A Jew at the Medici Court: The Letters of Benedetto Blanis Hebreo, 1615-1621 by Edward Goldberg (review)

Edward Goldberg's A Jew at the Medici Court is an edition of some 220 letters sent by the Florentine Jew Benedetto Blanis to Don Giovanni de Medici, the illegitimate son of Grand Duke of Tuscany, in the early seventeenth century. These documents support and supplement the more detailed, analytical study of Blanis that Goldberg also published in 2011, titled Jews and Magic in Medici Florence (reviewed in Preternature 1.2).

By the time these letters were written, the Blanis family was a well-established part of the economic elite. Originally Iberian, the family migrated from Italy in the early sixteenth century under a certain Moyse Blanis, eventually coming to settle in Orvieto. Moyse was well educated and wealthy, and he had some powerful and prominent connections in Italian society. Indeed, such was the family's influence that Benedetto's grandfather was able to secure a special privilege from the pope that allowed him to study medicine at the University of Rome—despite the fact that he was Jewish. Other members of the family also became well-regarded doctors. In the next generation, Laudadio Blanis, Benedetto's father, rose to become a renowned banker. These were clearly affluent and influential people.

In 1615, Benedetto was librarian to Don Giovanni dei Medici. In that year, though, his patron left Florence for Venice to take up a position as supreme commander of the city's army. But from that very day, and for the next five years, Benedetto wrote regularly to Giovanni—at least once a week. And it is this corpus of correspondence that Goldberg has reproduced here. While this is an important historical document for understanding life in the Florentine ghetto in the early part of the seventeenth century, there are some difficulties with this collection. In the first place, Goldberg has only Benedetto's letters—he does not have Giovanni's replies. This means that the volume needs to be read in conjunction with Goldberg's other study of Benedetto in order to appreciate the context in which each letter was composed. But second, none of the letters has been translated—they remain in the original Italian. Moreover, they are reproduced as they were set down in the original, with no attempt to modernize the punctuation. Although Goldberg has helpfully prefaced each letter with a short English-language précis of its contents, they are not always easy to follow, even for the scholar fluent in modern Italian. As a result, the audience for this collection will necessarily be limited to specialist scholars. This is unfortunate, for this is a rich body of material that sheds some new light on how men like Benedetto were able to exploit Renaissance interest in Hebrew for their own ends.

One of the first things that becomes apparent from this correspondence is the peculiar relationship between these two men—a Jew of the ghetto and a Christian Medici prince. Indeed, Benedetto frequently describes details of his personal life that presumes an intimate familiarity with the Christian Medici prince: he often refers to his own personal affairs and to his travels; his fasting during Yom Kippur; and even to the sermons he had to deliver as part of his living. But the extent to which such details could actually have been of interest to a noble relative of the Grand Duke is an open question. As it is highly unlikely that Giovanni responded in a similar tone or as regularly, one has to ask: were these letters really just loosely disguised petitions—or were they just fantasy?

The letters show that Benedetto preformed a number of important roles for Giovanni during this period. One of the most important was as a commercial agent. Among other things, he seems to have gone to special lengths to procure fine fabrics, selling them on to the Medici prince. Moreover, he was charged at...