Invisible Enlighteners

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

Federica Francesconi

• Editorial: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780812299625
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Jewish History

Federica Francesconi writes the history of the Jewish merchants who lived and prospered in the northern Italian city of Modena, capital city of the Este Duchy, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her protagonists are men and women who stood out within their communities but who, despite their cultural and economic prominence, were ghettoized after 1638. Their sociocultural transformation and eventual legal and political integration evolved through a complex dialogue between their Italian and Jewish identities, and without the traumatic ruptures or dramatic divides that led to the assimilation and conversion of many Jews elsewhere in Europe.In Modena, male and female Jewish identities were contoured by both cultural developments internal to the community and engagement with the broader society. The study of Lurianic and Cordoverian Kabbalah, liturgical and nondevotional Hebrew poetry, and Sabbateanism existed alongside interactions with Jesuits, converts, and inquisitors. If Modenese Jewish merchants were absent from the public discourse of the Estes, their businesses lives were nevertheless located at the very geographical and economic center of the city. They lived in an environment that gave rise to unique forms of Renaissance culture, early modern female agency, and Enlightenment practice. New Jewish ways of performing gender emerged in the seventeenth century, giving rise to what could be called an entrepreneurial female community devoted to assisting, employing, and socializing in the ghetto. Indeed, the ghetto leadership prepared both Jewish men and women for the political and legal emancipation they would eventually obtain under Napoleon. It was the cultured Modenese merchants who combined active participation in the political struggle for Italian Jewish emancipation with the creation of a special form of the Enlightenment embedded in scholarly and French-oriented lay culture that emerged within the European context.

Chapter 1

A Network of Jewish Families in the Early Modern Period

The Road Toward Ghettoization

On January 31, 1598, during the feast of its patron Saint Geminiano, Modena, having just become the new capital of the duchy, was in turmoil because of the recent move of the Este court, exiled from Ferrara. The family’s established position in Ferrara was definitively interrupted after seven centuries in late 1597, when Pope Clement VIII Aldobrandini used the illegitimacy of Duke Alfonso II d’Este’s successor Cesare as an excuse to depose the duke and to incorporate Ferrara into the Papal States. Cesare had been proclaimed duke with the support of Ferrarese citizens as well as the Este family’s Spanish and imperial allies, yet the pope’s claims gained spiritual and physical force when he excommunicated Cesare and sent troops to nearby Faenza. Cesare left his former capital and moved to Modena in early January. A local chronicler, Giovanni Battista Spaccini, wrote that on January 31 in Modena, “the children cried in the evening: ‘Out the Jews,’ saying that they did not want them in the city.”¹

Shortly after, on February 3, during the Carnival, the Conservatori of Modena, the most important ruling magistracy of the town council aside from the Anziani, received a procession that included the representatives of all the corporations: “The majority of the massari of the corporations arrived in front of the council, referring to the request they had already presented several other times, and again pleaded with the Conservatori to embrace them and help them in expelling the Jews.” The Conservatori heard the request and declared that they would take it into consideration.² The unusual procession arrived even before Duke Cesare. Spaccini reported: “A general council has been summoned. Then they went to the duke, praying for him to expel the Jews of Modena, because they constitute a great damage.… His High Majesty told them that this is a most important question, because if Jews are expelled from Modena, the same should be done similarly in the rest of the state.”³

The celebration for the patron saint and the Carnival belonged to the peculiar logic of the civic ritual of the early modern period: beyond other social functions, public celebrations and processions translated and interpreted the social world through a popular vocabulary.⁴ In 1598 Modena the effects went even further: the feasts prepared the emotional scene with a mixture of the holy and profane for a predetermined, political action—the request for the Jews’ expulsion. Moreover, the procession that petitioned the expulsion of the Jews from the city had a great political effect because the request was also made according to a precise hierarchical apparatus. First, it was addressed to the Council of the Conservatori, which in Modena always maintained a strong autonomy and was often in competition with the dukes; and second, before the duke himself.⁵ Even if the request was rejected,⁶ in reality in 1598 the status of the Jews was no longer recognized as a fixed and unmovable component of the city and its social order as it had been in the past. One year later, in January 1599, just two days before the new feast of Saint Geminiano, the first confiscation of Hebrew books (two more followed) took place, enacted by the local Inquisition. The timing of the two events was not accidental. The ritual procession and confiscation of Hebrew books represented the means for civic and church authorities to articulate the identity of the city and protect its political and Christian body.⁷ By the end of the sixteenth century, Jews and their books apparently remained the most visible sign of impurity within the Modenese Corpus Christianum since local inquisitors had already harshly persecuted Reformation movements and hunted down witches and sorcerers in previous decades.⁸ In May 1603, the inquisitor Arcangelo Calbetti da Recanati published a document, Contra gli abusi del conversare de Christiani con Hebrei, that was an attack against all the forms of what was perceived as dangerous Jewish-Christian social interchange: participation in reciprocal holidays and rituals, conversations on theological issues, sexual relations, and so forth.⁹

