Die Stadt der Neuchristen: Konvertierte Juden und ihre Nachkommen im Trani des Spätmittelalters zwischen Inklusion und Exklusion, by Benjamin Scheller

Abstract

The south of Italy contained by far the largest proportion of the Jewish population of medieval Italy during the middle ages, although, by the fifteenth century, communities had begun to spring up in northern towns as well. The history of the south Italian Jews, and of the protection extended to them by most of the kings of Sicily/Naples, has been told by Nicola Ferorelli, whose Storia degli Ebrei nell’Italia meridionale of 1915 was reissued in 1990 in a fine new edition edited and annotated by Filena Patroni Griffi. The destruction of so much of the Archivio di Stato of Naples by the Germans in 1943 rendered this work even more valuable because it was based on many documents that are now lost. Yet there were questions hanging in the air. The one Neapolitan ruler who turned viciously against the Jews, Charles II, left, as his legacy, large numbers of neofiti or Cristiani novelli, converts to Christianity who remained highly suspect in the eyes of the Inquisition. This group is known to have established itself in a commanding position in several Apulian towns, notably Trani, where the neofiti were heavily involved in trade, and where the Scolanova synagogue still acts as a reminder of the city’s Jewish past. As Benjamin Scheller now shows in his meticulous study of the converts and their descendants, the Trani neofiti benefited particularly from the reorganisation of south Italian civic government under King Ferrante I in 1466, which enabled them to position themselves between the urban patriciate and the wider population. On the other hand, suspicion of their religious practices and resentment at their social ascent was not easily dissipated. By the time that Ferdinand the Catholic decided to address the presence of Judaism in southern Italy, which he had conquered more than a decade after the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Sicily, the ancient converts and their descendants were the focus of keen attention. The expulsion of south Italian Jews who openly practised Judaism took place in 1510, though it proved neither complete nor permanent; but it was followed by the expulsion of the New Christians in 1514, an event that never occurred in Ferdinand’s other lands. This has long raised questions about who were the victims of this measure, and Scheller points not just to the numerous Marranos who had fled from Spain to avoid the attentions of the Inquisition, but to local New Christians as well. That the Iberian Marranos nonetheless became a significant force in the political and economic life of Spanish Naples has been forcefully shown in Peter Mazur’s New Christians of Spanish Naples (2013), which appeared around the same time as Scheller’s book, and should be read in conjunction with it.