The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community 9781503625020

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The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence

S TA N F O R D S E R I E S

IN

J EWISH H ISTORY

AND

C U LT U R E

e d i t e d b y Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

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

st a n f o r d u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s st a n f o r d, c a l i f o r n i a 2006

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. ds135.i85f574 2006 323.1192'404551'09031—dc22 2005015409 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Original Printing 2006 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/13 Galliard

This book is dedicated to my mother joanne h. siegmund who has been, along with everything else, my most patient and supportive listener and reader.

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Preface

xv

A Chronology of Select Events Related to the Ghettoization

xxi

Notes on Translation, Dates and Currency Introduction: Early Modern Boundaries and the Place of the Jews

xxiii

1

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

3.

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

135

Part II: The Construction of the Ghetto 4.

Staging the Expulsion: The Proceedings Against the Jews

171

5.

Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto

201

6.

Populating the Ghetto

223

P a r t I I I : A N e w Tu s c a n C o m m u n e a n d Religious Community 7.

A New Tuscan Commune: Centralization and Semi-Autonomy in the Medici State

241

viii

Contents 8.

Measuring Lengths and Distances in the Ghetto and City: Economic Parameters

292

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

Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index

415 417 565 591

Maps and Figures

Maps 1.

The world of Italian Jews in the late sixteenth century

xxvi

2.

The Jewish population in the State of Florence, Grand-Duchy of Tuscany, 1570

102

Figures 1.

The Edict of Expulsion of the Jews of Tuscany, September 26, 1570

47

2.

The Ghetto of Florence in 1584

202

3.

Marginal notations in the records of the Nove Conservatori: approval of a decision made in Cortona

264

Marginal notations in the records of the Nove Conservatori: approval of a decision made in the ghetto

265

Number of trips out of the ghetto taken by Jews, by age at time of trip, 1573–86

301

Number of men who took trips out of the ghetto, by age at time of trip, 1573–86

302

The new elite in the ghetto: correlation of governorship, membership in guilds and possession of a surname

319

Example of a travel permit given to Jews of the Florentine ghetto

334

The 1575 testament of Ginevra Blanis

390

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

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

224

Taxes Paid by the Jews of the Ghetto to the State (Through the Nove Conservatori), 1573–96

225

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

11.

Guild Membership of Jews Who Governed More than One Term, 1572–86

316

6. 7.

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 in 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 Comunità 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 technical 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 fortunate to study with Paula Hyman, Ivan Marcus and Shaye J. D. Cohen; with Eugene F. 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. I am grateful to them for their suggestions, many of which have led me to very

Acknowledgments 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.

xiii

Preface

In early July of 1570 the governors of twenty Tuscan towns received orders from the Magistrato Supremo, the highest court in Cosimo de’ Medici’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.1 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 time 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.”2 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 1497. 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.3 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.4 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 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.5 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.6 It must be noted, however, that though in the sixteenth-century Catholic world the Roman and Venetian indices of prohibited books included Jewish

xvii

xviii

Preface works along with Christian and pagan, the courts of Inquisition only rarely and exceptionally brought charges of heresy against Jews.7 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.8 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 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.9 Jews, in contrast, were not to be arrested, though their Talmud and other rabbinic commentaries were burned, prohibited and censored.10 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 administration of his state. The status of his subjects was formally simplified and systematized. And as part of that general reorganization, the Jews were relocated 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.

xix

A Chronology of Select Events Related to the Ghettoization

1516 1517 1530 1530

Venetian ghetto established Martin Luther posts his Ninety-Five Theses Sack of Rome 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) 1542 Institution of the Roman Inquisition under Pope Paul III (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)

xxii

Chronology 1566 1564 1566

Election of Pope Pius V (Antonio Michele Ghislieri, 1566–72) Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor (to 1576) 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 Hebraeorum 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 Camilla 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 ebrei, 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 iudeo or judeo (or iudei/ 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, cioè, iudeo” is translated as “a Jew, that is, a iudeo.” 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 dominates in the appearance of his or her name in the text (for example, Benvegnita Abravanel). An exception to this rule is the tables, where standardization was necessary. Place 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 soldo (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.

The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence

Paris

Avignon

Frankfurt

Hamburg

Prague

Tunis

Rome Naples

Trent Padua Venice Turin Mantua Genoa Bologna Ferrara Pesaro Pisa Florence Urbino Livorno Ancona Siena Perugia

Antwerp

Amsterdam

m a p 1 . The world of Italian Jews in the late sixteenth-century.

Centers of Jewish life in the late sixteenth century Other notable cities

Algiers

0

Fez

Madrid

London

!J

Vienna

Lublin

Candia CRETE

Izmir

Constantinople

MEDITERRANEAN SEA

Lepanto

Salonika

Cracow

Cairo

Alexandria

CYPRUS

Safed Tiberias Jerusalem

Introduction: Early Modern Boundaries and the Place of the Jews

In October 1570 Cosimo I de’ Medici issued an edict expelling the Jews from their homes in the cities and villages of his Florentine domain.1 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.2 The ghetto of Florence was never one of the most famous Italian or European ghettos, and it does not exist to be visited today.3 However, with a population of over 60,000 in 1550, Florence was one of the twelve largest cities in Europe between 1500 and 1550.4 Its ruler was an energetic, intelligent and ambitious man who worked brilliantly with urban and rural elite families to

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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.5 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.6 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.7 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 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 Christian 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 study 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 Christians’ 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 Christian 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.8 Similar themes are explored in studies about the

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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.9 In this broad context, the ghettoization of the Jews in Florence is an event which both symbolically and quite literally shifted and redefined the boundaries 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.
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 1571.10 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.11 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 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.”12 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.13 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

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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.14 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.15 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.
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 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.16 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.17 Many stud-

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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 analyses 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).18 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.19 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 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.20 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.21 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).22 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.23 It is not only the history of this Jewish institution and the urban and religious 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 European society, social groups who were identified, labeled as “other” and assigned negative attributes, whether as simply “foreign” or as impure, corrupting and dangerous.24 Once so stigmatized, the “discourse of violence”

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Introduction fully established, members of these groups were vulnerable to attack as individuals and as collectives. They were subjected to accusations, violence, segregation, 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 centuries 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 had previously faced an expulsion order. This had occurred when the Republic rejected them as well as other supporters of the Medici in 1494, 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.25 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.26 There is a relationship between political exile and excommunication: in both cases, the ones banned are ruled out of the defining community, and penalties 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.27 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 of both elite and laboring classes were effectively discouraged from appearing in the public streets, taverns and courts.28 Men were also affected by the enforcement of gender norms: a concerted cam-

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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.29 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).30 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.31 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 comparison 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.32 In 1563 the twenty-fifth and last session of the Council of Trent reaffirmed and strengthened Pope Boniface VIII’s 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 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.34 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.35 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.36 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.37 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.”38 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

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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).39 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 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.40 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.41 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.42 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 1500.43 The decade of the 1530s has its own appeal, for with the institution of the Portuguese Inquisition a substan-

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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.44 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 qua 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, is 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.45 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.46 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 cohabiting the same city, despite the principle suggested by the famous phrase cuius regio, eius religio 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 in some of the less tolerant cities.47 Jews continued to be expelled throughout 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.48 Jews also continued to be prohibited from taking up residence 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.49 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 IV’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.50 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-

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Introduction tuguese mercantile network. These overtures to Jews are rightly seen as the “new” mercantilism and the tolerance it encouraged.51 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.52 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.53 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.54 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.55 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.56 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.57 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 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) physical circumstances of their lives reflected their (degraded and rejected) spiritual status.58 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 idiom59) 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.60 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 practical, 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 the badge called the segno (sign) that Jews were

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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.”61 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.62 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 statuses, a situation that highlights the importance of the patron-client relationships built by the urban patriciate and working classes.63 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 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).64 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 territory, 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.65 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.

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Introduction The success of Cosimo I de’ Medici in establishing his rule, his place among the leaders of European states, and his dynasty is 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 administration and the local governance of the communes.66 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.67 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.68 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.69 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.70 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.71 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 been important in the region in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were weakened and ultimately replaced.72 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.73 The flurry of publications and reissue of local statutes and ordinances in the towns of Tuscany in the 1540s and 1550s 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.74 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 obviously directed parts of the process of state-building. For example, the

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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 sixteenth 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.75 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.76 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.77 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 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 centralizing 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, localized 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 in 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.78 In Tuscany, patricians eager for investment capital 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.79 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.”80 There is still some debate concerning the extent to which, under Cosimo, the patrician class was stripped of its power and given hereditary honor in its

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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.81 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 climbing into positions of statewide elite status by becoming officers of the regional militia.82 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 Renaissance Florence (1982), Florentine men had in the fifteenth century participated widely in associations that bonded men across the divide of urban quarters and neighborhoods, 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 divided the population of the city in ways that made it less likely that any kingroup 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.83 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.84 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.85 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.86 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.”87 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.88 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

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Introduction from the honors—such as exemption from sumptuary code restrictions— that their fathers and husbands enjoyed.89 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.90 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 loci or networks of sociality that a new government might fear conspiracy or the foment of discontent.91 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 loci 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 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, cittadini, contadini. And these ranks were further cut across by gender lines: women were wives of nobility, wives of cittadini, 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.92 The gonfaloni 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.”93 Toward the end of the century the regular meetings of the men in each gonfalone were interrupted; in 1531–32 the office of gonfaloniere was eliminated; and in a census of 1551 many families no longer resided in the gonfaloni where they had for so long been registered.94 “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.”95 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

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Introduction 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 Cristianità 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.96 In contrast, recent Italian historiography tends to divide itself into two rather separate subfields, one on the Catholic Reformation, and the other on state-building, with relatively few studies to link them.97 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 One of the earlier processes that moved states from jurisdictional state sovereignty 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.98 In the sixteenth century the rulers and bureaucrats of Tuscany governed a unit they referred to as “the state” (lo stato).99 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 institutions 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 territory 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.100 In this specific sense, Jews were never part of the larger community to which their Christian neighbors 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.101 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.102 For Christians and for Jews, then, a sense of commonality did not require personal contact, knowledge or geographic closeness to others in that largest commu-

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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.103 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.104 As Cosimo and his advisors used the term, lo 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.105 The word stato was officially used most often, as Nicolai Rubinstein once pointed out was true for despots and monarchs,106 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 podestà) to count them, each in his own administrative region. None of these governors expressed doubts or con-

Early Modern Boundaries 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 a gonfalone and because of the substantial overlap of residence.107 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.108 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 gonafaloni. 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.109 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.110 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

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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 harvest 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 confinanti) with other states are obliged . . . to visit and recognize all the borders (confini),” to note any alterations that have been made and to file their report.111 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 community’s boundaries, at least as they pertained to maintenance of the roads found therein.112 The Catholic Church is in the foreground, for it was this great early modern bureaucracy and not a monarchy such as Spain or France that first systematically 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 formation. 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 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.113 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, eius 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.114 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 hierarchy 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 populi. 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.115 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.116 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-

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Introduction sion.117 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.118 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.119

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.120 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.121 In their pastoral visits, which became

Early Modern Boundaries much more regular after the Council of Trent, the archbishops asked parish priests if they were keeping the required registries of communion, marriages, baptisms.122 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.123 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.124 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.125 With their needs insured, ties were weakened between the working-class people and the potentially competing 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

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Introduction to say that alterations and changes in religion bring with them the manifest danger of State, and therefore he remains warned.”126 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.127 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.128 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.129 It may be that the new importance of the parish created a certain

Early Modern Boundaries 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 it, 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 narration of the events. Here, perhaps, the story will unfold more as it would

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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-Tridentine, 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 administrative 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 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 Yeh. iel 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 in 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

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Introduction the ghetto and in the early ghetto period appears regularly in the records of the criminal court (Otto di Guardia e Balía), 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.130 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.131 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 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

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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.132 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 approximate 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.133 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.134 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.

O n e 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 1547, 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 similar privileges to members of several Italian-born Jewish households, perhaps upon Abravanel’s recommendation.1 Benvegnita, a personal friend of the duchess Eleonora di

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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.2 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 network 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.3 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.4 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 clerical reform.5 Nonetheless, church policy toward the Jews in the later sixteenth 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 Caraffa 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.6 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.7 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.8 “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.9 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

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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.10 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.11 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.12 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.13 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.14 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.15 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 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 towns16), 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 in 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 III 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.17 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.”18 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 it—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.”19 It was not the duke’s manner in 1557 to compel his subjects to wear a specially colored hat or any other Jewish mark.20 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

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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 Illustrious Signor Duke that pardoned him of anything from the past, while expecting him to be a good Jew.”21 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 judaizing 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, o turco, o giudeo come vuoi, 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!22

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.23 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.”24 By

Residential Segregation 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 Nuñes. 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.25 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.26 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).27 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.28 Pius V successfully pressured the duke of Milan (subject of the Spanish Habsburg king Philip II) 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 1567.29 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.30

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The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power A year and a half after Hebraeorum 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.31 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.32 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 1559.33 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 preference 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.34 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.35 This reaction could certainly have been anticipated. With the election of Pius V in 1566, Cosimo is said by one historian to

Residential Segregation have had to play a “politics of concession”; another documents the relationship between the two neighboring rulers as mutually beneficial.36 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.37 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. In a dramatic reversal of his loyalties, Cosimo allowed Carnesecchi to be arrested and deported to Rome, where he was tried and burned.38 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.39 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.40 The archbishop’s return in 1567 signaled Cosimo’s willingness to allow the Roman Church to establish its powerful presence in Florence. It was a moment of some consequence 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 relationship, 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.41 The papal bull of coronation was ceremoniously read in Florence on 13 December 1569, and Cosimo was crowned in Rome on 5 March 1570.42 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

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The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power he participated in the Mediterranean war against the Turks.43 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.44 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.45 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 negotiation 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.46 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.47

Residential Segregation 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 Medici’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 proceed 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).48 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

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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.49 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.50 The ghetto, distant, enclosed and strictly regulated, was seen as a compromise. 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.51 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.52 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 raisons d’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.53 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.54 All these groups, notes Donatella Calabi, obtained a “reserved urban space” for their residence.55 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 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.”56 It seems likely that the concept and institutional design of the Venetian ghetto (instituted in 1516) has its origins in the funduqs 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 funduqs 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.57 These structures were referred to in the report of a fifteenth-century Italian Jewish traveler named Meshullam ben Menah.em 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.58 In smaller cities where there was no funduq, traders often maintained residence or were lodged in the quarters reserved for local dhimmi—native Jews and Christians.59 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.60 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 communities, 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 replicated 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 funduq 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

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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.61 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.62 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.63 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 preambles of papal declarations, with their earliest expression in the 1416 bull of Benedict XIII, Etsi 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.64 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.65 And finally, beginning in 1584, Jews in Rome were ordered to attend sermons by preachers trained in the effort to convert them.66 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.67 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.68 That the impact of ghettoization on the Jews—the possibility that they might be converted—is not a motivating concern of the Medici is 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.69 Its stated mission was to prevent the relapse of converts into faithlessness by

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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.70 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 conversionary 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.71 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, policies and institutions of the Tridentine and immediately post-Tridentine church, the church of the Catholic Reformation.72 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 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.”73 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.74 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.75 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.76 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 segno 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 1215.77 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.78 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

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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.79 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.80 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.81 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.82 All other Jews were subject—if

Residential Segregation 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.83 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.”84 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 immediately seen clearly that each one is of the false Jewish religion.”85 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.86 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 segno 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,

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The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power though no one in Tuscany in recent decades had raised this as a concern.87 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.88 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.89 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 positions 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 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.90 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.91 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 1557–59.92 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.93 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 II in 1565,

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The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power even if not fully put into effect.94 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.95 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.96 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.97 AntiJewish 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.98 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 authorities, 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.”99 Spaniards, including Spanish abroad, were suspicious of New Christians

Residential Segregation (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.100 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. Although it is difficult to assign specific responsibilities to Cosimo and Francesco 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

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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 pietà) 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.”101 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 commune well, they would not have to ask for help.102 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 1570.103 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.104 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 1567.105 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.106 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.107 While any foreigner might be suspect, in Venice and Ferrara the Jewish and converso (judaizing

Residential Segregation 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 conspirators.108 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 Doña Beatrice de Luna (already know as Graçia 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.109 Nasi had lived as a Portuguese New Christian named João 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.110 He moved to the Ottoman empire, there to establish a Jewish persona (as Joseph Nasi) and to have Sultan Selim II make him Duke of Naxos and the Archipelago in 1566.111 Joseph Nasi’s wealth and actual influence at the court of Selim II were dramatically exaggerated by Christian Venetians, who first revoked his banishment 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.112 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 1573.113 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.114 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-

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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.115 As the mobility of gold and its unchangeability made it the symbol of power and security,116 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.117 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 anyone 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.119

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 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 Marrano, 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.120 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.”121 The Jews of Ferrara had not been forced to wear the mark in the sixteenth century until “finally” at this moment.122 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.”123 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.

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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 tolerant 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.124 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.125 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.126 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, disparaging 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.127 In a selfdescribed “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.128

Residential Segregation Except for the burning of 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.”129 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.130 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 in 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 10 July 1570 one such group of men was arrested in Siena and held there on charges of heresy by the papal inquisitor.131 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

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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.”132 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.133 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.134 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 ghettoization? 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 “violent 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 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 contact 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.”135 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,

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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 meaning of the ghettoization as it was fully expressed only later in what I have referred to as the second edict, the proclamation (bando) 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.136 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 territory 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 1567.137 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 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.”138 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 segno 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 10 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.”139 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.140 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.”141 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 confusione). 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-

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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.”142 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.”143 Some of the men and women were seen as fat, some as thin.144 Like Christians, the men generally wore beards, whether “red and curly” or “sparse and black.”145 Most of the Jews described were said to be of average, medium or proportionate height or stature (statura mediocre, 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.146 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.147 On their first encounter, a Christian might have mistaken a Jew for a foreign Christian, 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.148 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 rare Spanish or Portuguese converso living in both worlds, Jews did not attend church services or take the sacraments.149 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, Salamone, Laudadio, Sabatino and Abramo—names which were most unusual for Christians in Tuscany at the time.150 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.151 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

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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.152 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.153 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 is 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.154 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.155 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 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 in late medieval Christendom.156 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.157 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 religion; 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.

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Tw o 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 participation in many sectors of the economic and social world they chose to inhabit.
Alongside the secular and civic humanist culture that was critical to the emergence of the Italian renaissance states, and often infused through it, religion 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 Christian-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 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, initially 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.1 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.”2 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-

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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 pietà of Pisa with a large cash influx and new regulations.3 Indeed, the cash deposit that came to the monte di pietà 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.5 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.6 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 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.”7 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 mobility.
In the late sixteenth century, officials most actively involved in the development of the grand-ducal state and of the post-Tridentine 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

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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 otherness 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.8 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.9 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 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 taught. The story itself had a long history, but it made its most important appearance 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 religions.10 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-Tridentine 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 in 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.11 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

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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 mendicant friars, mostly Franciscan, whose preaching program included the denunciation of usury, a call to expel Jews and the promotion of monti di pietà, Christian charitable loan-banks.12 Fra Bernardino da Feltre’s sermons, including those in Florence in 1488 and 1493, 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.13 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.14 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.15 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.16 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.17 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.18 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 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].”19 Did the duke not realize that other mer-

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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 Christians 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.20 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.21 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.22 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.23 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

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.24 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.25) While the presence of nonbanking Jews in many places has been noted and documented, it is still generally thought that Jewish society and culture was characterized, supported and determined by the bankers.26 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.27 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.28 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.29 These bankers were an urban elite, not part of the Florentine patriciate but

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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.30 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).31 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.32 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.33 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 consortium 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.34 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.35 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 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.36 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 Doña Benvegnita Abravanel. Benvegnita was the daughter of a Jewish nobleman who served as financier at the court of Don Pedro, Viceroy in Naples. According to Abravanel family tradition, she had been Eleonora’s tutor or governess.37 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 1547.38 At about the same time charters were also granted to the da Rieti family and to the widow Fiametta da Pisa and her sons.39 It may be that Cosimo I was willing to grant banking privileges to Jews because of the potential economic stimulus that credit could bring.40 More certainly, he understood the necessity of providing creditors who would make small loans at a reasonable rate.41 Jewish bankers set up shops in places where there were not yet monti di pietà and in a few where there were, coexisting with them there as elsewhere.42 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).43 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-

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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.44 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.45 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.46 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.47 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.48 We are not speaking of a stable, historic population, 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 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.49 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.50 Combining information from the letters of exemption with data given in the census of Jewish households conducted in 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.51 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 1567.52 In Pomerance (or Ripomerance), Sabato di Salamone de Monteulmo was allowed to open a bank in 1558.53 Research has not yet

101

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State-Building and Status 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.54 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 1570.55 Davit di Iacob da Poppi was accused of illegally lending money in Poppi 1559 and 1560, and was still living there in 1570.56 Despite this apparently abundant evidence of Jewish banking in Tuscany, including moneylending not documented as officially permitted, the cumulative 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).57 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).58 These facts require us to revise the traditional 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.59 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 in 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

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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 1497 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 formal 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.60 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.61 In the 1540s 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 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.62 It was during the 1540s and 1550s that the New Christian Doña 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 Doña Graçia, 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 1537.63 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 1550s has not yielded evidence that any of them were living as crypto-Jews or openly as Jews.64 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.65 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

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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 (gabelle 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.66 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 markets67). 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.68 The invitation did not notably increase the volume of trade between Florence and the Levant.69 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 1593.70 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 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, now 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 infideles in Ancona to explicitly include persons of the Kingdom of Portugal “also if of the Jewish origin, now called New Christians.”71 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 III and Julius III, according to Simonsohn, “openly tolerated their reversion to Judaism.”72 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 1556.73 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.74 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

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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 gl’agli 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.”75 The number of Jewish merchants who arrived in response to the privilege of 1551 is 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.76 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.77 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.78 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 transcript 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 marrani) how many “Spanish Jews” there were. Moise Buondi—though eager to ingratiate himself—

State-Building and Status named only three: Isaia Coen, the accused; Daniel Baroch; and Ioseph Achias.79 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.80 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.81 He called only the latter “Spagnuoli,” adding quite maliciously that in his opinion “they are all 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.82 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, however, 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” settlement 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.83 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

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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 podestà 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.84 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 gunpowder-maker, a dance-master and even three Jews enrolled in a guild of painters.85 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.86 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.87 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

State-Building and Status Jews was to be allowed to lend at usury, that being a concession already granted to Don Iacob (Abravanel).88 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.89 Less extraordinary Jews also petitioned the court. One was Isac del Cano (alias Calò), 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.”90 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.

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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).91 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 in 1556 to produce and sell woolens with the same immunities and regulations as the merchants of Montopoli.92 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 (i.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 Montopoli and live there.93 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.”94 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 stillJewish 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-Building and Status these merchants would trade freely, paying taxes but without being required to join any guild or respect its regulations.95 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.96 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.97 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-

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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.98 The next month Cosimo’s son and the local official of the Tuscan city of Volterra had a longer exchange of letters.99 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.”100 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 (Hebrei) 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.101 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.102 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 (mercaiuolo and calzaiolo)

State-Building and Status 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.103 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.”104 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.”105 The captain wanted either explicit instruction to throw the Jews out or explicit permission to allow them to stay.106 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 remarkable 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-

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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.107 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.”108 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.109 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 be very sorry to lose this artisan, whose Jewish status was not referred to other than in his name.110 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.111 There is also no evidence that Prospero sought permission 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 accustomed 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.112 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 identity” 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, religion (Christian as opposed to Jewish). While as we have seen some local

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The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power (Christian) governors and individual Jews engaged a discourse about foreignness, 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?113 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].”114 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”115 (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

State-Building and Status henceforth allowed to engage in moneylending.116 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.”117 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 Jewishness 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.118 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 1559.119 The edicts were to be read, and in this case they contributed to the Medici’s 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” [Toscanità] that existed as a matter of cultural capital and pride was limited to Florentine courtier circles at this time.120 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-

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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,121 and some were considered citizens of the cities in which they resided.122

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.123 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.124

State-Building and Status

Sumptuary Legislation and the Status of the Jews Sumptuary law established a broad and general ban applicable to all persons 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 is, rank or status), age and gender (not simply sex, since marital status was relevant only for women and 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;125 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.”126 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.127 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.

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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.128 Doctors were also fully exempt, as were foreigners, and these statuses were presumably available to Jews.129 Thus Jews invited in 1551 as Levantine merchants may have followed the code for foreigners.130 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 capitani, vicari and podestà 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 indistinguishable 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.131 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 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 uniformly excluded from these guilds, and there were no separate Jewish guilds.132 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.133 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.134 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.135 Guild enrollments show that some guilds did not admit Jews even though they did not explicitly exclude them from admission in their statutes.136 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.137 The exclusion of Jews from guilds is sometimes explained by the requirement of an oath to be taken on the Christian 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-

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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 foreigners: “they are required to and must open a shop, and be matriculated … as foreigners [forestieri], with the vote of the Council; and they shall come, this having been done, as subjects [sottoposti] 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.”138 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.139 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.140 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 number 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 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.141 But the status of foreigner was not applied arbitrarily to all Jews.142 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 1549, having been born in Empoli and having lived there all their lives.143 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.144 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

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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.145 It is true that, prior to 1571, Jews who were bankers and those who were invited to come to the state in 1551 as Levantine merchants were deliberately exempted from every imaginable 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.146 The other Jews in the state, however, were treated by the system as ordinary inhabitants.

State-Building and Status Under Cosimo I’s 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.147 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.148 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 [qualità] or condition,” though the rates were different for residents of the city, contado and disretto.149 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.150 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.151 The following examples of taxes paid by Jews should therefore be seen not as exceptional but as indicative of the general expectation 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.152 In Arezzo in the

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The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power 1550s and 1560s customs officials fined several Jews for tax fraud (“frode dazaria”), from which we may infer that they were not exempt from taxes.153 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.154 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.155 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.156) 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.
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 was self-defined. It was a challenge to centuries of church doctrine and popular 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.157 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, nourished 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, Jews 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.158 The Jews were “out of place” and it was necessary to build a new structure to contain 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 exemption for Jews who possessed banks and paid “certain taxes,” a reference to the annual fees they paid for the charters.159 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

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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, members 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.160 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.161 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 Christians—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 Jewish 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.162 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 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.163

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 disorder 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,

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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 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 università delli ebrei.164 The “università” was

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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 hebrei, 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.

T h r e e 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 understandings of people who were collectively assigned the status of minority groups or subalterns.

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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.1 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.2 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 living in “communities,” or as at least in relationship to a nearby Jewish community.3 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.4 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.5 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.6 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.7 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 organic growth, organized according to the religious, political and gender norms prescribed in rabbinic texts.8 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.9 It was a history contemporary 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 autonomy—either 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.10 It might even be argued that medieval church doctrine, medieval rabbis and other self-interested elite men, religious and nationalist historians of

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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-developed (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.11 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.12 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 k. ahal, even though that word was and is variably used to mean “the men of a place” and the “board of elders.”13 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 documents the word capi, where it occurred, actually referred specifically to “heads” of associations of Jewish bankers licensed to operate banks in the city.14 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.15 (After their permits to lend at interest in Florence were revoked in 1494 and

Before the Ghetto 1527, Jewish banking was never reauthorized in the city, where a monte di pietà was established in response to Mendicant preaching in 1496.16) 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 capi (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.17 According to a provision of 1463, four banks were allowed to be serviced by families and staff, to a maximum of seventy persons.18 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).19 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.20 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.21 This demography must shape our understanding of the provisions in the fifteenth-century charters that seem to have endowed the Jewish bankers

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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.22 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.”23 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.24 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 exercised 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.25 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.26 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 organized 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.”27 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 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.28 Therefore, despite rabbinic opinion that arbitrators should be scholars or turn to rabbis for clarification,29 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.30 In any event, in the absence of evidence we cannot call the Jews of fifteenth-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.31 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 1416:32 “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.”33 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

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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.34 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 Yeh.iel Nissim da Pisa.35 Lest his reader imagine that his concern about the ethics of moneylending was historically unfounded, his rules an “invention,” Yeh.iel 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.36

With this introduction, Yeh.iel 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 Yeh.iel’s generation invites a measure of scepticism about Yeh.iel’s “old document.” There seems to have been a meeting of some Jews in Florence in 1428/29; 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.37 The authority and weight the (supposed) decrees lent his own argument against the usurious practices he condemned was important to Yeh.iel. But perhaps equally important here is Yeh.iel’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, Yeh.iel 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 Yeh.iel’s lifetime

Before the Ghetto 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.”38 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 1554.39 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 proceedings against them which began in 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 activities 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

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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.40 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.41 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 complicated or controversial divorces, individuals could and occasionally did correspond with important nonlocal rabbinic scholars such as Joseph Colon in Mantua.42 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.43 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.”44 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.45 Moreover, there does not seem

Before the Ghetto 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.46 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.47 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.48 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.49 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 podestà.50 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.51 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 gabella and the salt tax, and other favors such as charitable aid, inter-

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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.52 In this important aspect the Jews of Tuscany were both most like and most unlike the average citizens (cittadini) and countrypeople (contadini) 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 1550s. 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.53 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 “comunità” such as Pescia or Prato.54 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 designated rabbinic leaders in the pre-ghetto period only partially addresses the question of their interrelatedness as community. One fundamental limitation 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 confraternities 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.55 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.
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.56 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

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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.”57 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 Yisrael58) is, however, to be distinguished from belonging to a specific, localized community (which Katz refers to as a kehila). 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.59 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.60 For urban patrician women of Venice who did not enter convents, it was the combination of “shared life experiences” and social contact 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.61 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 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.62 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.63 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 occupationally 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 Doña Graçia 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.64 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 k.ehilah, 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.”65 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?66 To what extent were Jews, not only the elite men but also the women and non-elite men, associated with each

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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.67 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.68 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 maintenance of “sacral community.”69 For example, David Sabean has demonstrated that in the Protestant duchy of Württemberg individuals who did not participate in the communion ritual were seen as, and understood themselves to be, outsiders and potentially dangerous to the Christian community.70 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.71 As Bossy argued, “to the ordinary population . . . what the Counter-Reformation really meant was the institution among them . . . of a system of parochial conformity.”72 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 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.73 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.74 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.75 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”76; 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.”77 These ninety-odd Jewish residents neither lived near one another nor congregated voluntarily into a Jewish neighborhood or quarter. Their distribu-

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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.78 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.79 The addresses of the houses of these Jews were not included in the important census of 1570 which anticipated the expulsion.80 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.81 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?82 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.”83 From 1494 to 1537, under conditions of frequent changes of government and political crises, confraternities in Florence

Before the Ghetto 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 confraternities.84 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 confraternità. 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.85 According to the census of 1570, of 104 discrete

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The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power Jewish households in Tuscany,86 which averaged over five persons each, only eight Jews, all men, lived alone, three of them in Florence.87 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.”88 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 Trinita89; 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.90 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 [hebraichamente].”91 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 1570.92 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 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.93 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 religiously. 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 households as servants or dependent relatives, compared to only three adult males.94 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

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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.95 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.”96 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 excommunication 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 community. 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 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.97 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.98 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.99 That is, there were only two men who moved into the home of a woman and her parent(s).100 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.101 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.102 There are three additional households in which a male householder lists as a member his mother or father or both, so that we know his link to them was unbroken or reinstated as they aged.103 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.104 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

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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.105 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.106 The tradition calls men to prayer three times daily, and to more extensive 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 minyan. Educated Jewish men therefore preferred

Before the Ghetto 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.107 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.108 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.109 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.110 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 Yeh.iel Nissim da Pisa, to bring their sons ritually into

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The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power the covenant between God and Israel.111 In addition to Yeh.iel 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 evidence 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.112 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.113 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.114 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 in 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.115 Although we lack specific information that there was a Jewish butcher, or kosher-slaughterer (shoh.et), 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 sheh.itah 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.116 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.”117 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 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).118 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.119 It is possible that Jews may have simply buried their dead on their own private property; 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.120 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.121 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 (scrittoio) of Agnolino hebreo were “forty large Hebrew books.”122 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

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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 mik.veh (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.123 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.124 Servadio di Liuccio, who bore the epithet “maestro della scuola” in 1573 in the ghetto,125 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.126 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 1574 “for the education of poor boys” and for dowries for poor girls.127 [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 communal funds for schooling or for the provision of dowries to which Ginevra promised her contributions in 1574, 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 h.asadim 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 themselves 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.129 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.130 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 1558.131 But this does not mean that there was no one in Florence or nearby who had rabbinic knowledge and skills. There were, in

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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 “mro,” “mgo” or “mo,” 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 “mro” (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 is 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 Mro Benedetto. In this case, we know that Mro 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.132 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.133 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.134 However, he left no collected responsa or sermons, and very little correspondence.135 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 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 “mo,” 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 (mik.veh) 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.”136 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-

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The Segregation of Jews and the Spatialization of Power mone.137 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.138 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.139 In the “scuola spagnuola” some Jews appear to have used bilingual prayer books, with “Christian letters,” at least for reading psalms.140 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 tradition for Jews to recite hymns and psalms in their own (vernacular) language.141 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 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 H . odesh (the New Moon) just a week after the holiday of Simh. at 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.”142 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 provi). 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.143 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 is called a Roman. Where he was from before Padua and Rome we do not know, but he was not a Levantine merchant.144 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.145 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.146 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.

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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 factors 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.

Four

Staging the Expulsion: The Proceedings Against the Jews hoy me misero che disgratia e la mia, o, che male ho fatto alle persone che habino da cercare nuovi occasioni di farmi privar della gratia sua —Agnolo di Laudadio Hebreo to Francesco de’ Medici, Pisa, 20 October 1570, Mediceo del Principato 554, 155r

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.
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.1 Indeed, this is exactly what happened to resident Gypsies when they were expelled in March 1573.2 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.

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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 vanquishing 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.3 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.4 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 is 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 conventioni). 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 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 capitoli 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.5

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 is 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.6 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.”7 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

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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 all 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.8 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 expelled.9 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.10 In the letters that were sent to cities where Jews held banking charters, the Jews were charged with transgressing their capitoli.11 The bankers accused had their lending activities suspended, they were ordered to appear before the magistrates 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.12 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 pietà 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.13 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.”14 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

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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 podestà who received the letters were ordered to conduct a census of the Jews in their jurisdiction, counting the number of famiglie 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.15 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.16 The census was a population study—and provided the data needed to organize a population transfer.17

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.18 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, Magister Simone di Laudadio da Rieti hebreo.19 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.20 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,21 and Ioseph di Leone da Fano hebreo on 22 July).22 The appearances in court were completed on 22 and 24 July with Samuel di Manuel de Sant’Angelo 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.23 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.24 Rieti’s charter had been granted upon

Staging the Expulsion 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.25 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.26 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.27 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.28 If Francesco would agree, Agnolo would be able to explain the closure of the bank as a policy decision, but one which did not mean his own demise in Tuscany. Already a merchant 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.29 Agnolo also made it absolutely clear that there were five or six families of Jews who were in a different category, “born and raised with every civility and honor,” and petitioned 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.30 The door was not entirely closed, but almost.

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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 in 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.31 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.”32 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.33 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.34 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.35 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.36 There is no evidence of Jews attempting to organize and help each other,

Staging the Expulsion 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.37 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.38 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 letter, and twenty-six men of Pescia, “homini delli primi,” each signed their name below the text, dated 2 July 1570.39 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 [civilmente] and as righteous men [huomini da bene] and that we have continuously received from them service and favors [accommodation: servitio e commodi]. 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.40

It is fair to assume that this letter, written “in the name of God” (Al nome d’Iddio) 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 pietà. This may have

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The Construction of the Ghetto provided a strong motivation to town-dwellers to try to keep their Jewish bankers.41 The townspeople of Empoli and Pescia could not yet have known that monti di pietà, giving loans at only 5 percent, would be successfully installed in their cities soon after the expulsion of the Jews.42 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 contadini. 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.43 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.44 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.45 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 pietà predated 1570 in Volterra, Arezzo, Pisa, Prato and even Montevarchi.46 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 capitoli. 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 capitoli, 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.47

Staging the Expulsion 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.48 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.”49 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.50 More positive testimony 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.”51 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.52 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.53 Lazero di Pier da Empoli, a non-Jew, submitted in his own hand a statement of the banker’s righteousness: 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.”54 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.55 Letters came in support of Davit di Raffaelo da Reggio, too: thirteen men of San Giovanni declared his honesty.56 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.57 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

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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 Balía. 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.roAlessandro [di Giovanfrancesco Catani] who clobbered him with [his] cane . . . and, M.ro 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.”58 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.59 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 parties 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.60 But if he was not known to the Christians, he was probably allowed to play his role because of his costume; that is, his outfit undoubtedly reflected his social standing. He—like one of the two Christian men—was referred to as Mro (Magistro or Maestro) in the court

Staging the Expulsion 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.61 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.62 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.63 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.64 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.65 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

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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 podestà 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.66 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 festival days, although communal statutes were necessary to enforce this piety.67) 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.68 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.69 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 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.70 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.”71 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.72 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 in 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.73 On the second and third of August a number of Christians, mostly women, who worked for Jews in Pescia were questioned.74 The interviews were kept brief. Information 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.75 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.76 The majority of the charges were brought against Manuello hebreo, the banker in Pescia who was an agent of the da Pisa family bank.77 Laudadio, head of that

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The Construction of the Ghetto bank, was also accused of tricking some borrowers into paying interest for an extra month.78 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 public, suggesting that there was none.79 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.80 The podestà 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.”81 And on 20 August 1570 Iacopo di Lotto, the vicar of Monterchi, 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.82 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 Monterchi) were also, as we have noted, commanded to collect data on the employment of Christian servants by the Jews in their jurisdiction.83 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.84 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 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.85 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-à-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.”86 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.87

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 Ma 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.”88 He also has (tiene, keeps) a laborer (poderino), from 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.89 A separate, more complete list of these people clarifies that the banker in question was Davit da Reggio in San Giovanni.90 The wetnurse, named Betta di Giusto Bonegi, lived in Figline and nursed Raffaello, son of Magister

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The Construction of the Ghetto Davitte ebreo, in 1561.91 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.92 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 podestà of Prato reports that the Jewish bankers in Prato have “an old German” (un tedescho vechio) as their servant, and “some Christian women who work sometimes in their house doing their laundry and other necessary chores.”93 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.94 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.95 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).96 Like the other Jewish employers, Mattasia had maintained long-term relationships 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.97 There was an eighteen-year-old girl named Caterina da Vinci who had, according to the report, worked for him six years.98 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 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.99 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 podestà of Empoli did not stop with the list of servants who had worked for the banker, but included in 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 Ma Dorina”—a Jewish woman called Mona Dorina, or sometimes Delvora.100 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 earlier.101 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.102 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 addition 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.103 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.104 The Christians who were interrogated in Pescia were clearly aware that living in the Jews’ homes and being salaried

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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.105 But, they sometimes added, they were paid well.106 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 podestà, 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:107 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 [ebrei], 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.”108 And, as mentioned earlier, the vicar of Monterchi had not hesitated 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 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.109

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-manufacturer in Empoli.110 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 men and women living in every combination and alone—who had made their 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 statecraft. 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.111 Their guilt

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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 condemnations 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.112 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.113 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.114 Cosimo and Francesco would hardly have feared accusations of despotism, 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 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 1583.115 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.116 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 1579.117 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 1578.118 His public policy and personality were judged harshly by two contemporaries who wrote chronicles, Giuliano de’ Ricci and the afore-mentioned Arditi.119 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 recommended that older children living at the foundling hospital (the Innocenti) be relocated in service or sent out to the street to cut expenses.120 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

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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 contadini. 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 50 scudi at 30 percent, compounding the interest for a hundred years.121 All these documents would be presented to the grand duke in a bound volume as the findings of the commission on the Jews labeled Processi 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.”122 Carlo Pitti’s proposal in August directly echoed a proposal that introduced an anti-Jewish treatise by the vicar-lieutenant of the archdiocese of Florence, Lodovico Martelli, which Carlo Pitti had also included as supporting evidence in his collected papers.123 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 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.124 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 azzimi (unleavened bread, or matsah). This took place, according to Martelli, in the house of a 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.”125 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.126 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 narratives 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 religion. 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 it had happened again, “very recently, in a nearby town.”127 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

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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 Nofri 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.128 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 political and religious and personality-based motives presented thus far in my explanation of the ghettoization are all compatible, all part of the larger picture. 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 pietà, 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 6⅓ percent, a rate officially reserved for loans of less than 25 scudi.129 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 pietà of Pisa.130 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 letter to Francesco in which 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.131 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.132

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.133 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

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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 pietà in those (few) places that would lose their Jewish bankers. The history of the monte di pietà 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 in 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 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.135 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 IV (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

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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.

F i v e 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.1 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.2

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.3 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.

(A)

(B)

(D)

(C)

f i g . 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 at the Mercato Vecchio and (D) the Mercato Vecchio. Source: Detail from Map of Florence, Stefano Buonsignori, Florence 1584. Scala / Art Resource, NY. Museo di Firenze com’era, Florence, Italy.

Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto The ghetto was located near the piazza of the Mercato Vecchio (the Old Market).4 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.5 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’Olio.6 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 stable7 and part of another had four rooms used by a dueling school (schuola di scherma).8 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.”9 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.10 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.11 In 1547 official streets of residence near the Mercato Vecchio were established for prostitutes for the first time.12 By 1568 a bordello was leased to a consortium of three distinguished landlords,13 probably the same houses that lodged two dozen prostitutes in 1562, according to a census of that year.14 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

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The Construction of the Ghetto prostitutes were authorized to live and work in all four of the city’s main quarters.15 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 prostitution. 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.16 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 (meretrici) 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 Onestà) to wear a yellow ribbon as a sign, or segno.17 When Jewish men and women were assigned their segno in 1567, it was also yellow. The effort to make some women easily identifiable as prostitutes, 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.18 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.19 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.20 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 icle when he writes that: “From January 1570 [i.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.”21 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.22 Thus, in this first reference, Arditi informs the reader that the Jews are associated with plague, that a “prostitute” 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 is 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.23 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 sell. 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 [le charne].”24 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

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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?”25 To gender we must add religion; 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.26 Thus prostitutes and Jews were color-coded, given restricted residence and taxed.27 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.28 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

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.29 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).30 The properties belonged to a church and members of eight old patrician families.31 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.32 Ownership of the buildings 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.33 t a b l e 1 . Acquisition of Property for the Ghetto Proprietors who sold property for the ghetto

Value (in florins)

Della Tosa Chiarissimo de’ Medici et co. Piero di Papa Pollacciolo, Giovanni di Val di Marina et co. Iacopo d’Andrea Donzello Alessandrini (three members) Fiametta and Alesandra De Nerli Simone d’Agniolo d’Ardinelli Lorenzo Manouelli Compagnia di San Zanobi

702 600 493 250 200 160 158 100 90

Total value of property

2,753

s o u r c e : Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Nove Conservatori del Dominio e della Iurisdizione Fiorentina 3696, 2–6; Nove 3697, 11r–15r; see note 31.

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The Construction of the Ghetto t a b l e 2 . Financing of the Purchase of the Ghetto Property Medici accounts

Private owners

debits: fl. 2,753 from Grand Duke for purchase of properties

credits: fl. 2,753 for sale of properties

credit: fl. 2,753, noted as a transfer from Grand Duke to the monte di pietà

debit: fl. 2,753 deposit to the monte di pietà

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.34 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 pietà, the charitable loan-bank of Florence.35 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 pietà 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.”36 Table 2 shows this virtual equation or merger in the book-keeping of the Medici accounts and those of the monte di pietà. 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.37 Therefore, at first the monte di pietà 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.38 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 5 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 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 pietà Cosimo used the extension of large loans at low rates to provide favors to friends and clients as he built his state through patronage.39 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 pietà. 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 pietà at the rate of 6.33 percent, much lower than he could have obtained from private bankers.40 (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.41) Since there was no outlay of cash for the purchase of the ghetto real estate, its financing required only that the monte di pietà 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 is 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.

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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.42 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,43 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.44 An overseer of the project was appointed, Antonio Gherardini: he was paid 10 florins when the project was completed for having “solicited” the construction and for having kept records of the materials used.45 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 10 florins for having kept the various account books (which he did in a very neat and consistent hand with good quality ink).46 Construction lasted over a year, before the end of which the Jews of Tuscany had moved into the ghetto. Workers were paid weekly.47 The first payday was Saturday, 10 February 1570/71, and the last was 28 February 1571/2.48 Five of the nine payroll accounts that were paid the first week belonged to kilnmen or brickmakers, fornaciai.49 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.50 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.51 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.52 Work slowed gradually but was continuous

Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto through the summer, through the Jewish holidays in September and October and into the winter.53 The ghetto was defined by the wall that enclosed it, into which were built two gates. As their name suggests, muratori 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.54 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.55 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 probably be explained by the simple fact that the ghetto was not yet ready for their arrival.56 The most important work undertaken to ready the ghetto for its new population 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

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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 vuotapozzi) who attempted to do this work was hired in May 1571 but lasted only a few weeks until he was replaced.57 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.58 Better housing in Florence had had latrines since the fifteenth century.59 Waste was conducted down and out of the house into depositaries called pozzi neri, 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.60 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.61 From the brief descriptions of the work done on the sewage system constructed for the ghetto, it is 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.62 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.63) 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.64 In any event, the workers in the ghetto prepared several new water basins.65 The great water-well in the piazza, if it did not predate the ghetto, may have been blasted in May.66 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.”67 The great well in the piazza was a focal point in the daily life of the ghetto.

Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto 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.68 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.”69 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 1602.70 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.71 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.72 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.73 The auction is worth considering here for the information it reveals about the profitability of the ghetto. Two representatives of the 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.74 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-

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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.75 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 1570.76 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.77 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 pietà. Table 3 shows that of the fifteen units, seven included shops which commanded 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 t a b l e 3 . Ghetto Shops and Apartments Rented at Auction in April 1575 Apt. no.

Shop?

59 60 63 66 62 65 61 71 73 74 75 72 68 69 70

Y Y Y Y Y Y Y N N N N N N N N

Other rooms

palio palio, terreno 3 stanze, soffita None 2 stanze None 2 stanze sala, 1 camera sala, 2 camere sala, 2 camere sala, 3 camere sala, 3 stanze sala, 2 camere, terrazo sala, 1 camera sala, 3 camere

Opening bid

84 140 140 70 140 105 140 70 — 84 126 84 112 56 126

Winning bid

141 204.15 259 71 199.10 110 213.10 71 85 85 129.10 94.10 112 80 127.15

s o u r c e : Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Nove Conservatori del Dominio e della Iursidizione Fiorentina 16, 30r–v, 34r–v. n o t e : 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.78 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 pietà. Moreover, the government was probably able to collect these rents from the Jews. When the auction was conducted in 1575, the ministers 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

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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 competition among the Jews drove the rent high for the desirable apartment.79 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.80 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.81 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.82 (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).83 Battara has shown that shops in Florence rented for anywhere from 1 to 108 florins per year.84 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.85 Iacobbe di Miele was a hat- and cap-maker (capellaio) 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.86 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.87 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.88

Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto 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.89 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.90 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.91 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 150.92 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.93 Families could have drawn on more than one income, though we not know whether Jewish women or children in the ghetto produced earned income.94 We may assume

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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.95 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. 70.96 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. 63.97 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 1570.98 Now she was reduced to renting an apartment of two rooms, one large and one small, no. 71.99 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.100 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.101 The gates of the ghetto were now supposed to be closed at the sound

Locating, Financing and Constructing the Ghetto t a b l e 4 . Hypothetical Ten-Year Projected Budget for the Ghetto, 1570s Purchase of the property Total expense of the construction 5 percent interest on the purchase price, not compounded, for first ten years

2,754 fl. 4,367 fl. 1,377 fl.

Total cost over ten years Rental income from the ghetto, lowest-rent estimate for ten years Rental income from the ghetto, average-rent estimate for ten years

8,498 fl. 8,571 fl. 14,143 fl.

s o u r c e s : Sources cited for Tables 1 and 3; Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Nove Conservatori del Dominio e della Iursidizione Fiorentina 3698, 1. n o t e s : 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.102 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.”103 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.104 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.105 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.106 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 might 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 pietà 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

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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.107 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 in, 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.108 Another craftsman was paid for gilding it in gold,109 and a second artist, also a stone-worker, was paid 21 florins and 1½ lire for having adorned the shield with “several thrones, chevrons, boats and other pietra (carving, or stone-work) made by him.”110 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.111 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” (l’orivuolo).112 Although mechanical clocks had been found in Florence since 1352, when a clock first struck the hour at the Palazzo Vecchio,113 large public clocks were still rare in the sixteenth century, expensive to make and expensive to keep in repair.114 The 1561 census of Florentine shops records that there were only two clock-makers (oriuoli) in the city.115 It makes sense that the clock referred to in the ghetto regulations was not a clock in the ghetto, but a clock that faced the Mercato Vecchio, for all merchants 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 symbol 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 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.116 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 disreputable 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.

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The Construction of the Ghetto
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.1 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.2 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.3 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 t a b l e 5 . The Population of the Jews in Florence and the Population of Florence, 1552–1672 Year

Jews

Florence

1552 1562 1567 1570 1622 — 1630 1632 1642 1661 1663 1672 1672

— — 93 or 97b 86 495 — 428 390 499/549c 513 546 572 450d

59,191 59,216 66,056

Sourcesa

Misc. Med. 324 Misc. Med. 224 MGS 4450, 173r MGS 4450, 173r BNF Cod. II, 1, 240, 4r, 13r; BNF Fondo Palatino, Cod. EB., 15,2 Strozz., I, 24, 112v–13r BNF Fondo Palatino, Cod. EB, 15 Strozz., I, 24, 114v–15r Strozz., I, 24, 130v–31r Strozz., I, 24, 132v–33r Strozz., I, 24, 142r ACEF Box E 25.1

n o t e s : 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, 240, 4r and 13r, “Descrizione dell’anime della città 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 città di Firenze fatta l’anno 1630 per la Quaranta d’ordine di S.A.” See also Pardi, ibid., 204. a For the abbeviations of sources, see the list of abbreviations, p. 415. b 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. c The subtotals and the totals given in this census record do not equate. d This 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 documentary 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 t a b l e 6 . Taxes Paid by the Jews of the Ghetto to the State (Through the Nove Conservatori), 1573–96 Payment

Payment

Year

scudi

lire, soldi

Year

scudi

lire, soldi

1573 1574 1575 1576 1577 1578 1579 1580 1581

150 150 150 162 162 150 130 140 101

3.10 3.10 3.10 — — 1.15 1.15 — —

1582 1583 1586 1588 1589 1590 1594 1596

133 130 114 122 118 66 106 122

— — — — — — — —

s o u r c e : Archivio della Comunità 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 pagamenti” (“Record of the Payments of the Head [Tax] of Years Past, as found written according to our Book of Receipts of these payments”). n o t e s : A marginal note to left of 1579 reads: “questan[n]o 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[v]uta 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).4 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).5 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 is 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

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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-tototal 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.6 During the six years, there were twenty-seven Jewish men matriculated into guilds (and also two Jewish women).7 There were at least thirty-one men elected to govern the ghetto.8 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 Jewish men.9 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 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.10 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 1427.11 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.12 The sample is small and the ratios differed 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.13 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

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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.14 On the other hand, households tended to become fuller in times of economic limitation.15 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 410.16 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 designated, that is, in the ghetto.17 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.18 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 ancient ministers and servants.”19 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 1575.20 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.21 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.22 Although they could now choose to live in Florence, Pisa or Siena, the da Rieti 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 Abravanel 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 1598.23 The da Pisa family made a quicker and more complete departure from Tuscany. They sold their property in and outside Pisa shortly after 1570.24 The sons of Fiametta and her deceased husband Abramo—Leone, Mose and Laudadio—moved from Pisa and Prato to Mantua.25 Their relative Vitale (Yeh.iel) 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 1574.26 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,

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The Construction of the Ghetto Pescia, Prato and San Giovanni.27 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.28 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 spicemerchants 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.29 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 1575.30 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.”31 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.32 As of 1595 this family had perfume shops in both Pisa and Florence.33 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 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.34 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).35 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 1575–76.36 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 is signified in Christian-authored documents, where a convert is consistently referred to as an “ebreo già” (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 già,” 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.37 Jews had been converting as individuals, and sometimes with other family members, ever since they had settled in central and northern Italy.38 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, “voluntarily.”39 (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 funduqs of Alexandria.40) Voluntary conversion was not, therefore, a new response to economic and social persecution.41 In line with

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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 producer 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.42 He was about nineteen years old at the time: he had been circumcised by Yeh.iel Nissim da Pisa in 1550. Having moved to Florence, he turned to the court of the Otto di Guardia e Balía in an effort to obtain from his parents his share (la rata) of the familial estate. This, he argued, he was entitled to while they still lived, even against their will, as provided in a bull of Pope Paul III that constituted the rights of converts.43 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.44 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.45 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.46 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 released from jail.47 Referred to both as a “widow” (vedova) and as “once the wife [or, past-wife, donna già] 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;48 therefore, it is observed and obtained, that Mona Riccha is condemned to pay 10 scudi in gold.49

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.50 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 uncertainty 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 commonly subject in Jewish law: the divorced woman (the gerushah) and the legally-still-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 collect 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

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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.51 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 Christian. 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 Florence, 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.52 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 (staia) 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 di fascine) and one dry bushel (moggio) of local charcoal every October for the rest of his life.53 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.54 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.55 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 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 during 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 convert: 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 social 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 it. 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

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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 Two 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.56 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 5.07.57 If we add in the twelve tailors as twelve separate households and the inn as one household, we would have 540 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.”58 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 t a b l e 7 . Population Multiplier: Men, Women and Children per Jewish Male in Five Tuscan Towns, 1570 Town

Empoli Monterchi Ripomerance San Giovanni Volterra All towns

Total

Mena

43 33 12 33 13

12/19 12/13 2 7 3

134

36/44

b

Women and Minors

Multiplier

24 20 10 26 10

3.58–2.26 2.75–2.54 6 4.71 4.33

90

3.72–3.05

s o u r c e s : Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Magistrato Supremo 93r, 104r, 108r, 110r. a 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. b I 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.59 (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.

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The Construction of the Ghetto Nonetheless, for these five towns, children were referred to variously as figliuoli/e (sons/daughters), figli/e grandi/e (big or grown sons and daughters), figliuoli piccioli (small or young sons and daughters), nipote (grandchildren, 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.60 I assume therefore that sons labeled “grandi” 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 nipote, bambini and putti.60

S e v e n 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 accomplish after initial proposals.1 I understand the efficiency of the Medici government 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 1540 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.2 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.3 Officials expressed an intensified

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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.4 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.5 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),6 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.7 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 Balía 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.”8 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 h.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).9 This is an interesting observation since when we consider the semi-autonomy of a

A New Tuscan Commune 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,10 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.11 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

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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.12 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 is 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 Università must make election of one

A New Tuscan Commune 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.13 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 1564.14 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.15

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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.16 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 1570.17 In September as noted, the magistrates chose a second group of four men to do their business.18 One was the well-established Florentine Abram d’Isach Romano, often called Tedescho, a single householder and a member of the Linen Guild since 1569.19 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 1561.20 The background of the other two men, Leone di Iacob da Pesaro and Gioello di Lustro da Veroli, is not easily established.21 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 capitoli, 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.22 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 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 monasteries. 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.23 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 capitoli 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,24 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

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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 Università, 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 [vecchi e più reputati], shall have authority to apportion funds for the costs that are incurred daily for the needs of the said Università, 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 selfgovernance 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 subcommunities 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.25 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 capitoli 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 community 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.26 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 Tuscan Commune ulations for communal officers and tax collectors as early as the second half of the sixteenth century.27 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.28 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 vecchi, elders. It was taken for granted that the governors would be male. The remaining six regulations set penalties for the most obviously problematic 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.29 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 Balía, 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.

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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.30 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 Università. 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 università 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.”31 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 administration 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 less 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.32 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 Università 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 personal 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 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 century as a state defined by its administrative authority (akin to what Peter Sahlins called “jurisdictional authority”33). 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.34 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.35 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.36 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.37 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.”38 In sum, the Nove was a centralizing organ created to regulate and control all the cities, towns and monasteries in the dominion.39 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

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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.40 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.41 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 università for one-year terms.42 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 capitoli 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 accounting. Finally, they were instructed to choose a sindaco, 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.43 Even more important is the one position that is not specified in the capitoli 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.44

A New Tuscan Commune Chancellors were primarily responsible for communication with the Nove. The chancellors are said to have ratified or “rogato” 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).45 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.46 The Florentine Jew Raffaello di Cipriano served as chancellor for many years, from 1572 to at least 1586.47 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).48

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.49 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.”50 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.

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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.51) 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.52 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 (città)—which could have citizens (civi, or cittadini)—when they allowed the ten governing Jews to elect “two of their civi” to be sindaci one after the other, instead of one for the full-year term.53 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.54 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.55 The number of governors was changed to three men at some point between 1596 and 1600, but the

A New Tuscan Commune t a b l e 8 . Jewish Governors in the Ghetto, 1572–86

1570 residence

No. of terms, 1572–78

Abram Baroch (Baroccas) Abram d’Isach Tedescho Iacob di M. Laudadio Blanis Iacobbe di Miel Romano Isacche d’Elia Calò

Florence Florence Monte S.Savinoa (Rome?) Florence

3 3 2 3 3

Laudadio de Brandes/Blanis Laudadio di Moise Alpelingo

Florence Pescia

3 3

Lazzero d’Isach Rabbene Lione [d’Isach] Ansiglia Lione di Raffaello di Iair Lazzaro da Pescia Michele di Donato Levi

Florenceb ? (Poppi)c Monte San Savino Pescia Florence

3 3 3 2 3

Sabatino di Bondid Sabbatuccio di Pellegrinoe Benedetto Castiglia Davitte di Falcone Vitale di Salamone da Cascia

Florence Florence

Governor

2 or 3 2 0 0 0

No. of terms, 1580–86 (or relative)

0 2 0 1 0 (son Daniel served 2 terms) 0 0 (brother Iacob served 1 term) 3 3 0 0 0 (brother Giovachino served 3 terms) 2 or 3 2 1 1 3

s o u r c e : Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households,” appendixes 1 and 4. n o t e : 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. a But his father Laudadio lived in Florence. b In 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[enti]e 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. c Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Magistrato Supremo 4450, 136r has a Lione di Isac hebreo with a household of five in Poppi. d 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). e 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 Balía del Principato 114, 314v–15r.

elimination of the fourth position was not a significant change in the way the community governed itself.56 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.

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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.57 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 1582.58 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 1585 to convince the rest of the Jewish community to convert, as well as in the diary of Lapini.59 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.60 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.61 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.62 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 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.63 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.64 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 1570.65 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.66 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.67 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.”68 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.69 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.70 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.71

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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.72 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 Iacob, 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.73 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.74 In

A New Tuscan Commune 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 Iacob 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.75 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.76 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.77 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.78 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-

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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 conflict 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 Università 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 governors], 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 [bulletini] of three men each . . . and when the six years have been completed it shall recommence from the beginning.79

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.80 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 development of their community? And whatever the level of autonomy, was the ghetto distinctively Jewish in its organization?

A New Tuscan Commune

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 capitoli 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.81 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 Università.” 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.82 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.83 A Venetian ambassador to Florence, greatly impressed by the peace and tranquility produced by the duke’s rigorous and fearsome rule over his subjects, may have been referring to these men when in his 1561 report he

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Commune and Community t a b l e 9 . 1572 Ordinances of the Florentine Ghetto Comparison to 1571

To pical summary of the legislation

Fines

1. The governing structure 2.. Public order: quiet in the synagogue 3. Public order: measures to calm economic competition among Jewish vendors in ghetto 4. Maintenance of property 5. Public order: rules for behavior in public spaces of the ghetto 6. Public order: no peddling on Christian holy days or Sundays 7. Public order/surveillance: newcomers to Ghetto to be reported after three days 8. Public order/surveillance: the Ten are required to appoint a 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 children may work in common rooms 10. Maintenance/sanitation: sinadaco responsible to have the Piazza cleaned every Friday and authorized to collect from shopkeepers for that purpose 11. Maintenance/sanitation: obligation of families to clean rooms and of sindaco to empty waste-bins and his right to sell contents 12. Surveillance: sindaco obliged to report newcomers 13. Surveillance: new arrivals require permission of the Nove 14. Public order: Ten and sindaco not to be abused, verbally or bodily 15. 15. Ten authorized to collect pledges made in synagogue with penalty for unpaid pledges 16. Maintenance of ghetto property: no one on the roofs 17. Surveillance: sindaco to report transgressions and receive a percentage of fines collected 18. Public order: Chancellor of ghetto is authorized as recorder of public writ, as if a public notary

— 1 scudo 3 scudi

Rev. of 2nd Rev. of 1st Rev. of 3rd

2 scudi 4 scudi

Rev. of 5th Rev. of 4th

4 scudi 4 scudi

Rev. of 7th Rev. of 8th

5 scudi

New

5 scudi

New

2 scudi

New

½ scudo

New

1 scudo — 4 scudi

New New New

25% extra

New

1 scudo ¼ of fines

New New

—

New

s o u r c e : Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Nove Conservatori del Dominio e della Iursidizione Fiorentina 13, 115v–18r, “ordinationi et cap’li circa li Hebrei habitanti nel Ghetto di Firenze,” approved 30 July 1572. n o t e : 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.84

A New Tuscan Commune In any event, in 1572 the Nove were given the right to oversee the legitimacy of the election of sindaci 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 capitoli, which had allocated half the fine to the camera and a full half to the poor-fund. However, the new position of sindaco 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 authorities.85 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 50-scudi fine.86 The governors responded with a request that they be allowed to fill the position with two Jews who would serve consecutive six-month terms.87 This request granted, two of the ten governors accepted the position for that period (1573–74).88 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.89 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

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'· ... f i g . 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 i Beni e le Attività Culturali; further reproduction or duplication is prohibited.

f i g . 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 Attività Culturali; further reproduction or duplication is prohibited.

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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.90 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),91 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.92 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.93 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.94 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.95 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.96 It is perhaps equally or more impor-

A New Tuscan Commune tant to note that rabbinic scholars had not yet attempted any translation of Jewish law into Italian.97 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.98

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 sindaci to work the Florentine neighborhoods, but it has not been demonstrated that he was able to require “neighborhoods” or parishes to appoint sindaci). It is important to note, therefore, that in the 1572 capitoli, 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 (tsedak.ah). These laws did not arise as concerns 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:99 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 Università.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

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Commune and Community during prayers. But the wording was different: the rule of 1571 (cited earlier) had stated that “when the Jews [hebrei] are in the synagogue . . . everyone [ogn’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 capitoli, 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 Università 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.101

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 Tuscan Commune 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 pay102 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 religious 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 capitoli 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;

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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.104 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 capitoli 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.105 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.106 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.107 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.108 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 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 Balía.109 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.110 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.111 The state might have refused to allow the governors 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.112 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 Mah. zor of Bologna).113 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

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Commune and Community ghetto on the day of the Sabbath, under penalty of 1 scudo” for each violation.114 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.115 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.116 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.117 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 aggressive 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.”118 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 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 h.erem. 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 capitoli 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 in 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 capitoli 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-Tridentine state.119

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 capitoli, 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

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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.120 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.121 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!122 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 responsibility for the routine maintenance and administration of the city.123 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).124 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.125 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).126 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 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 1582.127 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.128 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.129 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, instead 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.”130 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.”131 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

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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.”132 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.133 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.134 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.135 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,136 and who consequently refused office, refused to attend meetings and were absent or abstained from voting.137 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.138 Critically, the Jews were not paying fines the governors imposed on them—and the governors had no police at their command.139 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.140 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 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.141 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 sindaco 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 sindaci 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.142 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 competence 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.143 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

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Commune and Community two, whose authority to impose such sanctions was not seriously challenged within the community.144 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.”145 These rules—both their wording and the size of the penalties—are reminiscent of the laws passed by the state in 1567 to protect 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.146 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.147 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.148 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.149 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.150 The following February the Nove ordered that Isach da Fabbriano should be paid his due as informant, one quarter of the fine.151 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.”152 An important householder in Poppi before ghettoization, Davit had been in and out of jail in 1571, having had trouble

A New Tuscan Commune 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 is attested by the incarceration on 30 May 1575 of Leandro di Davit da Sulmonita hebreo and Isaia di Sabbato da Pilastrina (i.e., Palestrina) hebreo for insulting the deputies in the public piazza.153 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.154 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.155 For eight days no Jew was allowed to talk to Iacob.156 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.”157 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.158 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 Iacob Blanis in the head with a “stab to the flesh, and [drawing] blood.”159 In 1575 he accused Liuccio di Lione da Piazza of an assault, claiming that Liuccio had pulled his beard160; later that year he was accosted by his own nephew Laudadio di Agnolo.161 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.162 Finally, in 1580, his powerful father gone, Iacob got himself in trouble with the governors in office. There is no evidence that Iacob had ever had a quarrel with Daniel Calò, 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

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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 Iacob might have had of filling his father’s place as a leader.163 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.164 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 injurious words” against the two men in August 1582.165 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.166 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.167 One such power-broker was Iosef 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.168 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 mik.veh.169 The criminal court was willing to banish Abramo ten miles 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.170 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.”171 Incest and sodomy were of course religiously prohibited, but the insults also took specific aim at Ursi’s honor, which in Medicean Florence meant his self-restraint, a prerequisite to good governing.172 He was accused of misdirecting his power and control; that is 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.

A New Tuscan Commune

Republican Ideology, K.ehilah K.edoshah (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 it 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 independent governing style in the ghetto is associated with the term of a new chancellor, Leon da Pesaro (1593 until before 1600).173 The four governors wrote a set of twelve new regulations for the ghetto in 1595.174 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”). Particularly interesting is the ninth chapter, which referred to a ban, “already posted with the consent of all the greater part of the community.”175 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 capitoli to refer to these key concepts—h.umra’ (the ban) and k.ahal (the community).176 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 capitoli. The capitoli of 1595 were probably never submitted to the Nove, and they were almost certainly not confirmed by them.177 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

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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.178 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 [i.e., whoever has recourse to secular courts] shall fall under the Jewish Ban.”179 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.180 Nonetheless, 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 preamble 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.181 This larger council of the Jews of the ghetto was now also formally defined and limited in the capitoli of 1609. As has been mentioned above, it was composed of the eighteen men in the ghetto who were considered eligible for office, still without any attempt to regularize the membership by establishing conditions of age, marital status or length of residence in the ghetto.182 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 governing elite of the most important householders, to a cooperation between

A New Tuscan Commune 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.183 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.”184 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).185 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 supportive 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 privileged; 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,

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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 “republican” 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.186 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.187 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 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.188 Most powerful was Benvegnita Abravanel, the banker.189 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 “Capitoli dell’Hebrea,” even though technically the charter was granted to both Benvegnita and her son, Iacopo or Iacob.190 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 daughters-in-law.191 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).192 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.193 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

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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.194 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.195 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.196 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.198 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 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 capitoli, 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 (i.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.199 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 1574.200 She was then positioned to bring her husband, Agnolo di Moise di Elia da Perugia, into the Linen Guild.201 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 in 1570 who was not in that guild.202 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.203 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

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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.204 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 5).205 Only in the first few years after ghettoization were Jewish women found traveling outside of the city unaccompanied by Jewish men.206 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.207 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 1575.208 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.209 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 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

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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 pietà 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.210 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 grandducal 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 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 religious 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 religiously 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.211 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.

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E i g h t 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 superiority, 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 developing 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 collectors, 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 accepted and played these roles, eliciting suspicion and resentment, and sometimes acts of physical violence.1 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.2 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 moneylenders 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.”3 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 traditional Christian interpretation of the story of Sarah and Hagar in which Sarah is equated with the church and the free woman.4 Again drawing on

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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.”5 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 permitted to “hold their synagogue and do their customary ceremonies in such manner as they are tolerated by the holy Christian church.”6 The charters he gave Jewish bankers in Tuscany in the 1540s–60s 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.7 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.8

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 episcopal synod in Florence in the sixteenth century that produced canons on the Jews.9 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”).10 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.”11 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.12 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 not 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.13 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.”14 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

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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 possibility 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.15 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 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 II 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.16

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.”17 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.18 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

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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.19 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 rigattieri (traders in second-hand goods) and velettai (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 characteristically 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.20 Whether or not Jewish rigattieri 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 rigattiere 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 purposes, 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.21 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 issued in Venice to permit Jews to leave the ghetto after dark to attend to business or pleasure in the city.22 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 1579.23 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 fourteen-year period, 1573–86 (the data are missing for the other three years).24 The first license issued was given to Gratiadio di Ventura on 19 December 1573, two years after the ghetto’s gates were first locked.25 The Jewish chancellor 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.26 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.27 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

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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.28 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.29 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.”30 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

Economic Parameters 40

-

35

Number of Trips Taken

30

Males Females

25

20

15

10

69 65-

64 60-

59 55-

54 50-

49 45-

44 40-

39 35-

34 30-

29 25-

24 20-

19 15-

14 10-

5-9

0

0-4

5

Age Group (age at time of trip)

f i g . 5 . Number of trips out of the ghetto taken by Jews, by age at time of trip, 1573–86. Source: Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Nove Conservatori del Dominio e della Iursidizione Fiorentina 13–24.

trip at least once over the ten-year period. The data do not allow us to compare 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 as the men who traveled; the average number of trips per female traveler was 1.16, per male traveler, 2.03. Almost all the men in the ghetto’s first generation found an opportunity to travel out of Florence at least once, but a small group of men made frequent trips into the Florentine contado that lasted more than three days.31 This group—including several members of the da Empoli/Alpelinghi family from Empoli and Pontedera—spent a great deal of time on the road.32 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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Commune and Community 15 Number of Male Jewish Trip Takers

12

9

6

3

-69 65

-64 60

-59 55

-54 50

-49 45

-44 40

-39

-34

35

30

-29 25

-24 20

-19 15

-14 10

5-9

0 0-4

302

Age Group (age at time of trip)

f i g . 6 . Number of men who took trips out of the ghetto, by age at time of trip, 1573–86. Source: see Fig. 5.

ing the period 1573–86 by a large subset of eighty-eight men and women who were issued permits in 1580 and whose ages can be determined. The number of men who traveled while in their twenties also exceeded the number of men who traveled at other ages (see Figure 6).33 Travel was a physically demanding, potentially hazardous enterprise, and younger men were willing to travel the countryside farther and more frequently to reach their suppliers and markets. The permits show that teenage sons were introduced to the road by their fathers and other relatives. Slightly older youth kept each other company on the road; often the permit was given to a group of three or four men in their early twenties. Men traveled less after they reached their thirties, whether because they had established families or because they had established themselves economically, having risen from peddling to shopkeeping. Women who traveled sometimes had business to accomplish, but it was not business that required regular travel. Widows may have traveled more than other women and more than Figure 5 suggests.34 Figure 5 also hides the important and interesting detail that no woman obtained a permit for travel

Economic Parameters while she was seventeen to twenty-one years of age.35 Since younger girls and older women did travel, it is tempting to speculate whether these young women avoided travel because of its inherent dangers, including exposure to men before marriage, or because they were recently married and staying home with young children. One of the main reasons an Italian (or any early modern European) Jewish woman might have traveled was to visit the parents she had left when she moved to join a husband in the house, city or region of his parents, or else to visit her own grown and married children.36 If the men of the ghetto did not bring foreign brides to join them, few young women in the ghetto would have needed to leave the city in order to visit their parents. Whatever the explanation, young women in the ghetto had much less exposure to the outside world than young Jewish men. Whereas in the preghetto period Tuscan Jewish women had lived as neighbors with Christians, sharing their wells and ovens, weekly markets and access to rivers, forests and town life, now Jewish women of the Florentine ghetto lived in an urban neighborhood with their own well, piazza, communal rooms and synagogue. They could venture out, and must have, but they had less opportunity for non-economically determined contact with Christians. The greater access of young Jewish men of the ghetto to the outside world meant that their education was broader and more worldly than that of women, who were restricted both as Jews to the ghetto and as women for whom safety and reputation dictated that they be home at night and presumably off the public streets as much as possible by day.37 Insofar as ghettoization was a spatial location of the Jews, a form of state control over the bodies of the Jews, the ghettoization of Jewish women was more thorough than the ghettoization of Jewish men, and this difference contributed to the eventual erosion of women’s status in the ghetto. But the mobility of Jewish men can be understood as a kind of resistance which elicited a countermove from the government: the institution of permits. The travel permits that the Jews compliantly applied for and paid for in order to satisfy their need or desire to leave the ghetto subjected them in yet another way to surveillance, to control and to their own commodification as a source of income (like the grain) for the state. When Jews traveled into the city and country, their presence was not only “economic” but also, by necessity or choice, social. After their expulsion from the Tuscan contado and distretto, there were no special arrangements made to allow Jews to own or operate taverns or lodges outside of Florence or Siena. Sometimes the destination of the Jewish traveler from the ghetto was a distant Jewish community, or one too distant to arrive at on the first night.

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Commune and Community When Jews traveled overnight, with or without permits, they lodged, drank and ate at Christian-owned establishments. Jews did not need to go out of the city, however, to find an increasingly varied set of popular eating and drinking establishments. By the early seventeenth century there were “osterie, pasticcieri, albergatori and grecaioli” all competing for customers and resisting the attempts of state regulation to force them into well-defined categories. Before the locks on the ghetto’s gates had been installed in the fall of 1571, Jews frequented local taverns in Florence even at night. On the night of 16 March 1571, “returning home from the hosteria del Porco” (a well-known tavern near the Mercato Vecchio), Iacob Romano was attacked and wounded, stabbed in the neck by another Jew, Salamone, son of Rabbi Benedetto, who was unlawfully armed.38 Access at night was presumably cut off by the ghettoization,39 but Jews still frequented the taverns and wineshops during the day and when out of the city. The pastime was so commonly accepted that in 1608 the governors of the ghetto passed a new regulation: “That on the Sabbath and festival days, it shall not be permitted to anyone to go to drink and eat at hosterie or grecaiuoli of any sort whatsoever, nor to have wine brought into the ghetto from outside it on the day of the Sabbath, under penalty of 1 scudo per occasion [of the transgression].”40 The concern of the governors was neither primarily the mingling of Jews and Christians nor the non-kosher nature of the food and drink the Jews consumed, but violations of the Sabbath and holy days. Though it was not mentioned, the activities of which the ghetto governors may have disapproved probably included not only the use of money (prohibited by Jewish law on the Sabbath and holy days) but also gambling, which was considered a problem by the authorities of the state.41 Eating and drinking at taverns on other days was not challenged. The proliferation of eateries was a different kind of problem for the Florentine city government. According to legislation of 1619, the public taverns (osterie) were unable to pay their taxes because they were losing customers to the pastry-bakers (pasticcieri), hoteliers (albergatori) and wine-houses (grecaioli): boarding houses were going out of business because people were not taking meals there, and the profit from lodging alone was not enough. Therefore it was ruled, apparently to protect the osterie, that (1) the pasticcieri could neither serve food or beverage in their shops, houses, or even a separate room nor let anyone eat or drink on the premises and that (2) the albergatori were forbidden to serve food or provide lodging to inhabitants of the city or anyone staying in the city for more than eight months, such visitors being required instead to stay in the rented rooms (camere locande) of board-

Economic Parameters ing houses. Moreover, the albergatori were forbidden to sell wine to go— their wine had to be drunk at the table, and only by foreigners! As for the grecaioli—the Greek wine shops—they were not allowed to serve local wines, and they were not allowed to serve cooked food.42 At a meeting of “all the men of the council” (tutti gl’uomini del ʣʲʥʥ ) in the ghetto, at some point in the second decade of the seventeenth century and probably at about the same time as the Florentine municipal legislation just discussed, there was passed a strongly worded religious ban against any Jew, but particularly young men and boys (giovani e fanciulli), who ate or drank at any of these establishments on any day. The new rule made it “unlawful and in fact prohibited for a period of six months to eat or drink at osterie, bettole (pubs), grecaioli, alberghi, boarding houses and other similar places whether in Florence or outside, within a mile or one mile away.”43 (This ban reflects the influence of religious leaders in the early seventeenth century who are discussed in Chapter Ten.) The ban included religious as well as social and economic sanctions: it would be forbidden to buy from, sell to, barter with or act as a broker for anyone (male or female, of whatever age) who offended; offenders would not be called up to the Torah or given any other honor in the synagogue; nor would they be visited while sick, or given a Jewish burial; nor was the offender to be allowed to speak with anyone except the relatives with whom he or she lived. The wording of the ban was severe, but its large loopholes took into account the fact that socializing and eating in Christian establishments was a necessity, or a relatively harmless pleasure, for some Jewish men on some occasions. The governors reserved the right to commute the ban into a monetary fine in cases where they saw fit. And the ban implicitly recognized that Jews needed to eat in Christian establishments when they found themselves farther than a mile from the city, even though the food there was no more kosher than the food in the city. The ban also made an exception for individual Jews who wanted to enter a tavern alone for a glass of ices, warning that if this exception were abused it too would be prohibited!44 The implication is that a large part of the governors’ concern was the conspicuousness of crowds of young Jews flagrantly ignoring the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, and observed by Christians doing so. Perhaps the governors’ hope was that after six months of ban, the habit of eating at these taverns would have been broken, so that when the ban expired, the Jews would then at least refrain from going on the Sabbath—and perhaps would choose beer as their beverage instead of wine, avoiding the thorny issue of the religious permissibility or prohibition of the consumption of wine produced by gentiles. The wording of the ghetto regulation and ban suggests that the governors

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Commune and Community were not particularly concerned about Jewish women going to taverns and inns. Female honor may have been defined somewhat differently by Jews and Christians, given that in the Jewish mercantile and professional elite women were often publicly active in business, while married Christian women on the same socioeconomic level were not. However, like respectable Christian women, respectable Jewish women apparently kept their distance from the male-dominated public taverns in the city.45 As we have seen, women traveled less than men and, at least in the early decades of the ghetto, spent less time socially with Christians than Jewish men did.46 Gender-based cultural restrictions meant that men were, as a group, able to temper the extent of their isolation from the non-Jewish world more than women were. The ghettoization of the Jews had a number of unplanned consequences, results of its ripple effect. The first enormous crash of the legislation knocked the Jews of Tuscany down to their canonically designated place in the religious hierarchy. The resultant waves reorganized their relationship with the state. But long after those waves had circled out from Florence into the reaches of the Tuscan state and touched the Jews of every city and commune, pushing them out and into the ghetto, their ripple effect continued. One of the things it did, this chapter has suggested, was redefine gender roles as they were played out among Jews, making them conform more closely to the gender roles then found among urban Christians in Florence.

The Place of the Jews in the Economy of Florence Jews moved in the larger, predominantly Christian world as producers, as consumers and as distributors—scavengers and recyclers, peddlers, brokers, dealers and market traders who played a critical role in the redistribution of material resources. But their economic integration into the city did not depend on the incidental forays made by individual Jews. The economic relationship between the ghetto and the city was a matter of concern to the grand-ducal government, which did not intend to bring an impoverished and unemployable population into the heart of its capital city. The order to ghettoize the Jews therefore restricted Jewish economic activity only by prohibiting Jewish moneylending and by requiring that the Jews have their shops within the ghetto. In contrast to the papal ghettoization of the Jews in Rome, which restricted Jews to the trade of used clothing, the Florentine ghettoization included an invitation to the Jews to practice their crafts and commerce in the city. This invitation reflected the grand duke’s intention to allow the Jews to

Economic Parameters t a b l e 1 0 . The Matriculation of Jews into Florentine Guilds, 1571–1610 Guild

1571–80

1581–90

1591–1600

Linen Silk Merchants’

17 13 7

3 partial data 10

12 partial data 1

1601–10

no data 10 9

s o u r c e : The data, reproduced in Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households,” appendix 3, are from the following books of guild matriculation: Linen: Arte dell’Università dei Linaioli 5; Silk: Arte della Seta 3, 13, 14, 30; Merchants’ (Guild of Doctors and Spice Merchants): Arte dei Medici e Speziali 13, 14, 22, 23.

participate in the city’s economy, to fit themselves into its institutionalized structures and hierarchies through matriculation into some of the city’s guilds. The success of the ghettoization as an urban renewal project and real estate investment actually depended on the Jews’ financial solvency; they would otherwise not have been able to pay their rent and the head tax to the state and might have become a burden and risk to the city, a poor and unhealthy population. The government was well able to facilitate the Jews’ entrance into the urban economy because it controlled the policy of the guilds and could ensure that the Jews were admitted. The Florentine guilds had lost much of their independence under Cosimo I, who in the course of the broad restructuring of the administration of the state had appointed men to reform the guilds, revise their statutes and oversee their operations.47 Before ghettoization Jews were already present in three of the city’s guilds, and Jews continued to enter these guilds in the ghetto period (see Table 10). We do not know in what way Jews participated, once they had sworn in and paid their fees.48 These guilds, which oversaw many more crafts and industries than their names suggest, were the Linen Guild (Arte dei rigattieri, linaioli e sarti), the Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants (Arte dei medici e speziali, also referred to here as the Merchants’ Guild) and the Silk Guild (Arte della seta). The government did not require all the guilds to admit Jews: the Wool Guild admitted no Jews in the period under study, and no Jews were ever admitted into the Guild of Judges and Notaries, which effectively prevented them from entering civil service.49 On the other hand, as Jews spread into a range of economic activities, some guild councilors felt it necessary to specify in their statutes that Jews were not exempt from the requirement to matriculate in the guild. For example, in 1562 among the provisions of a reform of its statutes, the Silk Guild declared that any Jew (hebreo) who was practicing the craft of veil-making and was not yet a guild member was required to matriculate and open a shop.50 Jewish veil-makers had been matriculating into the Merchants’ Guild,

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Commune and Community which suggests that part of the problem was due to the overlapping administrative authority and economic competition between the two guilds. In any event, veil-makers as a whole were not referred to. The special attention paid to the Jews was expanded in the reform of the same guild after ghettoization in 1580: And everything that is ordained above concerning matriculation has [its] place and is to be observed also by any Jew who might want to engage in the occupation of selling or buying from Houses and Monasteries and other places things appertaining to veil-makers, haberdashers or shawl-makers [frangiai] or [might be] in other mode subordinate [to the guild]; and the said Jews must keep a shop, open and resident in the place appointed to the Jews by His Most Serene Highness [the grand duke] and therefore must matriculate with membership as retailers.51

Since anyone who engaged in the trade of items over which the guild had authority was required to matriculate, this paragraph on the Jews suggests a suspicion that Jews were evading guild membership. But thirteen Jews—all clearly of Italian origin—had matriculated into this very Silk Guild in the decade before the statute of 1580. The concern might have arisen from the presence in Florence of Levantine Jews, formally invited in 1551, who had been allowed to engage in commerce without matriculation into the various guilds. In fact, at least one Levantine Jew who played a prominent role in the ghetto does not appear in the matriculation records of the guild: Abram di Daniello Baroccas (Baroch). In the process of ghettoization, the charters of bankers had been revoked, and all Jews—ex-bankers, merchants and artisans—were required to move to the ghetto. But mercantile privileges that had been granted to Jewish individuals were never specifically revoked, and neither were the privileges of 1551 for Levantine merchants, which were confirmed and expanded in 1591 and more explicitly in 1593.52 Most Jews had no claim to such privileges and were required to apply for guild membership. In the decade prior to ghettoization, seventeen Jews (of a total Jewish population in Florence of less than a hundred) became members of the Linen Guild. Because Jews already voluntarily submitted to the guild, those who drafted the reforms did not think it necessary to refer specifically to Jews anywhere in the statutes of 1578, and proclaimed only that “anyone in the city who wishes to exercise the art of Linaiolo or Rigattiere” must matriculate, as well as “all those who would wish to work in the city of Florence as tailors or mattress-makers,” who were to pay half the standard matriculation fee.53 In contrast, the same Reform of 1578 for the first time specifically includes female tailors and cutters in the guild. The Linen Guild had not previously

Economic Parameters specified that women were required to matriculate, and although an occasional woman had entered the guild, large numbers of women worked in the trade without the benefits and obligations of matriculation. As the situation is described in the Reform, women were already doing work governed by the guild, to the damage of the guild and its members, since they were not being held to its standards—and of course, since they were not paying their share of the guild’s expenses. Now the guild both allowed and required them to join: And since there are found many women, in the Contado as in the City, who are exercising the craft [mestiere] of tailor, cutting and sewing for a price [a prezzo], privately at home just as publicly, holding shops open without having to pay any matriculation, which is damaging not only to this Guild but also to its matriculants; the Signori Reformers and Legislators have provided, therefore, that in the future all those women who work in this craft, holding shops open in Florence, must pay for their matriculation.54

One Jewish woman, Ginevra d’Agnolo Blanis, had already entered the guild in 1573, as a second-hand-dealer. Other Jewish women may have been among those uncounted and unmatriculated female workers who did not present themselves to the guild before the Reform of 1578 required them to do so, but if so, they do not appear in the roll-books in the decades that followed. While women in the ghetto were involved in commerce, as we learn from ghetto regulations that refer to female shopkeepers, they were only rarely represented in the guilds. Their economic activities were either exceptional, illicit, subordinate to those of their husbands and fathers or too low skilled to attract the concern of the guilds, which also ignored the work of the vast majority of female silk- and wool-workers in the city. Economically, as well as physically and politically, Jewish women were less integrated than Jewish men into Florentine institutions outside the ghetto. For men, at least, the Florentine guilds were not closed systems that limited membership through strict entrance requirements, but rather relatively open economic structures to which they might anchor themselves, or up which they might climb. Jews were able to enter each of the three guilds with or without a direct connection to an already established member or other qualifications such as residence in Florence for a certain number of years. The cost of admission to a particular guild was generally but not strictly linked to its status or to the expectation for profit from the professions it governed. The fee for guild membership, however, depended not only on the guild but on one’s specific profession within it, one’s sex and one’s place of residence (the city of Florence had higher dues than the contado and distretto). Thus

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Commune and Community newcomers could enter if they had the start-up capital, which could be quite high. In some guilds matriculation fees were reduced for applicants who had completed apprenticeships of six or more years.55 More frequently, Jews took advantage of the fact that matriculation fees were reduced dramatically or waived for relatives of members, and so extended families tended to congregate and stay in one guild. A guild member could bring in relatives while he or she was still alive and active in the guild. For example, in the Linen Guild reform of 1578 the regular matriculation fee for drapers and second-hand-dealers was set at 80 lire, but it was declared that “those who have had a father, grandfather, greatgrandfather, brother or paternal uncle who was matriculated into said guild may recognize the benefit from them, paying for such recognition only 4 lire and 8 soldi.”56 Tailors and mattress-makers, whose ordinary fee was 40 lire, paid this same low fee if they had a relative in the guild. Women who were members of the guild were able to extend this privilege to their sons and daughters and “all the other above-said” relatives.57 The guild expected—or intended—the full set of agnatic ties or direct matrilineal descent, but not marriage, to determine one’s occupational status and level of privilege. This is revealed in the list of relatives who could benefit in the Linen Guild, which did not include sons-in-law, wives or husbands. In one case, however, a man did benefit through his marriage: Agnolo di Moise d’Elia, a Jew in the ghetto, was admitted to membership in 1575 through his wife Ginevra. The clerk who carefully recorded Agnolo’s name to the third generation noted only that he was admitted through benefit “of the recognition of Mona Ginevra,” whereas in every other case from 1560 to 1590 that a Jew was admitted through a relative, the clerk specified the familial relationship between the two. Thus we read that Giovachino di Donato, a “Paduan Jew,” was admitted “by Michele his brother,” Sabatino di Buondi di Beniamin “by Sabatino di Buondi his uncle,” and Daniello d’Hisac d’Elia “by Hisac his father,” but not that Agnolo di Moise d’Elia was admitted “by Ginevra his wife (sua moglie).” By referring to her only as “Mona Ginevra,” the clerk, perhaps unwittingly, colluded with the patriarchal preference expressed in the guild’s statutes to render invisible the fact that a man’s status in the guild could be dependent on his wife’s. The fee to enter the Linen Guild, set in 1578 at 80 or 40 lire,58 could be paid in installments: a new member was required to make a down payment of only 9 lire and the remainder over the next three years. It was to the Linen Guild that most of the Jewish men in Florence belonged prior to ghettoization. Of the seventeen Florentine Jews who matriculated into the Linen

Economic Parameters Guild in the decade 1561–70, all but three did so as rigattieri, itinerant dealers in second-hand clothing. (Two were tailors, and only one, Sabatino di Michele Buondi, a shopkeeper matriculated as a linaiolo, or linen-merchant.) During the tumultuous year and a half from the time of the expulsion edict until the Jews were settled into the ghetto (September 1570–March 1572), no Jews matriculated into this guild or any other. In April 1572, however, eight new Jewish members were admitted into the Linen Guild, and another four in 1573, so that the same number of Jews entered the Linen Guild in the first decade after ghettoization as in the decade before it. From at least 1578 the Linen Guild incorporated not only drapers, tailors and second-hand-dealers but also vintners, hoteliers, cooks, poulterers and others, probably other victualers, who had previously been a separate guild.59 Jews did not branch out into these fields but continued to appear in the matriculation books only as rigattieri and linaioli—used-clothing-dealers, linen-merchants and other retail shopkeepers. As seen in Table 10 (above), Jews also entered the Silk Guild, in numbers that suggest that the cost of matriculation was not prohibitive. Indeed, though the status of the Silk Guild was much higher than that of the Linen Guild, membership fees for entrance into the former were set low, probably in an effort to encourage Florentines into the industry.60 According to the fees recorded in the books of matriculation, until 1573 membership cost Jewish matriculants 5 scudi (35 lire), which they paid in two installments. Thereafter, the admission fee was raised to 50 lire, which could be paid in four or five annual installments.61 The Silk Guild had two levels of membership, greater (per la maggiore) and lesser (per la minore or per il minuto). The fees that Jews paid in the 1570s and early 1580s correspond to the regular fees set for “lesser” membership in the guild. Jews who entered the guild in the early 1600s did so on both the lower and higher levels. “Greater” members were large-scale silk-manufacturers; jewelers and bankers who dealt in jewels or precious metals; wholesale-merchants who dealt in whole-cloth and warehouses62; gold-beaters and gold-wire workers; veil-makers; and linen-drapers (who must have also been matriculated into the Linen Guild) who sold merchandise that was protected by the guild. Members admitted per la minore were minor silk-manufacturers, merchants, shoemakers (shoes were often made of silk), tailors, embroiderers and those who printed cloth (drappi e panni) and other skilled workers including weavers, mattress-makers, dyers and silk-spinners.63 The first set of extant matriculation records from the ghetto period reveals that fourteen Jews matriculated into the Silk Guild from 1572 to 1582. Thir-

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Commune and Community teen of these were admitted with lesser membership: twelve were listed as minor silk-manufacturers (one of whom sold silk buttons), and one made shoes and gloves.64 The only Jew admitted during that period per il maggiore was Iacobbe di Giuseppe di Iacobbe ebreo da Empoli, admitted in 1580 “for the contado and distretto,” although he ought to have been considered a Florentine since he in fact lived in the ghetto, where he was supposed to live.65 It seems that Iacobbe’s guild membership entitled him to operate outside the city, probably in Empoli and Pontedera, where his family had come from. Thus, it should be noted, there were no Jews in the class of large-scale silk-manufacturers in the city of Florence in this period.66 Their titles, however, specify that the Jews in the Silk Guild were not merchants or workers, but owners of silk firms, however small. They were contracted by merchants to have silk cloth produced, and they organized the production of those cloths.67 The third guild into which Jews are known to have matriculated was substantially more exclusive than the other two. Entrance into the Guild of Doctors and Spice Merchants cost Jews twelve florins (about 90 lire) in the decades after ghettoization as it had before, unless they were admitted through a relative, in which case the entire fee was waived.68 Only a few of the Jews (and a smaller minority of the Christians) who entered this guild were doctors. The rest were merchants and artisans. Doctors and merchants paid the same fees; there were no major and minor categories for membership. A list of the crafts subject to the Arte dei Medici e Speziali published by the guild on 12 November 1574 shows that in addition to the doctors and pharmacists, the guild governed about forty occupations, including a diverse assortment of craftspeople and merchants such as barbers and sword-makers, mask-makers, lute-makers and booksellers.69 All these crafts were therefore theoretically “open” to Jews; of the occupations listed, I have seen Florentine Jews called haberdashers, tinsmiths, perfume-merchants, lantern-makers and veil-makers.70

Jews and Class Structure in Florence Jews, as we have seen, were structurally integrated into the Florentine economy through the guilds. Some were small-scale manufacturers, on the same level as the shopkeepers and the artisans known in Florence as “la genta mezzana,” which might be translated as the middle classes, or as persons of “middling” substance.71 The majority of the Jews in the ghetto, however, were more like those poor Christian Florentines described by Anthony Molho as “lowly urban artisans, unskilled workers . . . often deprived of any

Economic Parameters taxable property, ridden by debt, and bound by ties of dependence to more affluent and better placed neighbors.”72 But can it be said that the Jews of the ghetto belonged to one or more of the city’s socioeconomic classes? Or was there, discernible within the ghetto, an independent microcosm of the city’s class structure, or one that should be independently or differently described? Contemporary Florentine writers categorized status by reference to lineage (that is, possession of a good family name, a well-recognized and reputed lineage), wealth and political position. In this tradition, in an enormous project that involved analysis of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century data from tax records and the records of the Florentine dowry fund, Anthony Molho assigned the Florentine casate, or named lineages, to “status levels.”73 Molho’s categories draw on contemporaneous narrative indications of status and on modern studies of the Florentine elite which are based on taxable wealth, guild membership in the “higher” guilds and the frequency with which men of a certain lineage held certain government offices.74 To locate the Jews economically in the city, it is useful to consider Molho’s status system, even though it deals with a period largely prior to ours. Molho defined the Florentine elite or “ruling class” as those families who belonged to 417 casate that shared a set of characteristics, each of which was defined as a mark of status. They filled most positions in government; they had the most taxable wealth and the highest dowries; they bore surnames that carried recognizable status to contemporaries; and to a large extent they married Florentines of the same social rank. One hundred and ten of these lineages, “the core of the city’s elite . . . accounted for no less than 15 to 16 percent of the city’s inhabitants” in 1480.75 Molho demonstrates, then, that a fairly large percentage of the city’s families had status, which he separates into “high status, status, low status.” If we extend these criteria into the sixteenth century, we can fairly conclude that there were no Jews with any “status” at all. All 417 elite lineages in Florence and the thousands of households they represented were Christian. Jews were ineligible for public office. Moreover, notwithstanding the comparisons drawn by some Jewish historians between elite Italian Jewish families and the nobility, an examination of dowries exchanged by the Jews of Florence and Tuscany suggests that even before the banking families fled, Jews were never possessed of wealth comparable to that of the wealthiest Christians.76 There were extraordinarily wealthy Jewish families living in certain localities such as Venice, Ferrara and Ancona. These were Levantine merchants and Portuguese conversos.77 Some of these Jews and conversos appear in Florentine sources, especially in the correspondence of the Medici court, but they do not appear to have permanent residence in Florence.78

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Commune and Community Below the Florentine elite were the tax-paying citizens such as notaries, artisans and small-scale entrepreneurs, subdivided by Molho into those who carried a surname and those who did not.79 Nontaxpayers occupied the lowest socioeconomic rung. Occupationally and economically, the Jews fit into these lower three categories: they were less wealthy merchants and artisans who did not participate in the city’s governance, some with surnames and some without. There were also poor Jews who were dependent in part or in whole on the collections of alms in the ghetto and on charitable bequests. But do these categories describe the status and social world of Jews in Florence as well as they do Christians in Florence? Perhaps not. The ghetto had its own government and governing elite, as we have seen. It is also worth noting that the Jews were a socially distinct set of lineages: they did not intermarry with Christians of any rank, except for a small trickle of Jews who may have done so after they converted and left the ghetto. Consequently, their class structure must also be interpreted independently of that of the city.

II. The Consolidation of a Ruling Class from the Middle The new governing class in the Florentine ghetto was made up of shopkeepers and merchants, relatively poor men by Florentine standards. It was by default, perhaps, since the prior elite had not been excluded by the merchants but had left of their own accord, but this was republican rule (underneath the monarchy) nonetheless. In the ghetto these men were given a degree of authority and power over the rest of the Jews, and they held administrative positions and status within the ghetto that in the larger Christian society was held by much wealthier people, the rising bureaucratic class. Yet their new power was no threat to the grand duke or the state. It was not only contained and limited, it was also used by the state to help contain and control other Jews who might pose a greater threat: women, unmarried men, the poor— individuals who might transgress or challenge the limits of the culture’s social and religious tolerance.

Status in the Ghetto: Governance, Guild Membership and a Family Name Stratification in the ghetto is evidenced, as we have seen in the previous chapter, by the fact that the Jewish self-government was dominated by a group of less than fifteen men in each of the first two decades of the ghetto.

