L’identità dissimulata. Giudaizzanti iberici nell’Europa cristiana dell’età moderna (review)

L'identità dissimulata. Giudaizzanti iberici nell'Europa cristiana dell'età moderna. Edited by Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini. [Storia dell'Ebraismo in Italia, Studi e testi, xx.] (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore. 2000. Pp. 395. Lire 85,000 paperback.)

Professor Ioly Zorattini states that this is the first collection of articles devoted exclusively to crypto-Judaism, whose practitioners had various names in their own time and today--Conversos, Marranos, New Christians, and Portuguese. Crypto-Jews were Christians, mostly from Portugal, converted by force who practiced Judaism in secret or were waiting for the right circumstances to become open Jews again. The eleven articles, nine in Italian, one in English, and one in Portuguese, by well-known scholars and talented newcomers examine crypto-Judaism in several parts of Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

One should start with Benjamin Ravid's excellent synoptic article summarizing papal and Venetian policy toward New Christians who came to Italy and either openly or secretly became Jews again. Clement VII ruled in 1533, and Paul III and Julius III reaffirmed, that those who had been baptized by force should not be considered members of the Church. But Paul IV changed direction by burning twenty-six Judaizers in Ancona in 1555. By contrast, the Venetian government slowly came to adopt the earlier papal policy: it allowed New Christians to come to Venice and live as Jews in the ghetto. In addition, it would not try to discover if others living as Catholics outside the ghetto were crypto-Jews. Moreover, the Venetian Holy Office dealt very mildly with those who came to their attention through denunciations. The reasons were commercial: for the sake of its trade the Venetian government believed that it had to honor guarantees given to Jewish merchants that they would not be investigated for their behavior. Several other studies in the volume examine the results of papal and Venetian policies.

Ioly Zorattini provides a good study of the dangers and complexities that crypto-Jews living outside the ghetto encountered in seventeenth-century Venice. For example, Jewish law permitted endogamic marriage (uncle-niece or first-cousin unions), but canon law barred it. Thus, an endogamic union lacking ecclesiastical dispensation gave evidence of crypto-Judaism. Death and burial practices, purification rites, preparation of food, and keeping Jewish holidays involved clandestine activities and compromises for secret Jews, while close relations with Christians risked discovery. For example, prostitutes sometimes denounced supposed Christian clients after seeing their circumcized penises. But the penalties for uncovered crypto-Jews were invariably light, because of Venetian policy described by Ravid.

Lucia Frattarelli Fisher provides an excellent study, rich in new material, of crypto-Jews in Tuscany. In 1549 Duke Cosimo I awarded a sweeping safe-conduct to Portuguese crypto-Jews coming to Tuscany, and his successors protected them against the inquisition. The reason was trade: the dukes wished to build up the port of Livorno and commerce in Pisa and Florence. While Jews in Florence were obliged to live in a ghetto after 1570, Jews in Pisa and Livorno might live where they chose. In time the crypto-Jews rose in Tuscan society and included two professors of medicine of Portuguese background at the University of Pisa. But they did not meld into Tusan society. For example, although the descendants of the Portuguese rose high enough in wealth and position to intermarry with members of the Tuscan upper class, they did not. Aron di Leone Leoni provides much information about Jews and crypto-Jews in Ancona and Pesaro through a diligent search through local notarial archives.

The other articles are shorter. Ariel Toaff summarizes from his previous scholarship the benevolent policy of Pope Alexander VI toward Jews in the Papal State. For example, a five-year-old Jewish girl went to a convent asking to be baptized. The parents protested; the nuns would not let her go, but Alexander VI...