11
SALOMONE DI BONAVENTURA was a prosperous and, by all accounts, upstanding member of the community in early-fifteenth-century Tuscany. He always put his family first. He was a dutiful son and was a good and caring husband. He was also a proud father and doted on his two young boys with a touching concern for their education and well-being. Like any decent chap of the period, Salomone worked hard to make sure that they wanted for nothing. Having gone into business with his own father, Bonaventura, in 1422, he had built a career as a successful moneylender whose honesty and integrity were respected by clients and partners alike.
The bulk of Salomone’s business was done in the little town of Prato, about ten miles from Florence. Regular as clockwork, he handed over the annual payment of 150 florins to the Florentine treasury for the renewal of his license and ran a thoroughly respectable trade with few causes for complaint. Of course, like anyone, he had the odd enemy. But in itself this was nothing to worry about. Florence was a hotbed of malicious gossip and petty backbiting, and the competitive world of Renaissance commerce had always been riddled with jealousies and rivalry.
By 1439, Salomone was keen to expand his business. Profits had been rising steadily, and having purchased a privilege from the papal chancellery allowing him to extend his operations to Borgo San Sepolcro in 1430, he was now looking for fresh opportunities. Treasury officials had already hinted that he might soon be able to set up shop in Florence itself, and when his friend Abraham Dattili unexpectedly approached him about forming a partnership to lend money at the invitation of the Florentine government, Salomone jumped at the chance. It was too good to pass up.
From the surviving evidence, however, Salomone appears to have been a cautious man. Perhaps conscious of the fact that certain Florentines might try to undermine him if he was too obvious about his ambitions, Salomone took the precaution of putting his sons’ names down instead of his own when the contracts of incorporation were drawn up. It was, perhaps, a wise thing to do. At the time, the practice of money lending was strictly regulated, and although he himself did not yet have permission to trade in Florence, Salomone appears to have believed that by administering the business on his sons’ behalf, he would be sure of staying within the bounds of the law.
For two years, everything went smoothly. But then, in 1441, Salomone’s world suddenly and dramatically fell apart. What he thought was the perfect scheme really wasn’t. Without any warning, he was hauled in front of the courts in Florence and falsely accused of breaking the law. Although his children were officially Dattili’s partners, the prosecutors pointed out that Salomone was actually running the business. And since Salomone did not have permission to lend money in Florence, they said, he was clearly perpetrating a crime. Valiantly, Salomone tried to argue that since he had never traded in his own name, but merely on his children’s behalf, he had done nothing worthy of censure. He was convinced that legal niceties would win through, and that trained lawyers would have to respect the city statutes. It was clearly a trumped-up charge lacking any basis in reality.
But Salomone could not have been more wrong. It didn’t matter that he was innocent. The trial was a fix from the very beginning. Having set its heart on buying the town of Borgo San Sepolcro, the Florentine government needed money, and since it couldn’t raise the necessary sum by any legitimate means, the priors were determined to steal it from a suitably rich patsy. Salomone was the sacrificial lamb, and the court’s sole purpose was to strip him of every last penny.
Brushing his objections aside with a disdainful wave of the hand, the judge found Salomone guilty and handed him a fine of 20,000 florins. It was an incredible sum. It was twice what Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici had lent Baldassare Cossa to bribe his way to the papacy only thirty years before. It was, in fact, more than a king’s ransom. Salomone was ruined. His dreams were destroyed, his family left destitute.
News of the trial would have spread fast. But it is doubtful that any- one would have been surprised or even particularly bothered by the miscarriage of justice. Far from it. The chancellor, Leonardo Bruni, had been kept informed about the progress of the trial, and—perhaps because he was excited by the prospect of acquiring Borgo San Sepolcro—his letters clearly show that he believed Salomone’s condemnation to have been entirely justified. Yet it wasn’t that Bruni and the Florentines seriously believed he had broken the law. Rather, everyone would have known he was being punished for a quite different offense. Salomone’s “crime” was simply that he was Jewish.
TUSCANY AND THE JEWS
Despite his unusual prosperity and even more unusual persecution, Salomone di Bonaventura was a fairly typical member of Renaissance Italy’s thriving Jewish community, and given the society in which he had grown up, it was perhaps only natural that he should have expected fairness and justice from the Florentine court.
Jews had been resident in the peninsula since antiquity, and a fairly steady, although unremarkable, population appears to have been present in various cities through the Middle Ages. As the Renaissance began to get under way, however, the number of Jews living in Italy started to rise steadily. Forced to flee their homes in Spain, Portugal, and (later) Germany, they were attracted by the growing prosperity of Italian towns. The North, especially, seems to have exerted a particular pull. Cities such as Bologna, Venice, Padua, and Milan welcomed Jewish groups not only from across the Alps but also from Rome and the kingdom of Sicily. By the mid-fifteenth century, it has been estimated that there were more than two hundred Jewish communities extant in northern Italy alone.
