Invisible Enlighteners: The Jewish Merchants of Modena, from the Renaissance to the Emancipation

Invisible Enlighteners

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS

Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania

Series Editors: Shaul Magid, Francesca Trivellato, Steven Weitzman

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Invisible Enlighteners

The Jewish Merchants of Modena, from the Renaissance to the Emancipation

Federica Francesconi

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

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University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

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

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8122-5314-6

For my parents, Emilia and Floriano

Contents

Note on Spelling, Translations, and Currency

Introduction

Chapter 1. A Network of Jewish Families in the Early Modern Period: The Road Toward Ghettoization

Chapter 2. Jewish Leaders, Their Circles, and Their Books Before the Inquisition: A Parallel Story

Chapter 3. The Jewish Household: Family Networks, Social Control, and Gendered Spaces

Chapter 4. The Invisible Wealth of Silver: The Journey of the Formigginis from the Ghetto to the Ducal Court

Chapter 5. Jewish Female Agency in the Ghetto Mercantile Elite

Chapter 6. The Jewish Urban Geography of the Ghetto and Beyond

Chapter 7. Moisè Formiggini Before Napoleon: Two Steps Toward Emancipation and One Step Back

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Note on Spelling, Translations, and Currency

In conforming to the fluidity of writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I have retained all the original spelling and orthography applied to personal names, Jewish institutions, and places located in the ghetto of Modena as I found them in the archival documents I have consulted. For the sake of clarity, when quoting from primary sources, I have adjusted the punctuation to standard modern English. In the case of Hebrew words and expressions written in Latin characters and according to the Italian pronunciation from the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, I have transliterated them according to modern standards. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

The principal currency used in Modena and the Este Duchy in the period analyzed in the book were the Modenese lira and zecchino. The Modenese lira was a silver coin worth 20 soldi; there were 12 denari per lira. In 1600 one Modenese lira was valued at 1.5403 Italian lire (plural for lira); in 1639 the value diminished to 0.9242, and in 1679 to 0.5721. In the following century, the Modenese lira’s value diminished further to 0.3695 in 1739, 0.3733 in 1782, and 0.3846 in 1796. The zecchino in circulation since 1261 was valued per Modenese lira as follows: 8 in 1608, 13 in 1639, and 37½ in 1737. Unless otherwise specified, in this book the term lira is used for the Modenese lira. Other coins produced by the Ducal Mint and widely circulated were the scudo di Ercole III, scudo di Francesco III, giorgino, sesino, mezza lira, and ducato. The above key information draws on Angelo Martini, Manuale di metrologia, ossia misure, pesi e monete in uso attualmente e anticamente presso tutti i popoli (Turin: Loescher, 1883), 370–73; and Arsenio Crespellani, La Zecca di Modena nei periodi comunale ed estense corredata di tavole e documenti (Modena: Tipi di G. T. Vincenzi e Nipoti, 1884), 189–90.

Figure 1. Italy in 1600 after the 1598 devolution of Ferrara. Prepared by William Nelson.

Introduction

In January 1598, forced from his palace in Ferrara, the magnificent city that his family had governed for seven centuries, Duke Cesare d’Este moved his court to Modena. Citing the illegitimacy of the duke’s birth, Pope Clement VIII Aldobrandini had denied Cesare’s claim to Ferrara at the end of 1597, and the city was absorbed into the Papal States. The loss of Ferrara, a place that even today continues to echo the magnificence of the Italian Renaissance, was an irreparable blow to the Estes. In its stead, Cesare chose as the new seat of his duchy a city that was small, medieval, and according to local contemporary sources, dirty.

Small though it was, by 1598, when Cesare and his retinue arrived, there were already a considerable number of Jewish families in Modena. Among them were the Modenas, originally from Viterbo and Provence, but taking their name, as was the custom of the time, from the place in which they had established their residence. Present too were the Ashkenazi Sanguinettis, originally from Sanguinetto near Mantua and Germany. Both the Modenas and the Sanguinettis were influential moneylenders who would later become silk producers and traders. The Formigginis, at the time small mercers and artisans, had arrived from Ferrara and in two generations would become ducal silversmiths and reach the highest ranks of the ghetto elite of Modena. They were joined by a number of other Ferrarese Jews who, along with the nobles and courtiers, had decided to follow the duke to Modena.

Although publicly humiliated, politically weakened, and economically impoverished because of the loss of the Duchy of Ferrara and lands in Romagna and Comacchio, once established in Modena, the Este dukes would maintain the government of the city and the duchy for the entire early modern period and beyond. During this time, Modena’s Jewish population would increase, from a few hundred in the sixteenth century to 750 in 1638, when a ghetto was established in the city; at slightly less than 6 percent of the entire population, this was an impressive percentage within the early modern western and central European context. Cesare (r. 1598–1628) and his immediate successors Alfonso III (r. 1628–29) and Francesco I (r. 1629–58) inaugurated a long, if not tranquil, period of dynastic continuity that lasted until the arrival of French troops and Napoleon in 1796.

