be the source of Cecil Roth’s undocumented comment concerning a relationship between Bianca Capello and Jewish women provisioners; see Roth, The Jews in the Renaissance, 49. 23. Lapini, Diario, 102 (Catagalli edition, 145). The law to which he refers pertained to non-Florentine Jews. Restrictions on Jewish travel will be discussed below. 24. Ibid., 112 (Cantagalli edition, 163-64, where this page of the manuscript 1s

reproduced in facsimile). There were in fact Jewish women who provisioned the noblewoman. A second conteinporary source refers specifically to a Jewish woman in Bianca’s service named Gentile, who was arrested as a witch in 1588 (Ricci, Cronaca, 46v). There is no evidence, however, of her arrest in the criminal court records of that year.

25. ‘Trexler, “Florentine Prostitution in the Fifteenth Century,” 65. 26. There were important differences in the state’s approach to the two popula-

484. Notes to Chapter 5: Constructing the Ghetto tions. Most notably, prostitution was not forbidden to women, as moneylending was to Jews. That is, the “offensive” behavior of the prostitutes was not prohibited but was controlled and taxed, while nominal support was given to the effort to convert them. In the case of the Jews in Tuscany, the “offensive” behavior was prohibited, and no effort was made to convert them. Whereas a part of the tax collected from prostitutes was given to the Convertite, an institution established to bring “repentant” women back to the respectable life, the Jews of Florence were not taxed to support a house for their conversion to the Catholic faith as they were in Rome and other cities. On the Convertite, see Cohen, “The Convertite and Malmaritate? This supports my thinking in Chapters One and Two that in sixteenth-century Tuscany Jewish identity

: was understood by Christians more in national and regional terms than in religious terms: that is, that Jews who were moneylenders were “essentially” Jewish and could

be turned away from that occupation but not from their identity as Jews, just as women who were prostitutes were essentially Christian women and could be turned away from prostitution, not from being Christian women. 27. On profits from taxing the prostitutes, see Brackett (“The Florentine Onesta,” 275) who refers to the Onesta as “a flexible instrument of exploitation” of the prostitute population. Registered prostitutes were first ordered to pay a tax, which was assigned to the Convertite, in 1559 (ibid., 291). 28. The task given to the Office of Decency when it was established in 14-03 was, specifically, “to wean men from homosexuality by fostering female prostitution”

according to Trexler, “Florentine Prostitution in the Fifteenth Century, 373. As Trexler has shown, the government’s responses to sodomy and prostitution were colored by its interest in strengthening the institution of marriage and encouraging procreation. Homosexual behavior was considered sinful by Florentine moralists, who argued that parents and society in general encouraged boys and adolescents to engage

in it nonetheless, reaping social status. As Rocke points out, it is noteworthy that Bernardino did not imagine that prostitution could eradicate sodomy, since “when he explained why sodomites hated women, Bernardino employed cultural, not biblical, arguments that center the problem in contempt of women,” and he “evidently saw

sodomites’ rejection of women as stemming from their basic erotic orientation” (“Sodomites in Fifteenth-century Tuscany,’ 20-21). See also Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 13-44.

29. Nove 3696, 3697, 3698. Dora Liscia Bemporad consulted these volumes to conclude that there is no reference therein to the building of a synagogue in the ghetto (“La scuola italiana e la scuola levantina,” 5-6). 30. Florins (fl.) are the equivalent of scudi and (approximately) of ducats. There are 7 lire per florin or scudo and 20 soldi per lira. 31. Nove 3697, 12v—13r: a total of thirty-four rooms purchased from the Della Tosa on 19 January. Nove 3697, tr, dated 17 January: Chiarissimo di Bernardo de Medici owns half the property composed of thirty-five rooms; the other half belongs to his heirs Iacopo, Alberto, Cosimo, Piero and Alexandro, who are brothers and sons of Alexandro di Iacopo de’ Medici. For Pollacciolo, see Nove 3697, 11v-12r; for the others, see Nove 3696, 2-6 and Nove 3697, 13r—15r. For Table 1 I have rounded all figures to the nearest florin.

32. According to Conti, in his undocumented description of the ghetto as it stood before its destruction, in Firenze vecclia, 430, the families who owned the prop-

Notes to Chapter 5: Constructing the Ghetto 485 erty that would become the ghetto included, according to the 1427 catasto, the Pecori, the Fighineldi, the Filitieri, the Brunelleschi, the Della Tosa and the Catellini da Castiglione. 33. For this process, see Lansing, The Florentine Magnates, chaps. 3 and 5.

34. In other ghettos, where the rulers did not purchase the ghetto property, the governments protected the Jewish tenants from arbitrarily rising rents with laws granting them hereditary leases. This legal concept came to be known, in Italian, as ius gazaga (in Mantuan dialect, or, in Venetian dialect, casaca from the Hebrew hazakah). Nonetheless, there was much profit to private Christian owners: see, for example, Concina, “Owners, Houses, Functions,’ 182. In Florence, by becoming the landlord, the grand duke ensured that the state collected the rent itself and had direct control over the rents. 35. The most explicit record of this transaction is found in Nove 3697, 90, dated § February 1570 (Florentine style), with reference to a contract for the purchase of the property notarized by Francesco Giodani. The duke did not consider himself entirely above the law: letters were sent the following week to the “maestri de contratti” on account of the “gabelle de beni,’ suggesting that the appropriate gabvelle for the transfer of property were paid. The ghetto property became a “possession of the state,” administered by the Nove Conservatori (administered later by the Scrittoio delle Possessioni). 36. Menning, Charity and State, 261. Because it follows the bank thoroughly only into the 1560s, Menning’s study does not refer to the transfers between the monte and the Nove related to the purchase of the ghetto property. 37. For the relationship of the monte and the Jews in Florence, see Cassuto, Gi ebret a Firenze, 56-83, especially 76-83. More generally, see Ciardini, I banchiert ebret; Poliakov, Jewish Bankers; and Shatzmiller, Shylock Reconsidered. See also, reviewing most of this material, Menning’s discussion of Jewish moneylending in her introduction to the history of the monte di pieta in Florence (Charity and State, 1-35). 38. Menning, Charity and State, appendix A, table 4, “The first eighteen depositors with interest-bearing accounts, 1539-1542.” 39. Ibid., table 12, “Documented large loans, 1564-1574.” 40. Ibid., table 12, p. 301. Carlo Pitti is the only person who pays more than 6 percent interest (which became the rule in 1568). This is further evidence that he did not have the stature to be granted such a large loan and that he was being treated as an exception. 41. Ibid., table 12, 296-305. 42. Most recently, by Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589, 43; Dora Liscia Bemporad, “La scuola italiana e la scuola levantina,’ 14-15. The earliest source Liscia Bemporad has identified for this attribution was the eighteenth century author Francesco Settimani (ASF Manoscritti, col. 127, Diarto Fiorentino 1532-1737, Cc. §23V-56, passim).

I have not yet found a contemporary source for the attribution. Liscia Bemporad (ibid., 16) trusts the judgment of Baldinucci in Notizie des professori del disegno (502-3)

that no project great or small was undertaken without Buontalenti’s supervision. On the other hand, she believes that no substantial restructuring of the buildings was done (17). 43. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence, 145. 44. Nove 3697, ir; Nove 3696, 7r-v.

486 Notes to Chapter 5: Constructing the Ghetto 45. See Nove 3697, sr, where he is called “deputato sopra detta fabriche,’ and 41r, where he is paid on 28 Rebruary 1571/72.

46. Ibid. 47. The third account book, Nove 3698, contains a summary of the payrolls from each week, the totals carried over from the more detailed records in Nove 3697. 48. The payrolls are numbered consecutively up to number 56, reflecting the 55 weeks of work and one catch-up payment. 49. My understanding of the brick industry derives from the brilliantly detailed study by Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence, 171-241. 50. Nove 3696, 8v—17r. The fornaciai employed were Lorenzo di Giorgio fornaciaio a Sesto, Franscesco di Giralamo fornaciaio a Certosa, Berto di Donato del Zuta fornaciaio, Stefano di Lapo Vantini fornaciaio and the heirs of Andrea Landini fornaciai. Only the Landini produced pipes. A sixth kilnman, Matteo Mariti fornaciaio a settimello, began to work on the ghetto project in April. An illustration of the furnace owned by del Zuta (or Zuti) family and other kilns ca. 1600 is reproduced in Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence, 180.

st. Nove 3697, 18r. The laborers on the site were exclusively male and Christian. 52. In some cases, especially in payments to master wallers or carpenters, the record notes that the master has employed a small work crew of three or four men. 53. There is one week when the work slowed (payroll for week ending 13 October 1572; Nove 3697, 341); this was the week in which the holidays of Hoshana Raba, Shemini Atseret and Simhat Torah fell. But there was no deliberate effort to reduce the work and concomitant noise and disturbance during the Jewish holidays: the payroll was normal the week of the Jewish New Year and of Yom Kippur and Sukkot. 54. ASB, Scrittoio delle Regie Possession 6577, “Entrata e Uscita del Ghetto Esterno no. A.B.C A.C.B. Dal 1588 dal 16372”

55. ‘The regulations published in July 1571 seem to have assumed that the Jews would occupy the whole ghetto and that there would be Jews renting apartments which looked out, because it was part of the duty of the salaried gatekeeper to lock up the ghetto’s windows as well as its gates. It may be that Christians were rented apartments in the external ghetto only because the ghetto population was not large enough (or wealthy enough) to occupy the whole ghetto. On the other hand, medieval legislation often objected to Jews being allowed to look down from their windows on Christians and especially on churches and religious processions.

56. While at least one individual Jew (Agnolo da Rieti) attempted to obtain exemption for his family from the laws, I have seen no evidence of Jews attempting to postpone or delay their expulsion or of efforts to convince the duke to reverse the edict of ghettoization. According to Simonsohn, Jews did not do so in Mantua when ghettoization was initiated there in 1610 but rather attempted to influence the location and size of the ghetto (History of the Jews in the Duchy of Mantua, 39-42). 57. Niccolo da Prato votapozzi 1s found on the payroll until 30 June 1571 (Nove 3697, 231, 26r); [Lio]Nardo di Matteo votapozzi appears from then until February 1572 (ibid., 281-401, passim). 58. Ibid., e.g., 351, where he is paid to “acchonciare cessi e ritrovare fognie e rifatte

e pionbinate e rimesso docciont.” 59. Examples may be seen in the restored Palazzo Davanzati in Florence. 60. Fanelli, Firenze architettura e citta 1: 14.6; Schiaparelli, La casa fiorentina, 87-88.

Notes to Chapter 5: Constructing the Ghetto 487 61. Nove 3697, 68v. At the same time, the two carpenters Domenico di Bartolommeo and Giovanni di Francesco were paid for doors, windows, stairs and other items they had built for the ghetto. 62. Literature describing the sewage and plumbing of sixteenth-century Italian Cities is sparse, and my interpretation of the relevant material in the account books relies on studies of earlier periods including Schiaparelli, La casa fiorentina, extensive dictionary work and some imagination. The most troubling term is pozz1 ner, which seems to be being used as a synonym both for an excavated cesspool (cesst) and for a portable latrine. Internal ghetto regulations referred to the emptying of trovolt or sinogolt every week, but these seem to have been larger communal waste bins. 63. The payments to the well-digger refer frequently to his work sealing pipes with lead (“mesi doccioni e pionbinati,” and similar phrases). 64. Schiaparelli, La casa fiorentina, 77-80. 65. One in September (Nove 3697, 33r); more in February (40r). 66. Nove 3697, 23r. The person who blasted the well was called a Janciaio. There was more than one well in the ghetto, as is seen from an ordinance written by the Jewish governors in the ghetto in 1572 which says “no one may throw any garbage into any of the wells of the ghetto” (Cassuto, “T pit: antichi capitoli,’ 209). 67. Cassuto, “I pit: antichi capitoli? 37. 68. The payrolls are numbered consecutively up to number 56, reflecting the 55 weeks of work and one catch-up payment.

69. “E di maggio 1571 vi cominciorno a tornare et abitare gli detti giudet, ancorché di continuo vi si murassi” (Lapini, Diarw, 172). 70. Carpi, ed., Minutes Book 1: doc. 693, p. 388, on the election of three representatives “who will try with all means to cancel the making of the ghetto.” 71. In Padua, for example, the Jews were invited to choose the site for a ghetto. They elected a committee (which had a great deal of trouble making the decision) and ultimately submitted a plan and asked for a loan with which to build the ghetto. For

documents related to these events in Padua, see Carpi, ed., Minutes Book, vol. 1, Hebrew docs. on p. 388ff and Italian docs. on pp. 513-31. See also Ciscato, Gh ebret in Padova, 83. 72. Simohsohn, History of the Jews in the Duchy of Mantua, 39-43.

73. Since the two-year leases bid for at this auction took effect 1 May 1575, we would expect that they were first auctioned in 1571 and 1573. Unfortunately, there was no record of their original distribution. With even more certainty, I expected another

auction to be recorded in May 1577, but the books of the Nove Conservatori from that year are missing, as they are from 1579. (The volumes numbered 16, 17 and 18 correspond to the Florentine years 1574/75, 1577/78 and 1579/80; the missing volumes are therefore for 1575/76, 1576/77 and 1578/79.) The next set of information pertaining to the ghetto’s rentals appears in the records of rental intake by the Scrittoio delle Possessioni from 1588, referred to above, which administered the “private patrimony of the Medici,’ according to Litchfield (Emerngence of a Bureaucracy, 106). The ownership

of the ghetto confirms what Litchfield has noted (ibid., 101), that the distinction between public revenue and private patrimony was not well maintained. 74. Nove 16, 301, 34-1—-35V.

75. Nove 16, 29v-30v: “Bando per le allogazioni delle case del ghetto? dated 22 April 1575.

488 Notes to Chapter 5: Constructing the Ghetto 76. Interestingly, the letters sent in the summer of 1570 by the Magistrato Supremo to each town where Jews lived asked not only for the number of “mouths” (a head-count) but also “how many families of Jews” there were. In most censuses in Tuscany the units counted were generally mouths or hearths (fwochi). Ghetto period

census data do not allow us to determine whether the divided apartments of the ghetto led to smaller, more nuclear families.

77. We do not know, for example, where in the ghetto the various de Blanis, Leucci, de Calo and da Empoli lived, whether in large apartments or in several smaller units. 78. Annual rent from 15 known units (1983.5 lire) + rent from 60 units assuming a low rent of 71 lire per unit (4260.0 lire) = total estimated revenue of 6243.5 lire =

891.9 scudi. ,

79. Nove 16, 30r. 80. This is undoubtedly related to the fact that there were shops auctioned on the first day of bidding. Jews were willing to compete for the best shops, since the visibility and accessibility of their shops in the ghetto was critical. 81. Avery few Jews were somchow able to keep possession of their property in Tuscany, and they may have maintained dual residence, or a fictive residence in their home town or in Florence. For example, the Jew Iacob of Empoli is listed in a census in Pontedera in 1580 as the partial owner of two houses in that town as well as of a piece of land, Archivio di Stato di Pisa, Fiumi e Fossi 24-49, 145v—46r; he is even listed

as living there (“Iacobbe di Iosefo ebreo abita in ponte a dera”). 82. Battara, “Botteghe e pigioni nella Firenze del ’5007’ 3-28. 83. Nove 16, 30r—-v.

84. “Botteghe e pigioni nella Firenze del ’500,” 19-21, table VII, “Distribuzione delle botteghe secondo la pigione-” 85. Ibid., table IV, “Pigioni medie per gruppi di botteghe in fiorini,’ 10. 86. Iacob di Miel or Miele appears frequently as a governor of the ghetto from 1572 to 1586 (see Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households,” appendix 4). He is almost certainly the man matriculated as Iacob di Michele hebreo in the Arte de Medici e Speziali in Libro de matrichole 13, 120, on 17 December 1575. A Spanish accent could account for his father’s name being shifting occasionally (an italianization) from Miel to Michele.

87. A Jew inscribed as “Simone di. . . [sic]” was matriculated as a shopkeeper (botteghaio) into the Arte de Medici e Speziali one week before Iacob di Michele (AMS 13, 211, dated 4. December 1575).

88. Battara, “Botteghe e pigioni nella Firenze del 500; table VII. 89. Parenti, in Prime ricerche sulla revoluzione det prezzt, studies the account books for 1575-92 of Santa Maria Regina Coelorum di Chiarito, a convent outside of Florence. 90. Ibid., table XX, 201; table XXII, 206. 91. Parenti, ibid., 185 and note 11 there. Jordan Goodman estimates that depending on the fabric, weavers earned from 70 to 230 soldi per week (“The Florentine Silk Industry in the Seventeenth Century,” 206). A weaver who worked forty weeks a year might have earned from 140 to 460 lire (20-60 scudi). 92. Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence, 34.9, and for further literature on sixteenth-century wages, see bibliography cited there.

93. On Jewish membership in the guilds, see Chapter Eight.

Notes to Chapter 5: Constructing the Ghetto 489 94. Occupations in Florence were gender-segregated to a large degree, with women overwhelmingly employed in the textile industry or as prostitutes, and men in all other crafts and professions, as well as in the textile industry. However, the wage structure did not consistently pay men more for their work than women. On this, see Brown and Goodman, “Women and Industry in Florence.” In the ghetto, there is little evidence of how women were employed, but there were female shopkeepers. 95. We are reminded of Battara’s conclusions from his study of this census that Florence’s economic decline in the late sixteenth century was not due to a diminished industrial activity in wool and woolens, but to a reduction in commercial activity. Although the idea that there was a general economic decline has been challenged, it is true that Cosimo sought to increase commerce throughout his ducal reign. 96. Nove 16, 43v. With a in idem, Law, Family, and Women, 199-205. Kuehn challenges the commonly accepted notion that the daughter was released from patria potestas when she left his house. However, even in Florentine law the widow was supposed to have control over her dowry (205), but her autonomy as a widow was seriously limited in that she could not write a will, alienate property or take part in legal proceedings without the knowledge and permission of her father (203).

210. Colorni, Legge ebraua e leggi locali, 193-95, cites only two cases of polygyny among Italian Jews, but many more cases have since come to light. For discussion of the debate among Italian rabbis and the diversity of customs among Italian Jews concerning these situations, see Adelman, “Custom, Law and Gender” 211. On the difficulty of forcing halitsah, see Adelman, ibid., 107-10. For the culture’s intolerance to marriages made without respect to the wishes of the family, see Molho’s interpretation of the story of Andrea Minnerbetti: in Marriage Alliance, 188-91 he attributes the family’s anger at the son to the son’s decision to marry without the family’s approval or knowledge. 212. NM 604, 25r. Stow has found that in Rome from 1580 to 1582, “Roman Jews resolved the problem of halize. through an obligatory oath taken individually by the grooms brothers . . . binding themselves unconditionally to accept halizah should the need arise” See The Jews in Rome, 1, introduction, xvii—xviii. 213. NM 11120, 26r-v. 214. Fora detailed discussion of the Jewish law codes available to Jews in Tuscany at this time, see Siegmund, “Division of the Dowry,” 81-82 and notes there.

215. In “Division of the Dowry” I develop an additional argument from the Tuscan Jews’ use of stipulations: that assumptions of Jewish communal otherness and sameness in Roman and communal law were used to advantage by individual Jews who were able, in the absence of fixed Jewish law on some topics, to personally tailor their strategies for dowry and inheritance. 216. Indeed, some Jewish communities seem to have set up devices to insure the dowry in order to encourage parents to arrange marriages for their daughters while they were young teenagers, despite the greater risk of losing them and the dowry during the first pregnancy. Communal ordinances were passed in several important medieval Jewish communities stating that if the daughter died shortly after the first year of marriage, without living offspring, the dowry must be returned to her father.

See Siegmund, ibid., 83 and note 53 there (p. 100). | 217. Historians have traditionally referred to the wealth of a family as its “patri-

554 Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto mony.” I deliberately avoid the use of that word here, since the size of the dowry given to a daughter so closely resembles the size of the dowry that her mother brought her father, which might be considered the matrimony. It could be that the daughter saw herself as taking her mother’s dowry (and hence, her mother) with her. 218. AMS 13, 118r. 219. NM Testamenti 767, 1671r-v. 220. Iuditta was recorded as being forty-five years old in 1600 (NM 7742, ov) and was already a widow in 1596 when she signed a contract with the following signature:

“Io Iuditta Orsi sopradetta so[no] contenta et metto, affermo, e mi obligo a quanto sopra detto per fede del vero mi sono sottoscritta di propria mano”; NM 7741, s9v. (The autograph of the forty-five-year-old woman is, of course, not found in this archival copy of the notarized contract.) Iuditta’s self-presentation, faithfully transcribed, is not also adopted by the notary she used. In the text of the betrothal agreement of her daughter Dianora, the notary’s references to her always include her father and husband, e.g., Honesta Mulier Dona Tuditta Vidua filia olim Iosephi De Orsis hebrei et uxor olim Gratia Dei de Leuccis de Pisis hebrea (NM 7742, 139r), M[on]a Tuditta Leucci (ibid., 140r). He also spelled her name “Giudetta” (NM 7741, 58v, s9r).

221. The restitution of this dowry to the widow in 1595 is found in NM 7741, 35r—36v, where it is evident that the full value of the dowry including the supplemental “gifts” and fruits of the investment of her dowry, to which she was apparently enti-

| tled, was 784 scudi (fol. 36v). Dianora’s marriage to an Algerian merchant is recorded and described by the notary who was present at the actual ceremony in NM 7742, 137r—-v, dated 29 Heshvan 5361 (according to the Jewish calendar) and 4 November 1604. The Algerian merchant supplemented Dianora’s dowry, bringing it to 650 scudi.

222. The Jews who returned to Pisa in the 1570s and 1580s were wealthier and more autonomous than the remaining new elite—the governing class—in Florence. A full history of the Pisan Jewish community has not yet been written, so it is not yet clear at what point Jewish communal leaders in Pisa were given state-sanctioned authority over other Jews. 223. “Perhaps the most remarkable fact about sixteenth-century Roman Jewry is that Jewish women freely owned and disposed of property,” Stow, The Jews in Rome, I: introduction, xi. But we do not see them making obvious autonomous decisions — in the Roman material he cites or in the Florentine sources—about the disposal of jointly held property during the lives of their husbands. The exception, I think, is in the fact that women did write wills; see below. 224. Siegmund, “Gendered Self-Government.” 225. It should not, of course, be assumed that a testament was written in accordance with the law, or was enforceable; it was, strictly speaking, only the “will” of the testator. See Kuehn, “Women, Marriage and Patria Potestas? in idem, Law, Famuly, and Women, 203. The wills of the Jews of Venice, including those of Jewish women, have been identified and discussed briefly but invite further study: see Boccato, “Aspetti della condizione femminile nel ghetto di Venezia” 226. NM Testamenti 767, 167r—v. Ginevra’s father, Agnolo, was dead, although her grandfather Laudadio was still alive. I do not know whether patria potestas would have ascended to the grandfather in her case. If it did, Laudadio would have had to emancipate Ginevra before she could write a will, and her emancipation should be

Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto __§55 found in the archives of Perugian or Florentine notaries, but there is no reference to her being emancipated in her testament. 227. Ginevra’s father was a young man when he married Bellotia, daughter of Emmanuele di Simone of Monteulmo in 1558, and so Ginevra was almost certainly born in the 1560s. For evidence of the marriage of her parents, see Toaff, Jews in Umbria, 3: doc. 2480 (p. 1259).