In contrast to many other regions, such as Emilia and Lombardy, Tuscany did not have a particularly long history of Jewish settlement, but it, too, found itself the beneficiary of considerable immigration, and it is more than likely that Salomone’s father, Bonaventura, was among the many Jews who moved to Prato in the early fifteenth century. The commercial boom offered unrivaled opportunities for the growth of new businesses, and many of the trades in which Jews of the period tended to specialize found a natural home in the urban landscape of fifteenth-century Tuscany. At the time Salomone was embarking on his career as a moneylender, some four hundred had set themselves up in Florence, and perhaps only slightly fewer in Prato itself.
It was not the largest Jewish population in Italy—around 1,000 could be found in Venice, while no fewer than 12,500 were resident in the Papal States at about the same time—but Jews nevertheless constituted a lively and vibrant part of urban society. In Florence, the majority tended to live in the northeast of the city, clustered around the site of the modern synagogue in the vicinity of Santa Croce, but a significant number of the less prosperous also found homes in the narrow, crowded streets near Filippo Lippi’s convent in Oltr’Arno. Quickly putting down roots, they integrated themselves into the fabric of Florentine life with admirable speed and tremendous efficiency. As one historian has observed, “By the middle of the fifteenth century, it had become extremely difficult to distinguish Jews from Christians. They spoke the same language, lived in similar houses, and dressed with an eye to the same fashions.” Indeed, “Jews who settled in Italy from German cities were … shocked by the extent of assimilation among their Italian co-religionists.” This was, of course, no more true than of those Jews who practiced the most highly respected professions (such as medicine) or whose success in commerce put them on a par with Florence’s wealthiest bankers, and the Jewish elite found a ready place in the upper echelons of civic society. Even from the few details known about his earlier life, it is at least clear that Salomone di Bonaventura was among the most readily assimilated.
Jewish integration into the urban life of northern Italian cities was undoubtedly facilitated by the valuable roles they played in Renaissance society. Taking advantage of the city’s commercial prowess, many of Florence’s Jews embarked on careers in speculative trade (particularly in precious stones and metals) and money lending, and it is no surprise that one of the earliest known Jewish residents, Emanuel ben Uzziel da Camerino, was engaged in exactly these professions. Often operating out of smaller settlements outside Florence itself, Jewish moneylenders, in particular, found themselves snowed under with clients. Since usury laws technically forbade Christians to charge interest, Jewish moneylenders fulfilled a necessary economic function, and because they were frequently willing to lend where others would not, they provided much-needed oil for the wheels of the Tuscan economy. Injecting essential capital into ventures of all sizes, some—like Salomone di Bonaventura—became so prosperous as a result that they were even able to extend loans of a scale to match that of the more established merchant bankers, and it was, indeed, Jewish moneylenders who were called upon to provide Pope Martin V with funds when Christians were unable to meet his requirements.
Yet the roles played by the Jewish community in Italian—and especially Florentine—society also went far beyond commerce. Jews often possessed skill sets in an abundance that made them quite indispensable to social existence. Particularly in the later Renaissance, Jewish doctors—whose training had often brought them into closer contact with Arabic and Greek bodies of knowledge than their gentile colleagues—acquired a high standing and were much sought after. Elsewhere, such as in Mantua and Milan, “dynasties” of Jewish doctors proved themselves so invaluable that generations of medics were granted positions of favor and esteem at court.
Given the prominent role Jews played in Italian life, it was perhaps unsurprising that Jews should have enjoyed a certain measure of tolerance and respect that extended not only to commerce and patronage but also to the structures of law and politics. The papacy, for example, had long been eager to preserve the rights and privileges of Rome’s Jewish population. As long ago as 598, Gregory the Great had declared that the Jews “should not encounter any prejudice with regard to those privileges that have been granted them,” and this belief had moved thirteenth-century pontiffs to accord them the status of Roman citizens. Only three years before Salomone set up in business with his father—that is, in 1419—Pope Martin V had gone one step further and proclaimed that Jews
should not be molested by anyone in their synagogues; nor should their laws, statutes, customs and ordinances be interfered with … ; nor should they be molested in person or in any way beyond legal obligation; at no time should they be required by anybody to bear any distinctive sign.
