The Marcaria Family

The surname Marcaria unambiguously refers to the homonymous borough in the lower Mantuan plain. The practice of assigning as a family name the toponym of origin was, at that time, one of the structuring principles of Italian Jewish onomastics: the cognomen based on a toponym remained attributable and changing until the fifteenth century, which places the crystallization of the name Marcaria within a window that the Mantuan archive allows us to approach.

The place itself had not remained apart from regional Jewish life. Documents from the Gonzagas bear witness to it: it was from the borough of Marcaria that Rabbi Iacob da Marcaria originated, founder of the Hebrew printing press of Riva del Garda; however, no other document has been found on the Jewish settlement of the locality. This documentary scarcity is itself instructive: it reminds us that the small communities of the "Bassa" — Marcaria, San Martino, Gazzuolo, Bozzolo — lived in the orbit of the great qehillà of Mantua, satellites of a center where Italian Jewish culture experienced one of its highest flourishings. Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Mantuan Jews numbered up to two thousand souls, or approximately 10% of the population.

The inscription in this territory already speaks of a discreet virtue, that of involvement in collective life: these families of the plain, dispersed in the boroughs, subsisted only by constantly weaving a bond with the mother community, participating in that territorial solidarity which was one of the strengths of Renaissance Jewish Italy. As Robert Bonfil has shown, Italian Jewish life of this period was characterized by a fine articulation between local autonomy and belonging to a broader cultural ensemble, where the rabbi, the physician and the man of letters often combined functions in service of the group [Bonfil, 1994].

Before becoming a printer, Jacob Marcaria was a physician and a man of religious law. Documentation first connects him to Cremona, a major Jewish intellectual center in sixteenth-century Lombardy. The typography of Riva del Garda was founded by a Cremonese Jew, the physician Jacob Marcaria, who had transferred there around 1557-1558, after having been in Cremona a member of the rabbinical court — the bet din — presided over by Rabbi Joseph Ottolenghi. This departure occurred in the wake of the publication of Pope Paul IV's bull Cum nimis absurdum, which brutally hardened the conditions of existence for Jews in the Papal States and its zones of influence.

The Riva press was authorized under the name of Joseph Ottolenghi, a German rabbi to whom Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo had granted the privilege of printing Hebrew books. This dual status of Jacob Marcaria — practitioner of medicine and dayyan (judge of the bet din) — was nothing exceptional in Renaissance Jewish Italy, but it concentrated in a single figure several of the virtues that the tradition of Israel held in high esteem.

Scientific knowledge — medicine — and talmudic knowledge — the function of rabbinical judge — converge here in one and the same person. This conjunction embodies the ideal of the Italian Jewish scholar, for whom the study of the Law and mastery of secular sciences were not opposed but answered to one another. The relationship to halakha, in a member of the rabbinical court of Cremona, was not abstract speculation but concrete responsibility toward the community: to judge, to protect, to order collective life according to the Law. The trajectory of Jacob Marcaria, from the bedside of the sick to the court chamber and then to the printing workshop, illustrates this ideal with remarkable coherence.

The context is one of persecution. Pope Paul IV's bull Cum nimis absurdum (1555) marked a hardening of pontifical policy, and the prohibition made to Jewish physicians from treating Christians was one of its direct consequences. It was in this climate that Marcaria left Lombardy for the territory of Trent, under the protection of Cardinal Madruzzo. The success of the press rested on the cooperation of three men: Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo, bishop of Trent, who exercised his jurisdiction over the city and whose coat of arms appears in many of Riva's publications; Joseph ben Nathan Ottolenghi, rabbi and rosh yeshiva in Cremona; and Jacob Marcaria, dayyan and physician, also of Cremona, who was the printer and contributed learned prefaces to its productions.

Jacob Marcaria's major work was the founding, at Riva del Garda (in the episcopal territory of Trent), of a Hebrew printing house at the very moment when, elsewhere in Italy, the Talmud was burning in public squares. Marcaria's activity is generally associated with the Jewish history of Riva del Garda, where a Jewish community was active between 1430 and 1776, living a peaceful reality under the control of the Republic of Venice until the first decade of the sixteenth century, then under the Episcopal Principality of Trent.

