Les Juifs de Bologne

Jewish presence in Bologna dates back to the Middle Ages, in a city that, from the twelfth century onward, asserted itself as a major intellectual hub of the peninsula. The first Jews were attracted there, as elsewhere in central and northern Italy, by the activity of pawn-lending, long the only occupation that Christian authorities fully granted to Israelite communities. Money-lending, essential to urban economy and forbidden to Christians by ecclesiastical doctrine on usury, enabled the settlement of families of Jewish bankers who obtained, through condotte — contracts negotiated with the commune — the right of residence and practice.

This model of the itinerant Jewish banker, carrying circulating capital along the road and river axes of the peninsula, finds a striking illustration in the destiny of the da Pisa family, whose origins trace back to a Roman consorteria called mi-Beth El. Its patriarch, Matassia (Mattatia) di Sabato, enjoyed citizenship in Perugia, where he practiced banking. In 1393, this branch left Perugia for Tuscany, and in 1406 his son Vitale (Jehiel) di Matassia settled in Pisa [« La famiglia da Pisa »], the city that gave the lineage the surname under which it would traverse the centuries. After Florence's conquest of Pisa in the autumn of 1406, lending activity resumed under Florence's aegis, which granted Vitale the exclusive right to lend in the city. Vitale also opened benches in San Gimignano, Prato, Colle di Val d'Elsa and Arezzo [« La famiglia da Pisa »], constituting a credit network that crisscrossed Tuscany.

This movement of capital and people between Perugia, Pisa, Florence and, further north, the cities of Emilia, is characteristic of the Jewish economy of the time. Bologna, a crossroads between Tuscany and Lombardy, naturally fits into these circuits. The da Pisa family thus illustrates a phenomenon that can be cautiously extrapolated to other families of bankers: anchorage in a city is rarely definitive; it is the result of permanent negotiation between local power and mobile entrepreneurs, who move their benches according to political and fiscal conditions.

The most tangible vestiges of medieval Jewish presence in Bologna remain funerary. The tombstones from the old cemetery on via Orfeo are preserved in the Museo Civico Medievale. These stelae, engraved with Hebrew characters, testify to the antiquity and rootedness of a population organized into a structured community, possessing its institutions, places of burial, and houses of study.

It should be emphasized that medieval Bolognese documentation, less abundant than for the Renaissance period, allows only a broad reconstruction of the life of these first generations. Names, occupations, population densities remain partly conjectural, deduced from scattered notarial acts and the rare surviving epigraphic monuments. What is certain is that at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the community had reached sufficient maturity to become, in the Renaissance, one of the great centers of learned Judaism in Italy.

Before Bologna reached its Renaissance peak, one date deserves a prominent place in the history of Judaism in the region: 1418. That year, an assembly of the leaders of the Jewish communities of Italy met in Forlì, an Emilian city less than a hundred kilometers from Bologna ["The da Pisa family"]. Vitale di Matassia da Pisa, the Tuscan banker whose name would perpetuate itself as a family patronym, participated in person, representing an already firmly established Tuscan community in its lending benches.

The assembly of Forlì is not an isolated event. It is part of a series of vaadim — synodal assemblies — which, in the medieval era and at the dawn of the Renaissance, attempted to coordinate the legal, fiscal and communal responses of Jews scattered across the peninsula. The very geography of the place — Forlì, at the heart of Romagna, midway between papal Emilia and Tuscany — betrays the concern for a meeting point accessible to delegates coming from both north and south of the peninsula.

For the history of the Jews of Bologna, this episode has an indirect but real significance. It recalls that the Bolognese community did not exist in isolation: it was part of a network of regional interdependencies, intercommunal solidarities and circulations of capital and knowledge. The bankers who set up their lending benches in the cities of Emilia knew their Tuscan counterparts; the rabbis who taught in the Bolognese academies corresponded with their peers in Florence, Mantua or Rome. The assembly of Forlì is the visible sign of this dense and interconnected Italian Jewish geography that the Counter-Reformation would tear apart in the second half of the sixteenth century.

The participation of Vitale da Pisa in this assembly also illustrates a structural trait of Italian Renaissance Judaism: the great families of bankers were not merely providers of credit. They assumed communal responsibilities, represented their coreligionists before the authorities and contributed to the elaboration of the internal law of the communities. This dual role — economic and institutional — would be found, a few decades later, in the figure of Daniel ben Isaac da Pisa in Rome, entrusted by Pope Clement VII with reorganizing the Roman Jewish community.

