Italia Judaica: Gli Ebrei nello Stato Pontificio fino al Ghetto (1555) (review)

BOOK REVIEWS317 Unfortunately, this scholarly volume has not received the editing that it deserves . John J. Silke Portnablagh, Co. Donegal Italia Judaica: GIi Ebrei netto Stato Pontificio fino al Ghetto (1555). Atti del VI Convegno internazionale, Tel Aviv, 18-22 giugno 1995. [Pubblicazioni degU Archivi di Stato, Saggi 47.] (Rome: Ministero per i Beni CulturaU e Ambientali , Ufficio Centrale per i Beni Archivistici. 1998. Pp. 307. Paperback.) This volume contains the proceedings of an international conference held at Tel Aviv under the joint auspices of the Italian government's Ministero per i Beni culturali e ambientali and the Universities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The present installment of ItaliaJudaica, concerned with Jews in the Papal States until the establishment of the Roman ghetto in 1555, is the sixth in a series that dates back to the first congress held at Bari in May, 1981. Fifteen papers were presented at the conference in Tel Aviv, but two, by Mich èle Luzzati onJews in Bologna and by A. Toaff on the Jewish bank in Umbría, are not included. EngUsh and Italian are the official languages of the volume. There does not seem to be a thematic sequence to the order of the papers. Schlomo Simonsohn discusses the lot ofJews in the Papal States and considers their condition to have been relatively favorable, despite ups and downs, at least in contrast to their coreligionists elsewhere in Europe, until the advent of the Counter-Reformation and such measures as the erection of the ghetto by Paul IV in 1555. Joseph SchatzmUler examines the papal monarchy as viewed by medieval Jews "and the political expectations they nurtured—rightly or wrongly—regarding the Apostolic See" (p. 30), focusing on the papal enclave at Avignon, which was the seat of the Roman Curia for part of the fourteenth century. Alberto M. Racheli, in a paper enriched with numerous plates, traces from an architectural viewpoint the transformations experienced by the "Rione Sant'Angelo," the quarter enclosing the Roman ghetto. Simon Schwarzfuchs draws attention to the light shed on various aspects ofJewish life and society in the Papal States from the late 1530's to 1569 by the responsa (judgments) pronounced by Rabbi IsaacJoshua ben Immanuel of Lattes in the course of settling marital and morals disputes, controversies in the banking sphere, among many other matters. Micaela Procaccia, on a related theme, takes up Jewish encounters , not with rabbinical but with secular justice, specifically the criminal court of the Governatore in Rome in the first half of the sixteenth century, whose records are remarkably complete, despite occasional lacunae, concluding that the establishment of the ghetto in 1555 produced an increase in Jewish criminaUty . Sandra Debenedetti Stow, in a technical but elegantly presented paper, deals with the linguistic and cultural mediatory efforts conducted by Jewish scholars both within their own community as well as with the outside Christian 318BOOK REVIEWS world, with principal attention on the Uterary efforts of the fourteenth-century Rabbi Jehuda Romano. Fausto Pusceddu reconstructs the lively Jewish presence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the provincial papal city of Rieti situated just north of Rome. With his dense, richly documented paper, Fausto Parente analyzes closely the debate that raged within curial circles, following the burning of confiscated Talmuds in Rome, on September 9, 1553· The contenders were, on the one hand,the hard-liners,led by the Spaniard Francisco Torres, rabidly anti-Jewish, who argued for the suppression of Hebrew books and commentaries, and the more moderate, humanistic wing that would have contented itself with their expurgation. The next two papers, by Anna Esposito and Cesare Colafemmina, offer concise but solidly documented studies of the progressive deterioration in the status of the Jewish enclaves in two provincial centers, respectively the Patrimony of St. Peter in Tuscia, including the occasional papal seat of Viterbo (Esposito), and Benevento (Colafemmina). The first paper limits its attention to the late Middle Ages, whUe the second, chronologicaUy more ambitious, ranges from the eleventh century to the midsixteenth . The stories of the two Jewish communities run roughly parallel courses, from relative affluence and security to a general deterioration of their situations,mitigated by occasional,benign papal intervention on their behalf...