The chronology is well established by research: Jacob Marcaria's tipografia is dated to 1557-1563; Bloch estimates that the workshop began its activity in 1558. The workshop operated under a singular ecclesiastical privilege. This paradox — a cardinal protecting the printing of Jewish books at the height of censorship — reveals the complexity of Italian geography of toleration. Madruzzo was engaged his entire life in the production and preservation of art, literature, and music, and he is well known for having supported the preservation of Jewish culture in the face of Church restrictions.

Marcaria was not a mere technician. He edited several of the works himself, wrote learned prefaces, and in some cases is thought to have actually been the author of works published under the names of other writers. His best-known work is probably the Kitzur Mizrachi, an abridgment of Elijah Mizrahi's Sefer ha-Mizrachi — a commentary on a commentary, since it concerns condensing Elijah Mizrahi's super-commentary on Rashi, that is, a work that inscribes itself in the long chain of explanations of the Torah. This enterprise of pedagogical condensation reveals a concern typical of Italian rabbinic circles: making knowledge accessible, abbreviating its monuments to disseminate their substance.

In this enterprise one reads a major contribution to Jewish thought and to literary knowledge. To print, at this time of destruction, was an act of preservation: keeping in circulation texts on grammar, on the calculation of the calendar, on commentary, was to guarantee the very transmission of tradition. We touch here upon the virtue that Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi placed at the heart of Jewish experience: the injunction of zakhor, of active remembrance, of which the book is the privileged instrument [Yerushalmi, 1984]. Marcaria's workshop, supported by the work of decorated manuscripts whose catalogue Giulia Tamani has drawn up for Italy [Tamani, 2010], prolonged through print the long chain of Israel's written Memory. Colette Sirat reminded us how much the survival of medieval Jewish philosophy depended upon these relays of copying and printing [Sirat, 1983]; Riva del Garda was one of them.

What the two new documentary sources [Zakhor Corpus id:fbbaa615-c316-4642-bd20-c33e37c4b40f] make it possible to establish with increased clarity is the true extent of Riva del Garda's production: approximately thirty-four printed titles between 1558 and 1562, a considerable sum for a provincial workshop that operated under perilous conditions.

The first published work was the Halakhot of Isaac Alfasi (1558), followed by other halakhic works, including two editions of the Tur of Jacob ben Asher (1560 and 1561). With the Talmud forbidden in Italy, these collections of religious law became essential substitutes for study: Alfasi's Halakhot condensed Talmudic jurisprudence in a practical and accessible manner; the Tur — the four "rows" of law — offered a medieval synthesis of halakha that Ottolenghi's students could study in place of the Talmud itself. Riva del Garda received its Hebrew press in 1558 when the physician Jacob Marcaria obtained a license from Cardinal Madruzzo, and with the help of Rabbi Joseph Ottolenghi, he first published an edition of Alfasi at a reasonable price for the students of Ottolenghi's yeshiva.

The Sefer Mordekhai figures among these major printings. This voluminous halakhic compendium of Mordekhai ben Hillel, which traditionally accompanied Alfasi's Halakhot in major editions — Constantinople 1509, Venice 1521-1522 — found new editorial impetus at Riva at the very moment when the great Venetian presses were paralyzed by censorship. The Riva edition bears witness to an effort of textual restoration: the workshop published a revised and corrected version, bearing the corrections and annotations that were lacking in earlier editions. This philological care, joined to the boldness of the enterprise, speaks to something of an ethic of tikkoun — of repair — applied to the texts themselves.

The press also produced philosophical works, notably the first printing of the Milhamot Adonaï of Levi ben Gershom (1560), as well as ethical literature. This first printed edition of the Milhamot Adonaï deserves to be underlined: the major philosophical work of Gersonides, written in the fourteenth century and until then in manuscript circulation, gained through Marcaria's workshop access to printed diffusion. It is an act of philosophical safeguarding in the fullest sense of the term — a text that, without this printing, might have remained confined to the sole scholarly circles holding manuscript copies.