Economic Parameters It should be noted, however, that one third of the total adult male population participated at least once in the government, representing an even larger sector of the Jewish community than the 15 percent of the Florentine population who had been the “core” of the city’s elite a century earlier. The wealth of Jews in the period 1572–1612 is impossible to determine since they were made to pay a head tax and not a property tax. Our knowledge of the socioeconomic structure of the ghetto is based, therefore, on membership in the various guilds, participation in the ghetto government and the use of surnames. As Table 11 demonstrates, Jews who were members of the ghetto government were, with very few exceptions, members of at least one guild. The economic and governing elites in the ghetto overlapped but were not identical in the first decades of the communal organization. In these first years and decades the strategies families employed in the ghetto were critical: which guilds they entered, how hard they strove to be elected to the government and the marital alliances they forged—all not only reflected but also determined and formalized their status. We have seen that the guilds had different matriculation fees: the Merchants’ Guild was more expensive to join than the Silk Guild, and the Silk more than the Linen. It is less obvious whether the three guilds had correspondingly ranked status in the eyes of contemporaries. In the late sixteenth century the guilds were not as clearly marked for status as they had been earlier. In the fifteenth century the twelve Florentine guilds were powerful corporations, divided into major guilds and minor guilds. Among these guilds the Silk Guild and the Merchant’s Guild were “major” guilds while the Linen Guild fell into the lesser category. Jews who participated in the ghetto government were guild members or had equivalent economic status in the city, but of the Jews who governed more than once in 1572–78, only about half were members of the higher two guilds. The Jewish governors who matriculated only into the Linen Guild were, however, not the tailors or peddlers who also belonged to this guild, but shopkeepers who dealt in second-hand goods and were counted among the respected men of the ghetto. Of the twenty-one or twenty-two men who formed the core of the governors from 1572 to 1586, only four were not members of at least one guild: Abram Baroch (or Baroccas), Lazzaro da Pescia, Benedetto Castiglia and Davitte di Falcone.80 Of the thirty-two Jewish men who entered the Linen Guild between 1571 and 1600, thirteen (41 percent) were admitted through a relative who was already a member. Of the twenty-three we know entered the Silk Guild

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Commune and Community t a b l e 1 1 . Guild Membership of Jews Who Governed More than One Term, 1572–86 Governors of the ghetto

Abram Baroch Abram d’Isac Tedesco Daniello d’Isach d’Elia Calò Davitte di Falcone Giovachino di Donato Levi Iacob di Giuseppe Alpelingo Iacob di Mag. Laudadio Blanis Iacobbe di Miel Isach d’Elia Calò Laudadio (de) Blanis Laudadio di Moise Alpelingo Lazzaro da Pescia Lazzero d’Isach Rabbene Lione di Raffaello Iair Lione Usigliob Michele di Donato Levi Sabatino di Bigniamino di Bondic Sabato di Sabato di Bondic Sabatuccio di Pellegrino Vitale di Salamone da Cascia

Guild matriculation and date

None Linen, 1569 Linen, 1574 None Linen, 1565 Doctors and Spice Merchants, 1549; Wool, 1561; Silk, 1580 Linen, 1575 Doctors and Spice-Merchants, 1575 Linen, 1565 Silk, 1572 Wool, 1559; Linen, before 1592a None Silk, 1582 Linen, 1573 Linen, 1573; Seta, 1575 Linen, 1564 Linen,1572 Silk, 1573 Linen, 1570 Doctors and Spice-Merchants, 1579

Period active in government

1572–75 1571–1610 1580–1611 1574–80 1583–86 1571–95 1573–78 1572–85 1572–78 1572–75 1573–78 1572–74 1574–86 1573–78 1573–86 1571–74 1578–1607 1572–85 1574–82 1580–82

s o u r c e s : Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Nove Conservatori del Dominio e della Iursidizione Fiorentina 13–23, and from the guild matriculation books, as detailed in Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households,” appendixes 3 (Guilds) and 4 (Governors). n o t e : Names are standardized here in a commonly used version. The appendixes in “From Tuscan Households” preserve the spelling of names as found in the sources. a I did not find a record of his matriculation, but Raffaello, Laudadio’s son, was admitted by virtue of his father’s membership in 1592. b The following appear as governors, never in the same year: Lione d’Abramo d’Ansiglia (1573), Lione Ansiglia (1575), Lione Usiglio (1578, 1581, 1586) and Lione d’Isacch Usiglio (1584). In the guild matriculations we find, in the Linen Guild, Lione di Moise d’Isac hebreo spagnuolo (25 August 1573), and in the Silk Guild, Leone di Moise Usiglio hebreo (May 17 1575). Names are not usually as confused as this, but I believe they all refer to one man, whom I call Lione Usiglio. I cannot explain why his father was referred to as Abramo once and as Isacch once; however, it seems possible that Lione’s father had had no Hebrew name (the familty were of Spanish origin, probably ex–new Christians), and Abram, Isac and Moise were natural choices. Perhaps not coincidentally, “Abramo,” the name least common of the three among Tuscan Jews, was dropped earliest. c Sabatino di Buondi, Sabato di Beniamin Bondi and Sabato di Sabato di Buondi were listed as governors in 1580–86, but never in the same year: As noted in notes to Table 8, I cannot determine whether these were two or three men. Three times Jews of this lineage matriculated into the Linen Guild, but into three branches of that guild: Sabbatino di Michele Buondi (1561), Sabbatino di Bunedi [sic] detto el meretto (1561) and Sabbatino di Buondi di Beniamim (1572).

between 1571 and 1610, nine (39 percent) came in through a relative. And of the twenty-five Jewish men who entered the Merchants’ Guild between 1571 and 1610, eleven (44 percent) came in through a relative.81 These figures are remarkably consistent. On average, about four of every ten Jews who matriculated into a guild came in as family of members and received a reduced fee or waiver. This means that the three guilds were com-

Economic Parameters parably open to Jewish men who wished to join and who had obtained the necessary skills and start-up capital. Women were allowed to enter these three guilds, but the names of only two female Jewish guild members in this period, Ginevra di Agnolo di Laudadio (Blanis) and Sarra d’Agniolo di Zaccheria, are recorded.82 Most of the women of the ghetto were probably working at home, engaged in low- or semi-skilled paid work in the textile industry, which did not require matriculation, or were involved in the refurbishing of the used-clothing collected by men.83 In addition, they worked as shopkeepers alongside the men of their families or, very often, while the men were out of the ghetto. Though guild statutes confirm the existence in Florence of female rigattieri, no Jewish women were matriculated as such. In terms of absolute numbers, the two more exclusive guilds were not more difficult for Jews to penetrate than the lower guilds, but the numbers flatten the real story. Table 10 shows that there was a fairly even distribution of Jewish men in the three guilds, but the Jews who matriculated into the Silk Guild and, to a lesser degree, the Merchants’ Guild were largely members of three casate.84 Nine of the fourteen Jewish matriculants into the Arte della Seta in the first decade (1572–82) belonged to three important families: the Buondi (or Bondi, a Florentine family), the de Blanis and the Leucci. Fewer Jews were admitted to the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, but membership was more broadly distributed to families in the ghetto (five of the seventeen matriculants from 1572 to 1592 were Leucci, but the remaining twelve Jew were of twelve distinct lineages). The ghetto’s most successful families are identified not only by their concentration in the two higher guilds but also by their strategy of diversification. It was characteristic of the Jewish elite that they placed family members in more than one guild. This strategy allowed the family greater flexibility in responding to changing economic markets and guild regulations. Eighteen individual Jews were matriculated into at least two guilds.85 Of these, six were born into the da Empoli/Alpelinghi family,86 three belonged to the Leucci family87 and two were the grandchildren of Laudadio de Blanis.88 In some cases it was not one individual who matriculated into more than one guild, but rather one family that succeeded in placing members in both places. Two families who accomplished this were present in Florence before the ghetto: the Buondi and the Tedeschi.89 Although the Leucci, Blanis, Alpelinghi and Buondi clearly predominate numerically in the upper guilds, it is important to recall that in each of the three guilds, only 40 percent of the Jewish matriculants gained entrance or derived the benefit of free or reduced matriculation fees through a recog-

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Commune and Community nized relative. The predominance of these four lineages therefore should not be taken to mean that they were the only wealthy Jews in the ghetto. There was clearly economic mobility and opportunity for other Jews in the ghetto too, since 60 percent of Jewish matriculants did pay the substantial fees to make their way into the guilds. Other notably wealthy and high-status individuals and households, most of them governors, were Lione Usiglio, Isac and Daniel Calò, Moise Maracci and Sabatuccio di Pellegrino. The leading families in the ghetto are almost all identifiable in the sources by their surnames. Not all Jews had surnames, and not all Christians had surnames. The surname, we have noted, was the criterion that allowed Molho to distinguish between the lower-status groups in Florentine society. In the ghetto, of the twenty-seven men who governed at least twice from 1573 to 1612, only five did not have a surname (see Table 11).90 In the lower-status groups in the ghetto, men were identified only by the name of their father, or even by their own first name, and women were more likely to be identified only as wives.91 Women with high status in the ghetto were identified as daughters, and would carry their fathers’ surname, even if married. A century earlier, according to Umberto Cassuto, “among the Italian Jews, the family name is encountered only exceptionally.”92 Surnames were carried by families that had been in Italy for more than two centuries (e.g. da Rieti) and by some who were from north of the Alps (e.g. Tedesco), as well as by Jews from the Iberian peninsula (e.g. de Blanis), where surnames had been customary among Jews since at least the fourteenth century. In several families the sons or grandsons transformed a progenitor’s personal name into a family name (Buondi, Leucci), thereby appropriating an important sign of status. The production and standardization of these surnames in the sixteenth century, and sometimes the italianization of a foreign name,93 is a vivid sign of the Jews’ conformity to larger cultural expectations for the signification of status.94 For the Florentine Christians, name, political office and economic power were the primary indications that a family had the status that defined the endogamous elite. The correlation of governorship, membership in guilds and possession of a surname are also good indicators of the new elite in the ghetto (this is schematically represented in Figure 7). The pattern is disrupted mainly by the two wealthy and high-status Jewish families in Florence that did not participate in the ghetto government: the da Rieti, Tuscan ex-bankers who left Florence permanently in 1573, and the Leucci, Pisan perfume-merchants, most of whom returned to live in Pisa in 1588.95 Six Leucci men matriculated into the Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants and into the Silk Guild in the 1570s and 1580s, and none of them

Economic Parameters

Membership in Florentine guild, 1571–1611 Use of family name Governor in the ghetto, 1571–1610 Governor in the ghetto, more than one term, 1571–1610

f i g . 7 . The new elite in the ghetto: correlation of governorship, membership in guilds and possession of a surname.

appears on our lists of governors until Abramo di Ventura Leucci in 1600. Their absence demands an explanation. The Leucci came to Florence with such good connections to the court that, despite the ghettoization edict which required that Jewish shops be in the ghetto, they were allowed to open a perfume shop prominently located, not in the ghetto, but on the corner of via Martelli, a street (still extant) leading out of Piazza Santa Maria del Fiore, that is, the great piazza of the central cathedral.96 It is possible that the Leucci did not live in the ghetto. From 1572 to 1593 one fourth of the Jewish matriculants into the Merchant and Silk guilds in Florence were men of the Leucci family.97 From a strictly economic perspective they were the most privileged Jews in Florence. We cannot say why they were not ghetto governors: whether because, as Luzzati suggested, they would not associate with the lower status Jews;98 because they lived outside the ghetto; because they avoided leadership and its financial risks; because they had no intention of remaining in Florence; or because the local Jews rejected them, suspicious or resentful of their privileged position.99 The Leucci’s actual standing was determined by an external factor: a client relationship to someone influential in the Medici court or bureaucracy. Once the da Rieti and Leucci left and reestablished themselves in Siena, Pisa and elsewhere, the only elite in Florence were the men—or perhaps the families—of the Jewish merchants and shopkeepers who governed the ghetto.

An Additional Measure of Status in the Ghetto: Mobility and Access to the World Beyond Guild membership (and the associated resources), surname and membership on the board of governors were all elements of status that a man could

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Commune and Community obtain as a resident of the ghetto. Men who moved to the Florentine ghetto also sometimes came with a kind of status that commanded immediate authority: whenever a Jewish doctor arrived—physician or rabbi or both— he was made a governor at once. A dearth of information on the religious and private lives of individual Florentine Jews prevents any exploration of the personal status of some Jews in the ghetto who had had the opportunity to study but had not achieved the title h.aver or rabbi.100 The status of the Jews in the ghetto may be considered an expression of power, of agency circumscribed by the restraints on one’s autonomy or control. The social status, political voice and economic power we have been discussing are all are measures of the degree to which an individual or family was controlled by or dominated others. Jews as a whole were subjected in ways above and beyond the ways most other inhabitants of the state were controlled, since the state determined what the Jews were to wear, where they were to live and what work they were allowed to do. Therefore we may say that Jews who avoided or resisted these controls successfully expressed an extra degree of status relative to other Jews. We saw this in the pre-ghetto period, when some Jews were able to obtain exemptions from wearing the segno, thus identifying themselves to Christians and Jews alike as the elite among the Jews. In the first decades of the ghetto, Jews were unable to obtain exemptions from the segno. However, there were Jews who resided outside the ghetto, Jews who had shops outside the ghetto and Jews who realized greater extraresidential mobility than others. In the face of the government’s interest in restricting them to the ghetto, their successful expression of freedom to move and to be present outside of the ghetto—their spatial mobility, in other words—should therefore be considered a primary factor in our definition of status, a mark of status similar to presence in a guild or election as a governor. The Jews who scored highest on this scale were those who obtained permission to reside outside the ghettos of Florence and Siena. The da Rieti were allowed to return to Pisa in 1573; the Leucci had their perfume store outside the ghetto for years before they too were allowed to return to Pisa in 1588; and a new category of highly privileged, high-status Jews was created in Tuscany, and eventually in Florence, when Levantine and other foreign Jewish merchants were invited to Livorno in 1591 and in 1593.101 Lowest on the scale were the vast majority of Jewish women, who, as we have seen, were four times less likely to make trips outside the city of Florence than men and probably were restricted to the ghetto itself much more intensely than men.102

Economic Parameters In the ghetto, mobility was highly correlated with economic status. Guild members traveled more often, and for longer trips, than other men. By 1586 a total of 298 trips had been taken by about 135 men who were at least fifteen years old, of whom only twenty-five were members of guilds by that year. (Another eight of them would matriculate in the course of the next twenty years.) These twenty-five guild members, representing only 19 percent of the population of trip-takers, took 31 percent of the trips. The average number of trips taken over the course of the long decade by non-guild members was 1.9, whereas guild members took an average of 3.6 trips each.103 The greater mobility of the higher-status group is affirmed when we look at the guilds separately: the average number of trips per man for the loweststatus guild, that of the linen and used-clothing-dealers, was 1.7; for the Silk Guild, 4.0; and for the Merchants Guild, 4.1. It is perhaps not a coincidence, then, that the only Jew matriculated as a “major” member of the Silk Guild at this time was granted permission to operate in the countryside.104 It is possible that the guild would not allow Jews to matriculate on the higher level in the city, whereas further stimulation of the industry in the contado was considered more desirable than threatening. But the success of Iacob di Giuseppe di Iacobbe ebreo da Empoli in the guild was directly related to the extraordinary degree of mobility to which he and his family—the Alpelinghi or da Empoli—committed themselves. A Case Study in Status Management: The Alpelinghi. The status this lineage achieved in the ghetto was created and managed only with great commitment, effort and skill. The men took frequent extended excursions out of the city at all times of the year; they matriculated into the guilds and they seem to have taken turns maintaining a presence in the ghetto government. The family had engaged in production and distribution and commerce for over fifty years in Empoli and Pontedera, and their expert knowledge of the regional economy allowed them to make a successful transition from the production and trade in wool to silk—the same transition that was made by Florentine manufacturers as a whole in the late sixteenth century.105 Indeed, the Alpelinghi maintained a strong business relationship with the Tuscan countryside after their move to the Florentine ghetto from Empoli and Pontedera. There were six adult male members of this family living in the ghetto in the 1570s and 1580s: the above-mentioned Iacob di Giuseppe, his two sons Isac and Giuseppe, and his three nephews, Laudadio, Giuseppe and Salamone, sons of his brother Moise di Giuseppe. Collectively, they were matriculated into all three of the guilds (and had previously been admitted into the Wool Guild for the contado). Their relationship to the regional economy is apparent in—and depended on—the extraordinary number of trips

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Commune and Community these men took into the Tuscan countryside after they had moved into the ghetto. An analysis of the registration of permits given to Jews to travel outside of Florence shows that the men of this extended lineage traveled more than the men of any other lineage in the ghetto. Recorded among the extant books for the years 1574–86, there are only four Jews who obtained permits for more than ten trips.106 Three were members of this family: the most mobile Jew in the ghetto, Laudadio di Moise (twenty-two trips from 1574 to 1586); Giuseppe di Moise (ten or eleven trips); and Isac di Iacob di Giuseppe (ten trips from 1578 to 1585). Three of the next most frequent travelers were also members of the extended family: Iacob di Giuseppe dal Pontadera—the above-mentioned “major” member in the Silk Guild—(eight trips); his son Giuseppe di Iacob di Giuseppe dal Pontadera (seven trips); and Salamone di Moise (seven trips). Given their multiple matriculations, including Iacob’s entrance as a highranking member of the Silk Guild, it seems likely that on these trips Iacob and his sons and nephews were active in the regional economy not only as rigattieri, selling used clothing and linens at fairs and local markets. They were probably also coordinating the purchase and distribution of silkworm cocoons and of skeins of spun silk thread from rural Tuscany, participating in the development of sericulture that the Medici encouraged with laws requiring the planting of mulberry trees to feed the silkworms.107 The family, it appears, were not simply investors or passive partners in a silk firm but rather owned it and served as their own managers and suppliers. Indeed, they were active in the development, or even introduction, of sericulture right at its center, for, as Goodman notes, by the mid-seventeenth century sericulture had spread through the Arno valley toward the Pisan countryside. Indeed, it was heavily concentrated in a number of small towns and villages off the banks of the Arno, exactly between Pontedera and Empoli, the two hometowns of the da Empoli, or Alpelinghi.108 In the ghetto the men of Alpelinghi lineage seem to have taken turns as governors.109 They exemplify the new elite of the ghetto: men who had never been bankers, doctors or rabbis but placed themselves successfully in the guilds and in the self-government, and maintained the highest degree of “mobility,” limited only by the fact that they did not obtain official permission to live outside the ghetto or to move to Pisa or back to Empoli or Pontedera. In fact, they may have done so without permission, for some members of the Alpelinghi family still, or again, owned land and houses in Pontedera and Empoli in 1580, ten years after their presumed expulsion.110 Individuals of the lineage were in and out of the city, in and out of luck

Economic Parameters and even in and out of jail, but the status of the Alpelinghi was created and maintained by the economic and political acts of the lineage as a whole. The Alpelinghi concentrated on their economic position by traveling intensively to the countryside or back to the towns from which they had been expelled. Yet they took care to serve the community as its governors. In contrast, the Leucci served hardly at all as governors of the community, focusing their efforts instead on a return to Pisa.
Since there was no “old elite” and no deeply rooted class structure in the ghetto in its first years, families followed a variety of strategies to fix their place in what would be the new hierarchy. The archives reveal only pieces of each family’s strategy. Ioseph Ursi, from Perugia, committed an enormous dowry in order to marry his daughter into the famous Leucci family.111 Agnolo di Zaccaria entered the Merchants’ Guild just before his death, allowing his daughter Sarra to establish herself as his successor. Laudadio Blanis, the doctor, entered the Silk Guild in his old age, probably to make it easier for his granddaughter Ginevra to enter that business. His grandson, Laudadio di Agnolo Blanis, seems to have left the ghetto for a decade in order to return to it as a doctor, reestablishing his family’s name in the ghetto government. In the ghetto, as in the city of Florence, the overall status of an individual was negotiated in the context of his or her family name or casata, lineage. In the case examined above, of the extended family from Empoli and Pontedera, the surname (Alpelingo) was not adopted by all the members of the family, but they seem to have been working as a group. Thus, within a family, one individual belonged to a high-status guild; his brother, son, or uncle was a governor; and another relative traveled extensively, constantly strengthening the family’s economic position with his knowledge of market conditions and trends. Collectively, each lineage had status within the ghetto. This status depended on several factors which would probably not all be found in one individual, whose talents and proclivities were varied. This may in part explain why more populous lineages were the most successful. In sum, the Jews, though they lived in a ghetto, were part of the city’s lowest socioeconomic classes, that large, understudied group of small-scale merchants, artisans and skilled and unskilled laborers. This classification system, however, does not by itself adequately describe the ghetto; the other main indicators of status were participation in the Jewish government and resistance to the spatial restrictions of ghettoization itself.

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III. Economic Relationships of the Jews Within the Ghetto Unlike the loose association of Jewish individuals and families who had lived in Florence before the ghetto, the Jews of the ghetto had an economy. Jews who needed financial help or training to enter a new profession or begin a business obtained that help from family or from other, unrelated Jews. They were economically integrated with the city through its guild system, associated with their Christian guild-brethren and did business with them. Yet within the guilds they were set apart. They were subject to the guilds’ regulations and courts, but they were not elected to be guild officers. As guild members, they were required to conduct business through one of the guild’s official brokers (sensali), but they were not able matriculate into the Brokers’ Guild.112 They were, technically, integrated into the economy of the city, but social boundaries were maintained between Christians and Jews, who were always recorded as Jews when they matriculated, even if they were not required to pay a higher matriculation fee. Though they had a place in the ghetto among the dozens of semi-independent communes, and though they belonged to the guilds, the Jews were now squarely both inside and outside the systems of the state. As a result, each instance of aid and support one Jew gave another strengthened the ties that were turning the Florentine ghetto into a community. The new economic structure was unlike that of the prototypical medieval Italian Jewish community, which revolved around a family of wealthy bankers who patronized tutors, religious functionaries and scholars, employed servants and clerks and supported a few poor families of artisans. Neither did the socioeconomic structure of the Florentine ghetto reproduce the struggles experienced in Rome and Mantua, where Jewish bankers and Jewish merchants competed with one another for political control.113 In the first half-century of the Florentine ghetto’s history, there was social stratification, but the spectrum of wealth and power was not so wide: almost all the Jews in the ghetto were involved in various aspects of the textile industry or in commerce. There were no bankers and no great magnates. It is no coincidence that there was in these decades (1570–1620) no notable production in Florence of Jewish scholarship, music, drama or Hebrew printing comparable to that of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice, Mantua, Cremona and Ferrara and other places where Jewish artists and scholars still found Jewish and Christian patrons.114

Economic Parameters

Jewish Servants in the Ghetto We might expect to find that some Jews worked as servants for the wealthier families: Jews had been employed in domestic service in Tuscan households even before the edict of ghettoization forbade Jews to employ Christian servants. But the wealthiest families had mostly not come to Florence, the large joint households had been splintered and all families had less property to care for in the ghetto than they had had in the contado, where they had owned houses, vineyards and orchards. Among the more than one hundred and fifty adult Jews whose names were listed on travel permits registered by status-conscious clerks in the court of the Nove, we learn of only one Jewish servant, a woman named Ester, about fifty years old. She was listed as the “servant of the said Raffaello,” that is, of Raffaello di Cipriano, who was thirty years old, “short and fat, with a black beard,” married to Dolce (eight years his senior, and tall) and had a nine-year-old son named Sole.115 It seems unusual that such a small family should employ a servant, but Ester’s service was a mark of status for Raffaello di Cipriano, who had been the chancellor of the ghetto for almost a decade, and surely also for his wife Dolce, who was relieved of some of the work she would otherwise have been occupied with.116 Before ghettoization, some of the wealthiest Tuscan Jewish families had hired Christian women to nurse their children. Now that the employment of Christian wetnurses was forbidden to them by the Synod of 1573, even the wealthiest of the women of the ghetto had no choice but to nurse their own children or find Jewish wetnurses for them.117 In contrast to the pre-ghetto situation in Tuscany and to Jewish social structure in many fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian Jewish settlements, very few people in the new community depended on a wealthy elite for their employment or support.118 Of all the Jews listed on the travel permits over the decade, only two other individuals, in addition to Raffaello’s servant Ester, were defined in a nonfamilial relationship to other Jews on the same permit. A man simply called Giuseppe was the “factor” (fattorino) of Isac d’Elia (or Leuccio) da Pisa, who was a Leucci,119 and Sabato di Salamone appeared several times as the “agent” of the da Rieti brothers. These two men were not identified on the permits by their full names; they worked for the da Rieti and the Leucci, and their primary social identity was their relationship to their employer-benefactors.120

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Apprenticeship and Sponsorship in the Guilds Certainly not organized around one or more important families, the ghetto was, however, economically “organized” for specific purposes. In Chapter Seven we saw that the Jewish deputies orchestrated the collection of monies for the salaries of the gatekeepers and for the head tax, for maintaining the cleanliness of the ghetto and for the rent of the synagogue and the expenses of the governors. The economic organization of the ghetto also included, from the very beginning, a system whereby fines were collected for infractions of ghetto regulations and were deposited into a communal fund for the poor. The ghetto capitoli have already revealed the extent of the competition among shopkeepers and brokers in the ghetto. However, Jews also helped each other with loans and occupational development. These economic alliances may have arisen from friendships, from familial relationships through marriage that we have not been able to identify or from loyalties based on regional origin. One way Jews helped each other was by taking apprentices. Apprenticeship, referred to as “service” (servitio), lasted six or seven years. At least a few men were admitted to guild membership after completing apprenticeships to other Jews, service which not only taught them the trade but also gave them entrance to the guild at a reduced fee. Moise di Lione da Prato, “having served for more than six years,” was admitted to the Silk Guild in 1608, just seven years after the matriculation of the man to whom he had probably been apprenticed, Laudadio di Magister Agnolo Blanis.121 Another Jew who completed an apprenticeship was Abram di Daniello Calò, admitted in 1613 into the Silk Guild as a rigattiere—the occupation of his father and grandfather.122 His parents had married in the ghetto in 1575, so he was not necessarily a young man when admitted to the guild.123 Indeed, the evidence suggests that many men did not matriculate into the guilds until their late twenties or thirties. Financial cooperation among Jews is also evidenced by the guild matriculation records, which show that one Jew would provide surety for another to enable him to join a guild.124 Sabato di Pellegrino, a member of the Linen Guild, guaranteed (under oath) the matriculation fees of two Jews who were admitted into the Silk Guild in 1580, Lione di Salamone from Prato (“ebreo nel getto”) and Moise di Michele Gaiazo ebreo, thus entitling them to pay their fees in installments over five years.125 Just a few days later, one of these two served as guarantor for a third Jew, also of Italian origin, to matriculate as a merchant into the same guild, and more examples could be cited.126 The

Economic Parameters guarantors (mallevadori), it should be noted, were not recorded as relatives of those they helped, but it does seem that Jews of Italian origin were more likely to be associated with other Italians, and Jews of more recent Iberian origin with others of Spanish and Portuguese descent.127

Partnership and Brokerage Partnerships and even larger-scale cooperative ventures in the ghetto are suggested by the data. When Jews took trips on business, they quite often went in groups of two, three or more, especially to the annual fairs. Twentynine Jewish men went on one permit to the fair in Pistoia in 1574.128 Their travel in groups was not a response to a fear of traveling alone while wearing the Jewish badge: sixty-five of the 145 permits issued were given to and valid for one lone Jewish traveler (and usually no other permits were written for other Jews going to the same place on the same day). Indeed, forty-three different Jews took trips unaccompanied by any other Jew in the ten years for which we have data. We cannot, however, say whether the Jews whose names appear alone on the permits invariably traveled alone, or with Christian partners, since Christians did not require permits to leave the city.129 Evidence suggests that the Jewish merchants in the ghetto made an effort, with limited success, to build their economic strength communally by attempting to channel their business in the most profitable direction: the Levant. Such an effort may be the context for the grand-ducal privilege that was granted in 1572 to the Jewish broker or sensale, Abram Baroch,130 and for an apparently similar privilege granted to Salvadore di Teseo in 1583.131 Abram di Daniello Baroch was one of the Jews who had come to Florence as a Levantine merchant, protected by Cosimo’s invitation in 1551, probably through the commercial network developed by Servadio Greco hebreo, the Jew from Damascus who had been made Cosimo’s trade commissioner. He may have been a refugee, with his father, from the papal attack in Ancona on merchants who were accused of being Marranos in 1555.132 His father was also involved in Italian trade with the Levant but by 1572 had returned to live there. In July 1572 Abram petitioned Francesco de’ Medici to appoint him as a sensale, following his predecessor Servadio Greco.133 In his petition, as it is summarized in a memorandum, he explained that the Jews were approaching him, asking him to serve as their broker, which he dared not do without the prince’s permission: Therefore, he begs Your Highness to concede that he might employ the office of broker [sensale] in this Your most felicitous city and state, in all types of merchandise, without being held to pay any import or export taxes, as is done in Venice

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Commune and Community and wherever Jews still live who exercise this profession, and just as the Most Serene Grand Duke previously conceded to one Servadio, the Greek Jew.134

Although Abram Baroch appealed to the precedent of Servadio in his effort to obtain this privilege, Baroch did not really achieve anything like the status Servadio had had.135 The response to his petition was positive but circumscribed: it was “conceded that he may be the broker of the merchandise and goods of the Jews and of no others [my emphasis] according to the regulations of the city.”136 That is, Abram Baroch was given, not a commission for Levantine trade, but the opportunity to organize and handle the trade of Florentine merchants who were Jewish. We might interpret Baroch’s petition as evidence that the Jews who came to Florence had moved quickly (in 1572) to try to enter the trade with the Levant, through Abram Baroch, or at least, that they had tried to use his knowledge and experience to help them establish their own markets. But each Florentine guild had its own set of brokers, or “merchant middlemen,” and the guilds strictly required that their services be employed.137 These agents had a guild of their own, the Arte dei Sensali—a guild with no Jewish members. By granting the petition of Abram Baroch in 1572, the grand duke encouraged the Jews of the ghetto to engage in Levantine commerce. He was willing to override normal guild regulations, appointing Baroch as their special sensale.138 As the sensale for Jewish commerce with the Levant, Baroch had a smaller role in Tuscan-Levantine commerce than Servadio Greco had had as sensale for all Levantine trade, Jewish, Christian and other. Nonetheless, the presence in Florence of Baroch and other Jews with Levantine connections must have helped the small Florentine Jewish silk and linen firms. At this time large Florentine silk firms were beginning to take orders from mercantile companies that acted as middlemen, moving away from the earlier system of marketing cloth to resident foreign merchants who would then send them on to Europe.139 With their relatives in Damascus, Salonika and elsewhere in the Levant, the Jewish Levantine merchants resident in Florence (soon to be outnumbered by Jewish merchants moving to Livorno) seem to have served in both capacities, as “resident foreign merchants” and as merchant middlemen. It seems likely that for local commerce within the city and for attendance at regional fairs the Jews were obliged to use the sensali of the corresponding guilds. All guild members were required to make and register their transactions through specially designated guild brokers. In the Silk Guild there were twenty sensali at all times;140 in the Linen Guild there were six, all appointed by the grand duke.141 No guild member could buy or sell without the

Economic Parameters approval of one of these agents, who were supposed to ensure that goods were sold at the prices established by the guilds, and who were not themselves allowed to engage in the trade. Jews, however, as noted above, were not accepted into the Brokers’ Guild. In the appointment of Abram Baroch a precedent was set that Jews could be specially appointed as sensali. In 1583 a Jew named Salvadore di Teseo requested another grand-ducal privilege to serve as broker for the Jews. Abram Baroch, who was a governor in the ghetto until about 1575 (but no later than 1577), was gone.142 Salvadore’s location during the 1570s is not clear, but by 1583 he was living in the ghetto, along with his father and his son.143 A cousin of his, Salavdore di Servadio, may have been the son of Servadio Greco.144 In any event, in response to his petition, Salvadore was appointed by the grand duke as a sensale, with duties privileges very similar to those of sensali appointed to the guilds. He was designated broker and middleman [sensale e mezzano] to handle the brokerage of the goods of all the other Jews, with the power to trade and barter in the said things with any merchants he wants [con poter fare in detti così mercati e bazzarri con qual si voglia mercanti], among them Christians, under the subscribed conditions: namely, that the said Salvadore should be bound to matriculate into the guilds corresponding to the merchandise in which he is dealing, paying the matriculation dues and taxes and keeping the book assigned by the Chancellors, respectively, of the said guilds where he will be matriculated, wherein he is obligated to write, and to have listed by each of his contracting merchants, each sale and barter of every type of commerce.145

This time it was clearly not Levantine trade that was being discussed. There was no reference in the privilege to the prior concessions to Servadio Greco or Abram Baroch, neither of whom had had to join the guilds or had had to pay, as Salvadore did, the “required taxes.” The public notification of Salvadore’s privilege also emphasized that the Jews were subject to the courts and laws of the guilds in all matters, the jurisdiction of the Otto di Guardia notwithstanding.146 By granting Salvadore di Teseo’s petition to become a sensale for the Jews in 1583, the grand duke again allowed the Jews of the ghetto to circumvent many of the regulations of the guilds. Perhaps they sought to use their own brokers because were not satisfied with the terms given to them by the official guild brokers.147 The concession suggests that the government had to acknowledge that the guilds were creating an untenable situation for Jewish merchants, or that commerce would be increased by allowing the Jews to use their own brokers. We do not know how successful Salvadore was in his effort to capture the ghetto market, which was not given to him as a monopoly. Individual Jews who were integrated into the guilds were presumably

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Commune and Community still allowed to use any broker they liked. In any event, already treating the Jews as an administrative and political unit, the state was now willing to allow Salvadore to try to organize the Jews of the ghetto as an economic unit as well. The privileges granted to Abram Baroch and to Salvadore di Teseo only distinguished these Jews from others of the ghetto by giving them access to the occupation of sensale, but they are an early sign of the willingness of the state to give special consideration to Jews who were particularly useful in the development of commerce. In 1593 Ferdinando de’ Medici extended his famous invitation and extensive privilege to merchants of all nations, including “Levantines,” Spanish, Portuguese and Hebrews, to come to Pisa and Livorno, protecting them explicitly from any inquiry into their past as Christians and allowing them to live freely as Jews.148 New special concessions to individual Jewish merchants who wanted to live, not in Pisa or Livorno, but in Florence, began to appear in 1599: exemption from the requirement to matriculate into a guild, permission to live outside the ghetto, permission to bear arms by day and night.149 The utilitarian, mercantilistic policies of the grand duchy created, within decades, a great gap between the wealth and status of ghettoized, primarily Italian-born Jews and nonghettoized, primarily non-Italian Jews in Tuscany, a story that takes us beyond the limits of this study. The privileges given to Abram Baroch in 1572 and to Salvadore Teseo a decade later might be interpreted as signs of an attempt by the Jewish merchants in the ghetto to organize themselves economically, either to their advantage or in response to economic discrimination. However, they could equally well reflect the ambitions of two enterprising Jews who hoped to corner a market as brokers and agents for the shopkeepers and manufacturers in the ghetto.

An Employer of Women in the Ghetto? In the first forty years of the ghetto, there were no efforts that we can connect to the ghetto’s governors to organize its economy, except in terms of the collection of funds for taxes, sanitation and aid for the poor. Moreover, the commercial activities of shopkeepers and rigattieri did not support a large underclass of workers. Individuals, however, may have provided employment directly for skilled or semi-skilled workers. In particular, the industrial enterprise of the Jewish silk-manufacturers could have provided work, especially for the women of the ghetto. From 1572 to 1582 twelve Jews matriculated as setaiuoli, silk-manufacturers

Economic Parameters at the top end of the employment pyramid. In a large silk company the owner might either hire a manager (ministro) or be the manager. There were then managerial assistants (garzoni) and below them factors (fattori, to be distinguished from the factors sent to foreign lands as merchant representatives), “the link between the firm and the silk-workers, putting out work to the winders, throwsters, weavers” and others.150 For each factor in a seventeenth-century silk firm there were an estimated thirty-three workers.151 The Jewish firms in the ghetto must have been much smaller operations, or the Jews who matriculated as setaiuoli may have been partners of a few small firms. One of the silk-manufacturers was Ginevra d’Agnolo Blanis. The spatial organization of the ghetto (evidenced by references to rooms used by women in the capitoli discussed in Chapter Seven) opens the possibility that Ginevra, and perhaps others, provided work for the Jewish women in the ghetto who gathered in the communal rooms of the ghetto to weave silk cloth on looms set up there.152 The young silk-merchant expressed her relationship to the girls and women of the ghetto in her testament, in which she instructed her executor to set up a fund to finance the marriages of eight poor girls. Ginevra had no daughters at the time she wrote this will, but she did not find it necessary to explain who should make a curtain (uno paramento), “which the Jews shall promise to call mine,” for the Torah’s ark in the ghetto synagogue. It was to be woven in her honor after her death; surely the unspoken assumption was that the women of the ghetto—perhaps employees of her own silk firm—would be commissioned to weave and embroider it.153
In this chapter we have observed the Jews at work, finding themselves a new economic niche, networking, building on their relationships to family members and other Jews in the ghetto. The ghetto was not, in economic terms, a microcosm of the city; it was totally dependent on the guild system and on the possibility of Jewish membership in the guilds. However, the work that individuals did to establish themselves economically helped turn the ghetto into a socially interdependent community. One Jew took a Jewish apprentice or brought a relative into the guild; one made a loan or took an oath to guarantee that another Jew’s matriculation fee would be paid on schedule. Our understanding of these economic ties is deepened and complicated when we turn in the next chapter to look at arrangements between Jews that were not only financial but also social contracts: marriage and the dowry, economic institutions which played a critical role in the consolidation of the ghetto community.

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N i n e From Virilocal to Local:

Marriage in the Florentine Ghetto

In the spring months of 1580 an unusually large percentage of the Jews of the Florentine ghetto—sixty-six, more than a fifth of the population—obtained permits to leave the city for a period of up to four days.1 These trips were in addition to other trips taken by individuals and small groups all that year. Where were these people going? Possible explanations range from the ordinarily festive (a wedding, an outing to gather morels or truffles from the woods), to the preventative (a response to an episode of sickness in the ghetto or city, a rumor of plague or threat of violence), to the mysterious (a response to an astrological omen or prediction). Contemporary Christian Florentine chronicles do not note anything unusual in these months: perhaps it was a specifically Jewish, if fleeting and unidentifiable, religious phenomenon: a visit to a miraculous site or relic, or to burial grounds, or some briefly popular Kabbalistic practice. Jews of all ages traveled in large groups over a period of weeks, including twenty-six women and girls. The permits issued by the Nove on two days were for large crowds: on 2 April, the Saturday in the middle of the eight-day Passover holiday, twenty people were granted permission to depart. On 28 May, twenty-eight Jews were granted a permit: it was Shabbat Nasa, one week after the Jewish holiday of Shavu‘ot (the Feast of Weeks).2 The way their names appear in the register suggests something about how the Jews stood about in the office of the Nove. One permit lists four men first, then two women referred to as wives of two of the listed men and six other adult women and fourteen children, but in no particular order.3 Children were added to the lists in a somewhat haphazard manner as they apparently stood clustered with their friends and mothers in the doorway of the office of the Nove. It is not possible from the way that the names appear in the records to match all of the children with their parents. The notation on the permits of the physical features of the women as well as those of the men,

Marriage in the Ghetto however, attests that the women were present and not just named in absentia by their husbands. The physical description on these permits was most likely intended to prevent the Jews from selling or trading the permits among themselves. This was a new feature on the permits, which had its origin in the city’s great concern about the spread of disease. La peste was in Genoa and was being closely watched. A regulation had come into effect the previous year (in November 1579, as noted earlier) that prohibited people in the city of Florence from lodging any foreigner who was not carrying a valid certificate of health (fede di sanità) that had been issued by appropriate government authorities. These certificates were to include a physical description and notation of the permitcarrier’s age, to ensure that the person carrying the pass was the one who had passed the health exam.4 Similar health certificates were used in Milan in 1579.5 It was in the same year that prostitutes were first required to obtain permits for travel outside the city for any trip lasting longer than eight days. Travel permits given to Jews before 1579 had not noted the physical features or the ages of the Jews, but by 1580 the clerks issuing them had adopted this surveillance procedure from the office of the Sanità and added the same type of physiognomic detail.6 The travel permits given to Jews in 1580 were all limited to four night trips, in contrast to earlier permits, which were frequently for fifteen days or a month. This restriction may also have been a response to the fear that traveling Jews could bring contagion back to the city, for the disease was still near Genoa, which was more than a four-day round trip. The net result of this surveillance and record-keeping was the equivalent of our own photo identification cards, or more precisely, dated guest passes with photo ID, as may be seen in Figure 8. With so many Jews obtaining permits to travel in that year, we have before us a rather complete physical description of a large part of the community. In the spring of 1580, when permits were given to large groups, the Jews were not listed as individual family units. Whereas in 1567 and 1570 the authorities listed Jews as discrete Jewish “families” and households when they counted them before ghettoization, now the Florentine clerks issuing permits registered the Jewish subjects as individuals and as groups. This observation may serve as a point of entry into another part of the story of the Jews’ ghettoization. Ghettoization uprooted Jews from their homes in the villages of Tuscany and, specifically, from that fundamental social-spatial unit, the house. How did the transition from rural household to the urban ghetto and its apartments affect the composition of the Jewish household? And how

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f i g . 8 . Example of a travel permit given to Jews of the Florentine ghetto. Source: Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Nove Conservatori del Dominio e della Iursidizione Fiorentina 18, 25r, 2 April 1580. Reproduced by permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali; further reproduction or duplication is prohibited.

did the expulsion and ghettoization affect the marriage plans, possibilities and strategies of these Jews? This chapter explores the impact of the events of 1570 and 1571 on the families who were directly affected. It does not attempt to pursue the history of the ghetto far enough into the seventeenth century to make broad conclusions about the longer-term impact of ghettoization on the Jewish marriage system. However, no discussion of the relationship between the ghetto and the city can be complete without a consideration of the role of marriage and the dowry, a crucial element in the social and economic organization of early

Marriage in the Ghetto modern Jews and early modern Christians alike. The data on the permits of 1580 allow us to investigate these questions, especially insofar as we can use them to reconstitute the age at which people married and had children in the first decade of the ghetto’s history. We might begin by noting the presence among the travelers of twelve married couples with their children.7 The travel permits of 1580 that recorded so many women and children also recorded the age of each person listed. Precise ages were given except for women over forty and men over fifty, whose ages were rounded to the nearest half decade.8 There were eleven children on the permits aged nine years or younger, all born since their parents had moved into the ghetto.9 These data allow us to use the permits of 1580 as a population sample of the Jews, nine years after their move into the ghetto. The married men were on average 4.14 years older than their wives, with a median age differential of five years.10 We will examine these numbers more closely later in this chapter, but this first impression is striking: it contrasts dramatically with what is known about the Christian marriage system in Tuscany in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. At the time of the famous catasto (1427–30), Christian men throughout Tuscany were on average more than six years older than their brides, and in the city of Florence the age difference was twelve years.11 The greater age differential in the urban Florentine marriages has been attributed to economic conditions that encouraged men to marry later, although the urban setting itself may have facilitated some men’s choice to postpone or avoid marriage.12 The age difference was even more pronounced in our period, when the median age at first marriage of the minority of patrician Florentine men who married at all was very high: thirty-three in the second half of the sixteenth century. Among the urban elite in Florence in the late sixteenth century, Christian men were on average fifteen years older than the women they married.13 This striking difference between Jewish and Christian marriage practice highlights the fact that age at first marriage was not determined exclusively by one’s status as a rural or urban person in Tuscany, but rather by a complex system of interdependent social, religious and economic expectations and needs. These factors were different for Christians and Jews, and it is worth asking whether Jewish and Christian marriage patterns became less similar or more similar as a result of ghettoization, which, as we have seen, both segregated the Jews and integrated them into the state. When we seek to understand the impact of the ghettoization on the Jews, the institution of marriage is indeed a very good place to start. In the propertied classes of premodern Western societies, marriages were business agree-

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Commune and Community ments, undertaken strategically to establish, protect or improve the status of each family, as well as to advance the lineage into the next generation.14 Jews shared this social interest in status, network and progeny. Moreover, they considered themselves religiously obliged to marry and procreate. But all these factors do not explain the importance of marriage for Jews. Before the institution of the ghetto and its self-government, marriage was the institution—not the synagogue, or the rabbinic academy—that most clearly determined and affirmed their membership in Jewish community. I do not refer here to the Jewishness of the potential fruit of the marriage, the children born. It was religious endogamy itself—the marriage of Jews to other Jews—that most fundamentally defined Jewish “community.” As we have seen, the Jews of Tuscany prior to the ghettoization in 1571 were not organized politically; they did not have appointed or elected rabbinic leadership; they did not live in distinct Jewish neighborhoods; and they did not even trace their immediate ancestry to the same lands of origin. Until 1570 this population of about seven hundred lived scattered in two dozen villages, as well as in the main cities of Pisa and Florence. The Jews of this geographic region were not a stable, immobile population. Frequent migration was characteristic of the Jews in the Italian states, who were ever in search of a favorable, or more favorable, environment in which to live and work. Parents sent away their daughters to be married and their sons to be schooled or trained. In this fluid and constantly changing world, when a couple was married the link created between two Jewish families enlarged and strengthened Jewish networks and also actively defined and reinforced the boundary that separated Jews from Christians. The connection established by that marriage carried a Jewish identity that was not tied to or based in any particular location. The Jews who lived in the towns of Tuscany prior to ghettoization had no specifically Tuscan Jewish community. We do see, as we would expect, marriages in the 1550s and 1560s that linked Jewish families of neighboring cities, such as San Miniato, Empoli, Pontedera and Pisa. However, Jews from Tuscany also arranged marriages with Jews from more distant, foreign places including Perugia, Reggio and Candia. It is because of their mainly regional pool of marriage partners that we can call the Jews of the central-northern Italian states a regional, “Italian” Jewish community.15 Nonetheless, it was not difficult for Portuguese and Levantine Jewish merchants who settled in Pisa and other Italian cities to find local brides, blurring the boundaries of the north-central Italian Jewish community that was defined by marital endogamy. The Jews who lived in Tuscany prior to ghettoization belonged to both an elastically

Marriage in the Ghetto defined regional community and to the broader, religio-ethnic category of “Israel.”16 The ghetto caused both immediate disruption and long-term changes in many of the key aspects of life that were driven by customs and by the economy, including marriage, household composition and the construction of gender roles. This exploration of the impact of the events of 1570–71 on the Jews will focus on three topics that have been of special interest to historians of the family and specifically of Tuscany since the study of the catasto of 1427–30 by David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber: (1) the rate of marriage, or nuptiality; (2) the age differential in marriage and the age at which Jews married; and (3) the size of dowries promised, the impact of the dowry in the local economy and the process of negotiation.

Italian Jewish Marriage Systems and Patterns in Tuscany Before Ghettoization Given that only a small number of the Jews living in Tuscany in the 1560s can be definitively identified as residents there in the 1540s, it would be misleading to speak of a “Tuscan” Jewish pattern in marriage, dowry and inheritance. The customs of the Jews of Tuscany reflect a large pool of practices that Italian Jews selectively employed. Like Jewish practices everywhere, they reflected a complex response to two influential traditions: the laws and practices of the non-Jewish majority among whom they lived, and the traditions of Jewish culture.17 By “Jewish culture” I mean the knowledge available to a given population of Jews that was perpetuated and transmitted through daily domestic activities, customs, speech and song; in literature and visual representation (manuscript and print); in daily prayer and specifically religious rituals; and in sermons, rabbinic texts, study and case law.18 The resulting way of life expressed varying and inconsistent degrees of adherence to each tradition, some synthesis of the two and creative adaptations to the possibilities that arose from the mixing of known traditions as people migrated, moved and married.19

Nuptiality: The Focus on Universal Marriage The most striking difference between Jewish marriage practice and the Christian marriage system among sixteenth-century Italians was the emphasis, among Jews, on universal marriage, an assumption of Jewish legal and

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Commune and Community literary culture. Indeed, the importance of marriage to the endogamous definition of the Jewish people, and to the construction of a more bounded regional identity, is underscored by the emphasis in both Jewish culture and practice on universal marriage. While it was an organizing principle of Jewish life, universal marriage was not an ideal in Christian families even if the marriage of all daughters was the preference of every family. Long before the eighteenth-century appearance of celibate, nonreligious single women, large numbers of women lived in religious houses, married to Christ, and other, unmarried women lived within the framework of charitable institutions.20 Sons were also married selectively, and among the elite a system of primogeniture took hold, wherein only one son and one daughter married. Marriage was thus an important family strategy for Christians, but their strategies included nonmarriage. As elite Christian families turned to a system of primogeniture in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century Italian states, the number of permanently unmarried sons and daughters increased, as well as the number of nuns. In contrast, Jews generally did not devolve wealth by primogeniture, and they continued to pursue the goal of universal marriage, at least for women. Without the convent as a socially and religiously sanctioned option for women who did not marry men, it was critical within Jewish society for Jewish men to marry while young. Allowing sons to remain unmarried into their twenties made for a more difficult marriage market for young Jewish women, since a postponed age at first marriage for Jewish men decreased the pool of marriageable men owing to the greater incidence of untimely death or conversion among men.21 One well-known strategy of both Jews and Christians who wanted to control the marital choices of the next generation was to issue ordinances, canonical or communal, against marriage without the consent of family.22 The tendency of Jews to devolve their wealth through daughters’ dowries more consistently than through sons’ inheritances meant that young Jewish men only had access to their parents’ generations’ wealth by marrying.23 Parents generally had more control over the choice of husband for their daughter than over the choice of wife for their son, but by arranging marriages for teenaged sons they were able to stack the decks in their favor. Jewish dotal and inheritance practices should therefore be seen as a strategic alliance that functioned to increase the rate at which Jewish men married, to curb the marital choice that was most disruptive to the survival of a particular Jewish lineage, to prevent out-marital apostasy and to preserve parental authority and class interests. It seems clear therefore that other differences between Jewish and Christian marriage patterns in Tuscany can be related to the fact that Jewish par-

Marriage in the Ghetto ents did not have the option of sending their daughters to live in convents. As Sperling’s research on convents has shown, convents—and forced monachization in them—played an essential and complex part in the endogamous self-perpetuation of the patrician class in Venice.24 Although the percentage of urban elite women who were nuns was not as high in Florence as in Venice, where it surpassed 50 percent, the convents were important to the system there too. Because male chastity prior to marriage was not a crucial social concern, the Christian marriage system in the Florentine state could tolerate delayed male marriage even though the ratio of marriageable men to marriageable women dropped as a result of concomitant male mortality: Christian women could enter convents.25 In contrast, all Jews were expected to marry. Adult celibacy was not an alternative ideal or institutionalized possibility—there was no Jewish equivalent of the monastery or convent—so Jewish parents did not have the option Christian parents had and used in increasing numbers in the sixteenth century of sending some of their daughters to live in convents and of restricting the marriage of sons.26 Jewish custom demanded that a man or his heirs find a husband for every daughter, and the expectation was that he would provide each daughter with a dowry in accordance with his means.27 For Jews, marriage was the main familial strategy, and universal marriage may be seen as a survival strategy or mechanism for a minority population whose numbers were regularly diminished by conversion, violence and voluntary or involuntary migration.

Universal Marriage: A Reality? We must next ask to what extent Jews lived lives that conformed to the Jewish cultural ideal of universal marriage. The quick answer is that not all Jews married; there were individuals who could not attract a spouse for one reason or another, or did not want to. The historical record undoubtedly fails to reveal unmarried Jews who were destitute, had turned to prostitution or concubinage, or had entered convents as proselytes or Christians.28 One methodological difficulty is that it is usually impossible to determine with complete certainty that an individual had never married (or would never marry), since most data provide a snap-shot, cross-sectional view from one year. To make matters more complicated, textual references to Jewish men do not ordinarily signify if they are married or widowed, as they do for women. The lessons of many techniques available to family demographers with larger populations and data sets are useful to us, but not the actual techniques.29 Instead, to arrive at my conclusions pertaining to a small number (hundreds)

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Commune and Community of Tuscan Jews, I have reconstructed the marital histories of the individuals by cross-referencing all the available information from several data sets. The list of Jews in Florence in 1567 is a worthwhile focus because it was an attempt to count every Jew in the city, parish by parish, including Jews who lived alone or in a Christian household. This list found ninety-seven Jews living in the city, including visitors.30 There was a striking imbalance of Jewish men and women in the city in 1567, which seems not to be a distortion produced by the process of counting and recording. Of the ninety-seven Jews, sixty were men and boys and thirty-seven were women and girls.31 Why were there fewer Jewish women and girls in the city? Some of the “missing” women seem to have been daughters who had been married to men outside of Florence, and some of the “extra men” were immigrants who had come to the city to find work. In addition to the fourteen married men and fourteen married women, there were twenty-seven nonmarried sons living with their parents, but only nineteen nonmarried daughters living with their parents. However, there were an additional nineteen adult Jewish men in the city who were living in Florence without a wife, but only four additional adult women: two widows with children and two other women listed as neither wife nor widow, both of whom had children. Of the nineteen nonmarried men, three were now living with their children. Seven were temporary foreign residents, or boarders, who may have had wives elsewhere. Nine of the men have no known marital history, including one sixty-year-old tutor, a twenty-five-year-old musician and two servants of undetermined age. If we use the criteria employed by Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, counting men never married by age forty-eight,32 there are a maximum of eight but no definitely “confirmed bachelors” among the Jewish men of Florence. If they were all over the age of forty-eight and none had never married (which seems unlikely), the “permanent bachelor” rate among Jewish men in Florence would be 13 percent, which superficially sounds like the 12.1 percent of Florentine men who were permanent bachelors in about 1427. That figure, however, excluded clergy, and our estimate of 13 percent is certainly far too high an estimate because there is no reason to think that most the eight bachelors are older men. Meanwhile, among the Florentine patriciate in the late sixteenth century, more men entered the clergy or remained single than married.33 In sum, a substantial number of Jewish men were living without wives in Florence, but a much larger proportion of Jewish men than Christian men in the city were marrying. We can broaden our picture of the marital rates of Jews by examining the pre-ghetto census of the Jews of Tuscany taken in 1570, three years later. There were eight female-headed households among 106 households in the

Marriage in the Ghetto towns where the members of households were listed. Five of these eight were headed by widows (one household was run by two widowed sisters). In each of the three others the head of household was a nonmarried woman who had a child.34 It must be noted that these mothers had made a choice to raise their children as Jews. When a marriage was not successfully arranged for a young woman, or ended with the wife widowed, divorced or abandoned, pregnancy could endanger her prospects for marriage. Her options included abandoning her children with a Christian foundling hospital in Florence or on the steps of a church; or she could convert and seek charitable refuge in one of the city’s Christian institutions; or she might disappear into the world of poor urban women surviving as prostitutes, servants and beggars. Instead, on the eve of ghettoization, the three had remained with their children as Jews in their villages, identifiable to the authorities who conducted the census as Jewish “families.”35 Some general trends may be pointed to. Nonmarried Jewish women were unusual in Tuscany, but women without children were almost unknown. The same census shows that only two in twenty-five households were headed by a man with children who had no living wife, while eight were headed by a woman.36 This and other indicators suggest that men remarried out of widowhood somewhat more often than women did. Childbirth-related female mortality meant that a limited number of men were able to marry a steadily replenished supply of women. If Jewish men of the lowest status found it difficult to marry or chose not to, men of middle and higher ranks often married more than once. One example of such a remarriage is that of Daniello Baroccas (or Baroch) levantino, a merchant living in Florence who in 1567 was about fifty-five years old, living with his thirty-year-old wife, Sole. Daniello’s household included four children, the eldest of whom was twentythree-year-old Abram, from a previous wife, and the youngest of whom was four years old, from the second marriage. Data pertaining to the similarly sized Jewish population of the city and territory of Cuneo in Piedmont suggest that this picture of Jewish nuptiality describes the marital system not just of Tuscan Jews but of the larger northern-Italian early modern Jewish culture to which they belonged, at least in its pre-ghetto context. A census in Cuneo from July 1721, before the institution of the ghetto there in 1723, found thirteen Jewish households with eightythree people.37 Among these were two unmarried men who were twenty-two years old, plus three men of unspecified age who were employed as agent, servant and teacher. All other men listed were married, one at sixteen and at least two more before the age of twenty.38 Besides two widows, there were only two unmarried women in this population whose ages were recorded as

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Commune and Community higher than sixteen: one maid-servant and one single woman who resided with her ill mother.39 Before ghettoization in Tuscany and Piedmont, then, marriage was the norm but not quite universal. There were also almost exactly even numbers of nonmarried or as-yet-unmarried men and women. Unmarried women seem to be the exception, possibly remaining unmarried in order to raise children born of a prior marriage or out of wedlock, or to care for a dependent relative.

Age Differential—Pre-Ghetto The norm, then, was that Jewish parents attempted to marry off all their children. Christians could not and did not, and often explained this cultural pattern as a response to the expense of dowries and the shortage of eligible husbands. The ability of Jewish parents to even aspire to marry off all their children must be associated with the fact that, in the Italian states prior to ghettoization, Jewish men were also encouraged by their cultural traditions to marry at an earlier age than was the norm for Christian men. Rabbinic literature consistently taught that young men should marry by age eighteen and that young women should marry soon after puberty, which was arbitrarily set at age twelve and a half. If this ideal was reflected perfectly on the ground, the pattern differed both from the northern European marriage pattern of late marriage for both partners and low nuptiality and from the (Christian) Tuscan marriage pattern of very late marriage for men and early marriage for women.40 But marriage for girls at thirteen to boys of eighteen was not universally practiced by Jews in the medieval and early modern diaspora, and it was not the only way a system that privileged universal marriage could operate in a Jewish context. For example, Jews living at the same time in the Ottoman empire achieved universal marriage by tolerating extremely early age at first marriage for girls, widely varying age differentials within marriages and polygyny.41 We must therefore attempt to determine the actual age at which men and women married in Tuscany. Age at first marriage cannot be determined from registers of marriages or of dowries because in the sixteenth century there was no state or Jewish agency or religious official to whom Jews routinely reported this critical event, either before ghettoization or in the ghetto. Jewish births and marriages were not recorded in any of the sources that have proven so useful to Florentine historians: there are of course no baptismal records; Jews did not participate in the state-sponsored dowry fund, the Monte delle Dote; and there are no known family account books or memoirs for this Jewish population.42 We will return, therefore, to our group of twelve married couples

Marriage in the Ghetto whose names and ages were recorded on the permits in 1580, and we will supplement those data with other available sources of information. A few dotal contracts with helpful information can be consulted, for example, since when a dowry was substantial enough to warrant notarization, Jews used public Florentine notaries.43 A Hebrew manuscript records the circumcisions performed by a rabbi in Tuscany, Yeh. iel Nissim da Pisa, who brought his skill to families in several Tuscan towns prior to ghettoization. His records have been useful in establishing and confirming the ages of some of the men whose names and ages appear in other sources, although on occasion they also conflict with ages given in other sources, a reminder of the pitfalls that await those who would trust their sources to provide “accurate” information.44 The first question we should ask of our travel-permit data is, of course, how accurate it is. In one instance where a man received two permits in one year, his age on the second permit was recorded as one year higher, appropriately reflecting the passage of a birthday. This is a good sign that the Jews were asked their ages, and that they were therefore recorded as these Jews knew or reported them. There was no reason for Jews to deliberately distort their ages, since permits were given to Jews without age distinction. But did Jews know their age and report it as they knew it? Giuseppe Alpelingo was recorded as thirty-two years old in the spring of 1580, but his circumcision was recorded as having occurred in August 1546. If this was done, as Jewish law requires, when he was a newborn infant, he should have already turned thirty-three years old. The age is close, but not exact, unless his circumcision had been delayed several months due to illness or the unavailability of the mohel. A slightly bigger discrepancy occurs in the ages of women, as we might expect: for example, one woman was recorded as both twenty-six and twenty-eight in the same year. This inconsistency suggests that whoever obtained the permit for her was guessing at her age. For our general purposes we can accept the data as rough but reasonable and study them in order to generalize about the ages at which Jews married before ghettoization and after, especially in order to learn how that corresponds to the low marital age differential we noted earlier in this chapter. We can arrive at a general idea of the age at which the twelve couples on the permits of 1580 had married because we know the ages of the couples and their (surviving) children, even if the ages of the parents may be rounded to the nearest five years in some instances. If we exclude from the group three couples who were so young in 1580 that they must have married in Florence after the ghettoization, we find that the average age differential in the remaining nine couples drops from 4.14 to 2.9. That is, for the group of couples whose marriages probably predate the ghetto, Jewish women married Jewish

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Commune and Community men who were on average only three years older, with the majority being four or five years older.45 Given the small size of the ghetto population, it seems worthwhile to give some names and details.46 In 1580 Ferrante Passiglio (50) and Regina (45) had children who were aged twenty-two and nineteen. Clearly married before the ghettoization, the couple’s age difference was about five years. Simone di Speranza (35) and his wife Anna (30) were raising a fifteen-year-old son in 1580, who was therefore born before the ghettoization; there was a five-year difference in their ages. Moyse Marraci (34) and Bona (30) were raising a twelve-year-old child; here husband was four years older than wife. Sabatuccio di Pellegrino (48) and Racchele di Salamone (40) had a grown daughter named Flaminia whose betrothal had been arranged in 1573. They had eight years between them. Lione di Moise Consiglio (32) and his wife Luna (36) had a twelve-year-old son in 1580. She was four years older than he: they might have been married before the ghetto, or one or both could have been widowed or divorced and remarried in the ghetto. Not all the couples who appear on our permits in 1580 had children, but for those who had already had children before 1571, the husband was on average 3.6 years older than his wife (or, excluding the marriage of Lione and Luna, which might have been a second marriage, 5.5 years). The data as a whole clearly suggest that in the generation of Tuscan Jews who married in the decade before ghettoization, it was common for women to marry men who were about four or five years older. The pre-ghetto differential is therefore remarkably smaller than that found among Christian Tuscans. Is it to be explained by any clear pattern in the age at which Jewish men and women married? And if so, was it a Tuscan Jewish marriage pattern, or an Italian Jewish system? It may be useful here to review what is already known about the age of marriage among Jews of two neighboring states: the cities and villages of nearby Umbria in the period 1450–1569, before their expulsion in 1569 when it became a papal territory, and the ghetto of Rome after the ghettoization in 1555. Ariel Toaff has found that in Umbria the average age at which Jewish men married was twenty-four or twenty-five, while Jewish women married on average at twenty or twenty-one. Behind these numbers is a class-based difference, as Toaff points out, an inverse relationship between marital age and social status. Wealthier Jews tended to marry earlier: the men of the elite by age twenty-two and the women before age twenty, while men who had to work to establish themselves financially married at twenty-six or twentyseven, and women at twenty-two or twenty-three years of age.47 Here we see that that age differential of pre-ghetto Tuscan Jews is similar to that of Umbrian Jews. Lower-status Umbrian Jewish men were marrying at about

Marriage in the Ghetto the same age as the majority of Tuscan Christian men, while women may have married some years later, suggesting the longer period of time it took their families to accumulate their dowries. On the other hand, elite status had the opposite effect on Jews and Christians in the sixteenth century: among Jewish men the elite married earliest, while among Christian men the elite married latest if at all.48 Jewish men in Rome during the ghetto period (1555–1700) were older when they married (at age twenty-four to twenty-eight) than were Umbrian Jews.49 They married Jewish women who were even younger, generally between ages thirteen and eighteen.50 The age differential between Jewish brides and grooms was therefore much higher in the Roman ghetto than in the cities and villages of sixteenth-century Umbria and Tuscany before ghettoization, and more similar to that of Christians in the Florentine capital. The data we have already discussed for the Jews of the city and territory of Cuneo in Piedmont reveal that men there married on average by age twenty, and women in their teens, perhaps with a cultural goal of marriage at age sixteen. Jews employed as servants married later or at lower rates. In sum, Jews in Cuneo married somewhat earlier than Jews in Umbria, but the relatively early marriage of both women and men and the small age differential suggest that the pre-ghetto Jews of Umbria, Tuscany and Piedmont even a century and a half later were participating in a particular marriage system. This pattern differs markedly from the pattern of later marriage for men and of a greater age differential of men and women that is found among both Christians in Florence and among Jews in the ghetto of Rome. How should we account for the differences between the Jews of Tuscany, Umbria and Cuneo, on the one hand, with their earlier marriage and smaller age differential, and the Jews of the ghetto of Rome, on the other, with their later age at marriage for men and larger age differential? The statistical study of the catasto of 1427 has shown that the urban environment in fifteenth-century Florence was “hostile to the formation of new families.”51 Perhaps the differences can be explained by the relative urbanization of these Jewish populations: the Jews of Tuscany and Umbria and Piedmont came from cities and towns that were all smaller than Rome, and all unrestricted by ghettos, while the Jews of Rome were urban and ghettoized.52 If urbanization is the key, we would expect to see the marriage patterns of the Tuscan Jews to shift toward those of Roman Jews once they were ghettoized in Florence, but such a shift might occur over a period of decades. Since it has been established that among Christians in Tuscany it was the marrying age of men and not of women that varied with degree of urbanization, our next inquiry must be into the actual age of marriage among the Jews.

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Age at Marriage in Tuscany, Pre-Ghetto The different age-differentials in Jewish and Christian marriages in Tuscany are explained more by the age at which men married than by the age at which women married. While Christians moralists regarded girls as ready to marry at thirteen and late to marry at twenty-one, strong social and cultural norms led families to have their daughters married at age sixteen, or, as Molho has shown, to represent their daughters as no more than sixteen years old until they were able to successfully arrange their marriage.53 Very different norms operated for men, who were expected to have established themselves financially before marrying, which might mean awaiting completion of an apprenticeship in a guild or emancipation by a father or his death. For Christians in Tuscany, bachelorhood in the third and fourth decade of life was socially accepted. Certainly, there were the reproaches of preachers against the homosexual activity that was said to be the inevitable partner of the postponement of heterosexual union.54 Nonetheless, in fifteenth-century Florence it was in the elite families most concerned about lineage that men were slowest to marry; “estimated age at first marriage ranges from 27.7 years among the destitute to 31.2 years among the wealthiest.”55 Using the genealogies of twenty-one elite Florentine families from 1500 to 1799, R. B. Litchfield determined that for men born between 1500 and 1600 who produced children, of those children, on average one son and one daughter married.56 For this minority of patrician Florentine men who married, the median age at first marriage was very high: thirty-three in the second half of the sixteenth century. For Christian women of all status groups the median age for first marriage was eighteen to nineteen in the late fifteenth and the sixteenth century.57 The difference between Jews and Christians is thus explained mainly by the fact that Jewish men married earlier than Christian men. The 1567 list of Jews in Florence in combination with the data on the permits of 1580 make it possible to estimate the age at first marriage of a number of men, comparing men who married before and after ghettoization.58 We look first at Jewish men who had children and married before the ghetto. The 1567 census gives age data that are too generalized: the six fathers whose ages might be compared with those of their eldest children are all rounded to the half decade— they are all forty, forty-five, or fifty-five years old.59 Even so, these fathers were on average already married by the age of twenty-eight, a calculation that overestimates their age because it assumes they had their first child the very year they married, and that that first child survived, and that that first child was still unmarried and living at home at the time of the 1567 census. In other

Marriage in the Ghetto words, the average age at marriage for these Jewish men in Florence was clearly younger than twenty-eight. Better information comes from the 1580 permits, on which ages are recorded more accurately. Raffaello di Cipriano was thirty in 1580 and had with him a nine-year-old son, suggesting he had married by age twenty-one.60 Other sources show that he was already married with two children in 1570, so he must actually have married for the first time in his late teens; his second wife was older than he.61 That Simone di Speranza had a fifteen-year-old son when he was thirty-five suggests he too was married by twenty at the latest.62 Moyse Maracci’s eldest surviving child when he was thirty-four years old in 1580 was his daughter Colomba, aged twelve, suggesting that he was married at least by age twenty-one or twentytwo.63 In 1580 Lione di Moise Usiglio (alt. Consiglio) was thirty-two years old and had a twelve-year-old son named Abramo and possibly a fifteen-yearold named Salamone, so he was married by age twenty and perhaps at seventeen.64 (If Salamone was not Usiglio’s son, he belonged to another Lione who traveled on the same permit, Lione di Raffaello who was also listed as thirty-two years old and would have had him at seventeen.) In sum, the men in our set of men who married before ghettoization did so when they were between seventeen and twenty-one years of age.65 These are Jews of the middle-merchant class—not the privileged elite who were able, for example, to obtain exemptions from the segno in 1567. Given a marital age differential of four or five years determined above, we should conclude that in the preghetto period Jewish women in Tuscany generally married in their mid- to late teens (fourteen to eighteen) to men who were on average four or five years older (seventeen to twenty-one).66 To conclude our analysis of the pre-ghetto period, Jewish men in Tuscany married much younger than Christian men, for whom the most common age at first marriage was twenty-six to thirty, and among whom urban men married at later ages than rural men, and the wealthiest latest of all (if at all).67 This earlier marriage pattern was held despite the fact that Jews were occupationally “urbanized” even before ghettoization, insofar as they were involved mainly in crafts, commerce and the medical profession rather than in agriculture. In the decades before ghettoization, social and economic opportunity encouraged the creation of new families and households among the Jews of Tuscany and in nearby territories.68 The consistency of the small age-differential among the Tuscan Jews indicates a stable social culture in which marriages were carefully arranged in advance to meet goals distinct from those of the majority culture. A similar pattern was seen in Piedmont and in Umbria. The great difference seen here reflects a very different culture surrounding

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Commune and Community marriage, the Jewish cultural norm of early and universal marriage. Most Jews in Tuscany, as in other parts of Italy, did not live strictly according to all detailed dictates of Jewish law, which they may or may not have known, as has been demonstrated in several studies in the practice of inheritance.69 Instead, the actual age at which Jews married reflects the tension between the Jewish cultural ideal, social norms among Christians and additional socioeconomic realities that Jews confronted. But the Jews in Tuscany, along with other Jews in central-northern Italian states, did have a distinctively Jewish pattern. Marriages were arranged at ages that departed from the surrounding norms to come closer to the ideal presented in the rabbinic tradition that a man should marry at about age eighteen. This earlier age at marriage ensured that a greater percentage of young Jewish men married young women chosen by their families, and the pattern was enabled by economic and residential patterns that supported the young married couples. Traditional sources encouraged girls to be married soon after age twelve, but most Jewish families waited until their daughters were several years older, gathering dowries and still conforming comfortably to the powerful expectations for female chastity of the surrounding culture that girls should marry at about age sixteen.70

A Pattern Disrupted People in the late 1500s were rarely sure of anything, as their testaments remind us, but death. A good marriage match was a goal, but never a certainty. Jews who were married in the first decade after their forced expulsion and ghettoization seem to have attempted to keep as close to the known marriage system as possible, as we would expect. The changes we can observe are those generally seen in the context of urbanization, and they seem to represent an accommodation to conditions in the large city. However, the changes are so immediate that they cannot reflect a cultural assimilation to urban norms, but rather a situational flexibility and response to the largely economic disruption caused directly or indirectly by the state’s moves against the Jews in 1570 and 1571.

Nuptiality in the Ghetto Ghettoization brought together, however involuntarily, over four hundred Jews. We might have expected to see a rush of marriages, especially by men and women who had previously lacked the resources and connections

Marriage in the Ghetto to find and arrange a marriage. This did not occur. We recall that there were twelve Jewish tailors who lodged together “living in their rooms Jewishly [hebraichamente]” in a workers’ dormitory in Florence in 1570.71 These men were almost all identified as recent immigrants to Florence who had matriculated into the Linen Guild from 1561 to 1570. Not one ever appears in the sources at any time between 1570 and 1600 as a householder or as a father of sons or daughters who followed him into the guild.72 They do not appear among the married men on permits in 1580 or as renters of apartments in 1575 or 1588; never established as householders, none of these twelve men ever joined the ranks of the ghetto governors. They are part of that under-documented, unstable population who often appear in the sources with only a first name. Given the availability of single men, a testamentary provision in 1574 of dowries to ten poor as-yet-unmarried girls in the ghetto suggests that financial and other social considerations inhibited marriage more than the numerical availability of partners.73 At least one generation was directly affected by the disruption of ghettoization in that in its wake a larger proportion of men and women did not marry or married at later ages. In contrast to the very low rate of nonmarriage among Jewish women in the census data from 1567 and 1570, we find that of the twenty-six Jewish women and girls given travel permits in 1580 there were (in addition to widows) five single women aged twenty-two to thirty-four who were not identified as wives and whose names do not mark them as widows.74 Could they nonetheless have been married at the time, or have had previous marriages? The Italian language was limited in its ability to express clearly the complicated marital history of some Jewish women. Jewish women were referred to regularly in administrative documents not only as “wife” (“moglie,” “consorte” or “sposa”) but also as a man’s widow or “past-wife” (“vedova,” “moglie già”). Because these two latter terms were used interchangeably, it is impossible to determine linguistically whether a past-wife was a widow, a divorcee or an abandoned wife whose husband had fled or converted to Christianity.75 But when a woman’s name makes no specific reference to a husband, it is reasonable to assume that she is not married. The youngest of the five women on our permits, Miriamma, the twenty-twoyear-old daughter of Regina and Ferrante Passiglio, was almost certainly unmarried when the clerk noted euphemistically on her travel permit that she was “tall in stature, and big, that is, full of life”—big with child.76 Had some of these five single women experienced engagements or betrothals that fell apart a decade earlier? Were dowries lost? Did bridegrooms flee, waste away in jail or convert? These women’s unknown histories remind us that there are still many unknown aspects of the ghettoiza-

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Commune and Community tion’s impact on the Jewish men and women of Tuscany. We know that the ghettoization disrupted for at least one generation the social patterns that had prevailed among Jews in pre-ghetto Tuscany. Families forced to move into the ghetto lost the houses in which they might have expected to control their adult sons and control and protect their daughters until marriages were arranged and safely executed. At the very same time the expulsion and the destabilization led to serious financial losses. The loss of their houses and the uncertainty of their future economic and living conditions in the ghetto also pushed Jews to accept less traditional age combinations while parents tried to arrange marriages for their daughters earlier than they might have otherwise, and men tended to wait somewhat longer before they married.

Economic Status and Age at Marriage in the Ghetto As we have seen, one major difference between Jewish and Christian marriage patterns was that among Christians the elite married latest, whereas in Umbria, Rome and Tuscany before ghettoization the Jewish elite married earliest, whether because they were deeply influenced by rabbinic tradition or because of different expectations for the creation and devolution of wealth. In the ghetto, elite Jewish men continued to marry at earlier ages than the majority of Jewish men. Representing the elite for us is the Blanis family, whose members appeared so often in our chapters on the government and the economy. Because the men in his family married so young, Laudadio Blanis, the elderly doctor from Perugia, was alive for the birth of at least one great-grandson: Agnolo son of Laudadio son of Magistro Agnolo di Magistro Laudadio Blanis, born in the ghetto of Florence. The child had been born by 1574, when his aunt Ginevra made him a beneficiary in her will, and he seems to have been her first-born nephew.77 His father was recorded as only twenty-eight years old on a permit in 1580, from which we learn that he was eighteen or nineteen at the time of the ghettoization. The Perugian doctor’s grandson was therefore married at some point before he turned twentyone or twenty-two. If there was some slight postponement of the age at which this young Jewish man of an elite family in the ghetto married, it was not more than a couple of years. Jews continued to invert the Christian pattern. Middling-class men who were enrolled in the Silk and Linen Guilds seem to have married in their mid-twenties in the early years of the ghetto, rather than in their very early twenties or late teens as they had done before. This was a delay, but still earlier than Christian men in the city of Florence. For example, Moise d’Abram Toro could not have married earlier than twenty-

Marriage in the Ghetto six, since in 1580 when he was twenty-six years his wife Allegra was only thirteen, the youngest age at which we have seen a married Jewish girl in Tuscany. Gabriello, son of Giuseppe and Speranza, was probably not married much before 1580 when he was twenty-five, since at that time his wife Gemma was only sixteen years old (see Figure 8).78 Daniel Calò, whose father was one of the best established merchants in the ghetto, married in 1574 between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-six.79 These are men of the respected, higher-ranking merchant class of the ghetto; for them marriage at twenty-five to twenty-six seems as common as twenty or twenty-one was a decade earlier. The slight postponement of marriage was undoubtedly caused at first by the economic difficulty Jews had in establishing themselves, but it may also have reflected the imbalance of Jewish men and women in the city. Travel permits were issued in 1580 to over a dozen men in their late twenties and early thirties who show no signs of having yet married. (These may be most of our twelve tailors, mentioned above.) Poorer Jews had always married later than the wealthy, and the ghetto had a higher proportion of poor Jews. For most Jewish men of the lower social stratum, the move to the capital city did deter and defer marriage. However, the relatively stronger economic resources of the Jewish elite and their more deeply ingrained Jewish cultural values allowed and led them to continue to marry earlier, in striking contrast to Christian elite men affected by urbanization. Universal and early marriage was privileged over the consolidation of wealth or the channeling of assets to one representative of the lineage. A postponement in the age at which men married is consistent with our knowledge of differences in the marital patterns of urban and rural populations in general and in Tuscany in particular. Economic, spatial and cultural factors, however, explain the particular circumstances. First of all, Jews lost capital in 1570 and 1571, along with real estate, businesses, clients and positions. As Jews in the ghetto sought to enter the guild system in Florence, they were apprenticed to guild masters, a long process that most men must have had to complete before they were ready for marriage. Dowries, after all, were capital that enabled artisans and starting merchants to achieve independence, not inexhaustible sources of income with which to support a family. Spatially, the ghetto must also have affected household formation. In Tuscany, Jewish householders frequently made room for their married offspring and even grandchildren within one house; the joint household of married brothers was also not uncommon.80 The more limited rental housing in the ghetto may have discouraged the formation of new familial units within the now more crowded urban parental household. Finally, the young men of the

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Commune and Community ghetto were not unaware of or uninvolved in the pleasures and diversions that occupied the attentions of Florentine youth and young men. As we have seen, they were found eating and drinking in the hostels; they played at games and dice; and they undoubtedly found sexual pleasure with women and probably with young men in the city, like other Florentines and like Jews in Umbria.81 In addition, a great many of these young men were traveling regularly out of the ghetto. It is possible that their dependence on traveling was felt to be incompatible with the responsibility of marriage. At the same time that men were delaying the age at which they married, the evidence suggests that some daughters were married at younger ages than had been customary. Two young girls mentioned above, Allegra and Gemma, were married when they were no more than thirteen and sixteen to men who were twelve and nine years older, respectively.82 These marriages might be interpreted in a number of ways. One likely possibility is that in the ghetto, where the Jews did not have free-standing houses but lived in interconnected apartments and rented rooms in refurbished palazzi, young people could not easily be kept segregated. Families may have felt that they had less control over the chastity and reputation of their daughters than when their daughters were easily supervised in the domestic households of the smaller towns of Tuscany. The earlier girls were married, the “safer” the family’s honor and the more likely it was that a marriage could be contracted and effected in the first place. We might expect that as the average age differential increased, women whose opportunity for an early marriage had been foiled would have found it harder to marry. Marriages in which older women married younger men, such as the marriages of Luna to Lione di Moise Usiglio and of Dolce di Raffaello to Raffaello di Cipriano (see notes 10 and 60 above), however, reveal a degree of flexibility in Jewish society which in turn reflects the premium placed on the married state. The Jewish hierarchy of values permitted age inversion, the remarriage of widowers and the reentry of single women (never married or widowed) into the marriage market after they had gained financial independence through the retrieval of dowry after divorce or widowhood, or through inheritance and investment.

Age Differential in Marriage in the Ghetto The change in the age patterns suggests that achieving social stability required a new flexibility, a tolerance of deviation from the previous cultural norms. The most lasting change was the extension of the age range during which Jewish women and men arranged their first marriages, and the overall

Marriage in the Ghetto increase in the age difference between marriage partners. On the other hand, girls who were of the ideal age to marry in the years that coincided with ghettoization were very likely to have found their marriage plans disrupted. These young women seem to have been able to marry only later in their twenties, or even in their thirties, as reflected by the rise in the number of single adult women and the more variable age differential. A woman was now more likely than before ghettoization to find herself in a marriage to a man who was younger than she or ten years her elder. A large age differential in marriage can both reflect and reinforce a culture in which marriage is less companionate, spheres of activity are more homosocial and women are seen by men as less responsible and competent than men. When girls are married to older men, that is, patriarchal assumptions are reinforced and adult, experienced men are more likely to feel justified in dominating (or “instructing”) the young women over whom they have been given authority.83 The changes we have seen hinted at in the ghetto—the earlier age of women’s first marriage and the greater age differential—contributed in some ways to the erosion of Jewish women’s status in the ghetto period, and it may also have contributed to some longer-term changes in the ghetto such as the development of gender-segregated social and religious spaces and institutions that will be discussed in the final chapter. Catalyzed by ghettoization, changes in age at marriage, age differential and rates of nuptiality reflect both the disruption caused by that crisis and the social and economic realities of urban life. Important differences remained, but these changes brought the Jewish community’s marriage system and, I think, gender relations, somewhat closer to those of contemporary Christians.84

Dowry, Status and the Marriage System For Jews as for Christians, the dowry that would be provided for the bride was an essential component of marriage, critical to the negotiation that preceded it, to the new couple’s financial independence and to the bride’s future. The dowry functioned as life-insurance for the widow, for though she did not inherit her husband, she was entitled to retrieve the full value of her dowry from his estate. Of course, as it was seen by the bride’s family, the dowry was initially supposed to attract a son-in-law with useful mercantile, financial or scholarly connections and other signs of status. In Jewish law, the dowry was also explicitly designed to protect the woman from divorce, or in the event of divorce, which was permitted by Jewish law. Under most circumstances, the husband was obligated to return the dowry to his wife if he

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Commune and Community wished to divorce her. Finally, the dowry devolved wealth, potentially protecting the husband’s estate from creditors and taxes.85 But Jews also symbolically expressed and measured their own status through dowry size, as did Christians. It was a primary measure and reflection of the status of the families of the bride and of the groom and of the place the new couple was expected to take in the social hierarchy. As Molho put it, the dowry had semiotic meaning: “here was a tangible and public sign of a family’s status, of its expectations to occupy, or to continue occupying, a space shared by a number of other families of comparable rank.”86 Status was never static; it was not an object to be possessed, but rather it required continuous negotiation. But in the 1550s to 1580s, because of their recent immigration to Tuscany on the one hand and ghettoization on the other, the status of individual Jews and of the Jews as a whole was unusually fluid. Jewish families in Tuscany needed to define their status relative to other Jews in the Italian states, relative to one another and, finally, relative to Christians in the city and state. The Florentine state did not attempt to restrict or determine the size of dowries that Jews could give; the size of the dowries they exchanged was not regarded as problematic. Through dowry, therefore, Jews freely expressed their status with regard to both Christians and other Jews. The economy of marriage and, specifically, the size of dowries exchanged among the Jews can only be cautiously reconstructed. Unfortunately, Hebrew marriage contracts, ketubbot, have not been preserved for Florentine Jews of this period.87 There is no source parallel to the records of the Florentine Monte delle Doti. However, because dowry was an exchange of wealth subject to a tax on contracts, state law required that each dowry be recorded by a public notary, who was also responsible for recording that the appropriate contract tax had been paid. Beginning in 1566, Cosimo I ordered that all notaries annually submit to the archive copies of the acts they had notarized.88 Consequently, information about dowries is found in two types of notarial documents which were part of the marriage process for both Jews and Christians. The sponsalitus was a record of the betrothal agreement in which the father or other representative of a woman promised to give a clearly stated dowry to the future husband, who promised in turn to marry the woman within a set period of time. The second document, referred to most frequently as the confessio dotis, was a legal confession of receipt that was signed whenever the dowry, or some part of it, was transferred to the new husband or his representatives.89 In other cases, the size of the dowry is revealed in notarial protocols when it is

Marriage in the Ghetto referred to in the resolution of the claims of heirs and creditors on an estate, as when a widow sought the restoration of her dowry. The Jews of Florence used many notaries, but because specific families made only erratic use of them, and because Jews of the lowest classes did not have their marriages notarized at all, it is not possible to undertake a systematic study of dowries. Nevertheless sufficient data exist to justify cautious generalizations.

Dowry Size in Context: Christians and Other Italian Jews The dowries of Christian Florentines in the sixteenth century ranged from 18 to 20 scudi for a poor girl to several thousand scudi.90 The average dowry among the leading families climbed dramatically in the fifteenth century to 1,852 florins by the early sixteenth century, and there is no sign that it dropped in the following decades.91 Florentine statutes concerning the payment of the tax, or gabella, on dowries and other monetary contracts used 100 scudi as the base dowry for calculations of the tax, while the tax rate was detailed for dowries and counter-dowries that reached as high as 2,000 florins.92 Even Florentines who were less prominent artisans and workers had dowries in the range of 200–300 scudi, or florins. In his study of the Monte delle Doti, the municipal fund in which citizens set up investment accounts for the future dowries of their young daughters, Molho found that the average dowry for all girls was 433.6 florins, and for whose fathers had no surname, 241.7 florins.93 In the decades both before and after ghettoization, even the wealthiest Jews in Florence were humbly equipped in comparison with the Christian elite. The range in dowry size was much smaller among Jews than among Christians in Florence, reflecting the more homogeneous character of the Jewish population and its more subtle stratification. This economic homogeneity was even more complete after ghettoization, when the small elite of Jewish moneylenders left Tuscany. As we shall see, however, the great majority had dowries that marked them as having the economic status that was normal for Christians in the same occupations and professions.

Dowries Before the Ghetto In the pre-ghetto period, the largest dowries in Tuscany were those of the great banking families, the da Pisa and the da Rieti.94 Many marriages were forged between these families and the “super-elite” in neighboring Umbria,

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Commune and Community where a Jewish community flourished before the expulsion from the papal territories in 1569.95 In Perugia and Foligno, bankers of the da Pisa, da Camerino and da Perugia families exchanged dowries that were “as high as [those of] the local nobility.”96 From a sample of 111 marital contracts identified in the archives of Umbrian towns from the period 1450–1550, Toaff found that Jewish dowries were not evenly distributed by size but rather fell into three groups, which describe “classes” in Jewish society.97 The super-elite, accounting for less than 3 percent of the marriages, had dowries of over 1,000 florins. A larger subgroup of dowries in the families of doctors and bankers, 17 percent, were set at between 300 and 650 florins. Eighty percent of the Umbrian sample comprised dowries of 50 to 300 florins (more than half of which ranged from 100 to 150 florins).98 The comparison with Umbria is appropriate not only because Jews of the central Italian states married across political boundaries in order to stay within class boundaries but also because many Jews from Perugia moved into Tuscany in the 1560s. One of these families was that of Laudadio di Moise de Blanis, a prominent medical doctor in Perugia.99 One of the largest Jewish dowries of the mid-sixteenth century in the region was received by Agnolo, a son of Laudadio Blanis who had gone to the University of Perugia to become a doctor of medicine. Considered a most desirable son-in-law, Agnolo was promised and given a 600 scudi dowry from Bellotia of the Montolmo family in Perugia when he married her in 1558.100 Similarly, Laudadio’s son Salvatore, also a physician, received at least 500 scudi in two payments in 1551 and 1553 as the dowry of his wife.101 Measured by dowry, the status of sons and daughters in one family could be somewhat unequal (even without taking into account the additional wealth that would devolve to sons in inheritance). With his high rank and earning potential, the just-mentioned physician Agnolo was able to attract as his wife a woman with a dowry three times larger than that which his sister Dolce seems to have been granted for her marriage to Abram di Agnolo da San Miniato in Empoli in 1552.102 Other female members of the Blanis family were granted dowries of an intermediate size: in his testament drawn up in May of 1575, the doctor Laudadio Blanis canceled a debt of 200 florins he had earlier loaned to his son Salvatore for the dowry of Salvatore’s daughter Laura, and he granted 400 scudi for the dowry of another granddaughter.103 Women’s marrying status was determined by their family’s name and the dowry it could provide (or lack thereof), but men’s status was more variable because it could be heightened by attributes such as scholarly and financial success.

Marriage in the Ghetto Just below the level of bankers and doctors in pre-ghetto Tuscany were those who worked as agents for the owners of the banks and merchant-entrepreneur families. When Patientia, daughter of Michele da Empoli in Pontedera, was married to Abram di Emanuel di Davit Sforno (from Bologna) in Pescia, her brother Zaccaria declared that he had delivered a dowry of 200 scudi to the groom, who, having counted it out in silver, added a 15 percent gift, “according to the custom of the Jews.”104 This match united two families in Tuscany; Zaccaria di Michele and his new brother-in-law used the same notary to register and form an equal partnership in the production and sale of garments.105 Diversification was the name of the game for the bankers, who were never sure of the renewal of their charter. Meanwhile, the bride’s merchant family from Pontedera and Empoli must have thought the match very good, since both the groom’s father and his uncle Mattasia di Davit Sforno were agents and ministers for the wealthy da Pisa family, one in Pescia and one in Empoli. For Tuscan Jews who were not involved in banking, dowries seem to have ranged from 50 to 200 scudi. We learn, for example, of Sarra, daughter of Agnolo di San Miniato and Ricca living in Empoli, who was married in May 1570 with a dowry of 100 scudi in gold. Sarra’s dowry was exactly the size her mother Ricca had brought when she moved from Empoli to Pisa to join Agnolo.106 Another marriage in Empoli was that of Daniel di Moise Alpelingo, one of four sons in the wool-manufacturing family. The woman Daniel married in 1567 or 1568 was Consola, most likely his first cousin, the daughter of his uncle Manuello who had moved to Pontedera. Consola’s dowry was under 100 scudi.107 In Prato, also in 1570 but before any awareness of the impending ghettoization, Perla, daughter of Salamone Ioab de Castrocaro, was married to Dacterus, or Dattero, son of Prospero di Agnolo of Candia. Her dowry was set at 130 scudi plus a gift of 50 lire from the bridegroom, “according to the custom of Prato.”108 These examples suggest that the majority of Tuscan dowries were probably sized very much as they were in Umbria, and also as they were in Rome, where the average value has been calculated as ranging from 76 to 100 florins in the early sixteenth century and as 150 scudi by the 1580s.109 The marriages of the poor and laboring people in Tuscany are still something of a mystery. There were Jews and Christians who needed help obtaining a dowry: the statutes of every guild attest to that fact when they devise rules for the selection of poor girls to receive dowries from funds collected from the guild membership. But what did poor folk do if a dowry was not obtainable? Did they marry without a dowry, or did they always have one, or at least declare one, however small? In Tuscany I have not seen a Jewish mar-

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Commune and Community riage contracted and notarized with a dowry of less than 36 scudi. We do not know whether all Jews married with a ketubbah, the written marriage contract required by Jewish law. The knowledge we do have regarding the size of Jewish dowries necessarily pertains to Jews who came before a notary to write or copy their marriage contract. Many of the marriages from the 1550s and 1560s that we have identified in the archives were arranged between families of Tuscan towns—Empoli, Pontedera, Prato and Siena—but others united partners from other regions. The names of all parties reflect the great mobility of these north-central Italian Jews. Marriage united Jews from disparate parts and gave them a broad communal identity that had little to do with political or local boundaries. Within that broad regional community it was through dowry that status was negotiated. Jews of one town or region could not differ too dramatically from those given in another town or region, or families of like status would not be able to marry. A general consistency of the range of dowries, then, seems to be a characteristic of Jewish life in central and northern Italy, and conformity to dowry levels was part of what made these Jews a regional community. This confirms the argument made in earlier chapters that before ghettoization it would be misleading to speak of a “Florentine Jewish community” or of “Tuscan Jewry” in cultural, religious or social terms. Until their ghettoization boundaries were drawn around these Jews, cutting them off from Jews elsewhere, only insofar as they were treated that way for political purposes by the Medici regime.

Familial Strategies Before the Ghetto The difficulty of providing competitive dowries was intensified by the parental obligation to arrange marriages for all daughters. The Jews of Tuscany used several strategies to maximize the dowries of their daughters or their ability to arrange appropriate marriages even without high dowries. One such strategy, common throughout the Jewish diaspora was the intrafamilial union, seen above in the marriage of Daniel di Moise da Empoli to his first cousin Consola. This was even more common in the most elite families. It is possible that another response to the difficulty of providing competitive dowries for many daughters was an effort, especially in what we are calling middle-class families, to limit the number of daughters who had to be married off by limiting the number of daughters born.110 The average household size of Jews counted in the census of Tuscany in 1570 was 4.66 or 5.07,

Marriage in the Ghetto smaller than that of the general population in the Florentine contado (6.14) and in the city of Florence (5.66) in the year 1552.111 In four towns where the data are complete for twenty-one bigenerational families, the average number of surviving children living with a parent or parents was 2.8.112 This number must be somewhat smaller than the true average number of births per child-raising couple, considering infant mortality and the fact that mature daughters and sons may have married and moved out of the home while younger children remained. Mortality certainly took its share: the four adult sons of Moise Alpelingo (Mosheh Alpelink.) of Empoli who lived in the ghetto of Florence in 1580 had at least two younger brothers who had died in infancy or early childhood.113 If these small families are not a simple result of high infant and childhood mortality, it is possible that some form of family limitation was being practiced. There is no evidence to suggest any gender-specific pattern of infanticide, abandonment or use of wetnurses which might have lead to higher infant mortality for girls, though these trends have been clearly identified among the Christian population.114 However, the available data do suggest a possible pattern of limiting family size. In several of the more important middle-status Jewish families in Tuscany only one son was born or survived to adulthood as a Jew.115 Thus, for example, when Isaac Calò died in 1574, his heirs were his only two children, both married, Daniel and Dolce.116 In 1580, forty-five-year-old Regina and her husband Ferrante (known also as Barzilai, Lione, Yehudah) Passiglio had two children in the ghetto, Miriamma, aged twenty-two, and Moise, aged nineteen.117 According to census material from 1570 and the many documents pertaining to his estate, Agnolo di Laudadio of Empoli and his wife Ricca had one son, Abramo, and a daughter, Sarra.118 In contrast, Agnolo’s brother and sister-in-law had no sons, but, perhaps trying for a son, brought forth five daughters in Empoli whose numbers, as we shall see, seriously reduced the size of their dowries.119 Were Jews of the middle class making an effort to restrict the size of their families, particularly after the first son had been born, or perhaps after the birth of one child of each sex?120 Such a pattern could result from the effort to meet the requirement of rabbinic law that men procreate, for this was understood to mean that a man should have a minimum of two children, both still alive at the time of his own death; some traditions specified that the children should be one male and one female. The composition of these important, established nonbanking households cited above and others should alert us to the possibility that some Italian Jewish couples, like Catholics of their age, knew and used a method or methods of family-size limitation after satisfying themselves that at least two of their children would

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Commune and Community survive to adulthood, which would fulfill their religious obligation.121 In contrast, the wealthiest Tuscan Jewish families (Da Rieti, Alpelinghi, Blanis) had as many as four adult sons each, in addition to daughters, suggesting they were willing to dower many daughters, though possibly with dowries smaller than the dowries they expected their sons to bring in.122 When there were more than one or two daughters to dower, parents often had to use more than their own resources to provide the dowry. In Florence, Christians turned in large numbers to the Monte delle Doti, created as a state-financed loan-bank for dowries. There, a small deposit made when a girl was a young child could grow into a sizable portion for her marriage or entrance to a convent in her late teens. The dowry was lost if the young woman died before that maturity.123 This unusual institution was not imitated by the Jewish households of Tuscany, although 10–15 percent of them were involved in banking. Instead, whether by loan, gift or bequest, wealthier relatives served as the most important resource in the quest to dower daughters.124 Indeed, the boundaries between loans, gifts and bequests were often blurred, perhaps deliberately. Drawn up in May of 1575, the testament of the doctor and one-time Perugian banker Laudadio Blanis reveals that he had lent 200 florins to his son Salvatore for the dowry of Salvatore’s daughter Laura.125 In his will, Laudadio Blanis left Salvatore no inheritance (which was given to Salvatore’s eldest brother Iacob) but he canceled this 200 florin debt, making it in effect a gift. It should be noted that canceling this “loan” seems to have allowed Laudadio to devolve some tax-sheltered wealth to his younger son. By this I do not mean to suggest that Laudadio had not really loaned his son money for Laura’s dowry. There was no reference to accrued interest on the loan, which suggests it might have been an interest-free loan. But though Jewish law formally prohibited Jews taking interest from other Jews, many Jews simply ignored the prohibition. This may be seen in the case of another Jewish family just before its expulsion from Empoli wherein one brother provided a loan to another for the marriage of his niece. The detailed story of this family, pieced together from the records of notaries and criminal courts, reveals much about the centrality of the dowry in the economy of Jewish life in this period.

A Family Saga in Empoli: Five Daughters and a Niece Agnolo and Laudadio, brothers and sons of Zaccheria, were living in one house in Empoli in July 1570.126 The head of the household was Agnolo, who owned the house and lived there with his wife Ricca (daughter of Uriel, from

Marriage in the Ghetto Pisa) and an unmarried son, Abram, who was almost twenty-four if we are to trust the record of his circumcision.127 Agnolo’s brother Laudadio was also married, and this brother, his wife and his five unmarried daughters all lived in the house. Agnolo and Ricca also had a daughter, Sarra, who had just been married in May 1570 to Zaccheria di Raffaello Finzi of Reggio. Her dowry was 100 scudi in gold.128 In July 1570 Sarra was no longer living in her father’s house: she and her new husband together with his brother and sister-in-law were living in the Tuscan town of San Giovanni as yet another co-fraternal household at the time of the census.129 In order to secure the marriage of Sarra to Zaccheria Finzi, who belonged to an Italian Jewish family of ancient lineage,130 Sarra’s father Agnolo had taken a loan of 100 scudi for her dowry from his brother Laudadio. On 4 April 1570 (a month before the marriage of Sarra to Zaccheria and just months before the state initiated its proceedings against the Jews), Agnolo acknowledged having received from his brother Laudadio the sum of 100 scudi in gold, as a loan for the dowry of his daughter Sarra. He agreed to a number of obligations.131 First, Agnolo agreed to pay Laudadio 8 scudi per year for the use of the 100 scudi—that is, it was a loan taken at a flat rate of 8 percent interest. It was agreed that when Laudadio was ready to give his “first” daughter, named Lionetta, in marriage, Agnolo must pay back half of the loan, 50 scudi, for the purpose of Lionetta’s dowry. After that, he would pay only 4 scudi annually for interest on (“use” of) the remaining loan. Second, when Laudadio was ready to marry off his second, unnamed daughter, Agnolo must turn over the remaining 50 scudi on the occasion of the wedding (nozze). Agnolo’s house in Empoli—the house in which they all lived—was designated as collateral for the loan. If Agnolo failed to repay the loan on schedule, Laudadio had the right to sell the house outright or to mortgage it. Third, Laudadio was exempted from paying any rent to Agnolo, in whose house he and his wife expected to continue to live with their remaining daughters, unaware of their impending expulsion from Empoli. Moreover, the contract stipulated, he could not be evicted by his brother from the house until the loan had been repaid in full. Fourth, if Laudadio’s first or second daughters died before being married, the 50 scudi that should have been used for their dowries were to go to Laudadio’s third, fourth and fifth daughters. If (heaven forfend—“Dio ne guardi”) they all died, the money was to be returned to Laudadio or his wife, whose name is not mentioned. We can almost see Laudadio contemplating the premature death of each of his daughters and the return of the loan as the

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Commune and Community dark shadow of his inability to envision a more successful resolution of his burden of five daughters. Meanwhile, the loan was to be held in deposit in the bank of Sabato, the Jewish minister of the bank at Prato, and the bank must allow Laudadio to withdraw the appropriate 8 scudi (or 4 scudi) annually.132 The assumption of the family’s continued residence in Empoli (if not of long and perfect health) is revealed in this contract between two brothers. Agnolo did not have 100 scudi in cash for Sarra’s dowry, but was willing to take a loan from his brother. Laudadio, meanwhile, considered his brother a good risk, and 8 percent interest plus free rent a fair return. He could not expect to give to all five of his unmarried daughters dowries that were nearly as high as that which his brother gave Sarra, an only daughter. We do not know the ages of the five daughters, but, maximizing the daughters’ chances, let us imagine arbitrarily that the youngest had just been born, and that their ages (if they were not twins) were one, three, five, eight and eleven (to allow for the possibility of miscarriage and of at least one son who had died in infancy). In theory, if Laudadio had left the full loan with Agnolo for five years, he could have married off his eldest daughter Lionetta at age sixteen with a dowry of 50 scudi, and meanwhile collected 40 scudi in interest.133 If he then waited another five years before collecting the remaining 50 scudi for the dowry of his second daughter at age eighteen, he should have earned 20 more scudi in interest. The accumulated interest (well over the base of 60 scudi, if it had been invested) could be expected to help provide modest dowries for his remaining daughters, although, of course, he would have hoped to have increased his fortunes by then. Though it was preferable to contract marriages for girls while they were young, the investment would have provided an incentive for delay. The financial arrangements undertaken for Sarra’s marriage exemplify the great difficulty of providing dowries for daughters, and reveal the enormous dependency of girls and young women on the ability of their families to provide them with dowries. The kind of husband with whom they would be paired depended on the financial success and stability of their fathers and on the number and health of their older sisters.

The Impact of the Ghettoization on Marriages Planned The record of the expulsion and ghettoization that grand-ducal administrators embedded in layers of archival material appears clear and neat, bloodless

Marriage in the Ghetto and almost painless. But how exactly were the Jews removed from their houses? We do not know many of the stories of those who may have resisted, of those who fought, of those who fled or of those who converted. The government knew how to quash not only rebellion but even the slightest inclination to resist: in 1568 it arrested Donna Bruna, claiming that the yellow sleeve she was wearing (in response to the newly published law) was not in conformity with the size and shape required. She was given a fine that would have more than ruined her and her two sons, and she was thrown in jail and kept there for more than a week until her pardon.134 The records of the criminal court are lost for the months from July 1570 (when the proceedings against the bankers began) through February 1571, while the ghetto was being purchased and built. In March 1571 when the archival records are restored, we observe three Jews being released from jail: Giuseppe di Salamone, Iacob da Pontadera and Davit di Iacob in Poppi.135 How long had they been locked up while “creditors” settled their suits? The Jews of Tuscany were apparently not all rounded up at once and jailed, or tortured, but how many other carefully planned or impromptu arrests of individuals facilitated the expulsion? We do know that the Jews of Tuscany must have lost most of their assets in the process. In Empoli, for example, on the twenty-fifth of October the goods and possession of Salamone and Giuseppe di Moise da Empoli were inventoried and sequestered, along with those of Raffaelle. On the very next day the podestà entered and inventoried the house of “Agnolino,” none other than Agnolo di Zaccaria who had borrowed 100 scudi from his brother for the dowry of his daughter Sarra.136 The banks of Tuscany were blockaded and the homes of nonbanking Jews were raided. The loan agreement that the two brothers designed to ensure dowries for their daughters turned out to be a high-risk investment that led to losses for members of three families. With the closure of the Jewish banks in 1570 and the expulsion from Empoli, the money that had been invested for Sarra and Zaccheria in the bank at Prato was surely lost.137 The house in Empoli, collateral on the loan, had meanwhile come into the possession of Sarra’s brother Abram, Agnolo’s heir, who was already overwhelmed with his own debts and now became responsible for the debts of his father. Even before his father died on or before 12 October 1575, Abram, who had also moved to the ghetto, was sued for more than 200 scudi by Christian creditors in the veilmaking business. He was jailed twice in 1573 for fighting; in November of 1574 he fled creditors; a warrant was issued by the Otto for his arrest as a fugitive; and finally, in early 1576, he was ordered to have the house in Empoli

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Commune and Community assessed and put to auction. Its worth was estimated at 430 scudi and it sold for 452 scudi.138 This would have covered his own debts, but unfortunately for him, the house was obligated not only to the loan his father had taken from his uncle for his sister Sarra’s dowry but also to the dowry of the widow Ricca, his father’s wife.139 In Florence Ricca, his uncle Laudadio, his brotherin-law Zaccheria and half a dozen Christian creditors (including the office of the Gabella) all filed claims against the estate he inherited from his father.140 Zaccheria di Raffaello filed suit against Abram because, in 1576, six years after their marriage, he had still had not received the dowry promised to his wife Sarra.141 He declared himself a creditor of Sarra’s deceased father Agnolo and of her brother Abramo; he was owed 110 scudi and 2 lire, for the dowry and expenses.142 As for Laudadio, the archives have not yet revealed whether his first daughter Lionetta successfully married with 50 scudi as she should have. When his “second daughter,” now revealed as Anna, was married in June 1575 to Daniel Vitale of Siena, she brought him a dowry of only 36 scudi.143 It is unlikely that her three remaining sisters, if any still lived, had dowries even as large as that. The entire family was shaken by the combined loss of Sarra’s dowry in Sabato’s bank, the expulsion from Empoli where they had all lived in one fine house, the fact that Laudadio had five daughters who required dowries (and no sons to bring in wives with dowries) and the debts of Abramo.144 The male descent line of this important family from Empoli had apparently reached its end. Abramo does not appear in the matriculation books of the guilds and he did not become a governor in the ghetto. He appears in our Florentine sources for the last time in July of 1576, involved in a fist fight with Giovachino Levita in the ghetto.145 It was Sarra who preserved the family’s status. At just about the time of her father’s death, she was matriculated, through her father’s prior membership, into the Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants as a “haberdasher and veil-maker in the ghetto.”146 She reported herself or was recorded by the guild notary as Sarra d’Agniolo di Zaccheria, thus represented as linked only to her father, despite her marriage. She took her father’s place in the world as her brother disappeared, but she could not become, as Abram could have, a leading force in the new community, since she could not join the ranks of its governors. Sarra maintained her status economically; her husband, it would seem, brought another aspect of status to the marriage. After a long absence from the archival records in Florence in the late 1570s and 1580s, Zaccheria di Raffaello Finzi, also called Gratiadio, returned to Florence as a rabbi bearing the title of honor “h. akham.”147

Marriage in the Ghetto

Dowry and the Preservation of Status in the Face of Ghettoization Between 1567 and 1571 the Jews of Tuscany were forced to wear the Jewish badge, to close the banks they operated and to leave behind the silk and wool operations and their other occupations in the villages where they lived. The elite had to end their use of Christian servants and wetnurses, and all were compelled to move from their houses to the rental apartments of the new ghetto. In these five years the Jews lost control over many fundamental expressions of their place in the social order: where they could live, what they could do, how they would be seen by both Christians and Jews from other parts—the aspects of life they used to establish their social identities and status. Because marriage in sixteenth-century Italy was so dependent on and expressive of status, the ghettoization was certain to affect the marriage market, both immediately and in the long run. In the first place, there was a question whether families who lived in territories where there was no ghetto (i.e. outside the Venetian, Papal and Tuscan states) would still be willing to contract marriages with them. Would high-status non-Tuscan Jews be willing to send their daughters to marry men who lived in the ghetto in Florence? Could some Florentine Jews find new lives outside the ghetto by marrying out? The dowry was one remaining sign of status, and it became ever more important to use it to full advantage. The dowries that were exchanged were a critical marker of status, even before ghettoization. They were not limited by the state, or standardized by Jewish law (halakhah) or communal enactment. The dowry factored in, on the one hand, the wealth of—or credit available to—the parents of the bride and, on the other hand, the value of the groom as judged by the parents of the bride. In the decades that followed ghettoization, the importance of dowry would reach new heights. Even without the disruption of the expulsion, it was difficult for Jews to fulfill the goal of dowering all daughters with dowries of the size their mothers and wives had had. Loans, gifts, family size limitation and complex financial contracts were all employed. These strategies were generally successful. However, universal marriage was a more important norm than the preservation of status or its expression through dowry, so girls would be married even if their dowries were smaller than those of the women their fathers, brothers and cousins had married. In the remaining sections of this chapter, we will survey the size of dowries that were promised in the ghetto and consider the sometimes

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Commune and Community unusual strategies employed by Jews to maximize the size of their dowries. For we will see that despite the financial losses Jews suffered in the process of expulsion and ghettoization, they attempted to give dowries that were similar in size to those they had exchanged before ghettoization, to regain status and to maintain some sense of continuity.