The story of the Modenese Jewish merchants who lived and prospered under the Este dukes during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may be said to constitute the backbone of a wider history of early modern Italian—and ultimately European—Jewish history. The Modenese Jewish mercantile elite enacted a process of sociocultural transformation and legal and political integration that evolved in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through a complex dialogue with Jewish identity, without suffering the traumatic ruptures or dramatic divides that sometimes led to assimilation and conversion elsewhere. Modenese Jewish merchants, while absent from the public discourse of the Estes, lived in a sociocultural environment that gave rise to unique forms of Renaissance culture, early modern female agency, and Enlightenment practice.

Invisible Enlighteners tells the social and political history of these Modenese Jewish merchants of the early modern era as it traces their settlement, ghettoization, and emancipation, and explores the means by which they established a network of upper-middle-class Jewish families and maintained their role as community leaders through business, interfamilial alliances, and the production of religious and secular culture over the course of more than two centuries. It begins with the election of Modena as the capital of the Este Duchy and the subsequent immigration of dozens more Jews from Ferrara into the city. It ends with the 1796 establishment under Napoleon of the Cispadane Republic and the beginning of the so-called first Italian Jewish emancipation.¹

The early modern period in Jewish history has no firmly established chronological boundaries. Most broadly defined, it covers the period between the fifteenth and the long eighteenth century, though some historians place its end as late as 1815.² Scholarly discourse on Jewish transformations in the early modern period and the passage to the modern era has enriched the field of Jewish history over the past four decades. Since the 1970s and 1980s, scholars have considered the early modern period to be a new phase in Jewish history, one that would include the impact of the Iberian expulsions, the establishment of the Italian ghettos and the syncretic society and culture therein, the diffusion of Sabbateanism from east to west, the development of Hasidism, and finally the Jewish Enlightenment.³ Accordingly, I consider the Iberian expulsions and the French Revolution as the points that frame early modern Italian Jewish history on each side. In Modena, the transformations brought about by the Iberian and other Jewish expulsions and migrations emerged most visibly in the early sixteenth century, with demographic and ethnic transformations of the local Jewish community, while the challenges of the French Revolution became more evident with the 1796 French occupation led by Napoleon Bonaparte, when the ideals of the Revolution effectively changed Jewish political participation as well as the practices of daily life.

In Ferrara, the earlier capital of the Este dynasty, the Jewish presence at court, in intellectual cenacles, and within the city’s commercial activities was often the focus of lamentations by local chroniclers, clergy, and individual citizens. Yet fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artistic works by Francesco Del Cossa, Ercole de’ Roberti, Lorenzo Costa, and Ludovico Mazzolino, such as the frescoes of Palazzo Schifanoia and the painting The Dispute of the Temple (c. 1515–20)—all with an abundance of Hebrew inscriptions—reflect the cultural interchange between Christians and Jews and the reciprocal appreciation that characterized the golden age of the city. On the other hand, Benevenuto Tisi detto Garofalo’s fresco Crucifix with Ecclesia and Synagoga (1523), originally produced for the Augustinian refectory of Sant’Anna, with its violent image of the synagogue’s demise, shows not only the centuries-long anti-Judaic sentiment but also the wide discontent regarding the growing Jewish presence in the city after the recent immigration of Jewish refugees from elsewhere in Europe and the Mediterranean.⁴ In nearby Bologna, one of two cities of the Papal States from which Jews had been permanently expelled after 1569, similar if more radical sentiments were expressed in Jacopo Coppi’s painting Miracle of the Crucifix in Beirut (1579). Its iconography represents an old trope of the triumphant crucifix spilling blood on top of the Jews, who were believed to be guilty of torturing Christ.

In Modena, where Jews remained a continuous and prominent presence in the city, both within their ghetto and in their shops, stalls, and mills spread throughout the historic center, no painting or fresco of that kind was commissioned or completed in any palace or church. Apparently, no artifact was created to suggest either appreciation of cultural interchange or discontent regarding the Jewish presence. If the city of Modena’s visual culture were a book, the city’s Jews would be a missing chapter. Their lack of representation in the arts seems to correspond to the dukes’ attempts to conceal what was a permanent characteristic of the new politically and financially reduced Este Duchy, that is, the prominent Jewish presence in the economy and culture of the city. Yet, by the mid-seventeenth century, the Modenese Jewry was a composite group—including new arrivals from Hamburg, Amsterdam, Livorno, Venice, and Constantinople—that had been amalgamated without friction into the preexisting Jewish population. The Portuguese Jewish community from Antwerp had already established branches in Modena before 1598. In 1652–53 Francesco I invited sixty Sephardi-Portuguese former conversos (Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism and often suspected of Judaizing in secrecy), entrepreneur and merchant families to settle in the duchy, for mercantilistic reasons, and many, including the Fanos, Tilles, and Francos, permanently settled in Modena.⁵

