The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community (review)

Abstract

The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community. By Stephanie B. Siegmund. [Stanford Series in Jewish History and Culture.] (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2005. Pp. xxvi, 624. $70.00.) Stephanie Siegmund's book is aU about how to think about the ghetto. TraditionaUy, the ghetto is the arch-symbol of the Jewish policy of militant Counter-Reformation Catholicism. A reinvigorated Church instituted a new and tougher policy on Jews in Italy, who were either expeUed or else stripped of many rights and privileges and confined to ghettoes. Indeed, the physical image of the ghetto, precisely because of its physical-spatial nature, served as the visible representation of the mix of restrictions and disabilities to which Jews were now subject, as weU as a symbol of the fear and loathing in which they were now formaUy and officiaUy held. This notion of the ghetto is a staple of Early-Modern Jewish historiography. It is a model with which Siegmund takes issue. She argues that one cannot speak of an undifferentiated Italian ghetto. WhUe ghettoes were in fact created in almost ali the communities where Jews were permitted to reside, they did not come into being in the same way, and their effects upon the local Jewish communities were not identical. Indeed, in the case of Florence, to which her study is devoted, the creation of the ghetto caused the creation of the Jewish community, both in the sense of bringing together disparate Jews living in Florence who had lived lives basicaliy separate from one another and often from Jewish practice, as weU as in the sense of a formal kehilah, which was formed by the state-ordered concentration of the seven hundred or so Jews living in Tuscany into a ghetto constructed by the state, and by the statesponsored formation of organs of seli-goverment. The Early-Modern kehilah being an organization dedicated, among other things, to promoting and even coercing religious praxis and halakhic conformity, it was a supreme irony that the Medici Christian state was responsible for pushing its Jews to live orthodox Jewish lifestyles. Or perhaps it was not ironic at ali, when one considers, as Siegmund does, the mix of factors that led to the decision of the Tuscan government to expel its relatively smali number of Jews from their places of residence throughout the (soon to be) Grand Duchy and to concentrate them in a ghetto in Florence in 1570-71. Traditional historiography has concerned itseE with the question of why it was that Cosimo I, the famous ruler of Florence who created both the Tuscan state and its feared and efficient administrative machinery, changed his longstanding pragmatic and even benevolent policy toward Jews in Tuscany in the late 1560's, when he began to conform to Papal policy and compelled the Jews to wear a segno (a yellow o on the hat) and move into a ghetto. …