As in Rome, so often in Florence. Though Jews were a distinct minority within the Florentine commune, their position was carefully set out in communal statutes, and they were occasionally entrusted with important ad hoc political positions when diplomatic or financial need required. Indeed, it is telling that one historian has been moved to observe that “by the standards of the age, Florence was a remarkably tolerant community,” while another has optimistically noted that even toward the end of the period “the Jews felt protected by the legal system, and knew that they could find in the civil courts the principal defenders of their rights.” It was not uncommon for Tuscan Jews to extol the merits both of Florence and of those Florentines who supported them, especially in later years. For the enthusiastically effusive Yohanan Alemanno, for example, Lorenzo de’ Medici was a latter-day King Solomon, the archetype of the ideal Jewish ruler.
In addition to pragmatic concerns, there were powerful cultural reasons for cities like Florence to welcome Jews enthusiastically into the community. Particularly in the mid-fifteenth century, Jews played an increasingly important role in intellectual life. With many of them becoming influential humanists in their own right, they played a key part both as agents of cultural transmission and as disseminators of Hebraic knowledge. Following the itinerant life of many other contemporary scholars, Judah Messer Leon (Judah ben Jehiel Rofe; ca. 1420/5–ca. 1498) wrote a number of important commentaries on philosophical works by Aristotle and Averroës, and composed a noted treatise on oratory (the Nofet zufim, or The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow) that drew on the paradigms of Latin eloquence and on Mosaic texts. In turn, Messer Leon’s pupil Yohanan Alemanno (also known as Johanan Alemanno; ca. 1435–post 1504) was both the author of philosophically rich Kabbalistic commentaries on the Torah and an educator of some note, responsible for introducing Giovanni Pico della Mirandola—who “gathered a school of Jewish scholars who aided him in his search for religious syncretism”—to Hebrew.
Religious factors, too, provided strong encouragement for Jews to be welcomed into the social whole as equal and active participants in the drama of the Renaissance. It was, after all, an article of faith that Christ had been born a Jew and had been persecuted because of his supposed claim to be the “king of the Jews.” It was impossible for even the crudest theologian to ignore the fact that—as Abrahamic faiths—Judaism and Christianity had common roots, and that the prophets of the Old Testament were celebrated in like fashion in the Torah. Later in the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino “maintained that the writings of Jewish Cabalists … were in agreement with the teachings of Christianity,” and had no hesitation in writing of the shared truths of the two religions. Florentines were not ashamed of proclaiming the place of Jews within the Christian tradition in urban rituals. During the celebrations on the feast of Saint John the Baptist in 1454, for example, the pageant included a cycle of scenes from biblical history from the Creation to the Resurrection, each episode of which was represented by a group of prominent citizens thought to have particular ties to that moment in the religious drama. When it came to depicting Moses, the figure of the prophetic lawgiver was surrounded by “leaders of the people of Israel,” all of whom were played by Florentine Jews. The city’s Jewry, in other words, was accorded as visible a part in the celebration of Florence’s urban identity as its Christian confraternities.
Such tolerance often found expression in the visual arts, and during the lifetimes of Salomone di Bonaventura and Filippo Lippi it was not uncommon for Tuscan churches to contain devotional works that not only testified to the shared features of Judaism and Christianity but also evidenced the cultural impact of social and legal integration. Of particular interest are depictions of the purification of the Virgin Mary and the presentation of Christ at the temple. This episode from biblical history was important in two respects. The story centers on a distinctively Jewish ritual. In contrast to Christian traditions, all Jewish women were required to go with their child to the temple to be purified in the eyes of the Lord within forty days of giving birth, and it was to fulfill this obligation as a dutiful Jewish mother that Mary took the baby Jesus to the temple. It was also a crucial moment in Christ’s life. In the eyes of Christians such as Jacopo da Voragine, the presentation of the child symbolized the Virgin’s humility before God, Christ’s fulfillment of the Old Law, and the beginning of the Christian purification drama that was explicitly marked by the celebration of Candlemas. It was with an acute sensitivity for this bivalent meaning that Renaissance artists used this story as an opportunity both to underscore Christ’s role as a bridge between Jews and Christians and to display an intense sensitivity for the norms of Jewish culture. Indeed, the Christian import of the scene relied on the artist’s ability to emphasize the “Jewishness” of the drama. In the strikingly similar renditions by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1342) (Fig. 35) and Giovanni di Paolo (1447–49)—both of which were painted in Siena but which are now in the Uffizi in Florence and the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena, respectively—the Virgin and Child are surrounded by key figures from Jewish history and practice. Preparing the offering in the center of Lorenzetti’s painting stands a distinctively dressed high priest; above Mary appears a statue of Moses (who is also depicted on her left), bearing the tables of the Old Law; while above Christ can be seen a statuette of Joshua, the Jews’ traditional deliverer, and to his left, Malachi, who holds a scroll proclaiming his role as the promised son of God. Mary herself is endowed with identifiably Jewish characteristics that are shown in a markedly sensitive manner. In Lorenzetti’s scene, she wears a richly embroidered dress in the Eastern style and carries a swaddling cloth that bears a passing resemblance to Jewish prayer shawls. Most important, Lorenzetti depicts the Virgin wearing earrings. Rarely worn by contemporary Christians, these were a visible sign of her belonging to the Jewish community, and of her being grounded in Hebraic law, while simultaneously bringing forth the Christian Messiah himself. Judaism and Christianity were thus woven together in a visual expression of tolerance and acceptance.