The field of grammar is represented by the Sefer diqduqe Raši, a compilation of grammatical rules drawn from Rashi. That of computation and astronomy is illustrated by the Sefer 'evronot, a collection of short treatises on the Hebrew calendar whose editorial responsibility is almost certainly attributable to Marcaria. The Kitzur Mizrachi (circa 1558-1562) completes this picture of coherent exegetical and pedagogical activity [Zakhor Corpus id:8b174d41-765e-4f49-9505-fb2153ca1876]: a condensation of Elijah Mizrahi's super-commentary on Rashi, intended to bring within reach of students a learned work until then reserved for masters. These three levels — halakha, philosophy, grammar and calendar — compose the portrait of an editor concerned with covering the entirety of the curriculum of a yeshiva deprived of the Talmud.

The editorial paradox is complete, and the archive underscores it: the Latin editions of Riva's Hebrew printing shop bore no indication of Marcaria's printing except one, because Catholic authors did not wish to make public the fact, relatively paradoxical, of resorting to a Jewish printing shop to publish Catholic works intended for the struggle against heretics. Thus the Jewish craftsman served, without being named, the very needs of the Counter-Reformation: a sign of competence so recognized that it crossed the line of confessions. This relation to the other — to serve without being named, to work for the profit of the other while nonetheless not renouncing oneself — illustrates a form of coexistence that owes nothing to naïveté but everything to necessity and pragmatism.

The Hebrew activity of the workshop was brief and ended with the death of its master. Jacob Marcaria died in 1562. The Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani specifies the fate of the last editorial enterprise: the last edition begun at Riva, the Book of Job with the commentary Meïr 'Iyyov by Meïr ben Yiṣḥaq Arama, of which sheets 1 to 64 were printed, was completed and published in Venice in the printing house of Giorgio Cavalli in 1567. The year 1562 was therefore the last year of Hebrew activity in the printing house, which nevertheless continued its production in other fields.

The Hebrew books that Cavalli published between 1567 and 1568 used typographic characters, both in cursive and in square script, identical to those used by Marcaria at Riva del Garda. Similarly, the typographic ornaments used on the title pages were the same as those of the Riva press. This material continuity — the same punches, the same vignettes, passing from the printing plate of Riva to that of Venice — says something about the way in which a man's work is prolonged in the community of the book. Marcaria's death did not put an end to what he had undertaken: the last book begun at Riva, the Me'ir Iyyov by Meïr Arama (1562), had to be completed by Cavalli in Venice, in 1566.

Marcaria's death did not put an end to what he had undertaken: texts circulated, were taken up, completed, disseminated. Marcaria's characters were also used later in Kraków, where his vignette was copied, attesting that the technical influence of the Riva workshop radiated far beyond the Lombard plain, reaching into the Ashkenazi communities of Central Europe. It is the nature of contribution to Jewish thought to survive its author, and to travel far beyond the place where it was first produced.

The very humility of his position — working under the privilege of another, not signing the Latin editions — detracts nothing from the scope of the enterprise; on the contrary, it speaks to its spirit of service. In a time when pride would have been perilous, discretion was also a form of wisdom. The illiberal attitude of the nephew and successor of cardinal Madruzzo must have led to the abrupt end of Marcaria's venture. The workshop of Riva del Garda remains, in the history of the Hebrew book, as an example of cultural resistance through the patient means of typography, at a time when fire threatened Jewish writing in the peninsula.

What became of the name Marcaria after the sixteenth century? Here, the archive becomes sparse and caution is warranted. Schaerf recorded it in 1925 among the Jewish surnames of Italy, which attests to its persistence up to the threshold of the twentieth century [Schaerf, 1925]. Its presence in the inventory of Italian geographical names definitively links it to the Lombard borough of origin.

The destiny of this name followed that of the Jews of Mantua, marked by decline and emigration. The Restoration marked the beginning of migration from Mantua, not only Jewish-Mantuan migration, toward Milan, the new center of Lombard Jewry. The great communities of the plain, once flourishing, were then reduced to a few families.

