The Jews and the Medici
The fate of Tuscan Jewry in the early modern period
was inextricably linked to the favor and the fortune of the House of
Medici. Though a Jewish presence was registered in Lucca as early as
the ninth century and a network of Jewish banks had spread throughout
the region by the mid-fifteenth, the organized Jewish communities of Florence, Siena, Pisa and Livorno were political creations
of the Medici rulers. And like the Medici Grand Dukedom itself, these
communities took shape in the course of the sixteenth century.
In the 1490s, under the Catholic theocracy of Fra
Girolamo Savonarola, both the Medici and the Jews were expelled from
Florentine territory. When the Medici returned to power in 1512, the
Jewish ban fell into abeyance, until the next expulsion of the Medici
in 1527. In 1537 Cosimo de'Medici seized definitive control of the
Florentine government and reorganized it as a princely state--the
Dukedom (later Grand Dukedom) of Tuscany. This state flourished for
two hundred years, under seven successive Medici rulers: Cosimo I,
1537-1574; Francesco I, 1574-1587; Ferdinando I, 1587-1609; Cosimo II,
1609-1621; Ferdinando II, 1621-1670; Cosimo III, 1670-1723; Gian
Gastone, 1723-1737.
As a sovereign prince, Cosimo I was free to dictate
new terms of Jewish resettlement according to his own best interests
and those of his regime. Coming from a merchant family himself, Cosimo
I recognized the vast potential of Jewish capital and Jewish
entrepreneurship, dispersed by the Iberian expulsion of the 1490s. By
the mid-1540s, less than ten years after he gained the throne, Cosimo
I began recruiting affluent Spanish and Portuguese Jews for
resettlement in his capital city of Florence and his chief port city
of Pisa. At the same time, many displaced Italian Jews who were
neither bankers nor wealthy merchants came to Tuscany as well,
particularly after the final expulsion of the Neapolitan community in
1540 and the creation of ghettos in the Papal cities of Rome and Ancona in 1555.
Cosimo I's liberalism was limited in scope and
pragmatic in principle. During the lifetime of his wife Eleonora di
Toledo (married 1539, died 1562), it was probably also influenced by
her strong relationship with Benvegnita Abravanel, whom the Duchess
had known in Naples before her marriage and whose family eventually
settled in Tuscany. In the first decades of Cosimo's rule, Jews
thrived particularly in Pisa, where there developed an influential
Jewish banking elite. This entrepreneurial class also produced famous
rabbinical scholars, including Vitale (Yehiel) Nissim da Pisa, and his
son Simone, who graduated as a Doctor of Medicine from the University
of Pisa in 1554. There were also scattered settlements of Jewish men
and women throughout Tuscany who enrolled in artisan guilds, owned
houses and orchards, produced wool and other marketable goods and led
generally stable lives.
After actively courting the Jews in the 1540's and
1550's and granting them many privileges, Cosimo I began retrenching
in the late 1560's and 1570's as political relations with Spain and
the Papal State became paramount. In 1567 he reimposed badges of
identification for Jews, in 1570 shut the Jewish banks, and in 1570-71
restricted legal Jewish settlement to two new ghettos in Florence and
Siena.
In practice, Medici rule was characterized by a
shifting balance of privileges and concessions, and for Jews in
Tuscany the door was never as open nor as closed as it might seem. For
example, some returned to live in Pisa only a few years after their
expulsion and a Jewish community was permitted, even encouraged, to
thrive in that great "special case"--the city of Livorno. In
1591 and 1593, less than a quarter century after Cosimo I ghettoized
his Jewish subjects, his son Ferdinando I invited Jewish merchants to
to settle in Livorno, granting them free residence, unlimited access
to trade and extensive self-government in this new Medicean free-port
on the Mediterranean.
The Livorno experiment was a triumph of enlightened
self-interest for both the Jews and the Medici. Indeed, this thriving
commercial hub became so essential to the Tuscan economy that even
Cosimo III (1671-1723), the most bigoted of the Medici Grand Dukes,
had little choice but to respect Jewish rights there. Vast fortunes
were made by an Iberian merchant aristocracy that gave Livorno Jewry
its particular culture and character. However, the Livorno community
also included "levantini" from Turkey and North Africa, "ashkenaziti"
from Northern Europe and Italian Jews of various origins.
In addition to banking and trade, especially with
the East, the Jews of Livorno developed diverse manufacturing
enterprises. In the late sixteenth century, Maggino di Gabriele moved
his glass and silk factories there from Pisa, in order to take
advantage of the new freedoms. The Jews of Livorno established a
monopoly on the Italian production of coral, which they frequently
used to ornament their own liturgical objects. In 1632, they imported
the first coffee into Italy and then opened the first coffee-houses.
In 1650, Jedidiah Gabbai founded a Hebrew press in Livorno, giving
rise to a major Jewish printing industry that supplied the Sephardic communities of North Africa and the Near East.
Livorno was a major center of Jewish commerce,
second in Europe only to Amsterdam. It was also a leading center of
Jewish study and mysticism, particularly under the influence of Rabbi
Joseph ben Emanuel Ergas (1685-1732) and other proponents of the Kaballah.
Indeed, business, religion, medicine and science could be
complementary enterprises. The medical doctor Mose Cordovero was among
the pioneers of banking in Livorno around the year 1600. Elia Montalto
di Luna, in the early seventeenth century, practiced medicine at the
Medici Court while writing treatises on ophthalmology, astronomy and
comparative religion.
These fleeting references to people, places and
events provide only a glimpse of the extraordinary richness of Jewish
history and culture during the two centuries of Medici rule
(1537-1743.) Although much historical research has already been done,
scholars have only begun to mine the vast resources of the Florentine
State Archive. Every day THE MEDICI ARCHIVE PROJECT is making exciting
discoveries regarding Jewish affairs, not only in Tuscany but
throughout Europe and the Mediterranean world--discoveries that
continually reshape our understanding of the past and lead the way to
future scholarship.
Sources: The
Medici Archive Project |