The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi

Leon Modena's Life of Judah

Leone Modena, Mark R. Cohen, Mark R. Cohen

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691213934
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Jewish History

Leon (Judah Aryeh) Modena was a major intellectual figure of the early modern Italian Jewish community--a complex and intriguing personality who was famous among contemporary European Christians as well as Jews. Modena (1571-1648) produced an autobiography that documents in poignant detail the turbulent life of his family in the Jewish ghetto of Venice. The text of this work is well known to Jewish scholars but has never before been translated from the original Hebrew, except in brief excerpts. This complete translation, based on Modena's autograph manuscript, makes available in English a wealth of historical material about Jewish family life of the period, religion in daily life, the plague of 1630-1631, crime and punishment, the influence of kabbalistic mysticism, and a host of other subjects. The translator, Mark R. Cohen, and four other distinguished scholars add commentary that places the work in historical and literary context. Modena describes his fascination with the astrology and alchemy that were important parts of the Jewish and general culture of the seventeenth century. He also portrays his struggle against poverty and against compulsive gambling, which, cleverly punning on a biblical verse, he called the "sin of Judah." In addition, the book contains accounts of Modena's sorrow over his three sons: the death of the eldest from the poisonous fumes of his own alchemical laboratory, the brutal murder of the youngest, and the exile of the remaining son. The introductory essay by Mark R. Cohen and Theodore K. Rabb highlights the significance of the work for early modern Jewish and general European history. Howard E. Adelman presents an up-to-date biographical sketch of the author and points the way toward a new assessment of his place in Jewish history. Natalie Z. Davis places Modena's work in the context of European autobiography, both Christian and Jewish, and especially explores the implications of the Jewish status as outsider for the privileged exploration of the self. A set of historical notes, compiled by Howard Adelman and Benjamin C. I. Ravid, elucidates the text.

Excursus 1: The Venetian Ghetto in Historical Perspective

BENJAMIN C. I. RAVID

FROM THEIR earliest diaspora days onward, Jews chose freely, for a variety of reasons, to live close together, as did many other groups residing in foreign lands. This tendency was strengthened in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as the secular authorities, primarily in the Germanic lands and Reconquista Spain, offered Jews special quarters as an inducement to settle in their realms. These areas, often referred to as the Jewish quarter or street, were neither compulsory nor segregated. Jews continued to have contacts on all levels—economic, intellectual, and even physical— with their Christian neighbors. But the Catholic church, growing in strength, looked askance at these relationships, and in 1179, the Third Lateran Council stipulated that henceforth Christians should not dwell together with Jews. To become effective, this general policy statement had to be translated into legislation by the numerous European secular authorities. On the whole—with the exception of some places in France and the Germanic lands—only infrequently were laws confining the Jews to segregated quarters enacted in the Middle Ages, and sometimes these laws were not actually implemented. The few segregated Jewish quarters that were established, the best known of which is probably that of Frankfurt am Main dating from the 1460s, were never called ghettos because the term originated in Venice and came to be associated with the Jews only in the sixteenth century.

While the Venetian government permitted individual Jews to reside in the city of Venice in the later Middle Ages, it never officially authorized Jews to settle there as a group, with the exception of a brief period from 1392 to 1397. The government did, however, allow Jewish moneylenders to live on the mainland, across the lagoons at Mestre, and the terms of their charter allowed them to seek refuge in Venice in case of war, in order to safeguard loan pledges from Christians that were in their hands. Accordingly in 1509, during the war of the League of Cambrai, a severe conflict during the course of which the enemies of Venice advanced across the mainland toward the island city, the Jewish moneylenders of Mestre and other places on the mainland fled to Venice. Shortly afterward, the Venetian government recovered its territories and ordered all the refugees to return home. But soon it realized that allowing the Jews to stay in the city was doubly beneficial: first, they could be required to provide the hardpressed treasury with substantial annual payments, and second, permitting them to engage in moneylending as pawnbrokers in the city itself would be convenient for the needy, whose numbers had been swelled by war. So the government issued a five-year charter that authorized the Jews to stay in the city and lend money in it.