228. This name provides a Jewish example of the phenomenon identified by Klapisch-Zuber, the way within one lineage personal names were used repeatedly, as though part of the familial “capital” (see “The Name ‘Remade’: The Transmission of

Given Names in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries” in idem, Women, Family and Ritual, 283-309). The de Blanis had a particularly strong attachment to the names Agnolo, Moise and Laudadio, which led Umberto Cassuto to confuse several aspects of the family tree. 229. In his study of pious bequests made by the people of Siena, Death and Property in Siena, Cohn found that the average bequest in 1576-1600 was 12.4 florins (table 6.1, 98), which was far exceeded by nonpious gifts (which in the sixteenth century

were about three to ten times higher, see graph 6.1, 99). In the sixteenth century, “although anxiety over the future of the soul certainly had not disappeared, their hopes for immortality no longer concentrated either on the ‘good works’ of charity or

through sacramental avenues. Their predominant obsessions with the afterlife focused instead on their material attachments to property and family” (155). The pious donations of women in the Counter-Reformation period (climaxing in the mid-seventeenth century) however, exceeded those made by men (198-89).

230. According to her own testament, if she predeceased her husband, her husband would inherit her estate, including her dowry. Her testament leaves unclear whether she had wealth that was independent of her dowry, or whether she expected her husband to acquiesce in these expenditures out of the dowry that he stood to inherit from her. In any event, by writing a testament Ginevra controlled her estate in the hope that neither the Florentine laws of intestacy nor the Jewish laws of succession would be applied. On the enforceability of testaments under Jewish law, see Colorni, Legge ebraica ¢ leggt localt, 213-21.

231. Molho, Marriage Alliance, chap. 7 232. Ibid., 17.

233. Some prominent young men of high-status families disappeared, still unmarried, without an archival trace after a decade in the Florentine ghetto. These include Abramo di Agniolo di Zaccaria, whose sister Sarra married Zaccaria di Raffaello Finzi in 1570 (Abramo was last seen in Florence in July 1576, OGP 134, 32v), and Iacob di Laudadio Blanis (last seen in Florence in 1578, as a governor).

234. Nove 18, 24v, 83v-84r: the eleven children who were under ten years old in 1580 were three girls named Perla and a Benedettta; two boys named Giuseppe, an Isach, an Isdrael, a Raffaello, a Sole and a Salon’ Chapter 10: Developing Jewish Community

1. The starting point for discussion of Italian Jewish communal institutions is Simonsohn, “The Ghetto in Italy” (in Hebrew); see also his History of the Jews in the Duchy of Mantua; both are now updated in his essay on Jewish self-government, “La condizione giuridica degli ebrei nell’Italia centrale e settentrionale” For an overview

556 Notes to Chapter 10: Developing Jewish Community of communal institutions in the ghetto era and social life therein, see Siegmund, “La vita nei ghetti”; Horowitz, “Jewish Confraternities”; and Ruderman, ed., Preachers of the Italian Ghetto. 2. A fundamental principle in Jewish law and culture is that Jews are responsible for one another; on this theme, see Rivlin, Mutual Responsibility in the Italian Ghetto. 3. ACEF Box D 3.2.4, published as doc. I by Cassuto in “I pit antichi capitoli” 4. When special problems arose, the governors obtained permission for specific, occasional extraordinary taxes, as when they decided to rescue a Jewish slave. 5. In the 1980s I was present in a synagogue in Jerusalem where “honors” were distributed after a loud auction during the Yom Kippur service. I do not know exactly how “offerings” functioned in sixteenth-century Italian congregations, but they may have been for ritual honors in the synagogue. It is also possible that the “offerings” mentioned in the regulations were for collections to be given to emissaries who had come to collect for the Land of Israel, another custom (Abraham David, “Sheluhei Erez Israel,’ Encyclopaedia Judaica, 14: 1364). | am, however, not aware of emissaries in Florence in 1572 or that funds were already being collected for this specific purpose in Florence. 6. “Item, che tutte le offerte che si faranno nella sinagoga si debbano pagare infal-

labilmente, et che quello tale che hara offerto et manchera di farne lo sborscio al tempo ordinato sia tenuto [pagarlo] al quarto pit della offerta che hara fatto, et li Dieci siano tenuti farne riscotere il tutto” ACEF Box D 3.2.4, published by Cassuto in “T piu antichi capitolr” 10: 33; Nove 13, 115v—-18r; “Ordinationi et capitoli circa li Hebrei habitanti nel Ghetto di Firenze.’ The bracketed word (pagario) is missing in the text edited by Cassuto from the ACEF but found in the version preserved in Nove 13.

7. Nove 17, 2021r—-v, “Nuovi cap[ito]li delli hebrei,” dated 13 November 1578, cap1tolo 3.

8. Ibid.: “Item. che tutti quelli hebrei a quali tocchera giornalmente ragunare la limosina p[er] li poveri bisognosi siano tenuti andare quando dal tavolaccino sara [sic] lor data la cassetta, et no’ andando sia tenuto quel tale chene manchera mettere in detta cassetta [lire] dua p[iccio]li del suo [fol. 202v] accioché 1 poveri no’ patischino

et no’ lemettendo la dito che lo fara detto caschi in pena di mezzo scudo e pit delle due [lire] da applicarsi come di sop[ra]-” 9. ACEF Box D 3.2.4; published in Cassuto, “TI pit antichi capitoli, 9: 207, dated 30 August 1571. The governors were not granted the nght to decide who might stay and who could not, a right possessed by Jewish communal governments in other states; rather, the provision stated that no foreign Jew was allowed to stay in Florence -more than three days and that the Jewish governors must denounce them to the state authorities. This rule was repeated in 1572 (ibid. 9: 210). 10. Ibid. 10: 32-33. 11. ACEF, box labeled Tribunale dei Massari D 1.1 Pareri legali, folder 1, “Espulsione di Ebrei 14. Sett. 1636-16 Marzo 1751” has copies of a number of decisions made

by the Jewish governors to’ expel Jews from the ghetto. The exact nature of the offending behaviors is not noted. In the case from 1645 (no pagination) alluded to, Alessandro d’Isac was expelled and his mother, Stella, widow of Isac was sentenced (for an unspecified offense) to be tied to the column of the well in the piazza of the ghetto.

Notes to Chapter 10: Developing Jewish Community —_§57 12. Perani and Rivlin, Vita religiosa ebraica a Bologna nel Cinquecento (Italian and English), 111, 114. (regulation version B, pars. 37 and 41): “Regarding all the women who wish to be attached to us and to undertake the ordinances of Chevrat Nizharim, may God protect and preserve it, we welcome them with love. Their names shall be

written in the book of records, but they will not be burdened with duties, except those that will be specified in a separate book of guidelines for conduct of women only.”

13. On the development of the custom of a death-bed confession, see Horowitz, “The Jews of Europe and the Moment of Death” A regulation from the first Italian Jewish confraternity in Ferrara, 1552, requires its members when visiting the dying, according to Horowitz (ibid., 271), to “encourage him to confess his sins before God and to deliver his final testament before his family’? Horowitz quotes this text to discuss the first part (confession), but I think it worth noting that the second section is not meant as a repetition of the first. The ritual recitation of confession to God together with delivery of the final testament in front of the family would help prevent discord in matters of the division of the estate and would make the death good (or beautiful) not only for the deceased but for the rest of the family. 14. NM Testamenti 767, 167r—v, discussed above in Chapter Nine. Although the notary records her name as Ginebra, the more common spelling I have chosen to use (as used in the matriculation records of the two guilds she entered) is Ginevra.

1. Ibid.

16. For examples of this genre in the original Hebrew with English translation, see Abrahams, Tiava‘ot geone Yisra’el. One of the earliest known texts of this genre (an eleventh-century ethical will) was already printed in Venice in 154-4 (ibid. 1: 31). There are no known ethical wills written by Jewish women prior to the seventeenth-century autobiography of Glickl of Hameln, but notarized testaments are as likely to be use-

ful for a gendered history of Jews as they have been for gender-focused studied of Christians. 17. NM Testamenti 265, 30r—v, dated 5 May 1574. 18. ‘Toaff, “Maestro Laudadio, 104, 109-11. ‘Toaff considers Laudadio as impor-

tant a banker as the da Rieti and da Pisa; he calculates that Laudadio might have had a working capital of 6,000 scudi (ibid., 104). 19. In Laudadio’s testament, it was the first bequest: “In primus reliq[ui]t opere sancte Marie Floris de florentia libras tres p[iccio]li?; NM Testamenti 26s, fol. 30r. In Ginevra’s will, it was the second: “Item iure legati reliq[ui]t et legavit opere S[anc]te M{[ari]e floris civitatis flore[n]tie 2% [seconda] ordinamenta lib’ tres picciolos”; NM Testamento, prot. 767, 167r. Christians left the same amount. See, for example, NM Testamento 7027 [of protocol series 7006-29]: all the testaments in this volume of wills written from 1585 to 1601 leave 3 or 342 lire to the Opera Sancte Maria Floris as either the first or second item (if it is the second item, the first specifies the place of burial—as too in Ginevra’s testament). 20. Toaff, “Maestro Laudadio, rot.

21. To Reche, daughter of his son Salvatore, 400 scudi. He cancels the debts owed him by his grandson Laudadio, son of the deceased Angelo. He leaves 500 lire picciolt to Reche, daughter of his deceased son Davit. Because he made Iacob his universal heir, there was no need for Laudadio to detail his possessions. I hope to find an inventory of his estate in future explorations of the notarial archives. It is possible that

558 | Notes to Chapter 10: Developing Jewish Community Laudadio had a separate, Hebrew will. If he did, we have no reason to think that he would have assigned his estate differently there than in this public, notarized will. 22. Asimple genealogy of the de Blanis family has been drawn up by Toaff, “Maestro Laudadio,’ 108. Of his four sons (Angelo, Salvatore, David and Giacobbe/Iacob), Laudadio was predeceased by at least two, one of whom may have been eulogized in 1557 in Pesaro; see Horowitz, “Speaking of the Dead? 159, note 62. Members of the

Blanis family converted to Christianity in the early 1600s, but other branches remained key members of the Florentine ghetto. 23. The record-book is found in the ACEF Box B 5.1, in a green folder labeled 32/23. For clarity’s sake, the book will be referred to henceforth as the pinkas della 3 Compagnia della Misericordia. It is a paper book, composed of seven bound quires each of eight large sheets, folded once. It is titled: “Libro appartenente alla compagnia della Misericordia . . . 1610-1641” and is primarily an account book. There are 94

numbered pages; the text begins on fol. 4v: “Entrate della Compag[nila de del governo di mi Sabato di Bigniamin Bondi e mi Crescenzo di Salamone che comincia alli 4 luglio 1610 in Firenze” Bracha Rivlin refers briefly to a Florentine pinkas with the same dates as the “n51a3 o°70n "7712 NAN o}1D”; it seems to be the same book,

but the original, which I consulted in Florence, does not use that title (she cites microfilm HM 630 at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem); see Responsibility in the Italian Ghetto (in Hebrew), 57, 298.

24. This confraternity was re-founded in 1671 and named the Compagnia Santa della Carita, also known as the Beneficenza; ACEF Box E 20.1 contains a beautiful document recording the reformation of the society and its mission to fulfill many functions including the washing of the dead, the provision of medical care and medicine for the poor etc. It is written in Italian, with phrases in an elegant Hebrew hand, and the name used for the society remained the “npyp di mx” combining the Hebrew

and Italian.

25. Perani and Rivlin, eds., Vita religiosa ebraica a Bologna nel Cinquecento. 26. “Walking the kuppah” was an obligation in many confraternities. See Perani

and Rivlin, eds., Vita religuosa ebraia a Bologna nel Cinquecento, 81.

27. Thus, for example, in 1588 certain rooms in the ghetto were rented by the “Com|uni]ta i homini delli ebre1”; see Possessioni 6575, Entrate e Uscite del Ghetto Interno, old series ABDA Dal 1588-1632, Book A, unpaginated, alphabetical entries. 28. ACEF Box D 3.2.4, fols. ror—15v is the document published by Cassuto as doc. IV, the capitoli of 8 January 1608; “I pit antichi capitoli;’ 10: 39. (These 38 capitol are found in Nove 368 (Domande e sentenze 1607-9), fols. 3741—-79v, where it is clear that they were approved on 8 January 1608/9, not in 1608.) The accuser no longer received one quarter, another sign of rapprochement between the governors and the community. 29. Ibid. 10: 73 (capitolo 24.); they assigned to each of the five one-fifth of the extraordinarily high 25 scudi penalty levied on any Jew who refused to serve office once elected or appointed. No one was allowed to circulate with or place any other collection box in the synagogue, except that “il Magnifico Maestro Moise da Caglia” was allowed to carry around or put in the synagogue any collection box without permission from the “huomini della Congrega” (ibid. 10: 71, 73). 30. The obligations were not only an ethical and a social mandate but specifically required by Jewish law. The religious motivations and Jewish legal traditions behind

Notes to Chapter 10: Developing Jewish Community —559 the activities of Jewish confraternities in early modern Italy are discussed throughout in Rivlin, Mutual Responsibility in the Italian Ghetto. 31. ACEF Box E 1.3, folder dated 1657-1857. The first item is a kind of index of books of the community that were “cleaned out.” Dated 1645-55, they were seventeen account books of tsedakah given by various members to the “Talmud Torah” (four books), to “Jerusalem” (six books), to “Zedaca” (five books), to “Moar Abitulod” (two books). 32. From 1610 to 1615 the records show that there were only three capi, suggesting that membership in the society experienced growth in this decade. 33. See above, note 8. I am assuming that the fine was meant to compensate for what they expected to collect in the box, at 2 lire a day, six days a week. 34. ACEF, Libro della Compagmia della Misertcordia, fol. 33v: “e piu si e havuto lire

ventitre soldi doi da m. Raffael Alpelingho p[er] resto delle otto scudi che lascio M[on]? Consola sua zia alla comp[agni]* p[er] spender qtt’ chi bisognava nel suo mortorio e Pavanzo fossi della man cioé [lire] 23-2.” 35. Nove 37, 344. 36. Daniel’s widow was named Consola, and she seems to be the same woman

just mentioned; further investigation into the notarial cartularies might uncover Daniels testament, which would clarify this matter. 37. ACEF Box B 5.1, “Opere Pie, Misc.” folder labeled 32/22, currently the twelfth folder in the box, dated 1576-1680. Papers written c, 1641 in preparation for litigation in a case of the Compagnia della Misericordia against three sisters, heirs of Baccio Orlandini to whom the house was sold. The sale of the house was notarized, apparently, by Angelo Farrulla or Farialla on 16 October 1576, but I have not yet been able to find it. It seems that his widow had the use of his estate as her dowry until her death, at which point it was to pass to the Compagnia. This is a striking limitation on her autonomy. 38. Hebrew words (in Hebrew letters) are used in this account book mainly for the following terms: the miscricordia, the cantor/religious leader, a society, a layleader, a learned person, a ro 1-Jew, treasurer, graves, Purim-gifts (for the poor), a poor person. There are also signatures in Hebrew by Ferrante (Barzilay) Passiglio and David Bondi (12 April 1610, fol. 8r). 39. Pinkas della Compagma della Misertcordia, fol. 17r. On the povert bisagnosi, see Pullan, “Charity and Poor Relief in Italian Cities,” and specifically in Florence (but for the early seventeenth century), Lombardi, Poverta maschile, poverta feminile. A survey of the changing concepts poor, needy and so on may be found in Jiitte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe. 40. Pinkas della Compagnia della Misericordia, fols. 221, 23r, repeatedly, while on

the same page the same scribe uses Hebrew honorific 02m and the terms for a poor person, 729. 41. Ibid., fol. 24r, entry dated 24 June 1613, “{lire] 24 spese p[er] 3 famigli di spag-

noli? 42. Pinkas della Compagnia della Misericordia, fol. 9v; he was paid the same in the first week of September. Leon Modena states that he was in Florence from June 1609 until sometime in the spring of 1610 (Cohen, ed., Autobiography of a Seventeenth-century Venetian Rabbi, 105—6 [ms. fol. 15a]). Therefore he is not the cantor or religious leader (311) who was paid by the society in 1611. Moreover, Modena states that he first

560 Notes to Chapter 10: Developing Jewish Community stayed in the house of Abram Todesco, then quarreled with him. The Tedeschi were not prominent in the governance of the society while Modena was in Florence. (The first three capi diect were: Sabato da Viterbo, Casandro dio Voglia and Vito Piaza, and the governors were Sabato di Bigniamin and Crescentio di Salamone.) After his departure, however, their names appear: Salamone d’Abram Tedesco was one of the leaders (o°019D) in May 1612 (fol. 16r); and another son, Ventura di Abram Todesco, was a capo diect in May 1614 (fol. 271).

43. The first payment is found on fol. 17. Although most of the payments refer to him as Hakham Finzi, he is explicitly called a doctor (medico) on fol. 3414: “Med[ic]° Vita Finzi p[er] la pagha del mese °S [Iyyar] 21 [lire]? The Hebrew title Hakham (learned man) was a new intermediate-level honorific title in sixteenth-century Italy, granted to scholars who were not yet forty years old, more seasoned than a haver but not yet formally ordained as a rabbi, a Gaon (see Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities, 92~94). The title Medico refers to a university-trained physician. 44. Nothing is known of the writings of this rabbi, who is identified by Hananel Neppi and Ephraim Ghirondi (Toledot gedolei Yisrael be-Italyah, Trieste: Tipografia Marenig, 1853, 114) as a student of Isac Gershon. Finzi probably studied in Venice: Isaac Gershon [Treves] was born in Safed and studied there before coming to be a rabbi and proofreader at the Hebrew press in Venice by 1576; see David Tamar, “Gershon, Isac;” in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, 7: 514-15. 45. Rivlin, Mutual Responsthility in the Italian Ghetto, 87-94.

46. On communally appointed rabbis, their salaries and their contracts, see Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities, esp. chap. 3. 47. Pinkas della Compagnia della Misericordia, fol. 31r-v, where he signed his own name “Io Vita Finzi heb[reo].”

48. Archives of the United Jewish Communities of Italy in Rome, Ms. 123, II, fols. 119r-20. The manuscript in which this list is found is described by Riccardo Di Segni in a “Catalogue of the Manuscripts of the Library of the Collegio Rabbinico Italiano, Rome, Italy,’ Ale sefer, supplement to 1990, 11. According to Di Segni, the manuscript comprises texts by M. A. Fano and by Yehuda Ghiron, who, it should be noted, was probably Yehudah Hayyim Ghiron, rabbi of Florence in 1719-38, namesake and descendant of the Ghiron who appears in Florence in 1598. In any event, the list postdates the 1668 death of the last rabbi on the list (quoted more fully below). The reference to the “Italian” community of Florence is explained by the fact that by

1641 the Italian Jews and the Levantine Jews had already split, as we shall see presently; this minute-book, then, came from the Italian community, but the earliest rabbis referred to were in Florence before that division. 49. Cohen, ed., Autobigraphy of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi, 105 (ms. fol. 15a). It is, however, hard to imagine that the Florentine community found that amount of money to pay Modena. Indeed, his dissatisfaction with the community

may have been caused in part by their inability to pay him the salary they had promised. 50. Ibid., 105-6 (fol. 15a). For his visit to Florence, see ibid., 26-27 of the histori-

cal introduction there by Adelman, “Leon Modena”; for Modena’s letters (in Hebrew), see Boksenboim, Lezters of Rabbi Leon Modena.

51. His presence in Florence is known only from his statement in the introduction to a collection of his sermons, Toledot Yaakov, published in Venice in 1609. His

Notes to Chapter 10: Developing Jewish Community — 561 statement in the introduction suggests that Albah was in Florence for six years and found the residents very receptive, “all of them worthy and all of them righteous and ready to drink up to hear and learn in their kindness (grace) and righteousness.” I have consulted a photoreproduction of the Venetian edition, published by the Goldman Brothers (Brooklyn, NY: Copy Corner, 1991). 52. AMS 13, Is0Vv.

53. On 27 April 1580, Iacob was fined for lodging these foreigners. Raffaello d’Abramo da Citerna had a contract for the official hotel (albergho) in the ghetto, and no one else was supposed to provide housing; Nove 18, 48r-—v. §4. On Vitale di Salamone da Cascia, see Segre, “Il mondo ebraico nei cardinali della Controriforma””

55. See above, Chapter Seven, note 59. 56. Shatzmiller, “Jewish Converts to Christianity in Medieval Europe, 303, 305. 57. Nove 20, 323V. 58. For the way the apostle Paul’s conversion was interpreted in different periods, for Augustine’s changing representation of his own conversion experience and for the argument that all conversion narratives are contingent on the specific moment in

which they were written and audiences for whom they are written, see Paula Fredrikson, “Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions, and

the Retrospective Self” in The Journal of Theological Studies 37, no. 1 (April 1986): 3-34. s9. Antonio, matriculated as fistco, AMS 14, 771, April 1599; Francesco, matriculated as medico fisico, ibid., 132r, November 1603. Alexander, who entered the church: NM Testamenti 6781, 977r. 60. Anumber of prominent Italian Jewish preachers of the era have recently been the subject of essays edited by Ruderman, Preachers of the Italian Ghetto; these are Judah Moscato (Mantua, c. 1530-c. 1593), Azariah Figo (Pisa and Venice, 1579-1637), Judah del Bene (Ferrara, c. 1615-78) and Leon Modena (Venice, 1571-1648). Another enormous intellect who died just as our period begins was Azariah de’ Rossi (Mantua, d. c. 1574), author of Me‘or Emmayyim. 61. In some guilds all who matriculated “per la maggiore” were called “maestri” When the word maestro appears to be a person’s title, however, it more likely refers to his membership in a specific guild, that of masons and carpenters, than to his place in the hierarchy. See Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence, 24.9ff and 161. Clearly, then, Jews who appear in our sources regularly as M” are almost certainly not maestro but Magistro, either doctor or rabb.

62. The Nove Conservatori were in the business of approving teachers hired by various communities, though not in the ghetto. These approvals (of a maestro dt musica, a maestro di scuola etc.) are recorded in the same series of books in which the approvals of capitoli are found. For example, see the approval of the appointment of a maestro di grammatica at Laterina, dated 30 December 1583 (Nove 22, 254r), and of . another in the commune of Castiglione Fiorentino on 12 September 1584 (ibid., 1451).