Like many surnames of Jewish Italy, Marcaria also knew Mediterranean diffusion, carried by Sephardic and Livornese circulations between Italy and North Africa — those networks studied by Lionel Lévy for the Portuguese nation of Livorno, Amsterdam, and Tunis [Lévy, 1999], and for the "last of the Livornese" [Lévy, 1996]. The name is encountered, under neighboring spellings, in the communities of the Maghreb where, in the early modern period, merchants and scholars from Italy flowed in — a world documented by the rabbinical archives of North Africa [Rabbinical Archives of Sidi Bel Abbès] and by community monographs such as that of Tlemcen [Botbol, 2000]. Lacking a document explicitly connecting these bearers of the name to the Mantuan root, one must here confine oneself to hypothesis: the kinship is plausible, not proven.

Yet this dispersal embodies a cardinal virtue of Judaism, the relation to the stranger and the capacity for rootedness in exile. Armand Abécassis showed how the Jewish experience makes displacement not merely an ordeal but a mode of fidelity — to bear everywhere the name and the Law [Abécassis, 1987]. The name Marcaria, born of a borough of the "Bassa," become that of a printer of memory, then dispersed on the shores of the Mediterranean, illustrates in its measure this aptitude of Israel to make of a lost place a lasting name.

If one seeks the thread that connects the established facts of this lineage, it invariably leads to the book. Physician, dayyan, printer and author: Jacob Marcaria was a man of a single vocation in four forms — healing the body, ordering life according to the Law, preserving the written word, transmitting condensed knowledge. These four gestures proceed from a single loyalty: that of transmission.

The catalogue of the workshop speaks to its profound coherence. The Halakhot of Alfasi and the Sefer Mordekhai answered the halakhic urgency of a community deprived of the Talmud; the two editions of the Tur completed this foundation of practical law. The first printed edition of the Milhamot Adonaï of Levi ben Gershom opened the door to philosophy. The Sefer 'evronot ensured mastery of the calendar, a pillar of communal liturgical life. The Sefer diqduqe Raši preserved grammar. And the Kitzur Mizrachi — the abridgment of Elijah Mizrahi's super-commentary on Rashi — crowned the exegetical edifice by bringing within reach of ordinary students one of the most learned works of the Sephardic-Byzantine tradition. Approximately thirty-four titles : this figure is not cold statistics, it is the measure of a resistance.

Maurice-Ruben Hayoun reminds us that Jewish philosophy has always understood itself as a chain of transmitters, each generation receiving and passing on the deposit it has received [Hayoun, 2023]. The workshop at Riva del Garda, raised in the face of the pyres, was a link in this chain. What the Marcaria family expressed best was neither wealth nor power — of which the archive says nothing — but this obstinacy in circulating texts, in keeping the letter alive at the moment when it was to be destroyed.

The broader context of the Italian Jewish Renaissance, as Bonfil has described it, illuminates this vocation: a culture that held together profane science and sacred study, individual autonomy and communal service [Bonfil, 1994]. The figure of Marcaria is a condensation of it. We must not, however, yield to embellishment: the documentary silences are immense, and of the lineage itself, before and after the great printer, we know almost nothing. This honesty is part of the narrative — as Yerushalmi reminds us, Jewish memory selects and forgets as much as it preserves [Yerushalmi, 1984].

Jacob Marcaria (birth dates unknown — † 1562) — also known by the forms Yaakov Marcaria, Iacob da Marcaria, Yaakov Marqriah (יעקב מרקריאה) — was a physician, dayyan (rabbinical judge) and printer. Originally from the town of Marcaria in the Bassa mantovane, he practiced medicine in Cremona before serving on the bet din presided over by Joseph Ottolenghi. Around 1557–1558, fleeing papal persecution, he settled in Riva del Garda under the protection of Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo and founded a Hebrew printing press that produced approximately thirty-four titles between 1558 and 1562. His best-known work is the Kitzur Mizrachi, an abridgement of Elijah Mizrahi's supercommentary on Rashi. He died in 1562, leaving unfinished the edition of Arama's Me'ir Iyyov, which the Venetian presses of Giorgio Cavalli completed in 1567. His typographic characters traveled as far as Cracow, where his vignette was reproduced.