This change also paralleled an important transformation of the Este state that occurred after the 1598 devolution, that is, a general redefinition of the relations among the various powers and institutions in Modena and within the duchy overall. This redefinition was also determined by economic factors. The famines that had devastated the whole Italian peninsula in the previous decades harshly damaged the economy in Modena. In the period from the 1560s to the 1580s alone, Modena’s agricultural sector lost half of its products and income. The effects of this were still occuring in the 1590s. Compared to other Italian cities, Modena was incapable of any vigorous recovery. From the 1590s through the 1630s, it was vexed by economic deficits, state debits, weakening of the currency, high costs of raw materials that dramatically hurt Modenese merchants, indebtedness of middle and small farmers, and the economic stagnation of all the professional corporations, with the exception of the hatters, who were still competitive on the national scale with their production of felt hats.¹⁰ The devolution of 1598 caused further economic damage that had significant consequences for the Estes’ finances. The loss of the Duchy of Ferrara and lands in Romagna and Comacchio brought an end to the previous influx of numerous and conspicuous resources that was gained from the spoils of agriculture, natural resources, and human capital.¹¹ In addition, the economic crisis contributed to irrecoverable damage of the duchy’s image within international politics. At the time, the state was reduced to the duchies of Modena and Reggio Emilia, the Garfagnana Estense, and the nearby Podesteria di Varano, and the new capital city was close to the Apennines. Indeed, the axis of city powers changed together with an inevitable confrontation with the mountain areas and its social classes.¹² Nevertheless, the “connection of the privilege,” consolidated for centuries, continued. Those noble families more involved with the Estes moved with Duke Cesare from Ferrara and its nearby areas to Modena. Cesare granted them numerous offices and lands using the old feudalistic system, which his predecessors had reinforced over the last fifty years.¹³

As the new capital city of the Este Duchy, in 1598 Modena earned the honor of receiving a general inquisitor—Giovanni da Montefalcone—and the Inquisition was brought to full inquisitorial status and embarked on a strong campaign against the influential Jews of the state. Modenese Jews found themselves caught between the peculiar situation of the Este Duchy and the general politics and dynamics of the Counter-Reformation. Policies of the papacy included the burning of the Talmud in 1553; the promulgation of the Cum Nimis Absurdum bull in 1555, which created the Roman ghetto, restricted Jewish economic activity and property ownership, and ultimately led to local expulsions and the establishment of ghettos throughout the Italian peninsula; and finally the promulgation of the Index of Prohibited Books, which definitively banned the Talmud and the Bible in the vernacular.¹⁴ The religious and cultural repression conducted by the Modenese Inquisition paralleled, and at times clashed with, the ducal program aimed at embellishing, restructuring, and reorganizing the new capital, taking into account “security, sanitation, and decoration.”¹⁵