The Renaissance marked the height of the Jewish community of Bologna. A city of science and law, it attracted leading Jewish scholars, some of whom gravitated toward the university world, particularly in medicine, a discipline where Jewish practitioners enjoyed an ancient and sought-after reputation. Bolognese Judaism of this period is characterized by a remarkable fusion between Talmudic rigor and openness to the secular knowledge of humanism.

The eminent figure of this period is Ovadyah Sforno (Obadiah Sforno), physician, rabbi and biblical exegete, whose work embodies the ideal of the Renaissance Jewish man, equally versed in the sciences and in the Law. Ovadyah Sforno founded a renowned Talmudic school in 1527. His biblical commentary, marked by rational clarity and philosophical sobriety, is part of a tradition of interpretation that engages with the thought of his time. This articulation between Revelation and reason, between the study of the Law and the practice of philosophy, constitutes one of the fruitful tensions that structure Jewish thought, as analyzed in modern reflection on the place of philosophy in fidelity to tradition [Strauss, 2001], and on the origin of the political in the Torah itself [Trigano, 1991].

Bologna also became a land of welcome. Following the Spanish Inquisition of 1492, Sephardic Jews settled in Bologna, among them the rabbi Jacob Mantino, physician and translator of Averroes. His presence illustrates the circulation of Sephardic scholars expelled from Spain toward Italy, where their philosophical and medical learning found a favorable reception. The arrival of these exiles enriched the communal fabric, hitherto of primarily Italian tradition, with an Iberian component bearing its own rites, languages and libraries.

Academic activity was intense and diverse. Beyond the school founded by Sforno in 1527, the city housed several study houses. A second academy, animated by silk manufacturers and intellectuals—among them Sforno himself—operated from 1537 to 1541. This conjunction between the artisanal world—silk-making, a weighty economic activity—and the intellectual circle reveals a community where material prosperity nourished the life of the mind. The Jews of Bologna thus combined commerce, finance, luxury craftsmanship and erudition, in a balance that would soon be compromised by the religious transformations of the century.

It is illuminating to compare this Bolognese model with that embodied by the da Pisa family in contemporary Tuscany. Yehiel Nissim da Pisa, called Vitale (1507–1574), banker and philosopher, directed in Florence the family's pawnbroking activities while drafting the treatise Ma'amar Hayei Olam ("Eternal Life"), devoted to the use of credit and the question of usury ["The da Pisa family"]. This treatise, which articulates Jewish law on ribbit (interest forbidden among Jews) and the realities of Renaissance finance, testifies to the same aspiration as that of Bolognese circles: reconciling fidelity to the Law with the demands of the world. The man of the Jewish Renaissance does not oppose his role as banker to his vocation as scholar; he makes it the very subject of his reflection.

Bologna holds a prominent place in the history of the Hebrew book from the earliest decades of printing. The city ranked among the birthplaces of the Hebrew incunabula—those books printed before 1500 that count among the most precious witnesses to Jewish culture at the end of the Middle Ages. Two Hebrew printing presses were established in Bologna: the first under the supervision of Abraham ben Ḥayyim dei Tintori of Pesaro, active from 1477 to 1482, and the second run by silk manufacturers and intellectuals, among whom was Obadiah Sforno, active from 1537 to 1541.

The jewel of this production is the 1482 edition of the Pentateuch. That year saw the publication of the first edition of the Pentateuch accompanied by the Targum of Onkelos and the commentary of Rashi, as well as the Five Scrolls with commentaries; only the Pentateuch bears the name of the city. This edition remains a capital milestone of Hebrew typography: it established a page layout—biblical text, Aramaic translation, and rabbinic glosses arranged together—that would become canonical and durably influence the presentation of the printed Jewish book.

The resumption of editorial activity in the sixteenth century confirmed Bologna's vocation. In 1537 there appeared a siddur of Roman rite, printed largely on parchment, as well as other works, including Sforno's Or Ammim the same year. This liturgical and philosophical production attests that Bologna's printing did not confine itself to foundational texts, but also served the daily piety and learned speculation of the community.