In seventeenth-century Modena, a new ambiguous, mostly utilitarian connection shaped the relationship between the Estes and the Jews. Perhaps because the presence of Jews in Ferrara had been so visible—too visible, according to sixteenth-century local chroniclers scandalized by Jews who even dared to play chess with the dukes⁶—in Modena the dukes made attempts to render invisible the numerous entrepreneurial activities that the Jews developed. Ducal authorities were cautious about mentioning them and imposed compulsory enclosure and other ghetto restrictions on the Jews in 1638, while also granting them state monopolies and the right to purchase property and conduct commercial activities. Modenese Jewish families established trade networks throughout the Italian peninsula and beyond. They worked as book dealers, silversmiths, printers, and silk weavers.

Elsewhere in the duchy, in cities and towns including Reggio Emilia, Scandiano, and Finale Emilia, Jews were also ghettoized throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And as in Modena, Jews in those places held all the state monopolies, including those for grappa (the grape-based brandy popular in Italy), glass, coral, diamonds, and even books for the ducal library. Moreover, beginning in 1622 both Jewish major entrepreneurs and Jewish small traders could enroll in all city guilds. After 1643, they could also conduct their activities outside the ghetto, in the city squares and streets—opportunities quite extraordinary in both the Italian and European contexts.

Modena became an important Jewish center not only because of the arrival of migrants and former refugees but also due to the presence of individual kabbalists and preachers from Safed; itinerant rabbis from the Italian peninsula; and maggidim (Jewish religious itinerant preachers), scholars, and healers from eastern and central Europe with strong ties to the Sabbatean messianic movements in the Middle East. It was the role played by Jewish merchants that made Modena the unique cultural crossroads that it was, however, a place where Humanism, Kabbalah, medical science, and Sabbateanism coexisted, and where later the values of the Enlightenment would challenge traditional Jewish culture. Modenese Jews shared these cultural aspects with Catholics and heterodox Christians in the city.

Archives, Historical Methodology, and Representativeness

Through both a synchronic and diachronic approach, Invisible Enlighteners connects the microhistories of Jewish individuals and families in Modena to macrohistorical processes. Its protagonists are Jewish men and women who stood out in their communities but who, despite their culture and prominence in the city’s economy, had been disenfranchised and ghettoized since 1638. In Modena, male and female Jewish identities were constantly contoured by internal cultural developments (such as Lurianic and Cordoverian Kabbalah, both liturgical and nondevotional Hebrew poetry, and Sabbateanism) and Jewish-Christian interactions (for example, with Jesuits, converts, and inquisitors). At times, these blurred both social and cultural boundaries even as theological borders continued to be rigidly upheld. In their capacities as jewelers, silk entrepreneurs, and librarians mediating between the duchy and other states, Modenese Jews often served as both cultural and financial intermediaries. In the 1770s, for example, Laudadio Formiggini, Moisè Beniamino Foa, and Emanuele Sacerdoti were, respectively, the duke’s silversmith, banker, and bookseller. Despite their important roles, these men’s lives remained constrained by theological anti-Semitism and restricted by ghettoization and legal norms, social codes, and limitations imposed by both secular and ecclesiastical authorities.⁷ New Jewish conceptions or ways of performing gender emerged in the seventeenth century, which reconfigured the domestic sphere. In addition, Jewish households were transformed by cultural hybridization, social control, and political negotiation. What was initially a sort of confinement to the house or, more properly, to the domestic sphere became the catalyst for the transformation of silent women, wives, and daughters of successful Jewish merchants into an active, almost entrepreneurial female community—the confraternity So‘ed Ḥolim (To Benefit the Sick)—devoted to assisting, employing, and socializing in the ghetto.

What went on between Jewish women and men, Jewish and Christian women, and Jewish women of different social classes within the walls of houses, synagogues, and tribunals too often remains unknown. But following connections between gender and class among Jews in early modern Modena helps elucidate this largely unknown area and contributes to a new understanding of Italian Jewry in its transition from the early modern to the modern age. Moving beyond the traditional periodization of Renaissance and baroque Italy challenges our perception of Jewish culture within the wider context of Europe and the Mediterranean in the early modern period. By singling out the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a defining age for Italian Jewry, Invisible Enlighteners explores the ways in which the Italian Jewish mercantile intelligentsia took part in the emancipation process during the Napoleonic era, ultimately reaching beyond Italy to set this story in a transnational context.