BERNARDINO’S RAGE
Despite the recognition of the common heritage of Judaism and Christianity, the source of Renaissance anti-Semitism remained religious in character. As far as churchmen like Filippo Lippi were concerned, it simply wasn’t enough that Christianity grew out of Judaism: the Jews would always be different. Indeed, the very closeness of the two faiths emphasized that the Jews would forever be the “other.” Although the Jews were believed to have stood witness to the truth of Christ’s coming, the fact that they refused to accept Jesus as the Messiah who had been sent to fulfill the Old Law set them at an impossibly vast distance from the Christian faithful. As the rabidly anti-Semitic San Bernardino of Siena and his followers among the Observant Franciscans repeated ad nauseam from the pulpit of Florence’s cathedral, no matter how much Judaism might otherwise have in common with Christianity, it would always be inferior, false, and even heretical so long as Christ’s divinity was denied. It was a stain that could never be removed, and the metaphor of an impure mark was even written into artworks—like Lorenzetti’s depiction of the presentation at the temple—that ostensibly presented Judaism in a positive light. While the whole point of Lorenzetti’s altarpiece was to underscore the fact that Christ came forth to fulfill the Old Law that Moses had brought to the Jews, Mary’s obviously Jewish appearance marked her out as standing at a distance from her own son and in need of purifying herself of the “stain” of her Hebraic heritage.
Indeed, for Christians like Filippo Lippi, the “problem” with the Jews was not simply that they denied Christ’s divinity but that they bore an inherited responsibility for Christ’s persecution and death. The Passion drama—ritually and dramatically reenacted by Christians every Eastertide—revolved around Christ’s betrayal by Judas and his unjust condemnation by the Sanhedrin. Since it had been unbelieving Jews who had tortured and killed the Son of God in antiquity, it was self-evident to Renaissance Christians that contemporary Jews—who also refused to accept Jesus as the Christ—bore the guilt of his suffering.
Yet the perception that Judaism was a wellspring of heretical untruth and inherited guilt did not exist merely as an abstract point; the very existence of Jewish “error” was thought to pose a pernicious threat to the Christian faith, and it was this that formed the basis of a more active variety of religious hatred. In the eyes of contemporary churchmen, Judaism was a disease that could all too easily spread throughout Christendom. Even if their influence on finance, culture, and medicine made them, in some sense, a “necessary evil” comparable to prostitutes, their presence in a Christian society was nevertheless held to be, at best, a serious risk to the integrity of the faith and, at worst, a malign cancer on the body social. It was this that was undoubtedly in the minds of Salomone di Bonaventura’s unknown “enemies” in the years before his prosecution.
Inspired by the virulently anti-Semitic preaching of San Bernardino and his followers in the early fifteenth century, Florentine humanists believed it was incumbent upon them to find the right intellectual “medicine” with which to treat the Jewish “infection,” and despite happily receiving loans, education, and treatment from the city’s Jews, they devoted themselves to exposing and extirpating the falseness of Jewish belief. Even those Christian humanists who devoted most effort to learning Hebrew and who showed the most interest in the Kabbalah sought to annex the most sophisticated elements of Jewish thought to their own philosophy while acquiring an arsenal of knowledge that could be used to attack Judaism itself, both for the sake of encouraging conversion and for the purpose of downright persecution. In 1454—the very year in which the Florentine Signoria encouraged the Jews to take part in the carnival celebrations—Giannozzo Manetti penned the Contra iudeos et gentes, an unabashed attempt to use close biblical scholarship to attack the basic tenets of Hebrew thought and persuade the Jews of Florence to convert to Christianity. Later, Marsilio Ficino mined the Talmud, the Seder ‘olam, and a selection of notable commentaries on Hebrew theology for his De religione christiana but, like Manetti, did so primarily to hoist the Jews with their own petard, as he saw it. Though densely argued, the treatise was vituperative in the extreme and left no doubt about Ficino’s belief in the absolute sinfulness of Judaism and the importance of stamping out the Hebrew faith for the sake of Christian truth. Jews, he claimed, had no excuse for their “heresy” and could expect mercy neither from God nor from man, for in the Mosaic Law they had been given the message that Christ came to fulfill, in the words of the prophets they had received foreknowledge of his coming, and in the signs attendant upon his incarnation they had seen clear evidence of God’s will.
