The Jews of Early Modern Venice. (Reviews).

Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid, eds., The Jews of Early Modern Venice

Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xix + 314. $52.50. ISBN: 0-8018-6512-3.

We have reason to welcome this collection of essays on the Jews of Venice organized by Robert Davis, whose work on civic violence is well known, and. Benjamin Ravid, a leading scholar of Venetian Jewry. The aim of the collection is to present an up-to-date portrait of Jewish life in Venice by culling the skills of noted scholars of the history of the city's Jewry. As Robert Davis writes in the Introduction, the emphasis fell naturally on the early modern period, coterminous with the first two centuries of the ghetto, founded in 1516 and named after the zone in Venice where the first of these walled and gated serraglii degli ebrei was located, the period also when the Venetian Jewish community flourished. The eleven essays in the volume are divided intelligently according to the themes of "Settlement": Benjamin Ravid and Donatella Calabi; "Ethnicities and Identitites": Brian Pullan, Benjamin Arbel, Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini, David J. Malkiel, and Howard Tzvi Adelman; and "Cultures": Robert Bonfil, David B. Ru derman, Don Harran, and Elliott Horowitz.

As Robert Davis also writes, the point of the essays is to show how Jews -- simultaneously -- were and were not integrated into Venetian life. Thus, Benjamin Ravid's detailed exposition of the various charters accorded Venetian Jews emphasizes continued ambivalence toward a permanent Jewish settlement. This theme continues in the essay of Benjamin Arbel, showing how vital Jews had really become in the Venetian economy. That well-to-do Jewish merchants did not seek to relocate elsewhere and were willing to put up with ghetto life is somewhat of a mystery, although Venetian Jews were clearly serving wide-ranging international family interests. Yet, no matter how integral these Jews had become, there were still Venetian Christians who feared divine punishment for allowing a Jewish presence. The specific conditions of settlement appear in the essay of Donatella Calabi, a most original piece, the work of an urbanist, which discusses ghetto housing in great detail on the basis of such items as notarial records. In other aspects of daily life, one sees a proximity and distance between Jews and the city that was constant.

There was also paradox, turning Jewish bankers, as Brian Pullan demonstrates, into a virtual Monte di pieta; Christian lending-morality would be served in one way or another. The Jewish banks, needless to say, became charitable institutions, limited to collecting interest rates that returned less than the expense incurred in operating the banks. A second paradox, visible in many of the essays, is that were it not for Jewish economic initiative, Venetian commercial decline would have set in far earlier than it eventually did. Could this explain, therefore, why the Inquisition in Venice was more timid than might be expected? Trials of Judaizers, explains Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini, there were, but the number of these trials was low: the Jewish merchants were invariably ex-conversos or their descendants. The trials of Jews for violations of canon law were fewer yet, and the punishments in all cases were mild.

Within the community, writes David Malkiel, there were well-defined, if oligarchic governing structures, modeled on Venetian and other Italian patterns, but rooted squarely in halachah, Jewish law, which gave rabbis the opportunity to exercise influence. The question of how truly empowered Jewish civil bodies were remains necessarily open, just as does the question of how exactly Jewish attitudes toward women and family life reflected those of Venetian Christians. Howard Adelman's essay on this subject moves in a sphere where little work previously has been done.

In each of these cases, the authors insist on the ethnic factor behind behavior. Unlike Rome, where Sephardim, very few of whom were ever conversos, were well absorbed into broader Roman Jewish society within fifty years at most after their arrival, in Venice, matters like converso background, commercial differences, economic gaps, and separate neighborhoods with separate synagogues, not to mention differing privileges received from the Serenissima itself, which often led to the overall community being more a federation of synagogues than to the synagogues being appendages of the whole, prolonged ethnic distinction. Nonetheless, in discussing high culture, Robert Bonfil can still insist on a Talmudism and an eventual kabbalistic turn that "mirrored" majority society while retaining its intrinsic uniqueness, transcending, it would seem, ethnic lines. The kabbalistically-driven inward turn Bonfil sees was balanced, as David Ruderman's essay shows, by attitudes like those of Tobias Cohen, an immigrant from Metz and graduate in medicine from Padua, who ended his days in Jerusalem following a Turkish sojourn. Cohen's exposition of newer experimental medicine functioned thanks to its traditional garb. In the same way, Don Harran explains how Renaissance musical forms were made compatible with Judaism thanks to the cooperation between the noted composer Salamone Rossi and the polymath rabbi Leone Modena. Christian elements were also incorporated into confraternal processions, writes Elliott Horowitz, for instance, in torch bearing at funerals. Yet what came in from the outside was also made the Jews' own.

This portrait of Venetian Jewry, going beyond and doing far more than supplementing a previous collection of essays, Gli ebrei e Venezia (secoli XIV-XVII), ed. Gaetano Cozzi (Milan, 1987), to which seven of the eleven authors in this new volume also contributed, offers a unified portrait, that points the way toward understanding modes of acculturation: how Jews might be insiders and outsiders at the same time. The continued mining of economic documents, notarial records, and communal and rabbinic texts like those underpinning the essays here will bring this a step forward toward completion.