The Size of Dowries and the Strategies Used to Obtain Them The size of dowries exchanged in the Florentine ghetto provides a clear indication of the new social structure. Because the banking families of Tuscany did not move to or remain long in the ghetto, there were now no Jews whose dowries approached those of the numerous Florentine Christian elite (which, we noted above, averaged 1,800 florins) or even of the small Perugian Jewish elite. Within the ghetto there were three clusters within the remaining range: the new elite gave dowries of from 500 to 600 scudi; the poor had dowries of less than 50 scudi, if any at all; the majority of those Jews whose dowries were documented exchanged dowries of 100–200 scudi. The measures Jews took to provide dowries suggest that these dowries were one of the most serious marks of status left to the ghettoized Jews in a world that had not only stripped them of most other positive signs of status.

The Elite The wealthiest Jews in Florence—a few families of ex-bankers, doctors and perfume-merchants—had dowries that compared to those of Christian notaries and independent artisans. The goal, for these families, was not to maintain status as the most important Jews in Florence, but rather to get out of the ghetto. Any marriage that could be arranged to a Jew who resided outside the ghetto, or into a family that might be able to arrange such a privilege, was worth an enormous investment. The wealthiest and most prominent family was that of the Leucci, who had been merchants in Pisa and had chosen to remain in Tuscany rather than to try to relocate elsewhere with the bankers when faced the expulsion from Pisa. Five hundred scudi were promised for the marriage of Iudit, daughter of Ioseph Ursi (or Orsi) in 1573 to Gratiadio di Ventura Leucci, who in turn promised to augment the dowry with supplemental gifts, the donora or counter-dowry.148 Before their expulsion, the Leucci had been perfume-merchants in Pisa, citizens of that city and resident there since the second half of the fifteenth century.149 Marriage into the family must have held great promise, especially in light of the da Rieti family’s successful petition to the

Marriage in the Ghetto grand duke to be allowed to return to live freely in Pisa in 1573.150 Gratiadio Leucci’s status was extraordinary even while he lived in Florence, perhaps awaiting his chance to return to his native city. In spite of the edict prohibiting Jews from living or working outside of the ghetto, his apothecary was located outside the ghetto on via de Martelli, a main street (still called by this name today) that leads from the piazza between the baptistery and the cathedral to Palazzo Medici Riccardi.151 The large sum of 500 scudi that Ioseph Ursi gave his daughter Iudit for her marriage to Gratiadio Leucci in 1573 seems very likely to have been the stolen property of the bankrupt and dismantled Jewish community of Perugia, where he had previously lived.152 If Ursi’s first concern was to establish high status and a secure future for his daughter, he was successful: Gratiadio Leucci, his family and his brothers received permission to return to Pisa in 1588, thereby rejoining the ghetto-exempted Italian Jewish elite. Iudit remained in Pisa after her husband’s death in 1595.153 The largest identified dowry in the ghetto during its formative period (1571–1612) was the 600 scudi promised in 1608 to a niece of Gratiadio Leucci, Laura, daughter of Bellafiore di Moyse de Uriellis and the deceased Abram q. Ventura de Leucci. This branch of the family was still living in Florence, perhaps by choice,154 but Laura left by marrying her first cousin, Ventura q. Gratiadio de Leucci, the son of the above-mentioned Leucci-Ursi union.155 First-cousin marriages such as that of Laura to Ventura were not at all unusual among the elite. They were made possible by Jewish law as applied in the Italian states and elsewhere at the time, which, unlike canon law of the church, allowed marriage between cousins and even between uncle and niece.156 Among Christians, marriages between relatives were forbidden through the third degree of consanguinity, and a papal dispensation was required for a marriage in the fourth degree of consanguinity. Italian Jews contracted marriages between cousins and other relatives regularly, especially in the highest-status groups where there were the fewest available Jewish marriage partners. This is explained simply by considering the demographic reality that the entire Italian Jewish population numbered only tens of thousands, less than a thousand of whom lived in Tuscany.157 In this context it is remarkable that the relatively speaking tiny Jewish elite (in terms of its absolute size) managed to remain religiously endogamous. A discernible number of Jews in every generation did convert to Christianity, although in the cases we learn about, the convert was usually already married. Endogamy strategies included arranging marriages to Jews from other cities, from overseas and to both men and women at younger ages and at older ages.

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Commune and Community Elite Jewish families prioritized the effort to maintain the size of the dowry, the primary mark of status for women, from one generation to the next, or to increase it when possible. Social stability had its vertical, chronological aspect as well as its horizontal, synchronic measurement: at least for the elite, the goal was not only to maintain one’s place relative to other families but to maintain one’s status within the history of the lineage. It is interesting that the size of a woman’s dowry may have corresponded more to that of her mother’s dowry than to her father’s current assets.158 The dowry given to a daughter may have been symbolically associated with the dowry of the mother (and perhaps also materially, insofar as it included parts of her trousseaux), so that it should be thought of as her share, not of the patrimony, but of the matrimony.159 But however it was seen, the transmission of social status was, for a woman, directly linked to the size of the dowry she was given. Men had additional ways to access status: rabbinic scholarship, the possibility of studying medicine at a university, easier access to guild membership, the possibility of participating in Jewish self-governance, and of course, marriage to a woman with a high dowry. In three cases where I have information about the dowry of both a mother and her daughter, the two are almost identical. One was the above-mentioned case of Ricca, a daughter of Uriel d’Isaia of Pisa, living in San Miniato before ghettoization, who, as a widow in the Florentine ghetto in 1575 sought to reclaim her dowry of 100 scudi from the estate of her dead husband, Agnolo di Zaccheria.160 This was exactly the sum that had been promised as a dowry to Ricca’s daughter Sarra, for her marriage to Zaccheria di Raphael Finzi in 1570.161 A second case was Iudit, daughter of Ioseph Ursi of Perugia, also mentioned earlier, who was engaged in Florence to Gratiadio di Ventura Leucci in October 1573. Her marriage contract promised a dowry of 500 scudi in gold.162 Widowed and living in Pisa in 1603, Iudit (now Iuditta) provided her own daughter Dianora with a dowry worth 550 scudi, supplemented by the groom to 650 scudi, thus ensuring that her daughter had at least the same status and level of financial protection that she had had.163 In the third case, Bellafiore, a daughter of Moise d’Uriel, had a dowry of 600 scudi in 1591; in 1614 her daughter Laura (mentioned above) married a first cousin, Ventura di Gratiadio, with a dowry of exactly the same size.164 Obviously, in cases where more than one daughter survived to marriageable age, and when the mother was still alive, the mother’s dowry could not actually be given to the daughter. Parents had to use additional resources to meet their goal, or would fall short. As in Christian families, birth order, the personal attributes of the bride, the availability of marriageable men and spe-

Marriage in the Ghetto cific economic, political and even personal conditions at the time of the search might affect the amount set aside for each daughter’s dowry.165 The more daughters, the more difficult it would be for them all to marry into the class from which they came, especially since Jews, unlike their Catholic neighbors, did not have the option of marrying to God those daughters who had attributes that would make them less sought after by men.166 In poorer rural Christian families, some daughters were abandoned to die as infants and many were abandoned to public foundling institutions.167 Given the anonymity of the act, it is not known whether Jewish women or couples in Florence might have abandoned some of their own offspring to the Hospital for the Innocents as well.168 Christian Florentine fathers, at least those in the elite, took care to plan for dowries for all their legitimate daughters who were not destined to enter a convent.169 Illegitimate daughters were often also given dowries, albeit smaller dowries than those of legitimate children; similarly, illegitimate sons were married to wives who carried smaller dowries.170 Jewish parents, too, tried to provide for all their daughters, but they were not required to and did not in fact give them all equal shares.171 The case of five daughters in Empoli has already been examined. In another case we see that Ricca, a daughter of Uriel d’Isaia of Pisa, was married to Agnolo di Zaccaria of San Miniato with a dowry of 100 scudi, while her sister Dolcina was married with a higher dowry of 126 scudi to their uncle Simone di Salamone di Simone Leucci.172

The Poor It seems that most of the marriages of the poorest Jewish couples were not documented with public notaries; consequently, we do not know if dowries of 10, 30 or 50 scudi were common or whether any Jews married without a dowry.173 We do know, however, that there were Jews in the ghetto who depended on the pious benevolence of wealthier Jews for any dowry at all. A charitable bequest by Ginevra d’Agnolo Blanis in the testament she dictated as a young woman in 1574 provided that 80 scudi be spent from her estate to provide dowries for eight poor Jewish girls, 20 scudi every year for two dowries, beginning within two years of her death. Her expectation, therefore, was that 10 scudi was sufficient to enable a poor girl to marry.174 The dowries Ginevra endowed compare favorably to those given in charity to girls nominated by members of the Florentine Linen Guild, which distributed funds that had been left to it by two benefactors for dowries for poor girls. The dowries provided each year to the chosen girls were either 40

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Commune and Community or 49 lire, that is, between 6 and 7 scudi per bride.175 These dowries were 30 percent smaller than the dowries Ginevra Blanis granted; however, it should be noted that the two benefactors to the Linen Guild had set up capital funds, from which the return of the investment would provide dowries perpetually.176 Other guilds had similar arrangements, and dowries were provided also by charitable societies in Florence, including the Buonomini di San Martino, that were founded as early as 1442.177 In contrast, the Jewish community of Florence did not yet have any communal mechanism for providing dowries to needy girls, and the earliest certain evidence of a communal dowry fund in the ghetto is from the mid-seventeenth century (see below in Chapter Ten). Ginevra probably did not have the resources to establish a permanent dowry fund; if her will was executed, eight girls benefited. However, her idea was institutionalized in short order, as we will see in the last chapter.

The Middle Class The largest group of dowries recorded in our sources were those given to daughters in the households of guild members, artisans and merchants whom I have previously identified as the governing elite of the ghetto. The dowries exchanged by these families mark them as part of the very bottom of the “middle class” in the city of Florence. This is so even if their status was high within the ghetto, as measured by the role they played in the ghetto governance or by the status they held due to their guild membership, antiquity of residence or membership in the Jewish confraternity, when it was established. Indeed, the strategies Jewish guild members and governors employed suggest that it was a struggle for them to maintain the 100 scudi dowry that seems to have symbolized that minimal level of status in the city. The customary pattern in the Italian states was that brides moved to the home of the groom (virilocality) and not vice-versa. In the ghetto the most important families were still able to attract brides with good dowries for their sons, even sometimes from families who lived outside Florence. In 1592 Ventura di Abramo, grandson of Isac Tedescho who had been one of the original Florentine householders before the ghetto and was a core member of the ghetto government, married Anna, receiving her large dowry of 270 scudi from her father, who lived in Perugia.178 A man who wanted to marry a woman with such a high dowry would be hard pressed to find her in Florence: the governing elite and economic mainstay of the ghetto seem to have struggled to provide their daughters with dowries of between 100 and 200 scudi. Fiametta, the daughter of Abraham di Simone Spagnuolo, was mar-

Marriage in the Ghetto ried to Daniello di Isach Chalo (Calò) in 1574 with a dowry of 150 scudi.179 Daniel’s father was a governor of the ghetto. Another governor was Sabato, or Sabatuccio di Pellegrino Romano. On 26 June 1573 a betrothal agreement was made between Sabatuccio of the Florentine ghetto and Lazzaro di Aaron, also a Roman Jew living in Florence.180 Sabatuccio promised to give Lazzaro 100 scudi as the dowry of his daughter Flaminia, and Lazzaro promised to marry Flaminia and to add 100 scudi of his own to the settlement.181 Was this perfectly balanced arrangement actually a disguise for the fact that both men lacked cash? Even negotiated and notarized, these prenuptial agreements ensured neither the marriage nor, if the marriage ensued, the full payment of the dowry. For example, in the betrothal agreement just mentioned, Sabatuccio and Lazzaro agreed to pay a penalty of 50 scudi “to the fisc and camere fiscali of the city of Florence” in the event that either broke the betrothal. A year later, on 1 July 1574, the promise between Sabatuccio and Lazzaro had not been fulfilled and a “dissolution” of the agreement was notarized.182 The new pact bound the parties to agree that neither should harass or abuse the other. No marriage took place and no divorce seems to have been considered necessary. We do not know why this engagement was broken, but it could be related to whatever it was that caused Lazzaro’s incarceration in the intervening fall of 1573, or to his subsequent flight to avoid the debt of 53 lire and expenses he owed to Liuccio Romano, another (Roman Florentine) Jew who had posted bond for his bail.183 After the dissolution of the betrothal, Lazzaro’s name disappears from the public record in Florence. He had probably disappeared earlier; indeed, it may be that the betrothal contract was dissolved in his absence and because of his absence. It is not impossible however that Sabatuccio—despite his status as a member of the Linen Guild and his regular election a governor of the ghetto—defaulted on the part of the 100 scudi of the dowry he was supposed to pay. The size of dowries we see promised in the documents is an articulate statement of the goals and aspirations of Jewish families. On the one hand, we have seen above that among the elite there was an effort to maintain their pre-ghettoization status by providing their daughters with dowries that were equal to those their mothers had had. We see Jews of middling wealth in the ghetto striving to give their daughters dowries appropriate to the socioeconomic class of Florentines in which the Jews now found themselves. It was important to dower daughters with dowries of this size—of at least 100 scudi—not only to keep up with the status of Italian Jews elsewhere but because, by doing so, the Jews, mostly refugees in Florence, could define themselves as part of the Florentine middle class, albeit at the low end.184 In

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Commune and Community the ghetto, dowry offered Jews a rare opportunity to present their status (and experience it) in terms that were economic and not religious, in terms that linked them to the city and its social structure rather than excluded them from it. In other words, dowry measured the similitude of Jews and Christians, instead of enforcing their otherness.

Two Strategies for Maintaining the Middle-Class Dowry In the generation that suffered the crisis of ghettoization, we see families using old and new strategies to attempt to lock in good marriage contracts. We have already noted their willingness to allow marriages of girls who were younger than usual or of older women and younger men. Two additional strategies were used in the ghetto period: overextension and stipulations. In the first, in order to maximize their status, or the very possibility that all their daughters would find husbands, the Jews of Tuscany seem to have tied all their available resources to the dowry. Whether undertaken as a calculated risk or unintentionally, this approach was simply to overextend: the dowry promised was simply higher than the family could afford, and it might never be paid in full. Sometimes it led to a canceled betrothal; at other times the marriage was completed before the transfer of wealth occurred and lasted despite the nonsatisfaction of its financial terms. This strategy stripped inheritances from sons and made the retrieval of their own dowries a complicated or impossible task for their widowed mothers. Jewish law ordained that the first-born son inherited a double portion and the other sons equal parts, but in practice Italian Jews, like other Jews, rarely adhered strictly to this law. In Tuscany, although sons expected to inherit, they could not expect to inherit very much if they had sisters. This is compatible with the cultural expectation that they would marry early. The system, that is, did not postpone marriage in the expectation that sons could only establish an independent household after they had inherited from their fathers. Instead, in a Jewish system that privileged early marriage for men and universal marriage for women, there would be no substantial inheritance after sisters’ and mothers’ dowries had been extracted from it. Indeed, if a man married early enough, his father might be able to help him dower his daughters, as did Laudadio Blanis, who provided loans and gifts for at least three of his granddaughters. In a certain sense, then, daughters were protected at the expense of sons and their inheritances. The system implicitly acknowledged that a man had other opportunities to advance his own status, while a woman’s main hope was to protect her natal status through a decent early marriage. Even with

Marriage in the Ghetto only one daughter, the dowry a father felt compelled to provide her might total his entire worth, as we shall see below in the case of Isacche Calò. While in theory the devolution of wealth through women might increase the status of women, economic realities meant that widows in the ghetto were rarely wealthy, and most of the time wives presumably struggled to survive along with their husbands. A second sign of the pressure on middle-class families in the ghetto to provide adequate dowries is the way they tried to mitigate the problematic implications of the strategy just described. Since the dowry consumed such a large part of a family’s assets, stipulations were sometimes written into the marriage contracts as a form of insurance designed to bring the dowry back to the bride’s family in the event that she or the son-in-law died prematurely or that the marriage was childless. Overextension of Resources. The size of a woman’s dowry was so critical to her and her family’s status that her father might promise a dowry for her that approached or even surpassed his actual net worth.185 As we saw in the case of Sarra d’Agnolo di Zaccheria, whose marriage was arranged prior to ghettoization, if the bride’s father died before turning the dowry over to the young couple, there was a serious risk that the couple would never see the dowry or would receive it only in part. Moreover, the common practice of delaying the payment of a dowry could lead to complicated and expensive lawsuits, intensifying the conflict between and within families which, in the ghetto, were also now neighbors. Let us examine the case of a guild member whose total assets were not much larger than the size of the dowry he promised to his daughter. Present in Florence before the ghetto, the Calò family identified themselves as Roman or Spanish Jews, and the name they carried was italianized in the course of the 1570s from Castaro or Castalho to dello Calò and finally simply to Calò (or sometimes Chalo). Like Sabatuccio di Pellegrino, Isacche d’Elia, the head of the household, was a member of the Linen Guild and had a usedgoods shop in the ghetto. Previously from Rome, he had been a shopkeeper in Florence with his unmarried son Daniel since at least 1568, dealing in jewelry and books, as well as clothing.186 In 1567 and 1570 there were only four people in his modest household: himself, his teenaged daughter Dolce and son Daniel and his wife Miriam. He was elected governor in the ghetto in 1573, and perhaps the previous year as well, a position Daniel would later assume and hold for many years.187 After Isacche’s intestate death in September 1574, there was a flurry of legal activity.188 In response to a request from his daughter Dolce, the Otto ordered that Isacche’s shop and home be inventoried. Two assessors, one a

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Commune and Community Christian dealer in second-hand goods who would know the items’ worth, and one a Jew (Iacob the son of Magistro Laudadio), took a detailed inventory of the rooms on 28 September 1574 and determined that the estate was worth 1,405 lire (about 200 scudi). This was only one third more than the 150 scudi that had comprised Dolce’s dowry, which her father had promised to give her husband Moyse Sacerdote at the time of the marriage. A few days later in a separate legal act on 2 October 1574, Isacche’s son Daniel formally repudiated his inheritance in favor of his sister.189 In repudiating his inheritance, Daniel most likely hoped to protect the estate from his own or his father’s creditors.190 This would have been an especially good strategy if Dolce’s dowry had not yet been taken from the estate, because then the assets would have been protected by her prior claim to them as uncollected dowry. However, no statement was ever made by Dolce or Daniel in the ensuing court struggle that Dolce had a claim to the estate, which leaves us unsure whether her dowry had already been transferred out, or perhaps had been “invested” for Dolce and her husband Moyse into Isacche Calò’s firm. The siblings Dolce and Daniel until this point had been working together, using the services of one Christian procurator. But Daniel’s wife, Fiametta, and her brother Sansone now interceded, appealing to the court to have Daniel’s repudiation nullified. Fiametta was the daughter of Abram Simonis, “similarly Spanish Jews,” who had brought Daniel a dowry of 150 scudi when they married in June 1574—the same size dowry that Daniel’s sister Dolce had been given.191 Fiametta and her brother claimed that in repudiating his inheritance, Daniel unlawfully alienated Fiametta’s dowry, for, they argued, it had been invested with Daniel’s father in the business that Daniel and Isacche had been running. If Dolce were allowed to inherit Isacche’s estate, Daniel would lose the very money that his wife had brought him as her dowry. Considering all the evidence and reviewing the entire case, the Otto di Guardia e Balía concluded and ruled in August 1575 that Daniel was heir to the estate insofar as there was a lien on it to Fiametta’s dowry, and his repudiation was disallowed. Dolce was to return the property to Daniel, and to pay for all the court’s expenses.192 It is impossible to determine whether Daniel and his sister were pitted against his wife, or whether they may have colluded in the shift in strategy, for either way, the estate was protected from his non-familial creditors. We do not know whether in the end Dolce’s dowry was protected or lost, and the case would certainly have been even more complicated if Miriam, the mother of Daniel and Dolce, had still been alive.

Marriage in the Ghetto The marriages contracted for the two adult Calò children exemplify the tension between the quest for “equilibrium” in Florentine society at large and the desire of individuals to climb the social ladder.193 With only one son and one daughter, Isacche Calò was able to arrange to send 150 scudi out with his daughter and take the same amount in through his son. Apparently unconcerned about the possibility that his wife might outlive him, he was willing to risk giving Dolce practically everything he had. The dowry that his son’s wife brought in restored his capital to its previous level, and Daniel, inheriting the inventory of used-clothing, furniture and other objects (and debts) in spite of his first move to renounce it, lived on to become a leader in the ghetto. The fact that Calò’s estate was hardly larger than the dowry his son had obtained in marriage suggests the emphasis families of the middle classes placed on elevating their daughters’ dowries, or at least on maintaining their previous status, especially in the early years of the ghetto when a new social hierarchy was just being formed. As we have seen, a dowry of 100 or 150 scudi could require the parents to take a loan which set at risk the family’s house and the mother’s dowry. Giving away a dowry so large might mean that the father and son’s business would depend almost wholly on the daughter-in-law’s dowry. Stipulations. Because the dowry was a substantial part of a family’s wealth, precautions were taken by the bride’s family members to shield themselves from unnecessary or extra loss. One of the strategies employed by Jewish parents in their efforts to ensure universal marriage and middle-class dowries without total loss of control over this part of the patrimony was the use of stipulations in betrothal and marriage contracts written and notarized by official Florentine notaries. With the inclusion of special stipulations they were able to negotiate, within limits, some insurance on these costly dowries. The use of stipulations in Jewish marriage contracts has a long history that reflects the widespread observance by Jews of rabbinic law concerning marriage, divorce and inheritance, on the one hand, and their willingness to override aspects of it, on the other. The stipulation (in Hebrew, tenai’) was a legal device first used by Jews of Syria and Palestine in the late Roman empire, then seen in North Africa, in medieval Italy, in Spain and among the Jews of the Rhineland.194 The legal device originated as a response to rabbinic marital and inheritance laws that some Jews wished to change. In this respect it is akin to other types of contracts used by early modern Jews such as the “half-a-male’s portion” contract used by Jews in early modern Poland instead of dowry in order to link a daughter’s share of the patrimony to her

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Commune and Community father’s assets at the time of his death.195 (There is no evidence in the Florentine archives of the use of that interesting contract.) Lacking the authority to revise the actual laws, they devised the strategy of adding specific stipulations to the writ of marriage itself, the ketubbah, which was a standardized legal formula. The stipulations, or conditions, were meant to override laws which did not appear specifically on the ketubbah but which were understood. We do not know how often the marriage contracts which appear in the notarial cartularies were paralleled by Hebrew and Aramaic ketubbot. Although Jewish law presumes the writing of a ketubbah, the notarized documents usually make no reference to the existence of a separate rabbinic document, nor need they have done so. Some stated that the marriage was performed or that the dowry was to be returned to the bride “in accordance with Jewish law.”196 In one extraordinary case in 1604 a Christian notary explains that he was present at the ceremony at which a Hebrew document was signed, and that the document at hand was a notation of the translation of that document as dictated to him by the groom.197 In fact, the groom wrote the ketubbah himself. The groom was Sima olim Ioseph Levi, an Algerian Jewish merchant in Pisa after Jews were again allowed to settle there; there is no indication that Jews in Tuscany generally followed this practice, and it does not seem particularly likely, given the special knowledge required. Where Jews used non-Jewish courts of law for their civil and marital disputes, as in Tuscany, stipulations were often included. The stipulations seen in Tuscan prenuptial agreements were mainly used to circumvent statutory inheritance law which made a man the heir of his intestate wife and which entitled a wife to restitution of the dowry at the end of a marriage. This was the rule in both Jewish law and in Florentine statutory law, as I have discussed at length elsewhere.198 Since these stipulations appear on notarized contracts that detailed the exchange of a dowry, and not on Hebrew ketubbot, it seems that they were designed to override local Florentine statutory law, which was applied to Jews in practice, as much as to override the “laws of the Jews” that theoretically applied to them. The specific stipulations (prenuptial agreements) included in these notarial contracts are unique to each contract.199 Such stipulations had been used in the past as “social safeguards,” generally to protect the wife by prohibiting the husband from actions that were otherwise permitted under Jewish law (in the said location), such as taking a second wife, or “disciplining” her by beating her, or making her move away from her family.200 But in Tuscany the stipulations were used for a new purpose: to give the father of the bride maximum control over the money he was spending on her dowry. In the June 1570 (pre-ghetto) marriage contract of Perla and Dacterus in Prato, for exam-

Marriage in the Ghetto ple, it was stipulated that if Perla predeceased her husband without living children, he must return half the 130 scudi dowry to his father-in-law Salamone or to Salamone’s heirs.201 According to Jewish law, Dacterus would have inherited Perla’s dowry in full upon her death.202 From her father’s perspective, Perla was not the only family asset at risk in this marriage; her dowry represented a substantial portion of her family’s wealth. The dangers of childbirth (especially for a young bride, as Perla must have been since her groom was only eighteen) could not be mitigated through negotiation, but this extra clause substantially lowered the total risk Perla’s family would undertake. Indeed, in the sample of contracts I have seen from Tuscany, the more complex and interesting stipulations were used to give the father of the bride maximum control over the money he was spending on her dowry and also control over the daughter herself. A variation on the theme is apparent in the much more complex betrothal agreement concerning the marriage of Iudit, daughter of Ioseph Ursi of Perugia, and Gratiadio di Ventura Leucci in October 1573, one of the most elevated marriages arranged among Jews in the early years of the Florentine ghetto.203 Ursi had one year in which to turn over the dowry of 500 scudi in gold to the son of the perfume-merchant from Pisa, and after the transfer the groom was to give Iudit a ring, and gifts, and conduct her to his house “in Florence or elsewhere.”204 The prenuptial or betrothal agreement in which these terms were set was signed in the presence of Ursi and the entire family of the groom, Gratiadio: his father, Ventura, along with his mother Ricca and his brothers. It included a number of provisions which, modifying both Florentine and Jewish law, served triply to protect Iudit, to limit her autonomy and most of all, to protect Ioseph Ursi’s money and control over his daughter. The first stipulation, similar that of Perla and Dacterus discussed above, was that if deus avertat (God forbid)205 Iudit should predecease her husband without sons or daughters, the dowry (this time, the whole dowry) was to be returned to her father, if he were still living, within a year of her death.206 This stipulation was meant to supersede the law of intestacy which operated in both Jewish law and Florentine courts, that a man inherits his wife. The second stipulation was that if Gratiadio predeceased her, dying without children, his heirs must likewise return her dowry to Ioseph Ursi within a year.207 In this case, neither Jewish nor Florentine law would have considered the widow heir. However, Jewish and Florentine law would have agreed that when a woman was widowed, she was due to receive her dowry from her husband’s estate.208 The second stipulation, then, while ostensibly protecting the widow by requiring the timely restitution of her dowry, actually modifies

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Commune and Community statutory law in that it specifies that the dowry should be returned, not to the widow Iudit, but to her father, should he still be alive. The stipulation, in fact, conformed to and extended the reach of the Italian legal tradition that patria potestas remained in effect the entire life of the father, unless a daughter had deliberately emancipated herself.209 This stipulation thus potentially and explicitly deprived Iudit of a benefit granted to women in both Jewish law and common law, namely, that once a woman was married (as long as she was not a minor), her income and her dowry reverted to her in the event of a “no-fault” divorce (under Jewish law) or widowhood (under both legal traditions). A third prenuptial condition written into the contract helps explain the notary’s careful notation of the presence of all of Gratiadio’s brothers (Abram, Daniel and Raphael) in the room at the signing of the marriage contract. The third condition stipulated that if Iudit’s husband predeceased her without leaving heirs, she would not be held hostage to marry any of his three brothers. If a married man died without heirs, the Jewish law of the levirate (yibbum) required that one of his surviving brothers marry the widow. Resulting offspring would be considered the deceased’s legitimate heirs. Alternatively, each of the surviving brothers could perform a ceremony called h.alitsah to release himself and his sister-in-law from that obligation. The woman’s status was actually not that of a widow (‘almanah) but rather than of a yevamah, a woman “bound” to marry one of her deceased husband’s brothers (the levir) who, until the release, could not marry anyone else or recover her dowry. Italian Jews such as the Leucci did not automatically subscribe to the prohibition of Ashkenazic rabbinic law on polygyny, which ensured that h.alitsah was practiced.210 Therefore it was conceivable that if Gratiadio died without child, one of his three brothers—even if they were all already married—could have sought to marry the widow. If Iudit or her father did not want that marriage to occur they would be in the unpleasant situation of needing to persuade each of the three brothers to perform the ceremony of h.alitsah and symbolically release the widow.211 The notation of all of Gratiadio’s brothers in the room at the signing of the marriage contract was, therefore, not a mere formality. Whether they were actually present at the signing of the contract or not, they were now legally bound to perform h.alitsah. In addition, in return for her release and the return of her dowry, the stipulation specified that Iudit would not be asked or forced to pay anything (“sine aliquo premio”).212 This prenuptial agreement thus protected Iudit from the experience of many Jewish women, as evidenced in the responsa of medieval and early modern rabbis, who had

Marriage in the Ghetto money extorted from them by the brothers of the dead husband before they performed the h.alitsah ceremony. Indeed, when Gratiadio died (having since moved with his family to Pisa), Iudit faced no opposition from her brothersin-law. There were other ways for the Leucci to keep her dowry in the family: they married at least one of their daughters, Laura di Abramo di Ventura, to one of her sons, Ventura di Gratiadio.213 The stipulation in this contract thus successfully preempted any possible difficulty Iudit could have had in obtaining the return of her dowry. As it turned out, she and Gratiadio did produce children, among them Ventura and Dianora, and at the time that Iudit was widowed, her father had already died. Her dowry was restored to her, and she joined the very small cadre of wealthy, legally independent widows. For over a millennium Jews in the Mediterranean and European diaspora had used standardized stipulations and enacted ordinances to create a conditional override of the husband’s right to succeed his wife. Before the ghetto Italian Jews living in Tuscany were not bound by these specific enactments or, for that matter, by any other text.214 They were, as we have seen in previous chapters, subject to no particular rabbinical authority, no Jewish court of law, no appointed or elected lay leadership. In the ghetto, the capitoli issued by the governors from the years 1571 to 1610 did not attempt to regulate marriage and inheritance. Yet the Jews of Florence were aware of both the law of succession and the tradition of overriding it and were clearly familiar with the customary usage of the stipulation, a device which allowed them to modify marriage law, even to individualize it or innovate.215 When a family sent one of its women and her dowry into a marriage, the arrangement was made with a careful eye not only to advancing the status of the daughter and thus the lineage by making a good match but also to reducing the risk of the investment to the family, especially to the father, in case of its failure by abrogation of the engagement or by the death of either partner before heirs had been born. Their use of stipulations was therefore a specific and deliberate part of the overall marriage strategy

The Impact on Jewish Women of Changes in Dotal Strategies and the Marriage System Great efforts were made to preserve the status of daughters, but, it must be noted, the financial commitment required by a large dowry could lead the father to negotiate for a marital contract which, while protecting his investment, might also deprive his daughter of the autonomy she would otherwise have had if widowed or divorced. The insurance of the dowry in case of the

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Commune and Community daughter’s death may also be linked to the parents’ desire to arrange marriages for their daughters at younger ages, when, as we know, the risks associated with pregnancy and childbirth were higher.216 In all, these contracts remind us that the size of a woman’s dowry should not be taken as an absolute indicator of a woman’s status, which was complex. These stipulations also reveal the tension that accompanied the willingness of the bride’s family to tolerate the loss of a substantial portion of its wealth when parting with the bride and the dowry.217 Generally, when they sent their daughter away to be married, they did not consider her, and her dowry, lost to their lineage; this was especially true if she fulfilled the expectation of having children. Ties were not cut, but rather stretched. Both men and women might represent the daughter as a critical link in the perpetuation of the familial or paternal lineage, and thus she might present herself. For example, upon her matriculation into the Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants, Sarra d’Agniolo di Zaccheria reported herself or was recorded by the guild notary only as the daughter of her father, a guild member, without reference to her husband at the time, Zaccheria, or Gratiadio, di Raffaello Finzi.218 Somewhat less dramatically, Laudadio’s granddaughter Ginevra was recorded by a scribe of the guilds she joined as “Ginevra d’Agnolo Blanis, currently the wife of Moise d’Agnolo da Perugia,” but still, not as “Ginevra di Moise d’Agnolo.” As an independent businesswoman entering the guild through her grandfather, she was still primarily identified with the patriline and not with her husband. But it was not only because her grandfather was in the guild; she also presented herself as Ginevra d’Agnolo Blanis to the notary who prepared her testament, although she appointed her husband as her universal heir.219 Similarly, at the age of about forty, more than twenty years after her marriage to the perfume-merchant Gratiadio Leucci, the widow Iuditta (Iudit, daughter of Ioseph Ursi) signed her own name, “Io Iuditta Orsi” (I, Iuditta Orsi). She had adopted the name of her father’s father, using it, as her father had begun to, as a family name—a mark of status in Florentine society. The status she claimed was even independent of the memory of her father, since she did not present even herself as “Iuditta di Ioseph Orsi già” but just as Iuditta Orsi. By contrast, her notary referred to her as the “Widow Iuditta, daughter of the deceased Ioseph Ursi and wife of the deceased Gratiadio Leucci,”220 thrice emphasizing the dependence of her status on (two) men. These three women, Sarra, Ginevra and Iuditta, are unusually well documented in the archives. But were they exceptional? They were all born and raised before the ghetto. They had undoubtedly heard tales of at least two influential, powerful and philanthropic Jewish businesswomen, Benvegnita

Marriage in the Ghetto Abravanel and Graçia Nasi. What limited these and other women, besides their comparatively inconsequential wealth, was not a frontal attack on their freedoms, but rather a shift in the organization of work, gender, marriage and family. The state deprived Jews of status by restricting their residence, movement and economic opportunities and by marking them as objects of scorn. Jewish men reached out to consolidate what status was left to them, defining their families against Jewish families of lower status and, in order to do so, willingly reduced the autonomy of their daughters and wives. This occurred on the level of government, as we saw in Chapter Seven, and it occurred in the culture attached to marriage and dowry. The examples of both Perla and Iuditta reveal how a widow’s independence could be severely curtailed or postponed by premarital stipulations such as those that returned the dowry to the bride’s father, if her husband predeceased him. According to the stipulations of Iuditta’s marriage contract, if Iuditta had been widowed while her father was still alive, he would once again have controlled her dowry and her ability to remarry. As it happened, Iuditta’s father Ioseph died before she was widowed. Her dowry was returned directly to her, and she was able to make autonomous decisions regarding her investments with it. She invested in real estate in Pisa, and in 1601 found a husband for her only daughter Dianora, giving her a dowry that surpassed her own.221 As a wealthy widow whose father had died, Iuditta Orsi was in that small class of women who had the greatest degree of autonomy, especially living as she did, out of the ghetto.222 We have seen that a large proportion of Jewish assets was tied up in womens’ dowries. It is no wonder that men attempted to control this property and the women who legally owned it.223 Little is understood yet about the actual control over the resources that constituted an Italian Jewish woman’s dowry during her marriage. It is commonly argued that premodern Jewish women experienced “autonomy” for the first time when widowed, and that, if wealthy, widows had more access to power than women at any other stage of life.224 But this autonomy was limited by the patria potestas of Florentine law while the widow’s father was alive. Some Jewish fathers attempted to increase their authority still further when they wrote stipulations into their daughters’ marriage contracts that asserted their control over the dowry and therefore their daughters’ future marriage prospects in the event that the first marriage ended. So even in widowhood, a woman was not automatically emancipated. However, if her father were dead, even a married woman could make autonomous legal decisions. She could, for example, write a testament.225 It is important, therefore, to note that a widow could have no autonomy at all, depending on the stipulations her father put in her marriage

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Commune and Community contract. On the other hand, a woman could exert a degree of legal autonomy even while married. One woman who asserted her will this way was Laudadio’s granddaughter, Ginevra d’Agnolo Blanis, who was matriculated into two guilds after moving to Florence with her husband Agnolo di Moise da Perugia.226 It could have been a pregnancy that spurred Ginevra to dictate her testament on the fourth of August 1574 while probably in her twenties (see Figure 9).227 The marriage had not yet produced any children that survived. While “healthy, thanks to God, in body, mind, senses and intellect” (sana dei gratia corpore mente sensu et intelectu) and while married, she made critical decisions regarding her future—where she would be buried (in Florence), how much money would be spent on the salvation of her soul, and with what physical objects her name would be forever associated. She also directed the future of the Jewish community as she weighted her bequests, channeling most of her money directly to the specific needs that concerned her (provision of dowries, education of boys, provision for paupers) rather than allowing any other individual or corporate group to prioritize his or their concerns on her behalf. She appointed her husband to be her heir (which he would have been anyway according to Jewish law or, had she died intestate, according to Florentine law). In the event that he died childless, the estate was to pass to her closest male agnatic descendant, her brother’s son, Agnolo di Laudadio (di Magistro Agnolo di Magistro Laudadio Blanis).228 She left nothing to her young female cousins (Reche di Salvatore and Reche di Davit), and it seems she did not have any young nieces to whose dowries she might have been more likely to contribute. Thus, within the family, she designated only her own husband and her nephew. Out of her estate she assigned over 140 scudi to pious bequests, including 10 scudi for candles or oil lamps to be lit in the synagogue, 10 to a “Society of the Misericordia of the Jews of Florence,” 10 “for the instruction of poor Jewish boys,” 10 scudi to thirty poor Jews “for the love of God and the remediation of her soul,” 80 scudi for dowries of eight Jewish girls, and 20 scudi for a silver lamp and a curtain, probably for the ark in the synagogue, “which the Jews shall promise that they shall call mine,” to be made for her within six years off her death. Ginevra, as we have seen, expected to have at least 140 scudi to give away beyond the rest of her estate which she left to her universal heir.229 This wealth may have come to her in inheritance or gifts from her father or mother or other relatives, or it may have been the product of her independent enterprise as a silk-manufacturer. In any event, Ginevra Blanis knew

Marriage in the Ghetto what sum she had brought to the marriage in dowry and what she possessed outright, and she used her testament to control the future application of her legacy.230 A Jewish woman of moderate wealth could have a degree of autonomy that historians have generally recognized only with regard to widows. Authorship of a will gave a woman “authority.” As she designated her beneficiaries, Ginevra documented the various branches of her social world to which she was committed and in which she saw her future: her husband, her or his progeny, her next-of kin through agnatic descent and groups of needy Jews in the ghetto—the boys who needed to be taught, the girls who needed to be married, the poor who needed to be fed and clothed.

Conclusions It is probably no coincidence that the few individual Jewish women who played notable or even critical roles in the development of Jewish community within the ghetto were women who came of age before the ghettoization and made their mark in the ghetto’s first decade. Ghettoization brought with it the creation of the Jewish self-government, which enforced lower visibility for Jewish women, and urbanization, which presented the ghetto’s families and governors with the challenge of protecting female chastity in the large city. As we have seen in our analyses of the age at first marriage, guild matriculation and travel permits, these changes discouraged families from nurturing (or perhaps tolerating) female independence. The urban setting and the culture of the new self-governing ghetto discouraged families from allowing their young women to postpone marriage, from helping them to become economically independent and from permitting them to spend time outside the ghetto unless traveling with the husbands. The emphasis on granting women high dowries (which were still of course smaller than average for Christian Florentines) should not be taken as a sign that women had maintained their pre-ghetto status into the ghetto era. The more money invested and the greater its share in the father’s estate, the more critical it was for him and his heirs to control it and safeguard the daughter to whom it was attached. Contemporary Florentines felt, and historians have confirmed, that the cost of dowries rose steadily in Florence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and that their provision and the making of good matches was an ever more difficult and complicated burden.231 Nonetheless, it has been argued that Florentine society was characterized by a desire to maintain a sense of equilibrium in the city, a sense that there was an appropriate balance of

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Commune and Community wealth within each class and appropriate distance between classes.232 The Jews of Tuscany, like the Christians, use dowry size to measure their status. They gave middle-class Florentine dowries—dowries that were taxed, dowries that were seen as appropriate to their economic and social status level. It is striking that after ghettoization, despite their financial losses, the Jews attempted to make matches and to maintain this dowry size, as if they too could thus steady the boat in their storm-tossed destiny. In all the ways we have discussed, individual Jews of the ghetto made an effort to reassert their prior socioeconomic status through the dowry. They thus made the dowry a very significant symbol in this new environment, where they had been set apart categorically and assigned a denigrated status as Jews in a way that seemed both to deny their place in the broader socioeconomic hierarchy of the state and to obliterate the social hierarchies that had existed within the Jewish population. The intensified emphasis on the dowry as a public expression of status mitigated the financial dependence of sons on their fathers and reduced the dependence of widows on their husbands’ estates. The pattern was perhaps made possible by the early entry of young men into the work-force and by the control women had over their own assets, earnings and investments. There are many signs, however, that the ghettoization financially ruined a generation and jeopardized either the marriages of their children or the dowries of women who would become widows. Some men, unable to find a class-appropriate partner in Florence, left the city in order to marry, thus reversing the traditional Italian Jewish virilocal pattern of marital mobility.233 Families who could afford to do so provided dowries for their daughters that enabled them to leave Florence. The overall pattern may have had the effect of draining the ghetto of its wealth. By the early 1590s the wealthiest families that had come to the ghetto (da Rieti, Leucci) were gone and the new elite of the ghetto were families of much more modest fortunes. Ghettoization also had a noticeable impact on the age at which Jews married and their rate of marriage, at least for the generation that experienced the dislocation of 1571 and for their children. Women were under pressure to marry at a younger age and the men they married tended to marry slightly later, so that there was overall a greater age differential in ghetto marriages. These younger women were comparatively less educated, less skilled and less mature when they came under the dominion of their husbands. The age difference thus contributed on the level of the individual family to a general loss of status for women in the ghetto that was institutionalized by the creation of the self-government. Altogether, patriarchy was intensified in the ghetto,

Marriage in the Ghetto although this trend is complicated by the fact that individual heads of household were increasingly subordinated to the program of the governing class in the ghetto. On the other hand, an individual woman of high status could carry with her into marriage the identity and status of her father (his name). Functionally and symbolically, the dowry may have reproduced the status of the mother. The result seems to be a strong connection of women to various circles or branches of “family”—her children, her husband, her father and his agnatic descent line. And in the ghetto, marriage also broadened a woman’s connection to the nascent community in which she lived, rather than transferred her from one family to another. This was especially true in the ghetto, where she might expect to live in proximity to both her family of origin and her husband’s relatives. Some of the implications of these changes will be explored in the concluding chapter. The dowry negotiations that preceded a marital match brought people together in financially complicated, often problematic ways, creating an interdependency of families that could last long after the death of one of the spouses. When these relationships soured, the ghetto peace was disturbed by fighting, by broken engagements and by the expense of lawyers and notaries and the ensuing court orders and appearances. When the relationships worked, however, bonds were formed in the ghetto between families of disparate origins. Marriage and dowries acted together to shoot branches of the highest elite out of the ghetto, and to knit and knot the rest of the families together, helping to turn the disparate groups of refugees into one community, complete with its spring harvest of young Florentine-born Jewish children born in the first decade. Their names, reflecting their preciousness, were recorded on the travel permits granted in the spring of 1580 as though the children had come up to the front of the synagogue to be noticed and blessed on the holiday of Shavu‘ot.234 Among the eleven there were three girls named Perla—pearls in the ghetto; a Benedettta, or Blessed; and two boys named Giuseppe—Jacob’s favored son.

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Te n The Developing Early Modern

Jewish Community and Continuing Redefinition of Jewishness

In 1500 the institution of the ghetto was unknown in the Italian states, and Jewish self-government, where it existed, was neither validated nor encouraged by secular or church rulers. Rome was the only city with a large Jewish population, and Jews lived scattered in hundreds of smaller cities and villages. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, most Italian Jews were living in ghettos, in more densely populated urban centers, and they were organized as semi-autonomous Jewish communities. Because of the political diversity on the peninsula, this shift to ghettos did not occur at once everywhere, and the development of institutionalized community sometimes preceded it. In Tuscany, however, the two developments were linked. The shift from loosely associated Jewish households to institutionalized communities in Florence (and Siena) was a direct result of the state’s act of ghettoization, rather than an organic process of demographic growth and communal development. When the ghetto was instituted, many of the institutions that have been considered characteristic of premodern or “traditional” Jewish communities were not found among the Jews of Tuscany. Seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury ghetto communities, however, typically shared a set of institutions including, first and foremost, a Jewish self-government, which often served as an umbrella organization for two or more ethnic subcommunities. In addition, organized communities typically had a burial society; other confraternities and charitable funds, including a dowry-fund; a publicly supported school; a communal cemetery, ritual bath, slaughter-house and tavern or inn; and usually one or more hired rabbis, whose duties included regular preaching in the synagogue, and other religious functionaries.1 In Chapter Three I presented the argument that such institutions did not unite the Jews of Florence or of Tuscany in the sixteenth century prior to 1571. Chapter Seven explored the relationship between the creation of the ghetto government and the administration of the Medici state. In this chapter we

Developing Jewish Community will glance forward at the institutional history of the Florentine ghetto in its first forty years to see the relationship between that self-government and the development of most of the other social institutions and divisions mentioned above. This chapter thus returns to the processes through which the Jews of the ghetto interacted with one another to become a local community or even, as it was termed by the leaders, a k.ahal k.adosh, a holy community. We see these interactions mainly through the lenses of those who did the work to build structure and order. Community leaders, official and unofficial, did the work of social control and charity, of establishing social hierarchies and of providing for those in need. And, as we shall see, they planned for the future by attempting to socialize young men and women into their roles or, when that failed, by expelling those who would not conform.

The Institutionalization of Tsedak. ah and Jewish Welfare in the Ghetto The first sign of “mutual responsibility” in the ghetto was the establishment of a communal fund to help poor Jews.2 This economic expression of communal identification is mentioned in the first set of regulations submitted by the self-appointed Jewish leaders in August 1571, in which one quarter of the fines for infractions of the ghetto regulations were assigned to the “poorbox” (la cassetta dei poveri).3 It seems unlikely that fines were a consistent source of replenishment for this fund since very few infractions were reported to the Nove. In addition, the governors were not authorized to tax the ghetto population regularly.4 Social welfare in the ghetto, therefore, started small, with voluntary contributions. There were at least three ways that collection was made of voluntary charitable contributions—tsedak.ah in the Jewish tradition, an expression of social justice and righteousness, but referred to by Florentine Jews in their vernacular Italian as elemosine or limosine, alms. Contributions were made conspicuously, in public, so that giving alms was itself an expression of commitment to the new community and an assertion of one’s place in the social hierarchy of the ghetto. The most public way to give tsedak.ah was in the synagogue, where people—probably only men—“made offerings,” apparently bidding pledges to “buy” various honors in the synagogue.5 The spiritual value of a specific honor in the synagogue that accrued to the donor was magnified by the stature he attained through his public display of generosity (and, simultaneously, of his wealth). The quest for public status must have led some congregants to make bids higher than they were later able or eager to pay. The

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Commune and Community governors attempted to discourage the temptation to make unrealistically high bids. They ruled in 1572 that the Jews “must pay without error all the offerings which they make in the synagogue, and that whoever has made an offering and fails to disburse payment within the time ordained shall be required [to pay] one quarter more than the offering that was made, and the Ten [governors] shall be held responsible to collect the entire sum.”6 Honor and status in the ghetto were a matter of perception, as they were everywhere, always being won or lost. The public display wealth and of beneficence (or sacrifice) was an important measure of status, so the governors attempted to ensure that whoever was granted this limited resources made payment for it into the community chest. Contributions raised during services in the synagogue and those collected for the alms-box from fines seem to have been put into the same fund. In 1578 the governors of the ghetto officially recognized only one communal fund: one of the six new capitoli ratified that year concerned collections for “the” poor-box.7 But six years into the ghetto’s history the demands on the community had grown and it was no longer possible to depend on fines, unsolicited contributions and the proceeds garnered from the auction of synagogue honors to meet the growing demand for assistance. In 1578 the ghetto had already organized a schedule according to which members of the community, or of some group in it, were required to perambulate the ghetto with the alms-box, asking for contributions. This schedule, according to the third new rule of 1578, needed re-enforcement, so it was declared that “all those Jews to whom it falls each day to collect charity for the ‘deserving poor,’ they are required to go around with the box when it is their day according to the schedule, and whoever does not go, let him put 2 lire in piccioli of his own into the said box, [and] in order that the poor not suffer and not put out their hands—whoever does this shall fall under a fine of half a scudo in addition to the 2 lire, to be applied as the above [penalties].”8 The purpose here was to ensure the regular collection of charity for the poor and to prevent begging in the streets. Anyone who did not want to perform the duty of collection could make up for the expected collection of 2 lire, but was discouraged from doing so with a fine of an additional half scudo, or 3½ lire. Presumably, the governors controlled the disbursal of financial aid from this one communal box. Both the magistrates of the Nove and the Jewish governing class were interested in controlling the size and quality of the Jewish population in the ghetto. The new governors were enlisted to this end by the state in 1571 to report all foreign Jews who came to the ghetto and remained more than three days without having obtained permission from the officials of the Nove.9 In addition, they were expressly forbidden to receive into their homes

Developing Jewish Community any new Jews without permission from the soprassindaco of the Nove.10 On the other hand, the governors were therefore, at least in theory, able to keep out indigent Jews—or others they considered “undeserving”—who might hope to join their community. As we have already seen in Chapter Seven, they were also able to expel Jews from the ghetto with approval from state authorities. One incident suggests that the Nove continued to support the authority of the governors within the ghetto, and not only in their relations with the city beyond the walls: in 1645 the governors were allowed to publicly humiliate a Jewish woman by having her tied to the well in the piazza of the ghetto, rather than to the column in the piazza of the Mercato Vecchio, where those convicted by Florentine courts normally suffered their public penance.11 The methods I have described above for collecting alms in the ghetto both assumed and afforded the opportunity for interaction in public spaces with the Jewish community at large in a way intended to increase honor in the ghetto, not shame. The public “offering” in the synagogue, if I understand it correctly to have been a kind of bidding for honors, was a competition among men, because only men received “honors” in the synagogue—to chant from the Torah, for example, or to be the one who recited the mourner’s k.addish. The carrying of the poor-box was probably also a gendered activity, if we can assume that it was carried out by a roster of men who seem to have been organized as a confraternity by 1574, as we shall shortly see. It is very likely that the coins dropped into the box were dropped there by women as well as men, but the women probably did not participate in the collection, which was public and would have required contact with strangers and neighbors that might not have been seen as appropriate. A Jewish society in Bologna, organized before the ghettoization there, explicitly included women in its membership, obliging them to pay the same entrance fee as men, but they were specifically exempted from the “burdens” given to the men.12 There was a third manner in which alms could be donated publicly: the testamentary bequest. Testaments might be read aloud in public at the time of composition and at the death-bed—along with a confession, increasingly popular among sixteenth-century Italian Jews—as well as after the death of the testator.13 Women who wrote wills could find in this approach access— through public exposure—to a kind of honor and therefore status that they were otherwise denied. When Ginevra d’Agnolo Blanis had her will drafted by a notary on 7 August 1574, she left money directly to her needy co-religionists through four specifically monetary bequests.14 (See Figure 9.) In Chapter Nine we had

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f i g . 9 . The 1574 testament of Ginevra Blanis (Ginebra q. figlia Magri Angeli Blanis). Source: Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile Moderno, Testamenti 767, 167r–v. Reproduced by permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali; further reproduction or duplication is prohibited.

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Commune and Community occasion to note some of the provisions of this important testament, but it is worthwhile to review them. She bequeathed 10 scudi to the “misericordia of the Jews of the city of Florence”—a first reference to the ghetto’s first confraternal society. She left 10 scudi “for the instruction of Jewish boys.” She left 10 scudi “for Jewish paupers” who were to be chosen by the executors of her estate. Her largest charitable bequest was for 80 scudi to be spent over a fouryear period to provide dowries for eight Jewish girls (two girls each year, 10 scudi per dowry). After the expense of candles and ritual objects she wished to donate to the synagogue, what was left of her estate went to her husband as universal heir and, should he predecease her, to any children there might be when she died; should there be none, to her nephew. This set of bequests made Ginevra Blanis one of the first large-scale benefactors of the new community. The details of this woman’s testament reveal critical information about the development of mutual responsibility in the Florentine ghetto and about Ginevra’s own intentions. She took care of her own soul: her afterlife was to be protected by the proper burial ritual, by candles lit in the synagogue for the remedy of her soul (pro remedio anime testatricis) and by her pious contributions. She provided for the memorialization of her own name: it was to be remembered in her gift to the synagogue of a silver lamp and a curtain for the ark, which her executor should promise to her “will be called mine.”15 But it was to the community’s future, too, that she unequivocally committed herself and in which she invested when she dictated this testament, certainly an “ethical will” if not a product of the quintessentially Jewish literary genre of that name produced by so many literate Jewish men of medieval Europe.16 Without children of her own, she was unambivalently committed to providing for other children. But her gifts to the less fortunate youth of the ghetto were not conditional; these gifts would be made even if she had children. Ginevra’s testament bore witness to her commitment to the future of the community of the ghetto, and I think it particularly noteworthy that she committed a part of her wealth to the education of boys and the marriage of girls before the “community” had developed any communal funds or mechanisms to do so, as we shall see. A few months earlier, Ginevra’s grandfather Laudadio Blanis had had his will publicly notarized by a different notary (who happens to have drawn up documents for members of important Florentine families including the Strozzi, Soderini, Lanci, Orlandini and Torrigiani).17 Laudadio, as we have seen, had been a prominent doctor in Perugia and a fairly important banker, although the sums he loaned were relatively modest (83 percent were for less than 50 scudi and only a few reached above 100).18 It is surprising that he

Developing Jewish Community assigned none of his estate to the Jewish poor or to the Jewish community as a whole. The difference between the testaments of grandfather and granddaughter is worth looking at in some detail. Laudadio had lived in many cities, including Orvieto, Rome, Perugia, Pesaro and Monte San Savino before he came to his last residence, in Florence. He made a small donation to the city of Florence—3 lire to the cathedral, the Opera of Santa Maria—but this was only the customary contribution of members of the Silk Guild to which he belonged; the same contribution was made by his granddaughter Ginevra in her will.19 He canceled the debt that one surviving son (Salvatore) owed him for the dowry of his daughter, and he gave a dowry-sized gift to Salvatore’s still unmarried daughter Reche. He gave a gift to a second granddaughter, Reche di Davit. He had already dowered his own daughter Dolce,20 and had probably already helped Ginevra since she was married by this time. Otherwise, every item in his possession fell to his son Iacob.21 In short, he left everything to family: dowries for his granddaughters and the rest to one son. For Laudadio Blanis, continuity and immortality would be found in genealogical descent, and given that world-view it was fortunate for him that some of his sons and grandchildren survived him.22 But for Ginevra, who did not have children, the future did not depend primarily on biological descent. She identified her nephew as her immediate (agnatic) descendant, but the testament she dictated earmarked substantial funds for broader purposes, both personal and communal—for the survival and ongoing production of a Jewish community, ensuring that the children of the ghetto would be properly educated and married. At the same time, she reinforced the Jewish gender roles that made an education the most critical asset necessary for the survival of a young man and a dowry the most critical asset for the survival of a young woman. When Ginevra assigned her bequests to address the specific needs that concerned her, she initiated the process by which the Jews of Florence would truly become a community. The governors of the ghetto had not yet in 1574 taken any action to address the two main concerns that Ginevra identified: the need to educate boys and the need to provide dowries for girls. If her priorities reflect the fact that she did not yet have children herself, they probably also reflect the likelihood that, as a silk-manufacturer, she employed poor ghetto women and girls who, given their customarily low wages, would need the kind of financial help she planned to provide. In 1574 the only specific institution to which Ginevra left money was the “charitable society of the Jews of the ghetto.” This is the earliest known reference to a confraternal society in the ghetto of Florence, probably a burial

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Commune and Community society; our next reference to it is its earliest extant record book (in Hebrew, a pink.as), initiated in 1610.23 Ginevra referred to the group as la società della misericordia. It was also called la compagnia della misericordia24—the same name used by Christian confraternal society in Florence since the early fifteenth century—and in Hebrew it was known as the h.evrat gemilut h.asadim, like burial societies throughout medieval Jewish Ashkenazic and Italian communities. The relationship in this period between the Misericordia and the communal fund for poor-relief that was administered by the governors of the ghetto and referred to frequently in their regulations is not clear. It is likely that a group in the ghetto acted as a confraternity and had membership and even records that would have predated the pink.as of 1610, had they been preserved. The charters of other confraternities that existed in Jewish communities, such as Bologna (from 1546), focus on three major precepts: study, prayer and good deeds—the care of the sick and the poor especially, but also the provision of dowries, the ransoming of Jewish captives and so on.25 The communal poor-fund or alms-box referred to in the capitoli of 1572 and 1578 may then have been controlled by the Misericordia.26 But whether there were two separate funds in the ghetto or one, the Misericordia was the only confraternity at the time in the ghetto, and its membership was undoubtedly drawn from the same group of people who made up the governing class. It is therefore particularly interesting that when Ginevra d’Agnolo Blanis dictated her will, making substantial charitable contributions to the community, she chose not to make her entire gift to this society, or to the “casetta dei poveri.” Rather than entrusting her legacy to the “community of the men of the ghetto” (as the members of the self-government were wont to call the population of office-eligible males in the ghetto and as the members of confraternity referred to themselves27), she chose to direct the future of the community by setting her own priorities and by making the executors of her estate responsible for the expenditures as she outlined them. As late as 1578, as we have seen, there was still only one general fund for the poor in the ghetto. But it was not long before the concerns Ginevra expressed in her testament were addressed by the organized ghetto’s communal leadership. The Jewish education of boys and the early marriage of girls were critical aspects of the socialization and propagation of the Jewish community. Indeed, it might be said that the Jews of Florence became a community that imagined its own future when they set as a priority the collection of funds for the investment in their children’s futures—acknowledging that individual families could fail to provide for them. By 1609 each of the concerns identified by Ginevra had been institutionalized as its own

Developing Jewish Community k.upah or collection box. The monies Ginevra designated in 1574 may have become, at the time of her death, the “seed money” for the establishment of at least three of five collection funds that existed by 1609. According to the ghetto ordinances of that year, one half of most fines would continue to be deposited into “the poor-box,” now called the cassetta dei poveri di detta repubblica, which had originally received one quarter of all fines.28 In the same set of rules, however, the governors recognized the legitimacy of five distinct funds for the poor, “cinque cassette de’ poveri,” which were passed around daily, “collecting charity.”29 Though referred to only as “boxes for the poor,” these five funds are a sign that in the thirty years of communal development, charitable and pious collection in the ghetto had undergone substantial diversification. The five boxes may have been associated with five developing societies: Jewish communal funds set up to raise money for specific purposes generally developed into social groups which specialized in fulfilling the specific religious tasks of social welfare.30 In any event, four of the five boxes circulating in 1609 almost certainly corresponded to the four communal funds that existed in 1645: (1) a general poor-fund called “Zedaca” (i.e., in Hebrew, tsedak.ah); (2) a fund for the education of boys, later to be called “Talmud Torah”; (3) a dowry fund, which would later be called “Moar Abitulod” (i.e., in Hebrew, mohar ha-betulot); and (4) a fund for “Jerusalem” (for the poor and the scholars living in that holy city, under Ottoman rule).31 The first full-fledged confraternal society that emerged in the ghetto was the burial society, whose earliest mention was, as noted above, in Ginevra’s will. The earliest extant book of this confraternal society, dating from 1610, shows that members had a schedule of “weeks” for which they were responsible to collect contributions for the fund. “All the men of the community” were divided into four lists, according to a reform of the statutes of this confraternal society in 1615, and each of these groups was given a chief (capo dieci).32 The statutes specified that the capo “must go with the bossola [almsbox] himself on Sunday and on Friday and on each of the other four days, day by day,” following the order of the men on the lists. Each week, one officer made these rounds and typically collected between 6 and 12 lire, which he deposited with a secretary who kept the accounts. These numbers represent essentially the same sum that the governors expected from the collection for the alms-box each week in 1578, when they declared a fine of 2 lire per day for anyone who failed to circulate with the box according to schedule.33 The society also occasionally received gifts from members’ estates. We have seen that in her testament of 1574 Ginevra allocated to it 10 scudi. The largest contribution recorded in the pink.as of the burial society (1610–41) was

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Commune and Community from another woman, Mona Consola, who in 1615 left 8 scudi, of which 23 lire and 2 soldi (less than half the total) remained after her burial was paid for.34 The society was involved in litigation with the Orlandini, a Christian family of Empoli, over a house that Daniel di Moise di Giuseppe da Empoli had sold them in 1576 for 260 scudi, of which he had received only 100. It seems that Daniel, who was a governor of the ghetto in 1605,35 stipulated in his testament that after the death of his widow, his estate (or a large part of it) should go to the Compagnia della Misericordia.36 In 1618 the Florentine court ordered the Orlandini, who had still not settled the debt, to begin paying the remaining 160 scudi, but in 1640 the society was still appealing to the court to enforce the collection.37 Without any large bequests or property from which to draw income, the society distributed only what it collected each week. The secretary of the confraternity kept his accounting records mostly in Italian, listing the expenditures very briefly. The consistent use of a limited number of Hebrew words or expressions (signified throughout this chapter by bold-face type) reveals the religious tradition that lay behind the work and monetary contributions of the society’s members, as well as something of the Hebrew literacy of the secretary of the society.38 Thus we read frequently that a small disbursement was given “per un ʩʰʲ ” (for an ‘oniy, a needy person), and the recipient is always referred to in Hebrew characters by the Hebrew term. The use of this Hebrew word places the distribution of money to needy Jews in the ghetto not into the conceptual framework of the poveri bisognosi, the deserving poor, but rather into a specifically Jewish ethical context.39 In contrast, the Italian phrase un malato was used in every record of money given to a sick person, or when, occasionally, a larger sum was provided for “a pair of chickens for a sick person” (un paio di polli p[er] un malato).40 Other expenditures that could not be expressed by reference to the most fundamental Hebrew word-concepts were articulated in Italian; thus we learn that funds were allocated “for the expenses of three famigli di Spagnoli (families of Spanish [Jews]).”41

The Employment of Rabbis The largest regular expense of the Misericordia was the monthly salary of a religious functionary. The first recorded payment of a monthly salary was 21 lire to an unnamed h. a z a n, a cantor or prayer-leader, on 9 August 1611.42 The cantor may also have been a scholar-teacher, doctor and shoh.et (kosherslaughterer), or he was soon replaced by one. From 1 June 1612 until at least September 1613 the same monthly “provision” of 21 lire was paid regularly to

Developing Jewish Community a functionary referred to generally (in that mixture of Italian and Hebrew) as 43 “Signor H . akham Finzi,” but also as the “Medico Vita Finzi.” Finzi’s titles identify him as both a rabbinic scholar and a doctor, and it is likely that the confraternity hired him to act in both capacities in the ghetto.44 It was very common for Italian Jewish societies—like Italian guilds—to retain a doctor, who was then available to treat them and to provide care for the poor in the community.45 Membership in the confraternity thus provided a type of health insurance, burial insurance and spiritual insurance all at once. His contract did not survive, but Vita Finzi was apparently also hired to be a rabbi for the community of Florence and he was its most educated member.46 He probably composed the confraternity’s fifteen capitoli of 1615 that he copied out in his educated hand and signed as one of its parnasim (leaders).47 A list of the rabbis of Florence, copied in Hebrew in the late seventeenth or eighteenth century from a lost minute-book of the “Italian” community of Florence lists him as “H . ayyim Fintsi, a teacher of righteousness, who came here from Pesaro in the year [5]371 [1611].”48 H . ayyim, or Vita, Finzi was not the first rabbi recruited to serve the Jewish community of the Florentine ghetto, but he may have been the first officially appointed rabbi. Finzi’s presence on the payroll, however, confirms my earlier contention that the Gemilut H . asadim, or Misericordia, was essentially synonymous at this time with the “community” or k.ahal. Directly before Finzi, Leon Modena had come from Venice to spend a year (1609–10) in Florence. The monthly payments Finzi received from the confraternity may have represented only a portion of his total salary, if it is true that Modena was paid 220 ducatoni (about 250 scudi) for his work as a rabbi.49 Modena taught, delivered weekly sermons and wrote a number of letters to acquaintances in Rome and Venice in which he complained vaguely about the Jewish community, the city and the “bad air.”50 Jacob Albah, a rabbi who had studied in Safed and also spent some time preaching in Florence, before Modena, was more favorably impressed, finding the residents there righteous, worthy and eager to learn.51 The Jews of Florence may have begun to seek the services of rabbis and doctors from outside of Florence within a decade of the ghettoization. The first was Vitale di Magister Salamone da Cascino hebreo, a physician who seems to have come to Florence in about 1579, when he was matriculated into the Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants.52 In 1580 he lodged, with other foreign Jews, in the house of Iacob di Laudadio de Blanis in the ghetto.53 It seems likely that he had been invited to Florence to be the doctor of the community, and possibly also its rabbi.54 Vitale’s special status is suggested by the fact that he was a governor in the ghetto for three consecutive years, 1580–81, 1581–82 and 1582–83. In 1578–79 the board of governors had still seated ten;

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Commune and Community the books for 1579–80 are lost; in 1580–81 the change to four was already effective and Vitale was in place. That he and no other Jew served in consecutive years leads me to think that Vitale was a strong political influence in the ghetto, perhaps even responsible for the shift to a smaller governing body. Having voluntarily moved into the ghetto, Vitale di Salamone and his three sons chose just a few years later to move out of it, converting to Christianity in or about 1583 and remaining in the city of Florence to practice medicine (for a potentially much larger and wealthier clientele), under the new family name, Medici. A sermon he is supposed to have preached in 1583 to convince the Jews to convert, published in Italian with a fair smattering of Hebrew (as well as Latin), is clearly the work of a well-educated man, while the other sermons he published at the same time (1585) reveal a well-read and thoughtful Christian theologian and preacher at work.55 Vitale Medici might perhaps fit into one of the categories of converts in a typology recently offered by Joseph Shatzmiller: an active communal leader, disillusioned or angry after his community rejects or frustrates his efforts at reform.56 We would like to hear the villainies and injurious words spoken against him in August 1582—just before his reelection to the ghetto government—by Manuello di Buondi in the ghetto, which led to Manuello being fined the very heavy penalty of 4 scudi for disrespecting an officer.57 However, we do not have access to the events of the year except through Vitale’s own conversion narrative, which follows a Lucan reading of Paul’s conversion, and describes an Augustinian moment of being flooded with the light of truth while studying a text—a Hebrew biblical text.58 His intellectual and spiritual struggles must have begun before he came to Florence, where he may have come to understand that his sons were not going to be able to easily pursue careers as physicians if they remained Jews. The boys were converted shortly after the father, taking new names and ultimately attending university. Two of his sons matriculated, as Christians, in the Florentine Arte de Medici e Speziali as doctors, and a third son became a priest and theologian.59 Were there other rabbis or rabbinic scholars living in or visiting Florence in these decades after 1571 when Jewish scholarship and culture continued to thrive elsewhere, in Italian cities such as Mantua, Ferrara, Venice, Pesaro, Padua, Verona, some smaller centers and farther off, especially in the great centers in Poland and in the Ottoman Empire?60 A number of Jews appear in texts with the abbreviated honorific symbols “mgo” or “mo,” used by Florentines scribes for the terms magistro and maestro, which could designate guild masters,61 teachers of all sorts62 and rabbinic scholars. We often cannot tell from this title what level or kind of education had been achieved by the one so designated. The presence of a rabbinic scholar named Grazia Dio Ghirone was noted

Developing Jewish Community on the copy of a ban published in the ghetto in 1598; he bore a magnificent title, mixing Italian and Hebrew: “M[agis]tro Ecc[elen]te Sig[nor] H . akham.” We recall from Chapter Seven that in 1595 the ghetto government first passed an ordinance against Jews going to gentile courts, but it never brought it to the Nove for approval—and could not have. Three years later in 1598, now with the full support of a rabbi who could pronounce the ban with authority and who could, presumably, also oversee or guide the work of Jewish arbitrators who would be chosen to settle disputes, the effort to stop the Jews from going to Florentine courts without express permission from the ghetto governors was renewed most solemnly.63 And, the governors added, “to whomever shall dare to act contrary to the above, let [all the saints and holy angels] add all the unhappy maledictions, sorrows and torments that are written into the Book of the Torah of Moses so that they may render him damned and condemned, in body and in mind, in this world and in the other world, G-d forbid.”64 The first person explicitly called a rabbi on the lists of governors entered into the record books of the Nove was a “Rabi Iacobbe Diovaglia,” one of the three elected governors of the ghetto in 1603.65 Through 1612 he was the only person explicitly called a rabbi who served a term as governor. Even the chancellors do not seem to have been rabbis: Leon da Pesaro, David Bettarbo and Isach Gallico were chancellors from 1588 to 1612, after Raffaello di Cipriano finally stepped down; none of them appears to have had a rabbinic title.66 More explicit information concerning the history of rabbis in Florence comes from a list of the rabbis of Florence, copied sometime after 1668 in Hebrew from a lost minute-book of the Italian Jewish community of the Florentine ghetto.67 According to this list, there was an official rabbi of the community, beginning in 1611: The great rabbi, the honorable teacher, Rabbi H . ayyim Fintsi, a teacher of righteousness, who came here from Pisaro in the year [5]371 [1611] by means of the great rabbi, the honorable teacher Rabbi Yedidyah Galanti of Tsefat,68 as is seen in the minute-book of the council, and he died in the year [5]381 [1621]. And during his days he had a true helper, the h. akham, the pious honorable teacher, Rabbi Mosheh ibn Basa mi-Blanis of blessed memory, and he also judged the people until the year of the plague, that is, in [5]390 [1630]. And after him the h. akham, the honorable teacher, Rabbi Yitsh.ak. Calo of blessed memory . . . , and after him, Rabbi Avraham Yedidyah Shalit of blessed memory from Rosh Chodesh Iyyar [5]390, and this rabbi died in [the month of] Tammuz. And Calo was buried on Rosh Chodesh Iyyar; and Rabbi David Dienna, he too was a shepherd over the people Israel in this Holy Community, and he died in Pisa on the 21st of Tammuz [5]408 [1648]. . . . Yeh.iel Fintsi [who is still alive] from Pisaro, he also [word obscured] over Israel in this holy Italian congregation from the year [5]410 [1650] until [5]428 [1668].69




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From Unification to Ethnic Differentiation in the Ghetto By 1611 a generation of Jewish men born and raised in the ghetto had matured, married, had children and established themselves as the leading families and “members” of the ghetto community. The tumult and disruption of ghettoization had quieted. The many social, religious and educational activities that had previously been conducted within individual households were now at least partially performed in the public realm and seen as communal activities which could be controlled by public ordinances. Religious worship, the education of boys, the marriage of girls, the purchase of kosher meat, even the seating arrangements in the synagogue, had become matters of concern to the ghetto’s governing elite. The governors of the ghetto had used their new-found authority to unify the Jews as a religious community. For the governors, this meant that there could be only one place where public prayer occurred. It was in the public religious setting that the social order was expressed and controlled. It was during the public prayer that all in the community would see who was honored, who was present, who deprived of the right to participate, who in charge. From 1571 to 1611 the governors passed regulations that aimed to unify public religious expression. These assumed that all public prayer took place in the synagogue and that Jews of all origins were capable of praying together in one synagogue, which was also used for various types of communal meetings. It is in the context of this public worship that we see the first signs of the division of the new community into sub-communities.

Italian and Levantine Jews In their effort to strengthen the community, and their grip on it, the governors inevitably took it upon themselves to decide what public prayer would be heard and how it would be recited or sung. Whether and how people prayed outside the communal synagogue was not a concern addressed in the public ordinances, but what was said, sung and done inside the synagogue was of tremendous concern. There was, as we saw in Chapter Seven, resistance to these social disciplinary efforts. In an early ordinance the governors set a fine for talking during the service; they also attempted to prevent merchants in the ghetto from opening shop before the morning service had come near to its conclusion.70 In 1609 they found it necessary to mandate the use of a particular rite and prayer book, ruling out musical and liturgical innovations or influences from non-“Italian” Jewish traditions: “No one may

Developing Jewish Community change the service from the Italian rite, nor sing it other than the Italian way, as is customary and as was written in the books called Magazzor Bolognesi, recently reprinted,71 and as in the other, earlier editions, under the penalty that whosoever contradicts and contravenes will be prohibited for six months from reciting the [prayer] service.”72 We should note the reference to the holy day prayer book of Bologna as “Italian” and to the “Italian rite” and “Italian way” rather than to the “Roman rite,” which was the common way of referring to the specific liturgical tradition preserved in that particular prayer book.73 This language points to an important trend in Jewish history and indeed in early modern European history in this period: the consolidation of specific liturgical traditions and religious customs and their association with a larger ethnic or national identity—confessionalization. Jews in Tuscany were of diverse socioeconomic status and regional origins as was acknowledged by the privileging of Jewish Levantine merchants in 1551. In the 1570s the Jews who lived in the ghetto had ancestors in northern and southern Italian cities; in the Ottoman Empire and in Spain or Portugal; in France, in Germany and surely elsewhere as well. With different traditions and languages, there were religious differences among these Jews as well, as we noted in our survey of the various settings for prayer in Florence before the ghetto. We saw in Chapter One that policies informed by Christianity attempted to “flatten” Jewish hierarchies and deny other significant differences among Jews in order to accentuate the otherness of Jews and their difference from Christians. In the ghetto’s first generation, men of long-time northern Italian, Roman, Spanish and German origin seem to have worked together to operate the ghetto—and seem to have accepted the “Italian” rite, represented by the Mah. zor of Bologna (which the Jews of Florence did not refer to as the Roman rite, though they might have), to guide the ritual practice of their communal synagogue. The consolidation of a rite thought of as “Italian,” as we see here, and an identity as an “Italian Jew” is worth considering, since Florentine Christians were not referring to themselves as “Italians.” The Italian Jewish identity invoked by the Jews of the ghetto (and referred to by Leon Modena in the same period) may have developed similarly to “Ashkenazic” identity. Both were facilitated by the printing press: the availability of the printed prayerbook galvanized loyalty to the Italian rite; the running glosses of Rabbi Moses Isserles included with Joseph Caro’s Shulh. an Arukh defined the local traditions of Jews in Germany and Poland as one unified tradition—an “Ashkenazic” rite—different from the one being standardized for Jews of

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Commune and Community Mediterranean and Iberian origin.74 This was not simply a matter of relocated Jews maintaining loyalty to specific geographic regions and liturgical traditions, a pattern seen throughout the Ottoman Empire after the arrival there in the fifteenth and sixteenth century of Spanish and Sicilian Jews. The claim to the new early modern Jewish “Italian” identity was not necessarily grounded in a loyalty that stemmed from historic provenance, and it was not only liturgically defined. Italian Jewish identity, like Ashkenazic identity, was forged in a dialectical process with another Jewish identity. But while Ashkenazic identity developed in the early modern era in tandem with and in opposition to Sephardic identity, both as imagined diasporas, “Italian” Jewish identity developed in part against “Levantine” identity. All the nations of the world were being represented as figures in couples on the margins of the maps of Christian European cartographers, but not the Jew (or Jewish couple), who must have seemed to the Christian of the time to be unassociated with any one particular land mass, coast or island.75 But if the Jews were not located on these maps, they were being located in ghettos. And meanwhile, they worked out the same relationships that were being forged by the authors and readers of maps and other print genres that helped Europeans order their increasingly complex world of knowledge: the relationship of land of origin and land of residence, the relationship of political authority and of the authority of specific religious customs, cultural and intellectual traditions; the relationship of the sexes and their gender roles. Italian Jews —located firmly in the ghettos in which they increasingly lived—presented a claim to Italianness in contrast to the foreignness of their Levantine coreligionists, as privileged as that was for the commercially sought-out merchants. The 1609 rule protecting the “Italian” rite in the Florentine ghetto might be understood as a demand for uniformity, expressing the governors’ hegemonic claim to define custom and usage in the ghetto. But additional evidence suggests that the number of Jews asserting a Levantine identity there had increased to the point where the Italian-born majority felt a threat to their own cultural dominance in the ghetto. Despite the fact that Levantine Jewish merchants were not invited to Florence by the famous privileges of 1593, which explicitly invited them to settle in Livorno and Pisa, they came to Florence as well.76 The population grew, and in 1639, after nearly a decade of court proceedings, the Levantine Jews in Florence were successful in their effort to be declared a separate community, complete with their own legal arbitration, chancellor and synagogue. It is necessary from that point on to speak of the Italian Jewish community in the ghetto and of the Levantine community in the ghetto.77

Developing Jewish Community

Gendered Communities in the Ghetto Until their separation Levantine Jews had expected to worship together with Italian Jews—a category that had already absorbed some Jews who might have elsewhere become “Ashkenazic”—using the Italian rite and acting as one religious community. Men and women, on the other hand, had never belonged to exactly the same religious community, at least in the socio-spatial terms that we have considered so important. The creation of gendered ritual space in the ghetto period of Italian Jewish history has been studied in relation to a more general shift of the early modern, Catholic Reformation era toward the separation of the sacred and the profane in both time and space. But in the Florentine ghetto gender segregation was not a result of a gradual process such as the one Elliott Horowitz revealed in his study of the transformation of the night-vigil or circumcision watch.78 It was almost immediate. Once prayer was organized and removed from the realm of private home, it was public and governable, and therefore had to be ordered by men whose task was to assure its performance and benefit to the community. Now that there was always a quorum of ten available adult Jewish men, prayer services and study in the ghetto had a permanently masculine face; that is, prayers would always be considered “public.” Although the architecture of the first synagogue in the ghetto is unknown, it had two spaces which were, at least conceptually, completely distinct: a scuola for the men and a scuola for the women. Women also therefore had a “public” religious life, in that they gathered with other women to pray, but the space they occupied was not the equivalent of the space occupied by the men. In all gender-segregated synagogues, the rituals pertaining to the reading of the Torah took place in the “main” sanctum where the men sat, from which women were excluded. In Florence, therefore, women had their own space for worship, but they were not left to control it on their own. In 1609 the governors of the ghetto gave themselves authority to appoint two women to keep order in the women’s scuola. Thus it was decided “that the scuola where the women go must be communal, to each woman; and that on the Sabbath and festival days it shall be the responsibility of the governors to elect two women to seat them, so that there should not arise among them disputes and discord, and so that they might sit quietly, and in peace.”79 Men also competed for seating, but to prevent discord the governors established fixed reserved seating for honored men in the congregation. Rather than allow the women to appoint their own representatives who

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Commune and Community would work out a similar permanent seating arrangement, the governors gave themselves the power to appoint two women as overseers. These women were not to be appointed to a permanent or annual position of leadership: the way the governors worded the regulation, they could appoint women arbitrarily each week and holiday, thus discouraging any continuity that might lead to the cultivation of autonomous female leadership in the ghetto, while perhaps ensuring that each newly elected board of governors could ensure the honored status—and the related seats—of their own wives. Despite their exclusion from the public religious and political domain, Jewish women in the ghetto developed autonomous institutions and leaders, though later than Jewish men did. The spatial relocation from the independent family house in a town or rural environment to the urban ghetto changed the way Jewish women socialized and worked, enabling them to build networks that reached beyond the horizontal relations with kin and the vertical relations with a household. A consororal society, the Compagnia delle Donne, existed by at least 15 April 1669, when (female) governors (“governatrici [della] detta compagnia delle donne”) gave money apart from that given by the “fund for marrying maidens” for the marriage of Chiara to Isaac.80 This society coexisted alongside the Society for Provision of Dowries (Moar Abitulod, referred to above), and in several cases the two societies contributed equally to provide a dowry. One of the dowries went to Sarra, the daughter of Lazzero Calò who was a relative, if not the daughter, of Laura Calò, one of the two current governors of the society.81 Women in other Jewish communities in the sixteenth century had belonged, in some cases, to societies along with men; we referred earlier to such institutions in Bologna and Ferrara. But their numbers in these societies were small and dwindled: Rivlin tells us that there were fourteen women in the society in Ferrara in 1516, eight in 1553 and none in 1584 and 1647.82 Excluded from “communal” confraternal societies—whose membership in Florence was largely coterminous with the male governing elite—women founded their own societies. The institutional history of Jewish women’s societies is still being written, but the Florentine compagnia delle donne seems to be one of the very first in evidence anywhere in early modern Europe or America.83 It thus seems that we might even speak of the historical development of a community of women in the ghetto, the institutionalization of which was distinct from and somewhat slower to emerge than the institutionalization of the community of men.
Before the state took the steps that made the Jews a semi-autonomous community in 1571, the primary social unit of the Jews in Florence and Tus-

Developing Jewish Community cany was the household and the primary social relationships were kinship, marriage and patronage. There are few signs of other deliberate social acts that institutionalized community at that time in Tuscany. It may be that the Jews did not develop social institutions before 1570 because they were so few in number that they did not need to formalize their relationships. Alternatively, one might imagine that they deliberately kept a low profile because of their uncertain political status. It should also be said that a number of very highly educated Jews in Tuscany—men who might have attempted to organize the Jews, found societies or establish schools—died or chose to convert to Christianity in the 1550s and 1560s: Yeh. iel Nissim da Pisa, among those who did not convert, Allessandro Franceschini da Foligno (Graziadio/Hananel da Foligno) and Fabiano Fioghi of Monte San Savino among those who did.84 We should also consider that once organized, institutions attract the attention of those who might wish to harness them or their new leaders for purposes other than that for which they were founded. But even without prominent Jewish leaders, the diffusion of Jewish religious knowledge and leadership activities throughout the population played an important role in the survival of Jewish culture and identity. It is the key to a model of Jewish cultural praxis and communal identity that coexisted with and was sometimes preferred to the organized, institutional model. Communal institutions in the ghetto developed in response to the social, political, demographic and economic changes that accompanied ghettoization. The expulsion and forced transfer to the city displaced individuals from larger households, some of which would no longer provide for the needs of the poor, the sick and the young or disaffected. Acting as a new community, the Jews did not abandon the needy to their likely fate, be it emigration, conversion or a life of prostitution, theft or begging. As the Jews settled into the ghetto as a permanent home, an economic elite and governing class quickly solidified and began to shift its focus from preserving the status of specific lineages to building the future of the community. On the one hand, the leaders, closely allied with the state authorities, set about instilling a sense of cohesion and trust by providing for the population’s basic needs. Facing resistance, the leadership began to reach out to the community for occasional general assemblies and regular town meetings. On the other hand, they raised funds to insure the socialization and subordination of young men and women through education and marriage. In the Florentine ghetto the formation of the community was a process driven by hundreds of daily interactions of which no record has been preserved. The most intense centers of this process, the dynamic and the conflicts, are evidenced in communal regulations and in the records of the

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Commune and Community ghetto’s institutions. As the bonds that tied Jews together in the ghetto strengthened and multiplied, their institutions became more complex. The creation of communal institutions was a process of continuous growth and transformation that was never “completed.” The fundamental institutions were, however, all in place by the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century: self-government; funds to help feed and control the poor and to socialize boys (through education) and girls (through marriage); and a communal rabbi. Although at first it seems that it reduced the complex of identities of the Jewish residents of Tuscany down to their Jewishness, the ghettoization in fact filtered and separated the distinct aspects of being a Florentine Jew: Jewishness, communality and Italianness. That is, the Jewish population of Florence became a locally rooted, Italian Jewish community, separated from the outside because of its religion. The ghettoization was designed to intensify otherness and hierarchical order in ways that were consistent with the prevalent norms of the larger society. This order was expressed by the division of Jews and Christians, but also internally by the intensified stratification of men and women (gender), of class and of ethnicity. The ease with which the ghettoization policy was effected, and the rapidity with which the Jews became a semi-autonomous commune, is evidence of the great extent to which the Jews of early modern Tuscany were an integral part of the political, religious and economic culture of the Medici state. They were, finally, among the last of Cosimo’s subjects to be brought fully under his great administrative umbrella as participants in the balancing of dependence and semi-autonomy that gave solid structure to his state.

Conclusion

In this study I have attempted to explain why the rulers of the Medici state chose to ghettoize the Jews and how that act affected the Jews. Peter Sahlins remarked that “ideas about geography, history, and strategy coexisted and shaped each other in different contexts. They appeared in no set hierarchical order of importance.”1 Similarly, ideas about religion and about the physical ordering of space coexisted and shaped each other, as did material signs, tools and institutions. They infused each other with meaning and suggested new possibilities to those who would use them. The ghetto was one such idea, tool and institution. The purpose to which it was put differed in each state, and the effect it had on the Jews in each state differed according to the circumstances. In the Florentine state, the impact of the decision to ghettoize the Jews was great and immediate. The Jews were expelled, stripped of their privileges, subjected to one law for the first time, forced to move to Florence and required to collect taxes and be governed as a community. There was no collective resistance to the state’s action because, before the ghettoization, there was no collective organization of Jews. Some of the elite attempted to protect themselves. Facing the choice of expulsion or ghettoization (or conversion), many of the wealthier families (almost all the Jews who had owned or operated banks) left Tuscany rather than move to Florence. A number of individuals and some small groups of families converted to Christianity. Most of the Jews came to live in the ghetto. This book has explored the expulsion and ghettoization of the Jews in Florence to make two contributions to the larger understanding and integration of Jewish and early modern European history. First, this study offers a new interpretation of ghettoization. I have argued that the early modern ghettoization of the Jews should not be seen as part of a continuously developing history of persecution and segregation, nor as a result of CounterReformation Catholic zeal. Rather, the ghetto—the physical and legal

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Conclusion entity—should be seen as a specifically early modern tool, put to use by different states to meet a range of specific political, religious, economic and administrative purposes. In Tuscany the ghetto played a key role in the Medici’s symbolic self-representation and legitimation as rulers of a rightordered and efficiently organized and administered Catholic state. It also organized the population of Jews in Tuscany in a way that was administratively and spatially suited to the regime’s developing bureaucratic statecraft. The second broad contribution of this book is the challenge it intends to pose to commonly accepted assumptions about the nature of premodern Jewish identity and Jewish communities. The examination of Jewish life in Tuscany before the ghetto, especially in Chapter Three, opening the definition of “community,” led to the argument of subsequent chapters that in many ways it was the act of ghettoization that “made” a Jewish community in Florence. We saw that although they were part of a broader diaspora community and perhaps of a regional, Italian subset of that historic nation, the Jews in the villages of Tuscany before ghettoization were neither already one “community” nor a group of individual k. ehillot, as these words are commonly used. The ghetto walls and laws symbolically and functionally grouped together individuals who had until then been seen by Christians and by the state as individuals with occupations—bankers, doctors, merchants and artisans— and as individuals and families with a place of origin—locally born or foreign-born. In the ghetto socioeconomic status and provenance were eclipsed as the state reconfirmed that religion was the primary category of identification, with gender close behind it. Paradoxically, the religious commonality of the Jews was then overshadowed by the new kind of communality they were assigned. It was a Jewish communality made local, established in law, in administrative structure and in the logic of urban architecture. It was the state that, first through this legal transformation and then through their physical relocation, fashioned the Jews into a local, self-governing community in Florence. In this newly organized urban context, the new Jewish governing elite excluded the participation of women and enforced a more rigid set of gender definitions. At the same time—and no doubt related to that definition—the leaders of the new community drew on a rich religious and cultural tradition, fashioning themselves a “holy community.” The republican myth of Florence and the image of the democratically governed Jewish k. ehillah coalesced in a community represented by and governed by a new, all-male elite whose status was not based on noble lineage or great wealth. The timelessness of the image and construct of “holy commu-

Conclusion nity” notwithstanding, it was the Medici whose enterprise catalyzed the development of the institutions and social dynamics that remade the Jews. In the ghetto, the social identity of the Jews was dramatically reshaped. The refugees were required to associate almost exclusively with one another; they were obliged to organize themselves religiously, politically and economically; they were turned into a localized community. Although we do not have the data we would need to discuss the Jews’ subjectivity, we have identified important implications of this change for their class structure, religious organization, gender roles and interaction with Christians. Before the ghettoization, as we have seen, the Tuscan Jews had few if any of the defining institutions, hierarchies or even places that have been thought to define Jewish life. Ironically, it was to a large extent the act of forcing the Jews to take up residence in their newly bounded neighborhood that created the Jewish institutions and Jewish community that much of Jewish scholarship presumes necessarily existed all along as a natural outgrowth of Jewish religiousethnic identity. The description of pre-ghetto life I have offered in Chapter Three helps explain how in fact Jews did live “Jewishly” even without the assistance of rabbinically led, organized and localized communities. Florence may seem exceptional, but the description of the pre-ghetto life of the Jews of Tuscany that emerges from the archival sources makes it possible to imagine that the case of the Tuscan Jews is not idiosyncratic but rather quite possibly normative for Jews in other eras and regions, wherever and whenever states did not officially support Jewish self-government or establish ghettos. Indeed, the long-held, preciously guarded tenet that Jews immemorially adhered voluntarily to Jewish law and voluntarily affirmed Jewish communal and religious leadership can be reappraised only after thorough case studies such as this one lead their readers to reexamine other cases. While most historians assume that Jews in the premodern world lived as semi-autonomous communities, and begin from there, we began with a population (not a community) of Jews and exposed in detail the way this population was turned, and developed, into a “community.” The picture drawn here of Jewish life before ghettoization should strike the reader as quite different from the one offered in the widely read works of Robert Bonfil and in the older historiographic literature on medieval Jewry familiar to most scholars of modern Jewish history, which reflects the perspective of medieval and early modern rabbinic elites. These chapters have shown that before the creation of the ghetto, Jews not only lived scattered in towns and villages throughout Tuscany, living among their gentile neighbors, but also that they most often lived in harmony and even sometimes in close relationships with

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Conclusion them. The archives suggest that when the expulsion order arrived, many of their neighbors spoke in defense of local Jews, and almost none trotted out the culturally available negative stereotypes and accusations that one might have expected to greet such an order. In addition, the Jews in Tuscany before ghettoization were people who had no self-government, no appointed rabbis and no communal-tax collection. We know that in early modern Europe the authority of the state and state power were often built upon a social order of constituted bodies, rather than at their expense. What the Tuscan case study adds to this model is an appreciation of the active role of the ruler (using bureaucratic technologies) in constituting the Jews as such a body in order to regularize them as a group through which state power could be exercised and order established. For the Jews of Tuscany, politically institutionalized, geographically located communal “Jewishness” was therefore an effect of such government instrumentality in the process of state formation and the ghetto of Florence was an early modern construction of Jewishness, within the physical walls of which the Jews built a new community. That the state was involved in the reconstruction of Jewishness in the sixteenth century (and not for the first time in the eighteenth) is an important corrective to the image of the essentially static Jewish premodern community that scholars are still working to revise. The early modern period is now understood to be the period in European history that saw both the diversification and differentiation of identities and the consolidation and standardization of national, racial and religious “types,” gender differences, cultures, rites and confessions. The spatial separation of Jews and Christians through ghettoization and the enforcement of religious and gender hierarchies was key to this process. And yet, though set aside in theory as dangerous and in need of subordination, the Jews in their ghetto seem to us to be not unlike the people of one of the city’s post-Tridentine parishes, and very much like the people of the state’s many other semi-autonomous communes. Indeed, by shining our spotlight on the way the state managed and controlled this sector of the Tuscan population we illuminate the early use of many of the tools and strategies the state employed more generally. Particularly well lit are those related to the organization of the population and the effort to achieve and maintain stability by controlling mobility and communication and by limiting social and intellectual contact to ever more homogenous circles. The treatment of the Jews fit with the general efforts of early modern states to contain, regulate, control, identify and “spatialize” particular groups of people in an age of increasing religious diversity. Jews, like everyone else in early modern European communities, found themselves subjected to the increasing ambitions

Conclusion of states, which in turn found new ways to exercise their power and control in spatial terms.
The ghettoization of the Jews in other states has been discussed in scholarship until now in the context of competing Christian impulses to either expel or convert the Jews. In Venice economic considerations led to a compromise with a preference to expel; in Rome the ghetto was established as a compromise with the desire to enforce conversion. There was no real place for the Jews, according to historians who have studied Jewish-Christian relations in early modern Europe, and so they were marginalized. My argument fundamentally inverts this approach. The ghetto, as I see it in the context of early modern Europe, was created as a new place for Jews, a semiotic and architectural marker of their place in a Christian world that was divided into increasingly confessionalized states. But despite continuity with medieval precedent for segregation, the focus on the spatial location of this “place” was new. My contribution here is the argument that as a spatially located, bounded community, the ghetto should be seen, not primarily in the context of medieval segregation (which had been largely limited to a Jewish badge of one type or another), but in the context of the sixteenth-century enclosure of monasteries and the creation of a strictly defined grid of parish-communities that was part of the program of the Council of Trent. The ghetto was in fact the space created for Jews in early modern western and southern Europe that worked the best for Jewish communal life. The other options early modern Christian rulers, states and cities pursued were expulsion, the distribution of individual privileges, the quiet tolerance of unorganized individuals and, in some regions, protection by overlords (which set Jews up for hostile relations with all those who resented or competed with the authority of those overlords). The ghetto was a system that, though it physically expressed and enforced Jewish subordination, allowed Jews to live in relative peace and stability. It has been important to distinguish between the larger functions ghettos served in the early modern Catholic states and the historically contingent factors that led to the creation of specific ghettos. For Florence, the spatialization of power was a tool deliberately adopted by the Medici for their political benefit. In the enforced spatial organization and deliberate location of the Jews in the ghetto, in this act of incorporation and localization, we can observe an early move toward a territorially oriented assertion of state authority, a new interest in the employment of a set of physical boundaries to define the subjects of the state. In drawing a physical boundary-line around the Jews in Florence, the Medici drew on the newly important con-

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Conclusion ceptual language of the Tridentine Church, with its focus on the boundaried and closely supervised parish that was critical to its program and success. In short, I have argued that as the parish became more clearly defined as the dominant communal unit in Catholic lands, the Jews’ residence within parish boundaries became more incongruous. The creation of ghettos gave the Jews what were, in effect, their own parishes. Ghettoization in Florence was a development of the administratively and religiously defined order imposed on the Tuscan population by an early modern regime that aggressively sought out, adapted and employed new technologies of power. Although the Medici did not ghettoize the Jews in order to satisfy papal demands, as earlier scholarship would have it, religion has certainly been underestimated as a factor in early modern politics in Tuscany. The history of the Florentine ghettoization demonstrates that the symbolic logic, language and architecture of the developing Medici state were deliberately infused with Christian tradition and specifically shaped by tools and strategies developed at the Council of Trent. In other words, this study of the ghettoization of the Jews of Florence reveals the infrequently acknowledged importance of the church in the state-building policies of Cosimo de’ Medici I, that administrative genius whose advisors were trained in libraries stocked with works of Machiavelli and Guiccardini.
The Florentine ghetto was never the largest or the most influential Jewish community in Europe or even in the Italian states. On the other hand, the Medici state was culturally one of the most influential states. It was among those that employed the most politically sophisticated statecraft, and, among the Italian states, it was one of the most independent of the Roman Church. The study of the Florentine ghetto illuminates critical subjects: state-building, confessionalization, church-state relations and the creation of technologies and methods of policing and surveillance in the early modern west. The ghettoization of the Jews is clearly useful as a case study in the construction of community. The process studied here invites comparison with the “communal identities” adopted or experienced at specific times by other ethnic, religious and professional groups and, ultimately, by “racial,” sexual and other modern, socially defined minorities.2 But the Florentine case also poses a specific challenge to commonly accepted assumptions about the nature of premodern Jewish identity and community, and exposes the role of the state in forming and shaping Jewish community. It is my hope that this study of Florentine history will challenge scholars to reexamine the creation of other early modern ghettos and the uses to which they were put. Indeed, I hope that readers of this book will understand that Florentine Jewish his-

Conclusion tory is not an “exception” but rather a call to reexamine our broadest assumptions about Jewish communities of other times and places. Where it may be tempting for some scholars to dismiss the Jews of Tuscany as unusually acculturated (or uncultured) because of the intensity in Tuscany of the “Renaissance,” I believe the evidence presented here of persistent Jewish daily and religious life independent of Jewish communal-institutional life should prompt the reexamination of the formation and transformation of Jewish communities elsewhere, both before and after the time studied here, in the context of ghettoization and in the contexts of other moments of state or local political intervention. I am eager to see, in the next generation of scholarship, once we have forcefully questioned the dominant paradigms, what may happen to our understanding of the history of the Jewish people, of Jewish-Christian relations and, more broadly, of the interaction of minorities and majorities and the construction of social identities. This book has presented the construction of the ghetto community of Florence, with dual emphasis on construction and community. It was important to me to tell the story of the Jews of Tuscany both because the great and impressive body of scholarship on Florentine history has not yet integrated the history of the Jews in that state and because the exploration of their story in the famous city of Florence provides such an instructive contrast with the already well-known histories of the Jews of Venice and Rome. But when we ask why the Medici ghettoized the Jews we are really asking how the emergent early modern state benefited from incorporating new groups and from reinforcing religious categories and social hierarchies. We can see how the state used and shaped communal life to compensate for the social disruption it caused in its quest for greater control over individuals and potentially threatening groups. Indeed, for the purpose of exploring the meaning and usefulness to the early modern state of “communities,” there may be no better example than the ghetto. In the Florentine ghetto we find the early modern state’s (almost) model community: it was religiously unified; it balanced local autonomy with subordination to and dependence on state authority; it was patriarchal. In the creation of the ghetto of Florence a population was transferred; a community was deliberately constructed and organized to govern itself for the first time; a religious group became one with a neighborhood. Ultimately, in the making of the ghetto of Florence, Cosimo and Francesco de’ Medici made for the Jews a new place within the Catholic landscape. In so doing, they contributed to the transformation of the ghetto into a standard urban feature of the early modern map and an enduring administrative unit of the early modern Italian city.

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Abbreviations

The following abbreviations for archives are used in the Notes: AAF ACEF ASE ASF ASP ASV BNF

Archivio Storico della Curia Arcivescovile di Firenze Archivio della Comunità Ebraica di Firenze Archivio Storico Empolese Archivio di Stato di Firenze Archivio di Stato di Pisa Archivio Segreto Vaticano Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze

The following abbreviations are used for fonts in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF): AMS Lana Linaioli MGS Misc. Med. MP NA NM Nove Nunz. OGP Possessioni Riformagioni Sanità Seta Statuti

Arte dei Medici e Speziali Arte della Lana Università dei Linaioli Magistrato Supremo Miscellanea Medicea Mediceo del Principato Notarile Antecosimiano Notarile Moderno Nove Conservatori del Dominio e della Iursidizione Fiorentina Nunziatura Apostolica Otto di Guardia e di Balía del Principato Scrittoio delle Regie Possessioni Auditore poi Segretario delle Riformagioni Ufficiali di Sanità Arte della Seta o Por S. Maria Statuti delle Comunità Autonome e Soggette

Notes

Preface 1. These letters, dated 30 June 1570 and 7 July 1570, are found in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF) in a bound collection of the Magistrato Supremo (MGS) 4449 (96a–97a). 2. A copy of the edict, “Decreto et general’ editto sopra li hebrei che di presente habitano nel Dominio Fiorentino,” is found in MGS 4450, 2v–5r, and is the text used here. Another copy is found in MGS 4449, 98v–100v, discussed in Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 110–11. Lelio Torelli, Cosimo’s secretary, approved the draft submitted in the name of Francesco Vinta, adding his signature on 28 September 1570 (he spelled his own name Vintha there and elsewhere, but historians have standardized that to “Vinta” and I follow that convention). “Ducal edicts were law, and under Cosimo they were countersigned by the Auditore della Camera, as first secretary, and published in the name of the Magistrato Supremo,” according to Litchfield, Emergence of a Bureaucracy, 89. The author was Carlo Pitti, who had been working on the drafting of the edict since mid-August; the official text was published (bandito) on 3 October 1570. It is included in Cantini, Legislazione toscana 7: 253–55, and a copy of the original is reproduced here as Figure 1. 3. The chronology of these events and the documents in MGS 4449 and 4450 are presented in detail in Chapter Four. The edict did not apply to the Jews of the administratively distinct ducal territory of Siena, and the Jews of Siena were not counted in the census; a few months later, however, there was a similar edict regarding the Jews in that territory, who were required to move into a ghetto in Siena. 4. MGS 4449, 106r–7v. The text is published as “Bando sopra gli ebrei del di 31 Luglio 1571” in Cantini, Legislazione toscana 7: 376–78. 5. For the attacks on rabbinic literature, see Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, 51–76, and for the medieval expansion of church prerogative to police the religious culture of the Jews, ibid., 96–99. 6. On the converts and Christian Hebraists involved, see Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder, 111–35. 7. On the Venetian Inquisition’s exclusive competence over Christians and the excluded status of Jews as “infidels,” see Ioly Zorattini, “Jews, Crypto-Jews and the Inquisition,” 105. After 1600, Jews also became subject to the Venetian Inquisition for reasons other than heresy such as the crime of improper social intercourse with Christians, witchcraft and abuse of the Christian faith (ibid., 108–15).