Yet while it was widely believed that invectives against the “errors” of Judaism could go some way toward staving off Christian apostasy and encouraging Jewish conversion, many of Salomone di Bonaventura’s contemporaries felt that the threat posed by Judaism was more complex and subtle than it originally appeared. As San Bernardino continually stressed, it was not merely Jewish ideas but also—and more worryingly—the character of Jewish practices that endangered the Christian faith. Like a true disease, the “perfidious lies” of the Jews could, Bernardino stressed, be spread through contact with their daily habits.
Even to the most ignorant Renaissance observers, it was evident that the patterns of Jewish life were shaped by the complex series of rites set out in the books of the Talmud, many of which (particularly circumcision and food laws) were entirely alien to the Christian tradition, and all of which were thought to have the capacity to communicate the “illness” of Judaism to unsuspecting Christians, even though they were designed to protect the purity of the Jewish faith.
Since Jews had such strict dietary regulations, especially with regard to the preparation and consumption of meat, for example, it was thought that any Christian who inadvertently purchased animal flesh from a Jewish butcher ran the risk of being “contaminated” by the vendor’s religion, and for this reason many cities legislated to ensure that each faith maintained its own, separate butcheries. Sex was no less pronounced an issue. The strictness of Jewish marriage rituals and the Hebraic preoccupation with purification ceremonies were turned back on the Jewish population to produce a total ban on sexual relations between Jews and Christians. And though prosecutions for this sort of “offense” appear to have been rare, the trials of those who were the victims of judicial attacks—such as Consilio, the son of Musetto, who was tried for having sex with prostitutes in Bologna in 1456 and in Lucca in 1467—indicate that Christian society was permeated by a latent sense of hysteria about cross-cultural promiscuity.
But in some instances Jewish ritualism was deliberately misrepresented as the already irrational sense of alterity was perverted yet further by the febrile imaginations of hate-fueled Christians. The most frighteningly absurd fabrications were invented, all of which were put to dangerous purposes and many of which found expression in the literary and visual arts. Among the more notorious stories was that recorded in Giovanni Villani’s Nuova cronica and enshrined in Paolo Uccello’s Miracle of the Profaned Host(ca. 1465–68), which was itself commissioned by Federico da Montefeltro as part of a broader campaign of anti-Semitic persecution (Fig. 36). In this patently ridiculous tale—which was itself a re-elaboration of the accusations of host desecration that had been leveled against Jews across Europe since at least 1247, and that had been a major feature of urban life in Germany throughout the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries—a Jewish moneylender was supposed to have stolen a piece of the consecrated host from a nearby church and taken it home to cook for his family. On performing this most profane of actions, however, he was dismayed to find that blood miraculously poured forth from the bread and spread across his floor until it spilled out into the street. The sinister exsanguination having been spotted by passersby, soldiers were called to break down the door of the Jew’s home while he and his impious family cowered in fear within. For all its falsity, Salomone’s contemporaries felt that this story provided a clear illustration of the threat that Jewish rituals posed to Christian life.
For Franciscan anti-Semites like San Bernardino, the dangerousness of Judaism necessitated both the marginalization of the Jews and the strict segregation of Christian life from Hebraic traditions. This went far beyond the prohibition of sexual relations and the establishment of separate butcheries. Preaching in Padua in 1423, San Bernardino made the following, terrifying statement of his belief in the dangers of coming into contact with Jewish practices:
I hear that there are many Jews here in Padua; hence I want to state several truths about them. The first truth is that you commit a cardinal sin if you eat or drink with them; for just as they are forbidden to eat with us, so we must not consume food with them. The second truth is that a sick man seeking to regain his health must not repair to a Jew; for this, too, is a cardinal sin. The third truth is that one must not bathe together with a Jew.
