The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community (review)

Between 1567 and 1571 Medici policy towards Jews appeared to undergo a crucial shift. Duke (and then Grand Duke) Cosimo I reversed traditional Medici tolerance, imposed the demeaning Jew-badge, and then restricted Tuscan Jewry to a single settlement in Florence, that settlement encircled by the high walls of a ghetto he ordered established next to the Mercato Vecchio. This apparently retrograde abandonment of Renaissance tolerance has been understood as a Medici concession to a reactionary papacy, an imposition of Roman-style restrictions in return for the papal grant of the new, more illustrious title to the ambitious dynasty.

Stefanie Siegmund has challenged that approach. For her, the new Jewry policy and the ghetto in particular were neither reactionary nor inspired by Rome; rather they were intrinsic to Medici state-building, part of the overall ordering and structuring that characterized the early modern bureaucratic state. This urbanization, spatial segregation, and formal legal definition of the Jews by the state for the first time constituted Tuscany's Jews into a kehila, or organized corporate community, characterized by new status structures and elites and eliminating women from leadership roles.

Siegmund's focus on the ghetto as a spatial expression of control and uniformity draws heavily on Foucauldian categories and the current rhetoric of urban studies, but it is also based on traditional methods of historical analysis and extensive research. Grounding herself in the sources, she questions both the chronology and evidence for this ghetto-for-title approach. Florentine ghettoization was formerly seen as a sad endnote to a glorious Renaissance community. Siegmund has used her extensive familiarity with the Florentine archives to transform it into a policy shift that reveals how considerations of urban planning, demography, economics, and gender can be integrated into Florentine Jewish history.

Anyone who has struggled with the immensity of the Florentine Archivio di Stato will appreciate the amount of work Siegmund has invested in some of her finest insights, as when she demonstrates the sort of hard-headed cost-benefit analysis that motivated the Medici to build the ghetto. Moreover, she does not hesitate to move from her documents to discussions of broad social process, offering suggestive links between disparate realms (convents and ghettos; the ghetto as parish; night-time regulation of Jews and bearing of arms) while demanding that we reconsider other associations whose significance has been taken for granted (treatment of prostitutes and Jews).

Siegmund stakes out positions with unusual enthusiasm, creating theoretical black-and-white distinctions where, at least for this reviewer, a more subtle functional gray might have been preferable. Siegmund is correct, for example, that ghettoization preceded the forming of Jewish communal institutions in Florence and that state authorization was necessary to approve communal ordinances. But this is not to say that the Jews' idea of kehila stemmed from the state's agenda or that there was some unique relation between Medici political policy and Jewish life in the ghetto of Florence. Gradual institutionalization is a typical feature of Jewish communal life all over central and northern Italy during the sixteenth century, a response to the decline of the old system of moneylenders' condotte, to the formation of new larger population centers, and to a developing rhetorical-conceptual vocabulary that drew freely upon Jewish halakhic sources as well as secular models. Siegmund herself highlights that in 1571 the Medici allowed (and indeed encouraged) hundreds of Jews to settle in Florence for the first time. This paradoxical ghettoization/opening up of the capital to relatively large-scale Jewish settlement was the real policy revolution. The rest of the developments she describes in Florence — both in government policy and in the community — seem to me to parallel, mutatis mutandis, what was happening elsewhere.

Siegmund regularly presents us with bold new interpretations of well-known...