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Notes to Preface 8. For Christian heresies in sixteenth-century Italian states, on which there is a fast-growing literature, see especially Martin, The Enemy Within; Grendler, The Roman Inquisition; and Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice. 9. For the view that the Venetian Inquisition made its most serious moves against Marranos or heretics who were particularly public and scandalous, see Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, and for the classic account of the irrepressibly verbal miller Menocchio, see Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms. For a recent discussion of the leniency of the Venetian Inquisition to the crime of judaizing, see also Ioly Zorattini, “Jews, Crypto-Jews, and the Inquisition,” 97–108. In discussing the exclusion of non-Catholics, mention should be made of the tolerance—or indifference—of the Venetians to Greek Orthodox and Armenians in Venice. See Ravid, “Myth of Venice and Lachrymose Conception,” 173–74 and literature cited there. 10. The purpose of the censorship of rabbinic literature and the prohibition of the Talmud is a subject of debate. While an obvious explanation for the Talmud’s place on the Indices of Prohibited Books might be that it was seen as a source of potentially heretical ideas which would further weaken the Catholic Church, Kenneth R. Stow argued with impressive documentary support that the Talmud was banned primarily as part of a plan to weaken Jewish faith and resistance to Christianity in order that the Jews might be more easily converted. See Stow, “The Burning of the Talmud in 1553.” The contemporary Hebrew witness to the burnings that occurred is compiled by Yaari in Serefat ha-Talmud be-Italyah.

Introduction: Early Modern Boundaries 1. The edict, referred to in the Preface, was approved 26 September and published 3 October 1570. See Figure 1. The text is discussed below in Chapter One. The provisions were relevant to the Jews of the Florentine dominion, which was administratively distinguished from the state of Siena, also under Medici rule. See Preface, notes 2 and 3. 2. On the derivation of the word ghetto and the origins of the Venetian ghettos, see Ravid, “Religious, Economic, and Social Background,” 211–59 and Concina, “Parva Jerusalem,” 9–155. There is very extensive literature on the origins of the Venetian ghetto, discussed further in Chapter One. 3. Nineteenth-century photographs of the Florentine ghetto have been preserved, and a number of them, as well as eighteenth-century plans of the (enlarged) ghetto, are reproduced in Bini, La città degli ebrei. See also Orefice, Rilievi e memorie. 4. De Vries, European Urbanization, appendix I; Genoa, Milan and Bologna have similarly sized populations; Venice was much larger, Rome smaller. The population of Florence was somewhat over 59,000 according to a census of 25 February 1562; in the whole of the state there were 560,354 inhabitants. See D’Addario, Aspetti della Controriforma, appendix, 399–400, doc. 32 (Misc. Med. 324). Florence grew less rapidly in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, however, than many other European cities; see Mols, “Population in Europe,” 42. 5. So little had been written on the Florentine ghetto by the early 1980s that the ghetto was not mentioned in Furio Diaz’s survey of the history of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany under the Medici who built it, Il Granducato di Toscana—I Medici (Turin: UTET, 1987). The Florentine ghetto is discussed briefly in Umberto Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze nell’età del Rinascimento (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1965 [1918]), 106–7,

Introduction: Early Modern Boundaries 110–17. Cassuto’s study, which was translated into Hebrew but never into English, is generally meticulous and retains a relevance unusual for a work written in 1918. 6. In order for Jews to be moved into the ghetto, residents of that part of the city lost their own place. The people who lived in the area that was the ghetto were renters and had no court of appeal. Their voices have not been preserved. 7. For an overview of this historiography in the German states, see Joel F. Harrington and Helmut Walser Smith, “Confessionalization, Community, and State Building in Germany, 1555–1870,” The Journal of Modern History 69 (March 1997): 77–101. 8. Brian Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice; Todd M. Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1665–1945; James S. Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews. The theme has been particularly well explored in an essay by Benjamin Arbel about Don Joseph Nassí, “The Jews in Venice and the Ottoman Menace.” Attention has also been paid to the movement of Jews in studies of the participation of poor Jews among the bands of roving beggars and thieves who crossed political boundaries in increasing numbers in the wake of the wars; see the essay of Yacov Guggenheim, “Meeting on the Road: Encounters between German Jews and Christians on the Margins of Society” in Hsia, ed., In and Out of the Ghetto, 125–36. On the movement of Christians across religious boundaries, and the possibility of living in cities where populations mixed (and intermarried) across confessional boundaries, see Luria, “The Politics of Protestant Conversion” and idem, “Separated by Death?” 9. Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation and Carlebach, Divided Souls. 10. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 22. 11. Ibid., 23. 12. Bonfil, “Change in the Cultural Patterns,” 110. 13. Such efforts to delineate spaces and control mobility are not found only in the operations of the state but also in those of the church and other early modern power networks. For an example of a guild effort to control the mobility of artisans who had been initiated into their crafts and had technical knowledge and skills that would threaten the Florentine economy if shared with other cities, see the Statuto dell’Arte di Por S. Maria, 17 September 1580: “No one, of whatever status, level or condition, who has for any time ever exercised [a list of specific crafts subject to this guild] shall dare or be able to leave the State of His M[ost] S[erene] H[ighness] without permission of the Magnificent Signori Conservadori of the said Guild” at penalty of death and confiscation of all his goods (Cantini, Legislazione toscana 10: 112–13). Of course, even by the mid-sixteenth century Florentine guilds were so integrated with state government that they can be called part of the government (see D’Addario, “Burocrazia, economia e finanze,” 374). 14. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 117. 15. The growing body of literature on the material culture of the Jews of Florence includes Dora Liscia Bemporad, “Ataròt di Firenze” in MCM La storia delle cose 3 (October 1986): 41–46; idem, “La scuola italiana e la scuola levantina nel ghetto di Firenze”; S. H. Margulies, “Il Talmud Torah di Firenze”; Gaio Sciloni, “Noterelle sui ‘Fuorighetto’”; and Giampaolo Trotta, “Cimiteri ebraici a Firenze.” 16. Bonfil’s synthetic work Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy (1991), available in Italian, Hebrew and English, has done much to reinforce the premise of Jewish otherness in Renaissance Italy. For a thoughtful historiographic explanation of the ideo-

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Notes to Introduction: Early Modern Boundaries logical biases that have led scholars including Roth, Bonfil and Ruderman to research either the sameness or the difference of Jews and Christians, see Ruderman, “Cecil Roth, Historian of Italian Jewry: A Reassessment,” in Myers and Ruderman, eds., The Jewish Past Revisited, 128–42. 17. On the use of passports to document and institutionalize the idea of “nationality” in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, see John C. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport. In the sixteenth century various passes and licenses were in use, usually required by ruling bodies concerned about vagrancy, out-migration and itinerancy (ibid., 18–19). 18. The psychological and cultural response of Jews to ghettoization in Rome is addressed most explicitly by Stow in his essay “Sanctity and the Construction of Space” and in his most recent book, Theater of Acculturation. 19. On the importance of bridges and gateways as symbolic and practical elements in the development of the Tuscan state, see Cribaro, “Urban Planning and Administration in Florence,” 279–83 and passim. 20. This is not to say that once fully established throughout the Italian states, the ghetto did not come to have a set of meanings or a sociological impact. For a (Marxist) discussion of the nineteenth-century ghettos as social spaces, see Pellegrini, Le aree segregate. 21. On the Roman ghetto and the history of papal policy that led to ghettoization, see Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy. The papal bull Cum nimis absurdum is reproduced there with a full translation in appendix I. On Bologna, see Muzzarelli, ed., Verso l’epilogo. 22. The differing motivations or goals of the pope and of the Tuscan grand duke are discussed at length in the next several chapters of this book. A little less than one year after the edict that forced the Jews into the ghetto, a second decree established the basic operation of the Florentine ghetto and its relationship to the Medicean state. MGS 4449, 106r–7v, dated “Die ultima Julii 1571” (see above, Preface, note 4). As Cassuto, who summarized the text (Gli ebrei a Firenze, 114–15) pointed out, it is in this text that the Tuscan state refers to the Università delli Hebrei and to the “ghetto” for the first time. 23. Certain material and political conditions led to the development of similar social and cultural institutions and forms of religious expression. See my own effort to cautiously generalize about social life within the ghettos, “La vita nei ghetti.” The essay provides a synthetic overview of life and Jewish culture (to 1750) as represented in the scholarship (to 1991) on specific Italian ghettos. On the image held by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Christians in Italy of the ghetto and of Jews, see Gunzberg, Strangers at Home. 24. John Boswell made one of the earliest comparative efforts in his study Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), which compared the medieval status of Jews, gays and prostitutes. Joshua Trachtenberg’s The Devil and the Jews (1944) is still important reading, and the starting place for subsequent comparative discussion has been R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (1987). David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence (1990) is a particularly effective study of how a discourse of violence, once established, can be turned against individuals of more than one vulnerable group (Jews, lepers and Muslims). On “labeling theory,” see Ali Madanipour, “Social Exclusion and Space.” In

Notes to Introduction: Early Modern Boundaries some recent works, the tendency is to emphasize the phenomenon of the regulation of marginal groups including Jews as part of the process of Sozialdisziplinierung; see, for example, Karl Vocelka, “Public Opinion and the Phenomenon of Sozialdisziplinierung in the Habsburg Monarchy,” in Ingrao, ed., State and Society in Early Modern Austria, 119–38. 25. Pratica Segreta 187, privilege granted by Cosimo to the captain of a family of “Zangari” on 15 May 1563 (45v–46r) to reside in the Sienese territory, outside the walls of cities, for up to eight days; see Cantini, Legislazione toscana 8: 96–97 for the 1574 expulsion of the Gypsies. 26. A useful discussion of political banishment is found in Muir, Mad Blood Stirring, 72–76 and notes there and Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 39–42. For an earlier period, see Starn, Contrary Commonwealth, especially for Starn’s discussion in chapter 4 there of the “confinement” of exiles (in specified cities). 27. On the persistence of hereditary slavery among Christians into the Middle Ages, especially for women, see Stuard, “Ancillary Evidence for the Decline of Medieval Slavery”; for the import trade in slaves in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, see Origo, “The Domestic Enemy: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany.” After the closure of the trade in slaves from the Black Sea, slaves in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy were often captives who entered through the port of Livorno, where Jews numbered among their owners (but not prominently among the traders); see R. Toaff, “Schiavitù e schiavi.” 28. On the progressive exclusion of (laboring-class) women from the courts and the streets from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century—and from an ability to defend themselves against assault, battery and rape (simultaneous with the consolidation and centralization of judicial power in the hands of the Medici family in Florence and perhaps with the declining status of men of the laboring class)—see Cohn, “Women in the Streets,” in Women in the Streets, 16–38. 29. Rocke, Forbidden Friendships; see also more specifically his essay “Il controllo dell’omosessualità a Firenze.” 30. Richard Trexler, “La prostitution florentine au XVe siècle: patronages et clienteles” Annales: ESC 36 (1981): 983–1015, trans. as “Florentine Prostitution in the Fifteenth Century: Patrons and Clients,” in Trexler, Power and Dependence in Renaissance Florence 2: 31–65. This topic is discussed further in Chapter Five below. On the exclusion of prostitutes from “community” as an early modern phenomenon, see Wiesner, “Paternalism in Practice: The Control of Servants and Prostitutes in Early Modern German Cities.” 31. In this important aspect, the ghetto of Florence differed from the ghetto of Rome, where the papal purpose in ghettoizing Jews is thought to have been their conversion; I discuss the situation in Rome in Chapter One. 32. In Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville, Perry argued that women in Counter-Reformation Seville experienced enclosure not only in convents but also in marriage and in institutions for “fallen” women. However, convents are particularly analogous in their use of architecture to enforce—or create the impression of—enclosure, as well as in the appointment of ducal governors to oversee them. The best introduction to the theory of enclosure and to the gender politics of the convents in the Italian states is perhaps Jutta Gisela Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (1999).

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Notes to Introduction: Early Modern Boundaries 33. On the church’s commitment to Periculosa since its 1298 publication in the Liber Sextus, see Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women. For Venice, see Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic, 13. For Florence, see the discussion of the reform published by the Magistrato Supremo on 12 April 1545 in D’Addario, Aspetti della Controriforma, 132–39. The text is conveniently reproduced in the same work in the appendix, doc. 78, 480ff. On Cosimo I’s intervention in the governance of convents, see also Weddle, “Enclosing Le Murate,” vol. 1, 245. 34. There were 47 convents in Florence in 1552 and 3,410 nuns according to Trexler, Nuns of Florence, 10, 15–16; moreover, “by 1561, 4,341 women lived in the city’s religious communities, and only 732 men did” according to Weddle, “Enclosing Le Murate,” 59–66, citing ASF Manoscritti 179, f. 289. The proportion of female religious in the population was double in 1552 what it was in 1427 (Brown, “Monache a Firenze,” 119). On the importance of the convent, see also the discussion below in Chapter Nine. 35. On Cosimo’s pious interest in the honor of the women, rather than his interest in asserting control over branches of the church in general, see D’Addario, Aspetti della Controriforma, 133–34. 36. On the architectural history of this convent in particular, for which an enclosing wall was first built in 1453, and for a general introduction to the idea of enclosure of religious women in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian policy and literature, see Weddle, “Enclosing Le Murate.” 37. Council of Trent, Session 25, Chapter 5; in Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2, 778. For a discussion of these decrees (in the context of previous synodal law), see Weddle 1: 230–20; for the incomplete application of the news laws of clausura, announced at the convent Le Murate in Florence by the archbishop of Florence in 1567, see ibid., 167. Efforts to reconstruct the architectural history of the convent suggest that it had four doors onto via Ghibellina, each leading into discrete sections of the large complex (ibid., 211–15). However, the recurring practical issue at Le Murate seems to have been the number and position of grates through which the nuns spoke with people outside, not the number of doors. 38. The papal bull Cum nimis absurdum (see note 21 above) made this stipulation: “ad quos unicus tantum ingressus pateat, et quibus solum unicus exitus detur.” The graphic metaphor is my own, but I think it is suggested by the striking difference that the monasteries were to have only one entrance, while the ghettos were to have two. Perhaps for Paul IV the existence of an exit was symbolically important since Jews could leave the ghetto (in conversion), while nuns were not to leave. 39. For a discussion of the ways that convent life empowered women, see Perry, Gender and Disorder, chap. 4. Samuel Cohn Jr. argued broadly and convincingly that in the late sixteenth century, women in Siena were at the forefront in accepting and acting on the principles of the program of the Council of Trent and had much to gain in doing so; see Cohn, “Women and the Counter Reformation in Siena: Authority and Property in the Family,” in Women in the Streets, 57–75. The idea that Post-Tridentine Catholicism was restrictive to women is expressed not only by scholars critiqued by Cohn (ibid.), but by that era’s own Caterina de’ Ricci; her view is shared by P. Domenico Guglielmo di Agresti O.P., editor of her letters; see Santa Caterina, 159. As for access to food, I am not thinking so much of the laws that prevented provisioners from entering convent walls (though these existed) but rather of the fact that nuns

Notes to Introduction: Early Modern Boundaries were prohibited to leave the monasteries to beg. Begging had provided an important part of their daily nutritional needs. During a prolonged economic and financial crisis in Prato, De’ Ricci, abbess of the monastery of San Giorgio, petitioned the Nove Conservatori in 1572 to be allowed to send out eight or ten of her eldest nuns to beg, arguing that before in hard times they could leave to beg, but that now with the strict enforcement of clausura they could not and the monastery was consequently starving to death. 40. On the religious and philosophical debates, see Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, chaps. 2 and 3. 41. Jews had already been expelled from Spain and Navarre, and from the Spanish territories on the Italian peninsula and in Sicily. There was therefore no place for Jews in these regions, but there was extensive discussion of Jewish lineage, customs and practices in the literature on the “purity of blood,” in the genealogies produced to prove it and in the inquisitorial activity of identifying Marranos. Something of a parallel may be seen in James Shapiro’s presentation in Shakespeare and the Jews of the role that Jews played in the literature and imagination of people becoming the “English,” centuries after Jews had been formally expelled from England, and at a time when there were most likely only a few dozen Jews in the entire state. The great interest the English had in debating whether the Indians of North America might be Jews (the so-called “Jewish-Indian theory”) is discussed in Popkin, “The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Indian Theory.” 42. For an overview of the reentry of Jews to Europe, see Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 44–48. 43. Bonfil, “Aliens Within,” 267. 44. The Inquisition in Portugal began its activities in 1537, but the flight of New Christians seems to have predated that and precipitated a royal prohibition of emigration in 1532. See Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmipolitans, 59. 45. On the fact that Jews did not receive a blanket welcome in Poland, see further below. 46. Israel, European Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 3; Hsia, Social Discipline, 6; this was argued by Salo Baron, who, however, emphasized that the “expansion” required large-scale migration by Jews, and also that it was Jewish dependence on royal protection that conditioned Polish economic tolerance; see A Social and Religious History of the Jews 16: 15–21, 140. 47. For details, see Hsia, Social Discipline. On the persecution and ultimate expulsion of Moriscos from the rest of the Kingdom of Granada in 1570–71 see Elliot, Spain and Its World, 225 and Parker, Philip II, 102–9. 48. For the German cities, see Hsia, Social Discipline, 43, 169–70; for the Friuli, see Muir, Mad Blood Stirring, 80. 49. Hundert, “Urban Jewish Residence in the Polish Commonwealth,” 26. 50. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 18. 51. See, for example Ravid, “A Tale of Three Cities.” This tolerance of Jews looks like the “utilitarian” tolerance of Jewish bankers, well known to medieval historians. It does differ in that the earlier form of tolerance was based on the premise that the presence of Jewish bankers would reduce the greater sin of Christian usury. However, the tolerance afforded Jewish physicians in France and northern Italy (see especially Shatzmiller, Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society) was not based on the same religious

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Notes to Introduction: Early Modern Boundaries reasoning, a reminder that tolerance based on “mercantilist” thought was new not because it was nonreligious, but because it was economic. 52. Specific cases of reentry, of course, followed expulsion. In the Republic of Genoa, for example, Jewish merchants from Livorno and other cities petitioned to be allowed to live there in 1654 and 1655. Urbani and Zazzu, The Jews in Genoa 1: lxxvii. Here, interestingly, the reentry came in the form of a set of capitoli di tolleranza per la nazione ebrea (1659) that required the Jews to live in a ghetto; see ibid., lxxx ff. This first charter and ghetto did not, however, establish for the small community of less than 200 Jews the permanent right to live in Genoa, and the next century was one of constant insecurity and repeated expulsions and readmissions. 53. Dates of the ghettoizations of Italian Jews in selected cities: 1516, Venice; 1555, Rome and Ancona; 1571, Florence; 1572, Siena; 1600, Verona; 1603, Padua; 1612, Mantua; 1613, Rovigo; 1624, Ferrara; 1634, Urbino, Pesaro, Senigallia; 1662, Este; 1670, Reggio Emilia; 1675, Conegliano; 1679, Turin; 1724, Casale Monferrato; 1725, Vercelli; 1731, Acqui; 1732, Moncalvo; 1779, Correggio. Source: Bonfil, “Change in the Cultural Patterns,” 407; Siegmund, “La vita nei ghetti,” 846–48. 54. Oberman, “Three Sixteenth-Century Attitudes toward Judaism” and also “The Stubborn Jews: Timing the Escalation of Antisemitism in Late Medieval Europe.” Others who wrote about the conversion of the Jews included Philipp Jakob Spener, founder of the pietist movement after the Thirty Years War, discussed in Hsia, Social Discipline, 24–25; on the importance of the conversion of the Jews in early modern Christian apocalyptic imagination, especially in German lands, see Carlebach, Divided Souls, 67–68 and passim. 55. Stow, “Consciousness of Closure.” 56. Ravid, “Establishment of the Ghetti of Venice.” 57. See Bireley, Counter Reformation Prince. Bireley (14) makes the important point that the anti-Machiavellian authors of 1590–1630 participated in the development of a discourse of religious tolerance for “reasons of state.” On the extent to which the relationship between the Medici and their ministers conformed to the vision in Machiavelli’s The Prince, see Litchfield, Emergence of a Bureaucracy, 130ff. 58. The argument is most fully developed in Stow’s expansive study of De Susannis, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy; see also his Alienated Minority, 307. 59. Manasseh ben Israel’s reference to the planting of Jews as fruit-trees taps wonderfully into a set of positive images: there is allusion to the new, exotic and valuable species of plants and trees found in and brought back from the New World; there is also here a hint of the politically resonant idea that since cultivation justifies conquest (on the “agriculturalist argument,” see Pagden, Lords of All the World, 76–86), whoever plants Jewish colonies (as fruitful trees) in England strengthens his own claim to mastery of that land. 60. See Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 147–48. 61. Council of Trent, Session 14, Decrees on reform, canon 6: “Though the habit does not make the monk, clerics must nevertheless always wear the clerical dress appropriate to their own order” (ut per decentiam habitus extrinseci morum honestatem intrinsecam ostendan); Latin and English as translated in Tanner, ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2, 716.

Notes to Introduction: Early Modern Boundaries 62. Venetian authorities had imposed both a mark on the Jews of Venice (a colored hat, from 1496) and a place (the ghetto, 1516), and reasoned that Jews were not allowed to wear the black hat worn by Christians so that they should be “known” as Jews. From the first half of the seventeenth century in Venice, the authorities expressed an attention to violations about the hat that seems, to Benjamin Ravid, to be linked with their concern about Jewish violations of the curfew hours of the ghetto and to have “reflected the constant concern that unidentified Jews wandering around the city at night might, among other things, have illicit relations with women” (Ravid, “Curfew Time in the Ghetto,” 248–51). 63. Litchfield, Dalla repubblica al Granducato, figs. 5a–14a. 64. On the imperial duchy given in 1530 to Alessandro de’ Medici and the transition from his assassination in 1537 to the rise of Cosimo, see Diaz, Il Granducato di Toscana, 57–72. 65. For Cosimo’s rise and successful transformation of the city-republic into a territorial state, see the evocative narrative of Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 13–66. 66. For a brief summary of the brilliant, efficient restructuring and reorganization of the state from republic to “monarchy,” see D’Addario, La formazione dello stato moderno, 193–246, esp. 221–36. More recent literature does not seem to me to have altered this fundamental understanding. 67. I am thinking of the language of legislation and of political action in the Senate, but see also Van Veen, “Republicanism in the Visual Propaganda of Cosimo I de Medici,” 200–209. 68. The legislation has recently been edited by Pratilli and Zangheri, in La legislazione medicea sull’ambiente. 69. For the argument that Cosimo did not replace the urban patrician families entirely with the sons of regional elites to form a new notarial class, see Litchfield, Emergence of a Bureaucracy. 70. Benadusi, “Career Strategies in Early Modern Tuscany” and “Families in Early Modern Tuscany.” 71. Brown, “Cosimo I de’ Medici.” 72. Litchfield, Emergence of a Bureaucracy, see especially chaps. 4 and 8. For the earlier view that under the Medici regime the nobility were replaced by a new bureaucratic class who were “outsiders to Florence and creatures of the Duke,” see Anzilotti, La costituzione interna, 536. 73. On Cosimo’s prodigious military-installation program of fortresses and castles and more ephemeral earthen-works in Florence and throughout the dominion, and on his architects, see Gurrieri, “L’architettura delle fortificazioni.” On the militia, see Ferretti, “L’organizzazione militaire in Toscana.” 74. Salvestrini, “Su editoria e normativa statutaria in Toscana.” 75. Muir, Mad Blood Stirring. 76. Bossy, “Counter-Reformation and the People of Europe.” 77. On the weakening of the traditional political zones called gonfaloni in this era (between 1551 and 1632), see Litchfield, Dalla repubblica al Granducato, 18–22. It is partly explained by the general migration of patrician and professional classes to the southern part of the city (closer to the new site of Medici power in the Palazzo Vec-

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Notes to Introduction: Early Modern Boundaries chio and the Palazzo Pitti and farther away from the enlarged population of urban workers) and to new preferred residences along the processional routes between the Duomo and the Palazzo Pitti (ibid., 24–26). 78. For the creation of dependent nobility in France, see Bien, “Manufacturing Nobles.” 79. Menning, “Loans and Favors, Kin and Clients.” 80. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, 203–4. 81. Litchfield, “Office Holding in Florence,” 543, 547 and passim. 82. Benadusi, “Career Strategies in Early Modern Tuscany.” 83. Kent and Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood; see also Martines, Strong Words. 84. Trexler, Public Life, 379–82. 85. For an example of the latter, see Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna. 86. Rocke, Forbidden Friendships. 87. Ibid.; see especially chap. 5, “‘Great Love and Good Brotherhood’: Sodomy and Male Sociability.” 88. Patriarchy and paternalism are practices of early modern state-building that have not yet been as deeply explored for sixteenth-century Tuscany as for the Venetian, French and other early modern states. See, for example, Hanley, “Engendering the State.” 89. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 5: 409, “Riforma sopra il vestire di 4 Dicembre 1562.” On the other hand, the age of majority had been changed from twenty-five to eighteen for criminal law and from twenty-five to twenty for civil purposes (ibid. 4: 175–76, “Legge sopra l’età in civile e criminale del di 23 Luglio 1561”), and in that respect the state attempted to take more direct control of young unmarried men. 90. I draw this phrase from the definition presented by Monica Chojnacka in Working Women of Early Modern Venice (2001), where she speaks of community as the sharing of “interests, common goals or circumstances or experiences” (xviii). 91. Weissman lays out this political analysis beautifully in Ritual Brotherhood, chap. 5, esp. 209–11. 92. Kent and Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood, 13–14. 93. Ibid., 14–18, 24ff. 94. Ibid., 174–78 (the meetings seem to have resumed in a period of opposition to the Medici and renewed republicanism); Litchfield, Dalla repubblica al Granducato, 19. 95. Kent and Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood, 177. 96. The parallels are clearly set forth in Hsia, Social Discipline. 97. Noteworthy exceptions include the works by Brian S. Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice and The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 1550–1670; and, implicitly, Carlo Ginzburg’s classic study The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. There are also important studies of the specific relationship between Cosimo I and the papal church: Niccolò Rodolico, “Cosimo I e il Concilio di Trento” and Arnaldo D’Addario, “Il carteggio degli ambasciatori e degli informatori medici da Trento nella terza fase del Concilio,” Archivio storico italiano 122 (1964): 5–8, 9–16 and the relevant documents; H. Jedin, “La politica conciliare di Cosimo I” Rivista storica italiana 62 (1950): 345–74, 477–96; and D’Addario, Aspetti della Controriforma a Firenze. 98. See Sahlins, Boundaries, 7–9.

Notes to Introduction: Early Modern Boundaries 99. See further discussion of the “state” below in this chapter. See Rubinstein, “Notes on the Word Stato.” I thank Patricia Simons for bringing this essay to my attention, as well as for her other suggestions on an earlier draft of this chapter. 100. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 91–130; Sabean, Power in the Blood, 37–60; Rubin, Corpus Christi; Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, esp. 159–65. 101. In the mystical art of ecstatic Kabbalah, practicioners did strive to achieve union with the divine, but this was not experienced as a public, communal event akin to the Christian communion. See Idel, Kabbalah, 59–73, and on the specific features of Kabbalah studied, practiced and written about by Italian Jews, Idel, “Major Currents in Italian Kabbalah.” 102. On the genealogy of the soul in the Kabbalah, see the collection of essays in Goldish, ed., Spirit Possession in Judaism. 103. For the view that the parish was a particularly unimportant center in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, see Trexler, Public Life. The gonfalone (neighborhood), of which there were sixteen, was an important “distinct and individual corporate world (as was its principal parish)” in the fifteenth century, according to the Kents, Neighbours and Neighborhood, 8, but there was more than one parish in some gonfaloni, including Lion Rosso, the gonfalone about which the Kents have written. 104. The word we translate as “state,” however, was sometimes used simply to refer to territorial possessions or dominions and sometimes to refer to power structure, sometimes to a specific regime: see Rubinstein, “Notes on the Word Stato in Florence.” 105. Fasano Guarini, “The Grand-Duchy of Tuscany.” 106. Rubinstein, “Notes on the Word Stato.” 107. Kent and Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood, 128, 135. The residents of the gonfalone of Lion Rosso in the fifteenth century belonged to San Pancrazio, San Paolo or Santa Marie degli Ughi. The Kents see the neighborhood as essentially the same as—or expressed as—the parish: “nevertheless, Lion Rosso’s primordial neighbourhood community, which by the middle of the fifteenth century had maintained its nucleus intact for almost two centuries, was that of the parish of San Pancrazio” (128). However, they also note that there was more than one church in Lion Rosso, and “gonfalone and parish, then, were simply the most institutionalized of a number of local corporate associations which partly but never entirely overlapped” (135). 108. Conti, La formazione della struttura agraria moderna, 238–39. 109. This complicated history and administrative topography is addressed in Elena Fasano Guarini, Lo stato mediceo di Cosimo I (Florence: Sansoni, 1973). See also Kent and Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood on taxation in republican Florence that was based on the system of gonfaloni. 110. On the earlier temporary measures taken in Florence, Milan and Venice after the great pestilence of 1348–49, see Cipolla, Public Health and the Medical Profession, 11–13 and chap. 1 as a whole and Cipolla, Fighting the Plague, 3–5. 111. Fasano Guarini considers the boundaries of the states quite important to Cosimo (“Lo stesso Cosimo I si preoccupava vivamente della loro conservazione o restaurazione, ordinando, con la legge del 12 aprile 1570, che nelle circoscrizioni giurisdizionali di frontiera venisse compiuta ogni anno una ‘visita dei confini con gli stati alieni’”; Lo stato mediceo, 7), but I would not conclude from the interest in protecting local borders that notions of power and legitimacy in Tuscany were territor-

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Notes to Introduction: Early Modern Boundaries ial. Cosimo’s great concern was economic, and he and his officials wrote a great deal of environmental law that was intended to have economic consequences. The law of 12 April 1570 is found in Cascio and Zangheri, eds., La legislazione medicea 1: 149 and is particularly interesting for its reference to the necessity of checking whether the “termini . . . sono mutati, or guasti, o in qualsivoglia modo alterati” (ibid.). 112. Cribaro, “Urban Planning and Administration in Florence,” 241–42. 113. Trexler, Synodal Law in Florence and Fiesole, 59. 114. D’Addario, Aspetti della Controriforma a Firenze, 125. Ten thousands of men and women were confirmed (“cresima”) in 1543 since they had never had that sacrament administered, according to an anonymous chronicler; D’Addario thinks that even if it is an exaggeration, it is evidence of the state of affairs. 115. On the failure of the new diocesan seminary in the sixteenth and seventeenth century to fulfill the goals set for it by the Council of Trent, see Comerford, Ordaining the Catholic Reformation. On the role of the parish priests, see Allegra, “Il parroco: un mediatore fra alta e bassa cultura.” 116. On the placement of mendicant churches in the city, see Lucas, City, Church and Jesuit Urban Strategy. Five thirteenth-century nonparochial churches (Dominican, Servite, Franciscan, Augustinian, Silvestrini and Carmelite) were spaced apart deliberately in a pattern that had the Mercato Vecchio at center (ibid., 67–69). 117. Trexler, Synodal Law, 71. 118. Bossy, “Counter-Reformation and The People of Europe,” 52. 119. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Council of Trent, Session 24, Decree on reform, canon 13, 768: “In his quoque civitatibus ac locis, ubi parochiales ecclesiae certos non habent fines . . . mandat sancta synodus episcopis pro tutiori animarum eis commissarum salute, ut distincto populo in certas propriasque parochiasque unicuique suum perpetuum peculiaremque parochum assignent.” 120. Ibid., canon 4, 763. 121. Nussdorfer, Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII, 24. 122. Comerford (Ordaining the Catholic Reformation, 34) notes that according to a random sample of the visitation records from 1585 until the 1670s of parishes in the Diocese of Fiesole (close neighbor of Florence), 17 percent of the parishes kept registers of baptisms, confirmations, marriages and deaths. 123. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood. 124. Romano, Patricians and Popolani, 102–11. 125. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, 205–12. 126. As translated ibid., 207, from “Relazione di messer Vincenzo Fedeli,” in Relazioni degli Ambasciatori veneti al Senato, ed. A. Ventura (Rome-Bari, 1976), 2: 213. 127. Pastoral visits in Tuscany are discussed by D’Addario in Aspetti della Controriforma, 227–29 and by Raspini, La visita pastorale. 128. See discussion in Chapter Three. 129. AAF, Visite Pastorali 09.1 (22 March 1568/69 to June 1569). 130. In his extraordinarily rich and comprehensive study of the Florentine Jews in the Renaissance before the ghetto, the biblical scholar, Florentine rabbi and historian Umberto Cassuto garnered information on Jews from the records of the criminal court (the Otto di Guardia), the guilds, the notarial archives, tax and census records and from various collections of petitions and correspondence, as well as legislation. 131. I examined these manuscripts, MGS 4449 and 4450, in detail in my doctoral

Notes to Introduction: Early Modern Boundaries dissertation, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” completed at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1995. I learned of these sources from the work of Michele Luzzati, who made use of some materials in MGS 4450, especially for his study of the banking population in Tuscany. As Luzzati pointed out, volume 4450 was (whether due to mislabeling or misplacement) unknown to Umberto Cassuto, who did, however, refer to MGS 4449 in his study Gli ebrei a Firenze. See Luzzati, “Dal prestito al commercio: gli ebrei dello stato fiorentino nel secolo XVI,” in idem, La casa dell’ebreo, 267–95, 271. 132. For example, Jews in Rome used Jewish notaries, which resulted in a large and archivally concentrated body of notarial acts pertaining to Jews in Rome. For discussion of these Jewish notaries and summaries of their acts, see Stow, The Jews in Rome, 2 vols. and idem, Theater of Acculturation, 8–13, 109–11. 133. I am thinking of someone like Abraham Righetto, a Jew arrested by the Venetian Inquisition in 1570. Righetto claimed to be a Jew of Spanish-Portuguese parentage, but born in Ferrara, and he claimed that he was taken for a Jew even while he frequented the ducal court in Florence in the 1560s as a gambling companion of the duke and duchess. But a Christian witness claimed that he had always been taken for a Christian. On Righetto, see Pullan, “A Ship with Two Rudders” and Ioly Zorattini, “Anrriquez Nunez Alias Abraham Alias Righetto.” 134. I am, however, pursuing the history of some of the converts I have encountered in the archives in a new project.

Chapter 1: Residential Segregation 1. These banks are discussed in Chapters Four and Six below. 2. OGP, Suppliche, 2234: “Ill[ustrissi]mo et S[e]r[enissi]mo S[ign]or Duca Do[n] Iacob Abravanel umil’ servo de v[ostr]a Ex[cellenti]a suplica quella voglia concederle gracia che lui co[n] quatro servitori posano portarglie arme de di et de note tanta in Fior[enz]a quanto per tutto Il suo felice stato.” Concedasseli. Lelio T[orelli]. 6 Oct [15]59 3. On the competition of these cities for Levantine commerce, see Ravid, “Tale of Three Cities.” For a discussion of a merchant charter of 1549 in Florence, see Frattarelli Fischer, “Il principe, l’Inquisizione e gli ebrei.” 4. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 106–17. Sometimes misunderstood as an argument that Cosimo ghettoized the Jews in order to obtain his grand-ducal title from the pope, Cassuto actually suggests that Cosimo ghettoized the Jews in an effort to maintain papal commitment to his title in face of the severe challenges and rejection of that title by the rulers of other European states. 5. D’Addario, Aspetti della Controriforma, doc. 91, 502–3; also reproduced in Cantini, Legislazione toscana 5: 154–55. The absence of any reference to Jews in the canons of the sessions of the Council of Trent is readily noted: two readily available editions are Tanner, ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils and Schroeder, trans., The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent. Sessions were held from December 1545 to 1547, from 1551 to 1552 and from January 1562 to December 1563. 6. The bull is conveniently presented in Latin and English translation in Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy, appendix 1, 291–98. 7. This council, which also renewed older canons forbidding Jews to own Christian slaves, is often cited as important for the Jews. But its importance lay more in the

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Notes to Chapter 1: Residential Segregation canon forbidding usury to Christians, which may have both led Jews to concentrate occupationally in the moneylending business and also stirred up fear and hatred of moneylenders. 8. “In some provinces a difference of dress distinguishes Jews or Saracens from Christians, but in certain others such confusion has developed that they are indistinguishable. Whence it sometimes happens that by mistake Christians unite with Jewish or Saracen women and Jews or Saracens with Christians. Therefore, in order that so reprehensible and outrageous a mixing cannot for the future spread under cover of the excuse of an error of this kind, we decree that such people of either sex in every Christian province and at all times shall be distinguished from other people by the character of their dress in public, seeing that in addition one finds that this was enjoined upon them by Moses himself.” As translated in Harry Rothwell, ed., English Historical Documents 1189–1327 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoods, 1975); the full set of canons is conveniently included in translation in Patrick J. Geary, ed., Readings in Medieval History (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1997), 442–43. 9. The phrase “distinguishing signs” comes from the title of Diane Owen Hughes’ very important essay “Distinguishing Signs: Ear-Rings, Jews, and Franciscan Rhetoric in the Italian Renaissance City.” Ruth Mellinkoff ’s study Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages alerts us to the broad range of visual signals beyond legislated signs that were used by artists to encode a variety of disparaged deviances. 10. The situation was similar in the Muslim world. S. D. Goitein has noted that the documents of the Genizah reveal that Jews of the Arab world in Mediterranean lands lived only rarely in places considered “Jewish quarters” and that even then there were usually non-Jews renting and living within these so-called quarters. See Goitein, Mediterranean Society 1: 71. 11. Salo Wittmayer Baron identified medieval church councils of Narbonne and Oviedo (in 1050) that predate the Third Lateran Council’s ban on Christians living with Jews (Jewish Community 1: 225). Baron also cites the 1266 church council of Breslau for the Archdiocese of Gnesen (Gniezno in Poland), which prescribes that Jews should not live among Christians on grounds that this will facilitate the correct Christianization of the Polish: “In view of the fact . . . that Poland is a new plantation in the body of Christendom, the Christian people might the more easily be infected by the superstitions and the depraved mores of the Jews living with them. In order that the Christian faith be more easily and quickly implanted in the hearts of the faithful in these regions, we strictly prescribe that the Jews inhabiting this province of Gnesen must not dwell indiscriminately among the Christians, but should possess contiguous or adjoining houses in a segregated location of each city or village. This should be so arranged that the Jewish quarter be separated from the common habitation of the Christians by a fence, a wall or a ditch.” On Breslau, see also Dubnow, History of the Jews 1: 47–49; the translation is that of Baron, slightly emended from the Latin cited in Dubnow. 12. Statuta Sabaudae, code of law of Amadeus VIII, year 1430, as cited by Woolf (“Life and Responsa,” 20–21); Woolf comments that there is evidence that the quarter was in fact locked. 13. For a detailed survey of efforts to segregate the Jews in the fifteenth century and earlier, see Toaff, Love, Work and Death, 187–93; Toaff concludes that Jews gener-

Notes to Chapter 1: Residential Segregation ally were not segregated but tended to congregate voluntarily; he sees these early efforts to segregate the Jews as the direct antecedent of the ghettoization. 14. For many regions historians know more about the legal status of medieval Jews than about their actual social and material conditions. Documents from Sicilian archives reveal that neither enforced Jewish quarters nor exclusively Jewish quarters were found among the Jews of Sicily and the Kingdom of Two Sicilies—a much larger Jewish population than ever lived in the central and northern Italian peninsula—even at the moment of their expulsion in 1492. See Simonsohn, Jews in Sicily, esp. 1: 383–1300, xxxix, xlviii, lviii and the essays and additional documentary evidence in Italia Judaica: gli ebrei in Sicilia sino all’espulsione del 1492 Atti del V convegno internazionale Palermo, 15–19 giugno 1992, esp. essays by Francesco Giunta-Laura Sciascia and M. Louisa Garaffa. For Poland, see Zaremska, “Jewish Street (Platea Judeorum) in Cracow.” 15. Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 59. 16. In 1569 the ghetto of Bologna (1556) was closed (Jews were readmitted briefly in 1586) and there was a general expulsion order from the state except for the three main centers; by 1593 Rome, Ancona and Avignon were the only permitted places of residence for Jews in the papal state. Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia, 75–80. On the history of the Jews in Bologna, see Vincenzi, ed., Il Ghetto: Bologna. 17. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 92–93, 98; correspondence pertaining to the event is reproduced in the appendix there, 385–86. On the burning of the Talmud and its censorship in the sixteenth century, see Stow, “The Burning of the Talmud in 1553” and Yaari, Serefat ha-Talmud 18. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 96–97 (Hebrew edition, 76) and Anzilotti, La costituzione interna, 190. There is general agreement that Cosimo worked to limit the papacy’s reach in Florence: see also Baldisseri, La Nunziatura in Toscana, 105–6. 19. “Del far portare a’ giudei le berrette gialle non voglio parlare, che è cosa ridicula, et Sua S[anti]tà dorrebbe lasciar che Sua Ex[cellen]tia nello Stato suo facesse vestire et calzare a suo modo. Questo riforma nella Chiesa altro vorrebbe che andar dietro à topi.” Letter of First Auditor Lelio Torelli to the duke’s secretary, Bartolommeo Concini, 29 November 1557, ASF Archivio Strozziane, Serie I, filza 106, c. 78, as cited by Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 97. 20. There was no legislation concerning a segno from 1537 to 1567; confirmation that Jews were not required to wear a badge is found in volume 8 of the Auditore delle Riformagioni, 1560–64, where the many petitions from individual Jews do not include requests for exemption from the badge. 21. Testimony of Moise Buondi: “d[e]c[t]o Esaia rispose che no[n] sene curava et no[n] haveva paura et che haveva privilegio dal Ill[ustrissi]mo S[igno]re Duca ch’egli p[er]donava d’ogni cosa passata purche attendesse a esser buo[n] giudeo.” Nunz. 842 unpaginated, 3 October 1566, testimony of Isaia Coen. Adriano Prosperi notes the “subterranean presence of the duke” in this trial in L’inquisizione fiorentina dopo il Concilio di Trento, 103. See also his discussion of the case in “L’Inquisizione Romana e gli ebrei,” 85. 22. “D[omanda]. In particulare delle parole che disse dinanzi alla cassa di m[a]g[ister] Alamanno Salviati a lazzero presente moises buondi. R[isposta]. Andando esso testimone a chiamare lazzaro et moise essendo inna[n]zi alla casa di d[e]c[t]o m[a]g[ister] Alaman[n]o Salviati e venne a parole co[l] Moise il quale lo

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Notes to Chapter 1: Residential Segregation chiamava xpianaccio marranaccio et lui rispose o xpiano o turcho o giudeo cio che tu vuoi fammi il peggio che tu puoi p[er]che son[o] sotto un buon principe.’” A more literal translation would be “Christian, Turk or Jew, as you would have it.” Prosperi transcribes these words a bit differently: “o christiano o turco o giudeo che io mi sia, fammi il pegio che tu puoi” (“L’Inquisizione Romana e gli ebrei,” 85) and I have unfortunately not had the opportunity to recheck the manuscript since seeing his transcription. 23. Isaia Coen was never actually asked whether or not he had been baptized as a Christian, and never denied it. However, he clearly intended to deflect this charge by informing the inquisitors that he was born and raised as a Jew in Smyrna (and not in Spain, as was charged). There is the possibility that “Isaia Coen” was not truly born a Jew in Smyrna, despite his ability to marshal witnesses to that effect. If he was really only a used-clothing-dealer, why did the eminent doctor Laudadio Blanis come to represent him? Names and identities of Portuguese in Italy are notoriously slippery, so that it is tempting to explore who else he might have been—for example, Pires Diogo, born in Portugal in 1517, a medical doctor who had studied in Salamanca and, after living in Italy for more than a decade, had made his way to Ragusa by 1555 and assumed there the name Isaia Cohen (listed in Malavolti, Medici Marrani, 70–71). 24. Pullan, “A Ship with Two Rudders” and Pullan, The Jews of Europe, passim (s.v. Righetto). 25. In “Cristiani nuovi e nuovi ebrei,” Frattarelli Fischer refers to Isaiah’s testimony in support of her hypothesis that there was a secret set of privileges granted to the New Christians in 1548. While I am unconvinced by her theoretical reconstruction of this document, I agree that under Cosimo, New Christians who intended to live fully as Jews felt as safe if not safer than New Christians who intended to live fully as Christians. On the other hand, actual evidence of “crypto-Judaism” in Florence in these decades has not been presented (by Frattarelli Fischer or others). 26. These were Paul III (1534–50), Julius III (1550–55), Marcellus II (1555), Paul IV (1555–59), Pius IV (1559–65) and Pius V (1566–72). 27. Pius IV is often referred to as “lenient” toward the Jews in contrast to Paul IV, since he rescinded some restrictions against them. But Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy argues (16–17) that he was not more tolerant of the Jews than popes before and after: his modifications in their treatment were economic in nature, but his overall approach was still to persecute in order to encourage conversion. 28. Ibid., 17; the text is found in Bullarum privilegiorum 7: 439a. 29. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 99–100. For the changing status of Jews in Genoa, see Urbani and Zazza, eds., The Jews in Genoa 1: introduction. 30. It is generally thought that the majority of the Jews expelled in 1569 went to the Levant; see, however, Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy, 44–45 for a discussion of Hebrew sources which suggest that large numbers of Jews converted. Probably less than one hundred Jews crossed the borders between 1569 and 1570 as Jews (including a large number from Perugia), but many more left the papal territories between 1555 and 1569. 31. In Venice the ghetto predated Romanus pontifex by half a century (1516) and is explained by factors unrelated to papal policy. In Venice and Ferrara in 1569/70 there were serious threats made against the Jews: a threat to expel the Jews of Venice, and renewal of segno legislation in Ferrara. These episodes seem to be tied to the escalating

Notes to Chapter 1: Residential Segregation war with the Turks (reaching a peak in the Battle at Lepanto in 1571) and to the supposed and real ties between the Turks and the Mendes (Nasi) family, an extraordinarily wealthy New Christian family headed by Donna Beatrice de Luna, resident in Venice and Ferrara in the 1560s. 32. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 101. Cassuto acknowledged that there was no support for his theory in the study by Maffei, Dal titolo di duca di Firenze; he also noted that he was unable to find a request or promise to expel or ghettoize the Jews in his search of diplomacy between the duke and the pope (Gli ebrei a Firenze, 107, note 1). 33. Cantagalli, Cosimo I de’ Medici granduca di Toscana, 237, 253. 34. D’Addario, Aspetti della Controriforma, 152ff; Diaz, Il granducato, 187. Diaz notes (ibid., 188) that Maximilian had already consented to the title of Grand Duke when Pius IV had proposed it some years earlier. 35. Diaz, Il granducato, 188–89. 36. Ibid., 187; Spini, “Il principato e il sistema degli stati europei” 2: 190–93. 37. Ortolani, Pietro Carnesecchi, 252. 38. Ibid., 128–32 and passim. Ortolani questions why Cosimo did not at least warn Carnesecchi that his arrest was imminent (132), and concludes that Cosimo not only needed to conform formally to the new, firm definitions of heresy established at the Council of Trent but actually had to deliver the heretic. For Ortolani, this can only be explained as a price for the crown that Cosimo would receive a couple of years later (132, n. 2). 39. The most thorough study of the relationship between the court and the Papal See is D’Addario, Aspetti della Controriforma, especially 144–61. See also Cantagalli, Cosimo I de Medici granduca di Toscana (especially 271–87) and Diaz, Il granducato, 187–95. 40. The documents pertaining to this reconciliation have been published in Rodolico and D’Addario, eds., Osservatori toscani, 78ff. 41. There have been some efforts to resolve the chronological discrepancy by shifting the focus and discussing Cosimo’s decision to ghettoize the Jews as a response to the need to keep the pope satisfied, in light of opposition by European monarchs to the title of Grand Duke which he had already received, as also suggested by Cassuto (see next note). 42. Diaz, Il granducato, 189. The duke of Ferrara, Philip II and the emperor all remonstrated that Tuscany was not a papal but an imperial fief and that the pope therefore had no power to grant such a title. It was also suggested by Cassuto (Gli ebrei a Firenze, 106) that the strict anti-Jewish policy was used by Cosimo and his son Francesco to try to secure approval of the new title from the emperor and other princes, rather than to obtain it from the pope. Despite having married Giovanna d’Austria, Francesco did not actually receive the concession from her brother Maximilian II until the “Ratisbon decree” of 2 November 1575 after his own father’s death on 21 April 1574 (Diaz, Il granducato, 190, 232). 43. Spini, “Il principato dei medici,” 198. 44. D’Addario made no reference to the subject in Aspetti della Controriforma. There is also no reference to Jews in Jedin, “La politica conciliare di Cosimo I,” 345–74, 477–96; or in the earlier correspondence from Trent published by D’Addario in “Il carteggio degli ambasciatori”; or in Spini, “Il principato dei Medici,” 176–216. I have not yet found any discussion of the plans to ghettoize the Jews in the volumes of

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Notes to Chapter 1: Residential Segregation Medici correspondence to cardinals, to bishops or to the Roman curia in the years 1568–71, although it is true that in MP 3735 (1569 to 1570, in which countless letters congratulate the grand duke on his new title and no one applauds him for a decision to ghettoize the Jews) some pages are in code and I have not endeavored to decode them, having no reason to think they concern the Jews. I anticipate that someone someday may find letters in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze or the Archivio Segreto Vaticano that will shed more light on the decisions that were made. 45. MGS 4450, 140r–41v. 46. ASV, Segretario di Stato (Segr. Stato) Firenze 9. This volume contains the letters from the Nunzio (Ambassador) Brisegna to Cardinal Rusticucci, 17 July 1570 to 31 December 1571. It is worth noting that Bernardino Brisegna (who spells his name Brezegno in these letters) was the third papal ambassador (nunzio) to Florence and had been there since 1565; however, archiving of their weekly letters to the Segretaria della Nunziatura begins with Brisegna in July 1570. On the history of the Roman embassy in Florence, see Baldisseri, La Nunziatura in Toscana. 47. ASV, Segretario di Stato (Segr. Stato) Firenze 9, Brezegno, 1570, fol. 48r–v: “Ho ricevuto la l[ette]ra di V[ostra] S[ignoria] Ill[ustrissi]ma de’ vi [6] del presente, e per l’aviso della ricevuto della mia bascio sue Ill[ustrissi]me mani. Quello che di qua occorre al presente è che nella visita dello stato, che il S[igno]r Principe ha fatto visto il gran danno ch’i suoi sudditi patiscano, non solo delle usure degli Hebrei, ma ancora della prava, et perfida loro conversatione co’ Cristiani, ha proveduto per uno editto, gia publicato, che da qui innanzi nessuno Hebreo deva prestare ad usura, et gli concede solamente che fra certo tempo possino recuperar quello che si trovano haver prestato, comandando che tutti si vadino, finito il tempo, fore dello stato Fiorentino, et à quei che vorranno venire à Firenze per fare altri esercitii permette che possino venire, non prestando in modo alcuno ad usura, et gli si darà un luogo à parte ove possino habitare, si come più particularment si contiene nell’Editto, di che mando con questa à V. S. Ill.ma una stampa.” 48. For his most recent and elegant presentation of the early history of Venetian Jewry, see Ravid, “The Venetian Government and the Jews,” 3–30, and more specifically Ravid, “Religious, Economic and Social Background” and his prior research cited there. Ennio Concina is the author with Ugo Camerino and Donatella Calabi of an important volume that focuses on the architectural history of the ghettos in Venice: La città degli ebrei: Il ghetto di Venezia: architettura e urbanistica (Venice, 1991). 49. Pullan, “Jewish Moneylending in Venice,” 674. 50. Ravid, “Religious, Economic and Social Background,” 213–19; Concina, “Dal ‘geto de rame’ al ‘geto dove habita li hebrei,’” 27–33; on the importance of Jewish merchants to Venice and attitudes to Jews in Venice in the mid- and later sixteenth century, culminating in an effort to expel Jews from that city in 1570, see Arbel, Trading Nations, “Venice and the Jewish Merchants of Istanbul,” 13–28. 51. Ravid, “On Sufferance and Not by Right,” 20–24; see also Ravid, “The Venetian Government and the Jews,” 10–13. 52. Michele Luzzati offered a different economic explanation for the expulsion in his article “Dal prestito al commercio: gli ebrei dello stato fiorentino nel secolo XVI,” idem, La casa dell’ebreo, 267–95. Cosimo’s purpose in allowing Jews to settle in Tuscany, Luzzati argues, was to expand international commerce and develop industry in the state. Jewish bankers failed to accomplish this because they made conservative, small-scale subsistence loans instead of lending venture capital. Also, he notes, these

Notes to Chapter 1: Residential Segregation Italian Jews did more commerce with Jews in northern Italy than with the Levant. The failure of the Jews to accomplish Cosimo’s economic goals for his state made them, following Luzzati’s explanation, expendable. However, it must still be noted that Cosimo chose not to revoke or renegotiate the charters and redirect them into the kind of lending he had hoped for, but instead to expel them and all other Jews from the villages of Tuscany and create a ghetto. 53. “Utility” language was used by both Jews and Christians when called upon to justify a Jewish presence, although Christian tolerance was also sometimes invoked by religious leaders without reference to utility. But it is arguable that in many villages or regions where Jews were permitted to live, no specific political or economic rationale, philosophy, theology or ideology was invoked until their presence there was challenged. 54. The restriction of Germans to the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, predating the establishment of the first Venetian ghetto, is discussed briefly in Ravid, “Establishment of the Ghetti of Venice,” 228–30. 55. Calabi, “Il ghetto e la città,” 206, 212, 215 and passim. 56. Concina, “Dal ‘geto de rame,’” 30. 57. The medieval funduq—a structure that provided lodging for merchants on an upstairs level and storage and shelter for pack animals and wares on a lower level— was a recognized landmark by the thirteenth century in the Mediterranean Arab world, according to Goitein, Mediterranean Society 4: 29–30. On the history of the funduq, see Concina, Fondaci, and on early Venetian knowledge of this institution of the Arab and Byzantine worlds, see ibid., 65. 58. Meshullam ben R. Menahem reported on “four large fondaks, one for the Franks and another for the Genoese and their Consul and two for the Venetians and their Consul . . . and opposite them in the middle is the great fondak of the Ishmaelites” in Alexandria (c. 1481) (in Adler, ed., Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages, 162) and in Misr (Cairo), where “you could hardly believe that there are one thousand and more warehouses in each fondak,” each a small shop attended by its merchant or artisan owner (170). Obadiah da Bertinoro, writing from his travels in 1487, noted that in Alexandria “the Christians are obliged to shut themselves in their houses every evening; the Arabs close up the streets from without, and open them again every morning.” Adler, ed., Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages, 223. 59. Calabi earlier noted that the institution of the fondaco was “considered one of the most important urban strategies of the Serenissima” (“Il ghetto e la città,” 212) and described a fondaco in Venice for German (non-Jewish) merchants that predated the ghetto, as well as similar houses for Persians, Turks and other groups. Calabi does not discuss the degree of difference (for example, the badge Jews were required to wear) or make clear whether the fondaci were locked from without, as the ghetto gates were, or from within. A more extensive discussion of this early German fondaco in Venice is found in Concina, Fondaci, 125ff. 60. See Calabi, “Magazzini, fondaci, dogane.” 61. On the invitations to Portuguese New Christians to the duchy of Florence, see Frattarelli Fischer, “Il principe, l’Inquisizione e gli ebrei” and “Cristiani nuovi e nuovi ebrei.” The evidence she cites does not support the claim that the Portuguese New Christians who resided in Florence or visited the city in the 1550s were cryptoJews. 62. These developments are described fully in Milano, Il Ghetto di Roma.

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Notes to Chapter 1: Residential Segregation 63. Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy. 64. Idem, “Burning of the Talmud,” 435–59. 65. See Idem, Taxation, Community and State. 66. Idem, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy, 20, 24. 67. Ibid., 49. 68. MGS 4449, 106r: “sapendo quanto differenti sieno l’instituti et abominevoli costumi delli hebrei da quelli che si desiderano et essere de[v]ono nei veri christiani, et quanto facilmente, per la continua conversatione et assidua familiarità, essi potrebbero tirare gli animi dei semplici christiani nella loro vana superstitione et esecranda perfidia, il che, oltra che passerebbe con grandissimo disonore di Dio e perdita dell’anime, resultarebbe anco in totale vilipendio della christiana fede, alla cui conservatione hanno sempre come religiossissimi Principi, con ogni studio et sollecitudine invigilata, et desiderando come veri imitatori de’ sacri canoni et delle sancte leggi anco civili, quanto più possibil[e] sia, levare queste pericolose conversationi anco notturne e celate, a esemplo della città di Roma et altri luoghi.” 69. The proposed regulations for a new institution, the Pia Casa dei Catechumeni, whose organizers met for the first time on 14 June 1636, are found in the Archivio storico della curia arcivescovile di Firenze, busta Pia Casa dei Catecumeni I: “Costituzioni, ordini e leggi della Casa de Catecumeni di Firenze Aperta l’anno MDCXXXVI,” dated 20 September 1636. I am grateful to Don Gilberto Aranci, director of that archive, for his assistance in locating this document. The proemium gives evidence that the proposed institution is new to Florence: “considerato che trà molti buone opere che sono in questa Città, ci manca una Casa per li Catecumeni à commod[ità] di coloro, i quali desiderano di lasciare l’infedeltà, e venire alla fede del Redentore del Venere Umano Giesù Cristo.” The Casa was founded under the auspices of the Carmelite priest Alberto Leoni. 70. Ibid. 71. On the sermons of the convert Vitale Medici, delivered at the Church of Santa Maria Novella in 1583, see Chapter Ten. There is an ambiguous reference in a 1595 ordinance of the ghetto government to gatherings on Sunday afternoons which might possibly be interpreted as a reference to forced sermons (see Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli,” 10: 35). However, no other evidence for such an interpretation has yet been brought forward (and in Rome the forced sermons were delivered on Saturday afternoons). 72. The term Catholic Reformation is useful in that it recognizes, as recent scholarship has abundantly demonstrated, that “reform” was in many ways continuous and predated the crisis initiated by Luther. The term Counter-Reformation is still useful in that the Council of Trent was undoubtedly a response to the crisis of Protestant challenges theological, institutional, literary and practical. On the historiography of these approaches to the sixteenth-century church, see O’Malley, Trent and All That. 73. Corazzini, ed., Diario Fiorentino di Agostino Lapini, 157: “Et à di detto, cioè il dí de detto Spirito Santo [18 May 1567], cominciorno li giudei qui in Firenze a portare un O, nella beretta, giallo.” 74. Riformagioni 10, 17. In a letter written in the first person and addressed to Bastiano Concini, Francesco Vinta reveals his thought process regarding the segno. The letter is dated 27 April 1567 and includes the note that a copy should be sent to Cardinal Niccolini, who was then archbishop of Pisa. “Io ho quanto alli maschi obligatoli che portino la berretta, ò il cappello di color giallo, come portano anco nello

Notes to Chapter 1: Residential Segregation stato della Chiesa, et dei Venetiani. Et se questo fusse troppo, si potrebbe obligarli à portare su la berretta, ò sul cappello alla scoperta un cordone, ò nastra, ò altro finimento di color giallo quanto bastassi al giro del cappello, ò della berretta se ne seguira la resolution di S[ua] Ec[celentissima] Ill[ustrissi]ma; quanto alle fe[m]mine, ho detto portino la manica del braccio destro di color gialla, se e’ troppo, si può mutare, che su la manicha sia di qualsivoglia colore, portino un braccio di cordella, ò di nastro tanto apparente, che si vegga manifestamente.” 75. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 6: 327, “Contra li Hebrei,” 6 Maggio 1567. 76. Ibid. 6: 330–31: “Bando dell’Entratura dell’Arcivescovo in Firenze del dì 14 Maggio 1567 ab Incarn.” The notice informs the public that the archbishop would arrive the next day, the fifteenth of the month “con solenne pompa,” that all shops were to be closed and that business was to be suspended that morning in honor of the festivity. 77. There is an extensive bibliography on the history of the Jewish badge. The badge in Umbria is discussed in detail by Toaff, Love, Work and Death, 173–79; the great proliferation of municipal statutes requiring the segno suggests to Toaff that Jews “rarely and unwillingly” observed it (174). 78. This fact, overlooked in Jewish historiography, is documented and discussed by Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs.” 79. As Toaff puts it, “but if the badge was to constitute an effective barrier discouraging those Jews and Christians who intended to continue with their close everyday relationships, its more or less obvious failure, with the tacit consent of both parties, also reveals to some degree the strong resistance met by the broader and more general aim so doggedly pursued by the Minorites; namely, that of isolating and discriminating against the Jewish minority within Christian society” (Love, Work and Death, 179). 80. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 85. 81. The letters of exemption are found in MGS 4449 and discussed below in Chapters Four and Six. 82. Vinta justified this pattern of exemption by reference to a similar policy in 1466: “Trovo alle Riformationi che l’an’o 1446 fu ordinato li hebrei portassino un segno cioe un O nel petto di color giallo, ò nella spalla dritta, erano eccettuati quelli che risedevano quà et tenevano banca aperta, credo respetto à li pattii et capitulatione che havevano col monte respetto alla tassa che pagavano, sotto pena di scudi 100 d[’oro] à chi contra faceva per qualunche volta” (Riformagioni 10, 17r–v). 83. Menning, “Loans and Favors, Kin and Clients.” 84. Riformagioni 10, 17r: “si vegga manifestamente che siano hebrei.” 85. Ibid., 19v: “a fin che subita si veggha chiaramente che l’una et l’altra e della setta falsa religione hebrea.” 86. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 6: 341: “Bando che non si dia molestia nè di fatti, nè di parole alli Hebrei per le Strade del dì 14 Luglio 1567.” The imposition of the segno in 1567 and the (presumed) wave of hostility that followed it suggests that Jews immediately before 1567 had not generally been wearing a segno. 87. Riformagioni 10, 20r. In the house of Lazzero Rabben: “Tengono in Casa una serva Christiana la quale mi e referito che ha lattato i figli di Lazzero, et se li e fatto comandamento che si parta.” There is no note concerning the one other Florentine Jewish household that maintained a Christian servant woman. 88. Documents from the archives of the Jewish community (Archivio della

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Notes to Chapter 1: Residential Segregation Comunità Ebraica di Firenze, ACEF) show that thereafter, Jews who wanted to employ a Christian wetnurse were able to do so on occasion by obtaining a special dispensation. 89. MGS 4450, 149–67. 90. Letter of Federigo dei Conti di Montaguto to Bartolomeo Concino, and response of Francesco de’ Medici in Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 388–89, docs. 31 and 32. 91. Diaz (Il granducato, 185) notes in particular that Cosimo reserved real control of political affairs, and protected his own access to the palaces and command of the military forces and fortresses until his death. I have relied on Diaz for the life of Francesco, who has not been the subject of any sustained recent scholarship. 92. The cities represented are Prague, Passau, Stein, Klosterneuburg, Graz, Freyburg (Fribourg), Linz, Breslau, Vienna, Innsbruck, Ebersdorf, Konstanz, Neustadt and Hall (Halle). By the time of the marriage of Giovanna and Francesco, Jews had long since been formally excluded or expelled from most of these cities: Klosterneuburg (c. 1420), Linz (1421), Fribourg (1428), Breslau (1455), Passau (c. 1478), Halle (1493), Graz (c. 1496). Jews returned to Prague in 1562 after Ferdinando’s “retirement” from governing Bohemia. The source for these dates, which I have not verified in more current scholarship, is the Encyclopaedia Judaica, articles for the name of each city. 93. See Hsia, “The Jews and the Emperors,” 73. 94. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews 14: 150–51. From 1540 to 1618 the privileges that Jews obtained were necessary to protect them from accusations of ritual murder, from confiscations and from physical attack (Hsia, “The Jews and the Emperors,” 74). Their privileges could also be traded away by emperors: Jews were expelled from Regensburg (1519), Esslingen (1543) and Dortmund (1595) and there were efforts to do the same in Worms and in Wurzberg (1559); see Hsia, The Jews and the Emperors, 76–77. 95. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 14, 149–50. 96. The accusation of host desecration is set in context by Rubin, Corpus Christi, 122–26, and fully examined by her in Gentile Tales. 97. Hsia, Myth of Ritual Murder, 12. 98. Ibid., 136–62. 99. MP 4898, 514v–15r. 100. Some of these came to the attention of the Venetian Inquisition; see Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, part 3. 101. Di Agresti, ed., Santa Caterina de’ Ricci Epistolario III, 122 and the introduction, passim. With regard to the impoverishment of the convents, it should be noted that the complaints precede the bull of Gregory XIII on 30 December 1572, Deo sacris virginibus, which reinforced clausura of the nuns (which had already been mandated at the Council of Trent). Caterina resisted clausura when she argued that the nuns must be allowed to leave the convent to beg because they would otherwise starve. Ibid., 159. 102. Ibid., 123. 103. MP 552, 487r–90v. This report would make for a fascinating study on its own; I note here only that Jews (Jewish moneylenders, for example) are not blamed for the poverty in the state, nor are they even referred to in this report. 104. Cochrane, Italy 1530–1630, 34, 41–42. 105. Arbel, Trading Nations, 55. For the relationship of the Spanish Habsburg to the Ottoman Turks I have relied on the works of Geoffrey Parker.

Notes to Chapter 1: Residential Segregation 106. Giuliano de’ Ricci’s diary entry for 14 April 1569/70 records: “In questi tempi li Signori roppono guerra con sultan Selim imperador de’Turchi il quale voleva da loro la isola di Cipri et fanno preparamenti grandissimi, et il signor Antonio Martinengo bresciano, che di presente e’ qui in Firenze cortigiano del nostro serenissimo principe, ha hauto carico di 500 fanti et da loro altezze li e’ stato concesso li possa fare nel loro felicissimo Stato.” De’ Ricci, Cronaca 1: 35 (fol. 314r). 107. Giuliano de’ Ricci, Cronaca (1532–1606), 15 (f. 301r); see also his reference to the Venetians’ war with the Turk on 313v. 108. See Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 19–20 and 179–80; Arbel, Trading Nations, 55–76. 109. See Salomon and de Leon, “Mendes, Benveniste, DeLuna, Micas Nasi.” 110. The story of the abduction and the history of the Venetian Senate’s prosecution of those involved and related diplomacy is reconstructed in Ravid, “Money, Love and Power Politics.” 111. Ibid., 178. 112. This was by decree of the Senate on 6 March 1570, and applied to Turkish and Hebrew Levantines and all other Turkish subjects. Arbel, Trading Nations, 65. 113. This act was rescinded in 1573 and not carried out. The Venetians apparently thought better of the decision to expel the Jews while there were still Jews living in the papal city of Ancona, Venice’s principal port-competitor. See Arbel, Trading Nations, 65–69 and 75–76; and Ravid, “On Sufferance,” 35–50. 114. The allusion is to Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies. 115. Pullan suggests that the Venetian Inquisition was particularly concerned about individuals who too publicly flaunted the categories and boundaries of religious identity; see The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 96. 116. Pagden, European Encounters with the New World, 27 (and discussion in Chapter One as a whole). 117. Bernardo Canigiani was the representative in Ferrara from 1564 to 1577; in 1569–71 Florence also had an ambassador in Rome (Alessandro Medici) but apparently had not yet installed a resident ambassador in Venice. See Piazzo, Gli ambasciatori toscani del principato, 49, as cited in Diaz, Il granducato, 249. 118. MP 2892, 3 March 1569, n.p.: “Domenica udim[m]o la predica di compagnia dove si publicò severiss[im]a scomunica contra chi havesse notizia qui di hebrei stati xpiani, et non li revelassi à l’inquisitore.” A subsequent comment suggested that the Ferrarese were particularly interested in Don Iacob Abravanel, who, arrested and jailed as a Marrano, had made a dramatic night-time escape. To the best of my knowledge, the intriguing arrest of Iacob (Jacob) Abravanel as a Marrano has not yet been explored. 119. MP 2892. 13 March 1569/70, n.p.: “I S[ignor]ri Ven[etian]i S[erenissi]mi già in ordine 200 vele, et mandato gente in cipro à furia, seruitando di haver la guerra per rotta; et qui so[no] comparsi d’in sù quella piazza tanti Marrani et hebrei Levantini che ammorbono questa terra.” 120. On Righetto, see Pullan, “‘A Ship with Two Rudders.’” The complete inquisitorial record of Righetto in transcribed in Ioly Zorattini, Processi del S. Ufficio di Venezia, vol. 3 (1570–72) and in the Appendici, vol. 13. 121. “Lunedi passato finalmente si dette il segno agli hebrei; che è in sul’lembo della cappa dove i Can[cellie]ri portono le croci un palmo di nastro giallo simile à

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Notes to Chapter 1: Residential Segregation quello di Firenze delle publiche meretrici che si cuopre agevolmente mà l’obligho del portarlo non tocca più che xii or xv per cento di quelli che ci sono, et li più furfanti, restando il resto previlegiatissimi.” 122. Balleti, Gli ebrei e gli Estensi, 149–50. 123. Ibid. 124. MP 3288, 280r ff, dated 15 October 1568. 125. The complexity and diversity of beliefs held by sixteenth-century Venetians is brilliantly described by Martin in his study Venice’s Hidden Enemies. 126. Leon Modena’s comments in the proemio to his printed edition of his Historia de’ riti hebraici expresses this neatly: he has related only the customs, and not the reason for the customs, lest anyone think that he was interested in persuading any Christian reader to adopt the customs and the faith of the Jews. See Leon da Modena, Historia de riti hebraici, Ristampa fotolitografica dell’edizione veneziana del 1678 (Bologna: Arnaldo Forni, 1979). 127. Pius IV gave permission for edited (censored) printing of the Talmud, but this permission was revoked decisively in 1596 by Clement VIII, who also prohibited—with many Christian books—other “libri hebraeorum.” See Tedeschi, “Florentine Documents,” 580–81. 128. Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government, 300–306. 129. The Italian text of this section of the preamble to the edict, MGS 4449, 106r, is found above in note 68. 130. The suggestion has been made that Jewish descendants of conversos and/or the study of Jewish texts (especially kabbalistic texts) did exactly this. John Martin, for example, suggests that some Anabaptists and some millenarians who ended up in Venice were influenced by ideas that could have come from Iberian New Christians they knew and from their study of the kabbalah (Venice’s Hidden Enemies, 108–9 and 118–20). 131. MP 550, 51r, 112–13. Valerio Marchetti does not mention this group in Gruppi ereticali. 132. Ibid.: “Abraa[m] hebreo, contro il quale vi sonno assai inditii che s’accordava con l’heresie de Vinaldo et d’altri Tedeschi . . . Vinaldo Todesco orefice, convinto et confessor per heretico et ugonotto.” 133. If he read Yiddish, he might have had access to printed Yiddish paraphrases of some of the books of the Bible, but, according to an article by Raphel Loewe, there was no complete Yiddish translation printed until the late seventeenth century. Encylopedia Judaica, s.v. Bible, 867. 134. Bibles translated into Italian by Antonio Brucioli (1477–1566) were printed in Venice in 1532, 1538 and 1541 and in Geneva in 1562 (copies are found at the New York Public Library). There were Spanish-Jewish translations of the Bible (Encyclopedia Judaica, s.v. “Bible,” 873), but it is not very likely that Abraam was a Spaniard in the company of these Germans. The text these arrested men supposedly had read and then burned to avoid detection could have been anything: partial and full editions were printed by Luther with numerous revisions from 1522 to 1545 (with the books of the Hebrew Bible in print by 1534). 135. MGS 4450, 4v, also MGS 4449, 100r; Cantini, Legislazione toscana 7: 255. Jews who were not bankers were given four months to leave their habitations and transfer themselves out of the Florentine Dominion, and those who were licensed to lend had six months to finish their business and two more months to leave—eight

Notes to Chapter 1: Residential Segregation months total. On my translation of the terms hebreo and iudeo, see my Note on Translation, Dates and Currency. 136. Art, sumptuary codes and manner books all attest to the visual coding of society. But though use of such coding was a theme and specific symbols often were preserved, the categories used, the rhetoric used to justify them and the cultural meaning of the specific symbols changed. Thus the claims that the Jews created “confusion” resonated differently in the thirteenth century and in the sixteenth (as did the very meaning of “Jew”). For an excellent example of how symbols endured while their meaning shifted, see Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs.” 137. On the iconographical history of obligatory, identifying clothing or accessories for Jews and other groups, including prostitutes and lepers and beggars, see Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness. For a detailed study of the Jewish badge in Venice, see Ravid, “From Yellow to Red” and his extensive bibliography. Regarding the parallel treatment of Jews and prostitutes, see ibid., 201, note 29 on the difference between the place of the Jew and the prostitute in Christian theology; on the similarities in terms of their social function, see Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs” and Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 44–47. Legislation regarding the special clothing that had to be worn by prostitutes in Florence (and other related restrictions) was published in 1579/80; see Cantini, Legislazione toscana 9: 327ff. 138. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 6: 327: “qualunque persona di fede & religione hebrea, o vero Giudea, così maschio come femmina di qual si vogli età, natione, grado, & conditione habiterà, o starà nella Città contado & distretto di Fiorenza.” Males were to wear a round yellow O on their hat or other outer garment such as the “caperuccia della Cappa, et nella dietra della Cappotto o Mantello,” and women were to wear a “Manica della Veste di sora dal braccio” in yellow. 139. MGS 4449, 106v; Cantini, Legislazione toscana 7: 377. When the segno was introduced in 1567, there was no reference to “confusion.” Rather, the earlier provision stated that the segno was meant to provide evidence externally (extrinsicamente) of the intrinsic damnedness of the Jew. 140. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 6: 327. 141. MGS 4449, 106v–107r: “affinche gli Hebrei, tanta d’una quanto dello altro sesso, possino esser p[er] ciaschuno et in ogni luogo cognosciuti.” 142. Nove 18, 6r (“di barba castagnina et statura giusta”). 143. Nove 18, 25r: “Gem[m]a mogle [sic] di d[ett]o gabb[riell]o d’an[n]i 16 statura bassa, et magra Lustra donna di Moyse d’anni 24 magra stat[ur]a grande.” 144. Moise Passiglio, for example, was “grasso” at the age of nineteen (Nove 18, 23r), as was Isach di Rosciolo (sic) Romano at the age of twenty-six (Nove 18, 11r). 145. Nove 18, 38v, 61v. 146. For an example, see Figure 9. I discuss these travel permits in Chapter Nine below and have an essay in progress developing this argument further. 147. Ravid came to the opposite conclusion on the question of whether Jews were recognizably Jewish to Christians in his study of Venice, which was admittedly a more cosmipolitan city where the greater diversity might have made “Jewish” identity harder to discern. See his “Curfew Time,” 248–49. Ravid makes the point that Jews might have known both their own Jewish dialect and the local tongue. 148. Cohen, “The Case of the Mysterious Coil of Rope.” 149. Not all “Jews” lived as Jews at all times; there was a small population of

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Notes to Chapter 1: Residential Segregation people (known variably as Marranos or New Christians) of Iberian origin who presented themselves as either Jews or Christians, creating true confusion. Very few such have been documented in Florence, in contrast to Venice, for example. On these complicated people, see Ioly Zorattini, Processi del S. Uffizio di Venezia. 150. Individual Jewish families tended to use a small, distinctive pool of names so that it is often possible not only to identify a name in the sources as Jewish but also to guess that a certain individual belongs to a particular family. Jews seem quite similar in this as in other aspects of their use of names to Christian Tuscans, as described by Klapisch-Zuber, “The Name ‘Remade.’” 151. When the name of a Jew is recorded by a Florentine clerk, it is possible that his name is either Hebraized or Italianized in the process, so we cannot rely on court and administrative records to know what names Jews used in Jewish company. However, the men I have identified as Jews in the ghetto used Hebrew versions of their names when they submitted lists of governors to the Nove, when they worked with notaries and when they made their own records for the use of the Jewish communal organization and confraternities. It is possible that other Jews who possessed uncommon names or who used Italian versions escaped my attention altogether; for discussion of my approach to identifying Jews in the archival record, see the Introduction. 152. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 7: 376. 153. Also, of course, palatially. Many studies of Florence and Tuscany contribute in one way or another to this view of the city. In particular, see Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence and idem, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence; Litchfield, “Dalla repubblica al Granducato”; Strocchia, Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence; Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589. 154. For an astute critique of the tendency of social historians to attribute historical developments to social or psychological states of anxiety that are not easily or well documented and may at times be anachronistic, see Alan Hunt, “Anxiety and Social Explanation: Some Anxieties about Anxiety,” Journal of Social History 32, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 509–29. 155. It is probably true that Reformation on the one hand and the discoveries of science and exploration/colonization on the other created some anxiety for church officials, bureaucrats, rulers and other invested elites, as well as for ordinary people in the sixteenth century, and elites may justly have felt that their position would be strengthened and riot or revolt less likely where many orderly systems were in place. 156. These three main discourses of violence used against the Jews are discussed in a large body of literature about medieval anti-Semitism. For a recent exploration of the idea that “anti-Jewish persecution” can often best be explained as a very localized, opportunistic use by individuals of an available discourse of violence, see Nirenberg, Communities of Violence. 157. For an elegant study of the earlier Medicean appropriation of the republican Florentine image of David and the appropriation of the Donatello statue of David by the Florentines from the Medici palace in 1494, see Hollingsworth, Patronage in Renaissance Italy, 69, 85.

Chapter 2: State-Building and Status 1. I owe my formulation here to Edward Muir’s marvelous description of the Christian character of the ritual life of early modern Europe in his synthetic text Ritual in Early Modern Europe.

Notes to Chapter 2: State-Building and Status 2. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 5: 354ff, “Riforma attenente all’arte della Seta & Università di Porta S. Maria of 22 May 1562”; 360, “Et qualunche hebreo qual come qualche volta occore facessi nella detta Città lo esercitio del velettaio, venendo, & comperando alle Case & Monasteri senza tenere bottega residente sieno tenuti, & debbino aprir bottega & matricolarsi in detta arte per la maggiore con il partito de Consolo come forestieri, & venghino esso fatto sottoposti alla detta Arte, & alla osservanza delli suoi statuti, & ordini . . . etc.” 3. MP 313r; see discussion in Chapter Four. 4. MP 554, 71. Letter of Agnolo di Laudadio da Rieti, 20 October, Pisa. 5. MP 546, 654v. 6. Ibid.: “Noi altri che siamo nati et allevati nel felicis[sim]o suo stato.” 7. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 10: 112–13 (Statuto dell’ Arte di Por S. Maria, Libro secondo, 17 September 1580): “che nessuno di qual si voglia stato grado o condizione il quale per alcun tempo habbia mai esercitato, o in l’avvenire esercitasse personalmente il mestiero del Tiraloro, Battiloro, Maestro di Foglia, Stenditore, e che desse in lungo, Tintore di Seta, Dipintore, Legatore di opere, Aquarolo, Manganatore, Maestro di far Mangani, Maestri di far forbice da tagliar foglio d’oro o di ariento, Tessitore di Drappi di oro e di Seta con oro, ardisca o possa partirsi della Città di Firenze per uscir dello Stato di S.A.S. senza licenza delli Magnifici Signori Conservadori della dett’Arte, che per li tempi saranno sotto pena del bando del capo, e confiscazione di tutti i beni, e di potere essere ammazzati da qualsivoglia persona non solo senza alcun pregiudizio ma ancora con premio.” 8. Although Cecil Roth downplayed the tensions betweens Jews and Christians in Renaissance Italy, more recent scholarship does not dispute that attacks on Italian Jews from the fourteenth century through the sixteenth rarely manifested physical violence and were usually provoked by either mendicant preachers or a change in rule. For a list of attacks, see Roth, History of the Jews of Italy, 181–91. 9. On the “holy sassaiola”—ritual stoning—see Toaff, Love, Work and Death, 179–86. 10. Shargrir, “Parable of the Three Rings.” 11. Ginzburg, Cheese and the Worms, 152. 12. On the effect of this movement on the Jews of Florence in the 1470s, see Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 51–54. For a good summary of the situation in Tuscany in the last decades of the fifteenth century, see Veronese, Una famiglia di banchieri, 200–203, and for the effect of the new monte di pietà in Volterra, ibid., 203–23. 13. Cassuto, ibid., 56–59. 14. Ibid., 67. 15. The Jews who were accused and imprisoned and ultimately burned were German-speaking Jews, the city’s bishop a German humanist in the imperial service. On this episode, see R. Po-chia Hsia, Trent 1475. 16. Ibid., 51–56. 17. On violence and accusations in northern Italian towns and Austria that did follow in the wake of the attack in Trent and continued anti-Jewish preaching by Franciscans, see Hsia, Trent 1475, 128–29. 18. Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness. 19. MP 553, 14: “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

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Notes to Chapter 2: State-Building and Status 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]i magistrati n[ost]ri nemici li quali cercheran[n]o sempre metterci in disgra[tia] sua tutto il giorno molesta[n]doci e perseg[ui]tandoci si lei co[n] la Sua solita cleme[n]tia non piglia le difese n[ost]re che essendo noi me[m]bro debile no[n] habiamo p[er] noi altro ch[e] dio e V. Alt. et co[n] tutto il cuore mili offero e raccom[and]o. Di Pisa alli otto di 7mbre 1570. (Autograph: D[i] V. Alt. Ser.a minimo servitore. Angnolo [sic] di laudadio Heb[re]o.” 20. The locus classicus is Augustine of Hippo’s De Civitate Dei. On the development of this idea in Augustinian thought and later permutations, see Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 27–41 and passim. 21. This idea was neither well developed nor mainstream in the middle ages, but it was essential to the teaching of Joachim of Fiore and enjoyed a revival in the sixteenth century. See Reeves, Joachim of Fiore, 83–115. 22. On their entrance into the medical profession, see Shatzmiller, Jews, Medicine and Medieval Society. 23. The “necessity” (or “utility”) theory is discussed by Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 44–48. Bonfil argues that to the extent that Jewish moneylenders were actually “needed,” they were needed because the Christian spiritual economy depended on the existence of poor people, for whom the governments were not, however willing, to provide themselves. When Christian reform movements led to the creation of monti di pietà, therefore, Jewish moneylending was, in theory, made unnecessary. “Need”-based tolerance justified the licensing of prostitutes in most Italian cities; on the similarities in terms of their social function, see Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs,” 37–38; and Bonfil, ibid., 29–33 and 44–50, esp. 44–47. See also Ravid, “From Yellow to Red,” 182 and 203, note 29 on the difference between the place of the Jew and the prostitute in Christian theology. 24. There is, however, a growing body of scholarship, especially for Central European states, on Jewish migrants such as beggars and bandits. See, for example, the essays in Hsia and Lehmann, eds., In and Out of the Ghetto. 25. For example, Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities in Renaissance Italy, 2. So, too, in his more recent synthesis Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy: in a section on Jewish migration into central and northern Italy (50–59), Bonfil conflates “Jews” with “bankers” or “moneylenders.” Cf. Toaff ’s study of the Jews of medieval Umbria (Il vino e la carne), which shows vividly that bankers were a very small minority of the total Jewish population and unimportant after the end of the fifteenth century, though responsible for the original settlement of Jews in the region in the fourteenth century. 26. For example, in Cassandro’s Gli ebrei e il prestito ebraico Jews and Jewish moneylenders are synonymous. The approach has been reinforced by the fact that much of the important recent scholarship on Italian Jewry is about (intellectually and economically) elite Jews: e.g. Bonfil’s Rabbis and Jewish Communities and his Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy; and the works of Ruderman, including The World of a Renaissance Jew and Kabbalah, Magic, and Science. 27. Luzzati focuses on the banking families in his essays but notes the presence of

Notes to Chapter 2: State-Building and Status other Jews; for example, “Dal prestito al commercio,” in idem, La casa dell’ebreo, esp. 290–91, note 65, where he points out that Emanuele Alpilinc was in Empoli from 1528, and “Banchi e insediamenti ebraici,” ibid., 200. 28. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 18–21. Cassuto was interested in the presence of nonbanking Jews; he made careful note (ibid., 22ff) of Jews present in Florence prior to 1437. 29. On the fifteenth-century bankers and their charters, see Ciardini, I banchieri ebrei; see also Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 32–73, 119–71. 30. On the cultural output and world-view of Jews in Renaissance Florence and Renaissance Italy in general, see, in chronological order, Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze; Shulvass, The Jews in the World of the Renaissance; Roth, The Jews in the Renaissance. For the ongoing scholarship on rabbinic and literary Jews and on Jewish culture by Robert Bonfil, Elliott Horowitz, Arthur M. Lesley, Moshe Idel, David Ruderman, Hava Tirosh-Rothschild and many other Italian and Israeli scholars, a starting point is Ruderman, ed., Essential Papers and a collection I have not yet been able to consult, Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy, edited by David B. Ruderman and Giuseppe Veltri (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). See also the survey essays that comprise Vivanti, ed., Storia d’Italia. Annali 11: Gli ebrei in Italia. 31. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 53, 61–63, 73–86. 32. There was never a decree that required every Jew in the city to leave Florence: when the Jewish banks were ordered closed, it was simply taken for granted that the Jewish lenders and their dependents would have to leave. Jews who were not bankers were not specifically mentioned and seem to have continued to reside in the city and state in small numbers; see Roth, Gli ebrei a Firenze sotto l’ultima repubblica, 6–7. Cooperman correctly notes that Roth has no proof of Jews permanently resident in Florence after 1528, in “A Rivalry of Bankers,” 46. 33. There has been a remarkable interest in reconstructing the details of the lives of these prominent families in the absence of chronicles or diaries, reconciling contradictory or obscure details found in rabbinic manuscripts and archival sources. I have chosen to refrain for the most part from the seductive temptation to record my own corrections to the various articles by Margulies, Cassuto et al. Every trip to the archives has revealed new details about the relationships and genealogies of the northern and central Italian Jewish elite, and we can expect this to be true for the future. 34. On the difference between communal charters and individual charters of Tuscan Jews, see Siegmund, “Communal Leaders [rashei qahal] and the Representation of Medieval and Early Modern Jews as ‘Communities.’” Ariel Toaff has pointed out that Jewish bankers should be distinguished from Christian bankers only in that Jews were allowed to profit by taking interest, while Christians took their profit in the exchange of currencies. In Italy, especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Jewish moneylenders were not involved only with small-scale consumer loans; the wealthier Jewish banking families were true bankers. See Toaff, “‘Banchieri’ cristiani e ‘prestatori’ ebrei?” 267–87 and idem, Love, Work and Death, chap. 11, esp. 241–42. Here Toaff is responding to, among others, Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 31–32, who maintained that the economic contribution of Jewish bankers in Italy, and specifically in Florence, was insubstantial. 35. Ciardini, I banchieri ebrei. For an explanation of how Christian bankers were

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Notes to Chapter 2: State-Building and Status able to lend without being considered usurious, see De Roover, The Medici Bank, 30–38. 36. Luzzati, “Banchi e insediamenti ebraici,” see esp. 218–35. 37. Many historians and authors of fiction have relied on the statements about Abravanel’s relationship with Eleanora of Toledo made by Roth in his History of the Jews in Italy, 215 and 285. Roth did not provide his source, but his interpretation seems based on the passage written by an Abravanel descendant, the early seventeenth-century Dutch rabbi Menasseh ben Israel: “and in the house of his son, Don Samuel Abarbanel and of his wife Benvenida, Doña Leonora de Toledo was brought up at Naples, who is the daughter of Don Pedro de Toledo, the viceroy of Naples; who afterwards was married to the most eminent Duke Cosimo de Medici, and having obtained the dukedom of Tuscany, she honoured Benvenida with as much honour as if she were her mother.” Translated in Mechoulan and Nahon, eds., Menasseh ben Israel The Hope of Israel, 152. 38. On Bienvenida (Benvegnita) Abravanel (sister-in-law of Leone Ebreo) and her family, see Margulies, “La famiglia Abravanel in Italia”; Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 85–90; Malkiel, “Jews and Wills in Renaissance Italy,” 7–69. On the connections of the Abravanel with the Medici and with Jews in Pisa, see also Luzzati, “L’insediamento ebraico a Pisa,” in idem, La casa dell’ebreo, 28–29 and notes there. 39. Luzzati, “Dal prestito al commercio,” in idem, La casa dell’ebreo, 276–77. It is not yet clear how the da Rieti family (widow and heirs) obtained a charter before the Abravanel (widow and son); this point casts a shadow on Cassuto’s interpretation that the Abravanel were granted a charter only because of Eleanora da Toledo’s relationship with Benvegnita. 40. Luzzati argues that the Italian Jewish bankers were invited to Tuscany in the hope that their capital would stimulate industry in the state, just as the Levantine Jewish merchants were invited to expand international commerce. He further suggests that their expulsion in 1571 was almost a response to their failure to do so—or at least, that the Medici responded to the anti-Jewish campaign of the church because they had nothing to lose (“Dal prestito al commercio,” in idem, La casa dell’ebreo, 282, 292–93). Given the nature of the banking they were allowed by their charters—pawnbroking at controlled interest rates—I find it unconvincing that ducal administrators imagined that Jewish moneylending would provide venture capital for industry. Luzzati’s argument depends on his interpretation that the lowering of the interest rates allowed to the Jews in each renewal of their charters was a response to the state’s disappointment with the results of Jewish banking (283). It seems more likely to me that Cosimo was responding to the poverty of the countryside and trying to help the Tuscan contadini obtain loans at as low a rate as possible. 41. For a useful overview and introduction to the literature on Jewish moneylending in Tuscany in the fifteenth century, see Gow and Griffiths, “Pope Eugenius IV and Jewish Money-lending in Florence.” 42. For the relationship between the expulsion and the creation of new monti di pietà, see discussion in Chapter Four. On the coexistence of Jewish moneylending and the Christian lending institutions, especially in the Veneto, see Pullan, “Jewish Banks and the Monte di Pietà.” 43. These documents of the Magistrato Supremo were first studied by Cassuto in Gli ebrei a Firenze; they are also considered by Cooperman, “A Rivalry of Bankers”;

Notes to Chapter 2: State-Building and Status and extensively by Luzzati in “Dal prestito al commercio,” in idem, La casa dell’ebreo, 271, note 12. 44. Iacob Abravanel was living in Florence in Sancto Spirito with a household of twenty-two according to the census of 1562; I fiorentini nel 1562: descrittione delle bocche della città e stato di Fiorenza fatti l’anno 1562, facsimile edition of ASF Miscellanea Medicea 224, ed. Silvia Meloni Trkulja (Florence, 1991), 37r. 45. The generalization is flawed because there were Jews in some towns, such as Empoli, in the 1530s, even before the first charters; see Guerrini, Empoli, esp. 1: 152–65. In addition, the ministers of these branches were not in the powerful position of benefactor to other Jews who were living in the same town, and the resources they commanded were not sufficient to save them from ghettoization. We find many of these ex-banking agents in the ghetto of Florence, while the main banking families (da Pisa, da Rieti, Abravanel) were able to move elsewhere. 46. Luzzati’s analysis of the census material of 1570 finds that of a sample of 134 Jews of whom some indication is given of their age, the number of “adults” (people over age fourteen) and the number of children are almost exactly equal. “The impression, insofar as such restricted statistics are of value, is that this population had a youthful character, and therefore had a tendency toward growth more than toward natural decline” (“Dal prestito al commercio,” in Luzzati, La casa dell’ebreo, 275). Although my analysis produces slightly different numbers, it is clear that a great number of households in 1570 were made up of couples with young or teenaged children, as opposed to older couples or individuals with grown children. 47. For the 1562 data, see note 44 above. The 1570 census (data collected in Magistrato Supremo 4450) is discussed above in Chapter One, and the data are analyzed in Chapters Three and Six below. 48. The list of Jews in Florence in 1570 (MGS 4450, 173r ) did not include the Abravanel household, which had already left Florence. Jewish banking was not reinstated in Florence after the reorganization of the monte di pietà. (In Siena, in contrast, the monte di pietà coexisted with Jewish pawnshops.) However, two Jews in Florence seem to have been associated with banks in other parts of Tuscany: the doctor Laudadio de Blanis, who in partnership with his brother Samuel held title to a bank in Monte San Savino in 1564; and Moise Rabben in Arezzo (see Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households,” appendix 2 and also Salvadori and Sacchetti, Presenze ebraiche nell’Aretino, 78–79 and notes there). Whether there were any Jews living in Florence continuously from 1527 until 1570 has not yet been determined, but if there were, they were not many. See Chapter Three for an analysis of the origins of many of the eighty Jews whose presence in Florence in 1570 is documented. 49. Luzzati, “Dal prestito al commercio,” in idem, La casa dell’ebreo, 275. Luzzati also draws attention (292) to the fact that the majority of Jews in Tuscany were not financially valuable to the state. He based this figure on the count of at least one hundred and thirty bankers, their agents, families and servants who received exemptions from the segno between 1567 and 1570 (found in MGS 4449, 80v–91v). Many of the exemptions given to bankers do not specify exactly how many others in the household or firm are exempted, and the licenses often do not specify where the recipient lives. 50. Luzzati, “L’insediamento ebraico a Pisa,” in La casa dell’ebreo, 30; and “Prestito ebraico e studenti ebrei,” ibid., 113, note 12; Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 192. Luzzati

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Notes to Chapter 2: State-Building and Status concludes that “Ventura da Perugia Mantovano,” Cosimo’s librarian, is the same as the notorious Ventura di Moise of Perugia. Ventura is well documented as a student at the Studio, and other documents in the archives reveal that he was arrested and jailed during much of the late 1560s. 51. Luzzati, “Dal prestito al commercio,” in La casa dell’ebreo, 285. 52. MGS 4449, 71r; see also Salvadori and Sacchetti, Presenze ebraiche nell’Aretino, 59. The census of 1570 found him still living in Bibbiena. 53. MGS 4449, 70v–71r; Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 359. 54. Monte San Savino was granted as a ducal fief to Cosimo in 1550; see Fasano Guarini, Lo stato mediceo, 115. On the de Blanis family history and their banking activities, see Toaff, “Maestro Laudadio” and the documents summarized in Toaff, The Jews in Umbria, vol. 3, s.v. Blanis, Laudadio. De Blanis must have moved to Florence shortly before 1567, by which time he was living in Florence (Riformagioni 10, 23r), for he was still living in Perugia until at least 1562. It should be noted, however, that Laudadio did not die in 1565 as Toaff imagined (“Maestro Laudadio,” 97). 55. Manuello is referred to as a banker in MGS 4449, 86r, an exemption from the segno on 18 July 1567, but in the census of 1570 (MGS 4450, 90r–v, dated 22 July 1570, response to the letter of 7 July) a special note records that he is no longer a banker in Pontedera, where he lives. There is no record of any banking charter for Jews in Pontedera. 56. Salvadori, 59 notes that a Daniel di Iacob was protected by the court in Poppi in 1559 and 1560 and suggests that Cassuto’s reference to Davit di Iacob (Gli ebrei a Firenze, 204) was mistaken. However, it was Davit di Iacob hebreo who was called before the Otto di Guardia e Balía (OGP 114, 79r–v, dated 16 November 1569) for unauthorized moneylending, and it was Davit who was head of a household of eight in Poppi according to the census in 1570 (MGS 4450, 36r). 57. The Magistrato Supremo sent a request to twenty-one towns in July of 1570 asking them to report the number of Jews; see Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households,” appendix 1. 58. Ibid., appendix 2. 59. Ibid. The 128 households studied (including 12 tailors as 12 households) exclude Pisa with its Jewish population of 94 and Colle, with its Jewish population of 8. 60. “A tutti voi mercanti Greci, Turchi, Mori, Hebrei, Agguimi, Armeni et Persiani che vorrete venire.” Pratica Secreta 186, 94v–96v; this is reprinted in Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, appendix, 409–13 (called there Privilegi granducali, vol. 1, c. 94b) and discussed ibid., 174–78. 61. On the reentry of Jews into European lands from which they had previously been expelled, see Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, where 1570 is considered a critical turning point (without reference to the situation in Tuscany). But invitations to Jewish Levantine merchants were issued before 1570 in the Italian states; see Ravid, “A Tale of Three Cities.” 62. There is a large literature on the Portuguese diaspora. One might begin with the geographic and demographic discussion in Swetschinksi, Reluctant Cosmipolitans, 54–101 and bibliography cited there, although the author treats mainly of the period that begins in 1598. 63. On the charter of 1549, see Frattarelli Fischer, “Gli ebrei, il principe e l’inquisizione.” For the Portuguese Inquisition, see Introduction, note 44.