The choice of parchment for certain editions—a noble and costly material—signals the quality sought and the demanding clientele these workshops addressed. Hebrew printing, in Bologna as in Soncino, Naples, or later Venice, was far more than an industry: it constituted an instrument of preservation and dissemination of Jewish textual heritage at a crucial moment, precisely when that heritage was about to become the target of ecclesiastical repression.

It is worth noting here a convergence with the world of Tuscan men of letters. Yehiel Nissim da Pisa, whose treatise Ma'amar Hayei Olam was published in a modern critical edition by Gilbert S. Rosenthal [Banking and Finance among Jews in Renaissance Italy, Bloch Publishing Co., New York, 1962], belongs to this same culture of the written text, published, commented upon, which bound together the Jewish intellectual circles of Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century. The Hebrew book printed in Bologna circulated throughout the peninsula; in turn, the scholars of Florence, Rome, and Mantua contributed to sustaining the networks of authors and readers on which the Bologna presses fed. The book, the glory of the community, would soon become an object of proscription and fuel for the flames of bonfires.

The middle of the sixteenth century inaugurated the brutal reversal of the condition of the Jews of Bologna. The Counter-Reformation, by hardening the doctrine and discipline of the Roman Church, was accompanied by a policy increasingly hostile toward the Jewish communities of the Papal States. The city, which had returned to direct papal rule in 1513, bore the full brunt of this new orientation.

The first great trauma was the destruction of books. In 1553, the Talmud and other Hebrew works were burned by order of Pope Julius III. This auto-da-fé, which struck at the heart of what made the city's intellectual pride — its academies, its masters, its printed works — was part of a general campaign against Jewish texts throughout Italy. The confiscation and burning of books destroyed not merely objects: they sought to dry up the living sources of transmission and study.

Then came confinement. Pope Paul IV, through his bull Cum nimis absurdum of 1555, imposed draconian restrictions on the Jews of the Papal States and their confinement to enclosed quarters. Two years later, the Jews were forced to live in ghettos in all the cities of the Papal States; that of Bologna was created in 1556 and closed by two gates. The ghetto materialized a status of relegation: physical separation, control of movement, the wearing of distinctive signs, limitation of economic activities. The community, once integrated into the urban fabric and its silk and credit economy, found itself confined, watched, and progressively strangled.

This general hardening found its exact counterpart in the destinies of banker families linked to the entire peninsula. In Rome, Daniel ben Isaac da Pisa, head of the Jewish community of the city, had nonetheless benefited, some decades earlier, from a privileged relationship with papal authority: entrusted by Pope Clement VII with reorganizing the Roman community, he had, with twenty of the most fortunate members, elaborated the « Chapters of Daniel da Pisa », approved by papal bull on December 12, 1524, instituting a council — a congrega — of sixty members, half Roman and half immigrant [« The da Pisa family »]. This chapter of collaboration between a great Jewish banker and the papacy illustrates, by contrast, the magnitude of the reversal that the bulls of Paul IV and Pius V would represent. In less than a generation, the pope who grants a bull of recognition to a Jewish elite precedes the one who encloses and banishes the entire community.

The vise tightened further in Bologna. In 1567, free movement to and from the « enclosure » was declared strictly forbidden. This deprivation of movement completed the transformation of the ghetto into a collective prison, preparing the ultimate rupture. The logic of segregation led almost inevitably to total exclusion: after having enclosed, the papacy would banish.

The year 1569 marked the first expulsion of Jews from Bologna, decided within the framework of Pope Pius V's policy. This local measure was part of a decision of far broader scope, formulated by the bull Hebraeorum gens sola of the same year, which restricted the presence of Jews in the Papal States to Rome and Ancona. Bologna, excluded from these two cities of tolerance, emptied itself of its Jewish inhabitants, forced into exile towards neighboring states — the Duchy of Ferrara, Mantua, or other welcoming lands in Northern Italy.

To the expulsion of the living was added the desecration of the memory of the dead, a gesture of doubled symbolic violence. Pope Pius V gave the Jewish cemetery as a gift and ordered the destruction of all tombstones. Here, the archival item and memory respond to one another with cruel clarity: the stones torn up, some of which were preserved and reached the collections of the Museo Civico Medievale, are at once the vestiges of a flourishing community and the material proofs of its ordered annihilation. The funeral monument, the final trace of a rootedness, became an object of political destruction.