A wealth of previously unexplored sources in Italian, French, Hebrew, and Latin from state, private, and Jewish communal archives in Italy, Israel, and the United States allows an in-depth analysis of social and ideological structures within a long chronological framework. Thanks to abundant documentation of Jewish merchants’ lives and their prominent roles as Jewish community leaders, cultural intermediaries, and even politicians active on the national scene by the eighteenth century, Invisible Enlighteners challenges the criticism often leveled at microhistory as an approach suffering from lack of representativeness.⁸ The representativeness of this book’s protagonists is evinced by the fact that they were the only actors on Modena’s Jewish and non-Jewish social stage who displayed strategies of both conservatism and a tolerance for gradual changes, solidarity, cohesion, and social prestige.

Each chapter of Invisible Enlighteners employs—to use the Italian microhistorian Edoardo Grendi’s terminology—exceptional archival evidence (extra-ordinary documents) that, if properly read and interpreted, do not simply tell exceptional stories but also illuminate broad historical trends and macrohistorical phenomena.⁹ The Jewish banker Moisè Modena’s lists of books submitted to the Holy Office in a 1600 trial, showing thorough familiarity with medieval and Renaissance Jewish and Italian culture, and Moisè Formiggini’s first public speech before Napoleon in 1796, demonstrating deep knowledge of the French Enlightenment and Jewish emancipation, are excellent examples. Both sources reflect broader cultural trends of their times. Modenese Jewish merchants participated in early modern Italian humanistic culture and in the European political and cultural arena of Jewish and non-Jewish modernity. Yet, instead of acculturating in the sense of progressing toward modernity, the Jewish milieu of Moisè Modena and Moisè Formiggini underwent a process of cultural hybridization. My conceptualization of both cultural hybridization and hybridity responds to Peter Burke, who elaborated and brought this definition into Renaissance studies and early modern history. Jews in Italy did not submit to cultural colonization: Italian and Hebrew cultures were in their eyes equal, and agency and intention were often included in the process. Modenese Jewish merchants’ cultural hybridization evolved into a relationship I would describe as an intimate cultural communion between Jews and Christians, marked by intellectual interchange and reciprocal accommodation.¹⁰

Invisible Enlighteners, compared to other studies in Jewish history, does not consider individual inquisitorial archival sources in isolation but rather within the context of other available documentation.¹¹ For example, the 1600 trial sheds light on the otherwise unknown book culture of a Jewish banker and philanthropist in Hebrew, Italian, and Latin side by side with a series of other unpublished complete inquisitorial proceedings and records. This includes documentation concerning the confiscation and expurgation of Hebrew and non-Hebrew texts in early seventeenth-century Modena; denunciations, pretrial investigations, trials, and sentences; letters to and from the Supreme Congregation in Rome; correspondence of the Modenese Inquisition with various parties, including its branch offices, the vicariates; contemporaneous Hebrew autobiographies and ethical literature; various unpublished booklets (known as indices) containing instructions for the expurgation of Hebrew books; and copies of Hebrew books bearing the mark of censorship through the erasure of blasphemous passages. These additional sources help place the trials in question in their proper judicial and historical context, while also preventing factual errors and misinterpretations.¹²

Carlo Ginzburg has shown that records of Inquisition tribunals are an extremely valuable historical source when the defendants’ voices did not echo inquisitorial stereotypes and the inquisitors faced some unexpected declarations when their knowledge did not filter the words and gestures of the defendants. In some exceptional cases, we have a real dialogue, and can hear distinct voices, we can detect a clash between different, conflicting voices.¹³ Inquisitorial records do not just chart the unusual and exotic, or serve to prove the truth of the accusation or the defense. Rather, these sources provide insight into the daily lives of witnesses and defendants and give us a glimpse of their neighborhoods and the ghetto, their family and community relations, and even the ways in which these played out in both the public and private spaces.

Like their Christian neighbors, Modenese Jewish bankers and merchants as well as middle and lower-class Jewish men and women notarized their marriage contracts, apprenticeships, business partnerships, testaments, donationes inter vivos (literally, gifts between living people), and other acts that virtually covered all their transactions. In each chapter of the book, I use notarial documents from Modena, Ferrara, Reggio Emilia, Bologna, and Milan issued since the mid-sixteenth century to shed light on the Jewish mercantile elite’s commercial, entrepreneurial, and artisanal activities; their marriage politics; individual choices, options, and also renunciations about both their inheritances and dowries; and confraternities’ foundations, transactions, and fusions. The chapters thus bring together not only testaments dictated by the Modenas, Sanguinettis, Formigginis, and other Jewish merchants but also autobiographical documents, rabbinic responsa, and kabbalistic and Sabbatean literature, authored by intellectuals and merchants such as the kabbalist Aaron Berekhiah Modena (1578–1639), and the Sabbatean Abraham Rovigo (c. 1650–1713). Jewish families in Modena often caught the attention of local chroniclers (e.g., Lucia Poppi and Giovanni Battista Spaccini in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively) who reported their stories, often with ambivalence about a Jewish presence in the city. These chronicles show that Jews were present in Modena and that their Christian contemporaries recognized their role. They also help us place the vicissitudes suffered by Jewish individuals or the larger community within the context of the history of Modena, the Este Duchy, and the Italian peninsula.

