Alle origini di una comunità: Ebree ed ebrei a Livorno nel Seicento (review)

Cristina Galasso has boldly entered where a more experienced scholar might have hesitated to go. Without access to Hebrew sources or training in the complexities of halakha (Jewish law), she has plunged into local archives in order to give us a picture of the social organization and underlying social values of Livorno's Jewish community in the seventeenth century. For her understanding of "traditional" or rabbinic Jewish values she relies on secondary sources, primarily sociohistorical studies. Though there are, perhaps inevitably, occasional slips in her understanding, these are not crucial. We must applaud Galasso's pioneering effort and know that the book will serve as a valuable guide for much future research.

The book is divided into four parts: a brief summary of the Medici charters that, in the 1590s, gave birth and extraordinary autonomy to the Livornese Jewish community; a lengthy chapter on aspects of family and gender relations; a sketch of the Jews' position between multiple legal and religious systems of authority; and a short treatment of the institutions by which Jews encouraged communal solidarity.

Galasso effectively mines her main source, records of judicial appeals, for fascinating details about sexual (mis)behavior, domestic disagreement and even violence, theft, and fraud — in short, a broad range of human confrontations and controversies. Wills and census data provide her with less-sensational, but equally important, information on the size and layout of Jews' dwellings, their domestic furniture and private libraries, the place of servants and slaves in the household, and many other fundamental aspects of daily life. Fifteen graphs summarize data on topics ranging from the size of dowries and patterns of inheritance to the ethnicity of converts to Christianity and the gender of those on the communal dole.

Above all, Galasso emphasizes the legal, economic, and social independence of action enjoyed by Livornese Jewish women, contrasting this with the much more limited role she believes was available to Christian women of the time. Galasso's documentary sources nicely concretize for the Livornese context the picture of Jewish women's agency outlined by Giacomo Todeschini and described in detail for Rome by Kenneth Stow, for Venice by Carla Boccato, and for Turin by Luciano Allegra. We see Livornese women's dowries invested as the financial basis for family firms, women named as heirs and administrators of businesses, women as testators, and (even if widowed and remarried) women as guardians of their minor children. Galasso is so convinced of Jewish women's rights — which she attributes largely to the contractual, and therefore reversible, character of Jewish marriage — that she sometimes ignores counterarguments. For example, though she thanks Ruth Lamdan for personal help and cites her work on more than one occasion, Galasso ignores that scholar's emphasis on the patriarchally oppressive attitude of traditional Judaism towards women and cites her out of context as support for the exact opposite position.

In reconstructing family and gender relations in Livorno, Galasso faced formidable challenges. The city's archive was badly damaged by Allied bombing during World War II, and she had as a result to rely on sources that are fragmentary at best. Her conclusions must be seen, therefore, as still provisional. Thus, her argument that women were more concerned than men with religious rituals preparing for the afterlife, her understanding of a gender-defined difference between men and women conversos in how they remembered the Iberian peninsula, and her conclusion that gender solidarity among women overcame entrenched ethnic divisions are all generalizations that will require further investigation in the light of other contemporary sources.

Galasso wants to use her archival sources as a counterweight to rabbinic material in order to demonstrate that "observance of halakha was less rigid and uniform than might have been thought" (8). This is a potentially fruitful and urgently needed scholarly approach, but Galasso, it seems to me, too...