History then knew a brief respite, followed by a definitive closure. When they were authorized to return by Pope Sixtus V in 1586, the Jews did not return to the ghetto, and in 1597 Pope Clement VIII expelled them definitively. The bull Caeca et obdurata of Clement VIII, in 1593, had renewed and generalized the expulsion of Jews from the entire ecclesiastical state. It gave the Jews three months to leave the Papal States, with the exception of Rome, Ancona, and the Venaissin Comtat of Avignon. Thus organized Jewish presence in Bologna was erased for nearly two centuries, until the upheavals of the French Revolution.

The trajectory of the da Pisa family illustrates in its own way the fate of the great Jewish families of the region during this period. Settled in Tuscany and not in the Papal States, they were not directly affected by the expulsions of 1569 and 1593 in the same terms as the Jews of Bologna; but the general hardening of the climate, the bull Cum nimis absurdum and its consequences affected all of central Italian Judaism, reducing the spaces of economic and intellectual freedom that the Renaissance had allowed. The end of the sixteenth century marked everywhere the closure of a golden age.

From the end of the 16th century to the end of the 18th, Bologna remained, for the most part, deprived of a constituted Jewish community. The papal prohibition, maintained within the framework of the Papal States, made the city a place where Judaism, once so vibrant, survived only in the form of Memory and remnants. The contrast is striking with the fate of Jews in other Italian cities not directly subject to the Holy See: in Livorno, a free port of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, a prosperous Sephardic community developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, illustrating how much the political regime determined the Jewish destiny of each city [Lévy, 1996]. Where Bologna closed its doors, other Italian centers welcomed and flourished.

The decisive turning point came with the French revolutionary armies. It was only in 1796, with Napoleon's conquest, that the Jews of Bologna were authorized to return and, above all, to practice their worship freely. The entry of French troops into Emilia, the fall of the papal regime and the proclamation of principles of civil equality opened a new era. Emancipation, carried by the spirit of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, abolished the statutes of relegation and reopened to Jews the space of the city.

This movement is part of the vast process of Jews entering European political modernity, where the granting of citizenship profoundly transformed the Jewish condition, not without raising debates and resistance [Birnbaum, 1990]. The 19th-century Italy, marked by the Risorgimento and the unification of the peninsula, completed emancipation: the incorporation of Bologna into the Italian kingdom in 1860 consecrated equality of rights. The reconstituted community, though modest in size compared to its Renaissance splendor, resumed the thread broken by expulsion.

It then endured the trials of the 20th century — the fascist racial laws of 1938 and the persecutions of Nazi occupation — before being reborn in republican Italy, guardian of the salvaged tombstones and the Memory of its masters. On this recent period, it is advisable to remain cautious regarding the details of numbers and institutions, as precise local documentation exceeds the scope of this synthesis.

Abraham ben Ḥayyim dei Tintori of Pesaro (dates unknown) — Supervisor of Bologna's first Hebrew press, active from 1477 to 1482, Abraham ben Ḥayyim dei Tintori was the mastermind behind the 1482 edition of the Pentateuch, accompanied by the Targum of Onkelos and Rashi's commentary. This volume, the first of its kind printed in northern Italy in this tripartite composition, stands as one of the founding milestones of Hebrew typography. Little is known of his life outside this editorial activity, but his name remains attached to one of the monuments of Jewish culture during the Renaissance.

Ovadyah Sforno (circa 1470–1550) — Rabbi, physician, and exegete born in Cesena, Ovadyah Sforno was the dominant intellectual figure of Bolognese Judaism during the Renaissance. He founded a talmudic academy in Bologna in 1527 and participated in the second academy, active from 1537 to 1541, which brought together silk merchants and scholars. His commentary on the Pentateuch, sober and philosophically informed, remains one of the major works of Italian Jewish exegesis of the period. He also left the treatise Or Ammim, printed in Bologna in 1537. Among his students was the young Johannes Reuchlin, a symbolic encounter between Christian humanism and Jewish scholarship.

Jacob Mantino (circa 1490–1549) — Physician and translator born in the Iberian peninsula, Jacob Mantino settled in Bologna after the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. A specialist in Averroes, whose works he translated from medieval Latin into Hebrew and vice versa, he represented the Sephardic component of the Bolognese community, bearer of a philosophical and medical culture distinct from the Italian tradition. He taught in Bologna, served as physician to popes and cardinals, and helped make the city a center of philosophical dialogue between Jewish and Christian traditions.

