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

Stephanie Siegmund's book is all about how to think about the Italian ghetto. Traditionally, the ghetto is the arch-symbol of the Jewish policy of militant Counter-Reformation Italian Catholicism. A reinvigorated Church instituted a new and tougher policy on Jews in Italy, who were either expelled or else stripped of many rights and privileges and confined to ghettoes. Indeed, the physical image of the ghetto, precisely because of its physical-spatial nature, served as the visible representation of the mix of restrictions and disabilities to which Italian Jews were now subject, as well as a symbol of the fear and loathing in which they were now formally and officially held. This notion of the ghetto is a staple of Early-Modern Italian Jewish historiography.

It is a model with which Siegmund takes issue. She argues that one cannot speak of an undifferentiated "Italian" ghetto. While ghettoes were in fact created in almost all the communities where Jews were permitted to reside, they did not come into being in the same way, and their effects upon the local Jewish communities were not identical. Indeed, in the case of Florence, to which her study is devoted, the creation of the ghetto caused the creation of the Jewish community, both in the sense of bringing together disparate Jews living in Florence who had lived lives basically separate from one another and often from Jewish practice, as well as in the sense of a formal kehilah, which was formed by the state-ordered concentration of the seven hundred or so Jews living in Tuscany into a ghetto constructed by the state, and by the state-sponsored formation of organs of self-goverment. The Early-Modern kehilah being an organization dedicated, among other things, to promoting and even coercing religious praxis and halakhic conformity, it was a supreme irony that the Medici Christian state was responsible for pushing its Jews to live "orthodox" Jewish lifestyles.

Or perhaps it was not ironic at all, when one considers, as Siegmund does, the mix of factors that led to the decision of the Tuscan government to expel its relatively small number of Jews from their places of residence throughout the (soon to be) Grand Duchy and to concentrate them in a ghetto in Florence in 1570-71. Traditional historiography has concerned itself with the question of why it was that Cosimo I, the famous ruler of Florence who created both the Tuscan state and its feared and efficient administrative machinery, changed his longstanding pragmatic and even benevolent policy toward Jews in Tuscany in the late 1560's, when he began to conform to Papal policy and compelled the Jews to wear a segno (a yellow "o" on the hat) and move into a ghetto. The traditional explanation is that it was all about Cosimo's need for Papal and Habsburg recognition for his title as Grand Duke of Tuscany, which signified his superiority to the Dukes who ruled other parts of Italy. Or it had to do with the religious fervor excited by the war against the Turks which culminated in the Battle of Lepanto. Or to the death of his wife, who had been friendly to Jews, or the marriage of his son and co-regent to a Jew-hating wife.

For Siegmund, none of these explanations suffices. She prefers to see the creation of the ghetto as an act of bureaucratic reorganization of a sector of the population of the Tuscan state, a piece of the overall reorganization of society and institutions that constituted Early-Modern state-building. Siegmund describes this process as one that "required that communities and social networks and social hierarchies be dissolved, subordinated, co-opted, and restructured. . . . But there was also an effort to build and support social networks—communities—which were themselves closely linked to institutions that were supportive...