The Modenese Jewish mercantile society, among them the Formigginis—whose family archive, preserved in the Biblioteca Universitaria Estense di Modena, was forgotten for decades—flourished in the eighteenth century. The Formiggini’s archive includes twenty-three folders covering the years 1629–1955. These materials were donated to the Biblioteca Estense by Emilia Santamaria Formiggini, the widow of the known editor Fortunato Formiggini who committed suicide after the promulgation of the racial laws in Italy in 1938 by jumping from the Torre della Ghirlandina in Modena. The first eight folders include documentation from 1629 through the end of the nineteenth century. These materials have not had an easy life. The entire archive was originally deposited in the family villa Collegara in San Damaso, in the Modenese countryside, where in the second half of the nineteenth century hundreds of papers were thrown away or used to wrap fruits and vegetables and even monetary donations to the village poor.¹⁴ The original archive included Moisè Formiggini’s copies of speeches and correspondence with Italian, French, and German politicians and intellectuals, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Other documentation, preserved in the notarial records of the state archives in Modena and Reggio Emilia (the second city of the duchy), to some extent compensates for these losses.¹⁵ Despite its limitations, the existent evidence allows us to reconstruct the history of the Formigginis in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and more broadly to study the culture, economy, and society of Modenese Jewish mercantile elite in the context of both the Italian and Jewish societies during the ghetto period.

By studying the domestic sphere, we also gain insight into the lived experiences of Jewish women in early modern Europe. We get a sense of the choices that were available to them and how these varied regionally, ethnically, and by class. As elsewhere, Modenese Jewish women were relatively silent in comparison to the rich variety of women’s voices that survive from the contemporary Christian world. Yet, through various sources—the register of the female confraternity So‘ed Ḥolim and records of the Jewish court that deal with cases of illicit sexual activity together with notarial acts, dowries, and records of financial transactions—this book attempts to echo formerly silenced yet instructive voices of women from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Modenese Jewish society.¹⁶ I also discuss how rabbis’ and elite men’s prescriptive pronouncements about the female nature and ways in which women’s choices were conditioned and limited alongside the new options men were reimagining for women—a complexity often neglected or underestimated by Jewish and general historians.

The pinkas of So‘ed Ḥolim, now preserved in the archive of the Comunità ebraica di Modena, was kept for forty years by the same man, Leone Moisè Usiglio, a silversmith who served as a scribe (sofer), a fact that in itself deserves attention. The pinkas is a handwritten volume in quarto and has never been published. It is a sort of open book, periodically updated and expanded, with no proper author. Apparently, Usiglio simply recorded the meetings of So‘ed Ḥolim’s boards once or several times a year. He transcribed rules and decisions taken by So‘ed Ḥolim’s members in the distribution of work, organization of the economy, and even social aspects of the confraternity. However, when looking at its structure as an open book, the pinkas of So‘ed Ḥolim reveals much more complexity. We can consider So‘ed Ḥolim women to be coauthors of the pinkas because of their primary role in the confraternity whose actions were transcribed by the sofer. At the same time, they were the main readers of the pinkas—the minutes were often read aloud during the meetings in order to recall past discussions and decisions. Both Usiglio and Modenese Jewish women were listeners and auditors, although in different moments.

In addition to these written archives, Invisible Enlighteners also incorporates the insights into early modern Modenese Jewish life provided by material culture and the built environment. Domestic and synagogue architecture suggest a deep interplay between the visible public space and the invisible domestic sphere populated by Jewish merchants, and a consequent blurring of boundaries between the domestic and institutional. Modenese Jewish merchants commissioned, realized, and donated ceremonial textiles and objects to adorn their own synagogues (and those of others), houses, and confraternities. Some of those textiles and objects are still extant and preserved in public institutions and private collections. Objects in Modenese Jewish houses and synagogues help us gain a broader picture of cultural hybridity, material culture, and gender within the mercantile Jewish household. At the same time, these objects pose important challenges to the historian. For example, the silver ‘atarot (crowns) and rimmomin (finials) owned by the Formigginis are a patrimony that provides a unique glimpse into the history of the family’s cultural and artistic choices given that they had begun acquiring those objects in the early seventeenth century, passing them from one generation to another all the way to the twentieth century. We also must take into account the fact that—as occurred in the patrimonies of Judaica of other Modenese Jewish families—starting in the late nineteenth century those objects were often donated to public institutions and sold to private art collectors, exchanged, and donated, while some were never reclaimed after World War II.¹⁷ Moreover, in the absence of precise descriptive documents, it is not always possible to identify the synagogue of provenance of every Modenese seventeenth- or eighteenth-century silver artifact (often of Venetian craftsmanship) that is now preserved in the Tempio Israelitico in Modena or in private collections in Italy, Israel, and the United States.