Notes to Chapter 2: State-Building and Status 64. The title of the above-mentioned article (see previous note) by Frattarelli Fischer is somewhat misleading in that the material discussed pertains to Portuguese, not Jews. She neither provides evidence that these Portuguese were crypto-Jews nor makes this claim. However, she does imagine that Cosimo thought these Portuguese were likely to judaize (in “Cristiani nuovi e nuovi ebrei,” 105), and she refers to them as “Ebrei Portoghesi” (ibid., 103). Most important, Frattarelli Fischer tries to establish that a secret concession of privileges was given to New Christians permitting them to live as Jews. On this unlikely possibility, see note 78 below. 65. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 173, with no supporting evidence. 66. For a discussion of the competition for maritime trade, see Ravid, “A Tale of Three Cities.” 67. Although some historians call the Jews who came to Tuscany, especially to Livorno in the 1590s, “Ponentine” Jews, reflecting their origins in the West (Iberian peninsula), the merchants were valuable to the Medici primarily because of their trade relations with the East and therefore were referred to and referred to themselves as “Levantines.” I have attempted to refer to them as Levantine (Eastern) or Ponentine (Western) only when the texts refer to the land where they last resided. 68. Servadio was made head sensale (broker) of all trade with the Levant; he was granted authority over all the merchants who were invited, “Greeks, Turks, Moors, Egyptians, Armenians and Persians,” and the right to appoint deputy agents. Cassuto (Gli ebrei a Firenze, 174–77) discusses Servadio’s role and reproduces the text of the privileges given to the merchants in general in his appendix. He did not include the privileges specifically given to Servadio; I have found them in the Pratica Secreta 186, Privilegi Granducali 1539–61, 93v–94v. Although Cassuto commented that Servadio was not explicitly called “hebreo” in the documents from 1551, there is a clear reference to “Servadio hebreo di damasco,” confirming his Jewish identity, in Pratica Segreta 98, Giornale di 1550–1557, 16r, dated 15 June 1551. 69. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 178–79; Segre, “Sephardic Settlements in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” 144. 70. Even in Livorno, the response was not immediate: the population of the city grew only very slowly in the first few decades after the issuance of the “Livornina” in July 1593. See Livorno. According to Fasano Guarini (“La populazione”) the population of Livorno began to increase dramatically from 1591. However, Bruno di Porto notes that in 1601 there were only 114 Jews in Livorno out of a population of 4,362 (“La nazione ebrea,” 239). 71. The papal charter is published in Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews 6: 2566–22570; “etiam si de genere Hebreorum, novi Christiani nuncupati” (2527). On the history of the charters of Jews and New Christians in Ancona, see Simonsohn, “Marranos in Ancona,” where this charter is also reproduced. 72. Simonsohn, “Marranos in Ancona,” 235. On the Jewish community in Ancona, see Bonazzolli, “Ebrei italiani, portoghesi, levantini.” 73. On the “martyrs of Ancona,” see also Segre, “Nuovi documenti sui marrani d’Ancona.” 74. Pullan, “‘A Ship with Two Rudders”; Zorattini, Processi del S. Uffizio di Venezia, vol. 13, 43–44. On the testimony that Nunes had lived as a Christian in Florence, see Pullan, 43; for the cause of his arrest, ibid., 45. The inquisitorial proceedings have been edited in Zorattini, ibid., vol. 3 (1570–72), 37–61. 75. Riformagioni 10, 22v: “Una Casa su la piazza de gl’agli che dicono essere di

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Notes to Chapter 2: State-Building and Status Portugallo, ma no[n] si sono rapresentanti alla Chiesa ne presi sacramenti, et dicono che son Marrani, et sono cinque persone.” 76. In the census of 1567 (Riformagioni 10, 20–23), we find the following twentyone Jewish merchants and their households: Daniello Baroccas levantino and his family; Abramo Sarfati, without family (20v); Ioseph Attias “che negotia in dogana” and his family, including a brother Abram “che spesso va in Levante” (21r); Moyse Benascer and his family; Iasac Sabote levantino and Samuel Coen and five Portuguese (22v). 77. From the census of 1570 it appears that a number of these Levantine and Portuguese had left Florence or avoided identification as Jews; most notably absent from the census are the Attias/Achias family and the Benascer. The names of Jews are not given for Pisa, where there must have been some Levantine Jews (but a large number of that city’s Jews were members of the da Rieti and da Pisa households). 78. Frattarelli Fischer tries to establish that a secret concession of privileges was given to ex-converso Jews—New Christians who were already living as Jews—permitting them to live as Jews with impunity. She constructs this supposed document from a “copy” of an undated document, sent in 1593 to a government official by a Florentine Jew who sought to rely on the supposedly precedent-setting privilege. Referring to this reconstructed document, Fratarelli Fischer hypothesizes that “the existence of a privilege to Portuguese Jews who had once been Christians is evoked in the proceedings of Isaia Coen” (“Cristiani nuovi,” 108). However, both Isaia’s reference to “Christian, Turk or Jew” and his claim to be from Smyrna, not Portugal, make it more likely that he is alluding to the privileges of 1551 than to privileges of 1549 or to the secretly given, non-extant privileges hypothetically reconstructed by Frattarelli Fischer. 79. Nunz. 842, unpaginated testimony of Moise di Buondi romanus hebreus, dated 17 September 1566. 80. The following additional Jews who were matriculated into Florentine guilds before ghettoization had Spanish or Portuguese or Levantine names or signifiers: Laudadio Blanis; Isach Abrami Levantinus (AMS 12, 173v); Leone Passilio (ibid., 125v) was a Neapolitan, probably of Iberian origin. The Alpelinghi of Empoli and Pontedera and many other Jews were of Iberian origin but were not living in Florence in 1566. 81. For an introduction to the complexity of these labels and distinctions, see Segre, “Sephardic Settlements,” 112–20. Luzzati distinguished between Jews of “Iberian origin” and “Levantine” Jews in his catalogue of Jews present in Pisa in the 1550s–70s in “Dall’insediamento ebraico pisano,” in idem, La casa dell’ebreo, 130–34. In “Dal prestito al commercio,” however (ibid., 275), discussing data from a Hebrew-language source, he employs the categories “Italian” and “Sephardic.” Moise Buondi used the categories “Italian” and “Spanish,” including in “Italian” Jews of earlier Spanish origin whom he did not suspect of Marranism. 82. That there is a longer story to be told about Moise Buondi’s conflict with Isaia Coen is suggested by criminal court records from the same year referring (briefly) to Isaia’s intention to testify in a suit Moise’s uncle Sabatino brought against Moise; OGP 104, 225r–v. 83. According to the comessario of Castrocaro, Bernardino Rabatti, in his letter to the Magistrato Supremo dated 15 July 1570 (MGS 4450, 120r), the banker who had

Notes to Chapter 2: State-Building and Status been in the town had left six years earlier: “quanto a quel Raffaello di Elia hebreo et suoi ministri che prestavano a usura . . . si partirne piu di sei anni sono di questi parti.” 84. See Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households,” appendix 3. 85. Toaff, Love, Work and Death, 204–6. 86. The documents are edited in Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, appendix, 386–87. 87. Ibid., docs. 29, 30. 88. When Abravanel’s charter expired in 1562, the Aretines appealed to the duke to prevent any other Jews from being allowed to take his place. Riformagioni 8, 125r. However, on 9 March 1563 Vinta recorded the petition of Sabato d’Amadio hebreo da Coreggio, who said he had been in Arezzo for 16 years in the service of Donna Benvegnida Abravanella [sic]. Apparently Sabato knew that the banking charter would not be reissued; he asked to be allowed to stay in Arezzo as a merchant. Most Jews who lived in Tuscany did not need or seek to receive specific permission to do so; but Sabato wanted privileges and exemptions from all taxes and imposts, to receive summary justice and to be allowed to keep his books in Hebrew. Although Sabato was not a Levantine merchant, Vinta saw fit to recommend that he receive the same privileges that had been given in 1551, except that he had to pay customs they did not: Riformagioni 8, 512r. 89. OGP 2234, suppliche for 1559 (unpaginated). It was apparently necessary to reissue a ban on carrying weapons in 1567; see Cantini, Legislazione toscana 6: 321–22. For Servadio Greco, see Pratica Secreta 186, 94r: “vogliamo che vi sia lecito portare in ipsa nostra citta et dominio quanto all persona vostra solo, et dano in sino in due vostri servitori ogni sorte d’arme tanto offensibili quanto defensibile et soci di nocte come di giorno, senza pena et senza alcuno altro vostro preiudicio o danno.” 90. Riformagioni 9, 132, “Per informatione, fu gia concesso per l’Ecc[elentia] V[ostra] un privilegio generale in favore di piu forestieri Turchi, hebrei ecc[etera] che venissino ad habitare nel suo felicissimo stato, per il quale si concedeva infra le altre cose che fussino securi per tutti li debiti fatti con forestieri, e non sudditi suoi.” This provision is indeed stated clearly in the 1551 charter. 91. “antiquamente et da lungo tempo i[n] qua han[n]o co[n]tinuamente habitato si come di pr[esen]te habitano la Città di Pisa.” MGS 4449, 59r–v. 92. Ibid., 67v–68r, dated 2 June 1556. 93. Ibid., 68r, “come se detto Emanuello o suoi figlioli et fratelli respectivamente fusser nati et originarii di detta terra di Montopoli.” 94. “volendo Sua Eccellenza gratificare al supplicante a fine che possa sostentare honestamente la sua famiglia, et inspirato dal lume della gratia qualche volta ricognoscere la vera fede.” 95. “Safe-conduct” given to “Isac et Ysaia hebrei fratelli et fig[liou]li di Abramo libero salvo condotto et sicurta di potere venire, stare, partirsi et ritornare co[n] lor famiglie robe et mercantie nella città di fiorenza et di siena” and other cities and places in the Dominion “di poter vendere et mercatantare et habitarvi respectivamente et condurvi robe et mercantie co[n] il pagamento de’ soliti datii et gabelle s[econ]do gli ordini.” They were neither to lend or borrow at interest nor open any lending institution. The phrasing “venire, stare, partirsi et ritornare” is quite deliberate. This 10 December 1559 safe-conduct is like the banking charters in that it permits the family to have synagogues and conduct their ceremonies as far as the church allows it, but it does not specify the number of years for which it is valid. MGS 4449, 71r–v.

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Notes to Chapter 2: State-Building and Status 96. I have found no reference to Jewish residence in the statutes I have been able to examine in the collection called Statuti delle comunità autonome e soggette, including Statuti 26 and 304 (Arezzo and Cortine 1503–65; Empoli [statutes of 1560]). 97. On the return of the da Rieti and the Leucci to Pisa, see Chapter Six. 98. See Chapter One above. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 388–89, docs. 31 and 32. 99. Some of the letters exchanged were seen by Cassuto, who published excerpts (ibid., appendix, docs. 33–36, pp. 389–92) and discussed them (p. 105). My discussion is based on the original letters as cited below. 100. MP 542, 466r. 101. Ibid.: “ma no[n] sapendo se l’habitar q[ua] tanti hebrei scacciati da Sua Santità sia mente et voluntà sua, mi so[no] mosso a scriverle questa mia, à causa che la sia di cio con sapevole et piacendole mi possa dir qua[n]to in cio sia la mente & volunta di V[ostra] E[ccellenza] I[llustrissima].” 102. “I privilegi concessi dal duca n[ost]ro S[ignore] alli hebrei sogliono comprehendere solam[en]te li levantini, et non questi che habitano in Italia massime discacciati da S[ua] S[anti]tà. Però considerateli bene et eseguiti quell’ordine dover se haveret’ dubio alc[un]o vi lo dichiarerermo. Da Fiorenza.” MP 234, 12r. 103. MP 542a, 799r. 104. MP 234, 23v. 105. MP 542a, 799r (“sua Città, la quale in vero non mi par’ stanza per loro”). 106. Martelli may even have been looking for permission to expel the other Jews in Volterra as well, or to have decisive instructions to protect them all, for the letter mentions local ill-will toward the Jews: “et me pare vedere ancora, che questa comunità ce li vege malvolentieri et piu’ volte me l’ha fatto intendere.” I share Cassuto’s instinct (p. 105) that Martelli is sympathetic to the Jews and is hoping to receive permission to allow them to stay. Luigi Martelli, capitano of Volterra, should not be confused with Lodovico Martelli, sub-vicar of Florence at this time, who had a rather more clear opinion of Jews, expressed in his anti-Jewish treatise (a chronicle of Jewish child-murders and other supposed offenses) which Carlo Pitti included in his collection of materials to convince the Magistrato Supremo to expel the Jews (MGS 4450, 150r–52v, discussed below in Chapter Four). 107. The two towns are about five kilometers apart, and Elena Fasano Guarini has both towns in Cosimo’s Sienese territory during the period of the Grand Duchy (Il granducato di Toscana alla morte di Cosimo I [1574], table 18). 108. MP 542, 121r: “pensavamo per la venuta d’un certo Prospero d’Isach ebreo haver acquisitato nella nostra citta un artegiano che sia di setta fare cappelli berrette et altri simili e tener drappi nella sua bottega il quale e raro nel arte sua e perche ha hauto ordine di partirsi e si risolve andar ad habitar à cithona non dimeno voluntiere e con molta amorevolenzza si è offerto quando sia con buona gratia di V[ostra] E[ccelenza] Ill[ustrissi]ma venir spesso à Chiusci et accomodarci del arte e virtu sua.” I understand the meaning of “accomodarci” here according to the sixth definition of accomodare in the Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana: (disusata): “dare il comodo, concedere a comodo; affidare in custodio, provvedere, fornire, favorire.” 109. See above, Chapter One, note 90. The 8 June 1569 correspondence from the priors of Chiusi makes sense if the reason Prospero was forced to move out of Chiusi in 1569 was the enforcement of the bull Hebreorum gens issued by Pope Pius V on 26 February 1569. However, it is also possible that Prospero was expelled from Chiusi by

Notes to Chapter 2: State-Building and Status the governor of Siena, Federigo dei conti di Montaguto, after receiving the letter of 15 May 1569 (cited above) from with Francesco. 110. See note 107 above. The letter begins: “La co[muni]ta nostra per nobiliare la citta e per Universal conmodo e servitio ha sempre accarazzato gl’artiginai forestieri, e perche questo luogo ha nem di gattina nera per virtu dei nostri statuti i forestierei artegiani che vengano à essertar l’arte loro in Chiusci godano molte essentione e con tutto cio rare volte ci vengano” (MP 542, 121r). 111. See previous note. 112. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 389–92, docs. 33–36. In 1570, when the problem was finally dealt with, there were indeed Jews living in Volterra: three households comprising, however, only thirteen people—not the twenty-four present a year earlier. Luzzati, also noting the irritated tone of Francesco’s response (“Dal prestito al commercio,” in idem, La casa dell’ebreo, 292), attributes it to the prince’s annoyance with the Jews because, being poor, they were a nuisance. While I agree that Francesco saw poor Jews as a nuisance, I read his annoyance in this particular letter as directed at the capitano, not the Jews. The capitano has persisted in calling attention to a failure of the prince to provide a clear, rational policy. 113. According to Cassuto (Gli ebrei a Firenze, 195), “their juridical condition was the same as citizens, or according to the case, as foreigners living in Florence.” 114. “Provvisione contra li Hebrei,” 6 Maggio 1567, in Cantini, Legislazione toscana 6: 328. 115. MGS 4449, 98v. 116. Ibid., 99v. 117. Ibid., 100r; Cantini, Legislazione toscana 7: 255, “debbino . . . essersi partiti & lasciando loro habitationi transferitisi fuor del Dominio Fiorentino.” 118. In a letter to Francesco de’ Medici dated 12 August 1569, the Tuscan ambassador in Madrid refers disparagingly to a “few, who are of the race of Jews [di razza di Giudei], though they may be baptized.” MP 4898, 514v–15r. 119. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, appendix doc. 28, 386; Richardson, Printing, Writers and Readers, 28; 45 (citing Paul Grendler, The Roman Inquisition). 120. On toscanità, see Tribby, “Florence, Cultural Capital of Cultural Capital,” 224. 121. The duchy was divided administratively into three regions, where the contado referred to territory closer to the capital (Florence) and the distretto to farther areas. See Fasano Guarini, Lo stato mediceo di Cosimo I, 13ff and appendix. 122. The classic works on the legal status of the Jews in the Italian states are by Colorni, Legge ebraica e leggi locali and Gli ebrei nel sistema del diritto comune fino alla prima emancipazione. Colorni does not pay special attention to the case of the Jews in Tuscany or to the practical implications of legal status; his focus is on the continued status of Jews as Roman citizens in a legal system that utilized Roman, canon and common law. According to Colorni, anyone, including a Jew, was considered a citizen of the place where he (sic) was born, and citizenship was also achievable after a certain period of residence. Jews were citizens under Roman law and were to be afforded the same rights as all others, and continued to be considered as such through the feudal period (Gli ebrei nel sistema del diritto comune, 17 and note 77 there; Legge ebbraica e leggi locali, 43, 88–99). Stow goes farther, implying that common law protected any resident from expulsion, including Jews: “The bulk of Italian Jewry was

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Notes to Chapter 2: State-Building and Status saved from this fate [expulsion] by the ius commune (Italian Roman common law). Once Jews were admitted into an Italian town (Venice, Genoa and scores of other places constantly refused to do so), this law ensured that their right of residence was, for once, theoretically upheld” (Alienated Minority, 303). However, local statutes modified this picture. For example, in Anghiari, statutes were qualified in 1563 so that to obtain citizenship and leave behind the status of forestiere one had to reside in Anghiari for thirty years as a proprietor (and not renter) of a house. See Fanfani, Potere de nobiltà nell’Italia minore, 20. And in Pescia, according to Brown, “starting in the sixteenth century, immigrants had to wait fifty years to obtain citizenship, compared to only ten in the mid-fourteenth and early fifteenth century” (In the Shadow of Florence, 182). One of the main benefits of citizenship, the right to political participation, was almost certainly denied to Jews even when they were citizens. In Florence formal citizenship required thirty years’ residence in the city and, according to Litchfield, real property and approval by the Council of 200 or the duke (Emergence of a Bureaucracy, 46). 123. Full references to extant copies of the texts—I have used copies found in Cantini, Legislazione toscana and in Magistrato Supremo—are given in Bertoli, ed., Leggi e bandi. See documents 230 (86), 233 (88) and 300 (110). 124. There were three sets of sumptuary laws under Cosimo I: in 1546, 1562 and 1568. See Cantini, Legislazione toscana 2: 318ff; 5: 402–10; and 7: 35–41. 125. In 1562 (ibid. 5: 405) such a girl was a “fanciulla non maritata, anco’ che fusse figliuola di Padre nobile”; however, the law is limiting what is granted to married nobility—so it is taken for granted that non-noble girls are forbidden. In 1568 the ambiguity is removed with a simple reference to a “fanciulla nobile fiorentino non maritata” (ibid. 7: 37). 126. Grande dizionario della lingua italiana 12: 699, s.v “partito”: “Disus: Donna, femmina, fanciulla, cortigiano da o di partito: donna di facili costumi, prostituta, meretrice.” 127. In 1562 this privilege was shared by the wives and children of foreigners and other nobility; in 1568 it was extended to the wives [consorte] of all these men. 128. Benvegnita Abravanel is referred to as the wife of Samuel Abravanel, nobile, in her charter of 1547; she is not referred to as nobile, and he is dead: see MGS 4449, 67v, in the margin, “uxore nobilis D. Samuelis.” 129. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 4: 409; 7: 40. 130. I will demonstrate below, in discussing their status as taxpayers and as guild members, that Jews were not all considered foreigners. 131. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 6: 327, “Contra li Hebrei,” 6 May 1567. 132. Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 93. Roth cited Jewish strazzaiuoli guilds in Padua in 1448 and a guild of silkweavers in Bologna in the early sixteenth century (History of the Jews of Italy, 125, 127) and in Sicily, where there was also a guild of Jewish carpenters in fifteenth-century Palermo (ibid., 229). Baron surveyed Jewish occupational guilds in The Jewish Community 1: 364–72, but specific evidence for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century guilds in Italy (notes, vol. 3, 939–40) is thin. Baron made the crucial point that Jewish charitable societies, where they existed, served the same social needs for their members that guilds served (vol. 1, 349 and passim). 133. For a complete listing of the Jews in these guilds, according to the extant books of matriculation, see Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households,” appendix 3. It

Notes to Chapter 2: State-Building and Status should not be inferred from the almost complete absence of Jewish women on these lists that women did not work in the wool, silk, or linen crafts and trade, but rather only that they were not matriculated into guild membership. Women in Florence very frequently worked without being matriculated, as many of the reforming guild statutes point out (see Chapter Eight; see also Brown and Goodman, “Women and Industry in Florence,” 78–80). 134. A few men known to me from other sources as Jews appear in the matriculation lists without the signifier. See the Introduction for the methodological problem (and resolution) of the possibility that others, especially women whose names are less obviously Jewish, might have escaped my notice. 135. Guerrini, Empoli 1: 155 cites Mattasia ebreo [di Davit] in the Empolese Arte di Vaiai e Cuoiai in 1557 and Emanuelle and Bianca, a son and daughter of Giuseppe Alpelingo, in the Empolese Arte degli Speziali in 1549. On Mattasia in the guild, see also ibid., 357 note 206. 136. In determining which guilds actually admitted Jews and which did not, I have relied on the presence or absence of people identified as Jews in the matriculation roll books rather than on the statements in the guild statutes regarding the criteria for matriculation. 137. It was unexceptional for both Jews and women to matriculate into many of the lower-status guilds. Women are found in the following guilds (for which records in this period are extant): Arte de Medici e Speziali, Arte dell’università dei Linaioli, Arte della Seta, Università di Por San Piero. 138. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 5: 354ff, “Riforma attenente all’arte della Seta & Università di Porta S. Maria of 22 May 1562”; 360, “Et qualunche hebreo qual come qualche volta occore facessi nella detta Città lo esercitio del velettaio, venendo, & comperando alle Case & Monasteri senza tenere bottega residente sieno tenuti, & debbino aprir bottega & matricolarsi in detta arte per la maggiore con il partito de Consolo come forestieri, & venghino esso fatto sottoposti alla detta Arte, & alla osservanza delli suoi statuti, & ordini . . . etc.” 139. Arte della Seta 13, the book of matriculations, covers members admitted 1562 through 1582, and the first Jew to appear was in the year 1573. Jews who had been selling the veils probably could not afford to matriculate and eventually entered the guild of rigattieri, which covered tailors and re-tailors—that is, used-clothes-dealers. 140. The fees paid by Jews from 1573 to 1613 are the same as fees paid by other Florentines: 50 lire or 100 lire, depending on whether they matriculated per la minore or per la maggiore, in four or five annual installments. They also correspond exactly to the fees set forth in the statutes published in 1580 (Cantini, Legislazione toscana 10: 61). 141. For example, a Christian man from Luca paid 12 florins on 19 June 1578 “as a foreigner,” AMS 12, 147. 142. Only one case is unclear: “Leones Iacobi Leonis d’passili neapoletanus vendens merces” was admitted in the Medici e Speziali on 8 March 1558/59 (AMS 12, 125v). This man paid only six florins even though he was visibly a Neapolitan and well known to me from other sources to be a Jew in Florence in the 1570s. It is not clear why he was not required to pay 12 florins as a foreigner, but it seems most likely that he had attained the status of citizen (though I am aware of no formal process) by dint of having lived in Florence for some period of time. 143. AMS 22, 111v, 146r. The birth records of these Jews in Empoli are found in

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Notes to Chapter 2: State-Building and Status the “mohel-book” of Yeh.iel Nissim da Pisa, a Hebrew register he kept of circumcisions he performed in Tuscany, which was edited by Sonne in From Paul IV to Pius V, 214–20. (The first member of the family born in Empoli is no. 4, Yosef [Giuseppe] son of Moshe “Sephardi” Alpelink. , born in 1540/41.) 144. 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 the same. The absence of any reference to the role Jews were to play in the myriad aspects of guild life is further evidence of Christian society’s apparent preference for rendering the Jews invisible, which was so dramatically contradicted and paradoxically supported by the imposition of the segno and the ghetto. 145. Jews of the papal state paid annual taxes for the upkeep of the House of Catechumens and for Giochi di Agone e Testaccio e del Carnevale. These taxes and their devastating impact on the Jews are discussed by Stow in Taxation, Community and State. Not only the Jews of Rome suffered. Perugia is an example of a Jewish community devastated by the taxation: Toaff, in Gli ebrei a Perugia, 130ff, has described how the indebtedness of the community, which had to pay 18 scudi per year to the House of Catechumens in Rome, drove the male householders to sell a part of their cemetery and all their synagogal silver and entrust it to one of their members, Ioseph Ursi, to bring to Rome. The story of that debt and the man entrusted to pay it off continues in Florence, where the money actually landed in the form of a proud dowry given by Ursi to his daughter to marry her to a son of the distinguished Leucci family of Pisa, as discussed in Chapter Nine. 146. The exemptions for the merchants are specified in the privilege brokered by Servadio Greco; see Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, appendix, 411, doc. 54. 147. The catasto, made famous by its analysis by Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Les toscans et leurs familles, was a grand experiment in a statewide taxation based on net worth and income in 1427–30. According to the authors, the vastness of the project overwhelmed the state bureaucracy, which abandoned it after the collection of enormous quantities of data. For taxation under Cosimo I, I have relied on Diaz, Il granducato di Toscana, 148–59. On taxes collected in the fifteenth century through the gonafaloni of Florence, see Kent and Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood, 24ff. 148. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 6: 21ff, “Statuti della Gabella de’ Contratti del di 29 Aprile 1566,” which are a reform. See especially the section on the taxes paid on the “Gabella delle Doti e loro augumento” on pp. 52–61 and “Gabella delle Restituzioni delle Doti” on pp. 61–63. The tax rate on estates and gifts left in testaments was 54.5 lire per 100 scudi if paid within forty-five days of the death, more thereafter, p. 85. No gabella had to be paid for gifts to charitable organizations, guilds etc., p. 87, while for other “pious causes” there were limits of 200 scudi and 50 scudi, which could be sheltered, depending on the destination of the funds. 149. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 6: 52. 150. MGS 4449, 9v, Capitoli to Laudadio Moysis d. Rieti and his heirs. Cap. 15 gives them the right to live in the territory of Colle for up to two years after the expiration of the charter, paying a third of the annual tax during those extra years (20 florins in gold) and no other gabella or tax. 151. The very statutes concerning the gabelle ordered that henceforth notaries

Notes to Chapter 2: State-Building and Status send a copy of every act to a central archive. However, taxes are not mentioned in deeds of sale or inventories, but are most likely to be found when a person is accused of having paid the appropriate tax. Therefore, when Jews paid their taxes in an uncontested act, the notarial archives will have no reference to the fact. 152. Roth, Gli ebrei a Firenze sotto l’ultima repubblica, 22 and note 54. 153. Salvadori, Presenze ebraiche nell’Aretina, 58, note 15. I have been unable to consult the documents cited, which are in the Archivio di Stato di Arezzo, but they are records of the Dogana (Customs office) which controlled the import and export of merchandise including the cloth, pharmaceuticals and also animals in which Jews are known to have dealt. 154. Guerrini, Empoli 1: 153, note 422. 155. Ibid., note 419. Daniello is almost certainly one of the four sons of Moise di Giuseppe Alpelinghi (da Empoli), circumcised by R. Yeh.iel Nissim of Pisa in 1543, and thus twenty-four or twenty-five at the time of his marriage to his wife, who may have been his first cousin, the daughter of his father’s brother Emanuelle di Giuseppe of Pontedera. Guerrini notes that this gabella implies a very low dowry (or low gabella), but he does not mention what the average dowry and gabelle were in Empoli. According to my calculations, the tax corresponds to a dowry of less than 100 scudi, a very modest dowry. (My calculation is based on the rates fixed by the law cited above in note 148 from the year 1566, where the rate was 54 lire per 100 scudi of the dowry, since Guerrini does not refer to any alternative system operating in Empoli.) At this time the scudo was the theoretical equivalent of 7 lire and 10 soldi, so 6 scudi were 42 lire and 60 soldi. Thus the tax paid on this dowry was 45 lire, less than the 54 lire that would have been paid for a dowry of 100 scudi. A dowry of less than 100 scudi is low but consistent with data on other middle-class Jewish families at this time in Tuscany. On dowry size among Jews in Tuscany, see Chapter Nine. 156. On the expulsion of these “foreign” Jews (e.g. in 1477), see Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 53. 157. The classic survey on this subject is Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews. 158. I am using the idea of paradigm here as it is developed in Barbour, Myths, Models and Paradigms. 159. Vinta justified this pattern of exemption by reference to a similar policy in 1466: “Trovo alle Riformationi che l’an[n]o 1446 fu ordinato li hebrei portassino un segno cioe un O nel petto di color giallo, ò nella spalla dritta, erano eccettuati quelli che risedevano quà et tenevano [17 verso] banca aperta, credo respetto à li pattii et capitulatione che havevano col monte respetto alla tassa che pagavano, sotto pena di scudi 100 d[’oro] à chi contra faceva per qualunche volta” (Riformagioni 10, ibid.). 160. Luzzati, “Dal prestito al commercio,” in idem, La casa dell’ebreo, 275; MGS 4449, 80v–91v. 161. No mention was made of Levantine merchants: no noticeable immigration of merchants who identified openly as Jews had occurred since 1551. 162. As an extraordinary exception, the da Rieti who moved to Florence did manage to obtain exemptions from the segno by 1573 (Luzzati, “Dal prestito al commercio,” in idem, La casa dell’ebreo, 288–89), but no group of Jews was categorically exempted—certainly not bankers, since Jews were no longer allowed to engage in moneylending in Tuscany. Not all the da Rieti moved to Florence, as we shall see; see also Luzzati, “Da Pisa a Livorno,” ibid., 138–39.

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Notes to Chapter 2: State-Building and Status 163. “Cosmus Med. Mag. Etruriae Dux et Seremiss. Princeps F. Summae in omnes pietatis ergo hoc in loco hebraeos a christianorum coetu segregatos non autem eiectos voluerunt [ut levissimo Christi jugo cervices durissimas bonorum exemplo praebere domandas facile et ipsi possint Anno D. M. DLXXI].” No longer extant, this inscription was recorded by several witnesses in the nineteenth century, as cited in Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 117. I do not have evidence to determine whether this inscription (with its difficult or garbled Latin) was written at the time of the ghetto’s creation, as implied by Cassuto, or at a later date, but it is noteworthy that the hope expressed is that the Jews will, ultimately, convert because of the kindness and good example of Christian rulers, not because the ghetto will finally force them to see their servitude. 164. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 114.

Chapter 3: Before the Ghetto 1. Sections of this chapter were presented at a conference at the Jewish Theological Seminary (New York, 22 October, 2001) and appear as part of “Communal Leaders (rashei qahal) and the Representation of Medieval and Early Modern Jews as ‘Communities, ’” in Jewish Religious Leadership: Image and Reality, edited by Jack Wertheimer (JTS Press: New York, 2004), vol. 1, 333–70. 2. Sahlins, Boundaries, 7–9. 3. For example, Ruderman, “The Cultural Significance of the Ghetto,” 3 and Bonfil, “Aliens Within,” 279 and passim. Another approach was taken by Shlomo Goitein (A Mediterranean Society), who did not rely heavily on the notion of local Jewish communities, but rather argued that a vast “society” was created c. 900–1200 in the Arab Mediterranean litoral that embraced and was comprised of both Jewish and Muslim sub-communities. The bonds of the Jews in that geographically dispersed community are evidenced by their willingness to marry each other. 4. Helpful overviews of the use of the concept of community in historical context before nationalism include Macfarlane, Reconstructing Historical Communities, Boulton, Neighborhood and Society and Hillery, Communal Organizations. 5. In Italian Jewish historiography Simonsohn’s classic study of Italian Jewish communal organization, “The Ghetto in Italy,” treats community as a structure which develops organically and becomes increasingly complex as a function of time and demographic growth. Italian ghettos of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did generally have a recognizable set of social and political institutions, including an elected Jewish self-government, a court of arbitration, confraternities, one or more appointed rabbis, kosher-slaughterers, teachers, schools, school and synagogue buildings. See Siegmund, “La vita nei ghetti.” 6. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity,’” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (2000): 1–47. 7. Among the most influential contemporary exponents of this view is Robert Bonfil, who argues that from the “awareness of belonging to the Jewish people . . . they derived the principle of observance of Jewish law in all matters. This self-consciousness applied not only to religious ritual but also to the rules that expressed the community’s sovereignty through the regulation of most details of daily life” (“Aliens Within,” 279). For a lengthier explanation of my contrasting view, see Siegmund,

Notes to Chapter 3: Before the Ghetto “Division of the Dowry.” Shaye J. D. Cohen has demonstrated the centuries-long process by which rabbinic Judaism became the accepted, mainstream system within which Rabbanite (but not Karaite) Jews lived, in The Beginnings of Jewishness. In a related way, Miriam Peskowitz’s studies of Judaism and gender in the Graeco-Roman world (Spinning Fantasies) exposed the fault-line between Jewish women’s lives as they lived them—evidenced by archaeological remains and nonrabbinic texts—and the representation of women in rabbinic texts. Notably, in Jews of Georgian England, one of the earliest important books to venture off the hallowed path, Todd Endelman portrayed the Jews there as a socioeconomically diverse population whose very “nontraditional” lives—especially in terms of their religious commitments—must be understood not as the result of any modern emancipation and subsequent “breakdown” of Jewish community, but rather as a response to the particular circumstances of their settlement in England. Other early modern historians have studied the particular Jewishness—its ideology and ritual expression—of the “Portuguese Nation,” a group formed in Amsterdam of individuals who “returned” to being Jews from a former status in Portugal as New Christians. See Swetschinsky, Reluctant Cosmopolitans and Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation. See also Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism. Also contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the construction of Jewish communal identity in the premodern world are several excellent studies of the specific ties that bonded certain subgroups of early modern Jews such as medical students, Hebrew letter-writing correspondents and most obviously, rabbinic and kabbalistic circles. For the construction of intellectual communities and identities, see Ruderman, “The Impact of Science on Jewish Culture and Society” and Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery. Bonfil gives special attention to the culture of letterwriting that bound educated Jewish male scholars to each other in Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy; see also Horowitz, “Jewish Confraternities.” 8. See Yuval, “Yitzhak Baer and the Search for Authentic Judaism” for discussion of Baer’s historiographical approach and the influence of his image of Jewish communities as “organisms” that were organically part of a larger single body (of Israel). Yuval suggests that Baer was invoking the image of the organic church, but Tönnies’s more biological analogy was already known. 9. The fundamental collection of medieval Jewish ordinances remains Finkelstein’s Jewish Self-Government. 10. For the iconography of Synagoga in medieval Christian art, see Schreckenberg, The Jews in Christian Art. 11. Assis, The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry, 67–82. 12. Ibid., 154–60, on the range of jurisdiction and punishments applied. 13. Siegmund, “Communal Leaders,” 337–38. 14. Ibid., 343–51. The documentation concerning these bankers is found in Ciardini, I banchieri ebrei, a study designed to demonstrate that the Jewish bankers were invited and welcomed to Florence to provide credit to small-scale artisans, merchants and the poor, and that the charges of fraud and abuse leveled against them at the end of the century were largely false or exaggerated (see especially 18–19 and his summary of all criminal charges brought against the Jews in the fifteenth century, 11–12). Ciardini also presents the institution of the monte di pietà, which led to the demise of the Jewish bankers, as a morally superior civic institution, “più conforme al carattere, ai

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Notes to Chapter 3: Before the Ghetto costumi ed ai bisogni del nostro popolo” (21). On the presence of Jews throughout Tuscany in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, see Botticini, “New Evidence on Jews in Tuscany.” 15. In the context of fifteenth-century Florence, Trexler translates the word compagnia as confraternity or corporation (Public Life, 406, note 183). While Ciardini cautiously interpreted the data as evidence of a banking society or “Compagnia,” Cassuto, referring to the same documents, considered them evidence of a Jewish “community” (Gli ebrei a Firenze, 4, 45, 49 and passim; see discussion 212–14). For further discussion of the details of the condotte of 1437, 1448 and 1481 and for Cassuto’s evidence pertaining to the existence of Jewish community and community leaders and to his theory that there was an early constitution, see Siegmund, “Communal Leaders,” 343–51. 16. Ciardini, I banchieri, 103. On the introduction of the monte di pietà in Florence and, previously, in other Tuscan towns, see the under-recognized study of Poliakov, Jewish Bankers and the Holy See, 139–53, 166–69; and Menning, Charity and State, 1–47. 17. For a detailed evaluation of these texts, see Siegmund, “Communal Leaders.” It is not clear whether the Jewish elite in northern Italy would have imagined themselves to be of the “middle condition” that was the Aristotelian ideal adopted in one description of republican rule by the Florentine humanist and chancellor Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444) (Nicolai Rubinstein, “Florentine Constitutionalism and the Medici Ascendancy in the Fifteenth Century,” in idem, ed., Florentine Studies [London, 1968], 447–49, cited by Kohl, “Leonardi Bruni: Introduction,” in Kohl and Witt, eds., The Earthly Republic, 140). The point is, however, that the Jews imagined themselves to be leading and ruling for the common good of what they called “k. ahal.” They were in many ways a kin group, like those so important in fifteenth-century Florence, “extended further by marriage and by relationships with . . . business partners and other natural associates collectively subsumed under the designation amici” (Kent, The Rise of the Medici, 13ff). 18. Ciardini, I banchieri ebrei, 55. 19. Ibid., lxx–lxxi. 20. Ibid., 86. 21. Cassuto estimates that there were between one hundred and three hundred Jews in the city in the fifteenth century (Gli ebrei a Firenze, 212, note 3). 22. Ciardini, I banchieri ebrei, appendix, vi, p. xxxv. The charter granted to the bankers 15 September 1481 repeats the permission to elect officials (ASF Capitoli, vol. 102, cc. 103); see Ciardini, ibid., appendix, lxxv–lxxvi. 23. Siegmund, “Division of the Dowry.” 24. These Jews are routinely called “capitolati et compresi ne[i] capitoli,” e.g. in Prov. vol. 187, cc. 82, in Ciardini, I banchieri ebrei, appendix, cvii. 25. The banking charters of 1448 and 1481 make reference to a “capitula inter eos [hebreos] facta” and to a “capitula inter se ipsos suprascriptos hebreos facta,” and on this evidence Cassuto argued that in the fifteenth century the Jews of Florence had a “constitution,” and also supposed that there was an elected council (Gli ebrei a Firenze, 213). At the same time, he acknowledged (ibid.) that there is no extant record of the existence either. 26. The Otto, then called the Otto di Custodia, had originally been assigned

Notes to Chapter 3: Before the Ghetto (1437) only to ensure that the provisions of a banking charter were protected (see Ciardini, I banchieri ebrei, document viii). By 1460, however, Jews were using the court for their cases with Christians; see documents in Ciardini (e.g. documents viii and x). 27. Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities, 207–8ff; 207–46 treats arbitration and Jewish courts. 28. Rosenthal, “Paradoxical Relations.” Cited with permission of the author. 29. Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities, 228–30. 30. On Daniel da Pisa, see Milano, “I Capitoli di Daniel da Pisa.” 31. On the historiography of the regional conferences, see Baron, The Jewish Community 1: 320–22 with his note (n. 85) in vol. 3, 79–80 and the bibliography cited there. Among the synods Baron cites (1: 320) is a synod in Florence itself, in 1428 or 1429, the evidence for which is discussed here below. 32. More of the details are provided in my “Communal Leaders,” 349. 33. My translation here is based on the Hebrew text as cited in Finkelstein, 282, with some modifications to his English translation on 288. 34. Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government, 90; Baron, Jewish Community 1: 320. 35. JTS ms 1586, 74–101, written 28 Nisan (5)319. This manuscript was copied by Avraham ben Meshulam in Bologna in 1566. The English translation is that of Rosenthal, A Critical Edition of the Eternal Life. 36. As translated in Rosenthal, A Critical Edition of the Eternal Life, 152. The “language of the decision” is also included in Finkelstein as the “sole remaining provision of the ordinances of 1429” (Jewish Self-Government, 298–300). 37. An obscure Hebrew letter, thought to have been written in Florence in 1438/39 (unsigned), addressed to “leaders of the community of Israel” (geonei ‘edat yisra’el) in Romagna and Lombardy, refers to a gathering that took place in Florence, although no agenda or resulting actions or decisions are mentioned; this letter is reproduced in Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government, 296–97 and Margulies, Rivista Israelitica, xii, 8, 178. 38. On the strained relations between these banking families, which were related to each other by carefully arranged marital alliances, see Cooperman, “A Rivalry of Bankers.” 39. Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government, 302. 40. On this and other major controversies, see Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities, 107–9, where Bonfil also discusses the corrosive effect of the controversies and their role in catalyzing the institution of “communal rabbi.” 41. Ciardini, I banchieri ebrei, 4–13. Jews were also using the Merchants’ Court (Mercanzia), as in a case between two Jews in 1567 cited in Riformagioni 10, 7r. 42. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 213–14; see also Woolf, “Life and Responsa of Rabbi Joseph Colon,” 177–78. The body of surviving responsa literature of Rabbi Yosef Colon (She’elot u-teshuvot mahari’k. ha-shalem and Pines, ed., She’elot u-teshuvot u-pisk. ei Mahari’k. ha-h.adashim), however, includes only two letters (responsa nos. 170 and 171) pertaining to one issue (doubtful marriage) that arose among Jews, who are not named, in Florence. These two letters dated from the early 1470s, when Colon was either in Mantua or perhaps in Mestre (Woolf, “Life and Responsa of Rabbi Joseph Colon,” cf. 46, note 227). 43. See Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities, 77–78 and Cohen and Horowitz, “In Search of the Sacred.”

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Notes to Chapter 3: Before the Ghetto 44. Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities, 110. 45. For the determination that many cities in the Italian states had Jewish populations but no appointed, elected or obviously dominant rabbi, see Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities, 171. Bonfil argues that it was Christian authorities, in general, who prevented these communities from achieving the full autonomy they were culturally driven to seek. 46. This statement is qualified because there are still manuscript collections of early modern rabbinical responsa literature that have not yet been studied or indexed. Other writings of sixteenth-century Tuscan Jews and the relevant manuscripts are discussed in Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 327–60. Particularly important for historians are the treatise of Yeh.iel Nissim da Pisa on moneylending and the Hebrew correspondence of the da Rieti family. 47. The archival fonts I have studied systematically for 1566–70 are the journals of the Otto di Guardia e Balía; the Nove Conservatori del Dominio e Iurisditione; the two collections of the MGS 4449 and 4450 and other volumes of that magistracy, correspondence to and from the Medici court; and the books of matriculation of the guilds in Florence. Other sources I have consulted include volumes from the Nunziatura Apostolica, the Sanità, census data from 1567 and dozens of volumes of notarial cartularies. 48. Florentine clerks and notaries were generally very much concerned to note the status of the individual before them: Laudadio Blanis rarely appears in any document without his title Dottor, and as noted above, the epithet Maestro [or magistro] is used consistently for many Jews. It is remotely possible that Raffaello di Cipriano, the Jewish chancellor of the ghetto for many years from at least 1573 (Nove 14, 181v, dated 19 December 1573), might have held a position of authority over the Jews in Florence even before ghettoization. I raise this doubt only because the capitoli confirmed by the Nove Conservatori made no reference to the necessity of electing a chancellor, and there is no reference to his election in their surviving records. When was he appointed? However, no such status was noted by the Nunziatura Apostolica who took his testimony in 1566 where he described himself as a rigattiere (used-clothingdealer) and was described simply as “a Jew living in Florence” (Nunz. 842, unpaginated, testimony of “Raffael Simonis de Cibrano hebreus Flor[enti]e habitan,’” dated 16 October 1566). 49. Riformagioni 10, 20r–v, 21r–v, 22r–v; see note 82 and discussion of this list below. 50. I thank Dena Goodman for this point she raised in a conversation I had with her about an earlier draft of this chapter in February, 2001. 51. See below, Chapter Seven. 52. These examples, Jewish and Christian, are all taken from Riformagioni 10, dated 1565 to 1570. 53. Riformagioni 10, 65r–v. 54. The word that described these cities in relationship to the duchy was, in fact, comunità; this is discussed in Chapter Seven. 55. There are exceptions to this rule. Women did participate in some institutions: in some schools they were teachers of young children, and in some societies they cared for the sick and dead. See Siegmund, “La vita nei ghetti,” 886–88.

Notes to Chapter 3: Before the Ghetto 56. See Chapter Nine. 57. Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 6. Without changing his meaning Katz could have said “Jews everywhere shared a common faith.” 58. On the meaning of the last two terms and references to their usage, see “Kelal Yisrael,” in the Encylopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972) 10: 898. 59. See for example Amelang, “People of the Ribera”; Romano, “Gender and the Urban Geography of Venice.” Similar work has begun for Italian Jewish history: see Feci, “The Death of a Miller”; Stow, “Sanctity and the Construction of Space”; and Horowitz, “The Eve of the Circumcision.” 60. For a well-balanced overview of holy communities of women, see King, Women of the Renaissance, 81–156. 61. Chojnacka, Working Class Women. 62. On the importance of education outside the home for Jewish boys and men and its impact on “society” (that is, on the men who received it), see Ruderman, “The Impact of Science of Jewish Culture and Society” and “Contemporary Science and Jewish Law.” 63. Cohen, ed., Autobiography of a Seventeenth Century Venetian Rabbi. 64. See Cooperman, “Portuguese Conversos in Ancona,” 297–352 and bibliography cited there. 65. Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 66. 66. Boksenboim has identified 1700 Hebrew letters from the sixteenth century of which he has published 305, in their original Hebrew, in Letters of the Jews in Italy; see also Letters of Rieti Family (in Heb.) and Letters of Jewish Teachers in Renaissance Italy (in Heb.). The da Rieti family letters and a few of the others come from Tuscany but predate the ghettoization. To my knowledge there are no extant personal or family record-books (libri di ricordanze) of sixteenth-century Florentine Jews. 67. Both Jews and Christians took their separate burial for granted; in this respect, Jews were clearly not part of the Christian community, whereas in parts of Europe where Protestants and Catholics lived in the same cities and towns, the issue of burial in common ground became a focus of contention, division and boundarymaking that was part of the process of confessionalization. See Luria, “Separated by Death?” 68. See Sabean, Power in the Blood, esp. the introduction and chapter 1. Sabean’s communities are villages and small towns. 69. Ibid., 40. 70. Ibid., chap. 1, esp. pp. 53–57. 71. See Bossy, “Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe.” 72. Ibid., 52. 73. For example, Lastraioli, “Israele a Empoli,” 444, citing Cassuto as a main authority, says that the Jews of Empoli in the fifteenth century lived in a “judengasse” (sic) at Porta Giudea, now Piazza del Popolo. In the sixteenth century after a Jewish bank opened in 1514, he says (453), relations returned to normal, but there was never “familiarity” between Jews and Christians, partly because Jews chose to live isolated in their quarter and have as little contact as possible. He considers them anti-assimilationist/separatist, isolated in their own high culture. This common approach should be seen as vaguely anti-semitic insofar as it suggests that Jewish separatism (read, mis-

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Notes to Chapter 3: Before the Ghetto anthropy) helps explain their eventual expulsion or ghettoization, which is an argument that, at least in the case of Tuscany, cannot be defended. Cassuto, as noted below, deliberately refuted (in 1918) the presumption that Jews lived in one section of Florence, and Cecil Roth dedicated his study of Jews in the Renaissance (1959) to proving that Jews were integrated with Christians in all possible fields of intellectual and artistic endeavor; both scholars wrote in the context of the persecution of the Jews of Europe. 74. Riformagioni 10, 20r–v, 21r–v, 22r–v. The important census of Jews in Tuscany taken in 1570 lists each family in each town, but does not note the parish or street location of their house. Prior to my discovery of the Riformagioni document I argued this point (in my 1995 dissertation) based on evidence of Jewish residence in various quarters of the city of Florence in the fifteenth century presented by Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 209–10. The new data strengthen the argument immeasurably. 75. I mistakenly referred to twelve parishes in my essay “Communal Leaders,” p. 360. Not included in my count but present on the list are Moyse and his servant, said to live in Bologna, and a married couple who lived in Arezzo. 76. It is not clear to me to what building or location qual fonda refers. 77. Riformagioni 10, 22v: “Populo di San Michele Bertoldi. Una casa su la piazza de gl’agli che dicono essere di Portugallo, ma non si sono rapresentati alla Chiesa ne preso sacramenti, et dicono che son Marrani, et sono cinque p[er]sone. Isac sonatore d’Arpicordo co[n] dua suoi figli no[n] ha stanza ferma si trattiene q[uo]n[dam?] in una di qu[est]e case d’hebrei et q[uo]n[dam?] nell’altra.” 78. Litchfield, Dalla repubblica al Granducato. 79. For Empoli, Guerrini, Empoli 1, 153 says the colonia lived in a Jewish quarter of three streets, but that Jews purchased houses elsewhere in the city. 80. Although the houses themselves are not described in the census of either 1567 or 1570 (since the purpose of the census was not to gather information for the purpose of taxation), it is clear that some Jews owned their houses, while others rented. The house of one Jewish family in Empoli was valued at 430 scudi (OGP 130, 129r, dated 12 April 1575; 160v, dated 21 April 1575; OGP 131, 87r, dated 29 July 1575). 81. NM 76, 82r, 81r–v, dated 9 June 1570; NM 78, 8v, dated 23 May 1571. (On the palazzo of the da Pisa in Pisa, which was sold to Leone Alltino da Spoleto in 1561, see Luzzati, “L’insediamento ebraico a Pisa,” 26, note 22). The house of Sabato q. Dni Amadei da Coreggio was in Populo Sancti Gregorii, NM 76, 90r–v, 91r, dated June 1570. 82. I thank Ken Stein and Michael Galchinsky for bringing these questions to my attention at the Vann Seminar in Pre-Modern History at Emory University on 4 March 2001, and to Dena Goodman for posing to me the question of the control of public assembly. 83. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, 166, quoting from Brucker, ed., The Society of Renaissance Florence, 83. 84. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, 172–73. 85. Riformagioni 10, 22v. 86. This figure considers as collective households both the boarding house (about six Jews) and the twelve bachelor tailors who lived in one house. Not included here are the Jews who lived in Pisa, Montepulciano and Colle, from which only total numbers were reported, with no breakdown to the number of households.

Notes to Chapter 3: Before the Ghetto 87. In Florence: Abram Baroccas [Baroch], Ventura da Perugia and Moise di Buondi; in Pieve a Santo Stefano: Amadio di Ioseppe, bastaio; in Pontedera, Gabrielle di Mona Ricca hebreo, Moyse hebreo a Pontadera and Simone hebreo; in San Giovanni, Salamon hebreo “sarto solo.” 88. “che tien camere allocande sono permamente boche tre et ogni giorno quasi ha dua [sic] et tre forestieri” (MGS 4450, 8). 89. “Donna Rachella tiene camere locande e’ di eta di 35 anni in e’ allottiato Samuel Coen et Iasac sabote levantino et Rena puttina di 4 anni.” Riformagioni 10, 21v. 90. In Populo di San Michele Bertoldi, “una casa su la piazza de gl’agli che dicone essere di Portugallo, ma non si sono rapresentati alla Chiesa ne preso sacramenti, et dicono che son Marrani, et sono cinque persone.” Riformagioni 10, 22v. 91. MGS 4450, 173r: “poi una dozina in c[irc]a di giovani ebrei sarti che stanno hora in q[uest]a hora in quella bottegha de sarti cristiani per lavoranti et vivono nelle loro stanze hebraichamente.” The adjective giovani refers more to their bachelorhood than to their actual ages, since some were in their mid-thirties. 92. Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households,” appendix 1 and appendix 3b. The four who were householders are Michele di Donato (Levi, Levita) and his brother Giovachino; Moise Buondi; and Isach d’Elia Calo. 93. The census of 1567 shows six girls aged thirteen to eighteen and another four unmarried girls of unknown age, in addition to a young widow. Eight of these ten belonged to the Raben, Calo, Blanis and Baroccas and Benascer families. 94. The five towns are Empoli, Monterchi, Ripomerance, San Giovanni and Volterra (25 households comprising 134 Jews). See Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households,” appendix 1. In my count of “dependent” relatives I exclude unmarried male household members who were immediate biological family of the head of household: brother, sister, nephews, children and grandchildren of the householder. Other than these, we find one married father of the head of household who maintained a parttime residence; two male servants (garzoni); four female Jewish servants (serve); three mothers (including the wife of above-mentioned father); one aunt and one “other old woman.” 95. Moise Buondi appears regularly in the notarial archives of Rome from the 1550s: see Stow, ed., The Jews of Rome, vol. 2 (index, s.v.). Details recorded there suggest that Buondi married an active businesswoman who brought a grown son into the marriage. 96. Moise Buondi and Ventura da Perugia are discussed in Chapter Seven on the self-government of the ghetto, where I note that they were two of the three Jewish Florentine householders in 1570 who did not become governors in the ghetto. On the afffair known as the “Tamari-Venturozzo Affair,” which concerned Ventura da Perugia’s effort to free himself of his obligations to the woman to whom he had been engaged in Venice, there is a large and growing body of literature. See Toaff, Love, Work, and Death, 28–29 and notes there; Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities, 242–43; Simonsohn, “The Scandal of the Tamari-Venturozzo Divorce”; Adelman, “Jewish Women and Family Life,” 161–64 and additional bibliography of more recent articles in Hebrew cited there (278–79). 97. This pattern undoubtedly intensified the perception of Jewish women as foreign in the eyes of their Christian neighbors—possibly as more foreign than Jewish

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Notes to Chapter 3: Before the Ghetto men. Christian suspicion of Jewish women in Florence—and the association of Jewish women with disease, prostitution and witchcraft—is discussed briefly in Chapter Four below. 98. The comparative degree of continuity/discontinuity experienced by Jewish men and women can be examined through a study of a set of households included in the 1570 census that allows us to determine whether a woman has moved into the already-established home of a man or vice-versa: households that include any adult relative of the head of household other than or in addition to a spouse or a parent. There is not sufficient information about the parents of these adult heads of household to determine whether the family is living in a new location or in a house that was previously occupied by the parents. 99. The 25 households that are described comprise 131 Jews and are from five towns: Empoli, Monterchi, Ripomerance, San Giovanni and Volterra. The household of Mathasia di Davitte in Empoli included his son-in-law (MGS 4450, 105r); the household of Raffaello di Manuello in Empoli included his brother-in-law and “the wife of the brother-in-law.” It is unclear from the list whether this brother-in-law is married to Raffaello’s sister, or whether he is the brother of Raffaello’s wife. In either case, this brother-in-law has moved into a home that is agnatically associated with the woman he married. 100. This should be contrasted not only with the number of women who moved into men’s homes (as follows) but also with the marital pattern of Jews elsewhere. In early modern Central and Eastern Europe, where teenaged marriages were the norm, the young couple might live with either set of parents for a few years until establishing their own home. See Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 117. In the nineteenth century it became most common for a teenaged groom to move into the home of the parents of his equally young bride, to be supported there for several years while he studied. See Immanuel Etkes, “Marriage and Torah Study Among the Lomdim in Lithuania in the Nineteenth Century,” in David Kraemer, ed., The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 156. 101. “Due Nuore” present in the household of Agniolo di Vitale da Camerino in Monterchi (MGS 4450, 108r). 102. One sister-in-law is the wife of the brother of householder Simone di Agniolo Cana Ruta in Monterchi (MGS 4450, 108r); the other is the wife of the brother of householder Angelo di Zaccaria in Empoli (MGS 4450, 105r). 103. In Monterchi, Agniolo di Isaia is the head of a household that shelters his mother and father; Dattero di Daniello di Castello lives with his mother; and Lione hebreo in Montevarchi shelters both his mother and an aunt, along with wife and children (MGS 4450, 108r; 110r). 104. The widowed sisters made their home in Prato and had no dependents or live-in servants (MGS 4450, 107r, 124r). 105. These step-relationships were likely to have been conflicted; a glance at how these tensions may have manifested may be taken from Flaviana Zanolla’s excellent “Mothers-in-Law, Daughters-in-Law, and Sisters-in-Law,” in Muir and Ruggiero, eds., Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective, 177–99. 106. On Perugia, in particular, see Toaff, Love, Work, and Death, 91–94. In addition to the scholarship on each individual city (and the edited minute-books from the Jewish governing boards of Padua and Verona), see Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities, passim.

Notes to Chapter 3: Before the Ghetto 107. The picture that emerges of the religious life of the Jews in the Tuscan towns conforms to that portrayed by Toaff in his study of the Jews, 1450–1550, of the smaller towns of Romagna-Emilia and Umbria, Love,Work, and Death. See especially there chapter 4, “The House of Prayer,” 84–99. 108. Inside a “typical” synagogue, as described by Leon Modena, “there is a separate space above or to one side with wooden screens for the women, who can pray and, see what is going on, but cannot be seen by the men or mix with them” (I riti, as cited and translated in Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 101). However, Modena wrote his book for both polemical and instructional purposes; we cannot assume that such division of space was created in all settings, and we do not yet know whether women and men both owned or used prayer books, or how often women attended, relative to men, or exactly when and where women were accustomed to reciting the prayers that were collected (or written) in the seventeenth century as prayers for women. Although the manuscripts of Italian rabbinic responsa have not yet been studied for this purpose, they are surely a source that could reveal more about the gendering of space and the experience of women in the synagogues that has until now been generalized into the experience of men (Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 217–25). 109. The 131 Jews in these twenty-five households included six nonfamily members: two male servants (garzoni) and four female servants (serve) or unspecified nonrelated women. It is possible that some of these servants served as tutors, at least for the young children. In 1567, however, one household in Florence had a tutor for its children, as did the da Pisa family; see discussion below. 110. Studies of Jewish education in northern Italy have described small boarding schools present within the homes of elite families, as well as yeshivot (day schools) in some of the better established Jewish communities. See Assaf, Mek. orot le-toledot heh.inukh 2: 92–237; Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities, 17–27 and idem, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 125–44. Such arrangements may have existed in Pisa and Siena at this time. For the use of private tutors by Jews in Renaissance Florence, see Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 185–87. 111. Yeh.iel Nissim’s record of these circumcisions was preserved and has been edited as an appendix in Sonne, From Paul IV to Pius V, 214–20; we do not know whether the boys born in Tuscany whom he did not circumcise were circumcised by other professional mohels or by any of the many Jewish doctors practicing in the region, nor do we know whether the midwives who delivered the children were Jewish or Christian. 112. The evidence collected for proceedings against the Jews in MGS 4450 is discussed in Chapter Four. 113. MGS 4450, 193v. A letter listing the servants who have worked for the Jews of Empoli includes a Caterina da Cascina, twelve or thirteen years old, who worked for a Jewess named Dorina (Dorina the widow of Moise is listed in Empoli) for about 5 years. And a boy named Meo di Beto di Nese, sixteen years old, who worked for her for seven years and received a salary of 9½ scudi per year, while his brother earned 2 scudi a year. Domenicho di Benedetto says he was with Mona Dorina Hebrea for three years “all’arte della lana.” 114. MGS 4450, 193v, Livo di Matteo bologniese d’Empoli says he helped the said Mattasia ebreo “a fare azimelle,” “e cosi di Ma Dorina di Moise hebreo aiuto.” 115. There is a substantial literature on these practices among Italian Jews,

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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. Sanità 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, Podestà 197, unpaginated pages at the back of the volume. 122. Ibid., “40 libri grandi hebraici.” 123. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 42–43. 124. Riformagioni 10, 20r: “Lazzero Rabeno fa il Rigattieri huomo di 40 anni ha moglie et quattro figli, cioe Laura, d’eta di 16 anni, Principia di 13 anni, Alex[and]ro d’anni dieci, Angelino di età 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. A mik. veh 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 più antichi capitoli,” 208). Bonfil’s research has not revised that finding (Rabbis and Jewish Communities, 102). 131. Cassutto, Gli ebrei 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 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 pertain 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 grandfather’s 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., 22r, “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, 21v). 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 l’ha visto nella squola leggere e [sic] psalmj 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 (“R[isposta]: 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 teste hav’ [in]teso dire da tutti li hebrei che vanno nella squola che e lor lecito leggere i salmi di davit o altra cosa in lingua spagnuola perche la leggie loro no’glielo vieta.” Blanis thus interpreted Moise’s reference to “Christian letters” as 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-

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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, 232r, 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, Provençal 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 “l.” Thus members of one Jewish family appear as Del Cano, Castaro, Castalho and Calò, 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 località dello Stato fiorentino” (Gli ebrei 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–46r (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–100v. The text was formally approved on 26 September. Earlier drafts, dated 8 August (MGS 4450, 140r–41v) and 13 August (MGS 4450, 8r–10r), 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 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 Judaeis 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. I 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). 11. In the case of the da Rieti, however, the privileges were simply revoked, without accusation of wrong-doing. The letter revoking the privileges (MGS 4449, 94v–95r, dated 30 June 1570; MGS 4450, 89r–v dated 4 July 1570) is printed in Cassuto, Gli ebrei 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, 97r; 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–52r (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 (mallevadori; see ibid., 36v). 15. Letters dated 27 July were sent to Castiglione (see the response of the podestà, 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 podestà of Foiano and to Pieve Santo Stefano on 22 August (see the responses from late August in MGS 4450, 133r, 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-

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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 (Gli ebrei 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: lione 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–40v. 21. Ibid.: Davit, 24r–25r; Emanuel, 26r–27v; Laudadio, 28r–29r. 22. Ibid., 18r–19v. 23. Ibid., 20r–21r; for Agnolo di Vitale, see 12r–14r. 24. A copy 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 ebrei a Firenze, 392–93) and in MGS 4450, 91v. 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 Il Montino, and the favorable response to Agnolo (dated 10 January 1569/70) is found in MP 234, 164v. 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: “Il Marchese Montino ci ha parlato molto affettuosamente sopra vostre belle parti et intorno al vostro desiderio. Haremo piacere di vedervi et d’udirvi p[er]o 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 Il Montino to bring with him on making his audience at court; MP 546, 460r. 26. MP 550, 291r (was 143). The letter of Agnolo di Laudadio hebreo in Pisa is addressed on the back to the Gran Principe di Toscana (Francesco) and dated 27 July 1570. 27. The reference is to a “colonna d’aqua gelato cavuta da una montagna di singular bellezza si per l’artificio che in essa la natura ha operato nel lungo tempo di mano in mano che l’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 546, 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 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] fuggire 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 all’ultimo tornasse In dispregio e dis’honor n[ost]ro che siamo cinq[ue] o sei casate In tutto lo stato suo nati e allevati co[n] ogni civilta e honore; mostri la liberalità dell’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 m’hanno 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]i magistrati n[ost]ri nemici li quali cercheran[n]o sempre metterci in disgra[tia] sua tutto il giorno molesta[n]doci e perseg[ui]tandoci si lei co[n] la Sua solita cleme[n]tia non piglia le difese n[ost]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[i] V. Alt. Ser.a minimo servitore. Angnolo [sic] di laudadio Heb.o 32. The phrase in MGS 4450 is variably “con suo giuramento datoli supra [or super] calamo secondo lo stile et modo di detti hebrei” (e.g. ibid., 12r) 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,

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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 4450, 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 podestà seeking 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, 140r–41v. This letter reappears in a later, revised draft in the same work, 8r–10r. 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, 20r). 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 io 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 i poveri no[n] potevano venire a perdere una opera di.’” Letter of Iacopo di Lotto, vicar of Monterchi, 20 August 1570. MGS 4450, 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 si 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 verità sarà 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–50v and 51r–52r. 41. For the argument that Jewish moneylending persisted into the nineteenth century because of the general failure of the monti di pietà, see Poliakov, Jewish Bankers, 146–59. 42. For Pescia, see Menning, Charity and State, 238–39, who notes that a proposal was made in 1570 for a new monte di pietà in Pescia, setting interest for loans at 5 percent. For Empoli, see Guerrini, Empoli 2: 542, 552–53. The duke allowed the community of Empoli to contract with the Nove Conservatori to erect a monte di pietà and made a loan of 5,500 scudi to the new bank in October 1571 to start it off. The capitoli 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 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 pietà 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, 80r: “ne in 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 n[ost]ra p[ro]p[ri]a mano di soprascritto.” 48. MGS 4450, 81r–v, 82r, 83r–v, 84r. 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, 212r–v. 51. MGS 4450, 210v. 52. MGS 4450, 69r, 70r. 53. All the statements are favorable and both verbally and conceptually independent of one another. See MGS 4450, 55r–56v, 58–59, 60, 61. All the letters date from July 1570. 54. MGS 4450, 62r. 55. MGS 4450, 55r–56v, dated 27 July 1570. 56. MGS 4450, 67r–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 simil’ 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.” 59. OGP 114, 275r–v, dated 13 February 1569/70. 60. MGS 4450, 110r. 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.

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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’è 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 Podestà, 4489, 21r–22v, in Brucker, ed., The Society 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 dì 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]amorata di uno x’ano [Christiano] che è 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 mandò a Pescia dove hoggi la si truova.” 66. Most of the responses of the vicars and podestà 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 Comunità 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 il sabato, although beginning at sunset on Friday, while for Christians, the sabbath was il 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 72. MGS 4450, 179r–v. 73. MGS 4450, 178r–v. 74. MGS 4450, 210r–12v. 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 bando) is in MGS 4450, 226r. A summary of the infractions of the banking capitoli by Manuello di Davit Sforno is found on 239r–40r. 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, 192r, letter of Luigi Sostegni, dated 30 July 1570. 80. The letter from the podestà 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, 184r: “sono adesso passati i 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 podestà 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, 225r–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, Gli 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]o

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Notes to Chapter 4: Staging the Expulsion tenuto ne servi ne serve ne Balie Cristiani ma si bene han[n]o 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 Malena 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, 12r–14v). 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, 110r). 93. MGS 4450, 184r, letter from the podestà 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 à farli bucate et altri servitii et necessarii.” 94. MGS 4450, 193r–v, 194r. 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 4450, 108r); there was “un garzone” in Empoli (MGS 4450, 105r) and “una serva” in San Giovanni (MGS 4450, 109r). 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, 193v. 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 dell’ebreo, indice dei nomi, s.v. Alpilinc. Between 1540 and 1556 the mohel Yeh.iel 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 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, 105r, “Nota delle famiglie e bocche di giudei che si trovavano in Empoli.” She and her husband, Mosheh Alpelink. , had four sons circumcised by Yeh.iel 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 Podestà 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 età di 12 o 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] 9½ l’ano senza altro et collui vi sta un altro suo fratello co[n] [scudi] 2 l’ano. Domenicho di benedetto dice essere stato co[n] detto [sic] m[on]a dorina heb[r]ea circa Anni 3 All’arte 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 l’azimelle e cosi a ma dorina di moise hebreo aiuto.” The list is signed by Luigi Sostegni, podestà 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, 210r). 107. Testimony of 2 August 1570, MGS 4450, 210r. 108. Testimony of Agnolo di Vitale hebreo, 24 July 1570, MGS 4450, 13v. 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 più de Christiani lo faccino ò p[er] ignoranza ò p[er] povertà lassando di dire si innamoramenti et peccati di carne” (MGS 4450, 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 4450, 179r–v). 111. MGS 4449, 101r–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. 115. Testament of Carlo Pitti, NM 2177, 14v–27r, dated 13 March 1582/83.

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Notes to Chapter 4: Staging the Expulsion 116. Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà,” 11. 117. De’ Ricci, Chronaca 1: 391v, 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, Aspetti della Controriforma, 309 and note 105 there. 121. Cassuto, Gli ebrei 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 Pietà (Vicenza, 1974), 175–81, cited by Veronese, 202, n. 15. Parts of it were also published by Ciardini (Banchieri, 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, 150r–52v, 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, Cosmè 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, “The Roverella, the Jews and the Image of Ecclesiastical Statehood,” a study by Campbell on anti-Jewish pictorial rhetoric in his Cosmè Tura of Ferrara, 99–129. 127. MGS 4450, 151. 128. MP 236a, 5v, 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,” 50–51). 129. Menning, Charity and State, appendix A, 301. Only thirteen loans were

Notes to Chapter 4: Staging the Expulsion 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, 155r: “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[ui]etato e le bascio li mani e la ringratio . . . No[n] dubiti gia mai v. Alt . . . che come li dissi ultimamente che li parlai, di nuovo li raffermo 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 l’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 nell’antica mia servitu. Ne pigli suspetto per tenere un mio figliuolo in Ferrara, impero che non ce lo tengo piu per comodo mio che p[er] 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 depositò su’l 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 podestà 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 challenge 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 sull’istituzione 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 mediceo di Cosimo I and the synthesis by Diaz, Il granducato di Toscana: I Medici. 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, 11r (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

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Notes to Chapter 5: Constructing the Ghetto soprassindaco on Pitti’s death in 1586, while remaining provveditore (Ricci, Cronaca 2: 32r). 4. A plan 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 III, who was grand duke 1670–1723. Cassuto (Gli ebrei a Firenze, 116) did not cite a source for his statement that the ghetto was enlarged by Cosimo III, but Carocci, Il 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). 5. 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, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 116. 7. Nove 3697, 11v–12r. 8. Nove 3697, 14r–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 città 1: 291. 10. Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà,” 286–87; Conti, Firenze vecchia, 430. 11. Conti, Firenze vecchia, 433. 12. Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà,” 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, “Dell’ordine pubblico: Meretrici, giochi, brutture e illuminazione notturna,” in Pratilli and Zangheri, eds., La legislazione medicea 4: 190–93. 13. Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà,” 287, note 64. 14. MM 224, 107r, 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). 15. Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà,” 291 and note 79 there, 296; Battara, La popolazione 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 Onestà,” esp. 273–77 and Trexler, “Florentine Prostitution.” 17. Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà,” 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 gona, 295, but the yellow ribbon was reintroduced in 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 Onestà,” 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 città di Arezzo e Cortine, del 1565 n. 46, 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 Onestà as prostitutes, were consequently able to live unregulated on better streets and charge a higher rate for their service (Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà,” 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 cominciò 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 l’abitazioni e botteghe che al presente si veggono in piazza giudea: che in su detta piazza di qua e di là erono le botteguzze, e stanzuzze delle meccanichissime meretrice, e si levorno e si murorno le stanze che vi sono; che spese detto signor Principe parecchi migliaja di scudi. E si serrono ogni sera, e piú tardi e piú 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 is reproduced in facsimile). There were in fact Jewish women who provisioned the noblewoman. A second contemporary 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-

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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 Onestà,” 275) who refers to the Onestà 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 1403 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, 11r, 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 vecchia, 430, the families who owned the prop-

Notes to Chapter 5: Constructing the Ghetto 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, casacà from the Hebrew h.azak. ah). 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 5 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 gabelle 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, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 56–83, especially 76–83. More generally, see Ciardini, I banchieri ebrei; 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 pietà 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, Diario Fiorentino 1532–1737, cc. 523v–56, passim). I have not yet found a contemporary source for the attribution. Liscia Bemporad (ibid., 16) trusts the judgment of Baldinucci in Notizie dei 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, 1r; Nove 3696, 7r–v.

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Notes to Chapter 5: Constructing the Ghetto 45. See Nove 3697, 15r, where he is called “deputato sopra detta fabriche,” and 41r, where he is paid on 28 February 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. 51. 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, 34r); this was the week in which the holidays of Hoshana Raba, Shemini Atseret and Simh.at 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. ASF, Scrittoio delle Regie Possessioni 6577, “Entrata e Uscita del Ghetto Esterno no. A.B.C A.C.B. Dal 1588 dal 1637.” 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 is found on the payroll until 30 June 1571 (Nove 3697, 23r, 26r); [Lio]Nardo di Matteo votapozzi appears from then until February 1572 (ibid., 28r–40r, passim). 58. Ibid., e.g., 35r, where he is paid to “acchonciare cessi e ritrovare fognie e rifatte e pionbinate e rimesso doccioni.” 59. Examples may be seen in the restored Palazzo Davanzati in Florence. 60. Fanelli, Firenze architettura e città 1: 146; Schiaparelli, La casa fiorentina, 87–88.

Notes to Chapter 5: Constructing the Ghetto 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 pozzi neri, which seems to be being used as a synonym both for an excavated cesspool (cessi) and for a portable latrine. Internal ghetto regulations referred to the emptying of trovoli or sinogoli 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 lanciaio. 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, “I più antichi capitoli,” 209). 67. Cassuto, “I più 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 giudei, ancorchè di continuo vi si murassi” (Lapini, Diario, 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, Gli ebrei 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 (Emergence 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, 30r, 34r–35v. 75. Nove 16, 29v–30v: “Bando per le allogazioni delle case del ghetto,” dated 22 April 1575.

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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 (fuochi). 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 Calò 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. A very few Jews were somehow 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 2449, 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 ’500,” 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, 21r, dated 4 December 1575). 88. Battara, “Botteghe e pigioni nella Firenze del ’500,” table VII. 89. Parenti, in Prime ricerche sulla revoluzione dei prezzi, 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, 349, 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 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 knowledge of the rents of only fifteen of seventy-five rental units in 1575, it is impossible to generalize about the impact that the switch from houses to apartments might have had, especially since we cannot be sure how complex households reorganized themselves in the rented rooms of the ghetto. The specific consequences to a few Jewish households can, however, be traced. 97. Lazzaro Raben’s house is mentioned in Nunz. 842 (unpaginated), where in testimony on 16 October 1566 (in favor of Isaia) Raffael di Simone de Cibrano hebreus mentions that Moise Buondi had lived in Lazzaro’s house for a year; in the census of 1570 Lazzaro is not mentioned but his brother Moise is a householder (MGS 4450, 173r; see Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households,” appendix 1). 98. MGS 4450, 173r. According to the census in 1570, of 104 households where the head was listed by name, eight were headed by women (see “From Tuscan Households,” appendix 1). Two of the fifteen units rented in 1575 were rented by women. It was unusual for a Jewish woman to be living independently of a man unless she was a widow, which is why it is reasonable to assume that the householder named Racchel who appears in these two sources is the same woman. 99. Nove 16, 30v. 100. There were still “sale comune” in 1609; see the capitoli of 1572 and 1609, published in Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli” 10: 32; 10: 39. 101. MGS 4449, 107v. The four, referred to in chapter three above, were Michele di Donato, Sperandino, Raffaello di Cypriano and Salamone di Moyse. 102. This is the purpose of the Campana according to the text of the edict (MGS 4449, 106v; Cantini, Legislazione toscana 7: 377). According to Staley, The Guilds of Florence, 74, the Bargello had a bell called the Montanara or the Campana, which was rung to signify the end of the day for salaried workers and at night to “warn citizens” to put away their arms. The difficulty arises from Staley’s comment that the Campana was dismantled in 1532 and that under Cosimo I, the new workmen’s bell was rung at the Duomo at half past three. Goldthwaite (The Building of Renaissance Florence, 164) also notes that worker’s time was marked by a clock. Was the name “Campana” transferred to some other bell which still rang the night hour? Perhaps it signified the “evening curfew” that is referred to without specific documentation or explanation by Menning (Charity and State, 167) and Brackett (Criminal Justice, 31). 103. Nove 3697, 70v, “per la fattura di dua porte alla salvaticha per questo ghetto.” 104. Ibid., 69v, 70v. The locksmith Cristofano di Piero magniano is paid 18 florins, 5 lire and change for “toppe, chiave e chiavistelli”; the other artisans are Giovanbattista di Francesco Ferruzzi and Francesco di Davitte magniano. 105. In February 1571/72 someone was paid a large sum (over 95 florins) “per aver

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Notes to Chapter 5: Constructing the Ghetto lastricato” (Nove 3697, 74r). This could refer to tiling within the houses, or to a stone pavement of the piazza and streets. Floors in Florentine houses had been tiled since the fourteenth century (Schiaparelli, La casa fiorentina 1: 18; Fanelli, Firenze architeturra e città, 145. 106. Nove 3698, 1; the exact figure is 4,366.4.19.6 (florins, lire, soldi, denari). Work paid for after 28 February 1571/72 is not included in this total. 107. I have not examined the books of the monte di pietà or the fate of the accounts of the families who sold the ghetto properties to the Medici, so I do not know how long interest was drawn on these loans, or for how long it was calculated at 5 percent. As for the cost of repairs, it seems that at least through 1612 the Jews undertook maintenance, repairs and, unlawfully, remodeling, and they did so at their own expense: the internal regulations of the ghetto abound with references to the responsibility of Jews in the ghetto to clean up mounds of plaster (see, for example, the capitoli of 1608/9, in Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli” 10: 39, no. 3). When the ghetto was enlarged in the 1670s after a fire, the state incurred expenses which have not been taken into account here; see Liscia Bemporad, “La scuola italiana e la scuola levantina,” 19. 108. Nove 3397, 73r: on 24 February, Giovanb[attista] di Francesco Ferruzzi scarp[ellin]o was paid 12 florins for having made “un arme di palle di loro Al[tezze] a tutte sue spese messa sopra la p[o]rta del ghetto di verso e suchilinai e tutto daccordo con messer Carlo Pitti.” 109. Ibid., 73v, dated 24 or 25 February 1571/72, a mettidoro [mettiloro = gilder] named Bartolomeo di Battista was paid for having “messo doro larme di loro Al[tezza] quale comessa [or somessa] sopra la porta de succhilinai [sic].” 110. Ibid., payment on 28 February “per pie soglie, scaglioni e navicelle e altre pietre aute da lui.” 111. On the association of clocks and secular authority, see Le Goff, “Merchant’s Time and Church’s Time in the Middle Ages” and “Labor Time in the ‘Crisis’ of the Fourteenth Century: From Medieval Time to Modern Time,” in Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages. Le Goff says that clocks were “municipal adornment” but could be used by rulers as a symbol of their authority, or even of government itself (“Merchants Time,” ibid., 49). 112. MGS 4449, 107v. There is no support for Cassuto’s assumption that this was an “orologio a sole,” a sun-clock (Gli ebrei a Firenze, 115). 113. Le Goff refers to “the clock of 1354” (“Labor Time,” in Time, Work, and Culture, 43), possibly relying on Staley (The Guilds of Florence, 73), who says, “Perhaps the earliest record of a public clock [in Florence] is dated March 15 1352 on which day the big clock of the Palazzo Vecchio struck the hours for the first time.” Despite Staley’s comment (74) cited above that a bell rang the end of the work day, in the fifteenth century clocks were used to mark the time of day-laboring construction workers. Account books studied by Goldthwaite show payments to a foreman “per aver tenuto l’oriuolo” (The Building of Renaissance Florence, 160, 164). On the use of clocks to control labor, see Le Goff, cited above, with reference especially to the development of textile industry in the fourteenth century. 114. On the unreliability of mechanical clocks, see Cipolla, Clocks and Culture. 115. Battara, “Botteghe e pigioni nella Firenze del ’500,” Tabella VI, 16. 116. See Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy.

Notes to Chapter 6: Populating the Ghetto Chapter 6: Populating the Ghetto 1. For a thoughtful review of the historiographic trends on this matter, see Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 7–11. The same book also illustrates that residence within the physical walls of a ghetto did not determine the type of engagement Jewish scholars chose to have with an intellectual tradition such as science. For the revision of the image of the Italian ghetto as a “closed society,” see Bonfil, “Change in the Cultural Patterns of a Jewish Society in Crisis.” 2. Misc. Med. 324, “Manoscritto cartaceo ‘facto per la descrittione di tutte le bocche della Città et Stato di Fiorenza . . . quest’anno 1562,’” edited in D’Addario, Aspetti della Controriforma, doc. 32, 399–400. 3. The census total is listed (MGS 4450, 173v) as 712 Jews but is overcounted by 2. The correct count is 710, as already noted by Luzzati, “Dal prestito al commercio,” in idem, La casa dell’Ebreo, 272. I have identified the following discrepancies between Carlo Pitti’s summary and the lists submitted by each town: (1) at Pieve the final count records 21 Jews, I count 19; (2) final count for Monterchi is 32, but the list actually has 33; (3) at Arezzo one Jew is listed, but he was counted twice by Pitti, for he was also listed in Castiglione. The list of Jews in Florence is found in MGS 4450, 173r; the data are presented in Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” appendix 1. 4. For 1632, see BNF Fondo Palatino, Cod EB, XV; for 1642, see ASF Strozziane, series I, cod. xxiv, 114v–15r; for 1661, see the same volume, 130v–31r. The age utilized was not static. Sumptuary and other legislation variously used ages 12, 17, 18 and 20. One census in 1630 divided the population into those older than and younger than 12 years (ASF Strozziane, series I, cod. xxiv, 112v–13r). 5. On this tax, see Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” appendix 6: “Excursus on the Taxes of the Jews, 1573–1596.” 6. For the data from the first two sources, see ibid., appendix 3 (“Jews Matriculated into Four Florentine Guilds”) and appendix 4 (“Jewish Governors of the Florentine Ghetto, 1571–1611”). 7. Twenty-one Jewish guild matriculants in 1556–70 were most likely still in Florence, but their names have not been included unless they appear in a source from 1571–76. 8. For the election of governors, see Chapter Seven. There is uncertainty in identifying some of the governors because their names are given in short form or because of other ambiguities. There may have been thirty-two or thirty-three men who served as governors in the first five years; see Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” appendix 4b. 9. Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” appendix 5: “Adult Jewish Males Documented in the Florentine Ghetto, 1571–1576.” 10. For example, a Jew referred to as Leandro di Davitte di Salmonela hebreo nel ghetto, who appears in none of the four sources used for our list, was fined 14 lire on 26 November 1575 for having emptied or thrown garbage (“un vasello pieno di bruttura”) in the piazza of the ghetto, near the well (Nove 16, 318v, dated 2 December 1575). 11. According to Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber (Les Toscans et leurs familles, 65), historians have variously used multipliers of 3.5 or 4; their study of the 1427 catasto yielded a ratio of 3.7 per rural male aged 15–70. For Pescia, Brown derived a ratio that

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Notes to Chapter 6: Populating the Ghetto for every male age 18 and older there were 3.3 men, women and children (In the Shadow of Florence, 24). 12. The average household size for these five towns (26 households, 134 people) was 5.15, which reflects that fact that Jewish men, like other Tuscan men, generally remained in their parental home into their twenties, married or not. In the state census of 1632, where 390 Jews were counted, including 123 men over age fifteen (see Table 5), the ratio of adult males to Jews in the ghetto was 3.16. 13. It is possible, however, that men, women and children did not come to the ghetto in direct proportion to their numbers. See below. 14. This is not as great a problem as it looks, however: there were very few banking households among the five towns that have been studied since most of the bankers lived in Prato and Pisa. 15. For the “impacted” hearths of Florence, see Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles, 92. 16. To derive this number I have assumed that 10 percent of the adult male population escaped my list (another ten men). When we use the high population multiplier of 3.72 to add women and children, we find an additional thirty-seven Jews for the inital ghetto population. 17. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 7: 255. 18. Only archival research in each Tuscan village would settle this point conclusively. Small numbers of Jews did, however, seek permission to resettle in Tuscan towns, beginning with Pisa as early as the mid-1570s. See Luzzati, “Dall’insediamento ebraico,” in idem, La casa dell’Ebreo, 125–48. For the growing community in Pisa, see Toaff, La nazione ebrea a Livorno e a Pisa. In the 1590s foreign Jews were allowed to settle in Pisa and Livorno, and in the 1620s a smattering of Jews obtained permission to return to or move into small Tuscan cities directly from the cities in question, without approval of or interference from the central government in Florence. On the presence of Jews in the towns surrounding Arezzo, see Salvadori and Sacchetti, Presenze ebraiche nell’Aretino. 19. Luzzati, “Legami fra banchi,” in idem, La casa dell’Ebreo, 257. 20. For the presence of the family in Pisa after 1571, see Luzzati, “Da Pisa a Livorno,” in ibid., 138–40. The letter dated 20 October 1573 written to Agnolo di Laudadio that allows him to return to live and do business in Pisa is preserved in MGS 4449, 111v–12. Agnolo and his family and wife, sons and their wives, and two associates and two female servants, were also exempted at that time from the segno. 21. One permit allowed three sons and two servants to “return” to Siena at their pleasure (Nove 16, 180r, dated 7 November 1575); a week later two of the sons obtained a permit to travel with their agent Sabato di Salamone in the dominion for ten days (ibid., 192r, 19 November). In December they were granted permits to go to Pisa for ten days (210v, 10 December and 17 December). On the da Rieti, see Cassandro, Gli Ebrei e il prestito ebraico. Giacomo Sozzi, in an unpublished undergraduate honors thesis, “The Jewish Community of Siena in the XVII Century,” Harvard University (1991), relying primarily on Cassandro and Luzzati, but also on original research in the Sienese state archives, states (52–53, fn. 90) that there were no da Rieti living in Siena between 1571 and 1578 and that they were in Pisa. However, a travel permit clearly reveals that in early 1576 Agnolo went back to Siena, where he apparently died that year: Nove 16, 231v has a licentia dated 5 January 1575/76 to “Dei febo [sic] di

Notes to Chapter 6: Populating the Ghetto Simone et a Agnolo di Moise hebrei habitanti in Siena di poter . . . ritornarsene a Siena.” 22. MGS 4449, 113r, dated 23 December 1576: copy of a decree of the grand duke to Raffaello, Dattolo and Giuseppe sons of Agnolo, “who is this day deceased.” It is not clear from the sources whether “Dattero” is Giuseppe, or whether Agnolo had four sons. 23. A group of nine da Rieti and staff, including Raffaello, Dattero and Rosa, were granted permission on 23 December to move permanently to Ferrara (Nove 16, 222v). According to Luzzati, their ties with Pisa were cut mainly when they sold their Pisan home, “il palazzo dell’Ebreo,” in 1579, but they may have had agents in Pisa still collecting debts as late as 1587 (“Da Pisa a Livorno,” in Luzzati, La casa dell’Ebreo, 140). 24. Ibid., 138. 25. Luzzati, “Legami fra banchi toscani e veneti,” in idem, La casa dell’Ebreo, 255. 26. Ibid., 256. Vitale Nissim had a son, Simone, a doctor, and two daughters, Ricca and Violante. Violante’s dowry was only 300 scudi; she married in 1566–68 to Abramo di Salamone Colorni of Mantua. Ricca was living in Pesaro in 1571, the widow of Leone Allatini, along with her son Latino (ibid., 257 and notes 114 and 115 there). 27. Anghiari: Manuelle di Samuello; Empoli: Mattassia di Davit Sforno; Monterchi: Angelo di Vitale da Camerino, agent of Samuello di Manuello, and Monterchi: Simone d’Agnolo Cana Ruta, agent of Manuelle di Samuelle; Pescia: Emanuelle di Davit Sforno, agent of Lione da Pisa; Prato: Gratsiadio, agent of the heirs of Abramo da Pisa; Prato: Sabato d’Amadio da Careggio; San Giovanni: Davit di Raffaello da Reggio, agent of Lione da Pisa, living in Florence. See discussion of bankers above in Chapter One. 28. One of the da Pisa’s agents in Prato, Gratsiadio, could be Gratsiadio Finzi who was living in Florence in 1574, when he was granted a travel permit (Nove 15, 140r–v, dated 6 October). Sabato d’Amadio da Careggio, also of Prato (a major urban center near Florence), might have remained in Florence, if he is the same as Sabato d’Amadio de Salamone who rented an apartment in the auction of 1575 (Nove 16, 30v). A third banker, Emanuelle Sforno, appears in a Florentine source after ghettoization, suing a Christian for a debt owed him in 1575; however, this is not evidence that he was living in Florence, since he would have had to turn to the Otto with his claim against a Florentine, regardless of where he was living. 29. See the detailed discussion of the Leucci in Luzzati, “Da Pisa a Livorno,” in idem, La casa dell’Ebreo, 142–43 and passim. 30. AMS 13, 91r–v: matriculation on 16 November 1573; Seta 13, 113r, 127v, matriculations on 9 December 1573 and 4 August 1575 respectively. 31. MGS 4449, 113v–14r: “dove son nati et allevati loro et loro antecess[o]ri di 200 anni in qua et in essa fare una bottega di profumeria et altri neg[oti]i mercantizi.” 32. MGS 4449, 114r–v. The text was probably copied here in 1595 when the two other Leucci brothers (Abramo and Raffaello) petitioned successfully to have their privilege renewed (ibid., 114v–15r, see next note). The date of the original letter, which had been given to “Gratia dio e fratelli” was either 11 or 27 May 1588 (both dates appear on the copy). 33. In 1595 Abramo and Raffaello, brothers and sons of Ventura Leucci, “hebrei profumieri in Pisa e in Firenze,” were finally exempted “like the other Jews in Pisa”

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Notes to Chapter 6: Populating the Ghetto from the segno, a yellow beret, and allowed to wear the black hat (MGS 4449, 115r). At least one member of the Leucci moved elsewhere, to Carrara (Luzzati, “Da Pisa a Livorno,” in idem, La casa dell’Ebreo, 143). 34. On the Jews of Siena who remained there, see Cassandro, Gli Ebrei e il prestito ebraico, 30ff. A branch of the da Rieti family that had left Siena during the war which led to its incorporation in the duchy returned only in 1578, when Simone da Rieti obtained permission to reside outside the ghetto. The relationship between this elite family and the Jews who were in the ghetto of Siena has not been studied; valuable information about the Jews of Siena, however, is found in Sozzi, “Jewish Community of Siena,” cited above in note 21. 35. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 7: 389–90. 36. There are no emigration visas in any of the other extant books of the Nove Conservatori, from 1573 to 1596. For the ten who leave, see Nove 16, 180r: granted 7 November 1575: “licentia a Salamone di Isach [crossed out: hebreo] camiz hebreo [sic] di potere insieme col quattro suoi figliuoli fra maschi et femine et la sua donna partire da questa citta et d[o]m[ini]o Fior[entina] et trasferirsi dove piu a lui parera senza preiud[izio] mand.” Nove 16, 206v: granted 5 December 1575, permit to “Moise di Core et Febo di Simone ambi hebrei et habita[n]ti in Siena di partire di Firenze senza alcun’ loro preiuditio per tornarsene in detta citta di Siena. mand.” Nove 16, 257r: granted 8 February 1576, permit to “Moyse ubina et a Salamone suo co[m]pagno ambi hebrei habitanti in Siena di potere senza loro pergiuditio uscir di Firenze dove di presente sono per tornarsene à Siena. mandan.” 37. Despite centuries of church teachings against forced baptism, Jewish parents still had to fight to protect their minor children. For example, according to her father, in 1559 the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Jew Emanuello Supino of Empoli was abducted from her home, “her mother not being there,” and brought against her parents’ will to a monastery. Despite her father’s petition to the duke to have her returned and the Otto’s subsequent order to the podestà of Empoli that she be found and questioned (to determine if she had truly chosen to convert) nothing was done. The court ignored the issue of her minority. Information in the Empolese archives regarding this incident is discussed by Lastraioli, “Israele a Empoli,” 454. The supplication to the Otto from Emanuelle is found in the OGP Supplications, 2234, no. 408, dated 22 October, along with a copy of the outraged order from the Otto to the podestà of Empoli commanding an investigation of the conditions under which the girl was taken to the monastery. A note at the bottom of the page in Lelio Torelli’s hand, dated 12 March 1559, comments, “Nothing else has happened.” The rest of the family remained Jews after the expulsion: her brother Raffaelo was found in Florence, and her father in Pisa in the 1590s. 38. See for example Luzzati, “Matrimonia e apostasia di Clemenza di Vitale da Pisa,” in idem, La casa dell’Ebreo, 59–106. Numerical studies of Jewish converts in Italy have not yet been undertaken, but the subject is discussed well by Toaff in Il vino e la carne, 181–208. Stow estimated that in Rome, ten Jews converted every decade in the sixteenth century, which meant that Jews were very familiar with converts; “A Tale of Uncertainties.” This is a subject to which I hope to return in a future effort. 39. Veronese, Una famiglia di banchieri, 208, 212. More generally, on the da Volterra family and these events, see ibid., 208–23. 40. See Chapter One, p. 63 and note 57. The travel diary (1481) of Rabbi

Notes to Chapter 6: Populating the Ghetto Meshullam ben. R. Menahem of Volterra, or Bounaventura di Emanuele di Buonaventura di Genatano, is translated in Adler, ed., Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages, 156–208. 41. Veronese notes that until the events of the late fifteenth century, there is no evidence that a Jew ever voluntarily converted in Volterra, and thereby implies that the early sixteenth-century conversions should be understood as a response to the intense pressure on them that she describes. See Una famiglia di banchieri, 212–13. 42. OGP 2252, 401r, dated 14 July 1569. 43. Ibid. The papal constitution referred to is apparently Cupientes Judaeos (1542) of Pope Paul III, on which see Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews, vol. 7: History, 274. This text does not specify how a determination would be made regarding the share of parental property due to a converted son, but mainly that parents cannot deprive the minors of their portion. 44. I have not found a notarized emancipation for Giuseppe, which would have had to have been filed by the father. On this subject, see Kuehn, Emancipation and in particular p. 47. 45. Luzzati, “Da Pisa a Livorno,” in idem, La casa dell’Ebreo, 142. Luzzati notes that the two converted “shortly after 1570.” 46. Emanuelle had obtained special privileges in the production and marketing of wool, which he would not have been able to carry with him into Florence, since the terms of these privileges explicitly required that he live in the region of Montopoli. MGS 4449, 67v–68r, dated 2 June 1556: “Emanuel di Ioseph Hebreo da Empoli che hoggi habita al pontadera . . . supp[lica]to S[ua] Ecc[elenz]a Ill[ustrissi]ma p[er] se et sua fig[liuo]li et fr[ate]lli carnali facii lor gra[tia] et special privilegio di poter’ nel traffico et exercitio ch’ fa[n]no d’Arte di Lana, ottener et goder’ li med[esim]i exetioni imunita et privilegii che godano li huo[min]i originarii di Montopoli che exercitano l’Arte di lana cosi di poter’ vender i pan[n]i come di poter condurr’ le lane et altre mercantie i[n] bottega.” (The supplication was granted.) His brother and nephews who remained Jews and moved to Florence lost their established woolens business and entered the linen and silk businesses as newcomers. 47. Nove 14, 136r, dated 10 October 1573. Emanuelle’s name appears variably in these sources as Manuel and Emanuello, but Emanuelle is most frequently used. 48. This should have read 31 July 1571. On 19 December 1573, the Jewish chancellor of the ghetto was required to make a public announcement in the ghetto that permission had to be obtained for any trip out of Florence that would last more than three days (Nove 14, 181v). A copy of this order is also found in the ACEF Box D, file 3, folder 2, p. 4. 49. Nove 14, 325r–v, dated 4 November 1573: “Atteso che M[on]a Ricca hebrea vedova, moglie già d’emanuello hebreo quale alcuni mesi sono venne ad habitare nel ghetto di Firenze in casa d’una sua fig[liuo]la del mese d’agosto pross[im]o pas[sa]to usci del detto ghetto senza licentia de superiori, et si transferi al Pontadera per recuperare la sua dote, dove stetti sino al pri[n]cipio del mese d’ottobre sussegando, Il che [?] non doveva ne poteva fare sotto pena di [dieci scudi in oro] per ciasc[un]a volta che usciva ò si trovava fuora del ghetto senza la debita licentia, si come fu disposta per il decreto fatto sopra cio in di 31 di Luglio 1573. Pero . . . cond[emnorn]o la d[etta] M[on]a Riccha—[dieci scudi d’oro].” 50. Nove 14, 188r, 193v, 211v.

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Notes to Chapter 6: Populating the Ghetto 51. This will partly depend on learning precisely when Emanuelle converted and when he died, information which may be available in the archives of Pontedera. It is conceivable that Ricca remained with her husband even though he had converted, and that when he died shortly thereafter she came to live in the ghetto as a Jew. 52. NM 77, 165r, Declaration’ elemosine. I should note here that the document in question refers to Felice twice as “Mgo Felice,” for which reason I do not call him “Maestro” but rather “Magistro.” 53. Equivalents are: 1 staio = 18 kg; 1 barrel of wine = about 164 liters. Lodovico Ghetti estimated in 1445 that the per capita, per diem consumption was 690 grams of wheat and .79 liters of wine per person (as cited by Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence, 346). This would translate to just under 14 staia of grain and 286 liters of wine annually. Felice was given 12 staia of grain and 328 liters of wine, plus cash and wood. 54. Salvadori and Sacchetti, Presenze ebraiche nell’Aretino, 62. These are the only converts that Salvadori found in his study of many local archives of the Aretino. Salavadori gives the date of their conversion as January 1570, but does not specify whether the date is modernized (i.e., before the edict of expulsion on 26 September 1570), or Florentine-style, after the edict. He also does not note their names, and it is even possible that it was not eight Jews, each given 12 stiora of land, but eight households. There were in Cortona on 2 September 1570 seven households comprising thirty-two Jews (MGS 4450, 126r). One convert present in Cortona in August 1573 was “Giovanmaria [sic] di giuseppe romano gia hebreo spetiale in cortona” (OGP 125, 142v). 55. MGS 4450, 133r; Nove 1348, 30. The sources do not reveal whether Ventura had a wife and if so, whether she was also baptized. 56. Luzzati, “Dal prestito al commercio,” in idem, La casa dell’Ebreo, 272–74 and table 2. Pisa, Cortona and Montepulciano are excluded because there was no breakdown of households there. 57. Ibid., 274. Working with five towns whose Jewish populations are described in detail, I have established a similar household average of 5.15. 58. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families, table 3.4, p. 73; table 3.5, p. 74. 59. The data from these lists may be seen in the appendixes of my dissertation, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto.” 60. For 1632, see BNF Fondo Palatino, Cod EB, XV; for 1642, see ASF Strozziane, Series I, cod. xxiv, 114v–15r, which Pardi cites incorrectly as n. XXV; for 1661, see the same volume, 130v–31r. The age utilized was not static. Sumptuary and other legislation variously used ages 12, 17, 18 and 20. One census in 1630 divided the population into those older than and younger than twelve years (ASF Strozziane, Series I, xxiv, 112v–13r). 61. Only three individuals listed as “figli” are not otherwise identified as married, young or grown. They cannot be categorized, and this uncertainty is reflected in Table 7 in the ranges given for the towns where they were found.

Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune 1. The process was more rapid in Venice and Rome, but years or decades passed between the political decision and the creation of the physical ghetto in some cities

Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune including Padua, Verona, Mantua, Reggio Emilia and Modena. All these ghettos post-dated the Florentine ghetto. A complete bibliography on these ghettos cannot be provided here, but on Padua, see Ciscato, Gli Ebrei in Padova, 73–83 and Carpi, ed., Minutes Book, introduction. On Verona, see Roth, “La fête de l’institution du ghetto.” For further bibliography on the literature on specific ghettos, see Siegmund, “La vita nei ghetti.” 2. Pope Gregory XIII was finally to convince Philip II to concede the title of Grand Duke, but the formal concession was made by Maximilian II to Francesco I with the “Ratisbon Decree” of 2 November 1575. Cosimo had died on 21 April 1574 (Diaz, Il Granducato di Toscana, 190, 232). 3. On Cosimo’s direct intervention—efforts to manipulate his state’s economy— with respect to guilds, the mint, the treasury and the tax system, road system, industries etc., see the broad overview by Brown, “Cosimo I de’ Medici.” 4. 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 community’s boundaries, at least as it pertained to maintenance of the roads found therein. See Cribaro, “Urban Planning and Administration in Florence,” 241–42. 5. Benadusi, “Families in Early Modern Tuscany.” D’Addario argues that the subjugation of the entire dominion to the needs of Florence was extreme and totalizing; for example, Florentines, whose primary concern was Florence, served as rettori and civil and criminal judges in the fifty-three podesterie and eleven vicariates of which the state was constituted (La formazione dello stato moderno, 227). 6. It is peculiar that the legislation on the Jews is included without explanation as a unit in the recent edition of Medicean legislation on the environment (Cascio Pratilli and Zangheri, eds., La legislazione medicea). Even as bankers, the Jews of Tuscany played a negligible role in financing the state; see Teicher, “Politics and Finance in the Age of Cosimo I.” Given that state expenditures ran from 500,000 to 800,000 florins in the 1550s, loans averaging 5,000 scudi or less are so small that merchants and firms who made them are collectively referred to in one footnote (ibid., note 27, 350–51). Loans made by Jewish bankers fall into this minor category. 7. Cosimo I actually engaged in some “refeudalization” with the institution of five noble fiefs: Sasseta, Magliano, Cetona, Roccalbegna and Caldana. See Fasano Guarini, Lo stato mediceo, 64–65. 8. Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 179. Simonsohn would agree that in general in the Italian states, Jewish communal form came first, recognition afterward: “Dovunque in italia, inclusi i domini papali, le comunità ebraiche furono prima o poi riconosciute dalle autorità come universitas, corporazioni, garantite di stata giuridico e posizione sociale simili a quelli delle corporazioni” (“La condizione giuridica degli ebrei nell’Italia centrale e settentrionale,” 116). Long before governments felt the need to encourage Jewish juridical autonomy, Simonsohn notes, there existed in Jewish communities two types of institutions—rabbinical tribunals and voluntary arbitration (ibid., 117). For the absence of such tribunals in Florence or in the towns of Tuscany before the ghetto (though there may well have been some in Pisa or Siena) or in the Florentine ghetto until 1636, see Chapter Three above.

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Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune 9. For Bonfil, this organic development occurred despite the state and church: “These Jewish communities lacked the political autonomy that alone could have guaranteed the independence of their institutions. They lacked the power of coercion. . . . Consequently, they were completely dependent on the real masters of the political situation . . . [who] did not in the least favor the granting of independence. In spite of these limitations, Jewish communities were in the process of being organized more or less everywhere” (Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 180 and more generally 197–212). Toward the end of the sixteenth century, some Jewish communities, such as Ferrara in 1575, obtained formal permission to judge Jews in ritual matters; see ibid., 206–8. In the Florentine ghetto, as elsewhere, there were occasional attempts to obtain authorization from the government for individual acts of excommunication and also clandestine efforts to excommunicate without permission. See discussion below in this chapter and in Chapter Ten. 10. Both priests and lay people were controlled with the threat of excommunication by the church; see for example cases from the Venetian Inquisition in Ruggiero, Binding Passions: the young priest Andrea da Canal who had turned to a woman for love-magic and was convinced to talk about her by a threat of excommunication and loss of benefices (83); a servant woman named Aloysia who, hearing that those who “signed” wounds would be excommunicated, came to the church to confess this activity (160). 11. Segre, “Gli Ebrei piemontesi nell’età dell’assolutismo,” 72–73. 12. MGS 4449, 106r–7v; published in Cantini, Legislazione toscana 7: 375; also in Cascio Pratilli and Zangheri, eds., La legislazione medicea, 151–52. 13. MGS 4449, 107v; see also Cassuto, Gli Ebrei a Firenze, 115. 14. MGS 4450, 173r; Linaiuoli 5, matriculated 29 December 1564. 15. MGS 4450, 173r; Nove 18, 83v, dated 28 May 1580, where he is listed as 30 years old. His name is spelled Cypriano or Cipriano. 16. A Sperandino di Moise da Servi was matriculated into the Arte della Linaiuoli 5 on 29 April 1572 (Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” appendix 3). These are the only two references to Jews named Sperandino I have seen in the Florentine archival records from this period, which is why I suppose that they are references to the same man. 17. Nove 18, 145r, records that on 6 August 1580 he was granted a four-day permit to travel out of the ghetto. He was listed there as having a black beard and as being “of proportionate height” (“statura giusta”) and as twenty-five years old, so he was about sixteen years of age in 1570. In MGS 4450, 105r, his mother Dorina was identified in Empoli as head of a household with two sons and a daughter. In ASE, Podestà 197, the house is listed as that of “Salamone e Giuseppe di Moyse ebrei.” 18. MGS 4449, 108v; Cassuto, Gli Ebrei a Firenze, 115. 19. MGS 4450, 173r; Linaiuoli 5, 3v, matriculated 20 December 1569 (see Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” Appendices 1 and 3). 20. MGS 4450, 90r; for matriculations, see Siegmund, ibid., appendix 3. 21. It is likely that Gioello di Lustro da Veroli was also a tailor in Florence in 1570. He may be the Benedetto di Lustro di Vevole who matriculated into the Linen Guild in 1572 (Linaiuoli 5, 18v, matriculated 29 April 1572, see Siegmund, ibid., appendix 4) or possibly his brother.

Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune 22. Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli” 9: 206–7, doc. 1. Cassuto published the text from the Archives of the Jewish Community of Florence (ACEF), where it is now found in Box D.3.2, folder 4. According to a note on the copy in the ACEF, the original should be a “memoriale di Carlo Pitti in filza sua numero 66.” If found, that text might provide the names of the supplicants. 23. Dora Liscia Bemporad argues that a synagogue was designed (possibly by the great architect Buontalenti) and built in the late 1570s (“La scuola italiana e la scuola levantina,” 6–7, 15–16). Two other possibilities should also be considered: (1) that the “moscha” that was rebuilt and referred to frequently in the account books of the construction of the ghetto was a synagogue (cf. however Liscia Bemporad’s comment that there is no reference in Nove 3697 to a place of worship); (2) that any large room or rooms in the ghetto may have served as a synagogue, once it was occupied by an ark for the scrolls of the Torah, of which several might have been brought to Florence by the refugees. 24. On the custom of bit..t ul ha-tamid (“the abrogation of public worship”), see Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities, 244–45 and notes there. 25. Even the existence of communal minute-books, written in Hebrew (such as those of Padua and Verona) does not necessarily imply a republican model of selfgovernment. Important Jewish communities which were governed by larger and smaller assemblies (like the governments of many of the Italian republics) included the largest Jewish communities, Venice and Rome. The exact composition of the many other governing boards commonly referred to as the communal governments of Jewish communities on the Italian peninsula must be considered individually. 26. Daniel da Pisa was of one of the banking families that had faced the earlier expulsion from Florence; others of his family resettled in Siena and Pisa and remained there until the expulsion of 1570. See Milano, Il Ghetto di Roma, 178; for the text of the capitoli (“chapters” or ordinances) and the papal bull, see Milano, “I capitoli di Daniel da Pisa.” 27. Simonsohn, History of the Jews in the Duchy of Mantua, 500. 28. The essential study of the men who took office in this period is Litchfield’s The Emergence of a Bureaucracy. For a detailed examination of patron-client relations in the government, see Menning’s “Loans and Favors, Kin and Clients.” 29. On the importance of the self-designation of leaders (who might call themselves parnasim in Hebrew, or rashei’ k. ahal), see Siegmund, “Communal Leaders.” 30. Nove 13, 115v–18r. The slightly different version in ACEF Box D.3.2 folder 4, published by Cassuto in “I più antichi capitoli” as doc. 2, does not include the Nove’s preamble or the appended list of the ten Jews approved as governors, and it is missing one paragraph. 31. “Item attesa la comessione et ordine havuta da S[ua]A[ltezza] Ser[enissi]ma N[ostr]o S[igno]re che al detto mag[is]trato sieno sottoposti li Hebrei habitanti nella città di Fir[en]ze et che quello loro universita et comunanza habitante nel luogo acio deputato che si chiama il Ghetto sia sotto la cura et reggiment et ordinationi del d[ett]o Mag[istra]to et al giuditio del d[ett]o magistrato si p[er] le cose civili come p[er] le transgressioni et cose criminali salvo che p[er] le quistini che si riservono al mag[ist]rato delli Otto come di sotto di dira.” 32. On the reorganization of the Otto in line with Cosimo’s centralizing tenden-

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Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune cies, see Fasano Guarini, Lo stato mediceo, 32–33; unlike Diaz (Il Granducato di Toscana, 96), Fasano Guarini does not present this as pure absolutism. (Brackett, in Criminal Justice, continues the effort to debunk the impression of absolutism.) 33. Sahlins, Boundaries, 28. 34. The militia was organized in bande (districts). The number of these districts was increased several times; by 1571 there were 36 districts and 25,519 soldiers; each district was centered in a main town and had a captain. Benadusi, “Career Strategies in Early Modern Tuscany,” 93, citing Ferretti, “L’organizzazione militare in Toscana,” 58–80. 35. There were other important agencies that worked more closely on a daily basis with the communities, for example, the Capitani di Parte Guelfa and then the Uffitiali dei Fiumi, on whom see Vivoli, “La legislazione medicea in materia di strade, ponti e fiumi,” 79–84. On the centralization and the role of the Nove, see ibid., 84 and Fasano Guarini, Lo stato mediceo, 50–53 and “Potere centrale e comunità soggette.” See also D’Addario, La formazione dello stato moderno, 193–246, esp. 221, “le prime riforme di organi amministrativi e giurisdizionali” and “la pacificazione del Dominio.” 36. Cribaro, “Urban planning and administration in Florence,” 363 notes that “this was not formally recognized by the Nove and the Parte until 1617.” 37. See the “Provvisione con la quale si riuniscono i due magistrati dei Cinque del Contado e degli Otto di Pratica, e si crea l’Uffizio dei IX Conservatori della Giurisdizione e del Dominio Fiorentino,” in Cascio Pratilli and Zangheri, eds., La legislazione medicea 1: 98ff. 38. MP 544, 490v: “trovo tutti i pistolesi si i cittadini, come tutti gli altri, molto obbedienti.” 39. See Anzilotti, La costituzione interna, 79–81; Fasano Guarini, Lo stato mediceo, 30; Diaz, Il Granducato di Toscana, 104–6. 40. The per capita tax on Pescia’s 6,192 inhabitants “in the last years of the Cinquecento” was 3 lire 5 soldi (Brown, In the Shadow of Florence, 168). Assuming that only men over age eighteen were taxed, this translates to roughly 10–13 lire per Pescian male, using the male-to-population ratio 3.3 from 1427 (ibid., 24). This is just a bit less than the 14 lire (2 scudi) that the ghetto had to collect from each male over the age of fifteen! Therefore, the per capita tax collected from Pesciatines (revenue for Pescia’s administration and for payments to Florence) was roughly equal to the per capita tax collected by Florence from the Jews. It should be noted that the ghetto was in the city of Florence and therefore benefited from some municipal services that were paid for in Pescia by taxes it imposed on its residents (Brown, ibid., 157) through indirect taxes: gate tax, meat and slaughter tax, retail sale of wine tax, oil, bread, contracts, fishing rights. 41. D’Addario, La formazione dello stato moderno, 233. D’Addario emphasizes that this was a privilege, but it did not help the people of Prato as they fell into debt to the Florentine State in the 1560s. 42. “In prima che ogni anno si deputino et eleghino p[er] detto mag[istra]to Dieci di detti hebrei.” See note 30 above. 43. These examples from 1585 were chosen from Nove 23, 198r, 269r–v. Many other examples could be cited. For the general function of the Nove, see sources cited in notes 35 and 39 above. 44. On the responsibilities of the chancellors, see Fasano Guarini, Lo stato mediceo,

Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune 54. On the salary of the chancellor in Pescia (840 lire), see Brown, In the Shadow of Florence, 131. 45. For example, in Nove 23, 168r, “il part[it]o delli gov[ernan]ti moderni rapp[resentan]ti il ghetto degl’ hebrei di Firenze rogato sotto dì 29 sta[n]te da Raff[aell]o di Cipriano Canc[ellie]re”; Nove 29, 133v, “partito rog[a]to p[er] Leon di Pesaro canc[ellie]re.” See Figures 3 and 4. 46. “Item, che le scritture cha ha fatte et farà il Cancelliere di detta Università per cosi a quella attinenti si presti fede come a scritture publiche”; capitolo 18 of the capitoli of 1572 (Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli” 10: 33). 47. The first reference to a chancellor in the ghetto is dated 14 August 1572 (Nove 13, 320r); that he was Raffaello di Cipriano is first specified on 23 December 1572 (Nove 14, 184v). The last mention of him as chancellor is dated 30 August 1586 (Nove 24, 143r). Raffaello is also cited as chancellor in OGP 130, 2v, dated 18 February 1574/75. 48. Citations follow for the first and last appearances of the next chancellors. Leone: Nove 29, 133v, Nove 31, 129v; David: Nove 32, 168v, Nove 33, 218r; Isacche: Nove 38, 75v, Nove 44, 163r. 49. Nove 23, 168r, dated 31 August 1584: “Item osservate [le cose] et ottenuto [il partito] et approvono il part[it]o delli gov[ernan]ti moderni rapp[resentan]ti il ghetto degli hebrei di Firenze rogato soto di 29 sta[n]te da Raff[aell]o di Cipriano Canc[ellie]re per il quale elessero [elessino?] p[er] 4 nuovi gov[ernan]ti. . . . Sabato di Sabato di Bondi [sic], Iacob di Michele, Benedetto Castiglia, et Salamone di Moise da Empoli. mand.” 50. Shulvass, relying on the capitoli published by Cassuto, suggests a “decline” of republican democracy in Florentine Jewish community paralleling the loss of that republic in Florence in general and argues that the government of the Florentine ghetto was autocratic and administered by government appointees (The Jews in the World of the Renaissance, 68–69). It is particularly interesting that the Jews adopted the language of republicanism more than five decades after the end of the republican period in Florence; this may reflect the influence of other Italian Jewish communities as much as it suggests a myth of democracy, encouraged, in the Florentine ghetto, by the absence of bankers. Even the officers of the Nove occasionally called the Jews of the Ghetto a “Republic” (Nove 43, 132r, dated 3 August 1611); but in at least one place in the 1608 capitoli, the governors refer to themselves as “li deputati della republica delli hebrei italiani di questa città di Fiorenza” (see Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli,” 10: 38), and in another place the Nove’s scribe, copying the confirmed ordinance, crossed out the word “republica” and wrote instead “Università” (Nove 368, 374v). I am not sure whether great importance was attached to the choice of words. 51. MGS 4450, 173r; Nove 13, 118r. 52. The rules that determined citizenship were not standardized and have not yet been adequately studied, but in Florence it was usually possible for immigrants to obtain citizenship after a few decades for the purpose of guild membership at lowered dues. In Pescia, according to Brown, “starting in the sixteenth century, immigrants had to wait fifty years to obtain citizenship, compared to only ten in the mid-fourteenth and early fifteenth century” (In the Shadow of Florence, 182). A large part of the town, Brown explains, was made up of immigrants; this kept leading families of Pescia in power, since political participation depended on citizenship.

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Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune 53. Nove 14, 139r, dated 19 October 1573: “Item osservate [le cose] et ottenuto [il partito] per ordine del S. A. . . . comesseno et co’mettono a li x [dieci] soprastanti del ghetto che sono di p[rese]nte in offizio che nonostante li loro capitoli p[er] q[uest]o anno durante il loro off[izi]o elegghino due di loro civi uno doppo l’altro p[er] sindici del d[ett]o ghetto l’uno de quali stia in off[izi]o la metà del tempo che detti soprastanti debbono stare in offizio, et l’altro l’altra metà et no’ nemanchino sotto pena della indegnatione et arb[itri]o del d[ett]o mag[istra]to mandantes.” 54. The records of the Nove Conservatori—our only source for the names of the governors—are missing for the late-summer elections of 1576, 1577 and 1579. The volumes are now numbered in sequence (16, 17, 18), but actually the Florentine years 1575–76, 1576–77 and 1578–79 are missing. Volume 16 is 1574–75, volume 17 is 1577–78, volume 18 is 1579–80. The ratifications of governors resume in 1580 for seven consecutive years (1580–86). See Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” appendix 4. 55. This information might have been recorded in the missing book that covered 1578–79. 56. In August 1595 four Jews were elected (Nove 31, 129v), but in 1600 and later years only three were elected (Nove 32, 168v [second of two pages marked 168v]). Despite the sequential numeration of the books (Nove 31, Nove 32), the records of the intervening years are missing. 57. Many details now require that we correct Cassuto’s assertion that this Laudadio de Blanis was still alive in 1608, as well as other information about his family tree (“I più antichi capitoli” 10: 74, note 1). The medical doctor Laudadio mentioned by David de Pomis was the son of Moise, not Agnolo. The Laudadio referred to in the capitoli of 1608 is his grandson, Laudadio di Magister Agnolo [di Magister Laudadio di Moise de Blanis]. The grandfather was still alive in 1575 when his testament was notarized, and not deceased in 1565 as posited by Toaff in “Maestro Laudadio,” 97. 58. Nove 18, 163r; Nove 19, 130v; Nove 20, 150r. He may also have been a rabbinical scholar; on that subject, see below. 59. Note that the date of publication of the “Omelie fatte alli Ebrei di Firenze nella chiesa di S. Croce et sermoni fatti in più compagnie della città” is 1585 (as per Cassuto, Gli Ebrei a Firenze, 208, note 1), not 1588 as stated in early printings of this book. Cassuto depended on the following entry in M. Steinschneider’s catalogue of anti-Jewish publications in Vessillo Israelitico 29 (1881), 271: “1585, Vitale Medici, dottor fisico, Omelie fatte alli [sic] ebrei di Firenze nella chiesa di Santa Croce, et sermoni fatti in più compagnie della detta città. Firenze 1585 in–4. [riporto il tit. secondo il cat. impr. libr Bodl. II, 707 (Ved. W, II, 1045, IV, 482) sotto i cristiani nati; preso Furst III, 478 ‘Vitale-Medici’ coll’anno 1584. Senza dubbio è il giudeo Jehiel di Pesaro presso W. I. 576, le omelie scritte (recitate?) nel 1582. Il Haym IV, 266, n. 6, dice chiaramente, ‘L’autore era Ebreo fattosi cristiano’ man non indica il nome giudaico.” But note that Lapini (Diario, 222) records that Vitale Medico’s sermons were delivered on 30 May 1583—not in 1582, at which time he was in fact still Jewish and a governor in the ghetto. I am not yet convinced that Vitale was Jehiel of Pesaro and have a study in progress on his conversion. For further biographical detail on Vitale, see Segre, “Il mondo ebraico nei cardinali,” 131. 60. The uncertainty reflects the fact that there are three years for which we have no records, as noted above. In this period the two most elite families in the ghetto,

Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune the da Rieti and the Leucci (who were not living in Florence in 1570 and are therefore not counted among the fourteen) also did not participate in the governing. It may be surmised that they distanced themselves from the other Jews while they strove to exempt themselves from living in the ghetto, or while they attempted to arrange to leave Florence. 61. The fourth householder who does not seem to have become a governor is registered as “Dattol[o] Romano,” head of a household of five in 1570. There is doubt about a fifth man, “Davit da Reggio,” head of a household of five. He may have been a governor in 1574 (if he was Davitte da Pisa) or in 1580 (if he was Davitte di Falcone). 62. This summary of the so-called “Tamari-Venturozza Affair” depends on the account by Toaff, Gli Ebrei a Perugia, 135–36 and Adelman, “Jewish Women and Family Life,” 161–64. On Ventura’s life in the years after that well-researched affair, see below. 63. Luzzati has found the record of Ventura’s matriculation into the Studio at Pisa in 1566 and has noted Ventura’s conspicuous role in obtaining exemptions from the segno for large numbers of his relatives from the duke of Tuscany (“Prestito ebraico e studenti ebrei,” in idem, La casa dell’Ebreo, 114, note 12). The information that Ventura had a post at the Laurentian library is in Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 192. 64. MGS 4449, 92v–94r. 65. MGS 4450, 173r. 66. I have found only one indication that Ventura was still in Florence, and subject to the Nove, after 1570: a permit to travel for four days to Poggio written to Ventura di Moise on 10 November 1575 (Nove 16, 184v). It is possible that he moved to Ancona shortly thereafter; I have found a copy of the testament of a Ventura Abrae de Perugia, living in the ghetto of Ancona (NM Testamenti Forestieri, filza 2, no. 217). Except for the problem of his father’s name, Ventura could meanwhile have married a woman named Ginevra and had four daughters by 1587, when the testament was written. The testament also mentions as his sisters Ricca and Perna and a brother Isach. 67. OGP 119, 269r, where he is released from jail on 20 September 1571. No information is available about the type of attack or the circumstances thereof. 68. Nove 16, 51v, 52r, 53r, approval for governors’ expulsion of “Lionello hebreo come homo di malavita,” dated 13 May 1575. 69. Nunz. 842, testimony of Raffael Simonis de Cibrano (hebreus flor[enti]e habitan’) dated 16 October 1566 (unpaginated), in which Raffael swears to have known Moise Buondi about a year, having a “compagnia di rigattiere co[n] d[e]cto moise p[er] due anni et intutto q[uest]o tempo che lui lo ha praticato li e parso molto fastidioso et tanto fastidioso che li e moto dividere d[e]c[t]a compagnia et in tutto questo tempo no’ lo ha visto pratichare troppo co’ nessuno hebreo p[er] esser si fastidioso.” 70. He appears as both victim and perpetrator of theft, violence and verbal abuse (OGP 104: 325v; 108: 52v; 112: 268; 114: 135r–v; 118: 159v–60r; 125: 292r, 358v–59r). 71. Riformagioni 10, 20rv lists in the Populo di Santa Maria Hipotecosa “Moyse Buondi rigattieri d’eta anni 40, Ricca sua moglie quasi della med[esi]ma eta, hanno un figl[iul]o di xv anni detto Manuello, [an]che Elia figliastro di Moyse d’anni 19.” 72. His will from 1575 was notarized by the Florentine notary Frosino di Gio.battista Ruffoli, NM 265, fols. 30r–v, on 5 May 1574.

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Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune 73. Laudadio had one other surviving son (Salvatore) and many grandchildren. It seems likely that Salvatore did not come to the ghetto of Florence in 1571. Additional information on this family has been collected by Toaff in Gli Ebrei a Perugia (see index, s.v) and in Il vino e la carne (see index, s.n. Blanis). 74. Laudadio was the son of Iacob’s brother (Magistro) Agnolo. In 1580 he was described as a twenty-eight-year-old man (Nove 18, 11r, dated 12 March 1579/80). He had at least two younger brothers, Giuseppe and Salustro, and a sister, Ginevra. 75. NM Testamenti 767, 167 r–v. 76. Laudadio was elected to govern in 1589, 1593, 1595, and 1604 (and probably years in between for which we have no data; see Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” appendix 4). The capitoli of 1608 reserved a special seat for him in the synagogue, which could otherwise be occupied only by his two sons. 77. These four are: Daniel d’Isach Calò, first confirmation on 28 August 1580 (Nove 18, 163r) at about age 30 (age listed as 30 in Nove 18, 23v, dated 28 March 1580); Laudadio di Moise Alpelingo and Lione Usiglia, both first confirmed on 31 July 1573 (Nove 14, 95r), Laudadio at about age 28 (age listed as 35 in Nove 18, 61v, dated 9 May 1580) and Lione at about age 25 (age listed as 32 in Nove 18, 83v, dated 28 May 1580); Salamone di Moise Alpelingo, first confirmed on 23 August 1582 (Nove 20, 150r) at about age 27 (age listed as 25 in Nove 18, 145r, dated 6 August 1580). 78. Took office in their thirties: Davitte da Pisa, Laudadio Blanis, Moise Torè; in their forties: Cherubino di Sabato da Palestrino, Giovacchino di Donato Levi, Liaccio di Piazza, Sabato di Beniamin di Bondi, Sabato di Pellegrino, Salamone di Lione di Prato, Crescenzio di Salamon di Orta, Davitte di Falcone, Raffaello di Iacob da Citerna. The ages of all these men are listed on permits in Nove 18. I do not have sufficient data to tell whether the determining factor was actually marriage, which would work prima facie, since elite men who became governors younger did marry earlier. 79. Capitolo 36 of the capitoli of 1608/9, reproduced from a version in the Archives of the Jewish Community in Florence in Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli” 10: 76. A more perfect copy of the 38 capitoli is found in Nove 368, 374r–79v; they were approved on 8 January 1608/9. This reform was one of a number in this set of capitoli that attempted to reduce tensions in the ghetto, as will be discussed below. The Florentine attempt to set the roster of eighteen council members in 1608 echoes a decision to fix council membership to twelve Jews in Mantua in 1548–49 (before the ghetto was established there in 1612). Simonsohn notes that the structure of the selfgovernment in Mantua was revised frequently as the Jews sought a satisfactory arrangement, owing to their “lack of experience” (History of the Jews in the Duchy of Mantua, 332–34). 80. See the text published in Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli” as doc. 5 (10: 78–80). A marginal comment to capitolo 36 of the regulations approved in 1698 (extant in Nove 368, 378v) clarifies that the regulations of 1608 were not annulled in toto in 1611 as Cassuto thought (ibid. 9: 205). Rather, only one section was annulled, capitolo 36, which had rewritten the rules governing the election of the Jewish representatives: “a q[ues]to cap[ito]lo è stato d’rogato q[uan]to all’ elect[ion]e de Gover[nant]i la quale d’rog[ant]e è In filza d. dom[and]e di q[ue]sto Mag[istra]to de ss. Nove del 1611 et ap[provono] q[ues]ta p[er] part[tit]o de 19 di Ag[os]to 1611.” 81. The copies of the capitoli published by Cassuto are sometimes the first draft and sometimes the copy. An example of the latter may be seen in the capitoli of 1572,

Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune where because of a scribal error (ellipsis), the copy in the Jewish archives is missing one paragraph of the text as it appears in the Nove. The capitoli were copied into one of two sets of books, the Deliberationi or the Domande e Sentenze. See also note 150 below. 82. For a comprehensive summary of the powers of the new agency, see Diaz, Il granducato di Toscana, 104–6. 83. The system was still operative in 1575; see Brackett, Criminal Justice, 36, citing OGP 128, 19 May 1575. 84. “Relazione di Messer Vincenzo Fedeli” (secretary to the Signoria of Venice, on his return from the Duke of Florence in 1561), in Albèri, ed., Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti, 354 (“E per sapere ed intendere minutamente tutti gli umori della sua città e del suo stato . . .”; the word umori here is not being used with its traditional physical meaning). Fedeli continues by saying that spies are also watching Cosimo’s ambassadors and ministers abroad and that he has verified accounts that the duke spends 40,000 ducats on these spies annually. “Relazione di Messer Vincenzo Fedeli,” in Albèri, ed., Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti, 355. 85. Cassuto’s edition of the capitoli of 1572 is missing this paragraph, which is found in the records of the Nove Conservatori (Nove 13, 117v): “che il detto sindaco sia tenuto subito che arrivera a Firenze Hebrei di nuovo farne rapporto al d[ett]o mag[istra]to et notificare a tali hebrei che vadino a rappresentarsi al do magto o suoi ministri sotto pena al sindaco che ne mancheva et alli hebrei a chi sia comandato et ne mancheranno di scudo uno d’[or]o p[er] ciasc[un]o er p[er] ciasc[un]a volta applicati come di sopra.” 86. Nove 14, 134r, dated 7 October 1573. 87. Nove 14, 139r, dated 14 October 1573. 88. Agnolo di Moyses da Perugia and Isach d’Elia, whose surname appears variously in the earliest sources as Cataio, Castaro and Catalho, but was soon standardized (and Italianized) as Calò. Nove 14, 141v, dated 15 October 1573; 150r–v, dated 29 October 1573. A sindaco continued to be responsible for reporting transgressions in the ghetto to the Nove at least as late as 1608 (see capitoli of 1608, no. 38). 89. Additional examples (not as photogenic) include Nove 43, 126v, from 27 July 1611, where marginal comments on the same page include “P[artit]o del Ghetto,” “Po S. Caterina,” “Po della Comp[ani]a di S. Michele . . . Castello,” “Po del sasso di Volt[err]a,” “Po di Fruecchio,” and “Po di Bugg[ian]o.” 90. Statuti 26, Riforme e statuti della città di Arezzo e Cortine del 1565, 46, 183, 188. 91. Statuti 304, Empoli dal 1560 al 1575, 51r: “Nessuna persona ardischa mandare porci sciolti per la terra d’empoli.” 92. For Empoli: “Item: . . . che nessuna persona ardisca ne di di ne di notte gittare acqua,” ibid., 52v. For the Florentine ghetto, capitoli of August 1571: “Item, che dentro al ghetto nessuno ardisca [word missing] o far altra bruttura, ne per le finestre si possa gettare cosa brutta sotto pena di scudi dua d’applicarsi come sopra.” This rule was repeated and elaborated in the ghetto ordinance of 1572 (see Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli,” 9: 206, 209). While I am sure the main issue was cleanliness of the streets, I do wonder how often a passerby was doused by someone above, as recently happened to me one evening while I strolled the streets of Colmar (Alsace). 93. Ibid. The statutes, the approval of which was confirmed 29 July 1560, were

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Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune actually not approved by the Nove but “with authority of the notary and chancellor and under Cosimo,” that is, by Cosimo directly, just before the agency of the Nove was created to oversee the supervision of the revisions and approvals of local statutes. For many similar examples, see the collected laws in Cascio Pritilli and Zangheri, eds., Legislazione medicea. 94. The sindaco was responsible for having the piazza cleaned and was authorized to make a weekly collection from the shopkeepers to pay for this. Nove 13, 115v–18r; the almost identical version from the Jewish communal archives was published by Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli,” 9: 211. 95. Ibid., book 43, passim. 96. That some volumes of the Shulh.an Arukh were in circulation is evidenced by Vajda, “Une liste de livres de 1572,” which discusses a manuscript list of books found in a woman’s house in 1572 in an inconclusively identified town in northern Italy (Manuscrit hébreu 1161 at Bibliotèque Nationale de Paris). This list includes the first part of the Shulh.an Arukh (Vajda says it must be from the first edition, Venice 1565, or from the two published in the same city in 1567). This very long list of sixty to seventy volumes, in manuscript and print, is evidence of the remarkable appetite of Jews for books (Christian libraries were on average much smaller), but also provides evidence that Caro’s law code was not the only book in use. By 1595 parts of the Shulh.an Arukh were found in a full third of Jewish households in Mantua that had libraries (430 private collections were inventoried, in a community of 2,000 Jews!). There were an average of fifty volumes per Jewish library. See Baruchson-Arbib, “Jewish Libraries.” 97. The “Historia de gli riti hebraici” by the Venetian rabbi Leon Modena (1571–1648), published by Modena in Venice (1638), is of the genre of autoethnography and, though it might well have been used by some Jews (especially of Iberian converso background) as a guide, it was not a book of Jewish law. On the history of this text, see Cohen, “Leone da Modena’s Riti.” I look forward to reading Professor Benjamin Ravid’s forthcoming work on the publication of translated Jewish legal texts in seventeenth century Venice. 98. On this point and the ability of Tuscan Jews prior to ghettoization to play to their advantage the relative obscurity of Jewish law, see Siegmund, “Division of the Dowry.” 99. The Jews of Florence were not under instruction from Christian or secular authorities to make their prayers quiet, as some Jewish communities were. On the comparison of the silence of Christian worship and the noisiness of Jewish worship, see, however, Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 239. 100. Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli” 9: 209; Nove 13, 116r. In 1608 this capitolo was rewritten (as capitolo 1), specifying that no one of any rank was allowed to talk or make any noise once the person appointed to say the prayers had begun leading them, in the morning, at vespers or in the evening. The penalty remained 1 scudo. 101. Cassuto, ibid. 9: 211; my translation is from the slightly different text in Nove 13, 117r: “Item che non sia lecito ad Alc[u]no di detta universita far arte o esercitio alcuno, ne occupare con cosa alcuna, alcuna parte dell tre sale.” In 1608 the common rooms were only mentioned in capitolo 3, which placed a 2 scudi fine on anyone who did not keep the ghetto or the common rooms clean.

Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune 102. The word “pagarlo,” which is missing in the text published by Cassuto, ibid., is found in Nove 13. 103. Cassuto, ibid., 10: 33; Nove 13, 118r. 104. Simonsohn has described the development of ghetto administration in Mantua in his detailed study of that Jewish community, History of the Jews in the Duchy of Mantua and has presented a composite picture of Italian Jewish self-government in his essay “The Ghetto in Italy” and in “La condizione giuridica degli ebrei nell’Italia centrale e settentrionale.” Simonsohn describes development primarily as a response to the size of the community, as well as to shifting balance of power between bankers and nonbankers. Others have focused more on the similarity of Jewish self-government and local state institutions (see, for example, Malkiel, A Separate Republic). My contribution here is to point out that a council was created in Florence only in response to the prior imposition on the Jews of a Jewish governing institution by the state. 105. The camerlingo is mentioned (as distinct from the cancelliere and from the sindaco) in the first clause of 1572 (Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli,” 209). We learn from capitolo 4 of the rules from 1578 (to be discussed below) that operai (functionaries) for the synagogue, tax assessors, secretaries and others are elected by vote of a majority of the Ten (Nove 17, 202r–v). In 1590 a reform was enacted and approved by the Nove which required two of the four governors of the ghetto to serve as operai of the synagogue (ACEF Box D, folder 3.2.4, fols. 7r–v, approved by the Nove on 9 November 1590). 106. In ACEF Box E, folder 1.3 Gestione Comunità, in a folder labeled “Verbali Consiglio, 1657–1857,” there is an index of books from 1645–55 that were deliberately destroyed during housekeeping of the communal office. Presumably all earlier books had previously been cleaned out. The lost books from 1645 to 1655 were the account books of alms given to funds or societies noted only as “Talmud Torah” (four books), “Jerusalem” (six books), “Zedaca” (five books, a general charitable fund), “Moar Abitulod” (two books, the name of a fund for providing dowries to poor girls—in Hebrew, mohar betulot). This list is particularly valuable as evidence of the various societies and funds that existed by 1645. The Archivio di Stato di Firenze also preserves a large set of records from the seventeenth-century ghetto, the fondo called Nazione Israelitica. Of the documents extant in the Jewish community archive in 1933, when it was catalogued by Umberto Cassuto, very little if anything was lost during World War II or in the flood of 1966. (Cassuto’s handwritten catalogue is found in Box E, folder 11.1, labeled “Archivio.”) Although the cataloguing system found today in the archive does not correspond to that used by Cassuto, my exploration of the archive in 1993 showed that only a few items mentioned by Cassuto were missing from the collection. Unfortunately this set includes what must be an extremely rare and valuable set of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Hebrew marriage contracts (probably decorated and on vellum). 107. There is no extant evidence in the 1570s, 1580s or 1590s of any active rabbinic court in Florence. The first evidence of a rabbi with special status in the community dates from 1598, when Ghirone helped the governors by translating the ban of excommunication into the vernacular (see Chapter Ten). 108. The use of notarial protocols in the Florentine archives is complicated by the

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Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune fact that the Jews of Florence, and of Tuscany before them, used dozens of notaries, unlike the Jews in some other cities who made extensive use of one or two notaries, or even had Jewish notaries, as at Rome. Documents notarized by Jewish notaries in Rome, 1536–1640, are the subject of Stow’s essay “Life and Society in the Community of Rome” and are closely summarized in Stow, ed., The Jews in Rome. 109. Nove 16, 51v. Lionello was sent to the “Galea,” or galleys, which seems to be a nonspecific reference to forced labor at the port of Livorno or on the duke’s warships there. Convicts were also sent, in the 1570s, to the mining island Porto di Ferraio. 110. Nove 16, 50v, dated 13 May 1575. The price for the slave was 100 florins, and the governors received permission to raise 50 florins from the ghetto, the remainder coming from other Jewish communities. This slave may be one of those twenty incarcerated Turkish slaves referred to in OGP 128, 318v–19v, dated October 1574, of whom one was named Abraman and one Abram. 111. NM 2148, 58v ff. The religious obligation is referred to in rabbinic texts as pidyon shevuyyim. The Jewish community archive (ACEF Box E.1.1, Gestione Comunità, in the first folder labeled “Deliberationi verbali consiglioni 1614–1838”) has a document recording that a Jewish woman named Fatima was redeemed from slavery by the Jews of Florence in 1614 at the cost of 85 scudi. On the rescue of Jewish captives by seventeenth-century Jews in Livorno as an organized activity, not ad hoc as here in Florence, see Laras, “La ‘compagnia per il riscatto degli schiavi’ di Livorno”; but for Jewish use of (non-Jewish) slaves, see Toaff, “Schiavitù e schiavi.” 112. The first plausible evidence of proselytization is recorded in a set of capitoli of 1595—never approved by the Nove—in what is possibly a reference to conversion-oriented sermons in the ghettos on Sunday afternoons: “In prima gli fanno intendere che le domeniche doppo desinare per l’ordinario et altre feste se occorerà si raguneranno nel loco solito per dar audientia a chi occurerà, e questo acciò non deviano venire a fastidio al Ser[enissi]mo Principe et ai sua degni magistrati di Nove di Firenze, e risse abominevoli” (Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli,” 10: 34–35). Right through 1608 the Jewish governors continued to approach the Nove for approval of capitoli and various one-time requests. The procedure may be observed in the Jewish archives, where there is preserved a copy of a request from the governors to the Nove to approve a decision they made in 1590, and a copy of a letter from the Nove granting that approval. See ACEF Box D, folder 3.2.4, fol. 7r (a copy of a text dated 8 November 1590) and the letter approving it, fol. 7r–v. 113. Capitolo 18 of the 1608 regulations. See Cassuto, “Ancora sulla famiglia da Pisa,” 72–73; Nove 386, 376v. This “Magazzor Bolognesi,” or Mah.zor Bologna, probably refers to the holy day prayerbook printed in Bologna in 1540/41, which followed the Roman (Italian) rite; see Attilio Milano, “Bologna,” in the Encylopaedia Judaica, 4: 1190–91. The problem the regulation alludes to is undoubtedly the small but growing number of Levantine Jews in the ghetto, who, when they participate as prayerleaders, introduce foreign elements (from the Spanish rite) into the service. 114. Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli” 10: 73; Nove 368, 377r. The use of the specific name grecaiuoli clarifies that Jews were going to gentile-owned eateries outside the ghetto; it will be noted that the concern of the governors here was the desecration of the Sabbath, not the violation of Jewish laws concerning wine produced by nonJews, or non-kosher food. It may have been this type of behavior that the Venetian

Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune rabbi Leon Modena found so disturbing when he came to Florence in 1609, as he wrote (letter no. 65 of Leon from Florence in 1609 to a rabbi in Rome): “this city is not upright to my eyes, and I have not found her to be as rumor would have had it.” See Boksenboim, ed., Letters of Rabbi Leon Modena, 142. Alternately, it may simply have been that the Florentine Jews were not particularly impressed by or respectful toward Modena. 115. The earliest mention of a hired rabbi in Florence is in 1611, and the first explicitly titled rabbi sat on the board of governors in 1603; see Chapter Ten. 116. Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities in Renaissance Italy, 72 and more generally, 67–72 and 104–16. 117. Ibid., 101. 118. Nove 368, 374r–79v; see Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli” 10: 38–40 and 71–77. Capitolo 15 calls for two women to be elected, presumably to handle seating and other arrangements in the scuola (cf., in Yiddish, the shul), “where the women go . . . so that they shall be there quietly, and in peace.” Capitolo 25 calls for communal meetings every fifteen days “to maintain the peace”; discord (sconcordie) is cited as having prompted capitoli 29 and 36. 119. I thank Valerie Kivelson for her comments on an earlier draft which led me to this perspective. 120. They are the bulk of the material found in the volumes of the Nove Conservatori del Dominio e Iurisditione that are called deliberatione (the first and largest section of each volume, which is divided into sections titled “Deliberationi, licentie, bandi, et altri partiti”—deliberations, licenses, orders and other decisions). 121. Nove 42, 217r, dated 10 November 1610; for the doctor, Magistro Luigi Guidoni di Palaia, ibid., fol. 290v, dated 17 February 1610/11. 122. Guerrini, Empoli 2: 486. 123. Brown, In the Shadow of Florence, 16, 19–20. The Nove limited Pescian selfgovernance by overseeing the election of officials and by requiring that all laws passed had to be presented once a year for approval, though not submitted on an ongoing basis. This is a higher degree of autonomy than that of the Jews in the Florentine ghetto, more similar to that held by the Jews in the ghetto of Venice. Also, in Pescia there seems to have been no chancellor appointed, so that the only officials who were not elected locally were the vicars. 124. Brown (ibid., 19) explains that the podestà in Pescia had power over criminal cases except those for which the penalty was death or mutilation, and that the local government shared jurisdiction over civil cases with the podestà. In contrast, the governors of the ghetto had no police force of their own. All civil and criminal cases continued to be handled by the Otto di Guardia, except those which pertained specifically to disobedience of the laws passed by the Nove Conservatori. In practice, Jews were allowed to arbitrate cases within the ghetto and also appeared before the court of the Mercanzia. For a summary of the relationship between administrative units in the state and jurisdictional units (although without reference to the status of Jews), see Diaz, Il granducato di Toscana, 96–103. A Jewish tribunal existed in the ghetto from 1636, and records of its deliberations are preserved in the ACEF Box D.1 1–10, “Tribunale dei Massari” and Box E 11.1, “Archivio, Gestione Comunità.” 125. The following are the texts of the approvals of decisions taken by the governors of the ghetto, the Commune of Arbiano and the Community and men of Villa di

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Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune Tavola: “Item osservate [le cose] et ottenuto et approvorno il part[it]o delli gov[ernan]ti moderni rapp[resentan]ti il ghetto degli hebrei di Firenze rogato sotto dì 29 sta’te da Raff[aello] di Cipriano Canc[ellie]re” (Nove 23, 168r, dated 31 August 1585); “Item osservate et ottenuto et approvorno il part[it]o del comune di Arbiano rogato sotto di 2 di 7bre [settembre] per Lione Villani canc[ellie]re” (Nove 23, 198r, dated 2 October 1585); “Item osservate et ottenuto il part[it]o et approvorno li capitoli e ordini nuovamente fatti p[er] la comunità e’ houmini della Villa di Tavola contado di Prato” (ibid., 269r–v, dated 2 January 1585/86). This last set of capitoli, by the way, is an excellent parallel to Jewish capitoli of later years: it includes regulations on the size of dowries, wedding parties, the rights of new members of the community etc. It should be noted that even when the capitoli themselves were not copied into this series of books by the officers of the Nove, their approval was. (See, for example, Nove 26, 229v, dated 19 November 1588, where the capitoli of the Compagnia di Santo Stefano di Castiglion’ fiorentino of 6 August 1588 are approved; it is noted there that they have been copied into the Filze di Domande, another set of books. My arguments in this chapter presume, accordingly, that we may expect to find references to any capitoli the Nove approved for the ghetto, even if they were not copied into this register in full.) 126. Guerrini (Empoli 2: 475) gives a summary description of the government of Empoli: it was composed of a Consiglio of twenty-four members, four Consuls and Priors, two Captains, two estimators (of taxes); two overseers for the school. Payment of taxes determined eligibility to vote for the councilors (Guerrini does not say, but I presume women did not vote). To be elected, however, one had to be male, of a certain age, free from debts and a resident of Empoli for a specific number of years. Offices were held for four months, six months or a year. Although the chief office was gonfaloniere (sometimes elected, sometimes appointed), the most important office was actually the cancelliere (appointed). 127. The four new governors of the ghetto are affirmed “con gl’oblighi, carichii, salario, ufizio, et altro s[econ]do il solito. mand.”; Nove 20, 150r, dated 23 August 1582. 128. There were at least four instances of such authorizations: Nove 17, 125v, dated 24 July 1578; Nove 18, 180r–v, dated 15 September 1580; Nove 19, 106v, dated 5 July 1581 (“Item osservate et ottenuto conc[esso]no lice[nti]a à Rapp[resentan]ti l’università delli hebrei del ghetto di Firenze d’Imporre un datio [sic] s[econ]do i loro ordini che butta la somma di scudi 30 p[er] potere pagare la pigione della sinagoga, et la provisione allor[o] Canc[ellie]re mand.”); and Nove 28, 46r, dated 5 May 1590. Since the words salario (salary) and spese (expenses) are used more frequently in these volumes, it is not clear whether the tax collected here was for the pro[v]visione of the synagogue (i.e., candles, oil and other supplies) or was salary for the chancellor. It is also not clear who paid for the rent of the three common rooms, the “tre sale comuni” mentioned in the capitoli of 1572. 129. Rather than requiring the governors to collect the per capita tax, the Nove preferred to auction this off (as a privilege) to the highest bidding Jew. However, the Jew who bought the tax in the ghetto was invariably one of the respected governors, and it seems likely that, the formality of the auction dispensed with, the collection of the tax was in fact undertaken by the governors and, later, the “estimators” they appointed. Iacob di Miel hebreo romano was the highest bidder at the auction of the tax in 1574 (Nove 15, 78r, 80r–v, 81r); the next time we hear of an auction for the tax is

Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune December 1578. No tax had yet been collected for the year, and so an auction was held. The tax of 150 scudi was bought at auction by Sabatuccio di Pellegrino (Nove 17, 230r, dated 12 December 1578). 130. Arditi, Diario, 12 August 1575, fol. 42 (ed. Cantagalli, 62). 131. “A di 26 d’Agosto 1575. Item atteso, che li hebrei habitanti nel ghetto di Firenze son [sic] tenuti per vigor delli ordini loro tener pulite et nette le stanze et luoghi d’esso ghetto et atteso che tutti li infrasc[ritt]i ne hanno mancato. Pero osservate et ottenuto et li condenorno in un mezzo scudo p[er] ciascuno secondo detti ordini et i nomi de quali son questi, cioè . . .”; Nove 16, 313r. The list includes twentyone men, one woman, the “inhabitants of the hostel” and another four men, who may or may not be the said residents of the hostel. 132. “che non sia lecito ad alcuno uccellare o sbeffare o fare oltraggio”; Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli” 10: 33; Nove 13, 117v. 133. “Uccellare”: In the Vocabulario della Crusca (1612) we find: “Per beffare, e burlare, tolta la metaf. Dagl’ inganni, e allettamenti, che, in uccellando, si fa agli uccelli. Lat. illudere, irridere.” I have translated it as “mock” in an effort to evoke the mocking bird, but I believe the idea was that people should not verbally taunt the governors by making the kind of bird-decoy calls that were used to trick, entrap and then hunt birds. 134. This was the first reform of the capitoli of 1572; Nove 17, 202r–v, dated 13 November 1578. These are not found in the Jewish community archives and consequently do not appear in Cassuto’s article “I più antichi capitoli.” 135. The only ordinance which did not directly concern the authority of the governors was the third, which set rules to enforce the collection of charity in the ghetto and to discourage begging. 136. Capitolo 6 renews the fine for insulting the Dieci and other officers. 137. Capitolo 1 affirms the authority of the two supervisors (soprastanti; note that in 1573 the ten governors were sometimes referred to by this term—see note 53 above) to call meetings of the Ten; capitolo 2 requires the Ten to submit their votes when called upon to vote. 138. Capitolo 4 establishes that when a majority of the Ten vote to appoint operai (administrators) for the synagogue, tax assessors, secretaries and others, the appointed must accept office. Whoever refuses must pay a fine, divided in thirds, to the Nove, the poor-box and the person who accepts the position in his stead. 139. Capitolo 5 affirms the authority of the Ten to collect fines. 140. It was not willing to assume responsibility, for example, for the Jewish poor, which is why it approved one additional rule in 1578 (capitolo 3). There was a schedule in place, apparently, according to which individuals in the ghetto were responsible for making rounds in the ghetto with the collection box; it was now ruled that if they failed to take their appointed turn, they would be required to put the appropriate amount of money in the box themselves. 141. For example, OGP 130, 2v, dated 18 February 1574/75, records explicitly that two Jews had been denounced by the chancellor of the Jewish deputies to the ghetto. Another informant who collected was Sabatuccio di Pellegrino (OGP 134, 263r); see below. Informants to the Nove may have had more difficulty extracting their share of the penalty: Isach da Fabbriano was finally granted, in February 1573, his quarter of a fine that had been collected in August 1572 (see below); Nove 13, 240r, 320r.

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Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune 142. There are also some fines for disrespectful behavior in the synagogue (in OGP 125, 40v, dated 3 July 1573, Zaccheria Sacerdote hebreo in ghetto and Giuseppe Aspelingo are fined lire 50) and for not keeping the streets clean in front of the store fronts. But in thirty years the governors never reported violations to the Nove and gave the agency half the penalty for trangressions of the majority of capitoli of 1572, including talking in the synagogue, calling a customer away from a Jewish shopkeeper who was in the midst of a sale, playing ball or gambling in the public areas of the ghetto and peddling on Sundays. 143. Simonsohn, History of the Jews in the Duchy of Mantua, 353, note 122. Examples of the use of both fines and various degrees of h.erem (excommunication) by other Jewish communities abound: most widely known are the Hebrew tak. k. anot of the interregional conferences of Jewish leaders in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which were held at Bologna and Forli (1416, 1418) and Ferrara (1555), published by Finkelstein (with an English translation) in Jewish Self-Government, 281–315, passim. The coordination of religious sanctions for a large region, treating the dispersed Jews as a community, was particularly important given the geopolitical characteristics of the Italian states and the geographic mobility of the Italian Jewish population in the pre-ghetto period. Although they assigned monetary fines to state coffers and to Christian charities even in these unsanctioned Jewish capitoli, it was realistic of Jewish leaders not to expect local state governments to be able to enforce collection. 144. The governors of the Florentine ghetto did not ask permission to use excommunication as a penalty for violations of the capitoli, so it cannot be stated with absolute confidence that the authorities would have allowed it. 145. “Che si deva portare rispetto et reverenza alli deputati e governanti del ghetto nè ingiurarli nè burlando nè sbeffeggiando, sotto pena di scudi sei come sopra.” Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli” 10: 40; these are also found in Nove 368, 374r–79v. In 1578 the fine for insulting the governors had been reaffirmed with the proviso that a majority of the Ten and the chancellor would have to vote in each case (Nove 17, 202v). 146. Or perhaps it is possible that the segno failed to elicit the intended response, and the subsequent edict of “protection” had as its subtext the instruction of the populace in the proper reading of the segno. “Bando che non si dia Molestia, nè di fatti, nè di parole alli Hebrei per le strade, Mandato l’Anno 1567. Sotto di 14 di Luglio.” A copy of this public notice is preserved in Houghton Library at Harvard University. It is ordered, “che non ardisca, ò prosumma in modo alcuno, ò sotto alcuno quesito colore dare molestia alcuna, cosi di fatti, come di parole ad alcuno Hebreo sia di che qualità si volgia, che pratichi, habiti, ò sia per transito in detta Città, & Stato in uccellargli, ò fare loro alcuno vilipendio, ò percuoterli, ma lasciarli stare, & vivere quiti, & andare à [sic] negotij loro senza detter molestie.” The penalty was large: 5 scudi or corporal punishment for both adults and minors. On the verb “uccellare,” see note 133 above. When Christians taunted Jews this way, as when Jews in the ghetto taunted their governors, that taunting would have sent an even more intimidating message to the Jews that they were fair game and ready targets. The word might also imply the more serious offense of entrapment by fraud or deceit. 147. “Statuti o sia Riforma dell’ Arte de’ Linajoli del dì 23 Luglio 1578”; Cantini, Legislazione toscana 9: 71–72, “E perchè ciascuno sottoposto o che si sottoponessi al giuditio di detti Consoli debba havere sempre convenienti rispetti così all’ Arte come

Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune a Consoli di quella sia modesto, e moderato nel parlare, che occorrerà farsi nell’agitare le Cause proveddono & ordinorno che qualunque persona dicessi villania, o parole alcune ingiuriose o mentissi per la gola, o minaciassi o volessi dare o dessi ad alcuno nella detta Arte o anzi a Consoli possa essere subito punito e condennato.” It should also be noted that the chancellor of the guild was required (ibid.) to report the incident to the Otto within eight days, if the guild council determined to fine the offender and not send him to the Otto for sentencing. 148. John Brackett made this point, with specific reference to the expression “ti menti per la gola” (the equivalent of our “you’re lying through your teeth”) in his paper “The Language of Violence” presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, San Francisco, January 1994. The way that ridicule may have had a ritual and religious function among Jewish youth as it did in Christian Florence has not yet been explored; on the broader significance of ridicule, see Trexler, Public Life, passim. 149. An unscientific count of violent cases in the records of the OGP suggests that, per capita, Jewish men were arrested much more frequently than Christian men in the period 1571–96. 150. The capitolo marked as number 13 in Nove 17, 115v–18r is essentially that which appears as 13 in document II of the ACEF version published by Cassuto in “I più antichi capitoli”; however, in the official version approved by the Nove there is an extra paragraph between capitoli 12 and 13 which, because of a scribal error, did not receive a number. This extra chapter does not appear in the Jewish copy; the copyist missed it since it was not numbered. This is strong evidence that the versions in the Nove are more reliable texts than the copies in the Jewish communal archive. 151. Nove 13, 320r dated 14 August 1572; 240r, dated 27 February 1572/73. It may be that Isach da Fabbriano is the same as Isach d’Elia de lo Calò, one of the ten governors elected that August. If so, then he was the chancellor before Raffaello di Cipriano took over, for in another place it is said that the notification was made by the chancellor of the Jews (f. 320r, see next note). He was in any event not the sindaco. 152. Nove 13, 320r: “Item atteso di sotto di xii del pre[se]nte mese di Agosto 1572 Davitte da poppi ebreo ritrovandosi nel ghetto di Firenze et nella sinagoga di d[ett]o ghetto dopo la fine de loro offitii disse in publico, che li fattori et soprastanti di d[ett]o ghetto li havevono fatto la spia, sicome sene ha fede per mano del canc[ellier]e di detti hebrei, che è nella filza de criminali.” Unfortunately, the details of the incident are lost in the missing book of the Otto from that year. Davitte was apparently being fined for having dared to use these words, for to accuse the governors of having “datto la spia” or “fatto la spia” (spied, informed, betrayed) was in itself to insult them. 153. OGP 130, 237v, dated 30 May 1575. 154. OGP 134, 263r, dated 26 September 1576. The three men were Leone di Falcone, his brother Davit, who was just about forty-one years old at the time (his age was recorded as forty-five when he was granted a travel permit, Nove 18, 11r, dated 12 March 1579/80) and Isach dal Pontadera. 155. This is the earliest evidence I have seen of the imposition of h.erem of any sort in the ghetto. H . erem imposed with permission of the Nove has a very different flavor from that of h.erem imposed secretly; see Chapter Ten. 156. “Ite[m] osservate [le cose] et ottenuto il partito co[n]cessono licenza alli

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Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune quattro Hebrei Governanti la università del Ghetto di Firenze di potere far un partito p[er] il quale deliberino che per otto giorni no[n] nossa alc[un]o heb[re]o parlare a Iacob di M[agistr]o Laudadio di [sic] Blanis heb[re]o. i[n] d[etto] ghetto, mand’”; Nove 18, 264v, dated 29 December 1580. 157. “Item oss[er]vate et ottenuto atteso che Iacob di m[agistr]o Laudadio Blanis hebreo nel ghetto di Firenze alli giorni passati ha usate parole insolente et ingiuriose contro li quattro hebrei governanti d[ell]o ghetto, come p[er] fede di detti governanti so[tto]scritta dal Canc[ellie]re appare de 4 del p[rese]nte in filza de Criminali di d[ett]o uff[iti]o sotto n[umer]o 20 p[er]o cond[emnor]no il d[ett]o Iacob in [scudi] 4 di m[one]ta co[n]forme a[i] cap[ito]li sopra cio da applicarsi s[econ]do gli ordini cioè— [lire] 28”; Nove 18, 323r, dated 23 December 1580. 158. Iacob was elected August 1573, his father Laudadio in 1574 and 1575; we have no information for 1576 and 1577, and Iacob was again elected in 1578. See Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” appendix 4, Governors. 159. OGP 124, 269v, dated May 22, 1573: “armato del cotello affrontato Iacob di m[agistr]o Laudadio hebreo et fertitolo d’una ferita nella testa a incisione di carne et sangue.” Iacob di Raffaello da Citerna (sometimes called Raffaello di Abramo da Citerna) was convicted for this serious assault and sentenced to a fine of 1,200 lire and 20 scudi for unlawful possession or use of the knife, and three tratte di fune (pulls or hoists of the rope). It is not clear what his status was until he was pardoned in 1576 (OGP 133, 85v, dated 29 March 1576) and absolved from the fune, which were administered in the Mercato Vecchio. (According to Brackett, Criminal Justice, 62, fune were also used for torture, but I have only seen them used for punishment. As Brackett describes it, the prisoner is stripped and a heavy sack bound to his feet. The prisoner is then hoisted up a rope with his arms tied behind his back. In the records of the Otto I have seen the description of defendants punished with one, two and three hoists in the 1560s–90s.) Despite this assault, Iacob and his assailant’s father, Raffaello di Iacob da Citerna, served together as governors on the slate elected 31 July 1573 (unless that is a scribal error, and assailant and victim served together!). 160. OGP 129, 344v, dated February 1574/75. Liuccio was absolved and was elected to be a governor in July 1575. 161. OGP 130, 237v, dated 30 May 1575. 162. OGP 128, 12v, dated 28 June 1574. 163. After the ban Iacob de Blanis disappears from our archival sources. 164. An exception was found in Abramo d’Isac Tedesco (hebreo nel ghetto), fined 4 scudi for using injurious words against the representatives while they were meeting in the synagogue, and especially against the one named Giacob di Michele (Nove 28, 315v, dated 7 April 1590). Abramo Tedesco was appointed the following August to be one of the governors (Nove 28, 120v) and remained one of the core governors thereafter, following his father’s lead. 165. Nove 20, 323v, dated 9 August 1582. 166. Nove 23, 332r, dated 18 July 1585; the Nove ordered that a quarter of the fine be turned over to the università on 4 December 1585 (fols. 249r–v). 167. Insults were particularly important in the grand-ducal period, Brackett argues (Criminal Justice, 102), because insults, especially in public, were aimed at “honor,” and there were fewer opportunities to acquire attributes which gave one honor in the grand-ducal period than in Renaissance republic. Although Jews had

Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune never been able to attain most of the public honors Brackett refers to, the implication that people with less access to honor were more violent about preserving what they did have is important to understanding the level of verbal abuse in the ghetto. On the other hand, it is not necessary to analyze insults in terms of honor. My own study of physical violence against medieval Jewish women by their husbands and the men’s frequent defense that their wives had cursed them suggests that cursing was often an expression of power used by those who had less access to physical and fiscal tools. 168. Betrothal agreement of 14 October 1573, NM 604, 24r–v. 169. The mik. veh is a ritual bathhouse used for religious ablutions monthly by married menstruating women; also for conversion and by men on special occasions. OGP 131, 262v, 263r, dated 5 October 1575. The election that year is recorded in Nove 16, 106v dated 30 July 1575. “In simili modo et forma veduta l’inqusit[io]ne formata à querela di Iosefte dorso hebreo Todesco contro Abramo di Salamone hebreo da Ma[n]tova dove in sustanza si so[s]teneva il di 22 di lug[l]io prox[im]o passsato venendo i[n]sieme a parole p[er] co[n]to di una fabbrica d’un bagno comune ordinato [263r] nel ghetto delli hebrei. Il detto Abramo alla prese[n]tia di molti altri hebrei havesse incarical ‘col parole i[n]giuriose il detto querela[n]te dicendoli che era un vitup[er]oso et un soddomito et che haveva usato et dormito col sua fig[liuo]la et altre parole cattive come à libro di querele n[ume]ro 344, c. 92.” 170. Abramo’s sentence of banishment was pronounced at the Otto on 5 October 1573 in the presence of his brother-in-law “Michelotto hebreo,” who was to deliver the sentence to him; OGP 131, 262v, 263r. Abramo was apparently already in prison (“veduto la carceratione fatta di detto Abramo”), having been detained there, possibly since the incident in July. He appeared before the court in January 1576 and was absolved from spending the rest of the year out of Florence; he returned to the court in February with a complaint against Iosef and two other Jews who, he claimed, were harassing him (OGP 132, 215v, 241r, 317v). 171. OGP 131, 262v; see note 169. The details of these cases were usually recorded only in the Libri di Querele, which have not survived. This series, probably the register of complaints lodged with the Otto, is referred to frequently in the series of books of the Otto called the Giornale, which have been examined for this study. 172. Neither Ursi’s manhood nor his heterosexuality is the butt of these insults; even called a sodomite, a man Ursi’s age in late Renaissance Florence would generally have been assumed to be the “active” partner. (See Rocke, Forbidden Friendships.) A great deal of recent research has explored the question of when Europeans began to conceive of the “sodomite” as having a homosexual nature. Two important collections are The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment, edited by Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1989) and Queering the Renaissance, Jonathan Goldberg, ed. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994). It is generally accepted that in Florence, where there was a strong consciousness that men engaged in homosexual acts (it was referred to in sermons and an entire office, Gli Uffiti della Notte, had been established to patrol the streets and arrest offenders), the word soddomito was used primarily to refer to a homosexual act, and not to other forbidden sexual acts. However, in this context, where Ursi is also accused of a forbidden heterosexual act, the relationship between the two accusations is what matters. 173. See note 48 above. The correlation to Leon da Pesaro is ambiguous: was he

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Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune an appointee of the grand duke whose approach in the ghetto provoked the Jews to begin to shelter their decisions from the Nove, or did he lead the way, feeling less loyalty or obligation to the Nove than Raffaello di Cipriano had felt? 174. The draft of these regulations that is preserved in the Jewish archives (published by Cassuto as doc. III in “I più antichi capitoli,” 10: 34–38) has many Hebrew words integrated into it and has few references to monetary fines. This suggests that it was an early draft, not the one submitted to the Nove, if these rules ever were submitted. No capitoli from 1595 were approved by the Nove. 175. “Imperò di novo se gli notifica come anco se notificò una h.umra’ già posto con consenso de tutta la maggior parte del k. ahal, che nissuna persona sotta qualsivogli quisito colore di cristiano o altri favori no’ ardisschi a chieder nè far chieder per fabricare o haverci attione, per che serà pubblicato per menudeh tanto qui quanto in altri k. ehilot.” This text is practically untranslatable: “that no person . . . should dare to petition, or have petition made or have any action there, or he will be announced as a menudeh (an ostracized person) both here and in other communities/congregations.” 176. See previous note. 177. No Jewish capitoli are recorded or referred to in Nove 31 (1594–95), which was the book of deliberations for that year (and had the election of four governors that August); the next book (Nove 32) covers 1599–1600, so it is possible that capitoli could have been approved during the missing years, but unlikely since they are not referred to in the texts of the capitoli of 1608. The capitoli are not found in Nove 360 and 361 (Domande e Sentenze for 1595–98), where we would expect them, since this series was now being used to register copies of capitoli submitted by various other communes and contained the capitoli of the ghetto in 1608 and 1611. 178. On this important topic, see Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities, 214–15 and passim. 179. ACEF Box D 3.2, folder 3, first item in folder (unpaginated). This text of the ban of 1598 is apparently a copy made in February 1642/43, when it was reissued. The text is peppered with Hebrew phrases, which I have signified in my translation by italics. The original decision was taken on the “Lunedi al mese di h.eshvan dell’Anno shin nun h.et,” and the ban was translated into the vernacular (retaining many Hebrew words) by the rabbi M[agist]ro Ecc[elen]te Sig[nor] h.akham Grazia Dio Ghirone. While at first glance it appears that we should read “h.erem Todesco” (a more obvious reading than h.erem Iodesco), it should be noted that this text is referring to Jews as Iodei (as a variant of Iudei), not Hebrei, and that the ban was translated “dal Iodesco al volgar”—meaning from “Jewish” Hebrew (not German) to Italian. 180. ACEF Box D 3.1.4, unpaginated, dated 14 March 1600/1601. The three were Davit Bettarhò, Abramo Leuccio and Sabato di Begnamino, “Governanti del ghetto delli Ebrei di firenze,” and they were told that “non ardischino p[er] l’avven[i]re innovare cosa alcunna, e contravven[i]re sotto quelle pene, e pregiudizi di pene pecuniarie, fune, confino, insino alla Galera, secondo che parrà al Magistrato . . . e perchè non ne possino pretendere ignoranza, li fu data copia di quanto in sopra . . .” 181. Cassuto published this text: see doc. IV of “I più antichi capitoli” 10: 38–39. The capitoli are found with insubstantial changes (except for one extra paragraph) in Nove 368, 374r–79v. 182. Cassuto, ibid., 10: 76, capitolo 36. This reform was one of a number of

Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune reforms in this set of capitoli that attempted to reduce tensions in the ghetto, as will be discussed below. 183. ACEF D.3.2 folder 3, not dated: “che per mesi sei dal giorno sopradetto sia inlecito e’ a fatto proibito l’Andare à mangiare ò bere à osterie bettole grecaioli alberghi camere alocante e’ altri luoghi simili tanto in Fiorenza quanto fuora lontane manco d’un miglio ho un miglio e’ questo proibitione si fa à ogni Yehudiy del nostro k. [ehila] k. [edosha] di qual si voglia grado sesso e’ conditione si voglia d’ogni età.” This ban on going to the osteria, though undated, was already in effect by 1622 because below in the same folder, in the capitolo dated 13 July 1622, we read of the “same penalty as would be applied to one who goes to an osteria.” 184. Capitolo 25 of 1608 (Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli,” 10: 74): “che ogni quindici giorni etiam che no ci sia occasione ma per mantenere la pace et unione di d[ett]a congrega si devea ragunare e fare congrega, et più volte quanta farà bisognno, e questo sia a carico di quelli che saranno a quel tempo governanti, ed d[ett]i congreganti siano obligati a venirvi et li dd. governanti devino fare invitare al[l]a congrega sotto pena di mezzo scudo.” This regulation has much in common with provisions of Jewish confraternities (in Bologna, Ferrara and elsewhere) to meet monthly to bring peace. See for example the statute (1546) of H . evrat Nizharim of Bologna, Regulation B, par. 14 in Perani and Rivlin, eds., Vita religiosa ebraica a Bologna nel Cinquecento, 101. 185. See above, Chapter Six, Table 5. 186. Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli” 9: 208. The text of the ordinance reads that the Jews shall elect “dieci di loro ebrei per offitiali et capi.” The state and Jewish men understood this to mean ten men. Although at times the word ebrei was used inclusively to mean both men and women, the text invariably indicated when it wanted to specify that women were included. Thus we read in the same text, the capitoli of 1572: “Item, che quando li hebrei così homini come donne saranno adunati” (ibid., 209). 187. This idea is developed more broadly and in greater detail in my essay “Gendered Self-Government.” 188. Unmediated, that is, by Jewish men. It is also necessary to debunk the notion that Jewish women who succeeded during that time did so only because of the favorable relationship between the duchess Eleonora di Toledo (wife of Cosimo I) and Benvegnita Abravanel. 189. On Benvegnita (whose residence in Tuscany has not been established) and her family, see Margulies, “La famiglia Abravanel in Italia” and Segre, “Sephardic Refugees in Ferrara,” 177–85. Benvegnita, raised in Naples in a family of Jewish nobility, was well educated, a friend of Eleonora di Toledo, wealthy and philanthropic. 190. Benvegnita’s charters for these and other cities are found in MGS 4449, 20v–39v. Her patrilineage is as important to her status as her marriage: it was noted that she was the daughter of the deceased Iacob Abravanello and wife of the deceased Samuellis Abbravanelli and mother of Iacob, son of Samuel Abravanel. Benvegnita (referred to as Benvenuta by Renata Segre, who has worked the archives in Ferrara) lived in Ferrara after Naples, and not in Tuscany, although it is possible that she also maintained a residence in Pisa or Siena. It should be noted that Benvegnita was not a New Christian, despite Howard Adelman’s remark in “Religious Practice Among Italian Jewish Women,” 203; Adelman does not provide a source for the date he gives there for her birth, 1473, which though possible seems early.

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Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune 191. MGS 4449, 85r, dated 20 June 1567: “Fiammetta madre, Lione, figlio di Fiammetta. . . . Portia moglie di Lione hebreo da Pisa et Nuora di detta Donnna Fiametta, Laudadio, et Isabella moglie di Laudadio et Nuora similmente di dettta Donna Fiammetta, et Moise fratelli, et Anna figliola, quatttro serve, cinque servidori, un figliuolino piccolo di Laudadio et nipote di Fiammetta, un maestro di detto fanciuollo.” 192. MGS 4449, patents for Isach da Fano Hebreo and his dependents (85v–86r, 12 June 1567) and Abramo di Isach di Fano (85v). 193. Ibid., 88r, dated 2 September 1567. 194. Ibid., 92v–94r: Ricca widow of Moise da Perugia was granted an exemption in response to the request of her son Ventura and of her (new?) husband Moise; Diana, wife of Lione di Raffaello, and her daughter Gratia were also exempted through petition of Ventura—but not because of Lione’s status: Diana was registered as a cousin of Ricca and Gratia as Ricca’s grand-niece (nipote). Others exempted by grace of Ventura were Dolce, widow of Raffaello Gallici, and her son Lione, because Dolce was a cousin of Salamone who is Ventura’s uncle and Lione is therefore a nephew (great nephew) of Salamone! In other words, all the relationships were described in reference to Ricca, and not to Ventura, although clearly Ventura had the closest connection to the court. Finally, Ventura obtained an exemption for Sarra wife of Moise and daughter of Iacob Balchair and her daughter. 195. Dorina married into the da Empoli, or Alpelinghi, family, discussed above. Dorina’s sister-in-law, Bianca, was also a businesswoman, who, with her (other) brother Emanuelle, ran a shop their father had opened dealing in items regulated by the Arte degli Speziali, into which guild both Bianca and Emanuelle were matriculated in 1549. Moise, Emanuelle and Bianca were all involved in banking in Empoli in the 1540s—and all were cited for infractions of laws regarding return of pledges; Guerrini, Empoli 1: 154. I have been unable to determine what happened to Dorina after 1570: she was in prison until 6 November 1570, when her sons paid the debt of 420 lire (ibid., 159, note 457, where Guerrini reads her name as Donina). 196. OGP 111, 221r, dated 21 January 1568/69. 197. There were, of course, still women who were wealthier than other women and than most men, who should be considered part of the economic elite. With ghettoization there was a split between the “economic elite” and a new “governing elite”; see Chapter Eight. 198. Specifically, that “No person, man or woman, is able to open shop in the morning before the tefilah, that is, on Mondays and Thursdays [when the Torah portion is read] until after the Sefer Torah has been put back, and on the other days until at least the Ashrei has been said, under penalty of 3 Giuli each time, and diligent care shall be taken in the matter” (translated from the text as edited by Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli,” doc. III, 10: 37). 199. On these restrictions, see my essay “La vita nei ghetti,” 886–91. 200. Linaioli, Libro di Matrichole 5, 65v, dated 29 September 1573; Seta, Libro di Matrichole 13, 120v, dated 3 November 1575. She paid no matriculation fees, benefiting from her relationship to her brother, who had entered the Linen Guild before her, and her grandfather Laudadio Blanis, who had recently entered the Silk Guild near the end of his life, probably to pave the way for his granddaughter.

Notes to Chapter 7: A New Tuscan Commune 201. Linaioli, Libro di Matrichole 5, 4r, dated 25 August 1575; Agnolo paid no fee, benefiting from his wife’s membership in the guild. 202. For her engagement and marriage, see NM 76, 27rv; NM 547, 5r–v; OGP 13, 291v–91r. Her matriculation is recorded in AMS, Libro di Matrichole 13, 118, dated 13 September 1575. 203. On the extent to which the courts were seen as a masculine space, see Cohn, “Donne in piazza e donne in tribunale.” One Jewish woman given such a license to pursue someone into the courts was “Regina vedova hebrea moglie fu di Giuseppe alholena” (Nove 25, 73r, dated 27 May 1587; in the text the last name is underlined, and above it in similar ink is written: Alcheleino, in a different hand). Her action was against “Francesco di . . . [sic] braschi Castellano nella Torre di Calla di Pescia stipendiato di S.A.S.,” and she was authorized to use any court in Florence, Pisa or Livorno. It is not stated that she lived in Florence. Many such licenses are given to non-Jewish women in these volumes. 204. NM 77, 56v–57v; NM 604, 54r–55v, dated 19 June 1574. 205. See discussion in the next chapter of the frequency of Jewish travel out of the ghetto. On the use of permits to allow Italian Jews to leave locked ghettos, see also Siegmund, “La vita nei ghetti,” 854–61 (section headed “La permeabilità delle mura del ghetto”) and the literature cited there. 206. I hesitate to say that they traveled “alone,” because we have no indication of whether they had hired Christian servants to travel with them; only Jews required permits to travel. 207. Nove 15, 140r–v, dated 6 October 1574. 208. Nove 16, 99v, dated 19 July 1575. Her husband was Daniello; her brother was Agnolo di Moise da Perugia (Nove 16, 47r). 209. For discussion of the role of halakhah in Jewish life and its relationship to this argument, see my essays “Gendered Self-Government” and “Communal Leaders.” 210. MP 236a, 5v, letter to Nofri Camaiani dated 19 May 1571. 211. By this I do not mean to suggest that it had matured and stabilized; indeed, communal structure was far from static. Most notably, the gradually increasing percentage of Levantine Jews in the ghetto reached a critical mass in the 1630s when the Jews of the ghetto successfully appealed to the state to be allowed to split into Italian and Levantine communities, for political and administrative purposes. This important topic lies outside the chronological scope of this book.

Chapter 8: Economic Parameters 1. This view, which seems to me just, is elegantly summarized by Chazan in Medieval Stereotypes. 2. See, for example, the charter granted to the da Rieti for a bank in Colle: “et quod in quibuscumque casibus et causis criminalibus que durante dicto tempore decurrerent dicto hebreo et pro omnibus excessibus maleficiis vel delictis que durante tempore presentis permissionis per dictum hebreum et socios vel aliquem eorem fierent vel perpetrarentur unus socius non teneatur nec obligatus sit pro alio . . . sed quisquis pro suis delictis suas debitas penas patiatur, ut anima que peccaverit ipsa puniatur et non alii, et sic eis inviolabiliter observetur” (MGS 4449, 7r, unpaginated).

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Notes to Chapter 8: Economic Parameters 3. The letter from which I have drawn this quotation is that of Pope Innocent III to the archbishop of Sens and the bishop of Paris, canonized under Pope Gregory IX (1234) in Raymond of Penaforte’s compilation the Decretales (as trans. in Chazan, ed. Church, State and Jew, 32–33). The previous passage is worth citing more fully: “we strictly forbid them to have any nurses or other kinds of Christian servants in the future, lest the children of a free woman should be servants to the children of a slave. Rather, as slaves rejected by God, in whose death they wickedly conspired, they shall, by the effect of this very action, recognize themselves as the slaves of those whom Christ’s death set free at the same time it enslaved them. . . . If indeed the Jews do not dismiss the Christian nurses and servants, you, armed with our authority, should strictly forbid all Christians, under penalty of excommunication, from daring to undertake any commerce with them.” 4. Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy, appendix, 295. 5. Ibid., 296; cf. Pope Alexander III’s rule that Christian wetnurses and midwives should not do their work in the houses of the Jews, canonized in the Decretales (in Chazan, ed., Church, State and Jew, 31). 6. MGS 4449, 71v. 7. MGS 4449, 2r–v. 8. MGS 4450, 3v. 9. Decreta provincialis (Florence, 1574). None of the other synods (1517, 1569, 1589) published sections concerning Jews; on these see documents 94, 95 and 97 in D’Addario, Aspetti della Controriforma, 505–7, 509–10. Altoviti died in December 1573 (Osservatori toscani, preface by Rodolico and D’Addario, 80). 10. The Decreta provincialis (see previous note) is discussed briefly by D’Addario, Aspetti della Controriforma, 220–21 and 507–9. 11. “Ingentes Deo & Serenissimis Principibus nostris gratias habendas esse agnoscit haec Sacra Synodus; quod eorum pietate ac religionis studio effectum sit, ut Iudaica pravitas, in commertiis, negotiis, ac omnibus aliis actionibus intra terminos ab Ecclesia permissos coherceatur” (Decreta provincialis, 14–15). 12. Ibid. “Iudaei festivis diebus a’ negotiis abstineant, et ante Resurrectionis Pascha per triduum in eorum domibus relegentur. Cap. I: Tamen pro suo munere, admonendos omnes fideles esse censuit de iis, quae a’ sacris Canonibus circa huismodi obstinatos Crucis Christi inimicos sunt praecipue interdicta. Iudaeis igitur non liceat diebus festivis ab Ecclesia receptis mercari, aut quocunque modo negotiari, aut aliud quidqua’ agere a’ sanctorum temporu’ veneratione aliena, extra septa loci eis ad habitandum specialiter assignati; & praesertim triduo ante Pascha, adeo ut eo tempore neque ex propriis Domibus exire possint.” 13. Ibid., Capitolo II, titled “Christiani aliquod ministerium non impendant Iudeis et eorum familiaritates effugiant; . . . ut Christiani nullo servitutis genere Iudaeis se addicant, non obstetricandi, lactandi, educandi, aut alicuius alterius ministerii eis opera praestent, sed & eorum Medicis, & cibis uti, & esculenta, & poculenta ab eis emere, & tandem societates, coniunctiones, nimias familiaritates cum eis habere omnino caveant, & qui non parverint in excommunicationem incidant praeter poenas a sacris Canonibus statutas.” 14. Klapisch-Zuber, “Blood Parents and Milk Parents: Wet Nursing in Florence, 1300–1530,” in idem, Women, Family and Ritual, 162. 15. See Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy.

Notes to Chapter 8: Economic Parameters 16. I cannot treat here the question whether ghettoization severed the intellectual and cultural participation of the Jews in the Renaissance, on which there is an important body of literature. In brief, however, it might be safe to point out that in Renaissance Italy, Jews who engaged in intellectual projects did so either with the patronage of Christian elites or with the financial support of families engaged as bankers or physicians. In Tuscany after ghettoization Jews could not be bankers or physicians to Christian clients, so Jewish patronage was nearly impossible, and the flame of NeoPlatonic Christian humanism that had interested theologians in patronizing Jewish Kabbalists was spent. 17. Nove 20, 114v (11 July 1587), reaffirming similarly worded capitoli of 30 July 1572 (Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli,” 9: 209–10). 18. Nove 20, 276r, dated 29 December 1582, “approval of a decision of the ghetto of the Jews” made on the previous day. Marginal: “App[rovazion]ne di part[it]o del ghetto delli hebrei.” “Item oss[er]vate et ottenuto approvorno il part[it]o d[ei] quattro hebrei governanti il ghetto di Fir[en]ze rog[a]to sotto di 28 di xbre [Dicembre] 1582 p[er] Raff[aell]o di Simone di Cipriano Canc[ellie]re, p[er] il quale proibirno che gl’ hebrei di d[ett]o ghetto cosi huomo come donna non possa tenere deschetti [sic] fuora della soglia della bottega ta[n]to grande, q[uan]to piccolo co’ bottoni ò senza accio che ivi possino passare le some di carboni et legne, et di piu che le p[er]tiche dove si spandano le robe non stieno piu che mezzo braccio discosto dalla bottega sotto pena di Scudi uno per ciasc[un]o chi tra[n]sgredirà et p[er] ciasc[un]a volta, riservandosi non dimeno facultà et autorità il d[ett]o Mag[istra]to di potere ogni volta et q[ua]n[do] li parrà di limitare d[ett]o partito, aggiugnersi, diminuire, et an’ullare et s[econ]do che parrà al d[ett]o mag[istra]to convenirsi mand.” Why “deschetti . . . co[n] bottoni o senza” are singled out is not clear to me, but I imagine that buttonsellers were particular avid to display their wares (or do their eye-straining work) in the daylight of the open street. 19. Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli,” 10: 36. Another reading of this passage might suggest that only men who are taxpayers in the ghetto should be allowed to work as brokers: “si fa intendere che chi non è a rolo di teste e che non la paghi non possi far senserià.” 20. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 9: 114–15 (Statuti o sia riforma dell’Arte de’Linaioli del dì 23 Luglio 1578, chap. 26): “And since such damaged clothes more often than not result because the tailors and seamstresses and rigattieri who make them do not use in them the quantity of material that is given to them for making them, to advance the clippings, and make of them their stuff, which results in great damage to those who give them work to do, which perhaps would not be [the case] if these tailors and seamstresses and rigattieri did not find where to sell off and get rid of such trimmings to Jewish rigattieri, or other persons [Rigattieri Giudei, o oltre persone]; therefore the said Sig. Riformators and Statute-makers desire as far as is possible to them to avoid, provide, establish and order that henceforth no [male or female] tailor or rigattiere, nor their servants [garzoni], apprentices [discepoli] or workers, nor others in any way for them, may sell, nor may any Rigattiere Giudeo or other person subject to this Guild buy any sort of cuttings of clothes, or cloth [panni o drappi] or of any other material whatsoever without express license of the consuls of the said guild for the present time [tempi esistenti].” 21. I first presented an analysis of methodological considerations in using these

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Notes to Chapter 8: Economic Parameters permits at the meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies, 14 December 1993, in a paper entitled “Gender, Age and Class as Determinants for Time out of the Ghetto of Florence: A Study of Travel Permits, an Archival Source.” My analysis is based on data covering eleven years of a fourteen-year period (1573–86) contained in the extant books of the Nove, volumes 13–24. No permits were recorded in this series after 1586, although there is no evidence of a change in policy toward the Jews that would have stopped Jews from traveling. It seems likely that copies of the permits were simply no longer made or that Jews were issued the permits directly by the gatekeeper, whose books have not been preserved. This possibility is supported by the fact that in the 1580s the formula for the permits was increasingly abbreviated, reflecting the routinization of the licensing procedure. 22. On this subject, see, for Venice, Ravid, “Curfew Time in the Ghetto,” esp. 243–48. I have not found evidence of this other sort of permit in Florence; however, they might have been handled directly by the gatekeepers, whose log-books, if they were kept, have not been identified in the archives or were not saved. 23. In November 1579 the Uffiziali della Sanità ordered that no one should lodge any foreigner who did not present a valid, printed certificate of health with age, effigy and goods carried. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 9: 181–82. 24. The records for three years are unknown owing to the loss of the Nove’s books for the (adapted) Florentine years 1576 (March 1576 to February 1577), 1577 (March 1577 to February 1578) and 1579 (March 1579 to February 1580). 25. Nove 14, 181r, dated 19 December 1573. The recipient, whose permit allowed him to visit Pisa, was almost certainly the young Gratiadio Leucci—strong evidence that the Leucci did move temporarily to Florence and that they were obliged to live in the ghetto like the other Jews despite their previous highly privileged status. 26. Nove 14, 181v. A marginal note records in Italian that “on the 23rd of the month of December notification was made of the present command in the synagogue of the Jews [nella singagoge delli hebrei] by Raffaello di Cipriano their Chancellor.” A copy of the order (with a few minor differences in wording) is also preserved in the archives of the Jewish community, ACEF Box D 3, folder 2.4, 5v. The same policy was announced for the Jews of the ghetto of Siena on 14 June 1575, and it is published in Cantini, Legislazione toscana 8: 224. 27. It is impossible to affix a firm identity to people who were identified in the source mainly by their own first name and their father’s first name. For example, there were ten permits given to Jewish men (or to a Jewish man) named Raffaello di Emanuele in Florence in the 1570s. I have been able to determine (in this and similar cases) that there are at most two such men in the small Jewish community, but not whether there are two men with the same name or just one man. For the purposes of this discussion I have preferred to underestimate the number of men who traveled rather than to overestimate it, in order to not exaggerate the evidence for my argument that (1) Jews were still exposed to the outside world and (2) Jewish men traveled much more than women. 28. In 1566, regulations required that the chancellor of the Gabella dei Contratti (the tax on notarized contracts) be paid through these emoluments in lieu of salary: he was to take between 2 and 5 soldi per license or estimate, and more for values he estimated above 25 scudi. (He was allowed to keep only half of what he collected; the rest went to the monte di pietà.) For drafting other documents the provveditori (chief

Notes to Chapter 8: Economic Parameters managing officers) took fees ranging from 15 to 16 soldi per item (e.g., for stanziamento, assolutione, domande di regresso, fede ordinario, postillo di storno etc.); Cantini, Legislazione toscana 6: 33–34, 38, dated 29 April 1566. In 1577, in the statutes of the Dogana (Customs Office), fees listed ranged from 2 to 14 soldi per “scritto” (ibid. 8: 361, dated 19 July 1577). 29. Examples include permits issued on Saturday, 10 December 1575 and on Saturday, 5 March 1579/80 (Nove 16, 210v; 18, 5v). 30. Nove 16, 209v, dated 9 December 1575. Buonacorso Buonaccorsi, then chancellor of the Nove, was commissioned with his assistants “di dar licentia alli co[mmun]i di vendere del loro grano quella quantita et in quel modo et come volta per volta ne ordinerà Carlo Pitti; et similmente di dare licentia alli Hebrei habitanti nel ghetto di Firenze di uscir fuor di Firenze per quel numero di giorni et per quelle occurrerete . . . per tutto conforme alla parola sua [that is, of Carlo Pitti, who also has the final word regarding the selling of grain].” 31. About 120 adult men left the city on a trip only once or twice during the tenyear period; a smaller group of eighteen men took between three and five trips, and a dozen Jewish men went on more frequent excursions. In contrast, only one woman took three or more trips during the period. 32. The men who traveled most frequently also spent the most time out of the ghetto: Laudadio di Moise da Empoli, 22 trips, totaling 410 days; Raffaello d’Emanuele, 10 trips, 198 days; Giuseppe di Moise, 11 trips, 147 days; Isac di Iacob di Giuseppe, 10 trips, 128 days; Giuseppe di Iacob di Giuseppe, 7 trips, 135 days; Iacob di Giuseppe, 8 trips, 135 days; Lione di Falcone/di Salamone Falcone, 8 trips, 118 days; Isac di Lione di Moise da Prato, 8 trips, 91 days; Elia di Isac di Elia, 7 trips, 87 days; Salamone di Moise Alpelingo, 7 trips, 87 days; Raffaello d’Abramo da Citerna, 5 trips, 94 days. 33. In the production of these graphs, I have assumed that the ages noted on the 1580 permits are correct, and I have used them to determine the age of each of these eighty-eight individuals at the time of each separate trip he or she took. In Figure 6, for example, from 1573 to 1586 there were nine occasions on which men aged 30–34 traveled on permits. 34. Several widows with adult children traveled, but because their ages were not recorded in the permits of 1580 they are not part of our subset and do not appear on the graph. 35. Because the age of the female travelers is only reported once (in 1580), this cannot be explained by a cultural bias which encouraged people to under-report the ages of young women who had not married. 36. See, for example, the travels of Leon Modena’s wife out of her city of Venice to visit one daughter, to marry off another daughter; of his daughters Diana and Esther on the occasion of the wedding of a nephew of theirs; etc. In Cohen, ed., Autobiography of a Seventeenth Century Venetian Rabbi, 117, 139, 153. 37. The confident mobility of working-class Christian women in Venice presented by Chojnacka in Working Women in Early Modern Venice revises earlier images of women’s restricted mobility, which were based on patrician women. Florentine historians have not yet addressed the extent to which working-class Christian or Jewish women in Florence may have shared this relative freedom. 38. OGP 118, 159v, dated 26 April 1571: “la inquisitione formata contro a Salam-

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Notes to Chapter 8: Economic Parameters one di Rabi benedetto hebreo dove insust[ant]ia si contineva il dì 16 di Marzo prossimo passato al detto Salamone di notti armato di . . . [sic] affrontato Jacob di . . . [sic] Romano hebreo che sene tornava a casa dal hosteria del porcho al [illegible word] haven[do] p[er]cosso di un colpo nella ghola co[n] missione di carne et sangue.” For his attack on Iacob, Salamone was fined 400 lire, and, for unlawful bearing of arms, he was condemned to pay 20 scudi and suffer three hoists on the rack (“tratte di fune”) in the public square. Note that Salamone was unlawfully armed, not because he was a Jew, but because it was night. 39. In the Venetian ghetto individuals were granted passes to leave the ghetto in the evening or to return to the ghetto after the closure of the gate, which could be opened for them by the gatekeeper. For a broader discussion of the permeability of the walls of other ghettos, see my “La vita nei ghetti,” 854–61 and bibliography cited there. 40. Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli,” 10: 73, a transcription from the manuscript in ACEF Box D 3.2.4. The state record is in Nove 369. 41. Legislation issued by the Otto included an “Innovazione della legge e prohibizione del tener giuoco e Biscazze, prohibizione del giuocarsi nell’Osterie,” dated 18 May 1579, and a “Bando sopra le Scommesse di Maschi e Femmina del dì Novembre 1585.” See Cantini, Legislazione toscana 9: 162ff; 11: 353. 42. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 15: 113ff: “Bando sopra li pasticcieri, albergatori e grecaioli del dì 14 Luglio 1619.” 43. ACEF, Box D 3.2 folder 3, undated: “che per mesi sei dal giorno sopradetto sia inlecito e’ a fatto proibito l’Andare à mangiare ò bere à osterie bettole grecaioli alberghi camere alocante e’ altri luoghi simili tanto in Fiorenza quanto fuora lontane manco d’un miglio ho un miglio e’ questo proibitione si fa a’ ogni yehudiy del no[st]ro k. [ahal] k. [adosh] di qual si voglia grado sesso e’ conditione si voglia d’ogni eta.” Though this text is undated, it postdates the previous rule (from 1608) and I would date it to the first two decades of the seventeenth century from its context and the names of the signatories. 44. Ibid.: “escludendo di tal pene uno che volesse andare a bere un bichiero di gicco [sp. unclear] solo senza compagnia alcuna che questo si concede a’ fatto, la qual concessione anco quando conoscieranno che si voglia abusare e’ malignare anco questo si riserbano in p’etto loro di proibire e’ condenare si come dal detto.” I have tentatively translated the illegible word (gicco) as “ices” in reference to the fashionable drink made with shaved or crushed ice. 45. Cohn, “Donne in piazza e donne in tribunale.” It seems to me from the notarial record that Jewish women may have appeared more than Christian women did in court, but this topic would require a full investigation of how laws requiring women to be represented by a male procurator (apotropos) would have applied to Jewish women. 46. Florentine state authorities did not begin to express concern about “carnal commerce” between Jews and Christians until the mid-seventeenth century. Jewish men were accused of having recourse to Christian prostitutes, and Christian men, Jewish prostitutes; this behavior was forbidden. Nonetheless, the impoverization of the community and strains on the familial structure inherent in urban life (especially the loss of large, self-contained households) undoubtedly led some women to that source of income. In 1670 a ban was placed on two Jewish women who were proba-

Notes to Chapter 8: Economic Parameters bly involved in the profession; ACEF Box E.1.1, folder 2, last document, dated 10 November 1670. In the same box are preserved copies of several seventeenth- and eighteenth-century statutes against carnal commerce between Jews and Christians. 47. The history of the Florentine guilds in the period of the ghetto has not yet been analyzed in any depth, but the many reforms of the guilds are published in Cantini, ed., Legislazione toscana. The intervention of the government in the 1540s–60s in the two major guilds, the Arte della Seta (Silk Guild) and the Arte della Lana (Wool Guild), is discussed by Diaz in Il Granducato di Toscana, 135–37. For the earlier history of the guilds, see Ciasca, L’arte dei medici e speziali and Doren, Le arti fiorentine. 48. Despite their common membership in the guilds, there is no explanation within the guild statutes of how Jews were meant to participate in the guilds other than by paying dues and swearing to abide by the rules. This is problematic: for example, were Jews exempt from the contributions required of members for candles for masses on Saints’ days? Did Jews participate in the guild’s dowry fund and submit, as did “all members,” the name of a deserving girl they hoped would be chosen as the recipient of a dowry from the fund? 49. See appendices of my dissertation “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto” for a complete list of Jews matriculated into the guilds. For the Guild of Doctors and Spice Merchants, two sets of books (libri di matrichole) recorded the names of matriculants, one for the city (AMS 11, 1539–56; AMS 12, 1558–60; AMS 13, 1573–89; AMS 14 takes the records through 1611) and one for the contado and distretto (AMS 22, 1525–69). Data are missing for matriculations into the guild for the city of Florence, 1561–68. Cassuto identified Jewish doctors in Florence utilizing AMS 11 and 12 only (see Gli Ebrei a Firenze, 183–85). For the Silk Guild, matriculations of 1573–82 are recorded in Arte della Seta, 13. Matriculations into the Linen Guild for 1560–99 are found in Linaiuoli 5, which records matriculations for the contado as well as for the city, but no information on fees paid. Jews matriculated into the Wool Guild before 1571, but not after. Matriculation records are not extant for the Università dei Fabbricanti or for the Arte dei Vaiai e Pelicciai, renamed Vaiai e Cuoiai (Furriers and Peltiers) in 1562. There were no Jews listed among the matriculants of the Giudici e Notai, Libro di matrichole 8; there appear to have been no Jews matriculated into the Por S. Piero (book 5, matriculants of 1554–83), a guild of bakers, shopkeepers and provisioners. 50. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 4: 355ff, 360, from a reform of the statutes dated 22 May 1562. The statute refers to Jews who “as occasionally happens, practice the art of velletaio in the said city, selling and buying to houses and monasteries, without maintaining a resident shop.” They were required to matriculate per la maggiore, as foreigners. 51. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 10: 64, “Libro Secondo dello Statuto dell’ Arte di Por S. Maria,” 17 September 1580. The passage continues to state that the Jews were subject to all the statutes and rules of the guild. 52. In 1640 a volume of privileges and exemptions from their guild that had been granted to individuals by various offices of the state was copied out by officers of the Silk Guild. One privilege, dated 26 October 1583, gave Salvador di Theseo the right to serve as “sensale e mezzano per trattar le senserie delle robe di tutti li altri Hebrei” and specifies that “il detto Salvador sia tenuto matricularsi nell’ Arte second’ la mercantie che tratterà.” It continued that all Jewish merchants and sensali subject to the

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Notes to Chapter 8: Economic Parameters guild must use the courts of the guilds for any disputes in which they are involved, notwithstanding the ordinary jurisdiction of the Otto over them (Seta 3, 122r–v; Cantini, Legislazione toscana. 10: 297, “Bando per gli Ebrei Sensali del dì 26 Ottobre 1583”). In any event, in 1599–1610 a number of other privileges were granted to Jews by the Otto, which exempted Jews variously from tariffs, from matriculation into the guilds, from the prohibition of bearing arms and even from living in the ghetto. Some Jews were therefore once again living with privileged status in Florence as early as 1599, though it is not clear whether their privileges were based on the charter of 1551 or of 10 June 1593. 53. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 9: 61. 54. The matriculation fees were set at 28 lire for shopkeepers and 14 lire for pieceworkers, and the policy was set that “as for recognition, sons and daughters may be recognized through their mothers . . . paying only 4 lire and 8 soldi” (ibid. 9: 62). 55. For example, regulations of the Silk Guild (Cantini, Legislazione toscana 10: 61) ordained that those who wanted to matriculate in the city per la maggiore, who had served six years as lavoranti, garzoni or fattori, were allowed to pay half the above. The same reduction was made for those who wanted to matriculate per il minore and had already worked for four years. For the rules concerning the contracting of apprentices, see ibid., 110f. For examples of Jews admitted at a reduced cost after having been apprenticed, see below. 56. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 9: 61. It is interesting that the phrase “fratello carnale” was used (translated here just as brother, but specifying the agnatic line, a brother of the same father), and thereby excluding both relations through the mother and spiritual kinship. 57. Ibid. 9: 62. 58. The matriculation books of the Linen Guild do not note the payment of fees, so it cannot be confirmed that the sums paid corresponded to the statutes. 59. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 9: 63. 60. There seems to have been a short experiment in 1575, when entrance fees were set at only 14 lire for greater membership and 8 lire for lesser. The specific concern of the government (“Bando attente all’Arte di Porta Santa Maria per conta delle matricole,” in Cantini, Legislazione toscana 8: 215–17) was that people already engaged in the craft and not matriculated should matriculate. This too was part of the effort to improve the quality of silk production in order to make Florence more competitive. 61. Dues for the Silk Guild in 1580 were 100 lire “per la maggiore” in the city, and 50 lire “per la minore.” See Cantini, Legislazione toscana 10: 7ff, Statuto dell’ Arte di Por S. Maria, 17 September 1580 (65ff). In the book of matriculations of the Silk Guild (ASF Seta 14, for 1600–1612), the fees recorded correspond exactly to the legislation (Jews paid 50 lire to matriculate unless the fee was waived). 62. Fondachi are included in the list; in this context the term seems to mean wholesalers. 63. “Libro Secondo dello Statuto dell’ Arte di Por S. Maria, Septembre 17 1580,” in Cantini, Legislazione toscana 10: 61, 65–66. In the bulletin published in 1575, rigattieri were included as greater members (but linaiuoli were not mentioned) and veilmakers were considered lesser members. The confusion with regard to the correct guild for rigattieri helps explain their reputation for shady dealings: since they dealt with used-clothing, they traded in items made of all the dozens of types of local and

Notes to Chapter 8: Economic Parameters imported cloth that people wore. Therefore they did not fit neatly into one of the guilds, once again confounding categories and transgressing boundaries. 64. All the matriculants listed in the appendix (1572–82) are “per il setaiuolo minuto,” except Lazzero di Isacch di Lazzero Rabben Hebreo, who is matriculated “per il membro minori Calzaiuoli et Giubinetti.” Setaiuoli are the owners of silk firms, manufacturers (Goodman, “The Florentine Silk Industry,” 120–21). Merchants received orders for the production of silk cloths and then would contract with a manufacturer to have the cloths made. 65. Evidence that he was there is that he and his family applied to the Nove Conservatori as required for permits to travel out of the city. 66. The absence of any reference to Jewish silk-manufacturing in Goodman, “The Florentine Silk Industry” suggests that the silk firms Jews owned were relatively small businesses. In the late sixteenth century there were very few larger silk firms in Florence (Jewish or Christian): a registry of silk firms that were partnerships with passive and active partners lists only two in 1571–75, one in 1576–80, seven in 1581–90 and one in 1586–90 (ibid., 164, figure 1). 67. On the structure of a silk firm, its employees and their responsibilities, see Goodman, “The Florentine Silk Industry,” chaps. 2 and 3 and especially his discussion of the suppliers (“drawers,” trattori), 100–104. As for factors (see ibid., 135, note 1), the Jewish silk firms were undoubtedly far too small to have had employees abroad, but they may have had mercantile relationships with the Levant through Jewish Levantine merchants resident in Florence such as Abram Baroch, who are, in a sense, both the “resident foreign merchants” responsible for most marketing in Florence in the sixteenth century and also the merchant-middlemen of the early seventeenth century (see ibid., 154–55). 68. The 12 florin fee was required of foreigners, whereas Jews who were the sons of members were admitted without a fee. Since Jews who were born in Florence matriculated into their fathers’ guild, and since I have no evidence that any of the Jews charged 12 florins was in fact born in Florence, despite my study of the matriculation records through 1611, I still do not know whether the guild would have considered a Jew born in Florence a foreigner. 69. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 8: 170. 70. Merciai, stagnai, profumieri, lanternai and velettai. The Silk Guild also claimed to have incorporated veil-makers (ibid. 8: 217), but Jews who were velettai appear only in the Arte dei Medici e Speziali. 71. The expression “middle classes” is used, “perhaps with a touch of anachronism” by Molho, Marriage Alliance, 126. For Molho, the mezzana were Florentine citizens, artisans and shopkeepers whose assets were 100 to 1,500 florins; they held the majority of the accounts in the dowry fund. “Middling folk” is the term used to refer to the people involved in all levels of urban commerce in early modern England standardized by Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 72. Molho, Marriage Alliance, 125. 73. Status was not determined for individuals or individual households, but rather for the lineages to which they belonged. This seems to complicate the results of Molho’s analysis: it assumes a degree of socioeconomic consistency within the casate rather than proves it.

