The Mediterranean and the Jews: Vol. 2: Society, Culture, and Economy in Early Modern Times.

Elliott Horowitz and Moises Orfali, eds. The Mediterranean and the Jews: Vol. 2: Society, Culture, and Economy in Early Modern Times.

Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2002. 266 pp. index. $35. ISBN: 965-226-221-8.

Three European, one American, and six Israeli researchers here cast their scholarly nets widely to elucidate aspects of the early modern period in Jewish history. The articles are all welcome additions to our knowledge in this emerging field. Though most of the papers were first delivered in 1993, they have held their value, and the editors are to be congratulated on high standards and achievement.

Benjamin Ravid has provided a useful chronological survey of the dozens of settlement charters issued to Jews in Venice from 1513 to 1797. Ravid's footnotes are, in effect, an index to his many individual studies, and the charter summaries provide leads to the Venetian specifics of broader issues: Renaissance bureaucracy, taxation policy, population control and migration, "ethnicity" among Jews, Jewish courts and the extent of their autonomy, to name only a few. Presumably, these will be further expanded in Ravid's promised two-volume history.

Elliott Horowitz continues his work on confraternal piety among Italian Jews with an extended version of his earlier published work on Ferrara's Gemilut Hasadim Society over the course of the sixteenth century. Horowitz embeds the statutes of this confraternity within a detailed history of local Jewries and links both to the broader themes of social and cultural history. He touches, for example, on youth, attitudes towards death, elitism and social stratification, and the place of women in society, all areas he has written on elsewhere. Horowitz has a full command of the scholarly literature on confraternities in general and on sixteenth-century Italian Jewry in particular, but he is ultimately forced to draw broad conclusions from relatively limited sources. He seeks to go from three sets of institutional regulations to underlying value systems; this reviewer, at least, would see some of the changes he documents as rooted not in changing social attitudes but in the demographic and fiscal realities of Ferrara's Jewish community. But he points the way to further research.

Kenneth Stow tries to bring the sixteenth-century Roman rabbi-cum-arbitrator Abramo ben Aron Scazzocchio to life. The piquant details drawn from Rome's Jewish notarial archives about Scazzocchio's entrepreneurial and litigious activities certainly justify Stow's subtitle, "another kind of rabbi," but they are, I think, too scattered to yield a satisfying portrait, either of the man or of the context of his career. Stow's monumental register of the archival material through 1557 (The Jews in Rome [1995-97]) shows how rich that archive is, but as Stow also notes in the introduction to his Theater of Acculturation (2001), these documents are quite difficult to work with. This reviewer would love to see Stow amplify this study by appending at least some of the original documents, either in the original or in translation.

John Edwards provides a wonderful exploration of the social and religious realities behind Francisco Delicado's oft-quoted but inadequately studied La Lozana andaluza (1528). Edwards uses his extensive familiarity with circumstances in Delicado's native Cordoba and with the conventions of Spanish picaresque literature to demonstrate that the work reflects well both the realia and the cultural attitudes of the Iberian conversos environment. By extrapolation, he suggests that the work is a similarly reliable historical source for the situation in Rome. Edwards promises further work; some of his findings will be strengthened by the research of Anna Esposito, conveniently available in Un'altra Roma (1995).

Moises Orfali has added to our store of knowledge about the remarkable sixteenth-century entrepreneur and philanthropist, Dona Gracia Mendes, in his treatment of several documents from the Ragusa (Dubrovnik) state archives. His article reminds us of the importance of trade between the Ottoman and Christian spheres for our understanding of Jewish, and especially Sephardic, history in the early modern period.

Anna Foa tries something quite ambitious in her discussion of "The Marrano's Kitchen." Foa notes that dietary predilections were often used by both conversos and Christian authorities as marks of judaizing and signposts of Jewish identity. She argues that this converso identity, no matter how fractured and "inauthentic" it may appear to us, was in fact systematically constructed, though the valence of specific practices was determined by Christian as well as Jewish conceptions of piety, and by the circumstances of converso life in a given locale--for example, in Venice as opposed to the Iberian Peninsula. We might question whether Foa's sources are as convincing as she makes them out to be. I, for one, would argue that on the one hand they demonstrate the syncretistic openness of folk religion generally, and on the other hand they reflect primarily on the radical split between female and male piety among Jews (and conversos), but Foa's description of a "transformation" of observance is stimulating.

Edwin Seroussi is devoting his career to the recovery, analysis, and performance of Jewish music, especially of the early modern period. His study of Livorno brings together a wide range of sources in order to describe that community as a crossroads for the development and dissemination of Sephardic music and for the modernization of Jewish liturgical music in the eighteenth century.

Alisa Meyuhas Ginio has collected numerous genealogical details about the family into which she married and presents them in a continuous historical narrative stretching from medieval Spain to modern Jerusalem.

Harm den Boer's treatment of Miguel de Barrios's anthology, Bello monte de Helicona (1686), might easily be overlooked in a collection ostensibly devoted to Jews in the Mediterranean. Den Boer, an expert on the history of the Spanish/Portuguese, and especially the Sephardic, book in the Low Countries, has recently been instrumental in editing several comprehensive microfiche collections of these rare and important publications. The present study investigates the complex allusions and implications of one text by Miguel (Daniel Levi) de Barrios, demonstrating that a converso's Spanish, and his Jewish, identities were not separate or in opposition; rather they interacted in complex ways that reflected the individual's personal history as well as the geopolitics of the day.

David Malkiel's treatment of the Reggios of Gorizia, pere et fils, might also be overlooked since their activity falls after the period defined in the book's title. Malkiel carefully untangles and scholarly disputes positions and the records of communal conflict to elucidate the complexity of the transition between tradition and modernity among Italian Jewish intellectuals. At least in this corner of northeastern Italy, Kabbalah remained a serious rival to maskilic teachings well into the nineteenth century.

BERNARD D. COOPERMAN

University of Maryland, College Park