Despite all the challenges, for social, cultural, and intellectual historians, Modenese papers and material culture uniquely illuminate a world otherwise rarely visible, a world in which men and women belonging to the Jewish mercantile elite were deeply involved in their community and in the vast sociocultural changes of those times.

Bridging Europe and the Mediterranean

In a recent study on a group of Sephardi merchants in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Livorno, Francesca Trivellato has coined the expression communitarian cosmopolitanism to capture the experience of Sephardic merchants who, in Livorno as elsewhere, synthesized multiple traditions and mingled with non-Jews but did so within the framework of corporatist society of unequal separate groups. The forms of communitarian cosmopolitanism changed from place to place, but everywhere they sought to contain fluidity and regulate the interaction between Jews and Christians.¹⁸ Modenese Jews were subjected to the restrictions described by Trivellato but, by January 1638, they had also been permanently ghettoized. The experience and role of Jewish merchants in Mediterranean and Atlantic ports in the early modern period has previously served to further the historiographical discourse on European Jewish integration and emancipation. By introducing the category of port Jews, Lois Dubin has argued that, perceived in their day as acculturated and useful agents, purveyors and facilitators of international maritime commerce, they benefited from relatively favorable civil-legal status and trod a particular road to modernity.¹⁹ For Dubin, participation in general civic councils and the possibility of voting—as in Mantua, Florence, Pisa, Livorno, and Trieste—was civil inclusion and a positive step along the path to emancipation.²⁰ Similarly, the cultural historian David Sorkin proposes an analysis of the social type of the port Jew, that is, merchant Jews of Sephardi or, to a lesser extent, Italian extraction who settled in port cities of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic seaboard and the New World.²¹

The study of the Modenese mercantile Jewish elite aims to enlarge these perspectives in order to focus more deeply on the relations of Italian Jewish merchants with other classes, political authorities, and their specific contexts—missed elements, according to Sanjay Subrahmanyan, in recent analyses of merchant communities.²² Modenese Jewish merchants confronted ghettoization as well as the political and legal impacts of the state and the Catholic Church, which affected all Italian Jews with the exception of those in Livorno. In analyzing their stories, Invisible Enlighteners bridges Europe and the Mediterranean in the early modern period, bringing into dialogue two different historiographical paradigms that have recently emerged: Nicholas Terpstra’s new approach to the Reformation by studying European communities of exiled and migrant refugees; and Natalie Zemon Davis’ and others’ attempts to ultimately focus on transcendence of cultures and identities through the stories of remarkable individuals in the Mediterranean.

Terpstra has reshaped the history of the early modern age in Europe by attributing much more significance to the 1492 Jewish expulsion from Spain than to the beginning of Martin Luther’s Reformation. This expulsion, Terpstra emphasizes, was the first attempt to purify an entire country of unbelievers and purge it from heresy. Beginning in 1492, forced expulsions reshaped Europe’s social geography, as communities of refugees were on the move throughout European regions. Within decades, along with Jews, groups of Dutch Anabaptists, Italian Calvinists, English Catholics, and Bohemian Hussites were forcibly removed from their places or voluntarily decided to leave. They often constituted new communities that adhered to the same principles of exclusiveness, purification, and purgation that had characterized the communities within which they had been marginalized or from which they had been rejected.²³ In fact, at the turn of the sixteenth century, the Modenese Jewish community was a Mediterranean and European society of refugees that was partially exclusive because of religious tenets and ethnic boundaries as well as external theological discriminations, legal constraints, and popular hatred; yet it was never governed by principles of purification and purgation. One of the consequences of following those principles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as was also the case in many other European cities, was the enclosure of communities of prostitutes and the sick in gated buildings and neighborhoods, followed by the ghettoization of Jews in 1638, which reshaped the fabric of Modena. As we shall see, the dukes never embraced the kind of violent public language of purification and pollution that characterized other cities such as Barcelona, Frankfurt, and Rome, where the Christian clergy were much more influential.

