#Stefanie Siegmund | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dwellordream · 3 years

Text

“The experience of Jews in Italy in the early modern period suggests that until the creation of the ghetto in the sixteenth century, there was no real break with the traditions of medieval social relations between Christians and Jews. In many ways, the history of Jews in Italy indicates that instability and resilience characterized their lives throughout the medieval period. From the fourteenth century, Jews were able to expand their communities, usually centered around networks of banks. In the 15th century communes moved against Jewish lending, and radicalized mendicant preachers stirred up opposition to Jews, resulting in a dramatic contraction of Jewish communities. Jews in southern Italy also endured fluctuating fortunes of expulsions and forced conversions under various rulers, but core populations survived and migrated north.

Migration seems to have been an essential part of the Jewish experience in Italy, reaching the levels of what one scholar has even termed nomadism. This does not suggest a lack of roots in any one place, but rather the ability through marriage or business to take up multiple residences with relative ease. In Rome itself, the experience of Jews mirrors much of the rest of Italy. Jews survived the fourteenth century in Rome quite well. The violence of Cola di Rienzo’s coup against the papal state did not set loose any violence or expulsion policies against Jews. The plague, as well, struck Rome just as elsewhere, but Jews did not become victims of fantastical conspiracy accusations. In the years before the Counter-Reformation, the papacy protected Jews in the papal states around Rome.

Jews were able then to navigate through complicated social and political conditions and still remain vital participants in local Italian societies. Despite expulsions and moments of persecution, Italian Jews continually reconstituted their careers and social networks during these late medieval and early modern centuries. What the experience in Italy shows is that there could be a range of reactions to Jews, including violence, judicial persecution, and expulsion, but that ultimately Jews were treated as normal actors in Italian society. The lives of Jews in the years before the creation of ghettos in the major Italian cities of Venice, Rome, and Florence in the sixteenth century were marked by a high degree of integration into local societies. We now have a brilliant portrait of part of this world in Stefanie Siegmund’s study of the creation of the Florentine ghetto.

The Medici state created the ghetto, as Siegmund argues, to fulfill the ideology of Counter-Reformation anti-Judaism and to reap the profits of rent generated by the new ghetto. Moreover, the ghetto was an expression of the Medici rulers’ desire to regularize and control its diverse population by creating a commune of Jews. When Jews of the Tuscan countryside tried to resist this forced relocation, they called on their neighbors to testify to their honest business practices and good characters. The testimony collected by the Florentine officials, albeit largely ignored, provides eloquent witness to the high degree of acculturation and relatively “normal” social relations between Jews and Christians. Jews in the small towns of the Tuscan countryside were considered long-time residents who had Christian friends, business partners, and employees.

The anti-Jewish leaders of the ghetto project could not find a significant number of Christians willing to condemn their Jewish neighbors. It is unlikely that those kinds of long-term relationships survived the creation of the ghettos where Jews were aggressively removed from the full range of daily social interactions with Christians. However, even with the creation of the ghettos, we may ask if Jews felt profoundly alienated from Italian society. General antagonism toward Jews in the form of ritual murder accusations, attacks, and expulsions declined or disappeared as the ghettos spread. Jews could be tolerated as long as they seemed to be controlled. We should not romanticize the ghetto, but it did not destroy the Jewish community.

(In fact, Siegmund argues that the ghetto actually created the institutions and self-consciousness of the Jewish community). Jews already used to swings in papal and local policy may have been able to take the constraints of the ghetto in stride. One scholar who has studied that world closely concludes: Jews’ perceptions of themselves and their relationship with the outside world in the age of the ghettos were ambivalent and contradictory. On the one hand, a fundamental instability colored ghetto life, owing to the precariousness of existence within the ghetto’s walls, marked by overcrowding, conversionary pressure, and growing poverty. On the other hand, Jewish identity was unexpectedly strengthened by the clear-cut delimitation of the community’s boundaries.

These two contrasting perceptions coexisted, representing two different aspects of the very same situation and at the same time expressing the basic paradox of the ghetto. The strengthened sense of community and identity may have given Jews the resources to function in the increasingly regulated and religiously aggressive worlds of early modern Italy. Jews who were relocated to ghettos increasingly lived their lives apart from Christians, but in a more constrained way they remained a part of local Italian worlds. They could work and socialize outside the ghetto. The restrained worlds of the ghettos produced the highly acculturated Jews of the early modern world such as come to life in the autobiography of Leone Modena. By the end of the sixteenth century, many aspects of Jewish-Christian relations that had characterized the medieval period in Italy survived into the worlds that had supposedly seen the transformations of Renaissance and Reformation.”

- Jonathan Elukin, “Expulsion and Continuity.” in Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages

#cw: antisemitism #jewish #renaissance #history #italian #jonathan elukin #living together living apart #religion

9 notes · View notes