Jewish moneylending was clearly very important. In addition to giving the government an additional source of revenue and assisting in promoting urban tranquility, it also had great significance in the religious sphere. Because both Jews and Christians adhered to the biblical commandment that forbade members of the same faith to lend money to each other at interest, the presence of Jewish pawnbrokers lending money on interest on loan pledges to the Christian poor rendered it unnecessary for Christians to engage in that activity in violation of the religious tradition. It also obviated the need to establish in Venice, as had been done elsewhere, a pawnbroking establishment under municipal or ecclesiastical supervision known as a monte di pietà, which could cause theological and political difficulties. Because the Jewish moneylenders thus not only helped to solve the socioeconomic problems of an increasingly urbanized economy but also prevented Christians from violating church law, the Venetian government periodically renewed the charters of the Jewish moneylenders until the Venetian Republic surrendered to Napoleon Bonaparte over two and a half centuries later, in 1797.

While the Venetian government tolerated the presence of the Jews in the city, the Catholic clergy—especially during the Easter season, when anti-Jewish sentiment tended to intensify—fulminated against them, against their residence in the city, and against their moneylending activities, and advocated their expulsion. Under clerical influence, on March 29, 1516, the Venetian Senate asserted that no God-fearing inhabitant of the city desired that the Jews should dwell spread out all over it, living in the same houses as Christians and going where they pleased day and night, and legislated that henceforth all Jews in the city were to go to live together on the island known as the Ghetto Nuovo (the new ghetto). Gates were to be erected on the two bridges leading out of it, and those gates were to be locked at sunset and only opened again at sunrise, with a substantial fine for any Jew caught outside after hours. The Christian inhabitants of the ghetto were required to leave, and as an incentive for landlords to comply, the Jews were required to pay a rent one-third higher, with that increase exempt from taxation.

Clearly, the word “ghetto” is of Venetian and not Jewish origin, as has sometimes been conjectured; it is encountered in Venetian sources from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and today it is generally accepted that the name derives from the previous presence of foundries where artillery was cast (il ghetto or il getto, from the verb gettare, “to pour” or “to cast”).

Despite the attempts by the Jews to ward off segregation in this new compulsory area, the Venetian government was adamant; while willing to compromise on a few administrative details, it was unwilling to make even minor concessions on the general principle that all the Jews in the city had to live in the ghetto. The presence of the Jews was necessary for economic reasons, and the ghetto was the institution that relegated them to their appropriate permanent position in Christian society.

Some twenty-five years later, in 1541, a group of visiting Jewish Levantine merchants complained to the Venetian government that there was not sufficient room for them and their merchandise in the ghetto and requested additional space. The government investigated, found their complaint to be valid, and, noting that the greater part of the imports from the Ottoman Balkans was handled by these Jewish merchants, granted their request. It ordered the area called the Ghetto Vecchio (the old ghetto), across the canal from the Ghetto Nuovo and connected to it by a bridge, walled up and joined to it and assigned to the Jewish merchants. Henceforth, Venice had not one ghetto but two, and they were to endure until the end of the republic.

The term “ghetto” soon spread beyond the city of Venice. In 1555, as part of the hostile attitude toward the Jews that was adopted by the Counter-Reformation, Pope Paul IV, shortly after his inauguration, issued a bull that severely restricted the Jews. Its first paragraph provided that henceforth in all places in the papal states, the Jews were to live separated from Christians on a single street—and should it not suffice, then on as many adjacent ones as necessary, with only one entrance and one exit. In compliance with this bull, that same year the Jews of Rome were required to move into a new compulsory segregated quarter, which was apparently called a ghetto for the first time seven years later in 1562.

Influenced by the papal example, many local Italian authorities instituted special compulsory, segregated quarters for the Jews. Following the Venetian and now also Roman precedents, these new areas were called ghettos already in the legislation that ordered their establishment in, for example, Florence, Siena, Padua, and Mantua.

Significantly, this new use of the word to mean a compulsory Jewish quarter came to be known also in Venice. In July 1630, the Jewish merchants in the city requested that the ghetto be enlarged for the sake of some additional Jewish families who, they claimed, would come to the city if they had suitable quarters. Very sharp objections were raised by both the Christian landlords who owned the buildings in the ghetto and those Jews who had built additional stories onto existing buildings, on the grounds that expanding the ghetto might lead to their own dwellings going unrented. Thereupon, to demonstrate that they did not seek the enlargement of the ghetto for their own sake but only for that of the newcomers, the Jewish merchants offered a guarantee of three thousand ducats, to be prorated according to the number of the anticipated twenty new families that did not actually arrive. The Senate, always concerned with attracting merchants to the city in order to enhance trade, and no doubt especially so after the plague of 1630-1631, accepted this offer and in March 1633 provided that an area containing twenty dwellings, located across from the Ghetto Nuovo in a direction almost opposite from the Ghetto Vecchio, be enclosed and joined to the Ghetto Nuovo by a footbridge over the canal. This area was not designated by any name in the Senate legislation of 1633, but a report issued by one of the magistracies of the government in 1636 referred to it as the Ghetto Nuovissimo, the newest ghetto. Obviously, this term did not refer to a “newest foundry” once in operation on that site, but rather to the newest compulsory, segregated, enclosed quarter of the Jews.

Subsequently, in a process that has not yet been traced, the word “ghetto” came to be used in a looser sense to refer to any area densely populated by Jews, even in places where they had freedom of residence and could and did live in the same districts and houses as Christians. Later still, it came to be the general designation for areas densely inhabited by members of any minority group, almost always for voluntary socioeconomic reasons rather than for compulsory legal ones, as had been the case with the initial Jewish ghetto.

It must be noted that the varied usages of the word “ghetto” in different senses has created a certain blurring of the historical reality, especially when the word appears in phrases such as “the age of the ghetto,” “out of the ghetto,” and “ghetto mentality,” so often applied to the Jewish experience in the Germanic lands and in eastern Europe in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and even nineteenth centuries. Actually, the word can be used in the Counter-Reformation Italian sense of a compulsory, segregated Jewish quarter only in connection with the Jewish experience in a few places in the Germanic lands, and certainly not at all with that in Poland-Russia. Although up to the Russian revolution of 1917 the Jews often lived in small towns and rural villages that were predominantly Jewish, they were never confined to specific segregated, walled-up quarters apart from their Christian neighbors. If the word “ghetto” is to be used in its original literal sense in connection with eastern Europe, then it must be asserted that the age of the ghetto arrived there only after the German invasions during the Second World War. But there was a basic difference: unlike those ghettos of earlier days, which were designed to provide the Jews with a clearly defined permanent place in Christian society, these ghettos rather constituted merely a temporary stage on the planned road to total liquidation.

Largely because of the word’s negative connotations, the nature of Jewish life in the ghetto is often misunderstood. Clearly, the establishment of ghettos did not—as the autobiography of Leon Modena demonstrates— lead to the breaking off of previous Jewish contacts with the outside world on all levels, from the highest to the lowest, to the consternation of church and state alike. Additionally, apart from the question of whether the ghetto succeeded in fulfilling the expectations of those in the outside world who desired its establishment, from the internal Jewish perspective, many evaluations of the alleged impact of the ghetto on the Jewish mentality and on Jewish cultural and intellectual life require revision. For example, an investigation of the cultural life inside the ghetto of Venice and the extent to which external trends penetrated it—as attested by the writings of Leon Modena, Simone Luzzatto, and Sarra Copia Sullam—leads to a reevaluation of the alleged negative impact of the ghetto in the intellectual and cultural spheres. In general, the determining element in those spheres was not so much the circumstance of the Jews being required to live in a ghetto, but rather the nature of the outside environment and whether it offered an attractive supplement to traditional Jewish genres of intellectual activity. In all places, Jewish life and culture should be examined in the context of the environment, and developments—especially undesirable ones—should not merely be attributed to the alleged impact of the ghetto.

An extended investigation of why the word “ghetto” is used so loosely and imprecisely would reveal many complex motivations. The most common reason is no doubt merely a simple casual use of the word without any awareness of its origin and nature. Others, however, are somewhat less innocent and may involve a desire, proceeding from either religious, national, or psychological considerations, to portray the life of the Jews in the preemancipation European diaspora unfavorably. The shared element is, significantly, that the term has become a value concept with negative connotations, rather than a descriptive word indicating a particular system under which Jews lived. The result has been to blur the historical reality of one of the basic aspects of Jewish survival, the Jewish quarter, thus giving additional urgency to the need for its systematic examination.

FOR FURTHER details, see Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 18 vols. to date (New York and Philadelphia, 1952-), vol. 9, pp. 32-36, vol. 11, pp. 87-96, vol. 14, pp. 114-120; Benjamin C. I. Ravid, “The Religious, Economic, and Social Background and Context of the Establishment of the Ghetti of Venice,” in Gli Ebrei e Venezia, ed. Gaetano Cozzi (Milan, 1987), pp. 211-259; and idem, “The Establishment of the Ghetto Nuovissimo of Venice,” to appear in the memorial volume for Umberto Cassuto.

Excursus 2: Who Wrote the Ambrosiana Manuscript of Hayyei yehudah?