In her Trickster Travels, Natalie Zemon Davis has explored the vicissitudes and adventures of Al-Hasan Al-Wazzan (also known as Giovanni Leone and Leo Africanus), an eclectic diplomat and author who crossed religious divides, social boundaries, and empires and states in the sixteenth century. She asks, Did the Mediterranean waters not only divide north from south, believer from infidel, but also link them through similar strategies of dissimulation, performance, translation, and the quest for peaceful enlightenment?²⁴ With regard to this interpretation of the Mediterranean context, early modern Modena was a cosmopolitan center not only because of the arrival of migrants and former refugees but also because of the presence of eclectic and unorthodox intellectuals from eastern and central Europe and the Middle East. Modena became a unique cultural crossroads in which mediterraneanizing themes such as the Lurianic and Cordoverian Kabbalah, the art of memory, and Sabbateanism coexisted together with Western-Europeanizing instances such as Counter-Reformation influences that could include a restriction of popular manifestations, control over what women could read, and separation between men and women in the religious and public spaces.

Given the economic freedom enjoyed by Modenese Jewish merchants, it is also important to compare their status with that of port Jews in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Certainly, when Francesco I invited the Sephardi-Portuguese merchant families to settle in the duchy in 1652–53, he aimed to bring the grandeur and wealth of the past back to his court. He tried to transform Modena and Reggio Emilia into important hubs of commerce—port cities without ports—following the precedent of the Medicean port of Livorno.²⁵ Yet, compared to their Sephardi counterparts in Livorno, Trieste, Hamburg, and other port cities, Modenese Jewish merchants did not limit their connection to the city to only a few decades. Rather, they invested in Modena, settling there for centuries, transforming and adapting themselves and their ghetto to the changes of the times within the city and the duchy, different historico-political international circumstances, and social and cultural challenges within the Jewish world. Modenese Jews remained in the Mediterranean of Al-Wazzan, never venturing into the remote lands of Recife and Goa as their Anconitan and Livornese counterparts had. Similarly to Sephardi merchants in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, Modenese Jewish merchants were conversant in the language and culture of the local Christian populations, created a commercial and artisanal network vital to the city and the state economy, and took care of the poor in their community. Yet, unlike the Sephardim in Amsterdam, for the Modenese Jewish merchants Judaism was an all-embracing way of life rather than a religion. Their community infrastructure was not created suddenly in a vacuum, but was rather the product of a presence in the Italian peninsula several centuries long and complex negotiations with local authorities and the church. Finally, their wealth was never exorbitant, nor did they have any role in state and international diplomacy until the last decade of the eighteenth century.²⁶

Navigating the Early Modern Age amid Italian and Jewish History

According to the Italian historian Attilio Milano, the Este Duchy was one of the few, more generous terre di rifugio in the Italian peninsula until 1598, while the period from 1600 to 1789 represented a pronounced decline, an age of oppression for the duchy and Italian Jewry as a whole.²⁷ The historian Vittore Colorni, in his work on the legal history of Italian Jews in the early modern period, emphasizes how at the beginning of the seventeenth century the legal status and living conditions of Modenese Jews dramatically declined and remained so throughout the end of the Restoration and the annexation of Modena to the Savoy Kingdom in 1859.²⁸ Both the historian Lino Marini in his deep analysis of the history of the Este state and Andrea Balletti in his 1913 history of Jews under the Estes remark on the prominent presence of Jews in the economy of the duchy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.²⁹ Invisible Enlighteners departs from these views in two ways. First, it rejects the idea of a sudden decline; second, it goes beyond the community and city to explore the complexity of merchants’ lives outside of the confines of the duchy.³⁰

The history of the Modenese Jewish community stands out for various reasons. Modenese Jewish leadership was marked by a great degree of continuity: Jewish bankers were not replaced by Jewish merchants like in Mantua at the turn of the sixteenth century, but rather the former transformed themselves into the latter. Perhaps even more remarkably, Modena and the Este Duchy were the only places in the Italian peninsula where Jews did not experience local expulsions or eradications from small villages during the early modern period. Considering the contemporary nearby states, traumatic expulsions at micro and macro levels had been carried out since the mid-sixteenth century in the Papal States, the Gonzaga Duchy (where Jews were expelled from Mantua in 1630 in the aftermath of the plague and then found refuge in the Este Duchy), and the Medicean State. Indeed, despite their contradictory attitude toward the Jews, the Estes did not produce Jewish refugees but, rather, admitted and even invited them.³¹ The emergence of a new Jewish leadership in Modena coincided with the community’s path from the late Renaissance to modernity, and is a key topic for understanding the development of Italian Jewish history in general. The first decades of the seventeenth century were crucial for the emergence of some families and their aggregation and for the intensification of ties between Jewish and Christian society and institutions.