63. See discussion in Chapter Seven and note 178 there. On the contention in Italy over the exclusive prerogative of ordained rabbis to pronounce a formal ban, see Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities, 67-75. The isolated cases, Bonfil argues, when lay leaders gave themselves authority to impose a ban without rabbinic leadership are exceptions which prove the rule, and the necessary presence of the rabbi is evidence

562 Notes to Chapter 10: Developing Jewish Community of the sacral role played by rabbis at this time. Even more interesting is his point that in order to ensure that the ban was taken seriously, lay leaders attempted to restrain rabbis from using this tool too frequently (73)! 64. ACEF Box D 3.2, folder 3: “a chi havesse ardire di far contro a q’nto sopra le possano giungere tutte le Maledittioni infelicita doglie e tormenti che sono scritte nel mwa nin 190 a fin che lo rendono dannato e condannato, in corpo et in anima in q”, et in Paltro mondo rn.” 65. Nove 34, 246v, election approved 8 January 1602/3. Iacobbe di Miele Romano was not given any honorific title on the many occasions his name appeared in the six-

teenth century, but when his son Latino was recorded in the register of the burial society in the second decade of the seventeenth century, he was listed, consistently, as Latino del Rabbi Iacobbe di Miele (Pinkas della Compagnia della Musericordia, fol. 24Vv, dated 26 April 1613). Iacobbe di Miele may be the same man as Iacobbe Diovaglia.

66. The last reference to Cipriano as cancelliere is in Nove 24, 143v, dated 20 August 1586.

67. See note 48 above. 68. In Hebrew, myxnxa (translated here as “by means of”) suggests that Gallante brokered the match between the Jews of Florence and Rabbi Finzi. Modena, in his autobiography (Cohen, ed., Autobiggraphy of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi, 105; ms. fol. 15a), refers to the fact that he was hired “through correspondence”; so too were marriages arranged, at least for the elite.

69. The Hebrew seems to read “Pisano”; the Hebrew copyist could easily have misread the Italian Pesaro (rendered in Hebrew as Pisaro). There was an important Jewish community in Pesaro, a port city on the Adriatic in the duchy of Urbino, which is where Neppi-Gerondi thinks Finzi came from. 70. This ruling is probably (but not decidedly) only superficially related to the complaints of preachers that Jews left the service after the Tefillah. In Venice a preacher who described three types of people who leave the synagogue after the Tefillah and thereby miss the sermon, included one type who “hurry to return to their business affairs.” This is problematic to Saperstein: if the preacher is referring to Sabbath prayers (with his reference to tefillah), he asks, should we really think that a rabbi could be more concerned about congregants skipping the sermon than about the ser1ous violation of Jewish law in going to work on the Sabbath? Or, he wonders, can the rebuke be related to an effort to increase attendance at a newly instituted weekday study session? See Saperstein, Jewish Preaching, 52, citing Shemuel Yuda Katzenellenbogen, Shnaym asar derashot, Venice 1594, 16b. Actually, Katznellebogen says in that

sermon that these people are leaving early to do “trade” (sehorah) or “their work” (melakhtam) or to earn meals (mezonot) or to bring “treyf” (non-kosher food) to the children of their houses! 71. The “Magazzor Bolognesi,” as discussed below in note 73, was a holy day prayer book, following the Roman rite, printed in Bologna in 1540. 72. Nove 368, 3741-79v, Capitoli delli ebrei di Firenze, approved on 8 January 1608/9, cap. 19; published from the version in the ACEF Box D 3.2 as doc. IV in Cassuto, “I pit antichi capitoli,” 10: 72-73. 73. One of the earliest printed Hebrew books in Italy was a prayerbook, the Mahzor Minhag Roma (Soncino and Casalmaggiore, 1486); the 1540 Bologna edition

Notes to Chapter 10: Developing Jewish Community —563 was also self-proclaimedly “according to the Roman rite” (a copy of the Mahzor ke-fi minhag K[ahal] K[adosh] Roma is found at the Library of the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania). 74. On the emergence of Ashkenazic identity, see Davis, “The Reception of the Shulhan Arukh? In the Historia de? riti hebraici Leon Modena refers repeatedly to three “nations” of Jews—Tedeschi, Italiani and Levantini—reflecting the divisions prevalent among the Jews of northern Italy and especially Venice in the first half of the seventeenth century. 75. The presence on early modern maps of national figures in heterosexual couples, but excluding the figure of the Jewish couple, was brought to my attention in a seminar of the Institute for the Humanities presented by Valerie Traub, 5 February 2003. 76. Some obtained permission, as early as 1593, to have houses outside the ghetto in Florence. For one such privilege, given to a Levantine Jew named Abram Isdrael, see Toaft, La nazione ebrea a Livorno e a Pisa, 439. 77. On the legal separation of the two groups, see Chapter Seven. ACEF Box E 1.1, second folder, “Deliberationi” of the Levantine community in Florence, 1639-71. The chancellor of the Levantine community in 1639 was Jacob Cafsuto— apparently the progenitor of the family that produced the bible scholar, historian and rabbi of Florence, Umberto (Mosheh David) Cassuto. It has not yet been established whether the Jews who were called “fuorighetti,’ who lived outside the ghetto from the midseventeenth century on, were all Levantine, or whether their numbers included some elite Jews of Italian origin. On the “fuorighetti,” see Sciloni, “Noterelle sul ‘Fuori-

ghetto.” 78. Horowitz, “The Eve of the Circumcision”; Bonfil, “Change in the Cultural Patterns of a Jewish Society in Crisis.” 79. Nove 368, 376r, cap. 15; published from the ACEF version as doc. IV in Cassuto, “I piu antichi capitoli,” 10: 72. For an effort by the Jewish government in Verona in 1586 to organize women’s seating in the synagogue, see the text from the Pinkas

Kehillat Verona translated in Adelman, “Italian Jewish Women at Prayer; 57-58, where it seems that men were appointed to make these arrangements, in contrast to Florence where women were put in charge. See also the extended discussion of seating in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American synagogues in Karla Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 80. ACEEF, Confraternite: Doti di Beneficenza, Box C 1.1 folder dated 1630-1730, original pagination fol. 23r. That the compagnia delle donne was a permanent institu-

tion in the ghetto is confirmed by the words of the contract which obligate the groom, in the event that his wife died without children, to return the monies he had received to the “said funds” (detti mb 1p). 81. ACEEF, Archivio Storico, Tribunali del Massari, D 1.3, folder dated 1623-1899.

See, toward the end of the collected papers, the unpaginated, undated text, a copy of a contract of a dowry “loan” to Sarra daughter of the deceased Lazzero Calo. The text postdates 1638 since it refers to the “Italiani ty” (committee of the Italians), reflecting the split that occurred between the Italian and Levantine communities in 1639. The governors are “s{igno]re donne Lustra Peseri e Laura Calo governator [sic] della compagnia delle donne” The second governor, Lustra Peseri, may have been related

564. Notes to Chapter 10: Developing Jewish Community to Agniolo Pesari, who was one of the officers of the main men’s society, the Gemilut Hasadim. 82. Perani and Rivlin, Vita relugtosa ebraica a Bologna nel Cinquecento, 114, note 203.

83. The participation of women in these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century societies in Italian communities may be compared to the non-participation of women in German societies at the same time. This should be understood in relation to the fact that the Italian societies (already) served a broader function than study and prayer, as is posited for the German societies; see Maria Bader, “When Judaism Turned Bourgeois.” Further research is necessary on the use Italian Jewish women made of both their membership in mainly male societies and membership in all-female societies in the two centuries before Bader’s study begins for German Jews. 84. On these converts and the influence of Christian-humanist Kabbalistic studies on this generation of Jewish scholars, see Secret, Les kabbalistes chrétiens de la renaissance, 239-55. But note the argument that Sisto da Siena (1520-69), author of the Bzblotheca Sancta, was not truly a converted Jew, and certainly not a Jewish scholar, in Parente, “Alcune osservazioni preliminari per una biografia di Sisto senese.” More generally, see Simonsohn, “Some Well-Known Jewish Converts” and Parente, “Il confronto ideologico tra Pebraismo,” with reference to Fioghi on 321-23. Conclusion 1. Sahlins, Boundaries, 37.

2. While I work to destabilize categories imposed on sixteenth-century Jews by sixteenth-century Christians and by previous generations of historians, I am well aware that I have been participating (for my own scholarly convenience) in the codification of another category that can be, is being and ought to be challenged: the early modern state.

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Index

In this index an “f” after a number indicates a separate reference on the next page, and an “ff” indicates separate references on the next two pages. A continuous discussion over two or more pages is indicated by a span of page numbers, e.g., “57-59.” Passim is used for a cluster of references in close but not consecutive sequence. Page numbers in italics refer to charts, maps and tables. Some individuals mentioned only once peripherally are not indexed. Individuals whose use of surnames is inconsistent or undocumented may be listed under their given name. Historians have been indexed when their names appear in the text and when their work is not only cited in the endnotes but also discussed more substantively.

Abram d’Agnolo di Zaccheria, 356, 361, age: as categorizing tool, 133; governors of

363-64, 545n118, 546127, 546n128, Florentine ghetto and, 258-59; of major-

547N144, 555233 ity, 426n89; travel outside Florentine Abramo di Salamone da Mantova, 280, ghetto and, 301. See also age at first mar-

515N169, 515N170 riage; age differential in marriage Abravanel (family): Cosimo I’s relation- age at first marriage: for elites, 346, 350; of ship with, 51, 99; in Ferrara, 51, 77, 99f, Florentine Christian men, 335; in

229, 439n118. See also by name Florentine ghetto, 350-52; before ghetAbravanel, Benvegnita (Benvenida): bank- toization, 342—48; for men, 342—48; rabing charter for, 51, 100, 285, 446n39; and binic literature on, 342; in Roman ghet-

Eleonora di Toledo, 51-52, 70, 99, to, 345, 539n50; status and, 344—45, 44637, 446n39; independent status of, 350-52; in Tuscany before ghettoization, 285; nobility of, 122, 454n128; as not New 346—48; in Umbria, 344; urbanization

517N190 538n39

Christian, 517n190; patrilineage of, and, 345; for women, 342-48, 380, 384,

Abravanel, Iacob: accused of being Mar- age differential in marriage: in Florentine rano, 77, 439n118; household in Florence Christians, 335; in Florentine ghetto, 335,

of, 100, 447n44; leaving Florence, 352-53, 535n10; before ghettoization, 447n48; nobility of, 122; patrilineage of, 342-45; urbanization and, 345 517190; petition and right to bear arms, | Agnolo di Moise da Perugia, 287, 310, 380, 52, 111; and privilege of 1551, 105; Tuscan 382, 505n88 banking charter of, 99; usury concession Agnolo di Vitale da Camerino, 101, 176,

of, 111, 451n88 178-79, 190, 474N34, 474N36, 493n27

abstinence, sexual, 545n121 Albah, Jacob, 397, 560n51

Achias, see under Attias Alcalein, Giuseppe, 528n78

592 Index Alessandro de’ Medici, xxi, 21, 51 | 546n126; daughter Sarra’s dowry, 357,

Alexander II (pope), 520n5 360—64, 546n128; in Guild of Doctors Allegra (wife of Moise d’Abram Toro), and Spice-Merchants, 287, 323; house

350—51, 352, 535110 raided, 363; joint household with

551n185 549n165

Allegra, Luciano, 536n23, 542n85, 543n89, brother, 360, 542n80; wife’s dowry, 368,

Allessandre Franceschini da Foligno, 405 Anghiari: citizenship requirement in,

alms-box, see tsedakah 453n122; Jewish bankers in, 101, 229-30, Alpelinc (Alpelingo, family): changes in 493n27; located on map, 102 name of, 470n145; circumcision ofsons, _Ansiglia, Lione d’Isach, 255, 256

478n101; in governing elite of ghetto, anti-Jewish sentiment: anti-Jewish influ256; Iberian origin of, 450n80; large fam- ences on Francesco de’ Medici, 71-77 ily size of, 360, 546n122; as matriculating passim; Christian anti-Jewish discourse, into more than one guild, 317; as mer- 10; economic explanation for, 179; chants, 230; mobility of, 321-23; travel expulsion and ghettoization as not outside ghetto by, 301, 523n32. See also based on, 70, 95, 184, 191-92; in French Da Empoli (family); individual members Piedmont, 54; of Lodovico Martelli, 87,

under given name except as below 194-95, 452106, 480n124; of Medici Alpelinc, Giuseppe d’lacob, 189; sons of, officials, 70, 196; of Paul IV, 57; of Carlo

232 Pitti, 194; preachers encouraging, 62, 94;

Alpelinc, Iacob di Giuseppe, 125 racialization of Jews in Christian dis-

Alpelinc, Moise di Giuseppe di Iacob (da course, 72, 119; and religious art, 94 Empoli), 189, 232, 321, 359, 4570155, Antwerp: Florentine merchants in, 1043

479N102, §45N113 Italian Jews forging links to Jews in, 149; Alpelingo, Laudadio di Moise (da Portuguese New Christians settling in, Empoli), 128, 255, 316, 321f, 504n77, 16, 105

523N32, 531N109 apartments, auction of, 213-16, 215 Altoviti (Altovitia), Antonio: presides over apprenticeship, 326-27, 351 synod of 1573, 294-95; returns to Flor- Aragon: conversion of Jews in, 15; expul-

ence, xxii, 38, 59, 67f, 70, 82, 133 sion of Jews from, 17, 106; Jewish bak-

Amadio d’loseppe, 465n87 eries and cemeteries in, 161 Amsterdam: Italian Jews forging links to Aranci, Don Gilberto, 436n69 Jews in, 149; New Christians returning Arbiano, 274, 509n125 to Jewish identity in, 4, 458n7; Por- arbitration, 140—41, 270, 281-82, 497n8 tuguese New Christians settling in, 16, Arditi, Bastiano, 193, 205-6, 480n118

105 Arezzo: attempt to expel Jews in, 110; Jew-

Anabaptists: expulsion of, 17; New Chris- ish bankers in, 99, 451n88; Jewish poputians influencing, 440n130; as unassimil- lation of, 491n3; local statutes in, 266;

able for Catholics, xviii located on map, 102; monte di pieta in, Ancona: Ancona Affair, xxi, 75, 149; ghetto 180; Nove Conservatori approving deciof, 9, 55, 57; as legal place of Jewish resi- sions of, 274; prostitution regulated in, dence in papal states, 57, 71, 194, 431n16; 483n20; Rabben family, 165; taxes paid Levantine and Ponentine merchants in, by Jews in, 127-28, 457n153 106; papal privilege for merchants in, arms: Campana rung to warn citizens to 106f; rabbi lacking in, 144; slave market put away, 219, 244, 489n102; edicts banin, 11; wealthy Jewish families in, 313 ning, 21; Jews petitioning to bear, 111

Anderson, Benedict, 30 Arone di Sabato, 535n10

Angelo di Zaccheria di San Miniato, art: Christian religious, 94; Jewish patron-

Index 593 age of in ghetto by Ginevra Blanis, 382, economic role of Jewish, 497n6; as per-

392 mitted to live in Tuscany, 131; profit

Arte dei Medici e Speziali, see Guild of motive in expelling Jewish, 62, 196-98;

Doctors and Spice-Merchants protection from crimes of their associArte dell Seta, see Silk Guild : ates, 293; status of Tuscan Jewish, 98— Ashkenazic identity, 401—2 100; at synods of Jewish leaders, 141;

Assis, Yom Tov, 468n119 time given to leave, 440n135; Tuscan Attias (Achias), Abram, 450n76 Jews first granted banking privileges, Attias (Achias), loseph, 109, 450n76 xxi, 98; “utility” of Jewish, 16, 96, Auctions: of apartments in ghetto, 213-16, 444n23; Venice grants charter to Jewish, 215; by bankers, of pledges, 198; of con- 61, 62; violence against Jewish, 94. See

cession to farm taxes, 510129 also condotte Augustine, Saint, 398, 561n58 banks: closing of Jewish banks, xv, 52, 80, Austria: expulsion of Jews from, 71-72, 82, 119, 175; Cosimo I creating banks, 26.

438n92; Vienna, 72 See also bankers; interest; monti de pieta Avignon, 431n16 Baroch (Baroccas), Abram di Daniello: azimelle (azzimi, Passover matsot), 160, 195 and Abram Baru of Ancona, 532132; in altercation in synagogue, 167; as broker,

Baba, Abraham, 271 327-28, 329; dual residence of, 528n78; badge, see segno (sign) father’s remarriage, 341; as governor of Baer, Yitzhak, 459n8 ghetto, 255, 329, 533142; as living alone, bakeries, 161, 468n119 465n87; as not matriculating in guild,

ban, see herem 308, 315, 316; as resident foreign merbankers: accused of violating charters, xv, chant, 527n67 81f, 95-96, 172-78 passim, 459n14;in cat- Baroch (Baroccas), Daniel or Daniello, egorization of Tuscan Jews, 117; Chris- 109, 327, 341, 450N76, 540N59 tian and Jewish distinguished, 445n34; Baron, Salo Wittmayer, 423n46, 430n11,

as capi versus communal leaders, 139- 454N132, 461n31 40, 143; competition between families Battara, Pietro, 216 of, 175; and conversion, 235; debts to as beggars, 10, 341 not forgiven, 197-98, 481n134; earliest Bellafiore di Moyse d’Urielle, 367f, 528n76, northern Italian Jews as, 97; exemption 548n154, 548n155, 549N164, 551Nn196

from segno for, 68, 101, 129-30, 139, Bellotia d’Emmanuele di Simone Mon447n49; exemption from taxes for, 126ff; tolmo, 356, 555227 failing to accomplish Cosimo I’s goal, Benadusi, Giovanna, 22 434n52, 446n39; family and staff accom- Benascer, Moyse, 450n76, 465n93 panying, 97, 128, 139; fees paid by, 126f; Benedetto, Salamone de Rabi, 164

Florentine Christian banking families, Benedict XIII (pope), 65 98; Florentine Jews as, 97—98; Florentine | Bernardino da Feltre, 94, 195, 484n28

Jews prohibited from banking, 62, 98, Bernardino of Siena, 544n110 100, 139, 229, 306, 445n32, 447n48; fraud — Bertinoro, Obadiah da, 435n58 attributed to Jewish, 173; good character _ betrothal contracts, 41f, 354

attributed to Jewish, 180—82; household Bettarbo (Bettarhd), David (Davitte), 253,

size of, 228; Jewish leaders confronting 399, 516n180 unethical practices of, 142; Jewish popu- _ Bibbiena, 101; located on map, 102 lations as developing from, 100, 447n45; _ Bible: Italian translations of, 80, 440n134;

leaving the state, 228-30, 235, 293, 4073 Luther’s translation of, xvii, 80, 440n134; local support for Jewish, 179~80; minor Yiddish translations of, 80, 440n133

594 Index Bireley, Robert, 424n57 554n226; guild membership and origins birth control, 358—60, 544n110, 545n121 of, 450n80; guild membership of goverBlanis (de Blanis, Blandes, Branes, family): nors, 316; moves to Florence, 448n54; no age at first marriage for men in, 350; complaints raised against, 191; rabbinic dowries of, 356; in exclusive guilds, 317; training of, 164-65, 469n134; in Silk large family size of, 360, 546n122; as Guild, 323; size of loans of, 392; sons prematriculating into more than one guild, deceasing, 558n22; synagogue in home 317; personal names in, 555n228; as sur- of, 165-66, 167; titles given in documents

name, 318. See also by name mentioning, 462n48; on vernacular Blanis, Agnolo di Laudadio, 258, 356, prayers, 166, 469n141; will of, 360,

5551227 392-93, 541N77, 55719, 55721; working

Blanis, Agnolo di Laudadio d’Agnolo di capital of, 557n18

Laudadio, 350, 382 Blanis, Laura di Salvatore, 356, 360, Blanis, David di Laudadio, 258 546125 Blanis, Dolce di Laudadio, 356 Blanis, Lelio di Laudadio d’Agnolo, 541n77 Blanis, Ginevra d’Agnolo di Laudadio: Blanis, Raffaello di Laudadio d’Agnolo, birth date of, 555n227; and brother Lau- 541N77 dadio, 259; guild membership of, 287, Blanis, Reche di Davit di Laudadio, 382,

317, 380; husband admitted to guild 393 through, 310; as identified with patri- Blanis, Reche di Salvatore di Laudadio,

line, 380; in Linen Guild, 287, 309, 382, 393, 557N21 518n200; nephew as beneficiary of, 350, Blanis, Salvatore di Laudadio, 258, 356, 360,

392; as patron of Jewish art, 382, 392; 393, 504N73, 557N21 provisions in will for the poor, 162-63, Blanis, Samuel, 103, 447n48 369f, 382f, 392ff; in Silk Guild, 287, 323, blasphemy, 272-73 518n200; surname of, 529n91; testament boarding schools, 149, 158, 467n110 of, 162-63, 382-83, 389-95, 390—91, Board of Health (Uffitio della Sanita), 33,

555230; women hired by, 331 299, 333 Blanis, Iacob di Laudadio: in Calo goods Boccaccio, Giovanni, 33, 93 inventory, 374; as disappearing from Boksenboim, Yakov, 463n66 Florentine ghetto, 555n233; as governor Bologna: expulsion of Jews from, 9, 431n16; of ghetto, 255, 258, 514n158; guild mem- ghetto of, 9, 55; Jewish confraternities bership of governors, 316; incidents of in, 394; located on map, xxvi; populaviolence of, 258—59; inheritance of, 360, tion compared with Florence, 418n4; 393, 55721; as insulting the governors, societies for Jewish women in, 404;

279-80, 397-98 synod of Jewish leaders in, 141; Tuscan

Blanis, Laudadio d’Agnolo di Laudadio: Jewish bankers settling in, 98 258f, 279, 323, 326, 504N74, 504n76, Bondi family, see Buondi (Bondi) family

557N21 Bonegi, Betta di Giusto, 187-88

Blanis, Laudadio di Moise: as banker, 103, Bonfil, Robert: on arbitration, 140; on

164, 447n48; Coen represented by, Christians preventing full autonomy for 432n23; death of, 256, 502n57; descen- Jews, 462n45; on expansion period, 15; dants as governors, 258-59; as doctor, on ghetto as paradox, 5; on Italian Jew103, 164; dowries of family of, 356, 372; ish cultural community, 535n115; on first great-grandson of, 350; in genera- Jewish community organization, 242, tion of scholars not replaced, 41; as gov- 409, 498ng; on Jewish otherness, 419n16; ernor of ghetto, 255, 258, 514n158; and on Jewish self-consciousness, 458n7; on granddaughter Ginevra’s testament, kosher-slaughterers, 468n116; on lay

Index 595 leaders imposing ban, 561n63; on utility | Buondi, Sabatino di, 255, 279

of Jewish bankers, 444n23 Buondi, Sabatino di Beniamin (Bigni-

Boniface VIII (pope), 12 amino) di, 310, 316, 504n78, 516n180 Bonsignori, Stefano, 163, 201, 202 Buondi, Sabatino di Michele, 311 books in Tuscan Jewish homes, 159, 161, Buondi, Sabato di Sabato, 316

468n121 Buonomini di San Martino, 370

Boralevi, Alberto, 481n1 Buontalenti, Bernardo, 210, 485n42, 499n23

Bordeaux, 16 burial (cemeteries), 150, 161, 163, 463N67 Borgo San Sepulcro, 99 burial societies, 386, 393-96