Raging violently against the Jews of northern Italy, Bernardino and his followers asserted that it was necessary not only for Christians to avoid all contact with Judaic practices but also for Jews themselves to be marked out with sufficient clarity that all Christians would know to steer clear of them. This was, of course, not an altogether new idea. Since the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the Church had ordered that all Jews be required to wear a distinctive dress, and by 1257 the Jews of Rome (excepting doctors and a few other protected professionals) were obliged to wear circular yellow badges on pain of a hefty fine. Such early attempts to mark Jews so publicly were, however, rather halfhearted and never rigorously enforced. Finding it all but impossible to push through its designs, the papacy let things drop, and the cities of northern Italy were generally happy to forget all about it. But the vitriolic preaching of San Bernardino and the Observant Franciscans changed everything. Whipped into a frenzy of hatred for Jewish beliefs and practices, the cities of northern Italy hurried to enact a flurry of new anti-Semitic legislation. In 1427, Ancona forced all Jews to wear a yellow sign in response to the preaching of Fra Giacomo della Marca. Tracing the course of San Bernardino’s itinerant preaching,Padua followed suit in 1430, and in 1432 Perugia, too, imposed tough dress laws. In 1439—the same year Salomone made his fateful agreement with Dattili—Florence itself was persuaded to introduce the same legislation, which was repeatedly reissued at various points after that, each time with greater severity. Indeed, in the next century, this frightening presentiment of the horrors of the twentieth century was to become so widespread that it would appear even in Michelangelo’s depiction of Aminadab in one of the lunettes of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
THE GREAT CRIME
Regardless of how well he had been integrated into Tuscan society, Salomone di Bonaventura would have been aware of a powerful sense of religious resentment against him whenever he traveled to Florence. Forced to wear a large yellow O on his left breast, he was marked out as a Jew and, even if he paid no heed to the jibes of the citizenry, would have been the unfortunate recipient of considerable prejudice. Yet what really paved the way for his ultimate persecution by the courts was a highly specific and extremely prominent refinement of growing anti-Semitic attitudes.
If the beliefs and rituals of Judaism were thought to pose a covert threat to the health of Christianity during the Renaissance, the Jews’ commercial activities were perceived as an active danger to the well-being of Christian society. Money lending and usury were the greatest worry, even though it is somewhat surprising that Jews should ever have wanted to lend money to the Christians who regarded them with such hatred. Prejudices against Jewish moneylenders had existed in Europe since the Middle Ages, and the willingness to tar Jews with crude accusations of greed were decidedly old hat even by the early fourteenth century. In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas’s ardent opposition to lending money at interest had given a theological basis to the widespread prohibitions on usury (see chapter 7 and above), and since money lending had become a business particularly favored by Jewish communities, such injunctions had often been the basis for waves of persecution. On at least two occasions during his reign, Louis IX of France ordered Jewish moneylenders to be arrested and their property confiscated to pay for the Seventh and Eighth Crusades, while Philip IV expelled all Jews from his kingdom on the basis of religious attitudes toward usury in 1306. So, too, Edward I of England’s Statute of the Jewry (1275) forbade Jews to “blasphemously” lend money at interest, and the subsequent Edict of Expulsion (1290) was justified primarily with reference to the continuation of the practice. But the sudden and dramatic rise of money lending and merchant banking in early Renaissance Italy had given a new potency to this particular branch of bigotry, and the suggestion that by charging high rates of interest, Jews were somehow seeking to exploit “good” Christians out of a sense of religious or ethnic hatred acquired a distressing new vigor.
In the early fifteenth century, Observant Franciscans such as Giacomo della Marca (1391–1476), Giovanni da Capistrano (1386–1456), and Bernardino da Feltre (1439–1494) led the way in attacking Jewish usury and in giving this form of anti-Semitism a hideous veneer of public respectability. Once again, however, San Bernardino of Siena stood out both for the viciousness and for the popularity of his diatribes. In one particularly vitriolic sermon, he condemned the “concentration of money and wealth” into “fewer and fewer hands,” and inveighed against Jews as the archetypes of anti-Christian usury with a fervor that would perhaps have made even medieval anti-Semites blanch. Firebrand sermons such as this set the tone for political action, and the Church’s approval provided Florentine oligarchs with precisely the excuse they needed to make war on those Jewish moneylenders whom they viewed as dangerous business rivals or to whom they were indebted. Without sparing a thought for the hypocrisy of such policies, a campaign of political persecution was unleashed. In 1406—the year of Filippo Lippi’s birth—the Signoria promulgated a decree that categorically forbade any Jews to lend money at interest, a provision that was subsequently reissued for the sake of preventing “the poor people of Florence” from being “ruined” in 1430.
