Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy - Hardcover

Bonfil, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520073509 ISBN 13: 9780520073500

Verlag: University of California Press, 1994

Inhaltsangabe

With this heady exploration of time and space, rumors and silence, colors, tastes, and ideas, Robert Bonfil recreates the richness of Jewish life in Renaissance Italy. He also forces us to rethink conventional interpretations of the period, which feature terms like "assimilation" and "acculturation." Questioning the Italians' presumed capacity for tolerance and civility, he points out that Jews were frequently uprooted and persecuted, and where stable communities did grow up, it was because the hostility of the Christian population had somehow been overcome.

After the ghetto was imposed in Venice, Rome, and other Italian cities, Jewish settlement became more concentrated. Bonfil claims that the ghetto experience did more to intensify Jewish self-perception in early modern Europe than the supposed acculturation of the Renaissance. He shows how, paradoxically, ghetto living opened and transformed Jewish culture, hastening secularization and modernization.

Bonfil's detailed picture reveals in the Italian Jews a sensitivity and self-awareness that took into account every aspect of the larger society. His inside view of a culture flourishing under stress enables us to understand how identity is perceived through constant interplay—on whatever terms—with the Other.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Bonfil is Professor of Jewish History at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem. His extensive publications on the history of Italian Jewry in Hebrew, Italian, French, and English have earned him an international reputation. Anthony Oldcorn is Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University.

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"The first fully developed and sophisticated statement of a position that goes against the main current of Jewish historiography for the past century. . . . The book will be of interest to scholars (beyond the specific field of Italian Jewish history) and to thoughtful general readers."—Marc Saperstein, Washington University

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"The first fully developed and sophisticated statement of a position that goes against the main current of Jewish historiography for the past century. . . . The book will be of interest to scholars (beyond the specific field of Italian Jewish history) and to thoughtful general readers." Marc Saperstein, Washington University

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Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy

By Robert Bonfil

University of California Press

Copyright 1994 Robert Bonfil
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520073509
I
The Laws of Topodemographic Distribution

First Phase:
Italy, Land of Immigration
The Dynamic Laws of Settlement

Static and Dynamic Factors

The demographic distribution of the Jewish presence in Italy, from the close of the thirteenth century throughout practically the whole of the fifteenth, came about as the result of a process that can be reconstructed with a fair degree of accuracy. In Sicily, from thirty to thirty-five thousand Jews, spread over twenty or so different localities, chiefly Palermo, Syracuse, and Messina, continued a presence that went back more than a thousand years, a presence that was substantially static in character. On the mainland, in contrast, the demographic distribution of the Jews was essentially dynamic : here the Jews seemed to be constantly on the move. Their constant mobility makes it impossible to determine their number, though one will not be too far off the mark in estimating them at another twenty-five to thirty thousand souls, out of a total peninsula population of between eight and ten million. With the exception of Rome, which, as will be seen later, constituted a point of departure rather than a point of arrival, the Italian peninsula was for the Jews, during this initial phase of our period, a land of immigration. This feature can be added to the dichotomy between Sicily and the mainland mentioned in the introduction.

There was an upward migratory flow, headed northward, of Jews of Italian origin, from Rome for the most part, and a twofold downward

flow, toward the south, of Jews of French and German origin. The French Jews, for the most part refugees expelled from their country in 1394, arrived from the west, whereas the German Jews, victims of the persecutions that came in the wake of the terrible plague of 1348, came down from the north in a slow but continuous stream. Others came in small groups from Alsace, the Rhine regions, even Poland. A return migration, on a reduced scale, was also recorded into southern Italy, from which the Jews had been expelled in 1291. Those involved were, for the most part, Jews of Italian origin, who were joined, roughly speaking toward the end of the fifteenth century, by a number of German and Spanish Jews.

The Reasons for the Migrations

What drove these people to move? In the first place, they moved because of conditions of absolutely ineluctable necessity expulsions, such as those mentioned above, to which others were added. These included the expulsion, for instance, of the Jews from the northeastern cities of Treviso, Vicenza, Feltre, Cividale del Friuli, and Udine, which probably occurred in the second half of the fifteenth century, an account of which can be found in a brief published chronicle.1 Next, a reason to move was a wide variety of ways of evaluating one's circumstances, in the light of which some places of residence might appear considerably less advantageous than others. In some instances, the motive may have been the pure and simple quest for adventure. The Jews, in any case, were not the only ones to display this behavior. Migrations made in the hope of finding better living conditions in the chosen destination than in one's place of origin were an everyday affair. The Italian cities north of Rome, which were experiencing a phase of expansion and economic development, naturally favored this general trend through a relatively liberal policy with regard to the granting of citizenship, of a share, that is, in the rights and protection enjoyed by their own citizens. This circumstance provides a possible key to the extraordinary capacity demonstrated by the Italian states at the end of the Middle Ages to make

the most of their human resources and therefore expand. Setting aside the sense of civic commitment or other values typical of the Renaissance, the interest someone might have in becoming and remaining a citizen (cives) of another city was often so strong as to justify any manner of sacrifice that city might demand. Seen in this perspective, the migratory movements of the Jews are perhaps one of the most typical expressions of their participation in the spirit of the century. Their migrations must also have been regulated, like those of the Christians, perhaps even more so, by the elementary terms of the age-old law of supply and demand.

It is not difficult to imagine how the various socioeconomic structures affected this law, making it more difficult for Jews to be accepted in those places where trade and professional guilds or groups of merchants enjoyed strong influence and translated their fear of competition into genuine hostility toward the Jews. Any investigation into the elements of the law of supply and demand which governed the migratory movements of the Jews can certainly take its cue from this essentially economic factor. Where this factor was operative, it was capable of permanently preventing Jewish settlement. In fact, commercially and industrially developed cities were very reluctant to accept Jews during the period that concerns us. Some, like Genoa and Milan, refused outright to allow Jews to settle there. Others, like Florence and Venice, allowed them in relatively late and after considerable hesitation.

Anti-Jewish Hatred and the Propaganda of the Mendicant Friars

The dynamics of opposition to Jewish settlement were, however, far more complex than appears from considerations of a purely economic nature. If one is to understand the problem better, one must return to a number of commonplaces that recent historiography has occasionally tended to forget. First and foremost, it should be emphasized that the presence of the Jews was, theoretically speaking, a circumstance abnormal enough to trouble a good Christan conscience, and hence was in constant need of justification. A particularly intense senti-

ment of Christian orthodoxy among the rulers was more than sufficient to prevent Jewish settlement or to provoke their expulsion. At times, the appeal to orthodoxy was simply a transparent pretext camouflaging more simple and ingenuous calculations of political pragmatism, such for example, as the desire to curry favor with the ecclesiastical authorities by making a show of strong opposition to the acceptance of Jews or by support for their expulsion. But, more often than not, it was a case of a sincere feeling of Christian orthodoxy on the part of those who believed that the day of divine judgment was at hand. Above all, one should not forget the friars of the mendicant orders, who preached vehement sermons to the crowds gathered in the churches and public squares, and whom the local municipal councils could ill afford to ignore. "In my opinion, we ought to make provision, either by ordinances or by whatever other means may prove more effective, to drive out and expel from within the city limits and from the surrounding contado [countryside] all of the Jews making usurious loans in our city, because, as Friar Bernardino repeated in his recent preachings, they devour our flesh and blood with their usury, without our being aware of it,"2 exclaimed a counselor from Foligno shortly after the visit of a Franciscan preacher to his city. And,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1994
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520073509
• ISBN 13: 9780520073500
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar