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

In September 1570 the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo I de’ Medici, gave the slightly more than 700 Jews living under his rule a choice: go into exile or take up residence in Florence in a quarter specifically designated as theirs. Such “ghettoization” did not lack for precedents. The city of Venice had famously subjected its Jews to a similar residential concentration in 1516, while recent papal policy had wavered back and forth between the creation of permanent ghettoes (such as Rome’s, in 1555) and expulsions (as in Bologna in 1569). But the Tuscan process differed from that of its neighbors in several significant ways. Pretext, purpose, and method turned out to have minds of their own.

Pressure from the Church influenced all three aspects. After all, this measure followed hard on the heels of the conclusion in 1563 of the Council of Trent, one of whose objectives was closer supervision of the faithful through more effective territorial organization. Reform aimed at securing what John Bossy has referred to as “parochial conformity” rendered ever more visible the anomaly of the presence of Jews within a militantly confessional polity. Ghettoization may thus be read as a means of resolving this contradiction by transferring Jews from Christian space to a quasi-parochial place of their own. Nevertheless, Stefanie Siegmund takes pains to emphasize that the main impetus behind the creation of the Florentine ghetto did not derive from Rome. Rather, it was a by-product of Cosimo’s program for modernizing the Tuscan state. Ghettoization issued from and contributed to an unprecedented bureaucratic interest in religious, social, and political space. At the same time it represented merely one of the many mechanisms by which the Grand Duke consolidated his power over all his subjects, Jewish as well as Christian. Seen in the long run of relations between Catholics and Jews, it can be read as a sort of intermediate step, one that lingered between the expulsion that was the preferred measure of the Counter-Reformation Church, and the pragmatic policy of mercantilist toleration by lay rulers that was beginning to loom larger as an option throughout sixteenth-century Europe.

The consequences for Tuscany’s Jews were far-reaching. Perhaps the one that made deepest inroads—and the portion of the book’s argument that departs most from accepted historical opinion—involves the crucial question of collective identity and its articulation. Medieval and early modern Jewish historiography has long linked the settlement of Jews with the near-universal emergence and persistence of “traditional” institutions and practices of spiritual and communal self-government. The Tuscan case Siegmund analyzes, however, suggests an alternative trajectory. The (admittedly few) Jews living in the region prior to 1570 did not constitute a community, if one identifies the latter with the presence of regulatory institutions and practices, rabbinical leadership, voluntary associations, and the like. Rather, community in this more formal sense emerged as a result of the state’s forcing its Jewish population to take on these responsibilities as part and parcel of the residential concentration it decreed. In the end, a community originally created for administrative purposes did not take long to become one in fact. By the close of the sixteenth century a new, composite elite had replaced the older generation of notables whose members had negotiated their privileges with the ruler on an individual, ad hoc basis. At the same time, the ghetto’s inhabitants took steps to erect many of the institutions associated with “traditional” Jewish communities. Hence the appearance of a communal council, hired rabbis, a burial society and other confraternities, a school, and a slaughterhouse and ritual bath. All these would become central nodes in a quarter that, after being enlarged in the seventeenth century, was finally demolished in 1868, when concern for civic reputation led local leaders to replace its run-down buildings with the huge Piazza della Repubblica...