Indeed, the promotion of Modena as the new capital inevitably implied not only a number of political changes but also a complex program of urban restoration and transformation devoted to the “abbellimento della città” (embellishment of the city) in the name of magnificenza. The image of Modena had to correspond with the dignity of the court, which had recently moved to the city; consequently, a number of construction sites opened up in different urban areas. While the ancient Roman walls and network of streets such as the Strada Maestra and Via del Castellaro still shaped the structure of the city, its axis was redesigned based on the system of central squares around the Cathedral, the City Hall Palace, the Palazzo della Ragione, and the Castellano. In a few years, the little square nicknamed del Giogo del Pallone was entirely paved and redesigned to allow the Modenese nobility to play the ballgame after which the square was named. The open space overlooking the Castellano was later organized as riding stables. The City Hall was completely restored, and its sala del Consiglio was refrescoed with images of “emblematic virtues”—truth, harmony, calm, preservation, and religion.¹⁶ This program was not devoid of criticism and at times was the object of serious obstructionism by the Conservatori. This also involved the Jewish presence in the city fabric: in 1600 the chronicler Giovanni Battista Spaccini, who had proposed the expulsion of the Jews from the city many times, declared himself scandalized by the prince’s initiative to take “all the beautiful stones of the land where Jews are buried” for his own buildings. It is difficult to say if his comment was sincere or ironic but nevertheless it denotes that, when lucrative opportunities were offered, the dukes did not hesitate in exploiting Jews, in this case expropriating their tombs from the Jewish cemetery (owned by the Modenas since the fifteenth century), and ultimately erasing their presence in perhaps the most visible Jewish place in the city’s fabric.¹⁷

On December 1617, a new procession went through the streets of Modena. The representatives of the arts—the tailors, hatters, apothecaries, shoemakers, wool workers, and barbers—again presented themselves before Duke Cesare: it was not the expulsion they requested—an extreme and impracticable act for the Estes—but rather the seclusion and establishment of a ghetto “as is common in the other Italian cities.”¹⁸ They requested that “Jews, explicitly enemies of Christianity by nature and vocation, be consolidated into only one area of the city and obliged to live there and not in any other place, separated, for as much as Your Majesty would like to tolerate them within the walls [of Modena].”¹⁹ They also presented their plea emphatically, claiming that they refused to believe that “Your Majesty would leave it to others to take the merit of this so saintly enterprise [the institution of the ghetto], already promoted twice under your favorable domination and now it has been again initiated by the city as being truly important because it includes both secular and spiritual issues, is propelled by the love and honor that the city has for its bishop and shepherd that they requested with vigor, and also because it was encouraged by the nobility, promoted by the corporations, and requested by all the people.”²⁰ This parade was also connected to the Carnival. Spaccini reports that, in the following days, “the weather being amazing, people dress up and play ring toss [giocano all’anello].… And the affair of the Jews goes on: there are rumors that it [the ghetto] will be established in the area of San Pietro, in Contrada Mazzocchi and in the streets behind unless it would not be annoying for the duke, being the area so close to the walls; Jews probably would not accept it, even if it is a saintly enterprise having Jews [constrained] in an enclosure.”²¹

The fact that the 1617 petition was addressed directly to the duke is emblematic of the political system on which the state was built, the incomplete absolutism. At the time, the state was accompanied by various forms of privileges of feudal nobles and the concentrations of power in the hands of bishops such as Obizzo d’Este (in Modena), and Rinaldo d’Este (in Reggio Emilia); the inquisitors; and the clergy, both secular and regular.²² Ultimately, the request to seclude the Jews was successful and granted a few days later after a Dominican preacher reinforced the request through public anti-Semitic sermons; yet the ghetto was ultimately established only in 1638 after some delays due to economic and political agreements between the duchy and the Jewish community.

Thus, in the new cultural and political framework after the devolution of Ferrara to the Papal States and the election of Modena as the capital city of the Este Duchy, it became increasingly difficult for Modenese Jews to maintain their previous social standing.²³ Only a few decades earlier, in 1561, Alfonso II, who had become Duke of Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio Emilia only two years earlier, entered Modena triumphantly, accompanied by a procession of the most important magistrates of the town council as well as the local clergy; on that occasion Jews had played a role. The procession paraded along a traditional route in the city, divided for the occasion by six triumph arches built with contributions from all the city corporations—among them bankers, notaries, bakers, and tanners—and the Jews. The Jews had two arches: the first, located at the Cittanova gate, was dedicated to the virtue of clemency, while the second, placed near the Strada Maestra, the main road of the city on the ancient Roman decumanus (currently Via Emilia), was dedicated to the virtue of prudence.²⁴ In the balance of the institutional structures mirrored there, the political and social position of the Jews had its own legitimizat...