Juifs apuliens (Pugliesi)

Jewish settlement in Apulia dates back to Late Antiquity. The southern provinces of the Italian peninsula, integrated into the sphere of Greek-Eastern influence, welcomed Jewish communities attested by bilingual Greek-Hebrew funerary inscriptions and synagogue remains, notably in Venosa in neighboring Basilicata and along the commercial routes of the Adriatic. These communities participated in an ancient Mediterranean Judaism, distinct in its practices both from the nascent Ashkenazi world and from Iberian Sephardic Judaism.

In the High Middle Ages, the region fell under Byzantine rule. During the early medieval period, Calabria, Basilicata, and Apulia, forming the Catepanate of Italy, were under Byzantine dominion; in the eleventh century, the region was again a peaceful haven for Jews. This Greek tutelage, despite episodes of imperial persecution — notably the forced conversion campaigns conducted under certain Macedonian emperors — left a lasting imprint on the Apulian communities: their Hebrew, their liturgical poetry, and their memory bear the mark of Eastern Hellenism.

It was in this context that the privileged connection of Apulian scholars with the Orient took root. At this time, many Apulian Torah scholars maintained regular contacts with the rabbinical academies of the Orient; the Chronicle of Ahimaaz, in 1054, preserves evidence of this. This document, written in Capua by Ahimaaz ben Paltiel, constitutes the master narrative source for the history of the Jews of southern Italy in the High Middle Ages: it traces, over several generations, the deeds of a learned family of Oria — that of Shephatiah and Amittai — blending family chronicle, piyyut (liturgical poetry), and wondrous tales. Apulian Judaism appears there from the outset as a Judaism of scholars, poets, and mystics, in constant dialogue with the Land of Israel and Babylonia. This Byzantine foundation explains the later singularity of the Apulian world: neither quite Latin nor quite Oriental, but an original Mediterranean synthesis [Chronicle of Ahimaaz].

The intellectual renown of Apulia crystallized in a celebrated formula from medieval rabbinic literature. Rabbenu Tam, one of the greatest Tosafist masters of twelfth-century France, applied to the communities of southern Italy a verse from Isaiah (2, 3) repurposed as praise: "From Bari shall go forth the Law, and the word of the Lord from Otranto" — substituting Bari for Zion and Otranto for Jerusalem. This repurposing, transmitted by scholarly tradition, speaks eloquently of the prestige that rabbis from across the mountains recognized in the Apulian academies. Here, rabbinic Memory and the literary archive answer one another: the formula is a transmitted topos, but it is attested in the Tosafist writings themselves, which confers upon it documentary value.

Oria was, in the ninth and tenth centuries, the prime center of this ferment. The topography of the city preserves its memory. The Giudea is the historic Jewish quarter of Oria — a network of narrow medieval lanes in the oldest part of the historic center, still accessible through the Porta Ebrei, the Gate of the Jews. This toponymic persistence constitutes an exemplary meeting point between monument and memory: stone preserves what texts proclaim.

Apulian Judaism was also a matrix of broader scholarly traditions. Research has shown how Mediterranean circulations connected Jewish communities across the entire length of the inland sea, making the ports of southern Italy essential relays between the Arab-Byzantine East and the Latin West [Goldberg, 2012]. At the scale of Western Christendom, Apulia occupied a hinge position, at once integrated into the Latin world through Norman and Swabian domination, and turned toward the East through its Greek heritage and talmudic networks [Chazan, 2006]. A scholarly tradition even reports that currents of mystical and poetic piety born in southern Italy spread northward, even irrigating the pious circles of the Rhineland — a motif that the study of Hasidei Ashkenaz has rendered plausible without fully demonstrating it [Marcus, 1981].

Among the traits that distinguish Apulian Jews, none is more significant than their own rite. The minhag Puglia, or Apulian rite, constituted one of the great liturgical traditions of Italian Judaism, alongside the Roman Italian rite (Italki or Bene Roma). A direct heir to the liturgical usages of the Land of Israel transmitted through Byzantine mediation, it was distinguished by its own piyyutim, the ordering of its prayers, and its ceremonial customs.

This rite is not a dead object. Its remarkable survival testifies to the vitality of the Apulian diaspora after the expulsion. Carried by the exiles, the minhag Puglia was preserved notably in Corfu, an Ionian island where an important community of Apulian origin maintained, until the twentieth century, a distinct rite called "Poliote," transmitted in mahzorim (prayer collections) that were manuscript and then printed. This preservation in diaspora stems from both History—attested by the liturgical books preserved—and the living Memory of a community that understood itself as the custodian of a heritage.

Apulian liturgy was nourished by an intense production of sacred poetry, which the Chronicle of Ahimaaz attests to its origins as early as the ninth century with the compositions of Amittai. This organic link between family chronicle, talmudic knowledge, and piyyut makes the Apulian rite a condensation of Apulian identity. It should be noted that, unlike the Sephardic world where family structure and networks of solidarity have been the subject of rigorous analyses [Ray, 2020], the Apulian world remains documented more fragmentarily: it is largely through liturgy and onomastics that the historian reconstructs communal continuities. Here, liturgical tradition and manuscript archive confirm each other mutually, without always overlapping perfectly—hence the probable status of this reconstruction.

If Oria dominated the early Middle Ages, it is Trani that embodies the scholarly apogee of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Adriatic port city gave Judaism one of its major figures: Isaiah ben Mali of Trani, called ha-Zaqen (the Elder), a Tosafist and legal decisor active in the first third of the thirteenth century. Trained in part in the talmudic schools of the Germanic and Ashkenazi world, he synthesized the critical method of the Northern Tosafists with the traditions specific to southern Italy. His Pesaqim (halakhic decisions) and his talmudic commentaries held authority far beyond Apulia.