Borgo S. Laurenzia, 99 butchers, 160-61 Bossy, John, 24, 36, 150

Boswell, John, 9, 420n24 Cafsuto, Jacob, 563n77 boundaries: confraternities as crossing, 28; | Calabi, Donatella, 62, 435n59 fixing parish, 36-38, 91-92, 412; of Flor- Calo, Abram di Daniello, 326 ence, 5; ghetto having clearly defined, 7, Cald, Daniel d’Isac: age at marriage of, 351,

14, 247, 411; ghettoization redefining 542n79; and lacob di Laudadio Blanis, between Christians and Jews, 4; between 279; as governor of ghetto, 373, 504n77, Jews and Christians, 190, 296, 324, 3363 551n187; guild membership of goverJews moving across, 3, 120, 168, 356, 358, nors, 316; as heir to Isaac d’Elia, 359;

419n8; of local communities, 242; marriage of, 371; and sister Dolce’s redefining in Christian Europe, 2-3; for dowry, 373~75; wealth and status of, 318;

states, 4, 31-34 wife Fiametta, 374, 551n196 Brackett, John, 261, 513n148, 514n159, Calo, Dolce, see Dolce d’Isacche d’Elia Calo 514n167 Calo, Isacche (Isac) d’Elia: death of, 373,

bridges, 91f, 242 551n188; dowry for daughter of, 373-753

Brisegna (Brezegno), Bernardino, 60, estate of, 373-74, 551n186; as governor of

434N46 ghetto, 255, 551187; guild membership

brit milah, see mohalim of governors, 316; heirs of, 359; and

brokers (sensali), 324, 327-30, 529N52, insulting the governors, 513n151; as sin-

53311137, 5331140 daco, 505n88; petition for safe-conduct Brokers’ Guild, 32.4, 328f of, 111; wealth and status of, 318 brothels, 96, 204f, 207. See also prostitutes Calo, Laura, 404, 563n81

Brown, Judith C., 22, 528n75 Calo, Lazzero, 404, 563n81 Brucioli, Antonio, 80, 440n134 Calo, Sarra, 404, 563n81 Bruna, Donna, 363, 546n134 Camaiani, Lelio, 196, 290

Bruni, Leonardo, 460n17 Camaiani, Nofri, 196, 290 Buonaccorsi, Buonacorso, 300, 523n30 Camerino family, see Da Camerino family Buondi (Bondi, family): in exclusive camerlingo (treasurer), 252, 270, 507N105 guilds, 317; as matriculating into more Campana, 219, 244, 489n102 than one guild, 317, 529n89;as surname, _cancellieri (chancellors), 252-53, 260, 270,

318. See also by name 276

Buondi, Manuello di Moise, 280, 398, 537n31_ + Canigiani, Bernardo, 76-77, 439n117

Buondi, Moise: age at marriage of, 540n59; canon law: Christians working for Jews in Coen case, 56, 108—9, 257, 273, 450N81, prohibited by, 69-70, 160, 186, 190,

450n82, 469n143; marginality of 156, 293-94; employment of Jews by Chris256f, 465n87, 489n97; son Manuello, tians in, 295—96; Jewish bankers not 280; on vernacular prayer books, 166, charged with violating, 471n6; Martelli

469n140 on Jewish violations of, 195; in proceed-

596 Index ings against the Jews, 174, 184ff, 189, 191; ghettoization, 66—71; Jesuits, 3, 65, 273;

selective enforcement of, 67; sexual con- Medici state as not allowing church to

. tact between Jews and Christians pro- control the Jews, 199; as territorially

hibited by, 195, 476n64 defined, 34. See also canon law; Catholic Capitani di Parte Guelfa, 251 Reformation; convents; Inquisition;

capttoli of Florentine ghetto: copies and papacy; parishes :

drafts of, 261, 504n81, 513n150; of 1571, Catholic Reformation: in building Medici 246-49; of 30 July 1572, 250-53, 261, 262, state, 32-39, 133, 412; Cosimo I’s reign 263, 266; of 1578, 276, 511n134; of 1595, coinciding with, 52-53; and Counter281, 516n174, 516n177; of 1609, 272-73, Reformation, 436n72; in Florentine

278, 282f ghettoization, 66—67, 70, 221; scholar-

Cappello, Bianca, 205f, 275, 483n22 ship focusing on, 2-3; and women’s parCarnesecchi, Pietro, 59, 78, 433n38 ticipation in religious life, 14. See also

Caro, Joseph, 266, 401, 506n96 Council of Trent

Casa Pia, 65-66, 436n69 celibacy, 338f

Cassandro, Michele, 444n26 cemeteries, 150, 161, 163, 463n67 Cassuto, Umberto: ancestor of, 563n77; on __ certificates of health, 299, 333, 522n23

Laudadio de Blanis, 469n134; catalogue Cesena, 54 of Jewish community archive, 507n106; Cetona, 116f, 497n7

on constitution of Florentine Jews, charitable loan-banks, see monti de pieta 460n25; on Cosimo I’s change of charitable societies, 163. See also confraterapproach, 52, 58, 429N4, 433n32; on nities; consororities Cosimo I’s quest for grand-ducal title, charity, see tsedakah 433N42; on expansion of Florentine Charles V (emperor), xxi, 21, 51, 74 ghetto, 482n4; on Florentine ghetto life charters: communal, 138f, 143, 246; for as obscure and miserable, 5—6; on Ser- Florentine Jewish bankers, 97-98, 138;

. vadio Greco, 449n68; on inscription Jewish bankers accused of violating, xv, over entrance of Florentine ghetto, 81f, 95-96, 172-73, 178, 459n14; in Jewish 458n163; on Jewish population of Flor- settlement, 97; for Portuguese merence in fifteenth century, 460n21; on chants, 105; status of Jews not covered Jewish residential patterns, 463n73; on by, 118. See also condotte Jews with surnames, 318, 529n92; on chastity, 294, 339, 348, 352, 383 marriage contracts, 542n87; on privilege © Cherubino di Sabato da Palestrino, 504n78 of 1551, 105f; on rabbis in Florence, 144, childhood mortality, 359

163, 468n130; sources of, 428n130 Chiusi, 116-17, 452n109; located on map, Castelfranco, 186 102

Castiglia, Benedetto, 255, 315 Christianity: anti-Jewish discourse of, 10; Castiglione Fiorentino: accusations bachelorhood tolerated by, 346, 539n54; against Jews in, 191; Jewish households disputes between Christians and Jews,

in, 110; located on map, 102 141; Eucharist, 31, 36, 72, 89; in FlorenCastrocaro: Jewish bankers in, 99; Jewish tine ghettoization, 173-74; Jewish dishouseholds in, 109; located on map, 102 paragement of, 78; proselytization in Catani, Alessandro di Giovanfrancesco, 182 Florentine ghetto, 271f, 508n112; relicatasto, 33, 227, 335, 345, 456N147, 491N11 gious boundaries as of increasing con-

Caterina de’ Ricci, 422n39, 438n101 cern in, 3; sense of community among Catholic Church: in building Medici state, Christians, 31; as torn between conver30—32, 132; church attendance in build- sion and expulsion, 18-19; as unarticuing sacral community, 150; in Florentine lated norm, 88; as woven into Tuscan

Index 597 society, 89. See also canon law; Catholic and, 150-53; rituals in expression of, 89, Church; Catholic Reformation; confes- 151; unmediated relationship of Jews sionalization; convents; conversion; fes- and duke, 145-46; women’s participatival and holy days; heresy; Protestant tion in, 147, 462n65. See also kahal

Reformation (kehillah); religious community

Ciardini, Avv. Marino, 459n14 Compagnia delle Donne, 404, 563n80

Circumcisers, see mohalim compagnie, 138, 153, 46015 citizenship, 119, 140, 254, 453M122, 50152 Concina, Ennio, 62-63

Cividale, 17 condotte: for Jewish bankers, 97-99 passim, class: class endogamy, 543n97; difference as 104, 126, 138—40, 171, 174, 285, 293f; Jew-

sign of order, 206; Florentine ghetto ish bankers accused of violating, 171, lacking class structure, 283-84; Jews and 175-76, 199; Jews negotiating, 140 class structure of Florence, 312-14; confessio dotis, 354, 543N89, 549165 mobility of working-class Christian confessionalization: ghettoization and, 3, women, 523n37; and residential pat- 30, 39, 411, 412; state-building and, 2-3, terns, 152; ruling class consolidation in 30; of Tuscan Jews, 401-2 Florentine ghetto, 314~23; status levels confraternities: centralization weakening, in city of Florence defined, 313. See also 25, 28, 37; as contact between govern-

elites; middle class; poor, the ment and citizens, 251; Jewish (Hevrot),

Clement VII (pope), 248 163, 386, 392-96 passim; power and Clement VIII (pope), 440n127 order represented spatially by chapels Clemenza di Vitale di Pisa, 528n76 of, 92; record books of, 507n106; revised

clerical dress, 20, 424n61 statutes for, 26-27, 29; social and politiclocks, 220, 490n111, 490n113 cal relationships built in terms of, 118; Coen, Isaia: accused of being a Marrano, suppression of, 152-53; women excluded 55-56, 108—9, 145, 257, 273) 432N23, from, 404; women participating in, 147. 450N78, 469n143; vernacular prayer See also burial societies; Compagnia

book of, 166, 469n140 delle Donne; consororities; Misericor-

Coen, Samuel, 450n76 dia of the Jews of Florence

Cohen, Shaye J. D., 458n7 Consola di Manuello di Giuseppe

Cohen, Thomas, 84 (Alpelingo/da Empoli), 128, 357f, 396, Cohn, Samuel, Jr., 422n39, 555n229 559N34, 559N36 Colle, 99, 127; located on map, 102 consororities, 147, 404, 564n83

Colon, Joseph, 144, 461n42 Constantinople, xxvi, 105 Colorni, Vittore, 453n122 Conti, Giuseppe, 203, 484n32 community: broadening definition of, contraception, 358—60, 544N110, 545n121 146-50, 408; the church as, 31; Floren- convents: as alternative to marriage, 338f;

tine ghetto as model, 413; Florentine as communities, 148; converts entering, ghetto as semi-autonomous, 7, 12, 200, 339; enclosure of, 12—14, 411, 421N32,

243, 273, 288, 290-91, 410—11; Jewish 422n34; impoverishment in Prato, sociality and gendered, 153-58; Jews’ 73-74, 438n101; power and order represense of commonality, 31, 147—48; mar- sented spatially by, 92; tax paid on riage building Jewish, 336-37, 385; as not entering, 127; in Tuscan economy, 298. led by rabbis in Tuscany, 143-45; organic See also Periculoso development attributed to Jewish, 242, conversion: in Catholic Reformation pro409, 498n9; parish as locus of Christian, gram, 53; by educated Tuscan Jews, 405, 30, 32; premodern Jews seen as living in, 564n84; forced conversion, XxVi, 17, 107,

135, 136-37; residential considerations 231, 494n37; ghettoization and, 18-19,

598 Index 64-65, 66, 221, 411; of Iberian Jews, 15; 145-46; and Ventura da Perugia, 101, 257,

love matches as cause of, 535n114; of 447N50 Paul, 398, 561n58; as response to edict of | Council of Trent: in Catholic Reformaexpulsion, 228, 231-35, 407; rewards for tion, 3; on clerical dress, 20, 424n61; as converts, 234; toleration of Jews and, 19, context of ghettoization, 12, 35, 52, 65, 94; of Vitale di Salamone da Cascia, 256, 132f, 412; convent life reformed by, 12, 43671, 502n59; wealthy Jewish families 422n39; Cosimo I and, 35, 52, 65, 131; on among conversos, 313. See also Casa Pia; episcopal residency, 34-35; final session

New Christians (Marranos) of, xxi; kinship networks weakened by,

Convertite, the, 483n26 24; on parishes, 35-38, 132, 411; as Cortona: accusations against Jews in, 191; response to Protestant challenge, conversion of Jews in, 234f, 496n54; Jew- 436n72 ish bankers in, 99; Jewish households Council of 200, 26

in, 110; located on map, 102 Counter-Reformation, 436n72. See also Cosimo I de’ Medici: and Benvegnita Catholic Reformation Abravanel, 51-52, 70, 99, 446n37; admin- _ courts, rabbinic, 272, 497n8, 507n107

istrative reforms of, xix, 22, 25; alterna- courts of law: attempts to keep Jews away

tives available to, 20; on Arezzo’s from state, 140, 281-82, 399; Jews turnattempt to expel Jews, 110; becomes ing to state, 270; Otto di Guardia e duke, xxi, 21, 51; building the Medici Balia, 42, 182, 232, 242, 2.49f, 277, 374; state, 1-2, 21-30; in campaign against rationalization of, 250; women in, 287, Huguenots, 59, 78; and Catholic Refor- 52.4N45 mation, 37-38, 52-53, 412; change of pol- Cremona, 324 icy toward Jews of, 51-52, 57, 70-71, 131; Crescenzio di Salamon d’Orta, 504n78 church becoming more powerful in crimes: Jew imprisoned for, 75, 175, 233, later years of, 295; and Council of Trent, 257, 433n15, 470n144; Jews accused of, 81, 355 52, 65, 131; Cum nimis absurdum 144, 174, 191f; Jews pardoned for their ignored by, 55; death of, xxii; direct role supposed, 130, 161, 191-92; Pitti collect-

in governance of corporate units, 289; ing evidence on, 194f enclosure of convents by, 13f; financing — criminal court, see Otto di Guardia e Balia Florentine ghetto, 208-9, 48535; as first | crypto-Judaism, 105, 432n25, 449n64. See

to create ghetto after Pius V’s Romanus also New Christians (Marranos) pontifex, 9, 58; Florentine Jews as confi- —cuius regio, eius religio, 17, 35

dent of support of, 55-57; Grand-Ducal cultural relativism, 93 title sought by, 58-61, 74, 132, 200; and Cum nimis absurdum (Paul IV): on guild statute reformulation, 23, 27, 123, entrance and exit for ghettos, 13, 126, 307; Jewish banks closed by, xv, 52, 422n38; ghettos required by, 9, 53-58 80, 82, 119, 175; Marriage to Camilla passim; issuance of, xxi; Jews employing

Martelli, xxii, 73; papal authority Christian servants prohibited by, 187, resisted by, 55, 431n18; parish systemati- 294f; on one synagogue for ghetto, 247, zation supported by, 91-92; Pius V’s 291; segno required by, 53, 82 support cultivated by, 57, 58-59, 70-71; Cuneo, 341, 345 privilege of 1551, 52, 104-8, 114f; and sin- | customs taxes, 126ff

daci, 261—62, 267, 505n84; territorial Cyprus, xxvi, 74f expansion under, xxi, 21; as tolerating Jews, 51, 131, 471n9; transferring power Da Camerino family, 98, 356 to Francesco, 21, 71, 73, 200, 241, 438n91; + Dacterus (Dattero) di Prospero d’Agnolo,

unmediated relationship of Jews and, 357, 376-77

Index 599 D’ Addario, Arnaldo, 37, 43344, 497N5 Abram d’Agnolo di San Miniato cirDa Empoli (family), see under given names cumcised by, 546n127; children of,

except as below. See also Alpelinc 493n26; on ethics of moneylending,

(Alpelingo, family) 142-43; in generation of scholars not Da Empoli, Dorina (Delvora): Christians replaced, 41; Giuseppe di Manuelle dal working for, 160, 189ff, 467n113; conver- Pontadera circumcised by, 232; grandsion of nephew of, 232; forename of, sons of Moise Alpelinc circumcised by, 478n100; as head of household, 498n17; 478n101; as mohel, 159—60, 229; moves to

imprisonment of, 518n195; independent Ferrara, 229; as not converting, 405; status of, 286; sons of, 246, 479n102, records used for confirming ages, 343;

545n113 register of circumcisions of, 455n143; Da Empoli, Giuseppe di Moise, 161, 321f, sons of Moise Alpelinc circumcised by,

363, 479N102, 523N32 457N155, 479N102, 545n113; treatise on Da Empoli, Salamone di Moise: books moneylending of, 142, 462n46 confiscated from, 161; in da Empoli Da Rieti (family): banking charter granted family, 321; goods inventoried and to, 99, 446n39; banking establishments sequestered, 363; as governor of ghetto, in 1566, 101; banking privileges revoked, 2.45f, 498n17, 504n77, 531n109; mother 176-77, 471n11; chapel in home of, 159;

Dorina da Empoli, 479n102, 498n17; dowries of, 355-56; exemption from

travel by, 322, 523n32 ghettoization of, 113; exemption from Da Fano, Abramo d’Isach, 285 segno of, 457162; fees paid by, 127; in Da Fano, Ioseph di Leone, 176 governing elite of ghetto, 502n60; Jew-

Da Fano, Isach, 285 ish scholars patronized by, 144; Jewish Da Fano family, 285, 471n13 servants of, 325, 532n120; large family Daniel di Vitale da Siena, 364, 547n143 size of, 360, 546n122; as leaving FlorenDaniello di Moise di Giuseppe (Alpelin- tine ghetto, 384; as leaving Tuscany, 98, gO), 128, 3571, 396, 4570155, 559N36 228-29; as not participating in ghetto

Da Perugia, Ricca, 286, 518n194 government, 318, 502n60; as returning Da Pisa (family): bank at Pescia of, 185-86, to Pisa, 229, 320, 366—67; as returning to 477n77; bank at San Giovanni of, 1015 Siena, 229, 492n21; as settling in Ferrara, banking charter granted to, 99; chapel 229, 493n23; as surname, 318. See also by in home of, 159; dowries of, 355-56; Jew- name ish scholars patronized by, 144; as leav- Da Rieti, Agnolo di Laudadio, 9of, 95-96, ing Tuscany, 98, 228-29. See also by 171, 176-78, 196—97, 229, 471n11, 486n56,

name 492N20, 492n21

Da Pisa, Abramo, 101, 285 Da Rieti, Dattero di Laudadio, 229, 493n23 Da Pisa, Clemenza di Vitale d’Isaaco, Da Rieti, Dattolo di Laudadio, 229

543n94 Da Rieti, Laudadio di Moise, 456n150

Da Pisa, Daniel, 141, 248f, 499n26 Da Rieti, Raffaello di Laudadio, 229,

Da Pisa, Davitte, 504n78 493N23

Da Pisa, Fiametta, 99, 188, 285, 478n95 Da Rieti, Rosa, 493n23

Da Pisa, Isaac, 294 Da Rieti, Simone di Laudadio, 176

Da Pisa, Isaia, 294 Da San Miniato (family), 98

Da Pisa, Laudadio d’Abramo, 176, 229 David da Montalcino, 543n94 Da Pisa, Leone d’Abramo, 175-85 passim, Davit d’lacob da Poppi, 103, 278-79, 363,

229, 473N33 448n56, 513N152

Da Pisa, Mose d’Abramo, 229 Davitte (Davit) di Falcone, 255, 279, 315, Da Pisa, Yehiel (Vitale) Nissim di Simone: 316, 504n78, 513N154, 529n90

600 = Index death-bed confession, 389, 557113 of the elite, 356-57, 366—69; in Floren-

De Blanis, see under Blanis tine ghetto, 365-85; before ghettoizaDecameron (Boccaccio), 33, 93 tion, 355-58; governors of ghetto and,

decima, 127, 252 267; for illegitimate daughters, 369; Jewdefense of the Jews, 176-83 ish community built by, 385; Jewish cusDe Susannis, Marquardo, 471n7 tom requiring, 339; Jews devolving

Dianora (di Iuditta Orsi and Gratiadio di wealth through, 338, 536n23, 542n85, Ventura Leucci), 368, 379, 381, 549n163, 551n185; men attempting to control, 381,

554N220, §54N221 383; of middle class, 370-79, 384; Monte Diaz, Furio, 71, 438n91 delle Dote, 342, 354, 360, 543n90; moth-

Diogo, Pires, 432n23 ers and daughters’ compared, 368,

Diovaglia (Dio voglia), Cassandro, 559n42 549n158; overextension of resources for,

Diovaglia (Dio voglia), Iacobbe, 399 372, 373-75; of the poor, 357-58, 366, disease: Board of Health, 33, 299, 333; cer- 369-70; for servants, 537n28; status and, tificates of health, 299, 333, 52223; dis- 313, 354-84 passim, 528n76; stipulations order and, 206; distinguishing signs sig- in marriage contracts on, 375~82; taxanifying, 53; Florentine state seeking to tion on, 127f, 457n155 prevent outbreak of, 211; ghetto life Dragoni, Francesco di Girolamo, 185 leading to, 64; Jews associated with, 71; dress codes: as ordering system, 19—20, 92; lepers, 10, 12; mobility associated with, resistance to, 82. See also segno (sign);

91, 333; poverty and, 74; travel permits sumptuary codes for preventing spread of, 333. See also

plague eating: Christians with Jews, 190; eating

divorce, 233, 267, 270, 353-54 and drinking establishments, 304-6,

doctors: de Blanis brothers, 103, 164; as 352, 542n81; kosher food, 160—61, 165, exempt from segno, 164; as exempt from 305, 386, 468n116 sumptuary codes, 121f; Vita Finzi, 397; Edict of Expulsion for Jews of Tuscany (26 and governors of ghetto, 258; in Guild September 1570), 46—50; choice of

of Doctors and Spice-Merchants, 312; expulsion or ghettoization in, xv; conguilds retaining, 397; Jewish, 16, 96, 99, version as not goal of, 65; conversion as 125; medical schools, 149, 158; rabbinical response to, 228, 231-35, 407; courses of

and medical training associated, 164; action in response to, 228; as deliberate status of, 320; at synods of Jewish lead- act of early modern state, 6f, 132, 191; ers, 141; utilitarian tolerance of, 16, 96; drafts of, 60, 184-85, 470n4; in ducal Vitale de Salamone da Cascia, 280, 397 public relations system, 119-20; generalDolce d’Isacche d’Elia Calo, 359, 373-75 izing about crimes of Jews, 174; issuance

Dolcina d’Uriel d’Isaia, 369 of, xxii, 1; on Jewish bankers violating Dorina, Donna, see Da Empoli, Dorina their charters, xv, 81f, 95-96, 172-73; on dowries, 353-58; age differential driving Jews employing Christian women, 173; price up, 536n25; Ginevra Blanis leaving as redefining religious, communal, and fund for poor Jewish girls, 162-63, 36of, spatial boundaries, 1; terms for Jews in, 382f, 392ff; changes in strategies affect- 118—19; text used in this study, 417n2;

ing women, 379-83; Christian versus time given Jews to leave in, 440n135; Jewish sizes of, 355; communal funds twofold strategy of, 81, 172-74; verbal

for, 370, 386, 404; Compagnia delle framing of, 81-82 Donne fund for, 404; confessio dotis, 354, | Edict of Ghettoization (31 July 1571): con-

543n89, 549n165; and counter-dowry version as not goal of, 65; and Cum (donora), 366; delaying payment of, 373; nimis absurdum, 13, 82~87, 420n22; dis-