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Notes to Chapter 8: Economic Parameters 74. Molho uses five categories, but the existence of a sixth group—Florentines too poor to appear in the tax registers—is implied. 75. Molho, ibid., 212. Molho counted 110 “core” casate and another 307 casate in outer circles of the elite (210; see 193–212 for the general discussion). Judith C. Brown (“Review of Marriage Alliance”) notes that these 417 casate whom Molho considers the “elite” are over one third of the population listed in the tax declarations of 1480 (and that the 110 core and most elite casate are 18 percent of the population). 76. Toaff has evidence of three Jewish dowries in Umbria (out of 111 fifteenthand sixteenth-century dowries he has identified) which were for sums as high as 1,000–1,100 florins. A small number of Jewish bankers were therefore at “same level of wealth as the rural and urban nobility” (Toaff, Il vino e la carne, 32). According to Luzzati (“Matrimoni e apostasia di Clemenza di Vitale di Pisa,” in idem, La casa dell’Ebreo, 75, note 56), the dowries of wealthy Christian families in Pisa in the fifteenth century were generally twice as high as the dowries in the wealthiest Jewish families (the extremely high dowry of Clemenza da Pisa, 600 florins, was exceptional). The highest Jewish dowry I have seen from the period 1550–1600 was the 600 scudi spent by Mose di Urielli to marry off his daughter Bellafiore to Abramo di Ventura di Leuccio Leucci in 1580 (Luzzati, La casa dell’Ebreo, 144–45 and note 88). By way of contrast, the Florentine government was so concerned by dowry inflation in the city that it tried to limit dowries to 1,600 florins in 1511 and to 2,000 casate in 1519 (Molho, Marriage Alliance, 302–3). Molho found that the average dowry size of elite families, mentioned in their journals (libri di ricordi), was 1,852 florins in the period 1500–1525 (ibid., 310, table 7.3), and there is no indication that dowries dropped precipitously in the following decades. 77. For an overview of these Jews and related bibliography, see Bonfil, “History of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews in Italy,” 222–28. 78. It is very likely that some of the Levantine merchants (e.g. Abram Baroch, Giuseppe Alcalein) who lived in Florence and Pisa in the 1550s and 1560s maintained a dual residence in Dutch, Ottoman and north African cities, or multiple residences. There certainly was a great deal of mobility between Safed, Smyrna, Constantinople, Egypt and the Italian cities, as is evident in the careers of many Kabbalists of this period. 79. Molho’s fourth and fifth status groups. 80. I say “at least” because I could have missed one or more of these Jews in the guild records, or they may have been matriculated into the Silk Guild during the years for which its records are missing (1583–99). 81. This paragraph excludes the guild entrance of two Jewish women and of converts. The percentage would be higher if we counted the three sons of Vitale Medici, who joined after they had converted to Christianity. 82. The missing data for twenty years of the Arte della Seta must be noted again; it is unfortunate that we do not know whether any other women followed Ginevra d’Agnolo’s lead (in 1574) in joining this guild. 83. On the entrance of women into the lower-skilled ranks of textile workers at the end of the sixteenth century as a result of male workers’ climb into higher-paying, new luxury crafts, see Brown and Goodman, “Women and Industry in Florence.” Even though Jewish men did not enter the same luxury trades in large numbers, Jewish women may have been able to supply the unskilled labor required for the produc-

Notes to Chapter 8: Economic Parameters tion of silks, linens and woolens. On the possibility that Jews in the ghetto acted as employers, see Chapter Nine below. 84. Each of Molho’s Florentine casate (lineages) might number hundreds of households. Molho found that the set of lineage-names drawn from the wealthiest households in fifteenth-century Florence corresponded to the set of lineages that had the largest number of households in the city. This correlation of wealth and casata size was also found in the ghetto, although in this early period the number of households per casata peaked at two or three (e.g. Blanis, Buondi). 85. In the years for which we have data; this is an undercount since we do not have information for the Silk Guild for the years 1583–98. See Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” appendix 3. 86. The six are: Ioseph Iacobi hebreus (AMS, Lana); Emanuel Ioseph Iacobi (AMS, Lana); Daniello di Moise (Linaioli, AMS); Iacob Iosephi Iacobi in Pontedera (AMS, Lana, Seta); Giuseppe di Iacob di Giuseppe di Iacob (Linaioli, Seta, AMS); Raffaello di Laudadio di Moise di Giuseppe (Seta, AMS). See Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” appendix 3. 87. Ibid. The three are: Graziadio di Ventura di Leuccio Leucci (AMS, Seta); Ventura di Leuccio di Salamone Leucci (Seta, AMS); Isach di Elia Leuccio (Linaioli, Seta, AMS). 88. Ibid. The two are: Ginevra d’Agnolo di Laudadio (Linaioli, Seta) and Laudadio d’Agnolo di Laudadio (Linaioli, Seta). 89. Buondi: Sabatino di Michele Bondi (Linaioli, 1561); Sabatino di Bunedi detto el Meretto (Linaioli, 1561); Sabatino di Buondi di Beniamim (Linaiuoli, 1572); Emanuelle di Moise di Buondi (Linaiuoli, 1572; he was admitted through his father, a record of whose matriculation I have not found); Sabato di Sabato di Bondi (Seta, 1573). A progenitor of this family may have been Sanson Buondi “ebreus velettarius et mercarius,” matriculated into the Guild of Doctors and Spice Merchants in 1529. Tedeschi: Abram d’Hisac Tedesco (Linaiuoli, 1569); Donato d’Isac Tedesco (Seta 1603); obviously, this family did not pursue this strategy in the early years of the ghetto. 90. Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” appendix 4b (Alphabetical listing of the Jewish Governors of the Florentine Ghetto, 1571–1612). The five governors who seem not to have obtained a surname are: Sabbatuccio di Pellegrino, Lazzaro da Pescia, Davitte di Falcone, Iacobbe di Miel and Vitale di Salamone da Cascia. (Vitale used “Medico” as his surname until his conversion, when he adopted the name of his sponsor, Medici.) Pescia, Falcone and Miel could well have later developed into surnames. It is difficult to discern whether the individuals named “di Buondi” had a father of that name or were already beginning to use it as a surname; I think the latter. For the surname as a sign of distinction among Christians in Florence, see Molho, Marriage Alliance, 212–14. As Molho points out (ibid., 281), the surname was not necessarily referred to in written documents, especially when the person being discussed was very well known. 91. E.g., Ginevra di Magistro Agnolo di Laudadio Blanis, wife of Agnolo di Moise; the widow of Ventura Leucci, who signs her own name as Iudit Orsi; Sara d’Agniolo di Zaccaria (da San Miniato), wife of Graziadio Finzi. 92. Cassuto, Gli Ebrei a Firenze, 243. For Florence, Cassuto cites only four examples of family names: Ravà, Galli, Blanis and Passigli. He notes (ibid., note 2) that

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Notes to Chapter 8: Economic Parameters other Jews who appear in Florence with family names (Baruk, Cannaruti, Cases and Farissol) are not Italian Jews. 93. For example, in the 1570s archival sources clearly referring to Isac (or Isacche) Calò also call him Castalho, Castaro, dello Calo and Calò. 94. Spanish, Portuguese and Provençal Jews appear to have adopted the custom of surnames before Italian and other European Jews did. And indeed, Blanis and Passiglia, Jews living in Tuscany by the mid-sixteenth century, were of Iberian origin. 95. On their presence in Pisa, see Luzzati, “Dal prestito al commercio,” in idem, La casa dell’Ebreo, 288–90. 96. The Leucci’s shop was located there as early as 16 November 1573, when Graziadio and Abramo di Ventura di Leuccio Leucci were both matriculated into the Arte de Medici e Speziali, each as a “Profumiere in sul canto della via di Martelli al offitio et matricola” (AMS 13, 91r–v). 97. In that guild in 1573–93 there were 18 matriculations, of which 5 were Leucci; in the Arte della Seta, 1572–83, there were 14 matriculations, of which 3 were Leucci; in total, there were 32 matriculations, 8 by members of the Leucci casata. See Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” appendix 3. 98. See Luzzati, “Legami fra banchi,” in idem, La casa dell’Ebreo, 257. 99. This last suggestion deserves consideration because of the tradition in Florence of excluding “magnate” families from political leadership. On the struggle for leadership between banking Jews and nonbanking Jews in Mantua (including an effort of the nonbankers to exclude Jewish bankers from positions in the Jewish government, and thereby to counterbalance the power the bankers had by dint of their wealth), see Simonsohn, History of the Jews in the Duchy of Mantua, 323–40. 100. It is generally thought that in medieval and early modern European Jewish communities, the highest status was held by families who possessed a combination of lineage and antiquity, rabbinic scholarship and wealth. See, for example, Grossman, Early Sages of Ashkenaz (in Hebrew) and, in English, “From Father to Son.” 101. For the da Rieti, MGS 4449, 111v–12. For the Leucci, MGS 4449, 114r–v. The “Livornina” did not immediately transform Jewish demography in Florence, because Jews only very slowly moved to Livorno, and even more slowly to Florence from there. On the development of Livorno, see Livorno: progetto e storia di una città tra il 1500 e il 1600, including the article there by Fasano Guarini, “La populazione,” 199–215. While the population begins to increase dramatically from 1591, Jews were only a presence from 1601: in an article in the same volume Bruno di Porto counts 114 Jews out of a population of 4,362 in Livorno in 1601 (“Nazione ebrea,” 239). 102. Just as an analysis of status among Jews must include an extra indicator— mobility—so the specific limitations of the autonomy of women should be examined in ghetto communities where the archives support such research. On Jewish women’s agency in the Roman ghetto, see Debenedetti Stow and Stow, “Donne ebree a Roma nell’età del ghetto.” 103. If we disregard the 22 trips taken by one member of the Wool Guild, the average number of trips per guild member is 3.0, still higher than the 1.9 for nonguild members. 104. After 1600, Jews began to matriculate regularly as membri per la maggiore, but Iacob was the only one to do so from 1572 to 1600. His matriculation was listed in the book of Florentine matriculations because he lived in Florence. If he had still

Notes to Chapter 8: Economic Parameters lived in Empoli, he would have been listed in the book that recorded matriculations of people in the contado e distretto, since these books were kept separately in this guild. The extant books of matrichole for this period are now labeled 13 (once Libro H, 1562–82 for the city), 14 (once Libro M, 1599–1616 for the city), 22 (once Libro Rosso I, 1434–1514 or 1516, for the contado) and 23 (once Libro B, 1592–1613 for the contado). 105. Silk production already thrived in the fifteenth century, but its increase in the late sixteenth made up for continuing losses in the wool trade. For this argument see Brown and Goodman, “Women and Industry in Florence,” one of several studies that has called for revision of the thesis of a general economic decline in Florence in the late sixteenth century. However, Parenti’s argument that there was a decline, not in production, but in commerce, still stands. 106. Data are missing for three years (see note 24 above), but they are missing for all Jews. This should not skew the results, because the trips taken by those who traveled most were not taken in one or two years, but were distributed over several years. 107. On the development of sericulture in Tuscany to reduce the dependence on imported silk, see Goodman, “The Florentine Silk Industry,” 86–87. 108. Ibid., 86. 109. Iacob served sporadically, probably until his death or infirmity (he was chosen in 1571 and elected again in 1578, perhaps in 1583, and definitely in 1584, 1589 and 1595). His oldest nephew, Laudadio di Moise Alpelingo (who had been matriculated into the Wool Guild for the contado in 1559) served in 1573, 1575 and 1578, until another nephew, Salamone di Moise, took his place, serving in 1582, 1585 and 1588. 110. We have already seen that one family member was matriculated into the Linen Guild “for the contado and distretto”; what is more, records from the Pisan archives reveal that the family still (or again) possessed property in the town of Pontedera ten years after the ghettoization—and apparently lived there. ASP, Fiumi e Fossi 2449, 145v–46r: “Iacobbe di Iosefo ebreo abita in ponte a dera” was a half-owner of three different houses and owned a section of a vineyard. In the same volume we learn (176r) that “Laudadio di Moise ebreo e frattelli in Empoli” owned land in Pontedera. 111. See Chapter Nine. 112. Several Jews obtained special licenses to be brokers, which might suggest that Christian brokers associated with the guilds were not conducting business with them on fair terms. This is discussed below. 113. Simonsohn, History of the Jews in the Duchy of Mantua, 323. 114. For example: in Mantua, 1573, Azariah de’ Rossi published Me’or Einayyim; see Weinberg, trans. and ed., The Light of the Eyes; other active and famous Jewish scholars and artists of the period include the musician Salamone Rossi (c. 1570–c. 1630); the preacher and author Leon Modena, the playwright Judah Sommo (1527–92); the poetic translator Salamone Usque. 115. Permit issued on 28 May 1580 (Nove 18, 83v–84r). 116. In the census of 1570, Raffaello da Cipriano was listed as head of a household of four in Florence. These four may have been himself, his wife, his son Sole (who, nine years old in May of 1580, would have been just under one year old in July 1570) and Ester, or a second child who had since died. 117. Jewish women in Florence who bore children they did not want to raise might have left them as foundlings to a Christian institution. For a fascinating

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Notes to Chapter 8: Economic Parameters account of one Jewish servant woman on the Venetian mainland who tried to abandon her illegitimately conceived child, having it brought secretly to the ghetto of Venice, see Boccato “Il caso di un neonato esposto nel ghetto di Venezia.” 118. As noted earlier, in the 1567 count of Jews in Florence (Riformagioni 10) the 92 Jews identified as inhabitants of Florence included the following Jews in domestic service: in the house of Lazzero Rabeno, one teacher (Maestro Agnolo, 60); in the house rented by Michelotto, one laborer (un lavorante chiamato Davit). 119. Isach di Elia traveled a number of times with his son, Elia di Isac di Elia, who was twenty years old in 1580. The last mention of these two is a permit given to the son in October 1586 (Nove 24, 190v). The privilege given to the Leucci to move to Pisa by the grand duke was dated 27 May 1588 (MGS 4449, 114r). 120. For this reason I cannot identify Giuseppe. But Sabato, when mentioned independently of his employers, was always referred to with his father’s name and sometimes as Sabato di Salamone delle Pomerance. For example, Nove 15, 93v–94r, dated 24 July 1574; Nove 16, 313r, dated 26 August 1575. He did not leave Florence with the da Rieti family in 1575, and he was still alive in Florence in 1578 when he received a permit to travel for fifteen days, along with two other Jews (Nove 17, 241v, dated 24 December 1578). 121. Seta 14, 113r, dated 15 October 1608. Laudadio, who matriculated in 1601— probably after a long absence from Florence—was Moise’s mallevadore (guarantor), on which, see below. 122. Seta 14, 156r–v. He was not admitted for free, because his father had been in the Arte dei Linaiuoli, not in the Seta. 123. NM 4485, 82rv, “confessio dotis” dated 15 June 1574. The marriage of Daniel Calò to Fiametta di Abramo di Simone is discussed in greater detail in Chapter Nine. 124. There is also at least one case of Jew whose fee was guaranteed by a Christian mallevadore: Lazzero d’Isach di Lazzero Raben “hebreo habitante nel ghetto”; Seta 13, 275r, matriculation dated 30 March 1582; the name of the guarantor, while decisively Christian, is not fully legible. 125. Seta 13, 253v, dated 30 November 1580. 126. Lione di Salamone da Prato was mallevadore for Salamone di Sabbato da Viterbo (Seta 13, 258v, dated 5 December 1580). 127. To my knowledge they were not related through marriage, although if they were, the relationship might not have been noted. A fourth guarantor was Zaccaria di Servadio, who helped Lione di Samuello enter the Silk Guild in 1600 (Seta 14, 31v; both were Italians); a fifth was Leone di Raffael Hyaier Hebreo, who was the mallevadore of Leone di Moise Usiglio Hebreo (both of Spanish or Levantine origin). 128. Nove 15, 93v–94r, dated 24 July 1574. The permit was for eight days. 129. Court records show that Jews, especially rigattieri, were frequently partners and clients in business with Christians. 130. MGS 4449, 110r, dated 11 July 1572. This important document was first identified by Cassuto (Gli Ebrei a Firenze, 179, note 1). 131. “Bando per gli ebrei sensali del dì 26 Ottobre 1583,” published in Cantini, Legislazione toscana 10: 297. 132. Renata Segre suggested to me in conversation that Abram Baroch, or Baroccas, might be identified with Abram Baru, a merchant living in Ancona in 1554. On Baru, and the inventory of his possessions which were seized during those proceed-

Notes to Chapter 8: Economic Parameters ings against the merchants accused of being Marranos (and burned as heretics), see Segre, “Nuovi documenti sui marrani d’Ancona” (for the inventory of Abram Baru, “one of the four “deputies” of the Portuguese nation,” active in Ancona since at least 1554, see 222–23). The Florentine Abram Baroch might also, however, be related to the Barochiel family living in Saloniki (mentioned in the inventory in Jaco Cazan, ibid., 167). 133. On Servadio, see Cassuto, Gli Ebrei a Firenze, 173–79 and my discussion above in Chapter Two. According to Cassuto (179), Servadio Greco held the post of sensale for life until 1572, at which point Abram Baroch took it over. However, I have not seen evidence of Servadio’s presence in Florence in 1570–72. 134. MGS 4449, 110v–11r, dated 11 July 1572: “Pero sup[pli]ca a V[ostra] A[ltezza] si degni concederli che possa usar’ l’off[iti]o del sensale in q[uest]a sua feliciss[im]a Città et stato in tutte le sorte mercantie senza e[ss]ere tenuto a pagar imposizione o ess[attion]e come si usa in Vin[eti]a et ancora dove habitano heb[re]i che exercitano tal’ Arte et come già il Ser[enissi]mo Gran Duca concesse a un Servadio heb[re]o greco p[er] tal conto.” 135. Cassuto considered him the successor of Servadio “in the office of sensale of the Levantine merchants” (Gli Ebrei a Firenze, 179). 136. “Concedesi che possa far il sensale di mercantie et robe d’heb[re]i et no’ d’altri s[econ]do li ordini della Città” (MGS 4449, 111r). 137. See, for example, sections on the sensali in the statutes of the Linen Guild. “Statuti o sia Riforma dell’Arte de’ Linaioli del dì 23 Luglio 1578,” in Cantini, Legislazione toscana 9: 28ff, where the guild counts among its officials six sensali (39). 138. It is not clear from the text of the privilege whether Abram Baroch was appointed to oversee and control all trade and commerce of the ghetto and all its merchants, or only that of Jewish merchants who wanted to do trade with the Levant. 139. On the rise of specialized merchant companies in seventeenth-century Florence and the decline in the use of factors (foreign representatives), see Goodman, “The Florentine Silk Industry,” 154–55 and 135, note 1. 140. On the functions of these middlemen in the Silk Guild, see Cantini, Legislazione toscana 4: 360ff, “Riforma attenente all’arte della Seta & Università di Porta S. Maria del di 22 Maggio 1562.” See also ibid., 10: 106, Statutes of the Por Santa Maria in 1580 (rigattieri, calzioli and ritagliatori who deal with panni or pannine are only allowed to buy them through one of the twenty sensali, or their approved garzoni, or by one of the mezzani approved by the Arte della Lana; in the same statutes (10: 117ff.) we find that the grand duke will appoint the sensali, who will then be confirmed by the consuls of the guild. They must be matriculated per la maggiore. These twenty will then be allowed to “work [esercitarsi] as brokers and middlemen in all the markets and affairs [in tutti li mercati, e negozii] pertaining to their profession” (ibid., 119). 141. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 9: 28ff, “Statuti o sia Riforma dell’Arte de’ Linaioli del dì 23 Luglio 1578”; the particulars concerning the six sensali are detailed on 48–51. 142. The records of the elections of 1576 and 1577 are missing, and he never appears among the elected thereafter. My last reference to him or his family, showing that they are living not in the ghetto but in Brozzi, comes from a criminal case before the court of the Otto di Guardia concerning two women (his wife or daughter and his mother or sister) who have had a fight: “querela. L’inquisitione formato a denun-

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Notes to Chapter 8: Economic Parameters tia di Ant[oni]o da Brozzi sindico de d[etto] l[uogo] contro M[o]na Ginevra d’Abramo Barech da Brozzi ove in sustanza si co[n]teneva il dì 30 di giugno pro[ssim]o passato haver p[er]cosso con un bastone sur un braccio m[o]na Piera di Daniello Barchi di d[etto] l[uogo]”; OGP 131, 211v, dated 15 September 1575. 143. In 1582–83 Salvadore took trips on which he was accompanied by his father Teseo and by his son Raffaello. If we assume that his father was at most seventy years old and his son at least thirteen during these trips, and that men did not marry before the age of eighteen, Salvadore could have been as young as thirty-one or as old as fifty-two in 1582 (Nove 20, 251v; 378r). 144. Seta 3, 124v–25r records that the privilege granted to Salvadore di Servadio was based on that of previous privileges granted to his cousins, Salvadore and Zaccheria di Teseo. Salvadore is not an uncommon name, but only a handful of Jews were granted mercantile privileges in the period 1572–1611. 145. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 10: 297. 146. Ibid.: “and so as to remove any suspicion or fraud or deceit on the part of the Jews just as [on the part of] anyone who would do business with them, & moreover it is resolved that the Jewish merchants and brokers are to be subject henceforth—in every case of differences depending or emerging from the said merchants or bartering (mercanti o bazzarre)—to the court and tribunal (al Foro e Tribunale) of the guilds, and consolati where they shall have been matriculated, and of the things and merchandise concerned and pertaining thereto—to the jurisdiction of the said guilds respectively, all of which notwithstanding that the Jews ordinarily are subject exclusively to the Magistracy of the Magnifici Signori Otto.” 147. This is one explanation of the election of Salvadore di Teseo Ebreo. It is also possible, however, that Salvadore convinced the grand duke to give him this status, for reasons that bear little on the relationship between Jewish merchants and Christian brokers. 148. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 14: 10–19. Despite its initial address to merchants of all nations (including Armeni, Persiani, Turchi, Mori), the many provisions of the privilege clarify that the merchants are presumed to be Jewish. For example, chapter 5 states that the merchants shall not be subject to any of the “pagamenti, suggezioni, Leggi e Statuti che sono sottoposti, o per l’avvenire fossero sottoposti li Ebrei abitanti in Firenze o Siena” (ibid., 12). 149. Because these privileges entailed exemption from the guilds, they are found copied into the books of the Silk Guild, Seta 3, 122r–25r; they were originally recorded in the volumes of supplications to the Dogana (Customs). 150. Goodman, “The Florentine Silk Industry,” 75. 151. Ibid., 76. 152. See above, Chapter Seven, pp. 268–69. There is no evidence of this employment, since women who spun silk or wove cloth at home were not required to matriculate. Studies of the silk industry in Florence have relied on the account books and ledgers of silk firms, but none have yet been discovered for any of the Jewish silk firms in Florence. 153. NM Testamenti 767 (protocols of the notary Benedetto Biffoli), 167v. The embroidery of curtains for the ark became an important activity and site for self-representation and the creation and preservation of historic memory for Jewish women in the ghetto period in many Italian cities. For further discussion and reproduction of extant curtains, see Liscia Bemporad, “Jewish Ceremonial Art.”

Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto 1. The record of these permits in the journals of the Nove Conservatori has been discussed above; see Chapter Eight and notes 21–25 there. 2. The Nove seems to have issued permits on Mondays, Tuesdays and Saturdays during the spring of 1580. It is interesting that the Jews did not avoid getting their permits on Saturdays, the Jewish day of rest. I think that the permits were good from the day of issue, not the moment of leaving the city, but it is possible that the actual certificates (which have not been preserved) had a space on which a gatekeeper would have noted the day of departure. 3. Nove 18, 83v. 4. See above, Chapter Eight, note 23. 5. See for example the models used in Milan in 1579, reproduced in Cippola, Public Health and the Medical Profession, fig. 3. 6. The inclusion of the physical description may well have begun immediately after the November 1579 regulation, but the journal from the Nove Conservatori for the year 1579 is lost, so our first permits with these descriptions date from 1580. 7. Nove 18, 17r–25r. 8. If the ages were not in fact correct, they do at least represent the age that these men themselves reported. Women’s ages were also recorded and their even distribution suggests that they were not estimates but based on exact responses to a query. 9. Nove 18, 24v, 83v–84r. 10. The married couples (and their ages as recorded in Nove 18, 17r–25r) are: Arone di Sabato (28) and Diamante (23); Ferrante Passiglio (50) and Regina di Ferrante Passiglio (45); Gabbriello di Giuseppe (25) and Gemma (16); Lione di Moise Usiglio (32) and Luna (36); Lione di Raffaello (32) and Perla (26/28); Lione Falcone (no age given) and Simaia (28); Moise d’Abram Toro (25/26) and Allegra (13); Moise Maracci (34) and Bona (30); Moyse di Michele (28) and Lustra (24); Raffaello di Cipriano (30) and Dolce di Raffaello (38); Sabatuccio di Pellegrino (48) and Racchele di Salamone (40); Simone di Speranza (35) and Anna di Simone (30). The average of 4.14 is the average age differential taking into account the two individuals in this list whose ages are given differently on two trips the same year. Lione Falcone’s age was not listed and has therefore not been included in the average or median, but other sources reveal that he was married by 1564 (Sonne, From Paul IV to Pius V, 219) and was therefore probably about 34 in 1580 (about a six-year age differential). On the Falcone family, Portuguese merchants from Pisa, see Luzzati, “Da Pisa a Livorno: Comunità e Frattura,” in idem, La casa dell’ebreo, 130–31. 11. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families, 210–11. 12. Ibid., 221. For the rural age at first marriage, see Emigh, “Land Tenure, Household Structure, and Age at Marriage.” 13. Litchfield, “Demographic Characteristics,” 198. 14. A marriage initiated by love or mutual attraction was rare, although lovematches may account for a portion of the conversions of Jewish women—maidens and widows—to Christianity, especially in the small dispersed Italian settlements in the pre-ghetto period. See Toaff, Il vino e la carne, 39–41 and 181–207; see also Luzzati, “Matrimoni e apostasia di Clemenza di Vitale da Pisa,” in idem, La casa dell’ebreo, 61–106. 15. Here I agree with Bonfil, Horowitz and others (and with the seventeenthcentury rabbi Leon Modena) that there is an Italian Jewish cultural community that

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Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto exists apart from the Sephardic and Levantine communities. On the extent to which Jews of distinct ethnic origin intermarried in Rome, see Stow, “Ethnic Rivalry or Melting Pot.” 16. For further development of this argument, see Siegmund, “Jewish Communal Leaders.” 17. An important focus of Jewish historical scholarship has been to understand how this interaction led to synthesis of Jewish and Christian cultural forms, or to the explicit rejection of contemporary Christian norms by Jews. On the “judaification” of one Italian literary and legal form, the testament, see Malkiel, “Jews and Wills in Renaissance Italy.” See also Bonfil’s study of rabbinical ordination (and the corresponding certificates) in Rabbis and Jewish Communities. 18. On Jewish familiarity with “Jewish tradition” generally, see Elman and Gershoni, eds., Transmitting Jewish Traditions. There are also important studies of the libraries of sixteenth-century Jews, though not of Tuscan Jews: see Baruchson-Arbib, “Jewish Libraries.” 19. For a case study that develops this thesis, see Siegmund, “Division of the Dowry.” 20. For the high rate of monachization among Florentines, see Litchfield, “Demographic Characteristics” (Litchfield uses the term monacation). Clergy aside, permanently single women in the fifteenth-century Tuscan countryside and the city of Florence were less than 2 percent of the population. In contrast, whereas in the country permanently single men were 5.3 percent, in the city of Florence that percentage was 12.1 percent (Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families, 216). On the seventeenth-century development, see Cox, “The Single Self ”; Palazzi reviews the various social spaces that non-married women inhabited in “Female Solitude and Patrilineage.” See also Bennett and Froide, eds., Singlewomen in the European Past. 21. On the effects of male mortality, see note 25 below. 22. The most relevant Jewish enactment of this sort was made in 1554, at a synod in Ferrara: “We also ordain that whosoever shall dare to betrothe [li-k. adesh] a young woman without permission of her father and mother if she has a father, or without permission of two of her closest relatives when she has no father, he shall be separated and excommunicate and so too the witnesses who witnessed the betrothal [k. iddushin].” Text reproduced in Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government, 302. A much more comprehensive ordinance in Casale in 1610 established that “no Israelite shall give Kiddushin to any woman, whether a virgin or a divorcee, unless it be with her consent, and in the presence of ten Israelites, two of whom must be blood-relatives of the bride” (trans. Finkelstein, 308). 23. The relationship between inheritance and dowry is explored in an important study by Allegra, “A Model of Jewish Devolution.” The system assumes that these Jewish men will marry Jewish women, although in practice Jewish parents were sometimes forced to provide dowries for daughters who converted, as they also were required to allow converted sons to inherit. 24. Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic. Sperling estimates that in 1581, 53.8 percent of patrician women in Venice were living in convents (ibid., 28). 25. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber explain (Tuscans and Their Families, 223) that the great age differential drove the price of dowries up because disease and violence ensured that the cohort of women in their early twenties was always larger than the

Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto cohort of men in their late twenties. Since men married so much later than women and their numbers dropped proportionally, many girls, “particularly in the higher social strata, had no statistical chance of finding a husband. For most of these, there was no alternative but the convent. . . . As men delayed their first marriages, fewer women could marry at all” (226). But, as Sperling has argued powerfully, referring to the situation in Venice, which was even more extreme, forced vocations were not a last resort but rather “the result of a particular type of bridal exchange to which Venetian patricians had committed themselves in order to legitimate and perpetuate their political prerogatives” (Convents and the Body Politic, 6). 26. On the other hand, female monachization was in large part a response to the dearth of marriageable men under a system of primogeniture which prevailed among Catholics (but not among Jews) by the middle of the sixteenth century; see Brown, “Monache a Firenze,” 119. 27. Babylonian Talmud, 68a; Shulh.an Arukh, Even ha-’ezer 58: 1 and 71: 1. In general, for references to Jewish laws and customs pertaining to marriage, see Epstein, The Jewish Marriage Contract. Many aspects of the relevant history of Jewish marital law and Italian Jewish customs are comprehensively reviewed by Stow in his “Marriages Are Made in Heaven,” esp. 450–66. For a discussion of the historical evolution of Jewish marriage rites, see Cohen and Horowitz, “In Search of the Sacred.” Although my work on this book was complete except for final editing before I had a brief opportunity to see it, one should now also consult Roni Weinstein, Marriage Rituals Italian Style: A Historical Anthropological Perspective on Early Modern Italian Jews (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), which treats Italian Jewish marriage customs and patterns as a part of the ritual life of “early modern” Italian Jewry and looks, not for change within that broad time frame, but rather for a distinctively “Italian” Jewish culture. 28. The census of 1570 included three female servants, whose ages are not given, living in the houses of Ventura di Abram da Perugia in Monterchi, Salamone di Manuelle Gallico also in Monterchi, and in the house of the banking agent Davit hebreo in San Giovanni. Recent studies have shown that female servants were often able to marry when they received a dowry from their employer, or a testamentary gift; in eighteenth-century Turin they were able to save their wages for their own dowries. See Allegra, “A Model of Jewish Devolution,” 41. 29. For a description of methods used when the data set is larger, see Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families. 30. Riformagioni 10, 17–25. 31. The ages of the children are not all noted; for those whose ages are specified the oldest unmarried children who live with their parents are twenty-five-year-old Manuello di Moyse di Buondi and sixteen-year-old Laura di Lazzero Rabben. It may be that daughters who were not yet married by age seventeen were recorded without reference to their age. On this list almost all the Jews are named. In only two cases there are figliuoli (a pair of them each time) who are not named, and while I have considered them sons (they live with their fathers), it is possible that one or two may have been daughters (but not more than that, or they would have been called figliouole). 32. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families, 216. 33. Ibid.; Litchfield, “Demographic Characteristics,” 197–98. 34. The widows lived in Volterra, Empoli and Florence; the presumably unmar-

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Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto ried women were Bella Fiore and her child in San Giovanni (MGS 4450, 109r), Mona Viola di Raffaello Hebreo and child in Poppi (ibid., 136r) and Dona Rachel in Florence (ibid., 173r; the fact that one of her householders is her daughter “Rena, puttina” is clarified in the list of Jews who were required to wear the segno of 1567, Riformagioni 10, 21v). 35. The letters which were sent out to the podestà and capitani requested a count of the number of “famiglie di ebrei,” and each reply listed “families and mouths.” MGS 4450, 102–22. 36. Unmarried parents in 1570 were: in Empoli, Fiorina, Gentile di Abramo and Agnelo di Zaccheria; in Monterchi, Simone di Agniolo Cana Ruta; in San Giovanni, Bella Fiore; in Volterra, Alegnura. 37. Segre, ed., The Jews in Piedmont 2: 1372–73 (doc. 2629). 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. Two unmarried girls are listed as being sixteen years old, which suggests that sixteen was a normative age for female marriage. Unfortunately, the census does not provide the ages of the young married women, which limits our knowledge of the average age at which they were marrying. The widows are Sarra, widow of Isac, and probably Allegra, sister-in-law of Ottoavia, the widow of Samuel Cassino. The age is not given for the maid Bona who lived in a complex household with three married units—parents, sons and daughters-in-law and two male employees. 40. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families, 202–20. 41. Thus universal marriage of women was accomplished in a very different way among Jews of the Ottoman empire, where marriages were arranged for prepubescent girls, polygyny (two wives maximum) was accepted and the age difference between spouses might be ten, twenty or even thirty years. See Lamdan, “Child Marriage in the Eastern Mediterranean.” 42. The account books were the main source used by Litchfield in his essay “Demographic Characteristics”; the Monte delle Doti was mined by Molho in his essay “Deception and Marriage Strategy” and in Marriage Alliance. 43. Unlike the Jews of Rome, the Jews of Florence did not use Jewish notaries or even Christian notaries who specialized in Jewish clientele. Individual Jews and Jewish families used notaries inconsistently. In the course of my research I have not undertaken to identify all notarized documents pertaining to Jews, since they are scattered not only throughout the notarial records of Florentine notaries but also of notaries who lived throughout the Florentine dominion, even after ghettoization. I have, however, consulted at least the internal indices of hundreds of volumes of fortyfour notaries who operated in Florence and other towns where Jews lived in Tuscany from 1550 to 1610. There are documents pertaining to Jews in all but thirteen of these notaries. 44. See notes 53 and 89 below. 45. These I have defined as couples in which the wife had not yet turned thirteen years old in 1570, the earliest age at which I have seen evidence of a Florentine Jewish girl marrying. Others in the group may also have married after ghettoization. Among Jews there was more flexibility, perhaps conditioned by the fact that there was no positive traditional alternative to marriage for Jews as there was for Catholics, who could enter convents or monasteries. However, when women in their mid-twenties or older

Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto are listed on the permits without reference to a husband, there is no sure way to know whether they might in fact be married or whether they would marry later. 46. It is impossible to know whether any of these marriages is a second marriage, so that one marriage partner is not a biological parent. I am assuming these are first marriages. 47. Toaff, Il vino e la carne, 33 (Love, Work, and Death, 13ff). Toaff ’s work is based on a sample of 111 Umbrian dowries, but because he does not provide a quantitative summary of his sources for these conclusions, we must consider the figures provisional. 48. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families, 211 and discussion below. 49. Debenedetti Stow and Stow, “Donne ebree a Roma nell’età del ghetto,” 71–77. 50. Ibid., 71–72. No analysis has yet been produced regarding the age at which Jewish women in Rome married prior to ghettoization. Here too, the authors cite only a few cases, all from the seventeenth century in support of this conclusion; evidence of early marriages for elite Jewish women is also provided by Milano, who found that in twelve marriages of the wealthy Roman Toscana family, all daughters were married between thirteen and seventeen years of age (Il ghetto di Roma, 355). 51. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families, 218 52. There are no studies yet that allow us to compare the age at marriage of Christians in Umbria and in Rome. However, it should be noted that Christians in the Veneto have a model more similar to that of the Jews in Umbria, and Christians in Florence, to that of Jews in Rome. See Grubb, Provincial Families of the Renaissance. 53. In “Deception and Marriage Strategy,” Molho uses multiple sources to demonstrate that parents often claimed that their daughters were younger than they actually were at the time of marriage, in necessary deference to a cultural ideal that made it more difficult for girls to marry as they advanced past the age of sixteen. For the evaluation that if a woman reached the age of twenty-one unmarried, she was considered “unmarriageable,” see Molho, Marriage Alliance, 139. 54. See Rocke, Forbidden Friendships. Rocke argues that truly punitive reaction against bachelors was reserved mainly for those few unmarried men who posed too great a threat to the gender- and age-based power hierarchy by continuing to play a receptive sexual role long after they had passed the age at which men grow a beard, that is, the age by which they were supposed to have assumed the role of the active and dominant adult male. 55. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families, 220. 56. Litchfield, “Demographic Characteristics,” 197–98. 57. Ibid., 198. The age of marriages of non-elite Christians in Florence in the sixteenth century has not yet been the subject of a full analysis. Grubb’s research has shown that the age disparity in Tuscany may have been exceptional: in the Veneto in the fifteenth century, the average age difference was rather smaller, with women marrying on average at around twenty and men at around twenty-five (Provincial Families of the Renaissance, 4). 58. Remarriage after widowhood was very common for both Jewish men and Jewish women, so that is it difficult to know if a man is living with his first or second (or even third) wife. It remains possible that a man may have adopted (legally or

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Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto informally) the children of his wife, but in the absence of such information we assume here that if a father has assumed paternity of a child, it is his child from his present marriage. 59. Lazzero Rabeno, aged 40, has an eldest child Laura who is 16, so he was surely married by 24; Moyse Buondi aged 40 has an eldest legitimate son aged 15, so married at about 25; Daniello Baroccas Levantino aged 55 has an eldest still unmarried son of 23, so he was married by at least 32; Abram Navarro, who is 40, has a 15-yearold son, so he was married by 25; Iasach 45 has an 18-year-old son, so he was married by 27; Lustro, 55 has a 20-year-old son, so he was married at least by 35. 60. Nove 18, 83v. 61. See Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” appendix 1, Jewish Residents of Tuscany in July 1570. 62. Ibid. 63. Nove 18, 25r. 64. Nove 18, 83v. 65. The permits reveal information about other fathers whose children are older; in such cases we do not know the age of the eldest child and so the data have not been included here. Thus Ferrante Passiglio, aged 50 in 1580 when he had unmarried children aged 22 and 19. He is not included in this average because it is possible that he had older children who had married and gone; in any event, he had married by age 28 at the latest. Also Sabatuccio di Pellegrino, aged 48 in 1580, had a daughter who was betrothed in 1574. 66. These ages are somewhat younger than the average marital age of twenty-four or twenty-five that has been estimated for Jewish men in nearby Umbria in the sixteenth century. Toaff states that from 1450 to 1550 the average age at which Jewish men married was 24–25, and women at 20–21; see Il vino e la carne, 33. In wealthier families, he notes, Jews tended to marry at earlier ages, so that in the highest class the average age was 22 for men and 20 for women, and in the middle class, 26–27 for men and 23–24 for women. The source is presumably his data set of 111 Umbrian dowries. 67. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families, 215–16. The data of the catasto were too complex to permit an “average” age at first marriage for men; see chap. 7, “Marriage,” for a full discussion. They concluded that men married even later in Florence and that wealthier men married later than others. 68. In Chapter One I argued that the growth in the population of Jews in Tuscany in this period was a factor in attracting attention to the anomaly of Jewish status in Tuscany, which led to ghettoization. This growth was caused both by the arrival of refugees from the papal states and by a “baby boom” in the 1560s, a result of the formation of new families. 69. Rabbinic law rules that (in the simplest cases) a man’s estate, after the dowry is returned to his widow, is inherited by his sons, of whom his first-born receives a double portion. A woman is inherited by her husband (or his heirs). However, it has been established that Italian Jewish men and women frequently wrote testaments which distributed their estates differently: men might leave their estates to their wives, or to their sons in equal proportions; women might leave their estates to a broad variety of relatives and household servants and charitable causes, though usually they made the husband universal heir. For examples, see Toaff, Love, Work, and Death, 41–54; Boccato, “Aspetti della condizione femminile nel ghetto di Venezia”;

Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto Malkiel, “Jews and Wills in Renaissance Italy”; Segre, “Sephardic Refugees in Ferrara,” 183–84. 70. Rabbinic sources cited for the early marriage of girls include Babylonian Talmud Yevamot 62b and Tosafot, Kiddushin 41a; see Biale, Jewish Women and Jewish Law, 65–66. For basic Italian Jewish customs in about 1600, perhaps the most immediate source is the manual/apologetic treatise of Leon Modena (1571–1648), Historia de’ riti hebraici, first published in Paris 1637 and in Venice in 1638. Modena writes that the appropriate age for marriage is eighteen to twenty for men (ibid., 88), but does not note the age for women. For overviews of the complex body of Jewish law that controlled women and relations between men and women, including marriage, divorce and succession, see Biale, Jewish Women and Jewish Law; Epstein, The Jewish Marriage Contract; Falk, Jewish Matrimonial Law; and Feldman, Birth Control in Jewish Law. See also the very important study by Colorni, Legge ebraica e leggi locali. Medieval and early modern rabbis in Italy, as elsewhere, were accustomed to presenting the law as unchanging: see, for example, the statement from a panel of rabbis in Venice in 1578, concerning the inheritance by the husband of the estate of the wife: “cosi sempre è stato osservato da noi universalmente”—“thus it has always been observed among us, universally” (Colorni, Legge ebraica e leggi locali, 177, note 70). 71. MGS 4450, 173r. 72. Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” appendix 3: the twelve are Isac; Sabbatino di Michele Buondi; Sabbatino Buondi; Lazzaro di Luca; Benedetto di Donato Tedesco; Salamone di Maestro Benedetto; Raffaello di Simone; Lustro di Moise; Ioseph Habramus; Moise di Hisac whose brother is Toro; Mise di Hisac whose brother is Lazzero; Sabbatino di Gabriello di Esau. 73. On the testament of Ginevra Blanis, already cited, see discussion below and in Chapter Ten. 74. Nove 18, 83v–84r. Camilla di Sabato, 28; Diamante di Iacob, 34; Emilia di Lione, 34, with children ages 3 and 4; Anna di Simone, 30; Miriamma di Regina e Ferrante Passiglio, 22. Except for Miriamma, whose name reflects parentage only, the men referred to in these women’s names may be either father or husband. It is therefore possible that these women were divorced, abandoned or even married to men who were not traveling with them. 75. The Italian language was limited in its ability to express clearly the complicated marital history of some Jews. A man could be referred to as the “marito” or “consorte” or “sposo” of a woman, or without reference to a woman. In the last case, we cannot know whether he was married or had ever married previously. If he were a widower, we would never expect to read that he was the “vedovo” or “marito già” (widower or ex-husband) of a woman. Rather, he would simply appear as a man whose marital status had not been specified. Unlike a woman’s status, a man’s status was independent of that of his deceased spouse. 76. She is called “grossa, cioè, piena di vita” in a permit granted 26 March 1580 (Nove 18, 22v). 77. Testament of 7 August 1574 (NM Testamenti 767). Laudadio had his own will notarized the following May (see Chapter Ten). The boy may not have not survived, but he had at least two younger brothers who did, Lelio and Raffaello, who were matriculated into guilds in Florence in the early 1600s (see Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” appendix 3).

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Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto 78. Nove 18, 24v, 25r. If Gabriello did marry much before 1580, Gemma would have been less than sixteen years old, like Allegra, providing additional evidence for my argument below that families were wont to marry off their daughters even earlier in the ghetto, and to tolerate larger age differentials. 79. He was recorded as thirty years old on a permit dated 28 March 1580 (Nove 18, 23v); he had received the dowry of Fiametta di Abram Simonis from her brother Sansone on 15 June 1574 (NM 4485, 82r–v). Daniel’s date of birth is unknown: he was listed as nineteen years old in the census of May 1567 (Riformagioni 10, 22r). The ages given in the Nove are usually far more reliable than those given in the 1567 list, which rounded up or down. If Daniel was born in April, there is a one-year discrepancy at minimum. If in this case the reliability of the two sources is reversed, Daniel may have married at twenty-five or twenty-six. 80. Examples of joint households (two married brothers) in the census of 1570 include: Agnelo and Laudadio di Zaccheria in Empoli; Simone di Agniolo Cana Ruta and his brother in Monterchi; Lione and his brother in Prato; Bonaiuto and Zaccarie q. Raffaello in San Giovanni. 81. See, for example, the ghetto ordinance of 1608 that “it shall not be permitted to anyone to go on the Sabbath and festival days to drink and eat at hostels or winehouses [grecaiuoli] of any sort whatsoever . . . under penalty of one scudo.” Reproduced in Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli,” 10: 73. On the frequency of Jewish-Christian sexual encounters in Umbria, see Toaff, Love, Work, and Death, 5–14 and in fifteenth-century Tuscany, 8. Toaff argues that while a Jewish marriage was the goal and “non-compliance was out of the question,” “often it was the young man’s father who provided money for gaming, wine and girls; in the larger towns, recourse to prostitutes was also tolerated as a necessary enhancement of the young man’s sexual education and aid to his future choices. His susceptibility to the dictates of the heart or the pleasures of the flesh placed no real obstacle in the path of his family’s longterm plan to marry him off to a Jewish woman of good family and in possession of a modest fortune” (ibid., 13). 82. Nove 18, 24v–25r. 83. Wiesner, Women and Gender, 60. Goitein uses a similar analysis to explain (but not to apologize for) some of the occurrence of wife-beating in a culture where women were referred to as “girls” and where physical discipline was the normal way to “instruct” and enforce obedience; see Mediterranean Society 3: 186. 84. The basic laws and customs of Jewish marriage, divorce, polygamy and succession (with comparative attention to Roman law, Canon law and examples from Italian Jewish legal history) are summarized in the important study by Colorni, Legge ebraica e leggi locali, 181–225. 85. In his excellent study of the Jews of eighteenth-century Turin cited above, Luciano Allegra has argued that the dowry should be seen as the primary strategy for devolving wealth and protecting it from taxes and creditors. It is not clear, however, that the taxes on estates were always higher than the tax on dowries; this requires further investigation. 86. Molho, Marriage Alliance, 16. 87. According to a handwritten catalogue written by Umberto Cassuto (kept in the archives of the Jewish community of Florence in Box E 11.1 labeled “Archivio”), there were thirty ketubbot from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century pre-

Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto served in the archives. These probably beautifully illustrated and valuable documents are no longer found in the archives. A rich cache of hundreds of Levantine Jewish marriage contracts—a registry of Hebrew ketubbot, but not the ketubbot themselves— exists in the archive of the Jewish community of Livorno. 88. Cantini, Legislazione toscana 6: 10–21. 89. Molho has raised the reasonable concern (Marriage Alliance, 308–9) that these “confessions” should not be taken as a reliable source on the size of the dowry, since the recipients may have deliberately underreported the dowry in order to pay less tax (gabella on contracts). Thus one might imagine that in addition to the hundred or so scudi recorded in Jewish marriages, more could have been exchanged. But if a father underestimated his daughter’s dowry on the legal documents and allowed his son-inlaw to confess to having received less than he actually did, the father or the daughter would have been unable to retrieve the full dowry upon divorce from or the death of the husband. (Indeed, the opposite caution has been raised, that Jews may have exaggerated the size of their dowries to discourage the likelihood of divorce; Milano, as cited by Allegra, “A Model of Jewish Devolution,” 38. Allegra himself argues that the amounts recorded on contracts in Turin are the actual sums paid.) As we shall see below, the dowry might be worth one third or even the entire estate of the father, so great precautions were taken to protect it in the event that the husband or wife died without heirs. Given such concern, it seems highly unlikely that the family would be willing to undervalue the dowry on legal documents, risking capital for the sake of a tax shelter. 90. Molho, Marriage Alliance, 152, table 4.6. Florence was a wealthy city. Of 11,402 dowry deposits made by citizens into the Monte delle Doti, 2,088 were for dowries under 250 scudi; 6,885 for dowries in the range 250–799 scudi; and 2,429 for deposits over 799 scudi. These deposits do not always reflect the whole dowry, since families supplemented them at the end to create a larger final dowry. 91. Ibid., 310, table 7.3, “Size of dowries according to ricordanze.” The “average dowry” I refer to here is not a true average dowry for all 417 lineages Molho studied (which contained, as Brown has noted in her “Review of Marriage Alliance,” 30 percent of the population in 1480). By “leading families” I refer to that selection of families Molho used, a group of 380 dowries memorialized in libri di ricordi. 92. “Statuti della gabella de’ contratti,” 29 April 1566, in Cantini, Legislazione toscana 6: 53ff. 93. Molho, Marriage Alliance, 99. 94. A dowry of 800 florins was restored to Clemenza di Vitale di Isaaco da Pisa after her divorce from David da Montalcino; this dowry sum represents the value of the cash and trousseaux and gifts given to the bride in 1480, and it is the highest dowry mentioned by Luzzati in his essays on the Jews of Pisa. See Luzzati, “Matrimoni e Apostasia,” in idem, La casa dell’ebreo, 75. 95. Toaff, Il vino e la carne, 30–32. 96. Ibid., 32. 97. Ibid., 22. Toaff states that Jews practiced class endogamy (29). Further research could address more complicated questions such as whether some classes were more endogamous than others and whether the endogamy applied differently to men and women. 98. Ibid., 30–32. The data shown graphically (for 111 dowries) actually display a

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Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto very gradual distribution curve of dowries in the range of 50 scudi to 400 scudi. We may call these Jews “middle class” for convenience; the exact size of a dowry, however, was linked to a family’s actual resources at the time that each marriage was negotiated. In summarizing his material, Toaff does not mention the dowries (apparently eight in number) that were for 50 scudi or less as a group, but they appear on his chart (figure 2, 31). To reconcile his numbers (89 dowries in the lowest group, 19 dowries in the middle and 3 at the high end), it would appear that all eight dowries in this group were for exactly 50 scudi. 99. On this family, see Toaff, “Maestro Laudadio”; see also below in Chapter Ten. 100. Toaff, The Jews in Umbria, 3: doc. 2480 (pp. 1259–60). 101. Ibid., doc. 2514 (p. 1277). 102. Ibid., doc. 2550 (p. 1294). 103. NM 265, 30v. The testament, however, does not tell us the full size of Laudadio’s granddaughters’ dowries. Unfortunately, the Blanis family did not use only one notary and I have not been able to find the betrothal contract or confessio dotis which would confirm whether Laura’s dowry was 200 scudi, or whether that was only a part of it. 104. Confessio dotis, dated 31 January 1568/69; NA 17046 75r–v. 105. NA 17046, 85r–v: dated 1569, 31 March. Notarized in the home of “Zacherie Michaellis hebreus d’emporio hab. in pontedera”; the two men make a business partnership, a “societatis,” in the “arte et exercitio vellamince”; they also engaged an agent, Isaac Elie Liucci hebreus de Pisa, with a contract for five years to sell their merchandise in Terra Civitate. The contract between Zaccheria and Abram was dissolved shortly thereafter (same volume, 19 September 1569, 107r–v, “Renuntiatio societatis”). 106. NM 604, 170v–71r, which notes that the gabella was paid on 27 May 1570. 107. Guerrini, Empoli 1: 153 and note 419. The gabella on the dowry was 6 scudi, which must correspond to a dowry of under 100 scudi according to the tax rates of the time. 108. Confessio dotis dated 9 June 1570, NM 76, 81–82r. 109. Jewish dowries peaked at only 230 ducats in late fifteenth- to early sixteenthcentury Rome. See Toaff, Love, Work, and Death, 22, note 50, citing the works of Anna Esposito; Stow, The Jews in Rome, 1, introduction, xvii. For further data on Jewish dowries, see the bibliography cited by Toaff, ibid., 22–23 and notes there. 110. That Tuscans practiced contraception was assumed by the Franciscan preacher Bernardino of Siena in 1427, who railed against it, infanticide, sodomy and Jews. The evidence of his sermons is discussed in Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber (Tuscans and Their Families, 250–54), who also make a strong numerical argument that birth control was being practiced, more by the poor and middle classes than by the wealthy. Their review of the evidence demonstrates convincingly that Tuscans were familiar with contraceptive techniques, especially nonprocreative sexual practices. More generally, see McLaren, A History of Contraception, chap. 5, “Fertility Control in Early Modern Europe.” On Jewish law and knowledge of the same, see Feldman, Birth Control in Jewish Law. 111. Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” 180. 112. Four towns included a full description of the members of the twenty-five households. In twenty-one of these the head of household was living with children

Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto (in one case, the children were already married sons). See Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” appendix 1. 113. The circumcisions of four sons of Mosheh Alpelink. are recorded for the period 1540–49 in the mohel-book of Yeh.iel Nissim da Pisa. See Sonne, From Paul IV to Pius V, 217–18. These were Yosef, Daniel, Yosef and Shlomo. The first Yosef died before his older brother was given his name. Evidence from the permits of 1580 (ages) has a Daniello, a Laudadio, a Giuseppe and a Salamone. The ages match for Daniel and Giuseppe (Yosef the second). I do not know who circumcized Laudadio. Shlomo is not a match for Salamone, since Salamone is six or seven years younger in 1580 than Shlomo would have been. It is likely, given the reuse of the name Yosef, that the first Shlomo died and a son, six years later, was given his name (Salamone). 114. Trexler, “Infanticide in Florence,” in idem, Power and Dependence, vol. 1, 39–42, 48–52. 115. In all the forthcoming examples the possibility remains that other sons were born and even survived of whom I have simply seen no mention in the archives. Based on the archival fonts I have searched and the database of references to Jews in the archives I have constructed, I am confident that if such sons existed they were not living as Jews in Florence. I do not have any evidence to suggest that second and third sons routinely left or converted, although that too is possible. 116. In the lists of Jews made in both 1567 and 1570, his Florentine household had four, listed in 1567 as himself, his wife Miriam and their two teenaged children, Dolce and Daniel. 117. Moise Passiglio is clearly Moshe ben ha-Rav Yehudah Passiglio Sefardi, the boy-child circumcised on 22 Marh.eshvan 5322 (1 November 1561) in Empoli (Sonne, From Paul IV to Pius V, 219, no. 25). He could have had other sisters; an already-married daughter, especially if she had been sent away from the ghetto, would be impossible to locate. 118. This family is discussed at length below. A son whose Hebrew name was Zechariah had been born before Abram, in January 1538 (Sonne, ibid., 217, no. 2), but did not survive his first year. Abram was born years later, in August 1546 (ibid., no. 9). 119. Cf. the case explored by Molho of Francesco Guicciardini, a Florentine patrician in the early sixteenth century who had so many daughters that he made their dowries conditional, lest a son be born with no inheritance remaining (Marriage Alliance, 178). 120. I thank my father, Frederick Siegmund (father to three daughters and no sons), for tactfully pointing out this possibility to me after reading an early discussion of this material in my dissertation. 121. Family limitation may have meant nonprocreative sexual behaviors, the use of abortifacients and even barrier contraception, all of which were or could have been known. Abstinence, with its birth-controlling effect, is not easily documented, but may have been a specifically Jewish phenomenon, since Jewish women had a religiously mandated obligation (and therefore right) to refuse sex with their husbands if they had not immersed in the mik. veh (ritual bath) each month after their menstrual cycle. Examples of Jewish women using this form of rebellion against their husbands’ sexual advances have been cited in many countries; see, for example, Assis, “Sexual Behaviour,” 32.

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Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto 122. Elite families in which there were many adult sons include the Leucci, the da Empoli/Alpelinghi, the da Rieti and the Blanis. In the case of the Blanis, however, we know of four sons and only one daughter. Was the daughter a long-awaited last child for Laudadio and Stella? It must be noted that the high number of sons helped ensure not only the prominence of these families in Tuscany but also their prominence in this study of the Jews of Tuscany. 123. Molho, Marriage Alliance, 30. 124. The later institution of dowry societies by Italian Jews is surveyed in my essay “La vita nei ghetti,” 886–88. 125. NM 265, 30v. Laura was approximately fifteen and unmarried in 1567 and living with her grandparents in Florence at the time (Riformagioni 10, 22r). 126. Or in San Miniato; MGS 4450, 105r. The census lists Jews of Empoli, Certaldo and San Miniato together. Agnolo, also referred to as Angelo or Angelus (and in Hebrew as Malachi), was a “velletarius Emporii” when matriculated into the guild in 1543 (AMS 22, 137r), but his son was circumcised in San Miniato (see next note). The brothers’ father, Zaccheria, was deceased (as indicated by the names of the sons as they appear in the sources: “Agnolo q[uondam] Zaccheria,” and “Laudadio q[uondam] Zaccheria.” 127. MGS 4450, 105r; Abram appears to be Avraham Gedalyah ben ha-Rav Malachi, circumcised 3 Tishrei 5307 (30 August 1546) by Yeh.iel Nissim da Pisa, in San Miniato (Sonne, From Paul IV to Pius V, 217). It should be noted that in this case the father Angelus/Agnolo has the Hebrew name Malachi, not Mordechai; there should be no assumption as to the “translation” or correspondence of an Italian Jew’s Hebrew and Italian names. 128. NM 604, 170v–71r. Agnolo and his son Abram recognized their debt to Zaccheria of 100 scudi of 7 lire and 10 soldi per scudo on 5 May 1570 (NM 547, 5r–v). In the notarial texts the name Raffaelle, or Raffaello, is usually written as Raphaele. Ricca never received the full dowry in her widowhood; in 1575 she did retrieve 50 scudi of the dowry plus 70 lire 15 soldi for the cost of wedding and expenses. OGP 12, 290v–92v. 129. MGS 4450, 109r. 130. On the multibranched Finzi family’s medieval origins, see Carpi, “Il ramo padovano della famiglia Finzi.” Our Zaccheria was also known as Gratiadio Finzi. See note 147 below. 131. NM 76, 27r–28r, dated 4 April 1570. 132. This banker, Sabato, should be identified with Sabato d’Amadio da Careggio, the agent of the da Pisa whose bank was shut down in July and who left Tuscany in response to the eviction from Empoli. It is reasonable to assume, but I do not have evidence to show that the deposits in this bank sustained losses as a result of the forced closure. 133. One hundred scudi for five years at 8 percent, according to this hypothetical model. 134. OGP 109, 209v, 17 maggio 1568, “It[em] simil’ modo et forma atteso la carceratione fatta di Mona Bruna figluola [sic] di Giovacchino hebreo et donna di Donato hebreo in fiorenza per esser stata trovata da Pennocchio famiglio del bargello andare’ p[er] Firenze co’ una manica di velo Giallo fuora della misura et modo ordinato dalla legge ultimame[n]te fatta sop[ra] gli hebrei.” She was condemned to pay

Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto 50 scudi, sent to the Stinche on 18 May and released on 26 May (232r) having received the pardon of the duke. 135. OGP 118, 27r, 36r, 100r. 136. ASE, Podestà 197, 112: “A di 25 di ottobre 1570, Inventario di tutte le robe e masseritie che sono in casa di Salamone et Giuseppe di Moyse hebrei.” The houses of Daniello and of Agnolino were inventoried on the next day; this is somewhat problematic since the census in July 1570 did not list Daniello as a householder. 137. It is interesting that the money was not invested with Zaccaria’s bankerbrother Davit di Raffaelo de Reggio in Castro San Giovanni (NM 547, 12r–v). 138. OGP 130, 129r, dated 12 April 1575 and 160v, dated 21 April 1575; OGP 131, 87r, dated 29 July 1575. 139. OGP 130, 41v, dated 7 March 1574/75. Ricca was probably his mother, but that is not specified in the documents, which only refer to her as Abram’s widow. 140. OGP 131, 290v, 291r, dated 12 October 1575, where the claims are said to be made against “Agnolino di Zacheria hebreo da Empoli hoggi morto et Abramo suo figlio da Empoli.” The expression “hoggi morto” should probably be taken to mean that Agnolino is simply “now deceased” (as a Jew who had at some previous time converted to Christianity was “oggi Cristiano”). 141. NM 604, 170v–71r. 142. Ibid., dated 27 April, 1576. The expenses were the gabelle Zaccaria was required to pay on the dowry. Zaccaria had already declared himself to be a creditor when Abramo’s house was put up for sale by the court, even before Agnolo had died (OGP 131, 290v, 291r, dated 12 October 1575.) 143. NM 605, 160v–61v, dated 10 June 1575; the exact amount received by Daniel Vitale de Senis (of Siena) was 36 scudi, 1 lira and 8 denari. The money was counted out by Laudadio in front of Anna, Iacob Ioseph de Pontadera and Vitale, Daniel’s father (Daniel was not present). 144. Abramo was the only male descendant of the two brothers. He had had at least one other brother, Zaccharia (the first born, whose grandfather Zaccharia was already dead), circumcised 8 January 1538 in San Miniato by Yeh.iel Nissim of Pisa, who had died in childhood. Sonne, From Paul IV to Pius V, 217. 145. OGP 134, 32v, dated 5 July 1576. The two had been denounced by the Ten to the Otto, had made their peace and been fined and were therefore not sentenced to prison terms. 146. AMS 13, 118r, dated 13 September 1575, where she is explicitly referred to (in the feminine form) as a merciaia. Sarra’s father had been admitted in 1543 (AMS 22, 137r). 147. Sarra married Zaccaria di Raffaello de Finzi. But on trip permits we find “Sarra hebrea donna di Gratia dio Finzi” (Nove 15, 140r–v, dated 16 October 1574). In the same year another permit is written to Zaccheria di Raffaello da Careggio (Nove 15, 93v–94r); and a Zaccheria di Raffaello da Reggio is listed as a renter in the auction of 1575 (Nove 16, 30r, 38). On Finzi’s presence in the ghetto, see Chapter Ten below. On rabbinic titles and their meaning, see Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities, 34–37 and passim. 148. NM 604, 24r–25r. The total value was not specified earlier but appears to have been 780 scudi in NM 7741, 35r–37r, where her dowry is restored to Iudit in 1595, now a widow.

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Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto 149. See Luzzati, “Dall’insediamento ebraico,” in idem, La casa dell’ebreo, 136, 142 and passim. 150. MGS 4449, 112r–v. 151. NM 604, 25v “ad angulum vie q. vocatuum de’ martellis.” Although there is no record of special permission given to them to do so, the Leucci may have also been living outside the ghetto, or distancing themselves from it socially, as noted in an earlier chapter, since none of the men of his family participate in the ghetto government until the year 1600. 152. For the story of the destruction of the Jewish community in Perugia by taxation, see Toaff, Gli ebrei a Perugia, 140ff. As Toaff has reconstructed it, in 1567 the community, in serious debt, sold its land and ritual objects and entrusted the proceeds to Ursi [Orsi] to take to Rome to pay off the debts to the Casa dei Catechumeni. The money was not paid; Ursi was accused by the community of having stolen it. The community denounced him to the governor of Perugia, and a process against him for a year from February 1568 to 1569 led to no conclusion. On 5 May the Commissario Generale of Perugia sentenced Giuseppe, but a couple of months earlier, on 26 February, Pope Pius V had decreed the expulsion of the Jews from the state with the bull Hebraeorum gens, giving them three months to get out. With the rest of the Jews exiled, Giuseppe fought from jail to appeal his case and succeeded in having it dismissed, at which point his presence in Florence is first noted. 153. MGS 4449, 113v–14r, response to a request from “Gratia Dio et fratelli di Ventura Leucci hebrei profumieri in Firenze,” who want to return to the city “dove son’ nati et allevati loro et loro antecess[o]ri di 200 anni in qua et in essa fare una bottega di profumeria et altri neg[oti]i mercantizi.” They are granted this permission on 27 May 1588 with the note that they are not to employ (keep) Christians in their house and they are not to lend money and must wear the segno. For Gratiadio’s death, see NM 7741, 55r. 154. In 1591 he was called “odviarius de Pisis,” a Pisan perfumier (NM 7740, 54v), when he married Bellafiore, said to be forty years old; but when Laura, “eorum filia,” was betrothed in 1614/15, he was “hebreo Florentine comitantes” (NM 11120, 26r). Abram could have moved to Pisa in 1588 with his brother Gratiadio; it seems that the family chose to maintain a permanent presence in both commercial hubs of the state. 155. In his confession of the dowry in 1614, Ventura claimed that he had only received 400 of the 600 scudi promised to him in 1608 (NM 11120, 26r–v). In this marriage of first cousins we see how money which had been given to Abram di Ventura Leucci in dowry from Bellafiore his wife now moved to another branch of the Leucci. 156. On prohibited marriage (including the laws of consanguinity) in the Jewish tradition, with comparison to the laws of the church and Roman law, see Colorni, Legge ebraica e leggi locali, 185–90. For examples in Pisa, see Luzzati, “Da Pisa a Livorno,” in idem, La casa dell’ebreo, 144–45. 157. Molho considers the difficulty of maintaining the homogamy of 417 lineages (Marriage Alliance, 241). But these lineages contained thousands of people in any given year! In her review, Brown notes that if they are to be considered the elite, it must be acknowledged that the Florentine elite was a vastly larger percentage of the population than the elite in England, for example (“Review of Marriage Alliance”). 158. What I mean to suggest is that the dowry, from the female perspective,

Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto rather than from the perspective of the law, might have been passed from mother to daughter, while the father’s estate was passed to the sons. In order to test this idea fully, I would want to compare the dowries of at least two generations of women and contrast them with the size of the estates inherited by their brothers or possessed by their fathers at the time of daughters’ marriages. 159. Note, for example, that in 1461 Filippo Rinuccini traced his ancestry through his father and the ancestry of his bride-to-be through her mother and back four generations, always through the female line (Molho, Marriage Alliance, 185). On the exclusion of daughters from inheritance after they had received dowry (exclusio propter dotem), see Kuehn, “Some Ambiguities of Female Inheritance Ideology in the Renaissance,” in idem, Law, Family, and Women, 238–57 and notes 363–74. 160. OGP 290v–92v; NM 604, 142r–v, 149v. Uriel d’Isaia was apparently married to Fiore di Salamone di Simone in 1549 (NA 587 [old cataloging system]), fols. 451–54, as cited by Luzzati, “Da Pisa a Livorno,” in idem, La casa dell’ebreo, 145). 161. NM 547, 5r–v, dated 4 May 1570; NM 76, 27r–v; NM 604, 170v, 171r, dated 27 of April 1576; OGP 13, 291v–92r. In 1570 Zaccheria was “olim” or “quondam” Raffaellis, signifying that his father was dead. 162. NM 604, 24r–26r, dated 14 October 1573, “no 22. spons.” (an engagement agreement, not a confession of having received the dowry). In this document the bride is referred to as Iudit, not Iuditta. 163. Dianora, daughter of Iudit Orsi and Gratiadio di Ventura Leucci, married with a dowry that exceeded 550 scudi in cash and gifts in 1604 (NM 7742, 137r–v). See also Luzzati, “Da Pisa a Livorno,” in idem, La casa dell’ebreo, 144–45. 164. Bellafiore di Moise d’Urielli married Abram di Ventura Leucci, and Laura, Bellafiore’s daughter, married Ventura di Graziadio di Ventura Leucci, each, reportedly, with a dowry of 600 scudi. See NM 7740, 54v–55r (confessio dotis by Abranus olim Venturae, dated 24 December 1591) and NM 11120, 26r–v (confessio dotis of Ventura di Gratiadio, dated 6 February 1614). See also Luzzati, ibid. 165. Molho notes, discussing the degree of reliability of the confessiones dotium documents in the notarial cartularies, that the sum reported to the notary was not always the full sum of the actual dowry exchanged. One reason, he suggests, is that fathers might wish to hide from their other daughters the fact that they had given preferential treatment to one daughter, contributing more toward her dowry (Marriage Alliance, 308). 166. On the financing of multiple daughters’ dowries by Christians using the Monte delle Doti in Florence, see Molho, ibid., 164–78. 167. On this topic, see Trexler, “Infanticide in Florence” and idem, “The Foundlings of Florence.” 168. On one episode in Venice, where an illegitimate Jewish infant was abandoned in a stairwell in the ghetto (and not left as a Christian foundling), see Boccato, “Il caso di un neonato esposto nel ghetto di Venezia.” 169. They might, however, delay investment if a daughter appeared to be unlikely to survive to the age of marriage or otherwise unsuitable. Molho, Marriage Alliance, 166–72. 170. Ibid., 93 and 95. 171. It is interesting that in Florentine law of intestacy, a woman’s children were entitled to an equal share of her dowry when she died, whereas in Jewish law her

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Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto estate was inherited by her husband or his heirs—not by her children. There were, however, regional variations on this law that were designed to protect the wife’s natal family and children from a prior marriage. On Florentine law, see Kuehn, “Women, Marriage and Patria Potestas,” in idem, Law, Family, and Women, 207. For bibliography and sources on the Jewish laws of succession, see Shmuel Shilo, “Succession” in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, 15: 475–81. See also Colorni, Legge ebraica e leggi locali, 201–13. 172. Luzzati, “Da Pisa a Livorno,” in idem, La casa del’ebreo, 145 and note 88 there, refers us to NA F 587 cc. 451–54 (which is, under the new cataloguing system NA 8154). Such a marriage, between niece and uncle (first degree of consanguinity) would have appeared preposterously incestuous to contemporary Catholics, for whom it was unlawful. Simone di Salamone Leucci was Dolcina’s mother’s brother. On Uriello di Isaia, present in Pisa in 1511, see Luzzati, ibid., 135–36, 145. 173. According to basic Jewish law, a woman ought to be given a ketubbah (that is, the marriage document which provides a sum of money or property), although a marriage that was performed correctly (with the recitation of the correct formula and the acceptance of a ring before two valid witnesses) would be accepted ex post facto as a valid marriage even without it. On Jewish marriage, see Epstein, The Jewish Marriage Contract. 174. NM Testamenti 767, 167rv. 175. “Statuti o sia Riforma dell’Arte dei Linaijoli del dì 23 Luglio 1578,” in Cantini, Legislazione toscana 9: 87–91. The first benefactor left money to be used for four dowries each year, to girls whose fathers were guild members. The amount to be given “for their dowry or in supplement to the sum” was 49 lire (88), to be paid after the marriage was consummated, which had to be within one year. The second benefactor had left funds to provide 120 lire every year for the marriage of three girls, so that each would be given 40 lire (89). There is no specification in the statutes that excluded Jewish guild members from submitting names of candidates, or from receiving dowries, but it is hard to imagine this happening. Elaborate rules governed the nomination and selection of the girls each year, and it is not even known whether Jews were allowed to vote in decisions of any sort in the guild. 176. One testament was written in 1515, and apparently the capital had been well cared for and was still fruitful in 1578. 177. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families, 225. 178. Toaff, ed., The Jews in Umbria, 3: doc. 2772 (p. 1386). Jews were allowed to return to Perugia (after the expulsion of 1569) in 1585; see doc. 2742 (pp. 1375–76). 179. NM 4485, 82r–v. 180. NM 3176, 59v; NM 604, 55v; in the text, Sabatuccio “quondam” Pellegrino and Lazzaro “quondam” Aron, which signifies that Sabatuccio and Lazzaro, being orphans, were emancipated and could freely contract these agreements. 181. NM 3176, 59v–60r, dated 26 June 1573, notarized in the notary’s shop in San Stefano in Florence. 182. NM 604, 55v–56r. 183. OGP 125, 354v: security is posted for Lazzaro for his release from jail on 14 October 1573. OGP 125, 5r: a warrant for the execution of the debt of 53 lire and expenses that Lazzaro, who is suspected of fleeing, owes Liuccio Romano hebreo. 184. Stow, working with notarial documents from Rome also sees the Jews as

Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto middle class and suggests as I do here that they saw themselves as middle class as well, despite the anachronism of the term. See “Marriages Are Made in Heaven,” 485–86. 185. Allegra, studying the Jews of the ghetto of eighteenth-century Turin, finds that this was a strategy for the devolution of wealth which apparently functioned to shelter the estate from taxes and creditors (“A Model of Jewish Devolution”). While this is a very important argument, other reasons for high dowries must be considered, especially since in Florence the tax rates on estates were actually lower than the tax rates on dowries (Cantini, Legislazione toscana 6: 52ff and 6: 85; 29 April 1566). Allegra does not discuss the tax rates in Turin. 186. OGP 111, 16r–v, dated 22 October 1568, where the father, son and Sabatino di Buondi were fined for fighting among themselves; similarly in a fight with Moise d’Emanuello di Buondi in OGP 112, 268r, dated 13 June 1569 and 283v, dated 17 June 1569 where it is mentioned that the bottega was on or close to Piazza Suchellinai, which was one of the two piazze at the gates of the ghetto that would be built two years later. When Isac died and his estate was inventoried, it did not include a shop, but only the contents of several rooms. For items the Calò dealt in, see OGP 114, 72v, where Mose di Violino was sued for a “catena et bottono di che e la disputa le pianelli, orechini, librinini.” 187. Nove 14, 95r (dated 31 July 1573) lists Isach d’Elia detto Calo as a governor; there is also an Isache d’Elia listed in 1572, but he could be the Isache d’Elia who was also a governor in 1578, since Calò was by then dead. Daniel d’Isache Calò was a governor frequently between 1580 and 1610; see Siegmund, “From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto,” appendix 4. 188. Isache’s death is mentioned as having already occurred on 15 October 1574 (OGP 131, 149v–50r), but it must have transpired before 28 September, since the estate was inventoried on that date and Daniel repudiated the inheritance on 2 October. 189. NM 850, 125r. 190. On the practice of repudiation in Florentine society, see Kuehn, “Law, Death and Heirs in the Renaissance,” who explains the elaborate strategies, including repudiation, that commonly served to protect the heirs from the debts of their fathers. 191. NM 850, 148r–v; NM 4485, 82r–v, “confessio dotis,” dated 15 June 1574. The language specifies that the dowry will be returned to the bride “more hebreorum,” according to Jewish law. 192. OGP 131, 149v–50v, dated 25 August 1575. 193. Molho, Marriage Alliance, 17, argues that Florentine society was characterized by a desire to maintain a sense of equilibrium in the city, a sense that there was an appropriate balance of wealth within each class and appropriate distance between classes. 194. On the history of stipulations (tak. k. anot) in marriage arrangements, see Siegmund, “Division of the Dowry,” 82–87 and 100–101, note 53. 195. On this contract, given to daughters at their marriage, see Fram, Ideals Face Reality, 81–95, esp. 86–88. For its medieval Ashkenazic precedent, see Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004), 150–51. 196. When he married her, Daniel Calò promised to return Fiametta’s dowry “more hebreorum” (NM 4485, 82r–v). Frequently, rather than referring to Jewish law, the expression signifies only that a Jewish oath was taken; thus when contracts

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Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto were notarized, it was usually noted that the parties were agreed “more hebreorum,” meaning that they had sworn a Jewish oath (e.g. NM 76, 28v). A complete study of this expression cannot be undertaken here, but it must be noted that it is not easily interpreted. For example, in 1591 Abram olim Ventura Leucci married Bellafiera di Moyse d’Urielle, promising her a donationem (counterdowry) according to Pisan Statutes and the “Ordinances of the Universitatis hebreorum” (NM 7740, 55r). Was this phrase synonymous with more hebreorum, or a reference to specific legislation of Jews in Pisa? I discuss this issue in my essay “Division of the Dowry.” 197. NM 7742, 139r–40r, signed at Pisa, 4 November 1604. The notary also made a copy for Iudit Orsi, mother of the bride. 198. Siegmund, “Division of the Dowry,” 77–80. On Jewish inheritance, see Epstein, The Jewish Marriage Contract, 138. For statutory law in Florence, see Statuti della Repubblica fiorentina (anno 1325), edited by Romolo Caggese (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1999), Rubric XVI, XVII: De dote restituendo uxori; rubric LXVIIII: De modo successionis mulierum ab intestato. Statutory law was not necessarily followed and is not always clear, and it must be interpreted by jurists: see especially Kuehn, “Some Ambiguities of Female Inheritance Ideology in the Renaissance,” in idem, Law, Family and Women, 238–57. However, the very practical regulations concerning the tax on contracts in Florence (29 April 1566) assume that women have the right of “restitution of the dowry” upon widowhood; see Cantini, Legislazione toscana 6: 61–62. 199. Many unique stipulations can be seen in Italian ketubbot in the splendidly produced volume by Shalom Sabar, Ketubbah, which includes over one hundred Italian examples from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Stipulations were customary only in some towns, especially in towns with a strong Sephardi influence; the two Florentine examples (dated 1722 and 1737) did not include them, which makes the notarized contracts studied here even more valuable. Among the stipulations (other than the aforesaid): that the brother of the bridegroom promises to perform h.alitsah (Ancona 1659, 48); that the bridegroom will not take a second wife and that he will not pressure his wife to renounce her dowry (common in Livornese contracts, 108); and various stipulations in the event of the bride or groom’s death after one, two, or three years of marriage (Venice, 1649, 187–88). In Ashkenazi European communities, stipulations were, according to Sabar, not included in the ketubbah but rather detailed in separate deeds that were considered legally binding (ibid., 290 and notes on 291). Both standardized and individually devised stipulations were commonly written into Jewish marriage contracts in North Africa, forbidding the husband to beat his wife, for example, or to force her to move with him to a foreign country, or to take a second wife without her permission. See Friedman, Jewish Polygyny (in Hebrew), 36–46 and many examples throughout. 200. Goitein, Mediterranean Society 3: 142–57. 201. NM 76, 81v. If “dicta D[o]na Perla decesserit sine liberis q. d. Deus advertat ante mortem dicti sui viri dictus dactarus eius vir teneat[u]r restituere eidem salamone at[que] eius heredibus et sucessionibus medietatem dotis predicte[m]. . . .” 202. On succession and testaments, see Colorni, Legge ebraica e leggi locali, 201–21. 203. NM 604, 24r–26r, dated 14 October 1573, “no. 22. spons.” This is an engagement agreement, not a “confession” of having received the dowry. They were not as worried about the loss of her dowry if she died as they were concerned that if she

Notes to Chapter 9: Marriage in the Ghetto were widowed and the money was not returned quickly, she would not be able to remarry. 204. NM 604, 24r–25r, betrothal agreement (sponsalia/sponsalita) dated 14 October 1573. 205. Deus avertat is the Latin equivalent of Dio ne guardi, translated earlier in this chapter as “Heaven forfend.” In the literal sense, in the phrase “may God avert [it],” it refers to an evil decree or malfortune, in this case the premature death of the bride. 206. NM 604, 24v. 207. NM 604, 25r. 208. In Jewish law she was required to take an oath that she had not already received it during his lifetime. 209. Kuehn, “Women, Marriage and Patria Potestas,” 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 ebraica 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 h.alitsah, 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 halizah through an obligatory oath taken individually by the groom’s 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. For a 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-

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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, 167r–v. 220. Iuditta was recorded as being forty-five years old in 1600 (NM 7742, 9v) 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, 59v. (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 Iuditta Vidua filia olim Iosephi De Orsis hebrei et uxor olim Gratia Dei de Leuccis de Pisis hebrea (NM 7742, 139r), M[on]a Iuditta Leucci (ibid., 140r). He also spelled her name “Giudetta” (NM 7741, 58v, 59r). 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 entitled, 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 H . eshvan 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, 1: 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, Family, 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 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 e leggi locali, 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

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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 più 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, “Sheluh.ei Erez. Israel,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 14: 1364). I 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 infallabilmente, et che quello tale che harà offerto et mancherà di farne lo sborscio al tempo ordinato sia tenuto [pagarlo] al quarto più della offerta che harà fatto, et li Dieci siano tenuti farne riscotere il tutto.” ACEF Box D 3.2.4, published by Cassuto in “I più antichi capitoli” 10: 33; Nove 13, 115v–18r; “Ordinationi et capitoli circa li Hebrei habitanti nel Ghetto di Firenze.” The bracketed word (pagarlo) is missing in the text edited by Cassuto from the ACEF but found in the version preserved in Nove 13. 7. Nove 17, 202r–v, “Nuovi cap[ito]li delli hebrei,” dated 13 November 1578, capitolo 3. 8. Ibid.: “Item. che tutti quelli hebrei a quali toccherà giornalmente ragunare la limosina p[er] li poveri bisognosi siano tenuti andare quando dal tavolaccino sarà [sic] lor data la cassetta, et no’ andando sia tenuto quel tale chene mancherà mettere in detta cassetta [lire] dua p[iccio]li del suo [fol. 202v] acciochè i poveri no’ patischino et no’ lemettendo la dito che lo farà detto caschi in pena di mezzo scudo e più delle due [lire] da applicarsi come di sop[ra].” 9. ACEF Box D 3.2.4; published in Cassuto, “I più antichi capitoli,” 9: 207, dated 30 August 1571. The governors were not granted the right 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 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. 15. Ibid. 16. For examples of this genre in the original Hebrew with English translation, see Abrahams, Tsava’ot ge’one Yisra’el. One of the earliest known texts of this genre (an eleventh-century ethical will) was already printed in Venice in 1544 (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 useful 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 important 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 265, 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 2da [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 3½ 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,” 101. 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 piccioli 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

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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. A simple 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 pink. as della ʧ`ʢ 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[ni]a 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 pink. as with the same dates as the “ʭʴʥʢʡ ʭʩʣʱʧ ʩʬʮʥʢ ʺʸʡʧ ʱʷʰʴ”; 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 Carità, 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 “ʤʴʥʷ di ʧ`ʢ” combining the Hebrew and Italian. 25. Perani and Rivlin, eds., Vita religiosa ebraica a Bologna nel Cinquecento. 26. “Walking the k. uppah” was an obligation in many confraternities. See Perani and Rivlin, eds., Vita religiosa ebraica 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 ebrei”; 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. 10r–15v is the document published by Cassuto as doc. IV, the capitoli of 8 January 1608; “I più antichi capitoli,” 10: 39. (These 38 capitoli are found in Nove 368 (Domande e sentenze 1607–9), fols. 374r–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 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 tsedak. ah 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 Compagnia della Misericordia, fol. 33v: “e piu si e havuto lire ventitre soldi doi da m. Raffael Alpelingho p[er] resto delle otto scudi che lasciò M[on]a Consola sua zia alla comp[agni]a p[er] spender’ qtt’ chi bisognava nel suo mortorio e l’avanzo fossi della ʤʸʡʧ H1 cioè [lire] 23–2.” 35. Nove 37, 34r. 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 Daniel’s 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 misericordia, the cantor/religious leader, a society, a layleader, a learned person, a non-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. Pink. as della Compagnia della Misericordia, fol. 17r. On the poveri bisognosi, see Pullan, “Charity and Poor Relief in Italian Cities,” and specifically in Florence (but for the early seventeenth century), Lombardi, Povertà maschile, povertà feminile. A survey of the changing concepts poor, needy and so on may be found in Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe. 40. Pink. as della Compagnia della Misericordia, fols. 22r, 23r, repeatedly, while on the same page the same scribe uses Hebrew honorific ʭʫʧ and the terms for a poor person, ʩʰʲ. 41. Ibid., fol. 24r, entry dated 24 June 1613, “[lire] 24 spese p[er] 3 famigli di spagnoli.” 42. Pink. as 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 (ʯʦʧ) who was paid by the society in 1611. Moreover, Modena states that he first

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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 dieci 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 (ʭʩʱʰʸʴ) in May 1612 (fol. 16r); and another son, Ventura di Abram Todesco, was a capo dieci in May 1614 (fol. 27r). 43. The first payment is found on fol. 17. Although most of the payments refer to o him as H . akham Finzi, he is explicitly called a doctor (medico) on fol. 34r: “Med[ic] Vita Finzi p[er] la pagha del mese ʸʩʩʠ [Iyyar] 21 [lire].” The Hebrew title H . akham (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 h.aver 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 Responsibility 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. Pink. as 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,” Alei 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 H . ayyim 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., Autobiography 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 historical introduction there by Adelman, “Leon Modena”; for Modena’s letters (in Hebrew), see Boksenboim, Letters 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 Ya’ak. ov, published in Venice in 1609. His

Notes to Chapter 10: Developing Jewish Community 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, 159v. 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. 54. 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. 59. Antonio, matriculated as fisico, AMS 14, 77r, April 1599; Francesco, matriculated as medico fisico, ibid., 132r, November 1603. Alexander, who entered the church: NM Testamenti 6781, 97r. 60. A number 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 ‘Einayyim. 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, 249ff and 161. Clearly, then, Jews who appear in our sources regularly as Mro are almost certainly not maestro but Magistro, either doctor or rabbi. 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 di 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., 145r). 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

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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 infelicità doglie e tormenti che sono scritte nel ʤʹʮ ʺʸʥʺ ʸʴʱ a fin che lo rendono dannato e condannato, in corpo et in anima in qto, et in l’altro mondo ʥ`ʧ.” 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 sixteenth 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 (Pink. as della Compagnia della Misericordia, fol. 24v, 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, ʺʥʲʶʮʠʡ (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., Autobiography 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 serious 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” (seh.orah) 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, 374r–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 più antichi capitoli,” 10: 72–73. 73. One of the earliest printed Hebrew books in Italy was a prayerbook, the Mah.zor Minhag Roma (Soncino and Casalmaggiore, 1486); the 1540 Bologna edition

Notes to Chapter 10: Developing Jewish Community was also self-proclaimedly “according to the Roman rite” (a copy of the Mah.zor 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 Shulh.an ‘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 Toaff, 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 ‘Fuorighetto.’” 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 più 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 Pink. as K. ehillat 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. ACEF, Confraternite: Doti di Beneficenza, Box C 1.1 folder dated 1630–1730, original pagination fol. 23r. That the compagnia delle donne was a permanent institution 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 ʺʥʴʥʷ). 81. ACEF, 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 Calò. The text postdates 1638 since it refers to the “Italiani ʣʲʥʥ” (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 Calò governator’ [sic] della compagnia delle donne.” The second governor, Lustra Peseri, may have been related

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Notes to Chapter 10: Developing Jewish Community to Agniolo Pesari, who was one of the officers of the main men’s society, the Gemilut H . asadim. 82. Perani and Rivlin, Vita religiosa 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 Bibliotheca 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 l’ebraismo,” 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, 363–64, 545n118, 546n127, 546n128, 547n144, 555n233 Abramo di Salamone da Mantova, 280, 515n169, 515n170 Abravanel (family): Cosimo I’s relationship with, 51, 99; in Ferrara, 51, 77, 99f, 229, 439n118. See also by name Abravanel, Benvegnita (Benvenida): banking charter for, 51, 100, 285, 446n39; and Eleonora di Toledo, 51–52, 70, 99, 446n37, 446n39; independent status of, 285; nobility of, 122, 454n128; as not New Christian, 517n190; patrilineage of, 517n190 Abravanel, Iacob: accused of being Marrano, 77, 439n118; household in Florence of, 100, 447n44; leaving Florence, 447n48; nobility of, 122; patrilineage of, 517n190; petition and right to bear arms, 52, 111; and privilege of 1551, 105; Tuscan banking charter of, 99; usury concession of, 111, 451n88 abstinence, sexual, 545n121 Achias, see under Attias

age: as categorizing tool, 133; governors of Florentine ghetto and, 258–59; of majority, 426n89; travel outside Florentine ghetto and, 301. See also age at first marriage; age differential in marriage age at first marriage: for elites, 346, 350; of Florentine Christian men, 335; in Florentine ghetto, 350–52; before ghettoization, 342–48; for men, 342–48; rabbinic literature on, 342; in Roman ghetto, 345, 539n50; status and, 344–45, 350–52; in Tuscany before ghettoization, 346–48; in Umbria, 344; urbanization and, 345; for women, 342–48, 380, 384, 538n39 age differential in marriage: in Florentine Christians, 335; in Florentine ghetto, 335, 352–53, 535n10; before ghettoization, 342–45; urbanization and, 345 Agnolo di Moise da Perugia, 287, 310, 380, 382, 505n88 Agnolo di Vitale da Camerino, 101, 176, 178–79, 190, 474n34, 474n36, 493n27 Albah, Jacob, 397, 560n51 Alcalein, Giuseppe, 528n78

592

Index Alessandro de’ Medici, xxi, 21, 51 Alexander III (pope), 520n5 Allegra (wife of Moise d’Abram Toro), 350–51, 352, 535n10 Allegra, Luciano, 536n23, 542n85, 543n89, 551n185 Allessandro Franceschini da Foligno, 405 alms-box, see tsedak. ah Alpelinc (Alpelingo, family): changes in name of, 470n145; circumcision of sons, 478n101; in governing elite of ghetto, 256; Iberian origin of, 450n80; large family size of, 360, 546n122; as matriculating into more than one guild, 317; as merchants, 230; mobility of, 321–23; travel outside ghetto by, 301, 523n32. See also Da Empoli (family); individual members under given name except as below Alpelinc, Giuseppe d’Iacob, 189; sons of, 232 Alpelinc, Iacob di Giuseppe, 125 Alpelinc, Moise di Giuseppe di Iacob (da Empoli), 189, 232, 321, 359, 457n155, 479n102, 545n113 Alpelingo, Laudadio di Moise (da Empoli), 128, 255, 316, 321f, 504n77, 523n32, 531n109 Altoviti (Altovitia), Antonio: presides over synod of 1573, 294–95; returns to Florence, xxii, 38, 59, 67f, 70, 82, 133 Amadio d’Ioseppe, 465n87 Amsterdam: Italian Jews forging links to Jews in, 149; New Christians returning to Jewish identity in, 4, 458n7; Portuguese New Christians settling in, 16, 105 Anabaptists: expulsion of, 17; New Christians influencing, 440n130; as unassimilable for Catholics, xviii Ancona: Ancona Affair, xxi, 75, 149; ghetto of, 9, 55, 57; as legal place of Jewish residence in papal states, 57, 71, 194, 431n16; Levantine and Ponentine merchants in, 106; papal privilege for merchants in, 106f; rabbi lacking in, 144; slave market in, 11; wealthy Jewish families in, 313 Anderson, Benedict, 30 Angelo di Zaccheria di San Miniato,

546n126; daughter Sarra’s dowry, 357, 360–64, 546n128; in Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants, 287, 323; house raided, 363; joint household with brother, 360, 542n80; wife’s dowry, 368, 549n165 Anghiari: citizenship requirement in, 453n122; Jewish bankers in, 101, 229–30, 493n27; located on map, 102 Ansiglia, Lione d’Isach, 255, 256 anti-Jewish sentiment: anti-Jewish influences on Francesco de’ Medici, 71–77 passim; Christian anti-Jewish discourse, 10; economic explanation for, 179; expulsion and ghettoization as not based on, 70, 95, 184, 191–92; in French Piedmont, 54; of Lodovico Martelli, 87, 194–95, 452n106, 480n124; of Medici officials, 70, 196; of Paul IV, 57; of Carlo Pitti, 194; preachers encouraging, 62, 94; racialization of Jews in Christian discourse, 72, 119; and religious art, 94 Antwerp: Florentine merchants in, 104; Italian Jews forging links to Jews in, 149; Portuguese New Christians settling in, 16, 105 apartments, auction of, 213–16, 215 apprenticeship, 326–27, 351 Aragon: conversion of Jews in, 15; expulsion of Jews from, 17, 106; Jewish bakeries and cemeteries in, 161 Aranci, Don Gilberto, 436n69 Arbiano, 274, 509n125 arbitration, 140–41, 270, 281–82, 497n8 Arditi, Bastiano, 193, 205–6, 480n118 Arezzo: attempt to expel Jews in, 110; Jewish bankers in, 99, 451n88; Jewish population of, 491n3; local statutes in, 266; located on map, 102; monte di pietà in, 180; Nove Conservatori approving decisions of, 274; prostitution regulated in, 483n20; Rabben family, 165; taxes paid by Jews in, 127–28, 457n153 arms: Campana rung to warn citizens to put away, 219, 244, 489n102; edicts banning, 21; Jews petitioning to bear, 111 Arone di Sabato, 535n10 art: Christian religious, 94; Jewish patron-

Index age of in ghetto by Ginevra Blanis, 382, 392 Arte dei Medici e Speziali, see Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants Arte dell Seta, see Silk Guild Ashkenazic identity, 401–2 Assis, Yom Tov, 468n119 Attias (Achias), Abram, 450n76 Attias (Achias), Ioseph, 109, 450n76 Auctions: of apartments in ghetto, 213–16, 215; by bankers, of pledges, 198; of concession to farm taxes, 510n129 Augustine, Saint, 398, 561n58 Austria: expulsion of Jews from, 71–72, 438n92; Vienna, 72 Avignon, 431n16 azimelle (azzimi, Passover matsot), 160, 195 Baba, Abraham, 271 badge, see segno (sign) Baer, Yitzhak, 459n8 bakeries, 161, 468n119 ban, see h.erem bankers: accused of violating charters, xv, 81f, 95–96, 172–78 passim, 459n14; in categorization of Tuscan Jews, 117; Christian and Jewish distinguished, 445n34; as capi versus communal leaders, 139– 40, 143; competition between families of, 175; and conversion, 235; debts to as not forgiven, 197–98, 481n134; earliest northern Italian Jews as, 97; exemption from segno for, 68, 101, 129–30, 139, 447n49; exemption from taxes for, 126ff; failing to accomplish Cosimo I’s goal, 434n52, 446n39; family and staff accompanying, 97, 128, 139; fees paid by, 126f; Florentine Christian banking families, 98; Florentine Jews as, 97–98; Florentine Jews prohibited from banking, 62, 98, 100, 139, 229, 306, 445n32, 447n48; fraud attributed to Jewish, 173; good character attributed to Jewish, 180–82; household size of, 228; Jewish leaders confronting unethical practices of, 142; Jewish populations as developing from, 100, 447n45; leaving the state, 228–30, 235, 293, 407; local support for Jewish, 179–80; minor

economic role of Jewish, 497n6; as permitted to live in Tuscany, 131; profit motive in expelling Jewish, 62, 196–98; protection from crimes of their associates, 293; status of Tuscan Jewish, 98– 100; at synods of Jewish leaders, 141; time given to leave, 440n135; Tuscan Jews first granted banking privileges, xxi, 98; “utility” of Jewish, 16, 96, 444n23; Venice grants charter to Jewish, 61, 62; violence against Jewish, 94. See also condotte banks: closing of Jewish banks, xv, 52, 80, 82, 119, 175; Cosimo I creating banks, 26. See also bankers; interest; monti de pietà Baroch (Baroccas), Abram di Daniello: and Abram Baru of Ancona, 532n132; in altercation in synagogue, 167; as broker, 327–28, 329; dual residence of, 528n78; father’s remarriage, 341; as governor of ghetto, 255, 329, 533n142; as living alone, 465n87; as not matriculating in guild, 308, 315, 316; as resident foreign merchant, 527n67 Baroch (Baroccas), Daniel or Daniello, 109, 327, 341, 450n76, 540n59 Baron, Salo Wittmayer, 423n46, 430n11, 454n132, 461n31 Battara, Pietro, 216 beggars, 10, 341 Bellafiore di Moyse d’Urielle, 367f, 528n76, 548n154, 548n155, 549n164, 551n196 Bellotia d’Emmanuele di Simone Montolmo, 356, 555n227 Benadusi, Giovanna, 22 Benascer, Moyse, 450n76, 465n93 Benedetto, Salamone de Rabi, 164 Benedict XIII (pope), 65 Bernardino da Feltre, 94, 195, 484n28 Bernardino of Siena, 544n110 Bertinoro, Obadiah da, 435n58 betrothal contracts, 41f, 354 Bettarbo (Bettarhò), David (Davitte), 253, 399, 516n180 Bibbiena, 101; located on map, 102 Bible: Italian translations of, 80, 440n134; Luther’s translation of, xvii, 80, 440n134; Yiddish translations of, 80, 440n133

593

594

Index Bireley, Robert, 424n57 birth control, 358–60, 544n110, 545n121 Blanis (de Blanis, Blandes, Branes, family): age at first marriage for men in, 350; dowries of, 356; in exclusive guilds, 317; large family size of, 360, 546n122; as matriculating into more than one guild, 317; personal names in, 555n228; as surname, 318. See also by name Blanis, Agnolo di Laudadio, 258, 356, 555n227 Blanis, Agnolo di Laudadio d’Agnolo di Laudadio, 350, 382 Blanis, David di Laudadio, 258 Blanis, Dolce di Laudadio, 356 Blanis, Ginevra d’Agnolo di Laudadio: birth date of, 555n227; and brother Laudadio, 259; guild membership of, 287, 317, 380; husband admitted to guild through, 310; as identified with patriline, 380; in Linen Guild, 287, 309, 518n200; nephew as beneficiary of, 350, 392; as patron of Jewish art, 382, 392; provisions in will for the poor, 162–63, 369f, 382f, 392ff; in Silk Guild, 287, 323, 518n200; surname of, 529n91; testament of, 162–63, 382–83, 389–95, 390–91, 555n230; women hired by, 331 Blanis, Iacob di Laudadio: in Calò goods inventory, 374; as disappearing from Florentine ghetto, 555n233; as governor of ghetto, 255, 258, 514n158; guild membership of governors, 316; incidents of violence of, 258–59; inheritance of, 360, 393, 557n21; as insulting the governors, 279–80, 397–98 Blanis, Laudadio d’Agnolo di Laudadio: 258f, 279, 323, 326, 504n74, 504n76, 557n21 Blanis, Laudadio di Moise: as banker, 103, 164, 447n48; Coen represented by, 432n23; death of, 256, 502n57; descendants as governors, 258–59; as doctor, 103, 164; dowries of family of, 356, 372; first great-grandson of, 350; in generation of scholars not replaced, 41; as governor of ghetto, 255, 258, 514n158; and granddaughter Ginevra’s testament,

554n226; guild membership and origins of, 450n80; guild membership of governors, 316; moves to Florence, 448n54; no complaints raised against, 191; rabbinic training of, 164–65, 469n134; in Silk Guild, 323; size of loans of, 392; sons predeceasing, 558n22; synagogue in home of, 165–66, 167; titles given in documents mentioning, 462n48; on vernacular prayers, 166, 469n141; will of, 360, 392–93, 541n77, 557n19, 557n21; working capital of, 557n18 Blanis, Laura di Salvatore, 356, 360, 546n125 Blanis, Lelio di Laudadio d’Agnolo, 541n77 Blanis, Raffaello di Laudadio d’Agnolo, 541n77 Blanis, Reche di Davit di Laudadio, 382, 393 Blanis, Reche di Salvatore di Laudadio, 382, 393, 557n21 Blanis, Salvatore di Laudadio, 258, 356, 360, 393, 504n73, 557n21 Blanis, Samuel, 103, 447n48 blasphemy, 272–73 boarding schools, 149, 158, 467n110 Board of Health (Uffitio della Sanità), 33, 299, 333 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 33, 93 Boksenboim, Yakov, 463n66 Bologna: expulsion of Jews from, 9, 431n16; ghetto of, 9, 55; Jewish confraternities in, 394; located on map, xxvi; population compared with Florence, 418n4; societies for Jewish women in, 404; synod of Jewish leaders in, 141; Tuscan Jewish bankers settling in, 98 Bondi family, see Buondi (Bondi) family Bonegi, Betta di Giusto, 187–88 Bonfil, Robert: on arbitration, 140; on Christians preventing full autonomy for Jews, 462n45; on expansion period, 15; on ghetto as paradox, 5; on Italian Jewish cultural community, 535n115; on Jewish community organization, 242, 409, 498n9; on Jewish otherness, 419n16; on Jewish self-consciousness, 458n7; on kosher-slaughterers, 468n116; on lay

Index leaders imposing ban, 561n63; on utility of Jewish bankers, 444n23 Boniface VIII (pope), 12 Bonsignori, Stefano, 163, 201, 202 books in Tuscan Jewish homes, 159, 161, 468n121 Boralevi, Alberto, 481n1 Bordeaux, 16 Borgo San Sepulcro, 99 Borgo S. Laurenzia, 99 Bossy, John, 24, 36, 150 Boswell, John, 9, 420n24 boundaries: confraternities as crossing, 28; fixing parish, 36–38, 91–92, 412; of Florence, 5; ghetto having clearly defined, 7, 14, 247, 411; ghettoization redefining between Christians and Jews, 4; between Jews and Christians, 190, 296, 324, 336; Jews moving across, 3, 120, 168, 356, 358, 419n8; of local communities, 242; redefining in Christian Europe, 2–3; for states, 4, 31–34 Brackett, John, 261, 513n148, 514n159, 514n167 bridges, 91f, 242 Brisegna (Brezegno), Bernardino, 60, 434n46 brit milah, see mohalim brokers (sensali), 324, 327–30, 529n52, 533n137, 533n140 Brokers’ Guild, 324, 328f brothels, 96, 204f, 207. See also prostitutes Brown, Judith C., 22, 528n75 Brucioli, Antonio, 80, 440n134 Bruna, Donna, 363, 546n134 Bruni, Leonardo, 460n17 Buonaccorsi, Buonacorso, 300, 523n30 Buondi (Bondi, family): in exclusive guilds, 317; as matriculating into more than one guild, 317, 529n89; as surname, 318. See also by name Buondi, Manuello di Moise, 280, 398, 537n31 Buondi, Moise: age at marriage of, 540n59; in Coen case, 56, 108–9, 257, 273, 450n81, 450n82, 469n143; marginality of 156, 256f, 465n87, 489n97; son Manuello, 280; on vernacular prayer books, 166, 469n140

Buondi, Sabatino di, 255, 279 Buondi, Sabatino di Beniamin (Bigniamino) di, 310, 316, 504n78, 516n180 Buondi, Sabatino di Michele, 311 Buondi, Sabato di Sabato, 316 Buonomini di San Martino, 370 Buontalenti, Bernardo, 210, 485n42, 499n23 burial (cemeteries), 150, 161, 163, 463n67 burial societies, 386, 393–96 butchers, 160–61 Cafsuto, Jacob, 563n77 Calabi, Donatella, 62, 435n59 Calò, Abram di Daniello, 326 Calò, Daniel d’Isac: age at marriage of, 351, 542n79; and Iacob di Laudadio Blanis, 279; as governor of ghetto, 373, 504n77, 551n187; guild membership of governors, 316; as heir to Isaac d’Elia, 359; marriage of, 371; and sister Dolce’s dowry, 373–75; wealth and status of, 318; wife Fiametta, 374, 551n196 Calò, Dolce, see Dolce d’Isacche d’Elia Calò Calò, Isacche (Isac) d’Elia: death of, 373, 551n188; dowry for daughter of, 373–75; estate of, 373–74, 551n186; as governor of ghetto, 255, 551n187; guild membership of governors, 316; heirs of, 359; and insulting the governors, 513n151; as sindaco, 505n88; petition for safe-conduct of, 111; wealth and status of, 318 Calò, Laura, 404, 563n81 Calò, Lazzero, 404, 563n81 Calò, Sarra, 404, 563n81 Camaiani, Lelio, 196, 290 Camaiani, Nofri, 196, 290 Camerino family, see Da Camerino family camerlingo (treasurer), 252, 270, 507n105 Campana, 219, 244, 489n102 cancellieri (chancellors), 252–53, 260, 270, 276 Canigiani, Bernardo, 76–77, 439n117 canon law: Christians working for Jews prohibited by, 69–70, 160, 186, 190, 293–94; employment of Jews by Christians in, 295–96; Jewish bankers not charged with violating, 471n6; Martelli on Jewish violations of, 195; in proceed-

595

596

Index ings against the Jews, 174, 184ff, 189, 191; selective enforcement of, 67; sexual contact between Jews and Christians prohibited by, 195, 476n64 Capitani di Parte Guelfa, 251 capitoli of Florentine ghetto: copies and drafts of, 261, 504n81, 513n150; of 1571, 246–49; of 30 July 1572, 250–53, 261, 262, 263, 266; of 1578, 276, 511n134; of 1595, 281, 516n174, 516n177; of 1609, 272–73, 278, 282f Cappello, Bianca, 205f, 275, 483n22 Carnesecchi, Pietro, 59, 78, 433n38 Caro, Joseph, 266, 401, 506n96 Casa Pia, 65–66, 436n69 Cassandro, Michele, 444n26 Cassuto, Umberto: ancestor of, 563n77; on Laudadio de Blanis, 469n134; catalogue of Jewish community archive, 507n106; on constitution of Florentine Jews, 460n25; on Cosimo I’s change of approach, 52, 58, 429n4, 433n32; on Cosimo I’s quest for grand-ducal title, 433n42; on expansion of Florentine ghetto, 482n4; on Florentine ghetto life as obscure and miserable, 5–6; on Servadio Greco, 449n68; on inscription over entrance of Florentine ghetto, 458n163; on Jewish population of Florence in fifteenth century, 460n21; on Jewish residential patterns, 463n73; on Jews with surnames, 318, 529n92; on marriage contracts, 542n87; on privilege of 1551, 105f; on rabbis in Florence, 144, 163, 468n130; sources of, 428n130 Castelfranco, 186 Castiglia, Benedetto, 255, 315 Castiglione Fiorentino: accusations against Jews in, 191; Jewish households in, 110; located on map, 102 Castrocaro: Jewish bankers in, 99; Jewish households in, 109; located on map, 102 Catani, Alessandro di Giovanfrancesco, 182 catasto, 33, 227, 335, 345, 456n147, 491n11 Caterina de’ Ricci, 422n39, 438n101 Catholic Church: in building Medici state, 30–32, 132; church attendance in building sacral community, 150; in Florentine

ghettoization, 66–71; Jesuits, 3, 65, 273; Medici state as not allowing church to control the Jews, 199; as territorially defined, 34. See also canon law; Catholic Reformation; convents; Inquisition; papacy; parishes Catholic Reformation: in building Medici state, 32–39, 133, 412; Cosimo I’s reign coinciding with, 52–53; and CounterReformation, 436n72; in Florentine ghettoization, 66–67, 70, 221; scholarship focusing on, 2–3; and women’s participation in religious life, 14. See also Council of Trent celibacy, 338f cemeteries, 150, 161, 163, 463n67 certificates of health, 299, 333, 522n23 Cesena, 54 Cetona, 116f, 497n7 charitable loan-banks, see monti de pietà charitable societies, 163. See also confraternities; consororities charity, see tsedak. ah Charles V (emperor), xxi, 21, 51, 74 charters: communal, 138f, 143, 246; for Florentine Jewish bankers, 97–98, 138; Jewish bankers accused of violating, xv, 81f, 95–96, 172–73, 178, 459n14; in Jewish settlement, 97; for Portuguese merchants, 105; status of Jews not covered by, 118. See also condotte chastity, 294, 339, 348, 352, 383 Cherubino di Sabato da Palestrino, 504n78 childhood mortality, 359 Chiusi, 116–17, 452n109; located on map, 102 Christianity: anti-Jewish discourse of, 10; bachelorhood tolerated by, 346, 539n54; disputes between Christians and Jews, 141; Eucharist, 31, 36, 72, 89; in Florentine ghettoization, 173–74; Jewish disparagement of, 78; proselytization in Florentine ghetto, 271f, 508n112; religious boundaries as of increasing concern in, 3; sense of community among Christians, 31; as torn between conversion and expulsion, 18–19; as unarticulated norm, 88; as woven into Tuscan

Index society, 89. See also canon law; Catholic Church; Catholic Reformation; confessionalization; convents; conversion; festival and holy days; heresy; Protestant Reformation Ciardini, Avv. Marino, 459n14 Circumcisers, see mohalim citizenship, 119, 140, 254, 453n122, 501n52 Cividale, 17 class: class endogamy, 543n97; difference as sign of order, 206; Florentine ghetto lacking class structure, 283–84; Jews and class structure of Florence, 312–14; mobility of working-class Christian women, 523n37; and residential patterns, 152; ruling class consolidation in Florentine ghetto, 314–23; status levels in city of Florence defined, 313. See also elites; middle class; poor, the Clement VII (pope), 248 Clement VIII (pope), 440n127 Clemenza di Vitale di Pisa, 528n76 clerical dress, 20, 424n61 clocks, 220, 490n111, 490n113 Coen, Isaia: accused of being a Marrano, 55–56, 108–9, 145, 257, 273, 432n23, 450n78, 469n143; vernacular prayer book of, 166, 469n140 Coen, Samuel, 450n76 Cohen, Shaye J. D., 458n7 Cohen, Thomas, 84 Cohn, Samuel, Jr., 422n39, 555n229 Colle, 99, 127; located on map, 102 Colon, Joseph, 144, 461n42 Colorni, Vittore, 453n122 community: broadening definition of, 146–50, 408; the church as, 31; Florentine ghetto as model, 413; Florentine ghetto as semi-autonomous, 7, 12, 200, 243, 273, 288, 290–91, 410–11; Jewish sociality and gendered, 153–58; Jews’ sense of commonality, 31, 147–48; marriage building Jewish, 336–37, 385; as not led by rabbis in Tuscany, 143–45; organic development attributed to Jewish, 242, 409, 498n9; parish as locus of Christian, 30, 32; premodern Jews seen as living in, 135, 136–37; residential considerations

and, 150–53; rituals in expression of, 89, 151; unmediated relationship of Jews and duke, 145–46; women’s participation in, 147, 462n65. See also k. ahal (k. ehillah); religious community Compagnia delle Donne, 404, 563n80 compagnie, 138, 153, 460n15 Concina, Ennio, 62–63 condotte: for Jewish bankers, 97–99 passim, 104, 126, 138–40, 171, 174, 285, 293f; Jewish bankers accused of violating, 171, 175–76, 199; Jews negotiating, 140 confessio dotis, 354, 543n89, 549n165 confessionalization: ghettoization and, 3, 30, 39, 411, 412; state-building and, 2–3, 30; of Tuscan Jews, 401–2 confraternities: centralization weakening, 25, 28, 37; as contact between government and citizens, 251; Jewish (h.evrot), 163, 386, 392–96 passim; power and order represented spatially by chapels of, 92; record books of, 507n106; revised statutes for, 26–27, 29; social and political relationships built in terms of, 118; suppression of, 152–53; women excluded from, 404; women participating in, 147. See also burial societies; Compagnia delle Donne; consororities; Misericordia of the Jews of Florence Consola di Manuello di Giuseppe (Alpelingo/da Empoli), 128, 357f, 396, 559n34, 559n36 consororities, 147, 404, 564n83 Constantinople, xxvi, 105 Conti, Giuseppe, 203, 484n32 contraception, 358–60, 544n110, 545n121 convents: as alternative to marriage, 338f; as communities, 148; converts entering, 339; enclosure of, 12–14, 411, 421n32, 422n34; impoverishment in Prato, 73–74, 438n101; power and order represented spatially by, 92; tax paid on entering, 127; in Tuscan economy, 298. See also Periculoso conversion: in Catholic Reformation program, 53; by educated Tuscan Jews, 405, 564n84; forced conversion, xvi, 17, 107, 231, 494n37; ghettoization and, 18–19,