In a sense this social and political transformation seems to confirm Jonathan Israel’s claim that the period between 1570 and 1713 marked the beginning of a process of reintegration of Jews into Western Europe. With this reentry, the Jews began to exert a most profound and pervasive impact on Western Europe in both cultural and economic spheres.³² The case of Modenese Jews does not completely conform to either the model of integration or that of exclusion. Rather, what we see here is the emergence of a civil society out of the private sphere of family networks. This Jewish civil society also played an important role in the wider, non-Jewish world. Whereas the Christian nobility in Modena was weak due to their inability to take part in mercantile activities, the more influential Jewish families in the decades immediately before the institution of the ghetto succeeded in creating, through opportune matrimonial alliances and commercial associations, a close-knit Jewish mercantile community. This enabled Modenese Jewish merchants to exercise a certain influence after 1638 and avoid precarious conditions. In the eighteenth century, this kind of civil society evolved into a sort of unique laboratory for governmental skills within the ghetto. Members of the Jewish community learned to administer the ghetto through commitment to local Jewish affairs and by playing an active role in the struggle to improve their status, as well as by involving themselves vigorously in the wider cultural and commercial affairs of the city. They forged governmental skills by constantly reinterrogating what Jewish identity meant and also by negotiating with Italian rabbis. An example of these governmental skills in action was their efforts to address problems such as the vicissitudes suffered by Jewish servants who faced seduction, exploitation, and pregnancy under the Jewish roof in the eighteenth century. In early modern Italian Jewish society, the lives of these women, young and in the majority of cases unmarried, were at times shaped by a sexual component in their relationship with their masters or coworkers. The Modenese Jewish community was able to contain destabilizing behaviors within their society, and to reintegrate women who would otherwise have been tragically lost by obliging their seducers to marry them or support them as well as their illegitimate children. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, in both contemporary Italian Christian contexts and other European Jewish communities, women in similar conditions were often rejected and left alone with their illegitimate offspring.³³

This study of the Modenese Jewish mercantile elite also sheds light on the history of the Italian Inquisition, the building of Italian states, and absolutism in the ancien régime as seen through the prism of ghettoization.³⁴ When the general political and social situation of Italian Jews dramatically changed with the onset of the Reformation, Modenese Jews found themselves caught between the peculiar situation of the Este Duchy after January 1598 and the general politics of the Counter-Reformation that led to the reinforcement of the Inquisition and the ghettoization of Jews. As the historian of the Inquisition John Tedeschi has demonstrated, the new Roman Inquisition, established in 1542, was not a drumhead court, a chamber of horrors, or a judicial labyrinth from which escape was impossible. Despite the fact that moral justice was impossible and although misuse and abuse of authority and arbitrary decisions occurred, the Inquisition assured judicial procedures that guaranteed a legal framework and dispensed legal justice.³⁵ This portrayal corresponds to the Modenese local Holy Office’s procedures and to the role that the central Inquisition in Rome played in supervising it during the early modern period.³⁶

After 1598, as the local Holy Office’s structures were reinforced, inquisitors in Modena combined the persecution of impurity with the need to collect funds by commuting sentences into sums of money—inquisitors accused Jews of profaning Christianity, persuasion of neophytes to return to Judaism, improper employment of female Christian servants, and ownership of forbidden books. At other times, Modenese Jews such as the crippled Pellegrino Formiggini were subjected to the torture of the rack (tabula): his hands were bound behind his back and he was lifted by a rope tied to his wrists, which was then attached to a beam on the ceiling in early December 1617.³⁷ From inquisitorial sources we gain insight not only into the social and political negotiations of the emerging Jewish elite—often protected by the dukes—vis-à-vis the church but also into theological controversies involving Christians’ view of Jewish culture and Jewish attempts to combat assaults on Hebrew literature particularly after the promulgation of the Index of Prohibited Books (1596) that definitively banned the Talmud and the Bible in the vernacular.

Sources documenting the role of the Inquisition are an important tool for investigating not only the history of a specific state or a specific Jewish community but also for exploring in-depth general Italian history. At a time when the Italian peninsula was highly fragmented from a political point of view, the Inquisition was indeed the only institution present in all Italian states. The Inquisition pushed for the establishment of more ghettos or for stronger discipline until Italian states established ghettos.³⁸ In Modena the Inquisition’s role in forwarding the establishment of a ghetto was notable. Not accidentally, it was as soon as the ghetto was established that the harsh inquisitorial campaign against Jews drastically lost strength. At this time, the most influential Jewish families—such as the Modenas, Sanguinettis, and Usiglios—formed and reinforced a shared leadership in both the commercial and economic sectors.

The multifaceted politics and dynamics of Jewish life in Modena suggest that ghettoization might have served as an instrument of early modern state building as had happened in Rome and Florence in the previous century.³⁹ Dukes in Modena imposed ghettoization, but it was negotiated step by step by Jewish leaders. In 1638 the mercantile Jewish elite was capable of leading the Jewish community into the enclosure without traumatic effects or sharp ruptures. Modenese Jewish leaders and merchants created a multilayered Jewish community with