Index 601 order as concern of, 244-45; in ducal employment of Jews by Christians, 295-96 public relations system, 119-20; on gate- § Empoli: accusations against Jews in,

keeper for ghetto, 220, 244, 48655; 185-89 passim; Iacob di Giuseppe Alpelghetto as administrative unit for, 244; inghi, 125; Emanuel d’loseph, 112; forced informing Jews of the ghetto of, 245; baptism in, 494n37; government of, 274, issuance of, xvi, XXli, 81, 218—19; on Jews 510n126; inventory of Jewish property as not easily recognized, 82, 128; as justi- at, 161, 468n121; Jewish bankers in, 99, fying and interpreting ghettoization, 82; 101, 229-30, 493n27; Jewish bankers sup-

per capital tax imposed by, 224-25; ported in, 179-80; Jewish presence in rhetoric of confusion in, 82f, 95, 119, 122, 15308, 1003 Jewish residential patterns 128; on segno, 82-84, 441N139; on Sienese before ghettoization, 152, 463n73; Jews Jews, 231; terms for Jews in, 118-19; on in guilds in, 123, 455n135; local statutes

universita delli ebrei, 133-34, 250, in, 266, 505n92; located on map, 102;

42022; verbal framing of, 81 marriage linking Tuscan Jews with education: Ginevra Blanis leaving funds those of, 336; monte di pieta in, 180, 198, for poor boys, 162-63, 382f, 392ff; board- 474N42, 475n46; Nove Conservatori ing schools, 149, 158, 467n110; in Flor- approving decisions of, 274; pigs run-

ence, 162; in homes, 159; medical ning wild in, 266; population multiplier schools, 149, 158; schools in traditional for, 237; taxes paid by Jews in, 128 Jewish communities, 386; yeshivot, 149, Endelman, Todd, 458n7

467n110. See also teachers; tutors endogamy, 367, 543n97

“Egyptians,” 11 England: expulsion of Jews from, 423n41; Eleonora di Toledo, xxi, 51-52, 70, 99, Jews as tax collectors in, 292; Jews set-

446N37, 446n39 tling in, 17; London, xxvi, 16, 105;

elites: age of marriage in, 346, 350; charac- Manesseh ben Israel argues for read-

teristics of Florentine, 313, 528n75; mission of Jews to, 19 Christian women as nuns, 339; defini- episcopal residency, 34-35. tion of Florentine Jewish, 313; dowries episcopal synod of 1573, 294-96 of, 356-57, 366-69; of ghetto, 230, 235, estate taxes, 127, 456n148 255, 258-60; government careers for, estimo delle teste, 127 259-60; large family size for, 360, ethical wills, 392, 557n16 546n122; in Medici state, 22-26 passim, ethnicity of Jews: differentiation in Flor118; in provincial militia, 22-26 passim; entine ghetto, 400-402; in governors of in regional culture, 22; of Tuscan Jews, ghetto, 248—49; official split in, 519n211; 101; women in, 284, 287. See also nobil- and religious rites, 166f. See also Italian

ity; patricians Jews; Levantine Jews; Spanish Jews

Emanuelle (Manuel) di Giuseppe (Ioseph) “ethnic purity,’ 14 Alpelingo, 103, 112, 232~34, 357, 44855, Etsi doctoris (Benedict XIII), 65

495N46, 49651 Eucharist, 31, 36, 72, 89

emigration visas, 231, 494N36 excommunication: Christians controlled employment of Christians by Jews: canon by threats of, 498n10. See also herem law as prohibiting, 69-70, 160, 187, 190, exile, political, 11, 23

293-94; of Christian women, 173, 294; expulsion: expulsion/reintegration model, Cum nimis absurdum on, 187, 294f; by 15-18; ghettoization as alternative to, 18, Jewish elite, 186—91; Jews defending 130~—31, 195—96, 411; princes right of, themselves regarding, 178; Medici state 471n7; of gypsies, 171; prostitutes, 204. collecting evidence on, 160, 184f; Paul See also expulsion of Tuscan Jews

IV on, 293-94 expulsion of Tuscan Jews: 171-200; anti-

602 Index Jewish sentiment as not basis of, 70, 95, Figo, Azariah, 561n60 184, 191-92; as deliberate act of state, 6f, fines: for blasphemy, 272-73; for disquiet 132, 191; ex post facto explanation of, 192; in synagogue, 247-48, 400; for failing to of Florentine Jews before 1571, 10-11, 51, keep Florentine ghetto clean, 275; Flor-

194; ghettoization as alternative to, entine ghetto Jews refusing to pay, 276; 130-31, 195-96; leading to leaving the for going out to eat and drink on Sabstate, 228-31, 407; Medici state benefit- bath, 304; governors collecting only for ing from, 199-200; Pitti’s role in, 193-98; most serious offenses, 277-78, 512142; postponements of, 211; profit motive in, for infractions of ghetto regulations, 62, 196-98; refugees resettling in Tus- 252, 261, 263; for insulting governors of cany, 228, 492n18; time given to leave, ghetto, 278, 281, 512n145; for not wearing 440n135. See also Edict of Expulsion for Segno, 69, 129, 139, 244f Jews of Tuscany; Edict of Ghettoization Finzi, Davit di Raffaello da Reggio, 176, 181, 187—88

fairs and markets, 298, 326 Finzi, Vita (Hayyim), 397, 399, 560n43,

Falcone, Lione, 535n10 560N44

family names, see surnames Finzi, Zaccaria di Raffaello (Graziadio), family planning, 358—60, 544110, 545n121 288, 361, 364, 478n91, 493N28, 529n91,

Fano, 98 546n128, 547n142

Fasano Guarini, Elena, 32, 427n111 Fioghi, Fabiano, 405 Fedeli, Vincenzo, 261-62, 505n8&4 Fiorina di Moise da Perugia, 288, 519n208

Ferdinand I (emperor), 71 Fiorina da Citerna, 285 Ferdinando de’ Medici: xxi, xxii, 295 first-cousin marriages, 367 Ferrara: Abravanel family in, 51, 77, 99f, Flaminia di Sabatuccio di Pellegrino 229, 439n118; Canigiani as Florentine Romano, 371

ambassador to, 76-77, 439n117; Da Rieti Flanders, 104, 149 . family settling in, 229, 493n23; general Florence: assembly of Jewish magnates in, 78,143; | —-economic activity in: Christian bankers,

ghetto of, 229, 432n31; Jewish courts 98, 180; Levantine merchants in, 52, 76, authorized in, 498n9; Jewish scholar- 104-9; monte di pieta in, 139, 196, 208-9, ship and art in, 398; located on map, 447n48, 475n46; Portuguese New Chris-

xxvi; New Christians returning to tians settling, 64, 435n61; silk industry Judaism in, 73; segno instituted in, 77; in, 21, 23 societies for Jewish women in, 404; syn- —layout and neighborhoods of: gonfaloni, agogue in, 158; wealthy Jewish families 27, 29, 32f, 425N77, 427N103, 427N1073

iN, 313 Mercato Vecchio, 202, 203, 207, 211, 220,

festival and holy days: cleaning streets 297; processional route of the Medici, before, 266; Jewish banks to close on, 24, 425n77; urban renewal plans for, 198, 294; Jews accused of opening banks on, 307. See also parishes 172, 178, 183ff, 190; Jews of Florentine —religious life in: Casa Pia, 65-66, ghetto prohibited from peddling wares 436n69; convents, 13, 422n34; episcopal

on, 249; Jews prohibited from doing synod of 1573, 2949-6; return of Archbusiness on, 295. See also Sabbath bishop Altoviti, xxii, 38, 59; synagogues Fiametta d’ Abraham (Abram) di Simone before ghettoization, 165—68 Spagnuolo, 370-71, 374, 551n196 —sociopolitical characteristics of: patron-

Fiesole, 428n122 client relationships in, xix, 20-27 passim, Fifth Lateran Council, 54 69, 118, 249; population, 1552-1672, 1, 223—

Figline, 186 24, 224, 418n4; ruling class of, 313, 528n75

Index 603 Florentine ghetto: trative unit, 244—46, 408; other com—class structure and status in: as at bot- munes and towns compared with, 243, tom of social hierarchy, 296, 323; elite of, 273-75, 297 230, 235, 255, 258—60; surnames and sta- §—regulations of, 250-83 passim, 511134,

tus in, 318, 319, 323 516n174, 516n177 (see capitoli of Floren—construction and physical characteris- tine ghetto) tics of: auction of apartments in, 213-16, | Florentine Jews: bankers among, 97-98, 215; expansion in seventeenth century, 139, 459n14; banking as prohibited for, 201, 203, 482n4; gatekeeper of, 66, 217, 62, 98, 100, 139, 229, 306, 445n32, 447Nn48; 220, 244, 486n55; gates of, 203, 218-19, cap on population of 1463, 139; census

220, 297, 48655; inscription over of 1567, 38, 69, 151, 340; census of 1570, entrance of, 130-31, 458n163; location of, 100; as community, 138-39; as confident 1, 201-3; on plan of Florence by Stefano of Cosimo I’s support, 55-57; contem-

Bonsignori, 202; prostitutes and broth- porary Jewish community, 6; expulsion els near, 203, 207; as rental property, 7, orders against, 10—11, 51, 194; imbalance 213-18; sewage system, 211-12, 487n62; of men and women, 340; incomes of, shops, 214, 286-87, 297-98, 400, 488n80 217-18; inquisitor interrogating, 42;

—establishment of: as alternative to invitation to settle of 1430, 97; occupaexpulsion, 130-31, 195-96; anti-Jewish tions of, 217, 489n94; as percentage of sentiment not basis of, 70, 95, 184, population, 5; population of, 1552-1672, 191-92; church's role in, 66—71, 221; con- 223-24, 224; public office prohibited to, version and, 66, 436n71; Cosimo I’s 260, 313; rabbis among, 144—45, 162, quest for Grand-Ducal title and, 59-61, 163—65; refugees outnumbering original 132, 433N41, 433n44; Council of Trent as population, 228; religious life before context of, 12, 35, 52, 65, 132f; as deliber- ghettoization, 162-63; residential patate act of state, 6f, 132, 191; explanation terns of, 151-52; and return of Archof ghettoization, xvi—xix, 8-15; as first bishop Altoviti, 59, 67; segno reinstated state to ghettoize Jews after papal bulls, for, 59, 67-70, 82-83; self-government as

9, 58; location for Jews provided by, 1, 7, absent before ghettoization, 137—43; . 32-39, 132, 411, 413; Medici state benefit- social relationships before ghettoiza-

ing from, 199—200, 411, 413; profit tion, 404-5; state-building and status of, motive in, 62, 196—98, 215, 219~21; 88-134; verbal harassment of prohibrhetoric of confusion in, 83-87, 95, 119, ited, 69, 120, 278, 512n146. See also Flor128f; utility in explanation of, 62, 434n52 entine ghetto —ethnicity and: ethnic differentiation in, Foiano: conversion of Jews in, 234f; Jewish 400-402, 519n211; foreign Jews restricted households in, 110; located on map, 102 in, 388-89, 556n9; Levantine Jews in, fondaci, 63, 435054, 435059. See also fun-

402, 519N211 dugqs

—gender and: patriarchy as intensified in, food, see eating 284, 384-85, 413; women’s status reduced _ forced conversion, xvi, 17, 107, 231, 494N37

IN, 303, 353, 383. See also gender foreignness: as categorizing tool, 133; for—government of: per capita tax on resi- eigners as exempt from sumptuary dents of, 224-25, 225, 500N40, 510N129; codes, 121f; Jewishness versus, 118; Jew-

as republic, 253, 314, 50150; as semi- ish women perceived as foreigners, autonomous community, 7, 12, 200, 243, 465n97; Jews as foreigners, 123-26; 273, 288, 290—91, 410—11; as Universita, nationality distinguished from, 63

133-34, 250, 420n22 Forlini, Benedetto, 215 —as new Tuscan commune: as adminis- Foucault, Michel, 68

604. Index Fourth Lateran Council, 20, 53, 67, 430n8 Gabriello d’Isache, 191 France: Avignon, xxvi, 431n16; Bordeaux, gemilut hasadim, see Misericordia of the 16; charters for Jews in, 98; Huguenots, Jews of Florence 59, 78; Jews as tax collectors in, 292; Jews Gemma (wife of Gabriello di Giuseppe), settling in, 17; New Christians settling 351f, 535n10, 542n78 in, 105; Paris, xvii, xxvi; residential seg- gender: as categorizing tool, 133; and com-

regation in Piedmont, 54; St. munal relationships, 147, 148—49; in Bartholomew’s Day massacre, xxii Cosimo I’s state-building, 27-28; differFrancesco de’ Medici: anti-Jewish influ- ence as sign of order, 206; exclusion of ences on, 71-77 passim; Abram Baroch women from public life, 1-12, 421n28; petitioning, 327f; becomes Grand Duke, gendered communities in Florentine

xxii, 433n42; Canigiani’s letters to, ghetto, 403-4; ghettoization as gendered 76-77, 114; and Bianca Cappello, 205, process, 2, 44; ghettoization redefining 483n22; in change in policy toward Jews roles, 306, 408, 410; governing authority iN 1569, 113-18, 131; and the church, 59, as gendered, 284; Jewish sociality and 295; Cosimo I transferring power to, 21, gendered community, 153-58; in Medici

71, 73, 200, 241, 438ng1; as cracking social categorization, 29; and mobility, down on opposition, 25; and Agnolo di 301, 303; occupations segregated by, Laudadio da Rieti, 9o0f, 95-96, 171, 489n94; patriarchy as intensified in 176-78, 196-97; death of, xxii; education Florentine ghetto, 384-85, 413; segno as

in Madrid, xxi, 72; on Jews expelled gendered, 67, 83, 129; sumptuary codes from papal states in Siena, 71, 74, 114; and, 121. See also gendered space; men;

Jews invited to Livorno by, 330; mar- women riage to Giovanna d Austria, xxi, 71-72, gendered space: common rooms for 295, 433N42; Martelli asks about Jews women in Florentine ghetto, 268-69, settling in Volterra, 114-15, 117, 452n106, 506n101; division of space in syna453n112; on New Christians, 72-73; Pitti gogues, 467n108; Florentine ghetto as enjoying patronage of, 196, 290; Prato’s feminized space, 13-14; gendering of

request for aid rejected by, 74; present- public places, 92 ing himself as pious Christian ruler, 132; | Genoa: of Jews from, 57; Jews reentering,

priors of Chiusi request that Prospero 424n52; located on map, xxvi; populad'Isach stay, 116-17, 452109; prostitu- tion compared with Florence, 418n4 tion policy of, 204; Tedaldi’s report on Gentile, Dona, 285-86

Pistoia to, 251 Germany: charters for Jews in, 98; expul-

: Franciscans, 94 sion of Jews from, 17, 438n94; Frankfurt, Frankfurt, xxvi, 54 xxvi, 54; Hamburg, xxvi, 16, 105 Frattarelli Fischer, Lucia, 432n25, 435n61, Gherardini, Antonio, 210

448n63, 449N64, 450n78 ghettoization: as attaching people to place, friendship: in Florentine social order, 25; 14; in colloquial language, 223; and conin Jewish social networks, 149, 167f, 326; fessionalization, 3, 30, 39, 411f; and conbetween Jews and Christians, 112f. See version, 18-19, 64-65, 66, 221, 411; Coun-

also Jewish-Christian coexistence cil of Trent as context of, 12, 35, 52, 65,

Friuli, 17, 24 132f, 412; date in selected Italian cities, fundugs, 63-64, 435057, 435n58 42.4N53; as early modern phenomenon, 5, 407-8; as expulsion alternative, 18,

gabelle, 127f, 252, 355, 456n150, 543n89 130-31, 195-96, 411; as gendered process,

Gabrielle di Mona Ricca, 465n87 2, 44; gender roles redefined by, 306, Gabriello di Giuseppe, 351, 535n10, 542n78 408, 410; Italian Jews as living in ghettos

Index 605 by eighteenth century, 386; Jewish com- insults to, 276-81 passim; 511n133, munities created by, 1, 7, 9, 12, 32, 135; 5121145; interests as tied to state, 274-75; 241-91, 405-13 passim; Jewishness rede- marital status and service as, 259; fined by, 4, 129, 134, 200, 222, 386-410 Medici state supportive of, 253, 271-89

passim; length of process of, 8, 241, passim, 389; number in first five years, 496n1; location for Jews provided by, 491n8; officials, 252-53; as only governXVIii, 1, 7, 32-39, 132, 411, 413; as not ing body in ghetto, 269-70; in populanorm for medieval Jews, 4—5, 4115 as tion estimation, 226; predetermined ordering system, 19; as performance, roster set in 1608, 260, 504n79; record 171; as redefining boundaries between books burned by, 270, 507n106; relaChristians and Jews, 4; sameness of Jews tionship with Nove Conservatori, emphasized by, 133; segrio compared 249-53, 269, 277, 283; republican lanwith, 19~—20, 67; semi-autonomous com- guage used by, 253, 283, 408; resistance munity created by, 12, 200, 290-91, 386, to authority of, 275-80, 283; salary of,

410-11; as spatialization of state power, 275; shift from ten to four, 254-55; shift 5, 14f, 45-168, 410f; and state-building, to more independent governing style, 3-7 passim, 14, 88-134, 221, 407. See also 281; sindaci, 252, 261-63, 267, 275, 2775

Florentine ghetto; Roman ghetto; 506n94; small group of men as, 254,

Venetian ghetto 314-15; specifically Jewish concerns of, Ghiron, Yehuda Hayyim, 560n48 267-73; status and service as, 258-59, Ghirone, Grazia Dio, 398—99 314—15; women excluded from, 258, 284, Ginevra Blanis, see under Blanis, Ginevra 408, 517n186; women’s scuola regulated

Ginzburg, Carlo, 79 by, 403-4

Gioello di Lustro da Veroli, 246, 498n21 grain sales by state, 300 Giovanna d Austria, xxi, 71-72, 295, 433n42 Gregory XIII (pope), xxii, 438n101, 497n2

Giovanni de’ Medici (cardinal), xxi Grubb, James S., 539n57 Giuliano de’ Ricci, 74, 193, 480n117 Gucciardini, Francesco, 412, 545n119

Giulio de Nobili, 210 Guerrini, Libertario, 457n155, 468n121, Giuseppe di Manuelle dal Pontadera di 510126

Giuseppe Alpelingo, 232 Guggenheim, Yacov, 419n8 Giuseppe di Salamone, 363 Guglielmo di Bastiano da Volterra (cancelGli Uffiti della Notte, 515n172 liere of Empoli), 181 Goitein, S. D., 430n10, 458n3, 542n83 Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants: Goldthwaite, Richard, 210, 489n102 Ginevra d’Agnolo Blanis in, 287; Da gonfaloni, 27-32 passim, 425n77, 427N103, Empoli family members in, 321; doctors

427N107 in, 312; Jews admitted through relatives,

gonfaloniere, 29 316; Jews in, 123, 125; Leucci family

Goodman, Jordan, 322, 488n91 members in, 319, 530n97; Gratiadio di governors of Florentine ghetto: age and Ventura Leucci in, 230; as major guild, service as, 259; Alpelinghi lineage as, 315; matriculation fee for foreigners in, 322, 531n109; amplification of authority 124—25, 455142; matriculation fees in, of, 276-77; autonomy of, 261-73; broad- , 312, 527n68; matriculation of Jews into,

ening support in community, 253, 1571-1610, 307; as more difficult for Jews 281-84; doctors and rabbis as, 320; elec- to enter, 317; lacobbe di Miele Romano tion of, 253-58; ethnic divisions and, in, 216; Sarra d’Agnolo di Zaccheria in, 248-49; as Florentine in origin, 253f, 255; 287, 323, 364; travel by members of, 321 formation of new governing elite, 258— Guild of Rigattieri (Used-Clothing Deal-

60; guild membership of, 315, 3163 ers), 298

606 Index Guild of the Notaries and Judges, 24, 124, 396-98, 516174, 516179, 558n24,

253, 307 559n38; wills, 558n21. See also marriage

guilds, 307-12; apprenticeship and spon- contracts (ketubbot) sorship in, 326-27, 351; autonomy dis- Hebrew letter-writing, 148, 462n46, 463n66 rupted, 23; of bankers, 98; as contact herem (ban; excommunication): in Florbetween government and citizens, 251; entine ghetto, 272f, 279, 281, 399, 513155}

Cosimo I manipulating, 22; crafts of in Mantua and elsewhere in Italy, 277, Jews in, 110; doctors retained by, 397; 512143; state and church resisting, dowries for poor girls from, 357, 369-70; 242-43 extent of Jews’ participation in, 525n48; —_—heresy: attitudes and policies toward, 10;

governors of ghetto in, 315, 316; Jews Cosimo I in prosecution of, 59; fear of barred from office-holding in, 24, 125; Jews serving as stimulus for, 53, 79-80; Jews in, 123-26; Jews matriculating into metaphor of infection applied to, 76; more than one, 317; Jews mentioned in mobility spreading, 34; papal policy statutes of, 120; Jews required to matric- against, 78-81; sixteenth-century Italulate into, 307—8; Jews set apart in, 324; ian states as concerned about, xvii—xix,

major and minor, 315; matriculation 3 fees for, 309-10; matriculation of Jews Herlihy, David, 337, 340, 53625, 544n110 into, 1571-76, 226; matriculation of Jews _Hevrot, see confraternities into, 1571-1610, 307; in Medici social sys- _ holy days, see festival and holy days tem, 29; members traveling, 321; mobil- —_ holy objects, see sacred objects ity seen as threat to, 34, 91f, 123, 419n13; Holy Roman Empire: Charles V, xxi, 21, 51, poorest Florentines excluded from, 27; 74; expulsion of Jews in, xvi, 71-72; Ferrelatives brought into, 310, 315; sensali dinand I, 71; Jews settling in, 17; Maxifor, 328—29; social and political relation- milian II, xxii, 58, 71, 433n42; violence

ships built in terms of, 118; as source of against Jews in, 94 information on Jews, 42; status and homosexuality: postponement of marmembership in, 314-18, 319, 323; statutes riage and, 346; prostitution seen as reformulated, 23, 27, 123, 126, 251, 307, preferable to, 206, 484n28; sodomites, 525n47; verbal abuse prohibited by, 278, 10, 12, 515172; suppression of sexual 512n147; women and, 123, 287, 308-9, activity between men, 12, 25, 27 317, 454133, 455N137, 528n83. See also honesty, attributed to Jews, 181f Brokers’ Guild; Guild of Doctors and Horowitz, Elliott S., 403, 557n13 Spice-Merchants; Guild of Rigattieri; host desecration, charges of, 10, 72, 87, 94 Linen Guild; Silk Guild; Wool Guild hosteria del porco, 304

Gypsies, 10, 171, 407n2 household composition, 225-26, 227-28 household multiplier technique, 226f, 236

halitsah, 378-79 House of Catechumens (Rome), 65,

Hamburg, xxvi, 16, 105 456N145

hearth size, 226, 236 Hsia, R. Po-chia, 438n94 Hebraeorum gens (Pius V), xxii, 57, Hughes, Diane Owen, 430n9