Isaiah of Trani remained famous for having formulated, with remarkable audacity, the principle of the critical authority of later generations: taking up the image of "dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants," he affirmed that the moderns, though inferior to the Ancients, see farther than them precisely because they inherit their knowledge. This formula, borrowed from the twelfth-century Latin learned culture and acclimatized in Jewish thought, perfectly illustrates the position of mediation of Apulian scholars between the Latin Christian world and the rabbinic tradition — a theme that recent scholarship has explored regarding medieval Jews' relationship to the Christian past [Ben-Shalom, 2022].

His grandson, Isaiah ben Elijah of Trani (the Younger), continued the family work. The Tranian dynasty shows how a relatively modest port community could produce a halakhic school of international reach. The most eloquent monument to this grandeur still stands. The synagogue of Trani, called in Judeo-Italian the Scolanova or new synagogue, was built in the thirteenth century in the medieval period, then confiscated by the Catholic Church during a wave of antisemitism in the 1380s, and converted into a church under the name of Santa Maria in Scolanova. This building — one of the four medieval synagogues of the city — stands as a stone witness to the Apulian golden age.

The turn of the fourteenth century marked a dark inflection. Under the Angevin dynasty, the protection that Apulian Jews had enjoyed under the Normans and the Swabians unraveled. The end of the thirteenth and the fourteenth century witnessed campaigns of forced conversion that struck hard at the communities of southern Italy. Trani, Bari, Manfredonia and other cities experienced waves of forced baptisms that gave rise to a singular group, the neofiti (neophytes) or mercanti, converted to Christianity but suspected of continuing to practice Judaism in secret for generations.

It is within this framework that the confiscation of the Scolanova of Trani around 1380 must be situated, a symbol of mounting pressure. These persecutions were part of a broader movement that swept across all of Western Christendom, from the expulsions of England and France to the Iberian violence of 1391 [Chazan, 2006]. The fate of the Apulian converts moreover presents striking analogies with that of the Iberian conversos: suspicion of clandestine Judaism, inquisitorial procedures, tension between imposed religious belonging and inward loyalty. Comparison with the anti-Jewish trials of medieval Spain illuminates the mechanisms of religious coercion at work [Tartakoff, 2017].

Despite this erosion, the Apulian Jewish community — and its neophyte shadow — persisted. The fifteenth century even saw, at intervals, periods of relative tolerance and economic recovery, Jews playing an active role in commerce, medicine, lending and the silk and dyeing trades. But this resilience would soon collide with a continental-scale upheaval: the arrival of the Spanish exiles, then the direct domination of the Aragonese crown.

In 1492, the expulsion of Jews from the Spanish kingdoms redistributed the cards of the Jewish Mediterranean, and Apulia became one of the refuges. The Edict of Granada of 1492 orders the removal of Jews from the Spanish kingdoms, and many find hospitality in southern Italy. Iberian Sephardim and native Apulian Jews then cohabited, in a kingdom of Naples which became, within a few years, a crossroads of Jewish destinies. This encounter between distinct traditions — the pugliese rite and Sephardic usages — foreshadowed the future recompositions of the diaspora.

But this refuge was short-lived. The arrival of the Spanish and the expulsion decrees of 1510 and 1541 eliminate all hope of return to these lands; thus begins a work of damnatio memoriae that tends to systematically erase all traces of Jewish presence. The Aragonese crown, master of the kingdom of Naples since the turn of the century, applied there the policy already tested in Spain. The choice of the kingdom of Naples proved disastrous: first invaded by the French, it became the possession of Ferdinand II of Aragon at the very beginning of the sixteenth century; Jews were expelled from it as early as 1510, and this expulsion was renewed for all of Charles V's possessions in southern Italy in 1541.

The demographic scale of this rupture was considerable. Over the years, restrictions and taxes increased, leading to the definitive expulsion of all Jews in 1541, even the wealthiest; official figures suggest that 30,000 people were expelled in 1510, followed by 42,000 others in 1541. The Apulian exiles dispersed toward the Papal States, Ottoman Greece — especially Corfu and Salonika —, the Ottoman Empire and the Levant, carrying with them their rite and their name. The cognomen Pugliese, still borne today in several Sephardic and Italian communities of the eastern Mediterranean, perpetuates the memory of this southern center. The singularity of this reversal — from welcoming exiles from another exile to their own expulsion in barely a generation — makes Apulian history a tragic condensation of the Jewish destiny in southern Europe of the early modern period.

The Apulian Jews form an essential yet long-neglected link in Mediterranean Jewish history. Rooted since Late Antiquity, flourishing under Byzantine and then Norman patronage, they carried a Judaism of scholars and poets whose successive capitals were Oria, Bari, Otranto and Trani. Rabbenu Tam's formula about the Law that "goes forth from Bari" was not flattery: it consecrated an intellectual reality attested by the Chronicle of Ahimaaz, by the halakhic work of Isaiah of Trani, by the persistence of a distinctive liturgical rite—the minhag Puglia—preserved in exile until the threshold of the contemporary era.

The Apulian destiny embraces, condensing it, the trajectory of the Jews of Western Christendom: an age of creativity and fruitful contacts, then fragmentation through forced conversions, finally radical rupture under Aragonese rule. The decrees of 1510 and 1541 did not merely end a presence: they inaugurated a forgetting of Memory from which history recovers only today, as the restored synagogues of Trani, the place-names of Oria and the scattered liturgical manuscripts speak again. To restore the Apulian Jews is to repair a damnatio memoriae and return to Mediterranean Judaism one of its oldest and most learned voices.