597

598

Index 64–65, 66, 221, 411; of Iberian Jews, 15; love matches as cause of, 535n114; of Paul, 398, 561n58; as response to edict of expulsion, 228, 231–35, 407; rewards for converts, 234; toleration of Jews and, 19, 94; of Vitale di Salamone da Cascia, 256, 436n71, 502n59; wealthy Jewish families among conversos, 313. See also Casa Pia; New Christians (Marranos) Convertite, the, 483n26 Cortona: accusations against Jews in, 191; conversion of Jews in, 234f, 496n54; Jewish bankers in, 99; Jewish households in, 110; located on map, 102 Cosimo I de’ Medici: and Benvegnita Abravanel, 51–52, 70, 99, 446n37; administrative reforms of, xix, 22, 25; alternatives available to, 20; on Arezzo’s attempt to expel Jews, 110; becomes duke, xxi, 21, 51; building the Medici state, 1–2, 21–30; in campaign against Huguenots, 59, 78; and Catholic Reformation, 37–38, 52–53, 412; change of policy toward Jews of, 51–52, 57, 70–71, 131; church becoming more powerful in later years of, 295; and Council of Trent, 35, 52, 65, 131; Cum nimis absurdum ignored by, 55; death of, xxii; direct role in governance of corporate units, 289; enclosure of convents by, 13f; financing Florentine ghetto, 208–9, 485n35; as first to create ghetto after Pius V’s Romanus pontifex, 9, 58; Florentine Jews as confident of support of, 55–57; Grand-Ducal title sought by, 58–61, 74, 132, 200; and guild statute reformulation, 23, 27, 123, 126, 307; Jewish banks closed by, xv, 52, 80, 82, 119, 175; marriage to Camilla Martelli, xxii, 73; papal authority resisted by, 55, 431n18; parish systematization supported by, 91–92; Pius V’s support cultivated by, 57, 58–59, 70–71; privilege of 1551, 52, 104–8, 114f; and sindaci, 261–62, 267, 505n84; territorial expansion under, xxi, 21; as tolerating Jews, 51, 131, 471n9; transferring power to Francesco, 21, 71, 73, 200, 241, 438n91; unmediated relationship of Jews and,

145–46; and Ventura da Perugia, 101, 257, 447n50 Council of Trent: in Catholic Reformation, 3; on clerical dress, 20, 424n61; as context of ghettoization, 12, 35, 52, 65, 132f, 412; convent life reformed by, 12, 422n39; Cosimo I and, 35, 52, 65, 131; on episcopal residency, 34–35; final session of, xxi; kinship networks weakened by, 24; on parishes, 35–38, 132, 411; as response to Protestant challenge, 436n72 Council of 200, 26 Counter-Reformation, 436n72. See also Catholic Reformation courts, rabbinic, 272, 497n8, 507n107 courts of law: attempts to keep Jews away from state, 140, 281–82, 399; Jews turning to state, 270; Otto di Guardia e Balía, 42, 182, 232, 242, 249f, 277, 374; rationalization of, 250; women in, 287, 524n45 Cremona, 324 Crescenzio di Salamon d’Orta, 504n78 crimes: Jew imprisoned for, 75, 175, 233, 257, 433n15, 470n144; Jews accused of, 81, 144, 174, 191f; Jews pardoned for their supposed, 130, 161, 191–92; Pitti collecting evidence on, 194f criminal court, see Otto di Guardia e Balía crypto-Judaism, 105, 432n25, 449n64. See also New Christians (Marranos) cuius regio, eius religio, 17, 35 cultural relativism, 93 Cum nimis absurdum (Paul IV): on entrance and exit for ghettos, 13, 422n38; ghettos required by, 9, 53–58 passim; issuance of, xxi; Jews employing Christian servants prohibited by, 187, 294f; on one synagogue for ghetto, 247, 291; segno required by, 53, 82 Cuneo, 341, 345 customs taxes, 126ff Cyprus, xxvi, 74f Da Camerino family, 98, 356 Dacterus (Dattero) di Prospero d’Agnolo, 357, 376–77

Index D’Addario, Arnaldo, 37, 433n44, 497n5 Da Empoli (family), see under given names except as below. See also Alpelinc (Alpelingo, family) Da Empoli, Dorina (Delvora): Christians working for, 160, 189ff, 467n113; conversion of nephew of, 232; forename of, 478n100; as head of household, 498n17; imprisonment of, 518n195; independent status of, 286; sons of, 246, 479n102, 545n113 Da Empoli, Giuseppe di Moise, 161, 321f, 363, 479n102, 523n32 Da Empoli, Salamone di Moise: books confiscated from, 161; in da Empoli family, 321; goods inventoried and sequestered, 363; as governor of ghetto, 245f, 498n17, 504n77, 531n109; mother Dorina da Empoli, 479n102, 498n17; travel by, 322, 523n32 Da Fano, Abramo d’Isach, 285 Da Fano, Ioseph di Leone, 176 Da Fano, Isach, 285 Da Fano family, 285, 471n13 Daniel di Vitale da Siena, 364, 547n143 Daniello di Moise di Giuseppe (Alpelingo), 128, 357f, 396, 457n155, 559n36 Da Perugia, Ricca, 286, 518n194 Da Pisa (family): bank at Pescia of, 185–86, 477n77; bank at San Giovanni of, 101; banking charter granted to, 99; chapel in home of, 159; dowries of, 355–56; Jewish scholars patronized by, 144; as leaving Tuscany, 98, 228–29. See also by name Da Pisa, Abramo, 101, 285 Da Pisa, Clemenza di Vitale d’Isaaco, 543n94 Da Pisa, Daniel, 141, 248f, 499n26 Da Pisa, Davitte, 504n78 Da Pisa, Fiametta, 99, 188, 285, 478n95 Da Pisa, Isaac, 294 Da Pisa, Isaia, 294 Da Pisa, Laudadio d’Abramo, 176, 229 Da Pisa, Leone d’Abramo, 175–85 passim, 229, 473n33 Da Pisa, Mose d’Abramo, 229 Da Pisa,Yeh.iel (Vitale) Nissim di Simone:

Abram d’Agnolo di San Miniato circumcised by, 546n127; children of, 493n26; on ethics of moneylending, 142–43; in generation of scholars not replaced, 41; Giuseppe di Manuelle dal Pontadera circumcised by, 232; grandsons of Moise Alpelinc circumcised by, 478n101; as mohel, 159–60, 229; moves to Ferrara, 229; as not converting, 405; records used for confirming ages, 343; register of circumcisions of, 455n143; sons of Moise Alpelinc circumcised by, 457n155, 479n102, 545n113; treatise on moneylending of, 142, 462n46 Da Rieti (family): banking charter granted to, 99, 446n39; banking establishments in 1566, 101; banking privileges revoked, 176–77, 471n11; chapel in home of, 159; dowries of, 355–56; exemption from ghettoization of, 113; exemption from segno of, 457n162; fees paid by, 127; in governing elite of ghetto, 502n60; Jewish scholars patronized by, 144; Jewish servants of, 325, 532n120; large family size of, 360, 546n122; as leaving Florentine ghetto, 384; as leaving Tuscany, 98, 228–29; as not participating in ghetto government, 318, 502n60; as returning to Pisa, 229, 320, 366–67; as returning to Siena, 229, 492n21; as settling in Ferrara, 229, 493n23; as surname, 318. See also by name Da Rieti, Agnolo di Laudadio, 90f, 95–96, 171, 176–78, 196–97, 229, 471n11, 486n56, 492n20, 492n21 Da Rieti, Dattero di Laudadio, 229, 493n23 Da Rieti, Dattolo di Laudadio, 229 Da Rieti, Laudadio di Moise, 456n150 Da Rieti, Raffaello di Laudadio, 229, 493n23 Da Rieti, Rosa, 493n23 Da Rieti, Simone di Laudadio, 176 Da San Miniato (family), 98 David da Montalcino, 543n94 Davit d’Iacob da Poppi, 103, 278–79, 363, 448n56, 513n152 Davitte (Davit) di Falcone, 255, 279, 315, 316, 504n78, 513n154, 529n90

599

600

Index death-bed confession, 389, 557n13 De Blanis, see under Blanis Decameron (Boccaccio), 33, 93 decima, 127, 252 defense of the Jews, 176–83 De Susannis, Marquardo, 471n7 Dianora (di Iuditta Orsi and Gratiadio di Ventura Leucci), 368, 379, 381, 549n163, 554n220, 554n221 Diaz, Furio, 71, 438n91 Diogo, Pires, 432n23 Diovaglia (Dio voglia), Cassandro, 559n42 Diovaglia (Dio voglia), Iacobbe, 399 disease: Board of Health, 33, 299, 333; certificates of health, 299, 333, 522n23; disorder and, 206; distinguishing signs signifying, 53; Florentine state seeking to prevent outbreak of, 211; ghetto life leading to, 64; Jews associated with, 71; lepers, 10, 12; mobility associated with, 91, 333; poverty and, 74; travel permits for preventing spread of, 333. See also plague divorce, 233, 267, 270, 353–54 doctors: de Blanis brothers, 103, 164; as exempt from segno, 164; as exempt from sumptuary codes, 121f; Vita Finzi, 397; and governors of ghetto, 258; in Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants, 312; guilds retaining, 397; Jewish, 16, 96, 99, 125; medical schools, 149, 158; rabbinical and medical training associated, 164; status of, 320; at synods of Jewish leaders, 141; utilitarian tolerance of, 16, 96; Vitale de Salamone da Cascia, 280, 397 Dolce d’Isacche d’Elia Calò, 359, 373–75 Dolcina d’Uriel d’Isaia, 369 Dorina, Donna, see Da Empoli, Dorina dowries, 353–58; age differential driving price up, 536n25; Ginevra Blanis leaving fund for poor Jewish girls, 162–63, 369f, 382f, 392ff; changes in strategies affecting women, 379–83; Christian versus Jewish sizes of, 355; communal funds for, 370, 386, 404; Compagnia delle Donne fund for, 404; confessio dotis, 354, 543n89, 549n165; and counter-dowry (donora), 366; delaying payment of, 373;

of the elite, 356–57, 366–69; in Florentine ghetto, 365–85; before ghettoization, 355–58; governors of ghetto and, 267; for illegitimate daughters, 369; Jewish community built by, 385; Jewish custom requiring, 339; Jews devolving wealth through, 338, 536n23, 542n85, 551n185; men attempting to control, 381, 383; of middle class, 370–79, 384; Monte delle Dote, 342, 354, 360, 543n90; mothers’ and daughters’ compared, 368, 549n158; overextension of resources for, 372, 373–75; of the poor, 357–58, 366, 369–70; for servants, 537n28; status and, 313, 354–84 passim, 528n76; stipulations in marriage contracts on, 375–82; taxation on, 127f, 457n155 Dragoni, Francesco di Girolamo, 185 dress codes: as ordering system, 19–20, 92; resistance to, 82. See also segno (sign); sumptuary codes eating: Christians with Jews, 190; eating and drinking establishments, 304–6, 352, 542n81; kosher food, 160–61, 165, 305, 386, 468n116 Edict of Expulsion for Jews of Tuscany (26 September 1570), 46–50; choice of expulsion or ghettoization in, xv; conversion as not goal of, 65; conversion as response to, 228, 231–35, 407; courses of action in response to, 228; as deliberate act of early modern state, 6f, 132, 191; drafts of, 60, 184–85, 470n4; in ducal public relations system, 119–20; generalizing about crimes of Jews, 174; issuance of, xxii, 1; on Jewish bankers violating their charters, xv, 81f, 95–96, 172–73; on Jews employing Christian women, 173; as redefining religious, communal, and spatial boundaries, 1; terms for Jews in, 118–19; text used in this study, 417n2; time given Jews to leave in, 440n135; twofold strategy of, 81, 172–74; verbal framing of, 81–82 Edict of Ghettoization (31 July 1571): conversion as not goal of, 65; and Cum nimis absurdum, 13, 82–87, 420n22; dis-

Index order as concern of, 244–45; in ducal public relations system, 119–20; on gatekeeper for ghetto, 220, 244, 486n55; ghetto as administrative unit for, 244; informing Jews of the ghetto of, 245; issuance of, xvi, xxii, 81, 218–19; on Jews as not easily recognized, 82, 128; as justifying and interpreting ghettoization, 82; per capital tax imposed by, 224–25; rhetoric of confusion in, 82f, 95, 119, 122, 128; on segno, 82–84, 441n139; on Sienese Jews, 231; terms for Jews in, 118–19; on università delli ebrei, 133–34, 250, 420n22; verbal framing of, 81 education: Ginevra Blanis leaving funds for poor boys, 162–63, 382f, 392ff; boarding schools, 149, 158, 467n110; in Florence, 162; in homes, 159; medical schools, 149, 158; schools in traditional Jewish communities, 386; yeshivot, 149, 467n110. See also teachers; tutors “Egyptians,” 11 Eleonora di Toledo, xxi, 51–52, 70, 99, 446n37, 446n39 elites: age of marriage in, 346, 350; characteristics of Florentine, 313, 528n75; Christian women as nuns, 339; definition of Florentine Jewish, 313; dowries of, 356–57, 366–69; of ghetto, 230, 235, 255, 258–60; government careers for, 259–60; large family size for, 360, 546n122; in Medici state, 22–26 passim, 118; in provincial militia, 22–26 passim; in regional culture, 22; of Tuscan Jews, 101; women in, 284, 287. See also nobility; patricians Emanuelle (Manuel) di Giuseppe (Ioseph) Alpelingo, 103, 112, 232–34, 357, 448n55, 495n46, 496n51 emigration visas, 231, 494n36 employment of Christians by Jews: canon law as prohibiting, 69–70, 160, 187, 190, 293–94; of Christian women, 173, 294; Cum nimis absurdum on, 187, 294f; by Jewish elite, 186–91; Jews defending themselves regarding, 178; Medici state collecting evidence on, 160, 184f; Paul IV on, 293–94

employment of Jews by Christians, 295–96 Empoli: accusations against Jews in, 185–89 passim; Iacob di Giuseppe Alpelinghi, 125; Emanuel d’Ioseph, 112; forced baptism in, 494n37; government of, 274, 510n126; inventory of Jewish property at, 161, 468n121; Jewish bankers in, 99, 101, 229–30, 493n27; Jewish bankers supported in, 179–80; Jewish presence in 1530s, 100; Jewish residential patterns before ghettoization, 152, 463n73; Jews in guilds in, 123, 455n135; local statutes in, 266, 505n92; located on map, 102; marriage linking Tuscan Jews with those of, 336; monte di pietà in, 180, 198, 474n42, 475n46; Nove Conservatori approving decisions of, 274; pigs running wild in, 266; population multiplier for, 237; taxes paid by Jews in, 128 Endelman, Todd, 458n7 endogamy, 367, 543n97 England: expulsion of Jews from, 423n41; Jews as tax collectors in, 292; Jews settling in, 17; London, xxvi, 16, 105; Manesseh ben Israel argues for readmission of Jews to, 19 episcopal residency, 34–35 episcopal synod of 1573, 294–96 estate taxes, 127, 456n148 estimo delle teste, 127 ethical wills, 392, 557n16 ethnicity of Jews: differentiation in Florentine ghetto, 400–402; in governors of ghetto, 248–49; official split in, 519n211; and religious rites, 166f. See also Italian Jews; Levantine Jews; Spanish Jews “ethnic purity,” 14 Etsi doctoris (Benedict XIII), 65 Eucharist, 31, 36, 72, 89 excommunication: Christians controlled by threats of, 498n10. See also h.erem exile, political, 11, 23 expulsion: expulsion/reintegration model, 15–18; ghettoization as alternative to, 18, 130–31, 195–96, 411; princes’ right of, 471n7; of gypsies, 171; prostitutes, 204. See also expulsion of Tuscan Jews expulsion of Tuscan Jews: 171–200; anti-

601

602

Index Jewish sentiment as not basis of, 70, 95, 184, 191–92; as deliberate act of state, 6f, 132, 191; ex post facto explanation of, 192; of Florentine Jews before 1571, 10–11, 51, 194; ghettoization as alternative to, 130–31, 195–96; leading to leaving the state, 228–31, 407; Medici state benefiting from, 199–200; Pitti’s role in, 193–98; postponements of, 211; profit motive in, 62, 196–98; refugees resettling in Tuscany, 228, 492n18; time given to leave, 440n135. See also Edict of Expulsion for Jews of Tuscany; Edict of Ghettoization fairs and markets, 298, 326 Falcone, Lione, 535n10 family names, see surnames family planning, 358–60, 544n110, 545n121 Fano, 98 Fasano Guarini, Elena, 32, 427n111 Fedeli, Vincenzo, 261–62, 505n84 Ferdinand I (emperor), 71 Ferdinando de’ Medici: xxi, xxii, 295 Ferrara: Abravanel family in, 51, 77, 99f, 229, 439n118; Canigiani as Florentine ambassador to, 76–77, 439n117; Da Rieti family settling in, 229, 493n23; general assembly of Jewish magnates in, 78, 143; ghetto of, 229, 432n31; Jewish courts authorized in, 498n9; Jewish scholarship and art in, 398; located on map, xxvi; New Christians returning to Judaism in, 73; segno instituted in, 77; societies for Jewish women in, 404; synagogue in, 158; wealthy Jewish families in, 313 festival and holy days: cleaning streets before, 266; Jewish banks to close on, 294; Jews accused of opening banks on, 172, 178, 183ff, 190; Jews of Florentine ghetto prohibited from peddling wares on, 249; Jews prohibited from doing business on, 295. See also Sabbath Fiametta d’Abraham (Abram) di Simone Spagnuolo, 370–71, 374, 551n196 Fiesole, 428n122 Fifth Lateran Council, 54 Figline, 186

Figo, Azariah, 561n60 fines: for blasphemy, 272–73; for disquiet in synagogue, 247–48, 400; for failing to keep Florentine ghetto clean, 275; Florentine ghetto Jews refusing to pay, 276; for going out to eat and drink on Sabbath, 304; governors collecting only for most serious offenses, 277–78, 512n142; for infractions of ghetto regulations, 252, 261, 263; for insulting governors of ghetto, 278, 281, 512n145; for not wearing segno, 69, 129, 139, 244f Finzi, Davit di Raffaello da Reggio, 176, 181, 187–88 Finzi, Vita (H . ayyim), 397, 399, 560n43, 560n44 Finzi, Zaccaria di Raffaello (Graziadio), 288, 361, 364, 478n91, 493n28, 529n91, 546n128, 547n142 Fioghi, Fabiano, 405 Fiorina di Moise da Perugia, 288, 519n208 Fiorina da Citerna, 285 first-cousin marriages, 367 Flaminia di Sabatuccio di Pellegrino Romano, 371 Flanders, 104, 149 Florence: —economic activity in: Christian bankers, 98, 180; Levantine merchants in, 52, 76, 104–9; monte di pietà in, 139, 196, 208–9, 447n48, 475n46; Portuguese New Christians settling, 64, 435n61; silk industry in, 21, 23 —layout and neighborhoods of: gonfaloni, 27, 29, 32f, 425n77, 427n103, 427n107; Mercato Vecchio, 202, 203, 207, 211, 220, 297; processional route of the Medici, 24, 425n77; urban renewal plans for, 198, 307. See also parishes —religious life in: Casa Pia, 65–66, 436n69; convents, 13, 422n34; episcopal synod of 1573, 2949–6; return of Archbishop Altoviti, xxii, 38, 59; synagogues before ghettoization, 165–68 —sociopolitical characteristics of: patronclient relationships in, xix, 20–27 passim, 69, 118, 249; population, 1552–1672, 1, 223– 24, 224, 418n4; ruling class of, 313, 528n75

Index Florentine ghetto: —class structure and status in: as at bottom of social hierarchy, 296, 323; elite of, 230, 235, 255, 258–60; surnames and status in, 318, 319, 323 —construction and physical characteristics of: auction of apartments in, 213–16, 215; expansion in seventeenth century, 201, 203, 482n4; gatekeeper of, 66, 217, 220, 244, 486n55; gates of, 203, 218–19, 220, 297, 486n55; inscription over entrance of, 130–31, 458n163; location of, 1, 201–3; on plan of Florence by Stefano Bonsignori, 202; prostitutes and brothels near, 203, 207; as rental property, 7, 213–18; sewage system, 211–12, 487n62; shops, 214, 286–87, 297–98, 400, 488n80 —establishment of: as alternative to expulsion, 130–31, 195–96; anti-Jewish sentiment not basis of, 70, 95, 184, 191–92; church’s role in, 66–71, 221; conversion and, 66, 436n71; Cosimo I’s quest for Grand-Ducal title and, 59–61, 132, 433n41, 433n44; Council of Trent as context of, 12, 35, 52, 65, 132f; as deliberate act of state, 6f, 132, 191; explanation of ghettoization, xvi–xix, 8–15; as first state to ghettoize Jews after papal bulls, 9, 58; location for Jews provided by, 1, 7, 32–39, 132, 411, 413; Medici state benefiting from, 199–200, 411, 413; profit motive in, 62, 196–98, 215, 219–21; rhetoric of confusion in, 83–87, 95, 119, 128f; utility in explanation of, 62, 434n52 —ethnicity and: ethnic differentiation in, 400–402, 519n211; foreign Jews restricted in, 388–89, 556n9; Levantine Jews in, 402, 519n211 —gender and: patriarchy as intensified in, 284, 384–85, 413; women’s status reduced in, 303, 353, 383. See also gender —government of: per capita tax on residents of, 224–25, 225, 500n40, 510n129; as republic, 253, 314, 501n50; as semiautonomous community, 7, 12, 200, 243, 273, 288, 290–91, 410–11; as Università, 133–34, 250, 420n22 —as new Tuscan commune: as adminis-

trative unit, 244–46, 408; other communes and towns compared with, 243, 273–75, 297 —regulations of, 250–83 passim, 511n134, 516n174, 516n177 (see capitoli of Florentine ghetto) Florentine Jews: bankers among, 97–98, 139, 459n14; banking as prohibited for, 62, 98, 100, 139, 229, 306, 445n32, 447n48; cap on population of 1463, 139; census of 1567, 38, 69, 151, 340; census of 1570, 100; as community, 138–39; as confident of Cosimo I’s support, 55–57; contemporary Jewish community, 6; expulsion orders against, 10–11, 51, 194; imbalance of men and women, 340; incomes of, 217–18; inquisitor interrogating, 42; invitation to settle of 1430, 97; occupations of, 217, 489n94; as percentage of population, 5; population of, 1552–1672, 223–24, 224; public office prohibited to, 260, 313; rabbis among, 144–45, 162, 163–65; refugees outnumbering original population, 228; religious life before ghettoization, 162–63; residential patterns of, 151–52; and return of Archbishop Altoviti, 59, 67; segno reinstated for, 59, 67–70, 82–83; self-government as absent before ghettoization, 137–43; social relationships before ghettoization, 404–5; state-building and status of, 88–134; verbal harassment of prohibited, 69, 120, 278, 512n146. See also Florentine ghetto Foiano: conversion of Jews in, 234f; Jewish households in, 110; located on map, 102 fondaci, 63, 435n54, 435n59. See also funduqs food, see eating forced conversion, xvi, 17, 107, 231, 494n37 foreignness: as categorizing tool, 133; foreigners as exempt from sumptuary codes, 121f; Jewishness versus, 118; Jewish women perceived as foreigners, 465n97; Jews as foreigners, 123–26; nationality distinguished from, 63 Forlini, Benedetto, 215 Foucault, Michel, 68

603

604

Index Fourth Lateran Council, 20, 53, 67, 430n8 France: Avignon, xxvi, 431n16; Bordeaux, 16; charters for Jews in, 98; Huguenots, 59, 78; Jews as tax collectors in, 292; Jews settling in, 17; New Christians settling in, 105; Paris, xvii, xxvi; residential segregation in Piedmont, 54; St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, xxii Francesco de’ Medici: anti-Jewish influences on, 71–77 passim; Abram Baroch petitioning, 327f; becomes Grand Duke, xxii, 433n42; Canigiani’s letters to, 76–77, 114; and Bianca Cappello, 205, 483n22; in change in policy toward Jews in 1569, 113–18, 131; and the church, 59, 295; Cosimo I transferring power to, 21, 71, 73, 200, 241, 438n91; as cracking down on opposition, 25; and Agnolo di Laudadio da Rieti, 90f, 95–96, 171, 176–78, 196–97; death of, xxii; education in Madrid, xxi, 72; on Jews expelled from papal states in Siena, 71, 74, 114; Jews invited to Livorno by, 330; marriage to Giovanna d’Austria, xxi, 71–72, 295, 433n42; Martelli asks about Jews settling in Volterra, 114–15, 117, 452n106, 453n112; on New Christians, 72–73; Pitti enjoying patronage of, 196, 290; Prato’s request for aid rejected by, 74; presenting himself as pious Christian ruler, 132; priors of Chiusi request that Prospero d’Isach stay, 116–17, 452n109; prostitution policy of, 204; Tedaldi’s report on Pistoia to, 251 Franciscans, 94 Frankfurt, xxvi, 54 Frattarelli Fischer, Lucia, 432n25, 435n61, 448n63, 449n64, 450n78 friendship: in Florentine social order, 25; in Jewish social networks, 149, 167f, 326; between Jews and Christians, 112f. See also Jewish-Christian coexistence Friuli, 17, 24 funduqs, 63–64, 435n57, 435n58 gabelle, 127f, 252, 355, 456n150, 543n89 Gabrielle di Mona Ricca, 465n87 Gabriello di Giuseppe, 351, 535n10, 542n78

Gabriello d’Isache, 191 gemilut h.asadim, see Misericordia of the Jews of Florence Gemma (wife of Gabriello di Giuseppe), 351f, 535n10, 542n78 gender: as categorizing tool, 133; and communal relationships, 147, 148–49; in Cosimo I’s state-building, 27–28; difference as sign of order, 206; exclusion of women from public life, 11–12, 421n28; gendered communities in Florentine ghetto, 403–4; ghettoization as gendered process, 2, 44; ghettoization redefining roles, 306, 408, 410; governing authority as gendered, 284; Jewish sociality and gendered community, 153–58; in Medici social categorization, 29; and mobility, 301, 303; occupations segregated by, 489n94; patriarchy as intensified in Florentine ghetto, 384–85, 413; segno as gendered, 67, 83, 129; sumptuary codes and, 121. See also gendered space; men; women gendered space: common rooms for women in Florentine ghetto, 268–69, 506n101; division of space in synagogues, 467n108; Florentine ghetto as feminized space, 13–14; gendering of public places, 92 Genoa: of Jews from, 57; Jews reentering, 424n52; located on map, xxvi; population compared with Florence, 418n4 Gentile, Dona, 285–86 Germany: charters for Jews in, 98; expulsion of Jews from, 17, 438n94; Frankfurt, xxvi, 54; Hamburg, xxvi, 16, 105 Gherardini, Antonio, 210 ghettoization: as attaching people to place, 14; in colloquial language, 223; and confessionalization, 3, 30, 39, 411f; and conversion, 18–19, 64–65, 66, 221, 411; Council of Trent as context of, 12, 35, 52, 65, 132f, 412; date in selected Italian cities, 424n53; as early modern phenomenon, 5, 407–8; as expulsion alternative, 18, 130–31, 195–96, 411; as gendered process, 2, 44; gender roles redefined by, 306, 408, 410; Italian Jews as living in ghettos

Index by eighteenth century, 386; Jewish communities created by, 1, 7, 9, 12, 32, 135, 241–91, 405–13 passim; Jewishness redefined by, 4, 129, 134, 200, 222, 386–410 passim; length of process of, 8, 241, 496n1; location for Jews provided by, xviii, 1, 7, 32–39, 132, 411, 413; as not norm for medieval Jews, 4–5, 411; as ordering system, 19; as performance, 171; as redefining boundaries between Christians and Jews, 4; sameness of Jews emphasized by, 133; segno compared with, 19–20, 67; semi-autonomous community created by, 12, 200, 290–91, 386, 410–11; as spatialization of state power, 5, 14f, 45–168, 410f; and state-building, 3–7 passim, 14, 88–134, 221, 407. See also Florentine ghetto; Roman ghetto; Venetian ghetto Ghiron, Yehuda H . ayyim, 560n48 Ghirone, Grazia Dio, 398–99 Ginevra Blanis, see under Blanis, Ginevra Ginzburg, Carlo, 79 Gioello di Lustro da Veroli, 246, 498n21 Giovanna d’Austria, xxi, 71–72, 295, 433n42 Giovanni de’ Medici (cardinal), xxi Giuliano de’ Ricci, 74, 193, 480n117 Giulio de Nobili, 210 Giuseppe di Manuelle dal Pontadera di Giuseppe Alpelingo, 232 Giuseppe di Salamone, 363 Gli Uffiti della Notte, 515n172 Goitein, S. D., 430n10, 458n3, 542n83 Goldthwaite, Richard, 210, 489n102 gonfaloni, 27–32 passim, 425n77, 427n103, 427n107 gonfaloniere, 29 Goodman, Jordan, 322, 488n91 governors of Florentine ghetto: age and service as, 259; Alpelinghi lineage as, 322, 531n109; amplification of authority of, 276–77; autonomy of, 261–73; broadening support in community, 253, 281–84; doctors and rabbis as, 320; election of, 253–58; ethnic divisions and, 248–49; as Florentine in origin, 253f, 255; formation of new governing elite, 258– 60; guild membership of, 315, 316;

insults to, 276–81 passim; 511n133, 512n145; interests as tied to state, 274–75; marital status and service as, 259; Medici state supportive of, 253, 271–89 passim, 389; number in first five years, 491n8; officials, 252–53; as only governing body in ghetto, 269–70; in population estimation, 226; predetermined roster set in 1608, 260, 504n79; record books burned by, 270, 507n106; relationship with Nove Conservatori, 249–53, 269, 277, 283; republican language used by, 253, 283, 408; resistance to authority of, 275–80, 283; salary of, 275; shift from ten to four, 254–55; shift to more independent governing style, 281; sindaci, 252, 261–63, 267, 275, 277, 506n94; small group of men as, 254, 314–15; specifically Jewish concerns of, 267–73; status and service as, 258–59, 314–15; women excluded from, 258, 284, 408, 517n186; women’s scuola regulated by, 403–4 grain sales by state, 300 Gregory XIII (pope), xxii, 438n101, 497n2 Grubb, James S., 539n57 Gucciardini, Francesco, 412, 545n119 Guerrini, Libertario, 457n155, 468n121, 510n126 Guggenheim, Yacov, 419n8 Guglielmo di Bastiano da Volterra (cancelliere of Empoli), 181 Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants: Ginevra d’Agnolo Blanis in, 287; Da Empoli family members in, 321; doctors in, 312; Jews admitted through relatives, 316; Jews in, 123, 125; Leucci family members in, 319, 530n97; Gratiadio di Ventura Leucci in, 230; as major guild, 315; matriculation fee for foreigners in, 124–25, 455n142; matriculation fees in, 312, 527n68; matriculation of Jews into, 1571–1610, 307; as more difficult for Jews to enter, 317; Iacobbe di Miele Romano in, 216; Sarra d’Agnolo di Zaccheria in, 287, 323, 364; travel by members of, 321 Guild of Rigattieri (Used-Clothing Dealers), 298

605

606

Index Guild of the Notaries and Judges, 24, 124, 253, 307 guilds, 307–12; apprenticeship and sponsorship in, 326–27, 351; autonomy disrupted, 23; of bankers, 98; as contact between government and citizens, 251; Cosimo I manipulating, 22; crafts of Jews in, 110; doctors retained by, 397; dowries for poor girls from, 357, 369–70; extent of Jews’ participation in, 525n48; governors of ghetto in, 315, 316; Jews barred from office-holding in, 24, 125; Jews in, 123–26; Jews matriculating into more than one, 317; Jews mentioned in statutes of, 120; Jews required to matriculate into, 307–8; Jews set apart in, 324; major and minor, 315; matriculation fees for, 309–10; matriculation of Jews into, 1571–76, 226; matriculation of Jews into, 1571–1610, 307; in Medici social system, 29; members traveling, 321; mobility seen as threat to, 34, 91f, 123, 419n13; poorest Florentines excluded from, 27; relatives brought into, 310, 315; sensali for, 328–29; social and political relationships built in terms of, 118; as source of information on Jews, 42; status and membership in, 314–18, 319, 323; statutes reformulated, 23, 27, 123, 126, 251, 307, 525n47; verbal abuse prohibited by, 278, 512n147; women and, 123, 287, 308–9, 317, 454n133, 455n137, 528n83. See also Brokers’ Guild; Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants; Guild of Rigattieri; Linen Guild; Silk Guild; Wool Guild Gypsies, 10, 171, 407n2 h.alitsah, 378–79 Hamburg, xxvi, 16, 105 hearth size, 226, 236 Hebraeorum gens (Pius V), xxii, 57, 452n109 Hebrew language: 78, 96, 148, 162, 166; books and manuscript, 78, 161, 257, 451n88; for personal status of women, 233; pronunciation and version of names, 85, 442n151; transliteration of in this study, xxiii; used in ghetto, 281,

396–98, 516n174, 516n179, 558n24, 559n38; wills, 558n21. See also marriage contracts (ketubbot) Hebrew letter-writing, 148, 462n46, 463n66 h.erem (ban; excommunication): in Florentine ghetto, 272f, 279, 281, 399, 513n155; in Mantua and elsewhere in Italy, 277, 512n143; state and church resisting, 242–43 heresy: attitudes and policies toward, 10; Cosimo I in prosecution of, 59; fear of Jews serving as stimulus for, 53, 79–80; metaphor of infection applied to, 76; mobility spreading, 34; papal policy against, 78–81; sixteenth-century Italian states as concerned about, xvii–xix, 3 Herlihy, David, 337, 340, 536n25, 544n110 h.evrot, see confraternities holy days, see festival and holy days holy objects, see sacred objects Holy Roman Empire: Charles V, xxi, 21, 51, 74; expulsion of Jews in, xvi, 71–72; Ferdinand I, 71; Jews settling in, 17; Maximilian II, xxii, 58, 71, 433n42; violence against Jews in, 94 homosexuality: postponement of marriage and, 346; prostitution seen as preferable to, 206, 484n28; sodomites, 10, 12, 515n172; suppression of sexual activity between men, 12, 25, 27 honesty, attributed to Jews, 181f Horowitz, Elliott S., 403, 557n13 host desecration, charges of, 10, 72, 87, 94 hosteria del porco, 304 household composition, 225–26, 227–28 household multiplier technique, 226f, 236 House of Catechumens (Rome), 65, 456n145 Hsia, R. Po-chia, 438n94 Hughes, Diane Owen, 430n9 Huguenots, 59, 78 humanism, 88, 96 Iacobbe di Miele: 216, 255, 316, 488n86, 529n90, 562n65 Iacob da Pontadera, 363 Iacob di Giuseppe d’Iacob (dal Pontadera/

Index Alpelingo), 246, 312, 316, 321f, 523n32, 531n109 Iacob di Raffaello (d’Abramo) da Citerna, 279, 504n78, 514n159, 523n32 Iacob of Empoli, 488n81 Iacopo de Graziadio, 219 Iacopo di Lotto (vicar of Monterchi), 179, 186f Iberian Peninsula, see Portugal; Spain illegitimate children, 369 infant mortality, 359 inheritance: and dotal strategies, 338, 372–75 passim, 536n23; ghetto governors’ semi-autonomy regarding, 267; and Italian Jews’ knowledge of Jewish law, 348; Jews appealing to authorities regarding, 270; in rabbinic law, 540n69 Innocent III (pope), 520n3 Inquisition: and blasphemy in Florentine ghetto, 273; in Catholic Reformation, 3; censorship of texts by, 55, 79; Cosimo I allows establishment in Tuscany, 59, 68; Florentine Jews interrogated by, 42; institution in Portugal, xxi; institution of Roman, xxi; Jews seen as infidels not heretics by, xvii–xviii; and New Christians, 72, 75, 418n9 insults: to governors of Florentine ghetto, 276–81 passim, 511n133, 512n145; guilds prohibiting, 278, 512n147; honor affected by, 514n167 interest: Christian bankers charging higher, 180; Jews prohibited from taking from Jews, 360; monti de pietà paying, 208. See also usury Ioseph d’Orso, see under Ursi Isacche Gallico, 253, 399 Isac d’Iacob di Giuseppe, 321f Isac di Lione di Moise da Prato, 523n32 Isach da Fabbriano, 278, 511n141, 513n151 Isach dal Pontadera, 513n154 Isaia di Sabbato da Pilastrina, 279 Israel, Jonathan, 4, 15ff Isserles, Moses, 266, 401 Italian Jews: citizenship of, 453n122; date of ghettoization in selected cities, 424n53; ethnic differentiation in Florentine ghetto, 400–402; ghettoization as not

norm for medieval Jews, 4–5; identity formation of, 401–2; links to Jews in Ottoman Empire, 149; as living in ghettos by eighteenth century, 386; map of sixteenth-century world of, xxvi; marriage building Jewish community in, 336–37; migration as characteristic of, 336; sexual relations between Christians and, 67–68, 183, 195, 296, 476n64; violence against, 92–93. See also Tuscan Jews Italy: confessionalization in, 2; heresy as concern in, xvii–xix, 3. See also Italian Jews; Tuscany; Umbria; and other regions and cities by name itinerant merchants, 89 ius gazaga, 485n34 Jesuits, 3, 65, 273 Jewish-Christian coexistence, 92–94, 180–83, 199, 292 Jews: as a community, 135, 136–37; as a “confession,” 3; criteria of Jewishness for this study, 43–44; crypto-Judaism, 105, 432n25, 449n64; demographic expansion in sixteenth century, 15–16; as deviating from Christian norm, 88; in early modern Europe, 15–21; eating with Christians, 190; feared as stimulus for heresy, 53, 79–80; ghettoization redefining Jewishness, 4, 129, 134, 200, 222, 386–406, 409f; as infidels not heretics, xvii–xviii; metaphor of infection applied to, 76; mobility of, 89–91; movement across confessional boundaries by, 3, 419n8; as not allowed to live in parishes, 38–39; otherness of, xvii, 9, 84–85, 88–89, 92, 123, 128–29, 130, 135, 148, 199, 419n16; as outside of Christian community, 31, 89, 137; plague associated with, 205; princes’ right to expel, 471n7; prohibition of books of, xvii–xviii, xix, 418n10; prostitutes associated with, 203–6, 483n26; racialization of in Christian discourse, 72, 119; recognizability of, 83–87; relationships with ruling powers, 292–93; remnant as allowed to survive, 96; royal privileges granted to Iberian, 138; sameness as

607

608

Index Jews, 83, 133, 147–48; self-censorship by, 78; as self-identified group, 10; sense of commonality among, 31, 147–48; sixteenth century as watershed period for European, 4; status as “natural,” xviii, 10; as tax collectors, 292. See also antiJewish sentiment; Hebrew language; Italian Jews; Jewish-Christian coexistence; Kabbalah; Levantine Jews; New Christians (Marranos); religious community; Spanish Jews; Talmud; toleration of Jews Judah del Bene, 561n60 Julius III (pope), 55, 107, 432n26 Kabbalah, 41, 98, 144, 427n101 k. ahal (k. ehilah), 138, 148f, 281, 397, 408 kashrut, 160–61, 165, 305, 386, 468n116 Katz, Jacob, 148f Kent, D., 27, 29, 427n107 Kent, F. W., 27, 29, 427n107 ketubbot, see marriage contracts (ketubbot) Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, 295, 337, 340, 536n25, 544n110, 555n228 kosher slaughter (sheh.it. ah), 160, 165, 386, 468n116. See also butchers Kuehn, Thomas, 551n190, 553n209 Lapini, Agostino, 67, 204–5, 213, 256, 275 latrines, 212 Laudadio di Zaccheria, 360–62, 363–64, 542n80 laundry, 186–90 passim, 294 Laura di Bellafiore di Moyse de Uriellis and Abram di Ventura Leucci, 367f, 379, 549n164 law, rabbinic, see rabbinic law law courts, see courts of law Lazzaro d’Aaron romano, 371, 550n180, 550n183 Lazzaro da Pescia, 255, 315, 316, 529n90 Lazzero d’Isac, 56 Lazzaro di Manuelle di Giuseppe Alpelingo, 232 Le Goff, Jacques, 490n111, 490n113 Le Murate, 13, 422n36, 422n37 Leon di Iacob da Pesaro, 253, 246, 281, 399, 515n173

Leone di Falcone, 513n154, 523n32 Lepanto, Battle of, 432n31; site located on map, xxii lepers, 10, 12 Leucci (family): Cosimo I granting privileges to, 112; dowries of, 366–67; in exclusive guilds, 317; large family size of, 546n122; leaving Florentine ghetto, 384; matriculating into more than one guild, 317; moving into Florentine ghetto, 230; not participating in ghetto government, 318f, 323, 502n60, 548n151; petitions to court of, 113; returning to Pisa, 320; as surname, 318; Ioseph Ursi marries daughter into, 456n145. See also by name Leucci, Abramo di Ventura di Leuccio: exemption from segno for, 493n33; as governor of ghetto, 319, 516n180; in guilds, 230, 530n96; marriage of, 528n76, 548n154, 548n155, 549n164, 551n196; renewal of privilege of, 493n32 Leucci, Dianora, see under Dianora Leucci, Gratiadio di Ventura di Leuccio: in guilds, 230, 530n96; marriage to Iudit d’Ursi, 280, 366f, 377–79, 380, 529n91, 554n220; travel by, 299, 522n25 Leucci, Isac d’Elia, 325, 532n119 Leucci, Laura d’Abramo, see under Laura Leucci, Raffaello di Ventura di Leuccio, 493n32, 493n33 Leucci, Simone di Salamone di Simone, 369, 550n172 Leucci, Ventura di Gratiadio di Ventura, 367f, 379, 549n164 Leucci, Ventura di Leuccio, 230 Levantine Jews: in categorization of Tuscan Jews, 117; in development of links between Italian and Ottoman Jews, 149; ethnic differentiation in Florentine ghetto, 400–402; as exempt from guild matriculation, 308; in Florentine ghetto, 402, 519n211; foreign elements introduced into prayer by, 508n113; local brides taken by, 336; Marranos contrasted with, 109; merchants as exempt from taxes, 126ff; merchants invited to Italy, 17–18, 52, 104–9, 131, 402; multiple residences of, 528n78; privilege of 1551,

Index 52, 104–8, 114f, 146; and sumptuary code, 122; wealthy Jewish families among, 313 Levantinus, Isach Abrami, 450n80 Levi (Levita), Giovachino di Donato, 166–67, 316, 364, 469n138, 470n144, 504n78 Levi (Levita), Michele di Donato, 245, 255, 316 Levi, Sima olim Ioseph, 376 levirate marriage, 270, 378 Levita, see under Levi Liaccio di Piazza, 504n78 licenses for kosher-slaughterers, 160 linaioli, 311 Linen Guild: apprenticeship and sponsorship in, 326; Salamone di Rabi Benedetto in, 164; Ginevra d’Agnolo Blanis in, 287, 309, 518n200; crafts of Jews entering, 310–11; crafts subject to, 311; Da Empoli family members in, 321; funds for dowries for poor girls, 369–70, 550n175; governors of ghetto in, 315, 316; Jews admitted through relatives, 315; Jews in, 123, 154; on market in cuttings in trimmings, 521n20; matriculation fees for, 310; matriculation of Jews into, 1571–1610, 307; as minor guild, 315; Reform of 1578, 308–9; relatives brought into, 310; sensali of, 328; women in, 308–9 Lione d’Abramo, 286 Lione di Raffaello, 347, 535n10 Lione di Raffaello d’Iair, 255, 316 Lione di Salamone, 326 Lionetta di Laudadio di Zaccheria, 361–64 passim Liscia Bemporad, Dora, 484n29, 485n42, 499n23 Litchfield, R. Burr, 20, 152, 346 Lithuania, 17, 292 Liuccio di Lione da Piazza, 279 Liuccio Romano, 371 Livorno: Ferdinand’s promotion of, 52; Francesco de’ Medici invites Levantine Jews to, 320, 330; Jewish captives rescued by Jews of, 508n111; Levantine and Ponentine merchants in, 106, 402,

449n70; Livornino, xxii, 320, 449n70, 492n18, 530n101; located on maps, xxvi, 102; Nove Conservatori approving decisions of, 274; registry of marriage contracts in archive of, 542n87; slave trade in, 421n27 local statutes, 266. See also capitoli of Florentine ghetto Loggia del Pesce, 203, 482n5 London, xxvi, 16, 105 love: between Christians and Jews, 183; in marriage, 535n114. See also friendship Lucca, 102, 161 Luria, Keith P., 419n8 Luther, Martin, xviii, xxi, 18, 80, 440n134 Lutheranism: in Catholic Reformation program, 53; expulsion of Lutherans, 17; Jews arrested as Lutherans, 79–80; metaphor of infection applied to, 76; as unassimilable for Catholics, xviii Luzzati, Michele: categorization of Jews of Pisa, 450n81; on dowries, 528n76; on economic explanation for expulsion, 434n52; on Francesco and Jew of Volterra, 453n112; household multiplier for Tuscan Jews of, 236; on Jewish bankers invited to Tuscany, 446n40; on Jewish bankers leaving Tuscany, 228–29; on Jewish doctors and merchants, 99; on Jews other than bankers, 444n27; on Leucci family, 319; Magistrato Supremo papers used by, 429n131; on percentage of Tuscan Jews as bankers, 101; on Ventura da Perugia, 447n50, 503n63; on youthfulness of Tuscan Jewish population, 447n49 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 18, 28, 412, 424n57 Madrid, xxi, xxvi, 72 Magistrato Supremo: authority over ghetto transferred to Nove Conservatori, 249; census of Jews ordered by, xv, 60, 145; in Cosimo I’s rule, 26; documents pertaining to Jews of, 42; edict expelling Jews approved by, 81, 417n2; on informing ghetto Jews of decrees, 245; Jewish bankers allowed to collect their debts by, 481n134; in proceedings

609

610

Index against the Jews, 70, 87, 175–86 passim, 191; on the state, 31 Mah.zor (Magazzor) Bologna, 271, 401, 508n113, 562n73 Maimonides, xvii, 266 Mantua: autonomy of Jewish community in, 277; bankers excluded from Jewish government in, 530n99; council of ghetto of, 504n79; ethnic divisions in Jews of, 248–49; ghetto of, 496n1; Jewish bankers and merchants competing for control in, 324; Jewish scholarship and art in, 324, 398, 531n114; Jews in allocation of ghetto space in, 213; located on map, xxvi; rabbi lacking in, 144; war of Mantuan Succession, 61 Manuelle, see under Emanuelle Maracci, Moise (Moyse), 318, 344, 347, 535n10 Marcellus II (pope), 432n26 marital status: as categorizing tool, 133; governors of ghetto and, 259, 282; in Italian language, 541n75; and sumptuary laws, 121 markets and fairs, 298, 326 Marranos, see New Christians (Marranos) marriage, 332–85; as business agreement, 335–36; changes in system affecting women, 379–83; as dislocating for women, 156–58, 370, 466n100; divorce, 233, 267, 270, 353–54; familial strategies for, 358–62; family consent for, 338, 536n22; first-cousin, 367; in Florentine ghetto, 348–53; Florentine Jews turning to state courts regarding, 270; as generating continuity for men, 157, 466n100; ghettoization’s impact of planned, 362–64; Jewish community built by, 336–37, 385; Jewish families as allied through, 147, 149; Jewish self-government as necessary for regulating, 143f; levirate, 270, 378; for love, 535n114; men leaving Florence to marry, 384; polygyny, 342, 378, 538n41, 553n210; and relatives brought into guilds, 310; remarriage, 341, 539n58; and travel by women, 303; Tuscan Jewish systems and patterns before ghettoization, 337–48; unmarried

men, 154–55, 156; unmarried women, 155, 465n93, 465n94. See also age at first marriage; age differential in marriage; betrothal contracts; confessio dotis; dowries; marital status; marriage contracts; prenuptial agreements; universal marriage marriage contracts (ketubbot): Cassuto’s catalogue entry for Florentine, 542n87; and dowry size, 356, 358; as source for this study, 41, 354; stipulations in, 373, 375–82, 552n199; strategies for good, 372 Martelli, Camilla, xxii, 73 Martelli, Lodovico, 69, 87, 194–95, 452n106, 480n124 Martelli, Luigi, 114–15, 117, 122–23, 452n106, 453n112 Martines, Lauro, 27 Martini, Carlo, 477n77 Marzopini, Girolamo, 210 Matsot, 160, 195 Maximilian II (emperor), xxii, 58, 71, 433n42 medical schools, 149, 158 Medici, Vitale, see Vitale di Salamone da Cascia Medici state: archives of, 41–42; Board of Health, 33, 299, 333; Catholic Reformation in building of, 32–39, 133, 412; centralizing tendency of, 22f, 25, 40, 250–51; Cosimo I in building, 21–30; cultural importance of, 412; ducal palace as outside parish system, 133; duke as sole source of status and authority, 26; ghettoization and growth of, 5, 7, 87, 241–44; ghettoization as benefiting, 199–200, 411, 413; governors of ghetto supported by, 253, 271–72, 276–77, 288–89; as not allowing Catholic Church to control the Jews, 199; parishes as social base unit of, 29–30, 91–92, 133; as patronage court in 1560s, 290; petitions to the court, 111–13, 145–46; prostitution regulation by, 12, 204, 483n20, 483n26; religion in building of, 6, 30–32, 132, 412; revenue sources for, 127; social categories of, 28–29; status of the Jews and building of, 88–134; unmediated relationship of Jews and

Index duke, 145–46. See also Magistrato Supremo; notaries; Nove Conservatori del Dominio e Iurisditione (Nine Conservators of the Dominion and Jurisdiction); Otto di Guardia e Balía (court of appeals for Tuscany and criminal court of Florence) Mellinkoff, Ruth, 430n9 men: age at first marriage for, 342–48; age differential in marriage, 342–45, 352–53; attempting to consolidate status, 381; communal relationships forged by, 148– 49; enforcement of gender norms, 11–12; gendered communities in Florentine ghetto, 403–4; imbalance of women and, among Florentine Jews, 340; Jewish sociality and gendered community, 153– 58; leaving Florence to marry, 384; living alone, 154, 155–56, 465n87; marriage generating continuity for, 157, 466n100; marriage rates for, 337–42, 348–50; Medici state-building eroding bonds between, 25, 26–27; and minyan (prayer quorum), 158–59, 165f, 268, 287, 403; paternal and patriarchal authority enhanced by Cosimo I, 27–28, 413; permanently single, 338, 340, 536n20; sumptuary codes and, 121; suppression of sexual activity by unmarried, 12, 25, 27; traveling outside Florentine ghetto, 300–302, 302, 522n27, 523n31; travel opportunities before ghettoization, 158; tsedak. ah given by, 387–88, 389; unmarried, 154–55, 156. See also confraternities Menasseh ben Israel, 19, 424n59, 446n37 Menning, Carol Bresnahan, 208, 485n36 Menocchio the miller, 79, 93 mercantilist tolerance, 16, 18f, 61, 423n51 Mercato Vecchio, 202, 203, 207, 211, 220, 297 merchants: in categorization of Tuscan Jews, 117; crafts subject to, 312; as exempt from taxes, 126ff; fees paid by, 126f; in Florentine ghetto, 230; in Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants, 312; Levantine Jews invited to Italy, 17–18, 52, 104–9; privilege of 1551, 52, 104–8, 114f, 146, 308; utilitarian tolerance of, 16, 18f, 61, 423n51

Merchants’ Guild, see Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants Meshullam ben Menah.em of Volterra, 63, 231, 435n58 Mestre, 61 middle class: dowries of, 370–79, 384; “la genta mezzana,” 312, 527n71; limiting number of daughters by, 358 midwives, 295f mik. veh (ritual bathhouse), 162f, 165, 280, 386, 515n169, 545n121 Milan: population compared with Florence, 17, 418n4; segno in, 57 Milano, Attilio, 539n50 militia: as contact between government and citizens, 251; in Cosimo I’s rule, 21, 23; district organization of, 500n34; Jews as barred from, 24; provincial elites in, 22–26 passim minyan, 158–59, 268, 287, 403 Misericordia of the Jews of Florence, 382, 392, 393–94, 558n23, 558n24 Mishneh torah (Maimonides), 266 mobility: as characteristic of Italian Jews, 336; gender and, 3013–03; seen as threat by early modern authorities, 33–34, 89– 91, 123; status and, 319–23; of workingclass Christian women, 523n37. See also travel outside Florentine ghetto Modena, ghetto of, 496n1 Modena, Leon: on age of marriage, 541n70; birth of, xxii; in Florence as rabbi, 397, 559n42, 560n49; on Florentine Jews desecrating Sabbath, 508n114; Historia de’ riti hebraici, 506n97; on Italian Jewish cultural community, 531n114, 535n115; and networks of families of Italian Jews, 149; as preacher, 561n60; and proselytization, 440n126; on three nations of Jews, 563n74; wife’s travels, 523n36; on women’s space in synagogue, 467n108 mohalim, 159–60, 467n111. See also Da Pisa, Yeh.iel (Vitale) Nissim di Simone Moise di Lione da Prato, 326 Molho, Anthony: on age at marriage, 346, 539n53; on dowries, 354–55, 528n76, 543 n89, 549n165; on equilibrium in Flor-

611

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Index entine society, 551n193; on homogamy, 548n157; on lineages, 529n84; on status levels in city of Florence, 312–14, 527n71 monastic enclosure, 3, 12–14, 411. See also Periculoso moneylending, see bankers; usury Monte delle Dote, 342, 354, 360, 543n90 Montepulciano, 102 Monterchi: accusations against Jews in, 185f; Jewish banker supported in, 180; Jewish bankers in, 101, 229–30, 493n27; Jewish population of, 491n3; located on map, 102; population multiplier for, 237 Monte San Savino: as ducal fief, 448n54; Jewish bankers in, 103; located on map, 102 Monteulmo, Sabato di Salamone de, 101 Montevarchi: accusations against Jews in, 186; monte di pietà in, 180; reference to Jew in court proceeding from, 182–83, 475n60 monti de pietà: broadening of function of, 208; creation of new, 179–80, 198; in Empoli, 180, 198, 474n42, 475n46; in financing Florentine ghetto, 208–9; in Florence, 139, 196, 208–9, 447n48, 475n46; interest paid by, 208; Jewish bankers in places without, 99, 179–80; Jewish bankers made unnecessary by, 444n23; mendicant friars promoting, 94, 139; in Pescia, 180, 474n42; in Pisa, 90, 180, 196–97; in Prato, 74, 180; predating 1570, 180; seen as morally superior to Jewish banks, 459n14; in Siena, 447n48 Montino, Marquis of, 177, 472n25 Montopoli, 112 Moore, Richard I., 9, 420n24 Moro, Bastiano di Paulo, 190 Moscato, Judah, 561n60 Mose (Moyse) d’Urielli, 367, 528n76 Moyse di Michele, 535n10 Muir, Edward, 24, 442n1 mulberry trees, 51, 198, 322 musicians, 98, 145, 151, 153f, 340 names preferred by Tuscan Jews, 85, 442n150

Naples: expulsion of Jews from, xvi, xxi, 17, 51, 106 Nasi, Graçia (Beatrice de Luna), 75, 105, 149, 432n31 Nasi, Joseph, 75 nationality: ducal commonality as not based on, 119; early modern people having no formal national identity, 31; foreignness distinguished from, 63; Jews and, 122–23. See also foreignness Navarre, expulsion of Jews from, xvi, 17, 106, 423n41 Navarro, Abram, 540n59 neighborhoods: exclusively Jewish, 54, 151f, 336; Florentine ghetto as, 201, 409; gonfaloni, 27–33 passim, 425n77, 427n103, 427n107; occupational variety in, 20; parishes contrasted with, 35, 267; sindaci and, 261, 263, 267; social bonds maintained by, 148 Netherlands: Jews settling in colonies of, 17; revolt against Spain, 21; toleration of Jews in, xviii. See also Amsterdam New Christians (Marranos): Anabaptists influenced by, 440n130; attempts to identify, 423n41; Coen case, 56, 108–9, 145, 432n25, 450n78; confusion caused by, 85, 441n149; duplicity and ambiguity attributed to, 3–4; Florentine synagogue for, 166; Italian Jews forging links to Jews in, 149; leaving Iberian Peninsula, 15–16, 104–5, 423n44; Levantine Jews contrasted with, 109; as merchants, 105–9; returning to Judaism, 4, 73, 107, 149, 432n25; settling in Florence, 64, 435n61; Spanish suspicion of, 72–73; as suspect during war against Turks, 74–77 Niccolo di Giuliano di Mugello, 188–89 Nine Conservators of the Dominion and Jurisdiction, see Nove Conservatori del Dominio e Iurisditione Nirenberg, David, 9, 420n24 nobility: as categorizing tool, 133; elites hoping to attain, 25; as mediating ducal power, 242; in Medici social categories, 29; patricians as transformed into dependent bureaucratic, 22–23

Index North American Indians, Jews identified with, 15, 423n41 notaries: Cosimo I regulating, 23; for dowries, 343, 354–55, 538n43; Guild of the Notaries and Judges, 24, 124, 253, 307; Jews as excluded from, 24, 253; Jews bringing to their homes, 152; Jews turning to, 270, 507n108; status of, 314 Nove Conservatori del Dominio e Iurisditione (Nine Conservators of the Dominion and Jurisdiction): as centralizing organ, 251; as contact between government and citizens, 251; control over communes and towns, 273–75; in Cosimo I’s administrative reforms, 23; creation of, 251; as editing decisions of governors, 261; and election of governors, 253; estimate of ghetto population of, 224–25; ghetto government’s relationship with, 249–53, 269, 275, 277, 283, 389; ghetto overseen by, 145, 207, 209, 213, 216–17, 221, 249, 484n31, 485n35; marginal notations in record books of, 263, 264, 265; monte di pietà overseen by, 196; Carlo Pitti as chancellor of, 193, 196; records as source for this study, 42; regulation of religious practices approved by, 271–72; on state borders, 34; travel permits issued by, 298ff, 332, 535n2 Nuñes, Enriques (Henriches Nugnes; Abram Righetto), see under Righetto, Abram Nunziatura Apostolica, 471n6 nuptiality, see universal marriage oaths, 473n32, 551n196 Oberman, Heiko, 18f occupations: of Florentine Jews, 217, 489n94; of Tuscan Jews, 110. See also bankers; doctors; merchants; musicians; rigattieri; servants; velettai offerings, 386, 389, 556n5 Office of Decency, 484n28 Order of St. Stephen, 26, 29 ordinances of ghetto of Florence, see capitoli of Florentine ghetto Orlandini, Baccio, 396, 559n37

Orsi, Ioseph see under Ursi Orsi, Iuditta, daughter Dianora’s dowry, 368, 381, 554n220, 554n221; dowry of, 323, 366ff, 456n145; father’s surname used by, 380, 529n91, 554n220; marriage to Ventura di Leuccio Leucci, 280; stipulations in wedding contract of, 377–79, 381 Ortolani, Oddone, 433n38 Otto di Custodia, 140, 460n26 Otto di Guardia e Balía, 42, 182, 232, 242, 249f, 277, 374 Ottoman Empire: Battle of Lepanto, xxii, 432n31; Constantinople, xxvi, 105; Cosimo I developing commercial relations with, 52, 105; Cosimo I in war against, 60; as growing menace, 64; Italian Jews forging links to Jews in, 149; Jewish scholarship and art in, 398; New Christians returning to Judaism in, 73; Portuguese New Christians settling in, 16; Selim II, xxii, 74f; Suleyman the Magnificent, xxii, 74; universal marriage for Jews in, 342, 538n41; Venetian war with, xxii, 21, 74–77 Padua: ghetto of, 496n1; Jewish scholarship and art in, 398; Jews fleeing to Venice from, 61; Jews in planning of ghetto of, 487n71; Jews try to avert ghettoization in, 213; map of world of Italian Jews, xxvi; medical school accepting Jews in, 149; pigs running wild in, 266; synagogue in, 158 palazzi, power and order represented spatially by, 92 Palazzo Vecchio, 71, 490n113 papacy: Alexander III, 520n5; Benedict XIII, 65; Boniface VIII, 12; Clement VII, 248; Clement VIII, 440n127; and GrandDucal title for Cosimo I, 52–58; Gregory XIII, xxii, 438n101, 497n2; heresy attacked by, 78–81; Innocent III, 520n3; Jews expelled from papal territories, xxii, 9, 57, 70–71, 113–16, 432n30; Julius III, 55, 107, 432n26; Marcellus II, 432n26; Paul III, xxi, 34, 107, 232, 431n14; in war with Turks, 21, 74. See also Paul IV; Pius IV; Pius V

613

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Index Parable of the Three Rings, 93 Parenti, Giuseppe, 217 Paris, xvii, xxvi parishes: as contact between government and citizens, 251; Council of Trent on, 35–38, 132, 411; ducal palace as outside parish system, 133; fixing boundaries of, 36–38, 91–92, 412; in Florentine communal government, 32f; Florentine ghetto compared with, 410, 412; Florentine ghetto contrasted with, 267; ghetto as outside parish system, 132–33; and gonfaloni, 32f, 427n103, 427n107; Jews as not allowed to live in, 38–39; Jews listed by in census of 1567, 38, 151; as locus of Christian community, 30, 32; Medici social systemization based on, 29–30, 91–92, 133; parochial conformity, 150; social and political relationships built in terms of, 118; as unit of social control, 37 partnerships, 327 Passiglio, Ferrante (Barzilai; Lione; Yehudah), 344, 359, 450n80, 535n10, 540n65 Passiglio, Moise, 359, 545n117 Passover, 160. See also azimelle (matsot) passports, 7, 420n17 Patientia di Michele da Empoli, 357 patria potestas, 378, 381, 553n209, 554n226 patricians: government careers for, 259– 60; hereditary honor replacing power of, 25–26; migration to southern part of Florence, 425n77; permanently single men among, 340; quest for favors by, 25; as transformed into dependent bureaucratic nobility, 22–23 patriline, women identified with, 380, 385; women not identified with, 549n159 patronage: ghettoization producing income for, 221; Jewish bankers as patrons, 98, 139, 143f; of Jewish art, 382, 392; of Jewish scholars, 144, 324; Jews playing system of, 113, 250; by the Medici, 21, 111, 177, 196, 209, 290; patronclient relationships in Florence, xix, 20–27 passim, 69, 118, 249 Paul, Saint, 398, 561n58 Paul III (pope), xxi, 34, 107, 232, 431n14 Paul IV (pope): attack on Jews, 17, 71; on

Christians working for Jews, 293–94; Cosimo I not influenced by anti-Jewish policies of, 55, 57; election of, xxi; on New Christians returning to Judaism, 107; reign of, 432n26; Roman ghetto established by, 9, 18, 64. See also Cum nimis absurdum pawnbrokers, see bankers Periculoso (1298), 12, 14, 422n33 periodization, 15–16 Perla di Salamone Ioab de Castrocaro, 357, 376–77 Perry, Mary Elizabeth, 421n32 Perugia: destruction of Jewish community in, 367, 456n145, 548n152; Jews leaving for Florence from, 57; located on map, xxvi; medical school accepting Jews in, 149; synagogue in, 158 Pesaro, 106, 398 Pescia: accusations against Jews in, 185–86, 189; autonomy of, 274, 509n123, 509n124; citizenship requirement in, 453n122, 501n52; Jewish bankers in, 99, 101, 230, 493n27; Jewish bankers supported in, 179–80; located on map, 102; monte di pietà in, 180, 474n42; per capita tax in, 252, 500n40; population multiplier for, 491n11 Peseri, Lustra, 563n81 petitions to the court, 111–13, 145–46 Petrarca, 266 Philip II (king of Spain), 57f, 74, 433n42, 497n2 physicians, see doctors Piazza, Vito, 559n42 Piazza del Fraschato, 203 Piazza del Ghetto Vecchio, 482n4 Piazza della Fonte, 482n4 Piero di Biagio di Francesco da San Giovanni, 185 Pieve a Santo Stefano: 109, 191, 491n3; located on map, 102 Pisa: chapels in homes in, 159; Cosimo I brings Levantine merchants to, 52; Agnolo di Laudadio da Rieti case, 90f, 95–96, 176–78, 196–97; Da Rieti family resettling in, 229, 320, 492n20; Florentine ghetto Jews doing business in, 298;

Index Francesco de’ Medici invites Levantine Jews to, 330; individuals with rabbinic training in, 164; Jewish bankers in, 99, 101; Jewish cemetery at, 161; Jewish citizens in, 122; Jews resettling in, 492n18, 554n222; Leucci family, 112f, 230, 456n145; Levantine merchants in, 52, 76, 105, 108, 402; located on maps, xxvi, 102; marriage linking Tuscan Jews with those of, 336; monte di pietà in, 90, 180, 196–97; slave market in, 11 Pistoia: fair of, 298, 327; located on map, 102; Tedaldi’s report on, 251 Pitti, Carlo, 193–98; anti-Jewish prejudice of, 194; as benefiting from expulsion of Jews, 196–98; census of Jews of, 491n3; as chancellor of Nove Conservatori, 193, 196; draft of edict of expulsion of, 184–85, 417n2, 470n4; examining Christians under oath, 185; and first charter for Florentine ghetto, 246; and grain sales by state, 300, 523n30; on Jewish bankers denying charges, 178; on Jewish infractions of canon law, 191; letters requesting evidence against Jews signed by, 184; Medici patronage for, 196, 290; monte di pietà of Pisa revived by, 90; proceeding against Jews organized by, 70, 87, 175, 193–98; properties for ghetto purchased by, 201, 209, 485n40; and travel permits for Jews, 300, 523n30 Pitti, Luigi, 210 Pius IV (pope), xxi, 52, 57f, 432n26, 432n27, 440n127 Pius V (pope): Cosimo I cultivating support of, 57, 58–59, 70–71; Cosimo I made Grand Duke by, xxii, 59–60; election of, xxii; Hebraeorum gens, xxii, 57, 452n109; Jews expelled from papal states by, xxii, 9, 57, 70–71; reign of, 432n26; on residency requirement, 34; Romanus pontifex, 9, 57f plague: Board of Health and, 13; Jews associated with, 205; Nove Conservatori and ghetto government regarding, 275; travel permits and, 333 Poland: Jewish scholarship and art in, 398; Jews as tax collectors in, 292; Jews pro-

hibited from living in cities in, 17; Jews settling in, 17; residential segregation in, 54, 430n11 political exile, 11, 23 polygyny, 342, 378, 538n41, 553n210 Pomerance (Ripomerance): 101, 237; located on map, 102 Pontedera: Jews resident in before 1570, 103, 110, 112, 232, 237; located on map, 102; marriage linking Tuscan Jews with those of, 336, 357f; relationship of Jews to after 1570, 233f, 2465, 301, 312, 321f poor, the: attitudes and policies toward, 10; beggars, 10, 341; Ginevra d’Agnolo Blanis leaving money for, 162–63, 369f, 382f, 392ff; dowries of, 357–58, 366, 369–70; as marrying later, 351. See also tsedak. ah poor-box, see tsedak. ah popes, see papacy Poppi: 103, 110, 191, 448n56; located on map, 102 populating the Florentine ghetto, 223–38 population multiplier technique, 226ff, 236–38 populi, 33, 35 Portugal: expulsion of Jews from, xvi, 17; Inquisition instituted in, xxi; Jewish communal organization in, 138; Jews as tax collectors in, 292; Jews settling in colonies of, 17; New Christians leaving, 15–16, 64, 104–5, 423n44 Prague, xxvi, 71 Pratica Segreta, 110 Prato: accusations against Jews in, 185–88 passim; chapels in homes in, 159; conversion of Magistro Felice in, 234; famine and poverty in, 73–74; Florentine ghetto Jews doing business in, 298; Jewish bankers in, 99, 103, 230, 493n27; Jewish banker supported in, 180–82; Jewish residential patterns before ghettoization, 152; located on map, 102; monte di pietà in, 74, 180; taxes paid to Florence by, 252 prayer: gendered division of space in, 403–4, 467n108; keeping shops shut during, 286–87, 400, 518n198; leaders of

615

616

Index in early ghetto, 247; Levantine Jews introducing foreign elements into, 508n113; location of in pre-ghetto Florence, 165–67; minyan, 158–59, 268, 287, 403; noise during, 267–68, 506n99; restricted to synagogue, 400 prayer books, 159, 166, 400–401 prenuptial agreements, 373, 375–82, 552n199 primogeniture, 338 printing, 119, 324, 401 privileges: cancellation of, 70, 81, 130; charters as, 98; for communities of Jews, 138; for Jewish bankers, xix, xxi, 51, 99, 101, 139, 143; for Jewish merchants, 17; Jews seeking, 112–13; privilege of 1551, 52, 104– 8, 114f, 146, 308; status of Jews not covered by, 118–20; utility in granting, 96 proceedings against the Jews, 171–200; broadening of attack on Jews, 174, 183–93; collection of evidence, 174–76, 184–91; defense of the Jews, 176–83; letters of 30 June and 7 July 1570, xv, 175f; letters of late July and August 1570, 184; Pitti’s role in, 70, 87, 175, 193–98 Processi contro gli Ebrei (“Proceedings against the Jews”), 70, 194 procurators, women serving as, 287–88 property purchased for Florentine ghetto, 207–8 Prospero d’Isach, 116–17, 452n109 prostitutes: attitudes and policies toward, 10; disease spread by traveling, 34; as disruptive of order, 205–6; expulsion of, 204; Florentine ghetto as near, 203, 207; ghettoization contrasted with legislation on, 12; Jewish men patronizing, 183, 205, 476n63, 476n64, 524n46, 542n81; Jewish women as, 465n97, 524n46; Jews and Christians connecting through, 151; Jews associated with, 203–6, 483n26; as living and working throughout Florence, 203–4; Medici state regulation of, 12, 204, 483n20, 483n26; no guild for, 123; in parish censuses, 36; poor women as, 341; seen as preferable to homosexuality, 206, 484n28; sumptuary codes and, 121, 204, 483n18; travel permits

required for, 333; utility in toleration of, 96, 444n23; yellow ribbon for, 77, 121, 204, 428n17. See also brothels Protestant Reformation: accusations against Jews in Protestant states, xvii; anxiety created by, 442n155; Christian community fractured by, 32, 38, 64; church attendance in building sacral community, 150; during Cosimo I’s reign, 21; and Counter-Reformation, 436n72; as heresy, xviii; St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, xxii; toleration and, 16–17. See also Anabaptists; Huguenots; Lutheranism Provenzali, Moses, 257 public prayer, see prayer Pullan, Brian S., 439n115 Rabatti, Bernardino (comessario of Castrocaro) 450n83 Rabbene (Raben; Rabben), Laura di Lazzero, 537n31, 540n59 Rabbene (Raben; Rabben), Lazzero d’Isac: age at marriage of, 540n59; Christian guaranteeing guild fee of, 532n124; as governor of ghetto, 255; guild membership of governors, 316; household of, 154, 489n97; Jewish training of, 165; shop rented by, 215–16, 218; in Silk Guild, 527n64; synagogue in home of, 167; tutor of, 154, 162, 532n118; wife Speranza as procurator, 288 Rabbene (Raben; Rabben), Moise d’Isac, 165, 218, 447n48, 489n97 rabbinic law: codification of, 266–67; assumed to be operative for Jews in Tuscany, 272; as continuously interpreted, 143–44 ,458n7; as not determining dowry, 365; on procreation, 359; social organization as required for, 136 rabbinic scholars: compilation and translation of rabbinic law, 266–67; families leaving Tuscany, 38; Vita Finzi as, 397; Florentine Jews turning to, 270; rabbinic law as continuously interpreted by, 143–44; status of, 530n100; at synods of Jewish leaders, 141

Index rabbinic tribunals (courts), 272, 497n8, 507n107 rabbis: as absent in Tuscany before ghettoization, 143–45, 409, 410; first mention of Florence hiring, 509n115; in Florence before ghettoization, 162, 163–65; for Florentine ghetto, 272, 396–99; and governors of ghetto, 258; medical and rabbinical training associated, 164; as not required for public prayer, 159; status of, 320; in traditional Jewish communities, 386. See also rabbinic scholars Racchel, Donna, 154f, 218, 489n98 racialization of Jews in Christian discourse, 72, 119 Raffael di Simone de Cibrano, 489n97 Raffaello d’Iacob da Citerna, 504n78, 514n159 Raffaello di Cipriano (Cypriano): age at marriage of, 347; age difference of wife and, 535n10; announces decrees establishing ghetto, 245; as chancellor, 253, 281, 399, 501n47; household of, 531n116; Jewish servant employed by, 325; position of authority before ghettoization, 462n48 Ravid, Benjamin, 61, 425n62, 441n147 Reformation, see Protestant Reformation Reggio Emilia, ghetto of, 496n1 religion: in building Medici state, 6, 30–32, 132, 412; as categorizing tool, 133; difference as sign of order, 206. See also Christianity; confessionalization; conversion; Jews; religious community; religious observance religious community: ethnic differentiation in Florentine ghetto, 400–402; Florentine ghetto creating, 291, 386–406; gendered communities in Florentine ghetto, 403–4; Tuscan Jews as, 158–68. See also convents; rabbis; synagogues religious observance, see books in Tuscan Jewish homes; eating; mik. veh (ritual bathhouse); mohalim (circumcisers); Passover; prayer; prayer books; rituals; Sabbath; sheh.it. ah (kosher-slaughter); synagogues; Torah scrolls

remarriage, 341, 539n58 Renaissance, 6, 413, 521n16 residential patterns: early marriage and, 348; before ghettoization, 150–53; government affecting, 14; living alone, 154, 155–56, 465n87 residential segregation, 51–87; by choice, 54; Cum nimis absurdum calling for, 53, 54–55; in medieval church councils, 430n11; in Muslim world, 430n10; as not common in medieval Jewish life, 53–54; Third Lateran Council on, 53. See also ghettoization Reuchlin, Johannes, 18 Ricca (wife of Emanuelle Alpelingo), 232–34, 288, 496n51 Ricca d’Uriel d’Isaia, 357, 361, 364, 368f, 546n128, 547n139 rigattieri: female, 317; guild on market in cuttings in trimmings, 521n20; Jews in Linen Guild as, 311; as not high-status, 165; reputation for shady dealing, 526n63; in Silk Guild, 526n63; as traveling, 298 Righetto, Abram (Henriches Nugnes; Enriques Nuñes), 56–57, 77, 107, 429n133 Rinuccini, Filippo, 549n159 Ripomerance, see Pomerance ritual bathhouse, see mik. veh ritual murder, accusations of, 72, 87, 94, 174, 195, 438n94 rituals: communal affiliation as expressed in, 89, 151; Eucharist, 31, 36, 72, 89; of relevance to women, 158. See also prayer rivers, 91, 242 Rivlin, Bracha, 404 roads, 91, 242, 497n4 Rocke, Michael, 27, 484n28, 539n54 Roman Catholicism, see Catholic Church Roman ghetto: age at first marriage in, 345, 539n50; architectural remains of, 6; bankers and merchants competing for control in, 324; conversion as purpose of, 18–19, 64–65, 66, 221, 411, 421n31; establishment of, xxi, 9, 18, 55, 64; and expulsion of Jews from papal states, 57; Florentine ghetto compared with, 64– 66; governing boards of, 499n25; as legal

617

618

Index place of Jewish residence in papal states, 57, 71, 194, 431n16; synagogue in, 158, 247; tax on Jews in, 66 Romano (Tedescho), Abram d’Isach, see under Tedesco Romano, Dennis, 37 Romano, Iacob, 304, 523n38 Roman rite, 401, 562n73 Romanus pontifex (Pius V), 9, 57f Rome: constitution for Jews of, 141, 248f; conversion of Jews in, 494n38; duplicity and ambiguity attributed to Marranos in, 3; ethnic divisions in Jews of, 248–49; House of Catechumens in, 65, 456n145; Inquisition established in, xxi; Jewish notaries in, 429n132; Jewish women owning property in, 554n223; Jews of different ethnic origins mixing in synagogues of, 470n145; located on map, xxvi; parish boundaries fixed in, 36; population compared with Florence, 418n4; sack of, xxi. See also Roman ghetto Rosenthal, Elaine G., 476n61 Rossi, Azariah de’, xxii, 531n114, 561n60 Rossi, Salamone de’, xxii, 531n114 Roth, Cecil, 443n8, 446n37, 463n73, 483n22 Rubinstein, Nicolai, 32 Sabato d’Amaddio da Careggio, 165, 176, 180–81, 362, 364, 451n88, 493n28, 546n132 Sabato di Salamone delle Pomerance, 325, 532n120 Sabbath, 85; Christians working for Jews on, 160, 186; cleaning streets before, 266; drinking prohibited on, 271–72, 508n114; going out to eat and drink on, 304f, 542n81; handling money prohibited on, 476n71 Sabbatuccio (Sabato; Sabattuccio) di Pellegrino Romano: age difference of wife and, 344, 535n10; betrothal agreement of, 371; as denouncing Jews to Otto, 511n141; as governor of ghetto, 255; guild membership of governors, 316; and insulting governors, 279f; sponsorship in guild by, 326; as without surname, 529n90; as taking office in his thirties, 504n78; wealth and status of, 318

Sabean, David, 150 Sacerdote, Moyse, 374 sacred objects: Jewish bankers accused of taking as pledges, 178, 184; Jewish bankers as not to take as pledges, 294 safe conducts (salve-condotte), 69, 111f, 130, 145, 299. See also travel permits Sahlins, Peter, 31, 251, 407 Sala, Leonello, 256f Salamone di Lione da Prato, 504n78 Salamone di Manuelle Gallico, 537n28 Salamone di Sabato da Viterbo, 280 Salamone d’Isac, 101 Salamone Ioab de Castrocaro, 357 Salamoni, Baccio, 215 Salonika, xxvi, 105 Salvadore di Servadio, 329, 534n144 Salvadore di Teseo, 327, 329, 534n143, 534n147 Salvadori, Roberto G., 496n54 salve-condotte (safe conducts), 69, 111f, 130, 145, 299 Salviatti, Alamanno, 56 San Giovanni: 99, 101, 185f, 230, 493n27; located on map, 1570, 102; population multiplier for, 237 Sanità, Uffitio della, see Board of Health sanitation, 211–12, 261, 275, 487n62 San Miniato, 99, 336 Sarfati, Abramo, 450n76 Sarra di Agnolo di Zaccheria di San Miniato: dowry of, 357–61 passim, 368, 529n91; father borrowing dowry of, 360–62, 363–64, 373; as guild member, 317; in Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants, 287, 323, 364; husband Graziadio Finzi, 288, 361; identified with patriline, 380; traveling by, 288 Savonarola, 51, 94 Scamatino, Betto, 188 scholars, rabbinic, see rabbinic scholars scuola spagnuola, 166–67 segno (sign): in Austria, 72; confusion as stated reason for, 83–84, 122, 129; Cum nimis absurdum calling for, 53, 82; in edict of ghettoization, 82–84, 441n139; exemptions from, 68–69, 101, 129–30, 139, 164, 285, 320, 447n49, 457n162; in

Index Ferrara, 77; fine for failing to wear, 69, 129, 139, 244f; Fourth Lateran Council on, 20, 53, 67, 430n8; as gendered, 67, 83, 129; ghettoization compared with, 19–20, 67; as ineffective, 437n79; Jews not mentioned in statutes until legislation for, 120; for Jews of Florentine ghetto, 244f; list of Florentine Jews made for, 38, 69, 151; for medieval Jews, 411; as not required for Tuscan Jews, 55, 68, 431n20; Pius V enforcing, 57; reinstatement for Tuscan Jews, 59, 67–70, 82–83, 122, 129–30, 204; sameness of Jews signified by, 83; as symbol of otherness, 69, 130; terms for Jews in legislation of 1567, 118; Torelli on, 55; Vinta on, 67ff, 436n74; and yellow ribbon for prostitutes, 77, 121, 204, 428n17 Segre, Renata, 243, 532n132 segregation, see residential segregation self-government: as absent before ghettoization, 137–43; election of governors of ghetto, 253–58; as feature of traditional Jewish community, 137, 386; Florentine ghetto compared with other communes and towns, 243, 273–75, 297; formation of new governing elite, 258–60; ghettoization and, 145, 243; Simonsohn on development of, 507n104; women excluded from, 284–89. See also capitoli of Florentine ghetto; governors of Florentine ghetto self-legitimation, 171 Selim II (sultan), xxii, 74f Senate, 26 sensali (brokers), 324, 327–30, 529n52, 533n137, 533n140 Sephardic identity, 402. See also Levantine Jews; Spanish Jews Servadio di Liuccio, 162 Servadio Greco, 52, 106, 111, 327ff, 449n68, 533n133 servants: dowries for, 537n28; Jewish servants in the ghetto, 325–26; Jewish women seeking work as, 296; Jews employing Christian, 69–70, 160, 173, 178, 184–91, 293–94, 295, 467n113; poor women serving as, 341. See also wetnurses

setaiuoli, see silk industry sewage system of Florentine ghetto, 211–12, 487n62 sexuality: birth control, 358–60, 544n110, 545n121; celibacy, 338f; chastity, 294, 339, 348, 352, 383; relations between Christians and Jews, 67–68, 183, 195, 296, 476n64, 524n46. See also homosexuality; prostitutes Sforno, Abram d’Emanuel di Davit, 357, 544n105 Sforno, Davit, 181, 183 Sforno, Emanuel (Manuello) di Davit, 176, 181, 185–86, 477n77, 493n28 Sforno, Mattasia di Davit, 160, 176, 188–89, 357 Shapiro, James, 423n41 Shatzmiller, Joseph, 474n37 sheh.it. ah, 160, 165, 386, 468n116 Shelomo ben Shemuel, 163, 468n131 shops, 214, 286–87, 297–98, 400, 488n80 Shulh.an Arukh (Caro), 266, 401, 506n96 Shulvass, Moses A., 501n50 Sicily: expulsion of Jews from, 423n41; residential segregation in, 54, 431n14 Siena: chapels in homes in, 159; convents in, 422n39; Cosimo I’s conquest of, xxi, 21; Da Rieti family returning to, 229, 492n21; expulsion of Jews from, xxii; ghettoization of Jews in, xxii, 9, 18, 231, 417n3; individuals with rabbinic training in, 164; Jewish bankers in, 101; Jews arrested as Lutherans in, 79–80; Jews expelled from papal states coming to, 71, 74, 114; located on map, xxvi, 102; medical school accepting Jews in, 149; travel permits required for Jews of, 522n26; Tuscan Jewish bankers settling in, 98, 231, 235, 494n34 Silk Guild: apprenticeship and sponsorship in, 326; Ginevra de Blanis in, 287, 518n200; complaint about Pisan Jews, 146; Da Empoli family members in, 321f, 530n104; government intervention in, 525n47; itinerant peddlers opposed by, 89; Jews admitted through relatives, 315–16; on Jews as foreigners, 124f; Jews required to matriculate into, 307–8;

619

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Index Leucci family members in, 319, 530n97; Gratiadio di Ventura di Leuccio Leucci in, 230; levels of membership in, 311–12, 526n63; as major guild, 315; matriculation fees for, 311, 526n55, 526n60; matriculation of Jews into, 1571–1610, 307; mobility of crafts opposed by, 90–91; as more difficult for Jews to enter, 317; privileges and exemptions for, 525n52; sensali of, 328; travel by members of, 321; women in, 123 silk industry: Cosimo I stimulating, 23, 322; decline in wool trade offset by, 21, 531n105; Jews in, 312, 527n66, 527n67; Jews with Levantine connections and, 328; mulberry trees, 51, 198, 322; wages in, 217; women in, 330–31 Simone d’Agniolo Cana Ruta, 542n80 Simone di Salamone, 279 Simone di Speranza, 344, 347, 535n10 Simone Prospero da Sezzo, 216 Simon of Trent, 94, 195 Simonsohn, Shlomo, 107, 458n5, 486n56, 497n8, 504n79, 507n104, 555n1 sindaci, 252, 261–63, 267, 275, 277, 506n94 Sisto da Siena, 564n84 slavery, 11, 187, 271, 421n27, 508n110, 508n111 social acts, 148–49 social anxiety theory, 86, 132, 442n154 sociality: Florentine networks of, 28; Jewish, 153–58; self-governing institutions and, 147. See also friendship sodomites, 10, 12, 515n172 Sommo, Judah, 531n114 soprastanti (supervisors), 252, 511n137 Spain: anti-Jewish ideas in, 72–73; charters for Jews in, 98; Cosimo I using Spanish troops, 21; duplicity and ambiguity attributed to Marranos in, 3; expulsion of Jews from, xvi, 423n41; Jewish communal organization in, 138; Jews as tax collectors in, 292; Jews settling in colonies of, 17; Madrid, xxi, xxvi, 72; Philip II, 57f, 74, 433n42, 497n2; practice of sheh.it. ah in, 160; residential segregation in, 54; war with Turks, xxii, 21, 74. See also Aragon Spanish Jews: 105, 108f, 166–67, 327, 396;

and Sephardic identity, 402; and Spanish prayer rite, 166f; specific individuals in Tuscany, 51, 125, 167, 189, 218, 370–74 passim, 429n133, 450n80; surnames of, 470n145. See also Levantine Jews; New Christians Spener, Philipp Jakob, 424n54 Sperandino di Moise da Servi, 245, 498n16 Sperling, Jutta Gisela, 339 Spoleto, 54 sponsalitus, see betrothal contracts state-building: Catholic Reformation in building Medici state, 32–39, 133; confessionalization and, 2–3, 30; Cosimo I building Medici state, 21–30; and ghettoization, 3–7 passim, 14, 88–134, 221, 407; Medici state benefiting from ghettoization, 199–200; religion in building Medici state, 30–32; territoriality and, 31, 32–34 statehood: requirements for, 136; Tuscan bureaucrats’ use of term, 31f. See also state-building status: age at first marriage and, 344–45, 350–52; dowry size and, 313, 354–55, 356, 365–84 passim, 528n76; elements of early modern European Jewish, 530n100; Florentine ghetto Jews lacking, 313–14; ghettoization reducing women’s, 303, 353, 383; governors of ghetto and, 258–59, 314–15, 318, 319; guild membership and, 314–18, 319, 323; Jewish men attempt to consolidate, 381; lineage in, 313, 323, 527n73; marriage for protecting and improving, 336; mobility and, 319–23; surnames and, 318, 323; tsedak. ah and, 387–88; women having independently of men, 284–85. See also class statutes, status of Jews in, 120–28 stipulations (tak. k. anot) in marriage contracts, 375–82, 552n199 Stow, Kenneth R., 18, 64f, 418n10, 432n27, 453n122, 494n38, 550n184, 553n212, 554n223 Suleyman the Magnificent (sultan), xxii, 74 sumptuary codes: exemptions from, 28, 111, 121f; on prostitutes, 121, 204, 483n18;

Index status of Jews and, 120–23; in visual coding of social categories, 82, 120 Sunday, 249, 294 Supino, Emanuello, 494n37 surnames (family names): Jews having, 314, 318, 530n94; status and lineage, 313f, 318; and status in Florentine ghetto, 318, 319, 323 synagogues: Ginevra de Blanis’s gift to, 392; in Tuscany before ghettoization, 159, 165–68; of Florentine ghetto, 247– 48, 499n23; gendered division of space in, 403–4, 467n108; in Italian cities, 158; for Levantine Jews, 402; noise in, 267–68, 287, 400; public prayer restricted to, 400; of Roman ghetto, 158, 247 synods of Jewish leaders, 141–43; in Ferrara in 1554, 78, 143; at Florence in 1428/29, 142, 461n31 Tabula delle Salute, 194, 480n121 tak. k. anot (stipulations) in marriage contracts, 375–82, 552n199 Talmud: burning of, xvii, xix, 55, 65, 78f, 119; papal permission for printing, 440n127; prohibition of, xix, 418n10; Trial of the Talmud, xvii Tamari, Tamar, 156, 256–57 Tamari-Venturozzo affair, 144, 156, 256–57, 465n96. See also Ventura da Perugia taverns, 304–6 taxation: to redeem Jewish slave, 271; catasto, 33, 227, 335, 345, 456n147, 491n11; customs taxes, 126ff; decima, 127, 252; estate taxes, 127, 456n148; gabelle, 127f, 252, 355, 456n150, 543n89; for governance of Florentine ghetto, 275, 510n128; Jews as tax collectors, 292; and Jews prior to ghettoization, 126–28; parishes in collection of, 32; per capita tax in Florentine ghetto, 224–25, 225, 500n40, 510n129; per capita tax in Pescia, 252, 500n40 teachers: 165, 273, 340, 467n110, 532n118, 561n62; in Cuneo, 341; in later ghettos, 458n5, 462n55; Nove approve contracts given to, 561n62; rabbis as, 397, 399; synod forbids Christians to employ

Jews as, 295f; terminology for, 398. See also education; tutors Tedaldi, Giovanbatista, 251 Tedesco (Tedescho, Todesco, family): as matriculating into more than one guild, 317, 529n89; Leon Modena and, 559n42; as surname, 318 Tedesco, Abram d’Isac, 246, 255, 316, 514n164, 559n42 Tedesco, Isac, 370 Tedesco (Todesco), Ventura d’Abramo d’Isac, 370, 559n42 Tedesco, Salamone d’Abram d’Isac, 559n42 territoriality: Catholic church as territorially defined, 34; parish boundaries fixed, 36–38; state-building and, 31, 32–34 testaments (wills), 389–95; average size of, 555n229; of Ginevra d’Agnolo Blanis, 162–63, 382–83, 389–95, 555n230; of Laudadio di Moise Blanis, 360, 392–93, 541n77, 557n19, 557n21; ethical wills, 392, 557n16; as source for this study, 41f; of women, 381–82, 389 testimony, see proceedings against the Jews Third Lateran Council, 53, 429n7 three rings, parable of, 93 Toaff, Ariel: on age at marriage, 344, 540n66; on bankers as minority, 444n25; on Laudadio de Blanis, 469n134; on Laudadio di Moise Blanis, 557n18; on class endogamy, 543n97; on dowries, 356, 528n76, 543n98; on Jewish community of Perugia, 456n145, 548n152; on Jewish versus Christian bankers, 445n34; on kosher-slaughterers, 161; on pleasure-seeking by young Jewish men, 542n81; on segno, 437n79; on segregation of Jews, 430n13 toleration of Jews: conversion and, 19; of Cosimo I, 51, 131, 471n9; in ghettos, xviii–xix; heresy making insupportable, xvii; as long as church law is respected, 174, 184; as medieval church policy, xviii, 131; mercantilist tolerance, 16, 18f, 61, 423n51; versus persecution of heretics, 79; in three rings parable, 93; two-fold

621

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Index paradigm of, 96, 100; utility as reason for, 16, 96, 435n53 Torah scrolls, 159, 403 Torelli, Lelio: Abravanel given right to bear arms by, 111; expulsion edict signed by, 417n2; first charter for Florentine ghetto approved by, 246; and forced baptism in Empoli, 494n37; and lack of general Jewish policy, 116; as secretary to Cosimo I, 26; on segno, 55 Toro, Moise d’Abram, 350–51, 352, 504n78, 535n10 Trachtenberg, Joshua, 9, 420n24 travel outside Florentine ghetto: by Da Empoli family, 321–23; daily travel, 300; by guild members, 321; lodging and eating in Christian establishments, 303–4; marriage affected by, 352; by men, 300–302, 302, 522n27, 523n31; status enhanced by, 320–23; trips taken, by age, 301; by women, 288, 300–303, 320, 523n31. See also travel permits travel permits, 298–300, 303, 332–35, 334, 343, 521n21, 522n28, 535n2 treasurer (camerlingo), 252, 270, 507n105 Trent: inquisition in, 474n37; located on map, xxvi; Simon of Trent, 94, 195; violence against Jews in, 94, 443n15 Trexler, Richard, 25, 206, 460n15, 484n28 Trial of the Talmud (Paris), xvii tsedak. ah, 387–89; among communal welfare funds, 395; circulating Florentine ghetto with alms-box, 388, 511n140; as concern of governors of ghetto, 267, 275, 388; enforcing collection of pledges for, 269; fines put into, 247, 263, 386; status and, 387–88; women and, 389, 557n12 Turin, xxvi Turks, see Ottoman Empire Tuscan Jews: —demographic characteristics of: baby boom of 1550s and 1560s, 100, 540n68; household size of, 226, 358–59; as percentage of population, 5, 30; population multiplier for, 227, 492n12; population of, 104, 223 —and Medici state: census of 1570, xv, 32–33, 60, 145, 160, 176, 184, 340–41,

464n74, 488n76; change of policy toward, 52, 57, 70–71, 113–18, 131; as disruptive of religious and spatial order, 86, 88f, 205–6; petitions to the court by, 111–13, 145–46; segno not required for, 55, 68, 431n20; segno reinstated for, 59, 67–70, 82–83, 122, 129–30, 204; utility as reason for toleration of, 16, 96 —relations with Christians: coexistence between Christians and, 92–94, 180–83, 199 —settlement in Tuscany: diverse origins of, 84, 401; as unauthorized, 120, 131–32, 198 —social characteristics of: names preferred by, 85, 442n150; self-government as absent before ghettoization, 137–43, 409f; those not bankers or merchants, 109–13, 198 Tuscany: administrative divisions of, 453n121; bachelorhood tolerated in, 346, 539n54; as Catholic territory, 30; Christianity as woven into society in, 89; convents in, 13; famine and poverty in, 73– 74; Jewish merchants invited to, 17–18; population of, 1562, 223; slavery in, 11; “Tuscanness,” 119. See also Medici state; Tuscan Jews; and cities and regions by name tutors, 144, 154, 159, 162, 467n109 Udine, 17 Umbria: age at first marriage in, 344, 540n66; Da Pisa and Da Rieti families marrying into families from, 355; dowries in, 356; kosher-slaughtering in, 160; occupational diversity of Jews in, 110; ritualized anger against Jews in, 92; segno in, 67–68 universal marriage: in Florentine ghetto, 348–50; Jewish emphasis on, 337–39, 342; as not a Christian ideal, 338, 342; for Ottoman Jews, 342, 538n41; reality of, 339–42; as survival strategy, 339 urbanization, 222, 227, 345–51 passim, 383 urban renewal, 198, 307 Urbino, xxvi Uriel d’Isaia of Pisa, 368, 549n160

Index Ursi (Orsi), Ioseph: daughter Iudit’s dowry, 323, 366ff; death, 381; insulted, 280, 515n172; marriage of daughter Iudit, 280; possible theft of Jews of Perugia, 367, 456n145, 548n152; stipulation in daughter Iudit’s wedding contract, 377–79 Ursi (Orsi), Iudit: see Orsi, Iuditta (Iudit) used-clothing dealers, see rigattieri Usiglia (Usiglio; Consiglio), Lione di Moise, 316, 318, 344, 504n77, 535n10 usury: Iacob Abravanel’s concession, 111; canon law prohibiting, 195; in charges against Jewish bankers, 172, 178; Christian opposition to, 94, 100; Christians prohibited from, 61, 98; Jewish synod on, 142; Jews allowed, 61, 98, 103; Pius V opposed to, 57 velettai (veil-makers): in Guild of Doctors and Spice-Merchants, 312, 527n70; in Silk Guild, 526n63, 527n70; Silk Guild requiring matriculation of Jewish, 89, 124, 307–8, 525n50; as traveling, 298 Venetian ghetto: architectural remains of, 6; establishment of, xxi, 18; etymology of term, 1, 61; exclusion as purpose of, 19, 62; Florentine ghetto compared with, 61–64; funduqs as model for, 63– 64; governing boards of, 499n25; passes for leaving, 299, 524n39; reasons for establishment of, 9, 19, 61–62, 411, 432n31; synagogue in, 158 Venice: attitude towards heretics in, 418n9; Battle of Lepanto, xxii, 432n31; colored hat for Jews in, 425n62; control of Friuli, 24; duplicity and ambiguity attributed to Marranos in, 3; elite women as nuns in, 339; fondaci in, 63, 435n54; Italian translations of Bible printed at, 440n134; Jewish merchants in, 17–18, 106; Jewish scholarship and art in, 324; Jews as infidels in, 417n7; Levantine merchants arrested in, 75–76; naval arsenal set on fire, 74; New Christians returning to Judaism in, 73; nonparochial loci of sacred community in, 37; population compared with Florence,

418n4; rabbi lacking in, 144; Righetto inquisitorial proceedings in, 56–57, 77, 107, 429n133; slave market in, 11; TamariVenturozzo affair, 144, 156, 256–57, 465n96; war with Turks, xxii, 21, 74–77; wealthy Jewish families in, 313 Ventura da Perugia (Samuel di Moise Ventura da Perugia): court connections of, 101, 257, 447n50; as not serving as governor of ghetto, 256, 465n96, 503n66; petitions for exemption from segno through, 285, 518n194; residence of, 257, 465n87, 537n28; Tamari-Venturozzo affair, 144, 156, 256–57, 465n96 Verona: ghetto of, 496n1; Jewish scholarship and art in, 398; rabbis in, 272; synagogue in, 158; women’s seating in synagogue in, 563n79 via de’ Martelli, 367 via de’ Succhelinai, 201, 203 Vienna, xxvi, 72 Villa di Tavola, 274, 509n125 Vinta (Vintha), Francesco: on exemption from segno, 457n59; expulsion edict signed by, 417n2; and lack of general Jewish policy, 116; at proceedings against the Jews, 472n18; on safe-conducts for merchants, 111; as secretary to Cosimo I, 26; on the segno, 67ff, 436n74 Viola di Raffaello, 191 violence in the ghetto, 277f Vitale, Daniel, see Daniel di Vitale da Siena Vitale di Salamone da Cascia: and Iacob di Laudadio Blanis, 279–80, 397; Manuello di Buondi confronts, 280, 397–98; conversion of, 256, 436n71, 502n59; as governor of ghetto, 255, 256, 397–98; guild membership of governors, 316; as rabbi in Florence, 397–98; sons of, 398, 528n81, 561n59; as without surname, 529n90 Volterra: conversion of Jews in, 231, 495n41; Jewish households in, 110; located on map, 102; Martelli asks Francesco about letting Jews settle in, 114–15, 117, 122–23, 452n106, 453n112; monte di pietà in, 180; population multiplier for, 237

623

624

Index water: drawn for Jews on Sabbath, 160, 186–89 passim; supply for Florentine ghetto, 211–12 Weissman, Ronald, 26ff, 37, 153 welfare, 387–96; communal funds for, 394; Misericordia of the Jews of Florence, 382, 392, 393–94, 558n23, 558n24; in testaments, 389–95. See also tsedak. ah wells, 189, 203, 211f, 303, 389 wetnurses: in charges against Jews, 294; Christian women serving Jews, 173, 184, 187, 191, 294f, 325, 520n5; Jewish women seeking work as, 296; as normative for Florentine Christians, 295; social status of, 295; Synod of 1573 on, 295, 325 widows: in census of Florentine Jews of 1567, 340; in census of Tuscan Jews of 1570, 341, 537n34; dowries as life insurance for, 353; independence curtailed by stipulations in marriage contracts, 381– 82; levirate marriage, 270, 378; travel by, 302 wife-beating, 542n83 wills, see testaments wine, 161, 304f wineshops, 304 witches, 10, 465n97 women: age at first marriage for, 342–48, 380, 384, 538n39; age differential in marriage, 342–45, 352–53; autonomy for wealthy, 383; carnality of associated with Jews, 205; changes in dotal strategies and marriage system affecting, 379–83; and charity, 389, 557n12; without children, 341; in Christian holy communities, 148; common rooms in Florentine ghetto for, 268–69, 331, 506n101; in communal institutions, 147, 148–49, 462n65; Compagnia delle Donne, 404, 563n80; in confraternities, 147; consororities, 147, 404, 564n83; in courts of law, 287, 524n45; in elites, 284, 287; as excluded from being governors, 258, 284, 408, 517n186; exclusion from public life of, 11–12, 118, 284–89, 421n28; familial strategies for arranging marriages for,

358–62; Florentine ghetto compared with convents, 12–14; and foundling hospitals, 341, 369, 531n117; gendered communities in Florentine ghetto, 403–4; ghettoization reducing status of, 303, 353, 383; and guilds, 123, 287, 308–9, 317, 454n133, 455n137, 528n83; identified with patriline, 380, 385; imbalance of men and, among Florentine Jews, 340; infant mortality for girls, 359; Jewish sociality and gendered community, 153–58; Jews employing Christian, 173; as kosher-slaughterers, 468n116; marriage as dislocating for, 156–58, 370, 466n100; marriage rates for, 337–42, 348–50; in Medici social categories, 29; midwives, 295f; mobility of working-class Christian, 523n37; as more ghettoized than men, 301, 303; names preferred by, 85; and noise in the synagogue, 267f, 287; perceived as foreigners, 465n97; permanently single, 338, 536n20; polygyny, 342, 378, 538n41, 553n210; power of as dangerous, 205; renting units in Florentine ghetto, 489n98; ritual bathhouses for, 162f, 165, 280, 386, 515n169, 545n121; selfgovernment’s impact on, 284–89; in silk industry, 330–31; sumptuary codes and, 121; surnames for, 318; in taverns, 306; testaments of, 381–82, 389; traveling outside Florentine ghetto, 288, 300–303, 320, 523n31; underidentification as Jews, 43–44; universal marriage as goal for Jewish, 338; unmarried, 155, 465n93, 465n94. See also convents; dowries; prostitutes; widows Wool Guild, 123, 307, 321, 525n47, 525n49 yeshivot, 149, 467n110 Yiddish translations of the Bible, 80, 440n133 Yuval, Israel Jacob, 459n9 Zaccaria di Michele da Empoli, 357, 544n105 “Zangari,” 11, 421n25