452n109 Huguenots, 59, 78

Hebrew language: 78, 96, 148, 162, 166; humanism, 88, 96 books and manuscript, 78, 161, 257,

451n88; for personal status of women, lacobbe di Miele: 216, 255, 316, 488n86,

233; pronunciation and version of 529N90, 562n65 names, 85, 442n151; transliteration of in Iacob da Pontadera, 363 this study, xxiii; used in ghetto, 281, Iacob di Giuseppe d’Iacob (dal Pontadera/

Index 607 Alpelingo), 246, 312, 316, 321f, 523n32, norm for medieval Jews, 4-5; identity

531N109 formation of, 401-2; links to Jews in Ot-

Iacob di Raffaello (d’Abramo) da Citerna, toman Empire, 149; as living in ghettos

279, 504N78, 514n159, 523N32 by eighteenth century, 386; map of six-

Iacob of Empoli, 488n81 teenth-century world of, xxvi; marriage Iacopo de Graziadio, 219 building Jewish community in, 336-37; Iacopo di Lotto (vicar of Monterchi), 179, migration as characteristic of, 336; sex-

186f ual relations between Christians and,

Iberian Peninsula, see Portugal; Spain 67-68, 183, 195, 296, 476n64; violence

illegitimate children, 369 against, 92-93. See also Tuscan Jews infant mortality, 359 Italy: confessionalization in, 2; heresy as inheritance: and dotal strategie:., 338, concern in, xvii—xix, 3. See also Italian 372-75 passim, 536n23; ghetto governors’ Jews; Tuscany; Umbria; and other

semi-autonomy regarding, 267; and regions and cities by name Italian Jews’ knowledge of Jewish law, itinerant merchants, 89

348; Jews appealing to authorities ius gazaga, 48534 regarding, 270; in rabbinic law, 540n69

Innocent III (pope), 520n3 Jesuits, 3, 65, 273 Inquisition: and blasphemy in Florentine Jewish-Christian coexistence, 92-94, ghetto, 273; in Catholic Reformation, 3; 180-83, 199, 292 censorship of texts by, 55, 79; Cosimo I Jews: as a community, 135, 136-373 as a allows establishment in Tuscany, 59, 68; “confession,” 3; criteria of Jewishness

Florentine Jews interrogated by, 42; for this study, 43-44; crypto-Judaism, institution in Portugal, xxi; institution 105, 432n25, 449n64; demographic exof Roman, xxi; Jews seen as infidels not pansion in sixteenth century, 15-16; as heretics by, xvii—xviii; and New Chris- deviating from Christian norm, 88; in

tians, 72, 75, 418n9 early modern Europe, 15—21; eating with insults: to governors of Florentine ghetto, Christians, 190; feared as stimulus for 276~81 passim, 511n133, 512n145; guilds heresy, 53, 79-80; ghettoization redefin-

prohibiting, 278, 512n147; honor ing Jewishness, 4, 129, 134, 200, 222,

affected by, 514n167 386—406, 409f; as infidels not heretics, interest: Christian bankers charging Xvil-xviii; metaphor of infection higher, 180; Jews prohibited from taking applied to, 76; mobility of, 89-91; movefrom Jews, 360; monti de pieta paying, ment across confessional boundaries by,

208. See also usury 3, 419n8; as not allowed to live in

Ioseph d’Orso, see under Ursi parishes, 38—39; otherness of, xvii, 9, Isacche Gallico, 253, 399 84-85, 88-89, 92, 123, 128—29, 130, 135, Isac d’Iacob di Giuseppe, 321f 148, 199, 419n16; as outside of Christian Isac di Lione di Moise da Prato, 523n32 community, 31, 89, 137; plague associIsach da Fabbriano, 278, 511141, 513151 ated with, 205; princes’ right to expel,

Isach dal Pontadera, 513n154 471n7; prohibition of books of, Isaia di Sabbato da Pilastrina, 279 XVil—xvili, xix, 418n10; prostitutes asso-

Israel, Jonathan, 4, 15ff ciated with, 203-6, 483n26; racialization Isserles, Moses, 266, 401 of in Christian discourse, 72, 119; recogItalian Jews: citizenship of, 453n122; date of nizability of, 83-87; relationships with ghettoization in selected cities, 424n53; ruling powers, 292-93; remnant as

ethnic differentiation in Florentine allowed to survive, 96; royal privileges ghetto, 400-402; ghettoization as not granted to Iberian, 138; sameness as

608 Index Jews, 83, 133, 147-48; self-censorship by, Leone di Falcone, 513n154, 523n32 78; as self-identified group, 10; sense of Lepanto, Battle of, 432n31; site located on

commonality among, 31, 147-48; six- map, xxii teenth century as watershed period for lepers, 10, 12 European, 4; status as “natural,” xviii, Leucci (family): Cosimo I granting privi10; as tax collectors, 292. See also anti- leges to, 112; dowries of, 366—67; in Jewish sentiment; Hebrew language; exclusive guilds, 317; large family size of, Italian Jews; Jewish-Christian coexis- 546n122; leaving Florentine ghetto, 384; tence; Kabbalah; Levantine Jews; New matriculating into more than one guild, Christians (Marranos); religious com- 317; Moving into Florentine ghetto, 230; munity; Spanish Jews; Talmud; tolera- not participating in ghetto government,

tion of Jews 318f, 323, 502n60, 548151; petitions to

Judah del Bene, 561n60 court of, 113; returning to Pisa, 320; as Julius Il] (pope), 55, 107, 432n26 surname, 318; loseph Ursi marries

daughter into, 456n145. See also by name

Kabbalah, 41, 98, 144, 427n101 Leucci, Abramo di Ventura di Leuccio: kahal (kehilah), 138, 148f, 281, 397, 408 exemption from segno for, 493333 as kashrut, 160—61, 165, 305, 386, 468n116 governor of ghetto, 319, 516180; in

Katz, Jacob, 148f guilds, 230, 530n96; marriage of, 528n76, Kent, D., 27, 29, 427n107 §48n154, 548n155, 549n164, 551n196; Kent, F. W., 27, 29, 427n107 renewal of privilege of, 493n32

ketubbot, see marriage contracts (ketubbot) _ Leucci, Dianora, see under Dianora Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, 295, 337, 340, Leucci, Gratiadio di Ventura di Leuccio: in

536N25, 544N110, 555N228 guilds, 230, 530n96; marriage to Iudit kosher siaughter (she/itah), 160, 165, 386, d’Ursi, 280, 366f, 377-79, 380, 529n91,

468n116. See also butchers 554n220; travel by, 299, 522n25 Kuehn, Thomas, 551190, 553n209 Leucci, Isac d’Elia, 325, 532n119 Leucci, Laura d’Abramo, see under Laura Lapini, Agostino, 67, 204-5, 213, 256, 275 Leucci, Raffaello di Ventura di Leuccio,

latrines, 212 493N32, 493N33

Laudadio di Zaccheria, 360—62, 363—64, Leucci, Simone di Salamone di Simone,

542n80 369, 550N172

laundry, 186—90 passim, 294 Leucci, Ventura di Gratiadio di Ventura, Laura di Bellafiore di Moyse de Uriellis 3671, 379, 549n164 and Abram di Ventura Leucci, 367f, 379, | Leucci, Ventura di Leuccio, 230

549n164 Levantine Jews: in categorization of Tuslaw, rabbinic, see rabbinic law can Jews, 117; in development of links law courts, see courts of law between Italian and Ottoman Jews, 149; Lazzaro d’Aaron romano, 371, 550n180, ethnic differentiation in Florentine

550n183 ghetto, 400-402; as exempt from guild

Lazzaro da Pescia, 255, 315, 316, 529N90 matriculation, 308; in Florentine ghetto,

Lazzero d’Isac, 56 402, 519n211; foreign elements introLazzaro di Manuelle di Giuseppe duced into prayer by, 508n113; local

Alpelingo, 232 brides taken by, 336; Marranos con-

Le Goff, Jacques, 490n111, 490n113 trasted with, 109; merchants as exempt

Le Murate, 13, 422n36, 422n37 from taxes, 126ff; merchants invited to Leon di Jacob da Pesaro, 253, 246, 281, 399, Italy, 17-18, 52, 104—9, 131, 402; multiple

515N173 residences of, 528n78; privilege of 1551,

Index 609 52, 104-8, 114f, 146; and sumptuary 449n70; Livornino, xxii, 320, 449n70, code, 122; wealthy Jewish families 492n18, 530n101; located on maps, xxvi,

among, 313 102; Nove Conservatori approving deci-

Levantinus, Isach Abrami, 450n80 sions of, 274; registry of marriage conLevi (Levita), Giovachino di Donato, tracts in archive of, 542n87; slave trade 166—67, 316, 364, 469n138, 470n144, in, 421N27

504n78 local statutes, 266. See also capitoli of Flor-

Levi (Levita), Michele di Donato, 245, 255, entine ghetto

316 Loggia del Pesce, 203, 482n5

Levi, Sima olim Ioseph, 376 London, xxvi, 16, 105 levirate marriage, 270, 378 love: between Christians and Jews, 183; in

Levita, see under Levi marriage, 535n114. See also friendship Liaccio di Piazza, 504n78 Lucca, 102, 161 licenses for kosher-slaughterers, 160 Luria, Keith P., 419n8

linaioli, 311 Luther, Martin, xviii, xxi, 18, 80, 440n134

Linen Guild: apprenticeship and sponsor- —_ Lutheranism: in Catholic Reformation

ship in, 326; Salamone di Rabi Bene- program, 53; expulsion of Lutherans, 17; detto in, 164; Ginevra d’Agnolo Blanis Jews arrested as Lutherans, 79-80; in, 287, 309, 518n200; crafts of Jews metaphor of infection applied to, 76; as entering, 310-11; crafts subject to, 311; unassimilable for Catholics, xviii Da Empoli family members in, 321; Luzzati, Michele: categorization of Jews of funds for dowries for poor girls, 369-70, Pisa, 450n81; on dowries, 528n76; on 550n175; governors of ghetto in, 315, 316; economic explanation for expulsion, Jews admitted through relatives, 315; 434n52; on Francesco and Jew of Jews in, 123, 154; on market in cuttings Volterra, 453n112; household multiplier in trimmings, 521n20; matriculation for Tuscan Jews of, 236; on Jewish fees for, 310; matriculation of Jews into, bankers invited to Tuscany, 446n40; on 1571-1610, 307; as minor guild, 315; Jewish bankers leaving Tuscany, 228-29; Reform of 1578, 308-9; relatives brought on Jewish doctors and merchants, 99; into, 310; sensali of, 328; women in, on Jews other than bankers, 444n27; on

308—9 Leucci family, 319; Magistrato Supremo

Lione d’Abramo, 286 papers used by, 429n131; on percentage Lione di Raffaello, 347, 535n10 of Tuscan Jews as bankers, 101; on VenLione di Raffaello d’lair, 255, 316 tura da Perugia, 447n50, 503n63; on

Lione di Salamone, 326 youthfulness of Tuscan Jewish populaLionetta di Laudadio di Zaccheria, 361-64 tion, 447n49 passim Liscia Bemporad, Dora, 484n29, 485n42, Machiavelli, Niccolo, 18, 28, 412, 424n57

499n23 Madrid, xxi, xxvi, 72

Litchfield, R. Burr, 20, 152, 346 Magistrato Supremo: authority over

Lithuania, 17, 292 ghetto transferred to Nove Conserva-

Liuccio di Lione da Piazza, 279 tori, 249; census of Jews-ordered by, xv,

Liuccio Romano, 371 60, 1453; in Cosimo Is rule, 26; docu-

Livorno: Ferdinand’s promotion of, 52; ments pertaining to Jews of, 42; edict Francesco de’ Medici invites Levantine expelling Jews approved by, 81, 417n2; Jews to, 320, 330; Jewish captives rescued on informing ghetto Jews of decrees,

by Jews of, 508n111; Levantine and 245; Jewish bankers allowed to collect Ponentine merchants in, 106, 402, their debts by, 481n134; in proceedings

610 Index against the Jews, 70, 87, 175-86 passim, men, 154-55, 156; unmarried women,

191; on the state, 31 155, 465n9g3, 465n94. See also age at first Mahzor (Magazzor) Bologna, 271, 401, marriage; age differential in marriage;

508n113, 562n73 betrothal contracts; confessio dotis; | Maimonides, xvii, 266 dowries; marital status; marriage conMantua: autonomy of Jewish community tracts; prenuptial agreements; universal

in, 277; bankers excluded from Jewish marriage government in, 530n99; council of marriage contracts (ketubbot): Cassuto’s ghetto of, 504n79; ethnic divisions in catalogue entry for Florentine, 542n87; Jews of, 248-49; ghetto of, 496n1; Jewish and dowry size, 356, 358; as source for

bankers and merchants competing for this study, 41, 354; stipulations in, 373, control in, 324; Jewish scholarship and 375-82, 552n199; strategies for good, 372 art in, 324, 398, 531n114; Jews in alloca- Martelli, Camilla, xxii, 73 tion of ghetto space in, 213; located on Martelli, Lodovico, 69, 87, 194—95, 452n106,

map, xxv; rabbi lacking in, 144; war of 480n124 Mantuan Succession, 61 Martelli, Luigi, 114-15, 117, 122—23, 452n106,

Manuelle, see under Emanuelle 453N112

Maracci, Moise (Moyse), 318, 344, 347, Martines, Lauro, 27

535n10 Martini, Carlo, 477n77

Marcellus II (pope), 432n26 Marzopini, Girolamo, 210 marital status: as categorizing tool, 133; Matsot, 160, 195 governors of ghetto and, 259, 282; in Maximilian II (emperor), xxii, 58, 71, Italian language, 541n75; and sumptuary 433Nn42

laws, 121 medical schools, 149, 158

markets and fairs, 298, 326 Medici, Vitale, see Vitale di Salamone da Marranos, see New Christians (Marranos) Cascia marriage, 332-85; as business agreement, Medici state: archives of, 41-42; Board of

335-36; changes in system affecting Health, 33, 299, 333; Catholic Reforma-

. women, 379—83; as dislocating for tion in building of, 32-39, 133, 412; cenwomen, 156-58, 370, 466n100; divorce, tralizing tendency of, 22f, 25, 40, 250-51; 233, 267, 270, 353-54; familial strategies Cosimo I in building, 21-30; cultural for, 358—62; family consent for, 338, importance of, 412; ducal palace as out53622; first-cousin, 367; in Florentine side parish system, 133; duke as sole ghetto, 348-53; Florentine Jews turning source of status and authority, 26; ghetto state courts regarding, 270; as gener- toization and growth of, 5, 7, 87, 241-44; ating continuity for men, 157, 466n100; ghettoization as benefiting, 199-200,

ghettoization’s impact of planned, 411, 413; governors of ghetto supported 362-64; Jewish community built by, by, 253, 271-72, 276-77, 288-89; as not 336-37, 385; Jewish families as allied allowing Catholic Church to control the through, 147, 149; Jewish self-govern- Jews, 199; parishes as social base unit of, ment as necessary for regulating, 143f; 29-30, 91—92, 133; as patronage court in levirate, 270, 378; for love, 535n114; men 15608, 290; petitions to the court, 111-13,

leaving Florence to marry, 384; polyg- 145-46; prostitution regulation by, 12, yny, 342, 378, 538N41, 553N210; and rela- 204, 483n20, 483n26; religion in buildtives brought into guilds, 310; remar- ing of, 6, 30—32, 132, 412; revenue sources riage, 341, 539n58; and travel by women, for, 127; social categories of, 28-29; sta303; Tuscan Jewish systems and patterns tus of the Jews and building of, 88-134; before ghettoization, 337—48; unmarried unmediated relationship of Jews and

Index 611 duke, 145-46. See also Magistrato Merchants’ Guild, see Guild of Doctors Supremo; notaries; Nove Conservatori and Spice-Merchants del Dominio e Iurisditione (Nine Con- = Meshullam ben Menahem of Volterra, 63,

servators of the Dominion and Jurisdic- 231, 435n58 tion); Otto di Guardia e Balia (court of = Mestre, 61 appeals for Tuscany and criminal court —_ middle class: dowries of, 370-79, 384; “la

of Florence) genta mezzana,” 312, 527n71; limiting

Mellinkoff, Ruth, 430n9 number of daughters by, 358

men: age at first marriage for, 342-48; age | midwives, 295f differential in marriage, 342-45, 352-53; mikveh (ritual bathhouse), 162f, 165, 280,

attempting to consolidate status, 381; 386, 515n169, $45n121 communal relationships forged by,148— | Milan: population compared with Flor49; enforcement of gender norms, 11-12; ence, 17, 418N4; segno in, 57

gendered communities in Florentine Milano, Attilio, 539n50 ghetto, 403-4; imbalance of women militia: as contact between government and, among Florentine Jews, 340; Jewish and citizens, 251; in Cosimo I’s rule, 21, sociality and gendered community, 153— 23; district organization of, 500n34; Jews 58; leaving Florence to marry, 384; living as barred from, 24; provincial elites in, alone, 154, 155-56, 465n87; marriage gen- 22-26 passim erating continuity for, 157, 466n100; minyan, 158-59, 268, 287, 403 marriage rates for, 337—42, 348-50; Misericordia of the Jews of Florence, 382,

Medici state-building eroding bonds 392, 393-94, 558N23, 558n24 between, 25, 26-27; and minyan (prayer | Mishneh torah (Maimonides), 266 quorum), 158-59, 165f, 268, 287, 403; mobility: as characteristic of Italian Jews,

paternal and patriarchal authority 336; gender and, 3013-03; seen as threat enhanced by Cosimo I, 27-28, 413; per- by early modern authorities, 33-34, 89—

manently single, 338, 340, 536n20; 91, 123; status and, 319-23; of workingsumptuary codes and, 121; suppression class Christian women, 523n37. See also of sexual activity by unmarried, 12, 25, travel outside Florentine ghetto 27; traveling outside Florentine ghetto, Modena, ghetto of, 496n1 300—302, 302, 522N27, 523n31; travel Modena, Leon: on age of marriage, opportunities before ghettoization, 158; 541n70; birth of, xxii; in Florence as tsedakah given by, 387-88, 389; unmar- rabbi, 397, 559n42, 560n49; on Florenried, 154-55, 156. See also confraternities tine Jews desecrating Sabbath, 508n114; Menasseh ben Israel, 19, 424n59, 44637 Historia de’ riti hebraici, 506n97; on ItalMenning, Carol Bresnahan, 208, 485n36 ian Jewish cultural community, 531n114,

Menocchio the miller, 79, 93 535115; and networks of families of mercantilist tolerance, 16, 18f, 61, 423n51 Italian Jews, 149; as preacher, 561n60; Mercato Vecchio, 202, 203, 207, 211, 220, 297 and proselytization, 440n126; on three merchants: in categorization of Tuscan nations of Jews, 563n74; wife’s travels,

Jews, 117; crafts subject to, 312; as 523n36; On women’s space in synagogue, exempt from taxes, 126ff; fees paid by, 467n108 126f; in Florentine ghetto, 230; in Guild mohalim, 159-60, 467n111. See also Da Pisa,

of Doctors and Spice-Merchants, 312; Yehiel (Vitale) Nissim di Simone Levantine Jews invited to Italy, 17-18, 52, | Moise di Lione da Prato, 326 104-9; privilege of 1551, 52, 104-8, 114f, Molho, Anthony: on age at marriage, 346, 146, 308; utilitarian tolerance of, 16, 18f, 539n53; on dowries, 354-55, 528N76, 543

61, 423n51 n89, 549n165; on equilibrium in Flor-

612 Index entine society, 551n193; on homogamy, Naples: expulsion of Jews from, xvi, xxi, 548n157; on lineages, 529n84; on status 17, 51, 106 levels in city of Florence, 312-14, 527n71_ ~—‘Nasi, Gracia (Beatrice de Luna), 75, 105,

monastic enclosure, 3, 12-14, 411. See also 149, 432N31

Periculoso Nasi, Joseph, 75

moneylending, see bankers; usury nationality: ducal commonality as not Monte delle Dote, 342, 354, 360, 543n90 based on, 119; early modern people hav-

Montepulciano, 102 ing no formal national identity, 31; forMonterchi: accusations against Jews in, eignness distinguished from, 63; Jews 185f; Jewish banker supported in, 180; and, 122-23. See also foreignness Jewish bankers in, 101, 229-30, 49327; Navarre, expulsion of Jews from, xvi, 17, Jewish population of, 491n3; located on 106, 423N41 map, 102; population multiplier for, 237. Navarro, Abram, 540ns59 Monte San Savino: as ducal fief, 448n54; neighborhoods: exclusively Jewish, 54, 151f, Jewish bankers in, 103; located on map, 336; Florentine ghetto as, 201, 409; gon-

102 faloni, 27-33 passim, 425n77, 427N103,

Monteulmo, Sabato di Salamone de, 101 427n107; occupational variety in, 20; Montevarchi: accusations against Jews in, parishes contrasted with, 35, 267; sindaci 186; monte di pieta in, 180; reference to and, 261, 263, 267; social bonds mainJew in court proceeding from, 182-83, tained by, 148

475n60 Netherlands: Jews settling in colonies of,

monti de pieta: broadening of function of, 17; revolt against Spain, 21; toleration of 208; creation of new, 179-80, 198; in Jews in, xviii. See also Amsterdam Empoli, 180, 198, 474n42, 475n46; in New Christians (Marranos): Anabaptists financing Florentine ghetto, 208-9; in influenced by, 440n130; attempts to Florence, 139, 196, 208—9, 447n48, identify, 423n41; Coen case, 56, 108-9, 475n46; interest paid by, 208; Jewish 145, 432n25, 450n78; confusion caused bankers in places without, 99, 179-80; by, 85, 441n149; duplicity and ambiguJewish bankers made unnecessary by, ity attributed to, 3~4; Florentine syna444n23; mendicant friars promoting, gogue for, 166; Italian Jews forging links 94, 139; in Pescia, 180, 474n42; in Pisa, to Jews in, 149; leaving Iberian Penin90, 180, 196-97; in Prato, 74, 180; predat- sula, 15-16, 104—5, 423n44; Levantine

ing 1570, 180; seen as morally superior Jews contrasted with, 109; as mer-

to Jewish banks, 459n14; in Siena, chants, 105-9; returning to Judaism, 4,

447n48 73, 107, 149, 432n25; settling in Florence, Montino, Marquis of, 177, 472n25 64, 435n61; Spanish suspicion of, 72-73;