Joseph ben Nathan Ottolenghi (c. 1490 – c. 1570) — rabbi of Ashkenazi origin, rosh yeshiva in Cremona, one of the pillars of Lombard rabbinical life in the sixteenth century. It was under his name that Cardinal Madruzzo issued the privilege to print Hebrew books in Riva del Garda, Ottolenghi being the reference rabbinical figure who conferred religious legitimacy on the project. He presided over the rabbinical tribunal in Cremona where Jacob Marcaria served as dayyan. The Riva press served directly his yeshiva students: the first edition published, the Halakhot of Alfasi, was intended for them at an accessible price. His name appears at the head of the colophons of numerous volumes from Riva del Garda.

Cristoforo Madruzzo (1512–1578) — cardinal and prince-bishop of Trent (1539–1567), imperial governor of Milan for Philip II of Spain. A leading figure of the Counter-Reformation — he presided over several sessions of the Council of Trent — he was paradoxically the protector of the Hebrew printing press of Riva del Garda, granting Joseph Ottolenghi the printing privilege at the very moment when Rome was burning the Talmud. His patronage illustrates the complexity of the confessional geography of sixteenth-century Italy: where the papacy prohibited, a frontier prince-bishop could permit. He is not a figure of the Marcaria lineage, but his protection was the condition of possibility for the entirety of Jacob Marcaria's editorial work.

Elijah Mizrahi (c. 1455–1526) — Ha-Re'em, Chief Rabbi of Constantinople, mathematician and biblical commentator, author of the Sefer ha-Mizrachi, a supercommentary on Rashi's Torah commentary. His work, dense and technical, lay at the heart of Jacob Marcaria's editorial labor: it was precisely because the Sefer ha-Mizrachi was a difficult monument that Marcaria composed its Kitzur — the abridgement —, making accessible to a broader readership the exegetical thought of this Sephardic-Byzantine master. Elijah Mizrahi does not belong to the lineage, but his name is inseparable from Jacob Marcaria's own work.

Isaac ben Jacob Alfasi (1013–1103) — Ha-Rif, rabbi of Fez and then of Lucena (Andalusia), author of the Halakhot, a condensation of the Talmud arranged according to legal practice. His work was the first title published by the Riva workshop in 1558, a choice far from arbitrary: with the Talmud forbidden in Italy, the Halakhot served as a practical substitute for Talmudic study. Alfasi does not belong to the Marcaria lineage, but his text is, through the 1558 edition, one of the founding stones of its editorial legacy.

Levi ben Gershom, called Gersonides (1288–1344) — philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and biblical commentator of Provence, author of the Milhamot Adonai (Wars of the Lord), a major philosophical synthesis of medieval Jewish thought. It was at the Riva del Garda workshop, under the hand of Jacob Marcaria, that this work received its first printed edition in 1560, after circulating in manuscript for more than two centuries. This first printing is, of all the workshop's output, the act that inscribes itself most directly in the history of universal Jewish thought.

From the Mantuan plain to the presses of Riva del Garda, then to the uncertain shores of Mediterranean diaspora, the name Marcaria traces a trajectory modest in its documentary scope but dense in significance. The archive retains only one leading figure from it, that of Jacob Marcaria — physician, dayyan of the rabbinical court of Cremona, then founder of the Hebrew printing house of Riva del Garda between 1558 and 1562 — yet this figure alone suffices to give the name its reach. The two new sources integrated in this version now allow us to measure its scope precisely: approximately thirty-four printed titles, from the Kitzur Mizrachi to the Sefer Mordekhai, from the Halakhot of Alfasi to the first edition of the Milhamot Adonaï of Levi ben Gershom, a corpus covering halakha, philosophy, grammar and liturgical computation.

Among all the virtues that the tradition of Israel has carried through the centuries, this lineage will have best expressed the contribution to the transmission of Jewish thought through the book: safeguarding threatened writing, printing grammar, commentary and calendar in an age of censorship and bonfires, condensing the masters to make them accessible, giving for the first time their printed form to works that had until then remained manuscripts. In this, it joins the commandment of zakhor, that active remembrance which, according to Yerushalmi, founds the very existence of the Jewish people [Yerushalmi, 1984]. A family of the Lombard "Bassa" will thus, by the hand of one of its sons, have taken part in the common work of Israel: ensuring that received speech does not perish — and, where it threatened to perish, fixing it in lead and ink so that it lives still.