Jews and Magic in Medici Florence: The Secret World of Benedetto Blanis by Edward Goldberg (review)

From the year 1615 to the year 1620, the Florentine Jewish businessman Benedetto Blanis sent a total of 196 letters to Don Giovanni dei Medici, an important scion of the famed Tuscan governing family. The former was a professional trader and amateur scholar from one of the leading families of the Florentine Ghetto, while the latter was a legitimized bastard child of the Grand Duke, Cosimo I. The letters of Benedetto to Don Giovanni constitute the single largest extant collection of epistles written by an early modern Jew, and they are preserved in the Archivio di Stato of Florence, in the compendium entitled “Mediceo del Principato 5150.” Edward Goldberg, founder and erstwhile director of the Medici Archive Project, discovered this remarkable compendium, which provides the documentary foundation for his Jews and Magic in Medici Florence: The Secret World of Benedetto Blanis.

Even though Benedetto was a merchant by occupation, Goldberg recounts that his true ambition was his scholarship and teaching. This is attested to by the weekly Sabbath sermons that he gave from his single-room home, as well as by the unpaid Hebrew lessons that he gave to as high an official as the confessor of Dowager Grand Duchess Christine de Lorraine (21). And even though Don Giovanni was a widely acclaimed military governor and a skilled civil architect, Goldberg notes that this Medici doyen was dedicated to the occult throughout his life. This is attested to by his maintenance of a full alchemical workshop at his residence in Florence (13). Thus, it should come as no surprise that while the relationship between Benedetto Blanis and Don Giovanni dei Medici seems to have begun in the realm of commerce, it quickly moved to the realm of the arcane. Goldberg recounts: “Together they ventured into dangerous and often forbidden territory: astrology, alchemy and the Kabbalah” (5). It is this joint venture that ostensibly lies at the heart of Goldberg’s narrative.

As a narrative of a journey into the occult, Goldberg’s account falls somewhat short. Indeed, it begins with the enticing premise that for Don Giovanni and his ilk, “Benedetto’s most valued attributes were his knowledge of Hebrew and his presumed mastery of Jewish mysticism” (18–19). Notwithstanding this bold pronouncement in Chapter 2, the next real mention of anything occult in regard to the relation between Benedetto and Don Giovanni comes only fifty-one pages later, in Chapter 5. Even there, however, no significant discussion of the role of the occult ensues; there is simply a brief mention of Benedetto’s apology to Don Giovanni for delaying in the translation of a Hebrew version of a work attributed to the late-thirteenth-and early-fourteenth-century Franciscan theologian Ramon Llull.

The first and perhaps longest detailed discussion of arcana only comes about halfway through the book, in Chapter 7. Within this chapter, Goldberg examines exchanges between Benedetto and Don Giovanni in regard to “ ‘curious’ and ‘forbidden’ writings, particularly arcana on the Inquisition’s Index of Prohibited Authors and Books” (119). These include books of Paracelsus, Ramon Llull, and Heinrich Cornelia Agrippa of Nettesheim, all of which entered into the discussion between Benedetto and Don Giovanni. The two interlocutors also discussed books of Jewish kabbalah. Despite the interesting documentation brought forth by Goldberg here, some of his historical facts are mistaken. For example, Isaac Luria, Moses Cordovero, and Hayim Vital were not “refugees from Spain and Portugal,” and there is absolutely no clear evidence that “Ramon Llull (1235–1315) recognized Jewish Kabbalah as a divine science with an essential role in forming the Christian consciousness” (122). Nor was Llull in fact the “founder of Christian Kabbalah” (70, and a similar statement again on 175).

Notwithstanding these factual errors, Goldberg’s accounts of the social role of the occult in seventeenth-century Italy are fascinating indeed. For example...