Montopoli, 112 as suspect during war against Turks,

Moore, Richard I., 9, 420n24 74-77

Moro, Bastiano di Paulo, 190 Niccolo di Giuliano di Mugello, 188-89

Moscato, Judah, 561n60 Nine Conservators of the Dominion and

Mose (Moyse) d’Urielli, 367, 528n76 Jurisdiction, see Nove Conservatori del

Moyse di Michele, 535n10 Dominio e lurisditione Muir, Edward, 24, 442n1 Nirenberg, David, 9, 420n24

mulberry trees, 51, 198, 322 nobility: as categorizing tool, 133; elites musicians, 98, 145, 151, 153f, 340 hoping to attain, 25; as mediating ducal power, 242; in Medici social categories,

names preferred by Tuscan Jews, 85, 29; patricians as transformed into

442n150 dependent bureaucratic, 22~23

Index 613 North American Indians, Jews identified Orsi, loseph see under Ursi

with, 15, 423n41 Orsi, Iuditta, daughter Dianora’s dowry, notaries: Cosimo I regulating, 23; for 368, 381, 554220, 554n221; dowry of, 323, dowries, 343, 354-55, 538n43; Guild of 366ff, 456n145; father’s surname used by, the Notaries and Judges, 24, 124, 253, 380, 529N91, 554n220; marriage to Ven307; Jews as excluded from, 24, 253; Jews tura di Leuccio Leucci, 280; stipulations bringing to their homes, 152; Jews turn- in wedding contract of, 377-79, 381

ing to, 270, 507n108; status of, 314 Ortolani, Oddone, 433n38 Nove Conservatori del Dominio e Iurisdi- | Otto di Custodia, 140, 460n26

tione (Nine Conservators of the Otto di Guardia e Balia, 42, 182, 232, 242, Dominion and Jurisdiction): as central- 249f, 277, 374 izing organ, 251; as contact between Ottoman Empire: Battle of Lepanto, xxii, government and citizens, 251; control 432n31; Constantinople, xxvi, 105; over communes and towns, 273-75} in Cosimo I developing commercial relaCosimo I’s administrative reforms, 23; tions with, 52, 105; Cosimo I in war creation of, 251; as editing decisions of against, 60; as growing menace, 64; Italgovernors, 261; and election of gover- ian Jews forging links to Jews in, 149; nors, 253; estimate of ghetto population Jewish scholarship and art in, 398; New of, 224-25; ghetto government’s rela- Christians returning to Judaism in, 73; tionship with, 249-53, 269, 275, 277, 283, Portuguese New Christians settling in, 389; ghetto overseen by, 145, 207, 209, 16; Selim II, xxii, 74f; Suleyman the 213, 216-17, 221, 249, 484n31, 485n35; Magnificent, xxii, 74; universal marriage marginal notations in record books of, for Jews in, 342, 538n41; Venetian war 263, 264, 265; monte di pieta overseen with, xxii, 21, 74-77 by, 196; Carlo Pitti as chancellor of, 193, 196; records as source for this study, 42; | Padua: ghetto of, 496n1; Jewish scholar-

regulation of religious practices ship and art in, 398; Jews fleeing to approved by, 271-72; on state borders, Venice from, 61; Jews in planning of 34; travel permits issued by, 298ff, 332, ghetto of, 487n71; Jews try to avert ghet-

535n2 toization in, 213; map of world of Italian Nufies, Enriques (Henriches Nugnes; Jews, xxvi; medical school accepting Abram Righetto), see under Righetto, Jews in, 149; pigs running wild in, 266;

Abram synagogue in, 158

Nunziatura Apostolica, 471n6 palazzi, power and order represented spa-

nuptiality, see universal marriage tially by, 92 Palazzo Vecchio, 71, 490n113

oaths, 473n32, 551n196 papacy: Alexander III, 520n5; Benedict

Oberman, Heiko, 18f XIII, 65; Boniface VIII, 12; Clement VII, occupations: of Florentine Jews, 217, 248; Clement VIII, 440n127; and Grand489n94; of Tuscan Jews, 110. See also Ducal title for Cosimo I, 52-58; Gregory bankers; doctors; merchants; musicians; XIII, xxii, 438n101, 497n2; heresy

rigattieri; servants; velettai attacked by, 78-81; Innocent III, 520n3;

offerings, 386, 389, 556n5 Jews expelled from papal territories, Office of Decency, 484n28 XXIl, 9, 57, 70-71, 113-16, 432n30; Julius Order of St. Stephen, 26, 29 ITI, 55, 107, 432n26; Marcellus II, 432n26; ordinances of ghetto of Florence, see capi- Paul III, xxi, 34, 107, 232, 431n14; in war

toli of Florentine ghetto with Turks, 21, 74. See also Paul IV; Pius

Orlandini, Baccio, 396, 559N37 IV; Pius V

614 Index Parable of the Three Rings, 93 Christians working for Jews, 293-94;

Parenti, Giuseppe, 217 Cosimo I not influenced by anti-Jewish

Paris, xvii, xxvi policies of, 55, 57; election of, xxi; on

parishes: as contact between government New Christians returning to Judaism, and citizens, 251; Council of Trent on, 107; reign of, 432n26; Roman ghetto 35-38, 132, 411; ducal palace as outside established by, 9, 18, 64. See also Cum parish system, 133; fixing boundaries of, nimis absurdum 36-38, 91-92, 412; in Florentine commu- —_ pawnbrokers, see bankers

nal government, 32f; Florentine ghetto Periculoso (1298), 12, 14, 42233

compared with, 410, 412; Florentine periodization, 15-16 ghetto contrasted with, 267; ghetto as Perla di Salamone Ioab de Castrocaro, 357, outside parish system, 132-33; and gon- 376-77 faloni, 32f, 427n103, 427107; Jews as not _— Perry, Mary Elizabeth, 421n32

allowed to live in, 38-39; Jews listed by Perugia: destruction of Jewish community in census of 1567, 38, 151; as locus of in, 367, 456N145, 548n152; Jews leaving

Christian community, 30, 32; Medici for Florence from, 57; located on map, social systemization based on, 29—30, xxvi; medical school accepting Jews in, 91-92, 133; parochial conformity, 150; 149; synagogue in, 158 social and political relationships builtin Pesaro, 106, 398 terms of, 118; as unit of social control,37 | Pescia: accusations against Jews in, 185—86,

partnerships, 327 189; autonomy of, 274, 509n123, 509n124; Passiglio, Ferrante (Barzilai; Lione; Yehu- citizenship requirement in, 453n122, dah), 344, 359, 450n80, 53510, 540n65 501N52; Jewish bankers in, 99, 101, 230,

Passiglio, Moise, 359, 545117 493n27; Jewish bankers supported in, Passover, 160. See also azimelle (matsot) 179-80; located on map, 102; monte di

passports, 7, 420N17 pieta in, 180, 474n42; per capita tax in, Patientia di Michele da Empoli, 357 252, 500N40; population multiplier for, patria potestas, 378, 381, 553N209, 554n226 491n11 patricians: government careers for, 259— Peseri, Lustra, 563n81 60; hereditary honor replacing power petitions to the court, 111-13, 145-46 of, 25-26; migration to southern part of — Petrarca, 266 Florence, 425n77; permanently single Philip II (king of Spain), 57f, 74, 433n42,

men among, 340; quest for favors by, 497n2 25; as transformed into dependent physicians, see doctors

bureaucratic nobility, 22-23 . Piazza, Vito, 559n42 patriline, women identified with, 380, 385; Piazza del Fraschato, 203

women not identified with, 549n159 Piazza del Ghetto Vecchio, 482n4

patronage: ghettoization producing Piazza della Fonte, 482n4 income for, 221; Jewish bankers as Piero di Biagio di Francesco da San Giopatrons, 98, 139, 143f; of Jewish art, 382, vanni, 185 392; of Jewish scholars, 144, 324; Jews Pieve a Santo Stefano: 109, 191, 491N3;

playing system of, 113, 250; by the located on map, 102 Medici, 21, 111, 177, 196, 209, 290; patron- _ Pisa: chapels in homes in, 159; Cosimo I

client relationships in Florence, xix, brings Levantine merchants to, 52;

20-27 passim, 69, 118, 249 Agnolo di Laudadio da Rieti case, 9of,

Paul, Saint, 398, 561n58 95-96, 176-78, 196-97; Da Rieti family Paul III (pope), xxi, 34, 107, 232, 431N14 resettling in, 229, 320, 492n20; FlorenPaul IV (pope): attack on Jews, 17, 71; on tine ghetto Jews doing business in, 298;

} Index 615 Francesco de’ Medici invites Levantine hibited from living in cities in, 17; Jews Jews to, 330; individuals with rabbinic settling in, 17; residential segregation in, training in, 164; Jewish bankers in, 99, 54, 430N11 101; Jewish cemetery at, 161; Jewish citi- _ political exile, 11, 23 zens in, 122; Jews resettling in, 492n18, polygyny, 342, 378, 538n41, 553N210

554n222; Leucci family, 112f, 230, Pomerance (Ripomerance): 101, 237; 456n145; Levantine merchants in, 52, 76, located on map, 102 105, 108, 402; located on maps, xxvi,102; | Pontedera: Jews resident in before 1570,

marriage linking Tuscan Jews with 103, 110, 112, 232, 237; located on map, those of, 336; monte di pieta in, 90, 180, 102; marriage linking Tuscan Jews with

196-97; slave market in, 11 those of, 336, 357f; relationship of Jews Pistoia: fair of, 298, 327; located on map, to after 1570, 233f, 2465, 301, 312, 321f

102; Tedaldi’s report on, 251 poor, the: attitudes and policies toward, Pitti, Carlo, 193-98; anti-Jewish nrejudice 10; beggars, 10, 341; Ginevra d’Agnolo of, 194; as benefiting from expulsion of Blanis leaving money for, 162-63, 369f, Jews, 196—98; census of Jews of, 491n3; as 382f, 392ff; dowries of, 357—58, 366,

chancellor of Nove Conservatori, 193, 369-70; as marrying later, 351. See also

196; draft of edict of expulsion of, tsedakah 184~85, 417N2, 470n4; examining Chris- —_ poor-box, see tsedakah

tians under oath, 185; and first charter popes, see papacy for Florentine ghetto, 246; and grain Poppi: 103, 110, 191, 448n56; located on sales by state, 300, 523n30; on Jewish map, 102 bankers denying charges, 178; on Jewish _—_ populating the Florentine ghetto, 223-38

infractions of canon law, 191; letters population multiplier technique, 226ff, requesting evidence against Jews signed 236—38 by, 184; Medici patronage for, 196, 290; popult, 33, 35 monte di pieta of Pisa revived by, 90; Portugal: expulsion of Jews from, xvi, 17;

proceeding against Jews organized by, Inquisition instituted in, xxi; Jewish 70, 87, 175, 193-98; properties for ghetto communal organization in, 138; Jews as

purchased by, 201, 209, 485n40; and tax collectors in, 292; Jews settling in travel permits for Jews, 300, 523n30 colonies of, 17; New Christians leaving,

Pitti, Luigi, 210 15-16, 64, 104-5, 423N44 Pius IV (pope), xxi, 52, 57f, 432n26, 432n27, Prague, xxv1,71

440N127 Pratica Segreta, 110

Pius V (pope): Cosimo I cultivating sup- Prato: accusations against Jews in, 185-88 port of, 57, 58-59, 70-71; Cosimo I made passim; chapels in homes in, 159; conGrand Duke by, xxii, 59-60; election of, version of Magistro Felice in, 234; xxii; Hebraeorum gens, xxil, 57, 452N109; famine and poverty in, 73-74; FlorenJews expelled from papal states by, xxii, tine ghetto Jews doing business in, 298; 9, 57, 70-71; reign of, 432n26; on resi- Jewish bankers in, 99, 103, 230, 493N273 dency requirement, 34; Romanus pon- Jewish banker supported in, 180-82;

tifex, 9, 57f£ Jewish residential patterns before ghet-

plague: Board of Health and, 13: Jews toization, 152; located on map, 102; associated with, 205; Nove (2: nservatori monte di pieta in, 74, 180; taxes paid to and ghetto government regarding, 275; Florence by, 252

travel permits and, 333 prayer: gendered division of space in, Poland: Jewish scholarship and art in, 398; 403-4, 467n108; keeping shops shut Jews as tax collectors in, 292; Jews pro- during, 286-87, 400, 518n198; leaders of

616 Index in early ghetto, 247; Levantine Jews required for, 333; utility in toleration of, introducing foreign elements into, 96, 444n23; yellow ribbon for, 77, 121, 508n113; location of in pre-ghetto Flor- 204, 428n17. See also brothels ence, 165—67; minyan, 158-59, 268, 287, Protestant Reformation: accusations

403; noise during, 267-68, 506n99; against Jews in Protestant states, xvii;

restricted to synagogue, 400 anxiety created by, 442155; Christian prayer books, 159, 166, 400-401 community fractured by, 32, 38, 64; prenuptial agreements, 373, 375-82, church attendance in building sacral

552n199 community, 150; during Cosimo I’s

primogeniture, 338 reign, 21; and Counter-Reformation, printing, 119, 324, 401 436N72; as heresy, xviii; St. Bartholo-

privileges: cancellation of, 70, 81, 130; char- mew’s Day massacre, xxii; toleration ters as, 98; for communities of Jews, 138; and, 16—17. See also Anabaptists; for Jewish bankers, xix, xxi, 51, 99, 101, Huguenots; Lutheranism 139, 143; for Jewish merchants, 17; Jews Provenzali, Moses, 257 seeking, 112~13; privilege of 1551, 52,104— — public prayer, see prayer

8, 114f, 146, 308; status of Jews not cov- Pullan, Brian S., 439n115 ered by, 118~20; utility in granting, 96

proceedings against the Jews, 171-200; Rabatti, Bernardino (comessario of Castro-

broadening of attack on Jews, 174, caro) 450n83 183-93; collection of evidence, 174-76, Rabbene (Raben; Rabben), Laura di 184—91; defense of the Jews, 176-83; let- Lazzero, 537N31, 540n59 ters of 30 June and 7 July 1570, xv, 175f; Rabbene (Raben; Rabben), Lazzero d’Isac: letters of late July and August 1570, 184; age at marriage of, 540n59; Christian

Pitti’s role in, 70, 87, 175, 193-98 guaranteeing guild fee of, 532n124; as Processi contro gli Ebrei (“Proceedings governor of ghetto, 255; guild member-

against the Jews”), 70, 194 ship of governors, 316; household of, procurators, women serving as, 287-88 154, 489n97; Jewish training of, 165; shop property purchased for Florentine ghetto, rented by, 215-16, 218; in Silk Guild,

: 207—8 527n64; synagogue in home of, 167;

Prospero d’Isach, 116-17, 452109 tutor of, 154, 162, 532n118; wife Speranza prostitutes: attitudes and policies toward, as procurator, 288 10; disease spread by traveling,34;as §_ Rabbene (Raben; Rabben), Moise d’Isac, disruptive of order, 205—6; expulsion of, 165, 218, 44748, 489n97 204; Florentine ghetto as near, 203, 207; rabbinic law: codification of, 266-67;

ghettoization contrasted with legisla- assumed to be operative for Jews in tion on, 12; Jewish men patronizing, 183, Tuscany, 272; as continuously inter- , 205, 476n63, 476n64, 524n46, 542n81; preted, 143-44 ,458n7; as not deterJewish women as, 465n9g7, 524n46; Jews mining dowry, 365; on procreation, and Christians connecting through, 151; 359; social organization as required for, Jews associated with, 203-6, 483n26; as 136

: living and working throughout Flor- rabbinic scholars: compilation and transence, 203-4; Medici state regulation of, lation of rabbinic law, 266-67; families 12, 204, 483N20, 483n26; no guild for, leaving Tuscany, 38; Vita Finzi as, 397; 123; in parish censuses, 36; poor women Florentine Jews turning to, 270; rabas, 341; seen as preferable to homosexu- binic law as continuously interpreted ality, 206, 484n28; sumptuary codes by, 143-44; status of, 530n100; at synods and, 121, 204, 483n18; travel permits of Jewish leaders, 141

Index 617 rabbinic tribunals (courts), 272, 497n8, remarriage, 341, 53958

507N107 Renaissance, 6, 413, 521n16

rabbis: as absent in Tuscany before ghet- residential patterns: early marriage and, toization, 143-45, 409, 410; first mention 348; before ghettoization, 150-53; govof Florence hiring, 509n115; in Florence ernment affecting, 14; living alone, 154, before ghettoization, 162, 163-65; for 155-56, 465n87 Florentine ghetto, 272, 396-99; and gov- __ residential segregation, 51-87; by choice,

ernors of ghetto, 258; medical and rab- 54; Cum nimis absurdum calling for, 53, binical training associated, 164; as not 54—55; in medieval church councils, required for public prayer, 159; status of, 430n11; in Muslim world, 430n10; as not 320; in traditional Jewish communities, common in medieval Jewish life, 53-54;

386. See also rabbinic scholars Third Lateran Council on, 53. See also

Racchel, Donna, 154f, 218, 489n98 ghettoization racialization of Jews in Christian dis- Reuchlin, Johannes, 18

course, 72, 119 Ricca (wife of Emanuelle Alpelingo), Raffael di Simone de Cibrano, 489n97 232-34, 288, 496n51 Raffaello d'lacob da Citerna, 504n78, Ricca d’ Uriel d’Isaia, 357, 361, 364, 368f,

514N159 §46n128, 547N139

Raffaello di Cipriano (Cypriano): age at rigattieri: female, 317; guild on market in marriage of, 347; age difference of wife cuttings in trimmings, 521n20; Jews in and, 535n10; announces decrees estab- Linen Guild as, 311; as not high-status, lishing ghetto, 245; as chancellor, 253, 165; reputation for shady dealing, 281, 399, 501N47; household of, 531n116; 526n63; in Silk Guild, 526n63; as travel-

Jewish servant employed by, 325; posi- ing, 298 tion of authority before ghettoization, Righetto, Abram (Henriches Nugnes;

462n48 Enriques Nufies), 56~57, 77, 107, 429n133

Ravid, Benjamin, 61, 425n62, 441n147 Rinuccini, Filippo, 549n159 Reformation, see Protestant Reformation Ripomerance, see Pomerance

Reggio Emilia, ghetto of, 496n1 ritual bathhouse, see mikveh religion: in building Medici state, 6, 30-32, ritual murder, accusations of, 72, 87, 94, 132, 412; as categorizing tool, 133; differ- 174, 195, 438n94

ence as sign of order, 206. See also rituals: communal affiliation as expressed Christianity; confessionalization; con- in, 89, 151; Eucharist, 31, 36, 72, 89; of rel-

version; Jews; religious community; evance to women, 158. See also prayer

religious observance rivers, 91, 242

religious community: ethnic differentia- Rivlin, Bracha, 404 tion in Florentine ghetto, 400-402; roads, 91, 242, 497n4 Florentine ghetto creating, 291, Rocke, Michael, 27, 484n28, 539n54 386-406; gendered communities in Roman Catholicism, see Catholic Church Florentine ghetto, 403—4; Tuscan Jews Roman ghetto: age at first marriage in, as, 158-68. See also convents; rabbis; 345, 539n50; architectural remains of, 6;

synagogues bankers and merchants competing for

religious observance, see books in Tuscan control in, 324; conversion as purpose Jewish homes; eating; mikveh (ritual of, 18-19, 64—65, 66, 221, 411, 421N31; bathhouse); mohalim (circumcisers); establishment of, xxi, 9, 18, 55, 64; and Passover; prayer; prayer books; rituals; expulsion of Jews from papal states, 57;

Sabbath; she/itah (kosher-slaughter); Florentine ghetto compared with, 64-

synagogues; Torah scrolls : 66; governing boards of, 499n25; as legal

618 Index place of Jewish residence in papal states, | Sabean, David, 150 57> 71, 194, 431n16; synagogue in, 158, Sacerdote, Moyse, 374

247; tax on Jews in, 66 sacred objects: Jewish bankers accused of Romano (Tedescho), Abram d’Isach, see taking as pledges, 178, 184; Jewish

under Tedesco bankers as not to take as pledges, 294

Romano, Dennis, 37 safe conducts (salve-condotte), 69, 111f, 130, Romano, Jacob, 304, 523n38 145, 299. See also travel permits

Roman rite, 401, 562n73 Sahlins, Peter, 31, 251, 407 Romanus pontifex (Pius V), 9, 57f Sala, Leonello, 256f Rome: constitution for Jews of, 141, 248f; Salamone di Lione da Prato, 504n78 conversion of Jews in, 494n38; duplicity Salamone di Manuelle Gallico, 537n28 and ambiguity attributed to Marranos Salamone di Sabato da Viterbo, 280 in, 3; ethnic divisions in Jews of, 248-49; Salamone d’Isac, 101 House of Catechumens in, 65, 456n145; Salamone Ioab de Castrocaro, 357 Inquisition established in, xxi; Jewish Salamoni, Baccio, 215 notaries in, 429n132; Jewish women Salonika, xxvi, 105 owning property in, 554n223; Jews of dif- | Salvadore di Servadio, 329, 534n144

ferent ethnic origins mixing in syna- Salvadore di Teseo, 327, 329, 534n143,

gogues of, 470n145; located on map, 534N147 xxvi; parish boundaries fixed in, 36; pop- Salvadori, Roberto G., 496n54 ulation compared with Florence, 418n4; salve-condotte (safe conducts), 69, 111f, 130,

sack of, xxi. See also Roman ghetto 145, 299

Rosenthal, Elaine G., 476n61 Salviatti, Alamanno, 56 Rossi, Azariah de’, xxii, 531n114, 561n60 San Giovanni: 99, 101, 185f, 230, 493n27;

Rossi, Salamone de’, xxii, 531n114 located on map, 1570, 102; population Roth, Cecil, 443n8, 446n37, 463n73, 483n22 multiplier for, 237

Rubinstein, Nicolai, 32 Sanita, Uffitio della, see Board of Health Sanitation, 211-12, 261, 275, 487n62

Sabato d’Amaddio da Careggio, 165, 176, San Miniato, 99, 336 180—81, 362, 364, 451n88, 493n28, 546n132 Sarfati, Abramo, 450n76

Sabato di Salamone delle Pomerance, 325, Sarra di Agnolo di Zaccheria di San Mini-

532n120 ato: dowry of, 357-61 passim, 368,

Sabbath, 85; Christians working for Jews 529n91; father borrowing dowry of, On, 160, 186; cleaning streets before, 266; 360-62, 363-64, 373; as guild member, drinking prohibited on, 271-72, 508n114; 317; in Guild of Doctors and Spice-Mer-

going out to eat and drink on, 304f, chants, 287, 323, 364; husband Graziadio , 542n81; handling money prohibited on, Finzi, 288, 361; identified with patriline,

476071 380; traveling by, 288

Sabbatuccio (Sabato; Sabattuccio) di Pel- Savonarola, 51, 94 legrino Romano: age difference of wife | Scamatino, Betto, 188 and, 344, 535n10; betrothal agreement scholars, rabbinic, see rabbinic scholars

of, 371; as denouncing Jews to Otto, scuola spagnuola, 166-67 511n141; as governor of ghetto, 255; guild — segno (sign): in Austria, 72; confusion as

membership of governors, 316; and stated reason for, 83-84, 122, 129; Cum insulting governors, 279f; sponsorship nimis absurdum calling for, 53, 82; in in gvild by, 326; as without surname, edict of ghettoization, 82-84, 441n139; 529n90; as taking office in his thirties, exemptions from, 68—69, 101, 129-30, 504n78; wealth and status of, 318 139, 164, 285, 320, 447N49, 457N162; in

