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Reviewed by:
  • The Jews in Sicily
  • Kenneth Stow
Shlomo Simonsohn . The Jews in Sicily. Volume 10: Notaries of Palermo, Part 1. A Documentary History of the Jews in Italy 24. Studia Post Biblica 48.3. Leiden: Brill, 2007. x + 732 pp. index. tbls. gloss. $297. ISBN: 978–90–04–15762–0.

For well over thirty years Shlomo Simonsohn has devoted his energies to publishing A Documentary History of the Jews of Italy. In a second series, published by the Pontifical Medieval Institute at Toronto, he has made available over 3,000 papal letters dealing with Jews, which, though strictly speaking are not part of the Italian series, are indeed so, especially the letters from the later fifteenth and into the sixteenth century. The Documentary History itself now comprises twenty-three volumes, of which Simonsohn himself has prepared four volumes on Milan; Renata Segre, three on Piedmont; Ariel Toaff, three on Umbria; Rosanna Urbani and Guido Zazzu, two on Liguria; and I myself two on Rome. Projected volumes will cover Tuscany and Southern Italy. In recent years, Simonsohn has undertaken what will be the largest single contribution, that on the Jews of Sicily. To date, there are ten volumes in print, but another ten are planned, including a monograph set to appear in 2011.

It is hard to estimate the importance of this vast undertaking. Unlike most cooperative ventures, the Documentary History is not a collection of chapters written by independent researchers. The whole is standardized. A reader who has used one of the volumes will be at home with them all. The one drawback is that indices were too often prepared by first names, making it difficult to trace family continuity. Some day, no doubt, the whole will be digitized for readers; the project began before any of us knew the word. Then the possibilities will expand geometrically for tracing families, financial cycles, population movements, and even the regularity of clauses in charters.

This comment is especially apt with regard to the latest two volumes in the series, nos. 9 and 10, part 1, in The Jews in Sicily, devoted to Sicilian notaries. The documents number in the thousands; most have been syncopated into columns, giving dates, names, and the nature of the transaction, mostly sales. Sometimes there is a full text, some of sales, but once or twice there is a will, and on one extraordinary occasion, a text relating to a Jew accused of sodomy and handed over to the Inquisition, with the question being whether the inquisitional or royal court [End Page 130] should try him. There is also a dispute among neighbors about opening a window into a common courtyard, and, of course, inheritance disputes, often involving female heirs. That said, the riches are here for the quantitative historian to mine —once he or she sets about digitizing. This is not to denigrate. The material has indeed been digested and made available in accessible format to the historian lacking the exquisite linguistic skills required to decipher the texts, or the patience to present them in an easily understandable format, skills that Simonsohn and his assistants do possess; this is no job for a tyro.

All this is different from what is found in the other volumes in the series, where the emphasis is on the individual documents and their contents. The documentations cover essentially everything in the archives pertaining to Jews beginning in the thirteenth century and run through the eighteenth. Each document is headed by a summary; at times a reader might wish for more detail, especially when confronting a lengthy Latin text. Thick indices are divided by person, place, and subject. One may also see how notaries in various regions differed in drawing acts and (mostly by implication) harbored changing attitudes toward Jews; the many charters taken together show the greater or lesser influence of the canons or ius commune in fixing Jewish status. The researcher can be fairly sure he or she is seeing it all, or almost all, thanks in no small part to Simonsohn's success in garnering sufficient funds to carry on the work, often with local assistance. Obviously, texts were missed. In the case of Rome, an entire team...

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