MARK R. COHEN

SCHOLARS have long accepted, without systematic analysis, that the manuscript of Hayyei yehudah found in the 1960s at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, is an autograph. After a careful study of the manuscript in preparation for this English translation, comparing its script with other specimens of Modena’s handwriting and examining other significant details contained in it, I feel confident that this opinion is correct.

Description of the manuscript

The manuscript (shelfmark X 119 sup.) consists of several quires and a few loose pages bound in a small notebook with a cardboard cover. The binding is decorative, with a design in four colors (red, white, yellow, and gray). There are thirty-eight leaves between the covers of the notebook, and the watermarks are uniform. The pages measure 20.2 by 15.5 centimeters, and a full page of writing contains, usually, twenty-five closely written lines.

The manuscript is provided with a title page, as was customary even with unpublished works during this period. Folio 3b (the Arabic pagination is that added recently by the Biblioteca Ambrosiana) contains the words Hayyei yehudah centered on the page and surrounded above and below by a design of wavy lines (see fig. 3). Beginning on folio 4a, the first page of the narrative, and continuing through folio 27b, the manuscript bears an original pagination using Hebrew letters for numbers (alef through mem-het for pages 1 through 48). At the top of “page 1” (see fig. 4) there is an abbreviation of the motto “With God’s help may we do this successfully, amen,” superscribed by Modena with a similar decorative flourish representing the first letter, b (with), as in other manuscripts written in his hand. This prayer is followed by the opening words of the autobiography, “This is the life story of Judah Aryeh.” This introduction is set off from the beginning of the narrative proper by its form: it is written in large, square letters and contrasts sharply with the rounded cursive that is used throughout the rest of the autobiography.

The text of the autobiography runs from folio 4a through folio 29b. Folios 30a through 34a (nine pages) are blank. Folios 34b and 35a contain a list of short, cryptic notes entitled “Miseries of my heart in brief.” The section begins, “Apart from the banishments, the death of my sons, and the other matters recorded here,” and lists disturbing episodes in Modena’s life between 1601 and the death of his son-in-law, Jacob Motta, in the summer of 1645. These fragments of narrative are in the form of “memorandums”—mazkeret (plural mazkarot), sometimes called reshimot le-zikkaron, “memorandum notes”—that Modena often recorded in various places. Some but not all of the entries are elaborated with greater clarity in the main body of the discourse, and it is possible that many of them originated in jottings Modena made elsewhere from time to time as he thought of episodes he wanted to include in his autobiography. Natalie Davis’s suggestion (see her introductory essay, note 38), however, that the section as it stands on folios 34b-35a, with its heading, “Miseries of my heart in brief,” represents a topical rethinking of Modena’s life around 1645 (perhaps inspired by a similar chapter in Girolamo Cardano’s autobiography published in 1643) has great merit. It is also consistent with the view held here that Modena himself wrote the Ambrosiana manuscript of Hayyei yehudah.

Similar to the “Testimony of Illustrious Men Concerning Me” that Cardano included in his autobiography (see Natalie Davis’s aforementioned note), on the penultimate pages of his own autobiographical notebook (fols. 35b–36a; see fig. 12), Modena recorded some commendations of his own work by noted authors. He copied a passage in Latin from De successionibus, a book on Jewish inheritance practices by the English Christian Hebraist, John Selden, indicating the author’s indebtedness to Modena’s book on the Jewish rites, and cited (in Hebrew) two other laudatory statements, one by a former Christian student, Jean de Plantavit de la Pause, bishop of Lodève, and the other by the Amsterdam rabbi Manasseh ben Israel.

Following another blank page (fol. 36b), the notebook ends with two versions of the author’s last will and testament, one written in 1634 and the second in 1647-1648. The earlier will was copied, appropriately, on the last blank page of the notebook (fol. 38a-38b). Having suddenly begun in the spring of 1634 to feel old and infirm and to believe that his end was near, as he related in his autobiography (fol. 23a), Modena drew up his will at the end of May of that year and copied it, symbolically, on the end page of the notebook that contained his ongoing autobiography. Thirteen years later, however, intervening events in his life and other personal concerns, including a sudden, precipitous decline in his physical and psychological state, prompted him to write a new last will and testament, for which, now, only the penultimate pages in the notebook (fol. 37a-b) were available.

At the bottom of the last page of the notebook, following the will of 1634, there are some additional cryptic jottings about Modena’s peregrinations from dwelling to dwelling between 1642 and 1647. These seem to fall into the category of the “memorandums” jotted down on folios 34b and 3...