Matassia (Mattatia) di Sabato (dates unknown) — Patriarch of the da Pisa family, a banker enjoying citizenship in Perugia, Matassia di Sabato is the point of departure for a lineage that crossed central Italy from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries [« The da Pisa family »]. His descendants left Perugia in 1393 for Tuscany, inaugurating a network of pawn banks that would extend to Pisa, Florence, San Gimignano, Prato, Colle di Val d'Elsa, and Arezzo. The Roman community from which he came, the consorteria mi-Beth El, attests to an antiquity and notability that his successors would convert into political and intellectual influence.

Vitale (Jehiel) di Matassia da Pisa (dates unknown) — Son of Matassia di Sabato, Vitale established himself in Pisa in 1406 and acquired the family patronym there after Florence's conquest of the city [« The da Pisa family »]. Florence granted him the monopoly on pawn lending in the city, thus founding the lineage's fortune. His participation in the assembly of leaders of Italian Jewish communities held in Forlì in 1418 — a few dozen kilometers from Bologna — testifies to his role in intercommunal coordination on a peninsula-wide scale. He is the ancestor of the family's great figures in the sixteenth century.

Daniel ben Isaac da Pisa (dates unknown, active circa 1524) — Head of the Jewish community of Rome in the early sixteenth century, Daniel ben Isaac da Pisa was charged by Pope Clement VII with reorganizing the community after the sack of Rome. With twenty of the community's wealthiest members, he drew up the « Chapters of Daniel da Pisa », approved by papal bull on December 12, 1524 [« The da Pisa family »]. These chapters instituted a congrega of sixty members, half Roman and half immigrants, the first known constitutional text of the Jewish community of Rome. A leading figure of Italian Judaism, he illustrates the political role that great dynasties of bankers could play.

Yehiel Nissim da Pisa, called Vitale (1507–1574) — Banker, philosopher, and man of letters, Yehiel Nissim da Pisa directed the family's pawn-lending activity in Florence while leading an intense intellectual life [« The da Pisa family »]. He is the author of the treatise Ma'amar Hayei Olam (« Eternal Life »), devoted to the question of usury (ribbit) and the legitimacy of credit according to Jewish law, published in critical modern edition by Gilbert S. Rosenthal in 1962. This treatise, which engages with the financial practices of the Italian Renaissance and halakhic precepts, makes him one of the most original economic thinkers of sixteenth-century Italian Judaism.

The history of the Jews of Bologna traces a curve of singular intensity: that of a community which reached the heights of Jewish erudition and typographic art in the Renaissance, before being precipitated into exile by the implacable logic of the Counter-Reformation. A city of talmudic academies, of physician-rabbis like Ovadyah Sforno, of Sephardic exiles like Jacob Mantino, and of presses that gave the world the Pentateuch of 1482, Bologna was a beacon of Italian Judaism. This beacon was extinguished by a succession of blows: the burning of the Talmud in 1553, the ghetto of 1556, the expulsion of 1569, and the definitive proscription at the end of the century.

The integration of the dossier on the da Pisa family enriches this history with a regional and intercommunal dimension that the Bolognese documentary tradition, more concentrated on the city itself, tends to minimize. Bankers who circulated between Perugia, Florence, and Forlì, synodal assemblies that brought together the leaders of Italian communities, the intellectual features of a Yehiel Nissim da Pisa thinking credit in the light of the Torah: all this reminds us that Bologna was not an island. It was a city of passage and convergence in a Tuscan-Emilian Jewish network which experienced, in the sixteenth century, the same ascent and the same shipwreck.

What strikes one in this trajectory is the close correlation between the political regime and communal destiny. Under direct papal authority, medieval tolerance and Renaissance flourishing gave way to segregation and banishment; it took the revolutionary rupture of 1796 to reopen the city to a free Jewish presence. Bolognese history thus confirms a general truth of the pre-modern Jewish condition in Europe: the precariousness of a status suspended on the good will of power, and the vulnerability of a flourishing culture in the face of the will to obliteration.

Traces remain. The stelae torn from the via Orfeo, preserved in a museum, speak both of the wealth of a community and the violence of its destruction. They constitute the paradoxical monument of this history: the material proof of a presence one wished to abolish, and the support of a memory that centuries have not succeeded in burying. To study the Jews of Bologna is to learn to read in these fragments the brilliance of a golden age and the long shadow of its extinction.