In practice, such decrees often proved unworkable. By placing harsh restrictions on usury, the Signoria unwittingly caused itself considerable financial damage. Without Jewish moneylenders keeping the economic wheels turning, the supply of credit quickly dried up, and the machinery of commerce groaned under the strain. Almost as soon as the decrees had been passed, exemptions were issued to allow some Jewish usurers to trade under license, while others were simply allowed to go on trading irrespective of legal restrictions, albeit with certain limitations on commercial practices and property ownership. It was these exemptions that permitted Salomone di Bonaventura to set himself up in business in Prato, and which created the conditions for the fateful partnership betweenAbraham Dattili and Salomone’s sons in 1439. But far from restraining the vehemence of anti-Semitic sentiments, such experiences only compounded the hatred that was felt, and it was the visceral dislike of Jewish moneylenders that laid the foundations for Salomone’s ultimate prosecution.
Later, however, even such monstrously disproportionate penalties were insufficient to sate the public passion for “vengeance.” The mood was turning ugly. In March 1488, a vitriolic attack on usury by Bernardino da Feltre in the Duomo prompted a group of young men to launch a violent attack on a neighboring Jewish pawnshop, catalyzing a riot that was suppressed only with some difficulty. In such a febrile atmosphere, it was clear that more direct and wide-ranging measures were called for, and during the ascendancy of Girolamo Savonarola the monte di pietà was established in December 1495 as the first truly systematic effort to stamp out the “stain” of Jewish money lending once and for all. Modeled on the identically named bodies that had been set up throughout northern Italy since their first appearance in Perugia in 1462, the Florentine monte di pietà was essentially a state-run lending institution that offered loans to any reasonably respectable citizen who might apply. Its goal was to undercut the city’s Jews without restricting the supply of credit, and so successful (if that is the right word) was the new strategy that Savonarola felt able to appropriate the worst forms of the rival Franciscans’ arguments and to call for the outright expulsion of the Jewish population. Even at the time of Salomone di Bonaventura’s prosecution in 1441, Christian artists such as Filippo Lippi would probably have seen a great deal of sense in such arguments, and would have found little to criticize about proposals for far-reaching reforms aimed at eliminating the “stain” of Jewish usury.
FROM HUMILIATION AND VIOLENCE TO THE GHETTO
As an expression of the virulent, hypocritical anti-Semitism that was endemic to early-fifteenth-century Florence, the trial and condemnation of Salomone di Bonaventura stands out as a powerful illustration of the cruelty that underpinned Renaissance perceptions of the “other.” It was a short step to take from social stigmatization and economic marginalization to outright persecution. The casual hatred that was felt by so many fifteenth-century Italians, and that found expression in the art of Lorenzetti and Uccello, was shortly to metamorphose into something more chilling.
Thanks to the preaching of Observant Franciscans like Bernardino da Feltre, the prevalence of increasingly harsh anti-Semitism ensured that the limited tolerance of the past was replaced with a willingness to intimidate and humiliate Jews in an almost ritualized manner, and it became “fun” for Christians to torture the Jewish population in a grotesquely public fashion. Throughout the fourteenth century, for example, Jews had been integral to the celebration of the annual Roman carnevale and had been obliged to pay a special tax in atonement for the betrayal and persecution of Christ. But by the second half of the fifteenth century, anti-Jewish sentiments were sufficiently high for Pope Paul II to introduce an entirely new means of debasing the Jews into the carnival program in 1466. As the highlight of the five-hundred-meter races that were thenceforth held along the via Lata (now known as the Corso, literally “the Race”), Romans were treated to a special competition specifically for Jews. The “competitors” were obliged to run barefoot, wearing only a thin vest resembling a modern T-shirt. To ensure that Christian onlookers found it suitably amusing, the Jews taking part were frequently force-fed for hours before the race so that they would end up being sick and possibly even collapsing. As the years went on, further innovations were introduced to heighten the “entertainment.” By the 1570s, as an English visitor later recorded, the Jews
runne starke naked … And all the way, [the Roman soldiers] gallop their great Horsses after them, and carie goades with sharpe pointes of steele … wherewith they will pricke the Iewes on the naked skin … [T]hen you shall see a hundred boyes, who have provided a number of Orrenges … [and] will … pelt the poor Iewe[s].
Worryingly, degrading episodes of public humiliation were just the thin end of the wedge.
Renaissance anti-Semitism was a powder keg, and it only took the smallest and most irrational of sparks to ignite a towering inferno of brutality. So intensive was the hysteria that had been stimulated by talk of strange rituals and heretical beliefs that violence was never very far from the surface of urban society, and Salomone was perhaps perversely fortunate that he lost only his fortune. But it was toward the end of the fifteenth century that the sporadic bursts of open aggression finally coalesced into a systematic pattern of persecution.