Index 619 Ferrara, 77; fine for failing to wear, 69, setaiuoli, see silk industry 129, 139, 244f; Fourth Lateran Council sewage system of Florentine ghetto, 211-12, On, 20, 53, 67, 430n8; as gendered, 67, 83, 487n62 129; ghettoization compared with, sexuality: birth control, 358-60, 544n110, 19—20, 67; as ineffective, 437n79; Jews 545n121; celibacy, 338f; chastity, 294, 339, not mentioned in statutes until legisla- 348, 352, 383; relations between Christion for, 120; for Jews of Florentine tians and Jews, 67—68, 183, 195, 296,

ghetto, 244f; list of Florentine Jews 476n64, 524n46. See also homosexuality; made for, 38, 69, 151; for medieval Jews, prostitutes 411; as not required for Tuscan Jews, 55, Sforno, Abram d’Emanuel di Davit, 357,

68, 431n20; Pius V enforcing, 57; rein- 544N105 statement for Tuscan Jews, 59, 67-70, Sforno, Davit, 181, 183 82-83, 122, 129-30, 204; sameness of Jews Sforno, Emanuel (Manuello) di Davit, 176, signified by, 83; as symbol of otherness, 181, 185-86, 477N77, 493n28 69, 130; terms for Jews in legislation of Sforno, Mattasia di Davit, 160, 176, 188-89, 1567, 118; Torelli on, 55; Vinta on, 67ff, 357 436n74; and yellow ribbon for prosti- Shapiro, James, 423n41

tutes, 77, 121, 204, 428n17 Shatzmiller, Joseph, 474n37 Segre, Renata, 243, 532n132 shehitah, 160, 165, 386, 468n116 segregation, see residential segregation Shelomo ben Shemuel, 163, 468n131 self-government: as absent before ghetto- shops, 214, 286-87, 297-98, 400, 488n80 ization, 137—43; election of governors of |— Shulban Arukh (Caro), 266, 401, 506n96

ghetto, 253-58; as feature of traditional Shulvass, Moses A., 501n50 Jewish community, 137, 386; Florentine Sicily: expulsion of Jews from, 423n4); resghetto compared with other communes idential segregation in, 54, 431n14 and towns, 243, 273-75, 297; formation Siena: chapels in homes in, 159; convents of new governing elite, 258-60; ghetto- in, 422n39; Cosimo I’s conquest of, xxi, ization and, 145, 243; Simonsohn on de- 21; Da Rieti family returning to, 229,

velopment of, 507n104; women ex- 492n21; expulsion of Jews from, xxii; cluded from, 284-89. See also capitoli of ghettoization of Jews in, xxii, 9, 18, 231,

Florentine ghetto; governors of Floren- 417n3; individuals with rabbinic train-

tine ghetto ing in, 164; Jewish bankers in, 101; Jews

self-legitimation, 171 arrested as Lutherans in, 79—80; Jews Selim IT (sultan), xxii, 74f expelled from papal states coming to,

Senate, 26 71, 74, 114; located on map, xxvi, 102; sensali (brokers), 324, 327-30, 529N52, medical school accepting Jews in, 149;

533N137, 5331140 travel permits required for Jews of,

Sephardic identity, 402. See also Levantine 522n26; Tuscan Jewish bankers settling

Jews; Spanish Jews in, 98, 231, 235, 494n34

Servadio di Liuccio, 162 Silk Guild: apprenticeship and sponsorServadio Greco, 52, 106, 111, 327ff, 449n68, ship in, 326; Ginevra de Blanis in, 287,

533133 518n200; complaint about Pisan Jews,

servants: dowries for, 537n28; Jewish ser- 146; Da Empoli family members in, 321f, vants in the ghetto, 325-26; Jewish wom- 530N104; government intervention in, en seeking work as, 296; Jews employing 525n47; itinerant peddlers opposed by, Christian, 69—70, 160, 173, 178, 184-91, 89; Jews admitted through relatives, 293-94, 295, 467N113; poor women serv- 315-16; on Jews as foreigners, 12.4f; Jews

ing as, 341. See also wetnurses required to matriculate into, 307-8;

620 ~#=Index Leucci family members in, 319, 530n97; and Sephardic identity, 402; and SpanGratiadio di Ventura di Leuccio Leucci ish prayer rite, 166f; specific individuals in, 230; levels of membership in, 311-12, in Tuscany, 51, 125, 167, 189, 218, 370-74 526n63; as major guild, 315; matricula- passim, 429n133, 450n80; surnames of,

tion fees for, 311, 526N55, 526n60; 470n145. See also Levantine Jews; New

matriculation of Jews into, 1571-1610, Christians 307; mobility of crafts opposed by, Spener, Philipp Jakob, 424n54 90-91; as more difficult for Jews to Sperandino di Moise da Servi, 245, 498n16 enter, 317; privileges and exemptions Sperling, Jutta Gisela, 339 for, 525n52; sensali of, 328; travel by Spoleto, 54 members of, 321; women in, 123 sponsalitus, see betrothal contracts silk industry: Cosimo I stimulating, 23, state-building: Catholic Reformation in 322; decline in wool trade offset by, 21, building Medici state, 32-39, 133; confes531n105; Jews in, 312, 527n66, 52767; sionalization and, 2-3, 30; Cosimo I Jews with Levantine connections and, building Medici state, 21-30; and ghet328; mulberry trees, 51, 198, 322; wages toization, 3~7 passim, 14, 88-134, 221,

in, 217; women in, 330—31 407; Medici state benefiting from ghetSimone d’Agniolo Cana Ruta, 542n80 toization, 199~200; religion in building

Simone di Salamone, 279 Medici state, 30-32; territoriality and, Simone di Speranza, 344, 347, 535n10 31, 32-34 Simone Prospero da Sezzo, 216 statehood: requirements for, 136; Tuscan

Simon of Trent, 94, 195 bureaucrats’ use of term, 31f. See also Simonsohn, Shlomo, 107, 458n5, 486n56, state-building 497N8, 504n79, 507N104, 5551 status: age at first marriage and, 344-45, sindaci, 252, 261—63, 267, 275, 277, 506n94 350-52; dowry size and, 313, 354-55, 356,

Sisto da Siena, 564n84 365-84 passim, 528n76; elements of early slavery, 11, 187, 271, 421N27, 508n110, 508n111 modern European Jewish, 530n100;

social acts, 148—49 Florentine ghetto Jews lacking, 313-14; social anxiety theory, 86, 132, 442n154 ghettoization reducing women’s, 303, sociality: Florentine networks of, 28; Jew- 353, 383; governors of ghetto and, ish, 153-58; self-governing institutions 258-59, 314-15, 318, 319; guild member-

and, 147. See also friendship ship and, 314—18, 319, 323; Jewish men

sodomites, 10, 12, 515n172 attempt to consolidate, 381; lineage in, Sommo, Judah, 531n114 313, 323, 527N73; marriage for protecting soprastanti (supervisors), 252, 511N137 and improving, 336; mobility and, Spain: anti-Jewish ideas in, 72—73; charters 319-23; surnames and, 318, 323; edakah for Jews in, 98; Cosimo I using Spanish and, 387-88; women having indepen-

troops, 21; duplicity and ambiguity dently of men, 284—85. See also class attributed to Marranos in, 3; expulsion statutes, status of Jews in, 120-28 of Jews from, xvi, 423n41; Jewish com- stipulations (takkanot) in marriage conmunal organization in, 138; Jews as tax tracts, 375~82, 552n199 collectors in, 292; Jews settling in Stow, Kenneth R., 18, 64f, 418n10, 432n27, colonies of, 17; Madrid, xxi, xxvi, 72; 453N122, 494n38, 550N184, 553N212, Philip IT, 57f, 74, 43342, 4972; practice 554N223 of shehitah in, 160; residential segrega- Suleyman the Magnificent (sultan), xxii,

tion in, 54; war with Turks, xxii, 21, 74. 74

See also Aragon sumptuary codes: exemptions from, 28, Spanish Jews: 105, 108f, 166-67, 327, 396; 111, 121f; on prostitutes, 121, 204, 483n18;

Index 621 status of Jews and, 120-23; in visual Jews as, 295f; terminology for, 398. See

coding of social categories, 82, 120 also education; tutors —

Sunday, 249, 294 Tedaldi, Giovanbatista, 251 Supino, Emanuello, 494n37 Tedesco (Tedescho, Todesco, family): as surnames (family names): Jews having, matriculating into more than one guild, 314, 318, 530n94; status and lineage, 313f, 317, 529n89; Leon Modena and, 559n42;

318; and status in Florentine ghetto, 318, as surname, 318

319, 323 Tedesco, Abram d’Isac, 246, 255, 316, synagogues: Ginevra de Blanis’s gift to, 514n164, 559n42 392; in Tuscany before ghettoization, Tedesco, Isac, 370 159, 165-68; of Florentine ghetto, 247- Tedesco (Todesco), Ventura d’Abramo 48, 499n23; gendered division of space d’Isac, 370, 559n42 in, 403—4, 467n108; in Italian ities, 158; Tedesco, Salamone d’Abram d’Isac, 559n42

for Levantine Jews, 402; noise in, territoriality: Catholic church as territori267-68, 287, 400; public prayer restrict- ally defined, 34; parish boundaries ed to, 400; of Roman ghetto, 158, 247 fixed, 36-38; state-building and, 31, synods of Jewish leaders, 141-43; in Fer- 32-34 rara in 1554, 78, 143; at Florence in testaments (wills), 389-95; average size of,

1428/29, 142, 461N31 555n229; of Ginevra d’Agnolo Blanis, 162-63, 382—83, 389~95, 555230; of Lau-

Tabula delle Salute, 194, 480n121 dadio di Moise Blanis, 360, 392-93, takkanot (stipulations) in marriage con- 541N77, 557N19, $57n21; ethical wills, 392,

tracts, 375-82, 552n199 55716; as source for this study, 4if; of Talmud: burning of, xvii, xix, 55, 65, 78f, women, 381-82, 389 119; papal permission for printing, testimony, see proceedings against the

440n127; prohibition of, xix, 418n10; Jews

Trial of the Talmud, xvii Third Lateran Council, 53, 429n7 Tamari, Tamar, 156, 256-57 three rings, parable of, 93 Tamari-Venturozzo affair, 144, 156, 256-57, _Toaff, Ariel: on age at marriage, 344,

465n96. See also Ventura da Perugia 540n66; on bankers as minority, 444n25;

taverns, 304—6 on Laudadio de Blanis, 469n134; on

taxation: to redeem Jewish slave, 271; cata- Laudadio di Moise Blanis, 557n18; on StO; 335 227 335s 345» 4561147, 491N11; class endogamy, 543n97; on dowries, customs taxes, 126ff; decima, 127, 252; 356, §28n76, 543n98; on Jewish commuestate taxes, 127, 456n148; gabelle, 127f, nity of Perugia, 456n145, 548n152; on

252, 355, 456150, 543n89; for gover- Jewish versus Christian bankers, nance of Florentine ghetto, 275, 510128; 445n34; on kosher-slaughterers, 161; on

Jews as tax collectors, 292; and Jews pleasure-seeking by young Jewish men, prior to ghettoization, 126-28; parishes 542n81; on segno, 437N79; on segregation

in collection of, 32; per capita tax in of Jews, 430n13 Florentine ghetto, 224-25, 225, 500n40, toleration of Jews: conversion and, 19; of 510N129; per capita tax in Pescia, 252, Cosimo I, 51, 131, 471n9; in ghettos,

500n40 Xviii—xix; heresy making insupportable,

teachers: 165, 273, 340, 467N110, 532n118, xvii; as long as church law is respected, 561n62; in Cuneo, 341; in later ghettos, 174, 184; as medieval church policy, xviii, 458n5, 462n55; Nove approve contracts 131; mercantilist tolerance, 16, 18f, 61, given to, 561n62; rabbis as, 397, 399; 423N51; versus persecution of heretics,

synod forbids Christians to employ 79; in three rings parable, 93; two-fold

622 Index paradigm of, 96, 100; utility as reason 464n74, 488n76; change of policy

for, 16, 96, 435053 toward, 52, 57, 70-71, 113~18, 131; as dis-

Torah scrolls, 159, 403 ruptive of religious and spatial order, Torelli, Lelio: Abravanel given right to 86, 88f, 205-6; petitions to the court by, bear arms by, 111; expulsion edict signed 111-13, 145-46; segno not required for, 55,

by, 417n2; first charter for Florentine 68, 43120; segno reinstated for, 59, ghetto approved by, 246; and forced 67-70, 82-83, 122, 129-30, 204; utility as baptism in Empoli, 494n37; and lack of reason for toleration of, 16, 96 general Jewish policy, 116; as secretary to —relations with Christians: coexistence

Cosimo I, 26; on segno, 55 between Christians and, 92—94, 180-83, Toro, Moise d’Abram, 350-51, 352, 504n78, 199

535n10 —settlement in Tuscany: diverse origins

Trachtenberg, Joshua, 9, 420n24 of, 84, 401; as unauthorized, 120, 131-32, travel outside Florentine ghetto: by Da 198 Empoli family, 321-23; daily travel, 300; —social characteristics of: names preby guild members, 321; lodging and eat- ferred by, 85, 442n150; self-government ing in Christian establishments, 303-4; as absent before ghettoization, 137—43,

marriage affected by, 352; by men, 4o09f; those not bankers or merchants, 300-302, 302, §22N27, 523N31; status 109-13, 198 enhanced by, 320-23; trips taken, by age, | Tuscany: administrative divisions of,

301; by women, 288, 300-303, 320, 453n121; bachelorhood tolerated in, 346,

523n31. See also travel permits 539n54; as Catholic territory, 30; Christravel permits, 298-300, 303, 332-35, 334, tianity as woven into society in, 89; con-

343, 521N21, 522n28, 535n2 vents in, 13; famine and poverty in, 73treasurer (camerlingo), 252, 270, 507N105 74; Jewish merchants invited to, 17-18; Trent: inquisition in, 474n37; located on population of, 1562, 223; slavery in, 11; map, xxvi; Simon of Trent, 94, 195; vio- “Tuscanness,’ 119. See also Medici state;

lence against Jews in, 94, 443m15 Tuscan Jews; and cities and regions by Trexler, Richard, 25, 206, 460n15, 484n28 name Trial of the Talmud (Paris), xvii tutors, 144, 154, 159, 162, 467n109 tsedakah, 387-89; among communal wel-

fare funds, 395; circulating Florentine Udine, 17 ghetto with alms-box, 388, 511140; as Umbria: age at first marriage in, 344, concern of governors of ghetto, 267, 540n66; Da Pisa and Da Rieti families 275, 388; enforcing collection of pledges marrying into families from, 3553 for, 269; fines put into, 247, 263, 386; sta- dowries in, 356; kosher-slaughtering in, tus and, 387—88; women and, 389, 557n12 160; occupational diversity of Jews in,

Turin, xxvi 110; ritualized anger against Jews in, 92; Turks, see Ottoman Empire segno in, 67-68 Tuscan Jews: universal marriage: in Florentine ghetto, —demographic characteristics of: baby 348-50; Jewish emphasis on, 337-39, boom of 1550s and 1560s, 100, 540n68; 342; as not a Christian ideal, 338, 342; household size of, 226, 358-59; as per- for Ottoman Jews, 342, 538n41; reality centage of population, 5, 30; population of, 339-42; as survival strategy, 339 multiplier for, 227, 492n12; population urbanization, 222, 227, 345-51 passim, 383

of, 104, 223 urban renewal, 198, 307

—and Medici state: census of 1570, xv, Urbino, xxvi 32-33, 60, 145, 160, 176, 184, 340—41, Uriel d’Isaia of Pisa, 368, 549n160

Index 623 Ursi (Orsi), loseph: daughter Iudit’s 418n4; rabbi lacking in, 144; Righetto dowry, 323, 366ff; death, 381; insulted, — inquisitorial proceedings in, 56-57, 77,

280, 515172; marriage of daughter 107, 429n133; slave market in, 11; TamariTudit, 280; possible theft of Jews of Venturozzo affair, 144, 156, 256-57, Perugia, 367, 456145, 548n152; stipula- 465n96; war with Turks, xxii, 21, 74-77; tion in daughter Iudit’s wedding con- wealthy Jewish families in, 313

tract, 377-79 Ventura da Perugia (Samuel di Moise

Ursi (Orsi), Iudit: see Orsi, Iuditta (Tudit) Ventura da Perugia): court connections

used-clothing dealers, see rigattieri of, 101, 257, 44750; as not serving as Usiglia (Usiglio; Consiglio), Lione di governor of ghetto, 256, 465n96, 503n66; Moise, 316, 318, 344, 504N77, §35n10 petitions for exemption from segno usury: Iacob Abravanel’s concession, 111; through, 285, 518n194; residence of, 257, canon law prohibiting, 195; in charges 465n87, 537n28; Tamari- Venturozzo against Jewish bankers, 172, 178; Chris- affair, 144, 156, 256-57, 465n96 tian opposition to, 94, 100; Christians Verona: ghetto of, 496m1; Jewish scholarprohibited from, 61, 98; Jewish synod ship and art in, 398; rabbis in, 272; synaon, 142; Jews allowed, 61, 98, 103; Pius V gogue in, 158; women’s seating in syna-

opposed to, 57 gogue in, 563n79

via de’ Martelli, 367

velettai (veil-makers): in Guild of Doctors via de’ Succhelinai, 201, 203 and Spice-Merchants, 312, 527n70; in Vienna, xxvi, 72 Silk Guild, 526n63, 527n70; Silk Guild Villa di Tavola, 274, 509n125 requiring matriculation of Jewish, 89, Vinta (Vintha), Francesco: on exemption

124, 307-8, 525n50; as traveling, 298 from segno, 457n59; expulsion edict Venetian ghetto: architectural remains of, signed by, 417n2; and lack of general 6; establishment of, xxi, 18; etymology Jewish policy, 116; at proceedings of term, 1, 61; exclusion as purpose of, against the Jews, 472n18; on safe-con-

19, 62; Florentine ghetto compared ducts for merchants, 111; as secretary with, 61-64; fundugs as model for, 63— to Cosimo I, 26; on the segno, 67ff, 64; governing boards of, 499n25; passes 436074 for leaving, 299, 524n39; reasons for Viola di Raffaello, 191 establishment of, 9, 19, 61—62, 411, violence in the ghetto, 277f

432N31; synagogue in, 158 Vitale, Daniel, see Daniel di Vitale da Siena Venice: attitude towards heretics in, 418n9; | Vitale di Salamone da Cascia: and Jacob di Battle of Lepanto, xxii, 432n31; colored Laudadio Blanis, 279-80, 397; Manuello hat for Jews in, 425n62; control of Friuli, di Buondi confronts, 280, 397-98; con-

24; duplicity and ambiguity attributed version of, 256, 43671, 502N59; as gOvto Marranos in, 3; elite women as nuns ernor of ghetto, 255, 256, 397-98; guild in, 339; fondaci in, 63, 435n54; Italian membership of governors, 316; as rabbi

translations of Bible printed at, in Florence, 397—98; sons of, 398, 528n81, 440n134; Jewish merchants in, 17-18, 561n59; as without surname, 529n90 106; Jewish scholarship and art in, 324; Volterra: conversion of Jews in, 231,

Jews as infidels in, 417n7; Levantine 495n41; Jewish households in, 110; merchants arrested in, 75-76; naval located on map, 102; Martelli asks arsenal set on fire, 74; New Christians Francesco about letting Jews settle in, returning to Judaism in, 73; non- 114—15, 117, 122—23, 452n106, 453N112; parochial loci of sacred community in, monte di pieta in, 180; population mul37; population compared with Florence, tiplier for, 237

624. Index water: drawn for Jews on Sabbath, 160, 358-62; Florentine ghetto compared 186—89 passim; supply for Florentine with convents, 12-14; and foundling

ghetto, 211-12 hospitals, 341, 369, 531n117; gendered

Weissman, Ronald, 26ff, 37, 153 communities in Florentine ghetto, welfare, 387—96; communal funds for, 394; 403-4; ghettoization reducing status of, Misericordia of the Jews of Florence, 303, 353, 383; and guilds, 123, 287, 308-9, 382, 392, 393-94, 558N23, 558n24; in tes- 317, 454133, 455137, 528n83; identified

taments, 389-95. See also tsedakah with patriline, 380, 385; imbalance of

wells, 189, 203, 211f, 303, 389 men and, among Florentine Jews, 340; wetnurses: in charges against Jews, 294; infant mortality for girls, 359; Jewish Christian women serving Jews, 173, 184, sociality and gendered community, 187, 191, 294f, 325, 520n5; Jewish women 153-58; Jews employing Christian, 173; as

seeking work as, 296; as normative for kosher-slaughterers, 468n116; marriage Florentine Christians, 295; social status as dislocating for, 156-58, 370, 466n100; of, 295; Synod of 1573 on, 295, 325 marriage rates for, 337—42, 348-50; in widows: in census of Florentine Jews of Medici social categories, 29; midwives, 1567, 340; in census of Tuscan Jews of 295f; mobility of working-class Chris1570, 341, 537n34; dowries as life insur- tian, 523n37; as more ghettoized than ance for, 353; independence curtailed by men, 301, 303; names preferred by, 85; stipulations in marriage contracts, 381— and noise in the synagogue, 267f, 287; 82; levirate marriage, 270, 378; travel by, perceived as foreigners, 465n97; perma-

302 nently single, 338, 536n20; polygyny, 342,

wife-beating, 542n83 378, 538N41, 553n210; power of as dan-

wills, see testaments gerous, 205; renting units in Florentine

wine, 161, 304f ghetto, 489n98; ritual bathhouses for,

wineshops, 304 162f, 165, 280, 386, 515169, 545n121; selfwitches, 10, 465n97 government’s impact on, 284-89; in silk women: age at first marriage for, 342-48, industry, 330-31; sumptuary codes and, 380, 384, 538n39; age differential in mar- 121; surnames for, 318; in taverns, 306;

riage, 342-45, 352-53; autonomy for testaments of, 381-82, 389; traveling outwealthy, 383; carnality of associated with side Florentine ghetto, 288, 300-303, Jews, 205; changes in dotal strategies 320, 523n31; underidentification as Jews, and marriage system affecting, 379-83; 43-44; universal marriage as goal for and charity, 389, 557n12; without chil- Jewish, 338; unmarried, 155, 465n93, dren, 341; in Christian holy communi- 465n94. See also convents; dowries;

ties, 148; common rooms in Florentine prostitutes; widows ghetto for, 268—69, 331, 506n101;in com- Wool Guild, 123, 307, 321, 52547, 525n49 munal institutions, 147, 148-49, 462n65; Compagnia delle Donne, 404, 563n80; yeshivot, 149, 467n110

in confraternities, 147; consororities, Yiddish translations of the Bible, 80, 147, 404, 564n83; in courts of law, 287, 440133 52.4n45; in elites, 284, 287; as excluded Yuval, Israel Jacob, 459n9 from being governors, 258, 284, 408, 517n186; exclusion from public life of, Zaccaria di Michele da Empoli, 357,

11-12, 118, 284-89, 421n28; familial 544N105 strategies for arranging marriages for, “Zangari,’ 11, 421n25