Shortly before Easter in 1475—that is, thirty-four years after Salomone’s trial—a two-year-old Christian lad named Simon suddenly went missing from his home in Trent. His family was hysterical, and a huge search was initiated. But when little Simon’s dead body was found in the cellar of a Jewish family’s home on Easter Sunday, what had already become a tragedy metamorphosed into violent madness. Accusations of what was known as blood libel had been common in Europe since at least the early twelfth century, and having listened to a series of viciously anti-Semitic sermons delivered by Bernardino da Feltre only a few days before, Simon’s father came to the conclusion that his son had been kidnapped by Jews, killed, and drained of his blood to use in certain, unspecified Passover rituals. All too ready to believe his accusation as a result of the historical fears of ritualized murder by Jews and the virulent prejudices with which Bernardino da Feltre had filled their minds, the city authorities immediately instigated an anti-Semitic manhunt. Eighteen Jewish men and five Jewish women were arrested and charged with ritual murder. The men were then subjected to months of horrific torture until, unable to bear the pain any longer, they “confessed.” Thirteen of them were subsequently burned at the stake.
For his part, little Simon was later canonized, and the Church did its utmost to foster the growth of his cult. A spate of similar witch hunts against Jews up and down the Italian peninsula followed almost immediately. In common with many other cases of blood libel in earlier centuries (particularly in Germany), Simon’s “martyrdom” served to validate all of the fears that Observant Franciscans like Bernardino da Feltre had been trying so hard to drum into a credulous populace, and effectively authorized the brutal and open persecution of the Jews. Indeed, the tragic story that unfolded in Trent was frequently commemorated in paintings and illustrations—for example, Gandolfino di Roreto d’Asti’s Martyrdom of Simon of Trent (Israel Museum, Jerusalem)—as a means of ensuring that the perceived criminality of the Jewish “heretics” was ingrained in every Christian’s mind and in the hope of guaranteeing that anti-Semitism would almost be consecrated as an article of faith. Preemptive violence was viewed with a certain measure of knowing approval.
More thoroughgoing attempts to marginalize, contain, and even exterminate the perceived Jewish “threat” were in the air. In the midst of the War of the League of Cambrai in 1516, Venice—the most cosmopolitan city in Italy—declared that Jews were to be confined within a new ghetto, which was the first of its kind in Europe and still stands as a visible witness to what would become more than four hundred years of continuous persecution. This trend only grew worse. As cities throughout Italy followed Venice’s lead, Jews were expelled en masse from Naples in 1533. On Rosh Hashanah in 1553, all the copies of the Talmud in Rome were burned in public. Having banned them from all professions, Pope Paul IV used Jews as slave laborers in Rome, and as Luther’s pernicious treatise On the Jews and Their Lies (1543) began to circulate, even those with protestant tendencies in Italy began to call for synagogues to be burned and Jewish houses to be destroyed.
Leaving the Palazzo Vecchio a ruined man, Salomone di Bonaventura walked out into a city that was basking in the radiance of Renaissance culture. It was a bustling urban metropolis, made rich by commerce, thronging with immigrants, and pullulating with artists like Filippo Lippi who were changing the world with their works. It was, moreover, the capital of a thriving territorial state that had gained much from cultural exchange between Jews and Christians. It would have been impossible not to have been dazzled by its sheer magnificence. But as Salomone’s trial had illustrated, it was also a city in which wanton prejudice was growing in step with artistic innovation. Tolerance was little more than a facade that was kept in place only insofar as it satisfied the self-interest of Christians. No matter how much Jews like Salomone brought to Florence, they were regarded with disdain, contempt, and outright hatred, forced to wear humiliating yellow signs, pushed to the margins of society, and persecuted with complete disregard for justice. Indeed, Florence even seemed to revel both in its hypocrisy and in its bigotry. Churches were packed with altarpieces that showed Jews as strange, foreign, and reprehensible, while the city’s monastic cloisters thronged with humanists who sucked Hebrew texts dry only so that their vitriolic pamphlets would meet with greater acclaim. In more senses than one, anti-Semitism was becoming an art form in Renaissance Florence.
What the embittered, broken moneylender could not know was that he was among the more fortunate Jews of the Renaissance. For though he lamented his misfortune and silently cursed the monstrous unfairness of his treatment, his co-religionists would shortly be ridiculed, confined, hunted, and killed on a scale that—despite some fluctuations in the later sixteenth century—would not be matched in Italy until the rise of Fascism. And what was worst of all, the artists of the period would lend their skill to celebrating—rather than condemning—this most shameful of episodes in human history.