Mantoue

Jewish presence in Mantua has roots in the late Middle Ages, at a time when Italian lords willingly welcomed Jewish moneylenders to meet the credit needs of an expanding urban economy. Tradition and documents concur in tracing this settlement to the twelfth century, even though continuous records only multiply from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries onward. The most eloquent material testimony to this anchorage remains the cemetery: the Jewish cemetery of San Nicolò was built in 1442 with the approval of the noble Gonzaga family, who ruled Mantua during the Renaissance.

It was indeed under the power of the Gonzaga, marquises and then dukes of Mantua, that the community experienced its remarkable stability. Under the protection of the Gonzaga dukes, Jewish life flourished in the city of Mantua. This policy was part of a broader orientation: the Gonzaga pursued a policy of religious tolerance that enabled the formation of an important Jewish community. The calculation was as much financial as cultural: Jewish bankers provided an indispensable credit service, while Jewish physicians, musicians and scholars contributed to the prestige of a court that rivaled, through its patronage, the greatest in Italy.

This configuration perfectly illustrates the legal regime described by Robert Bonfil for Renaissance Italy: that of Jewish communities living under "condotte," contracts of fixed duration negotiated with the sovereign, which guaranteed rights of residence and economic activity in exchange for taxes [Bonfil, 1994]. Jewish security in Mantua thus rested less on permanent status than on the prince's renewed will — a situation that explains both the community's flourishing and its structural vulnerability. According to historical research, the Mantuan community became, over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, one of the most numerous and most organized in the peninsula, endowed with its charitable institutions, its synagogues and its Talmudic schools.

If Mantua holds an eminent place in the history of the book, it is because it was one of the very first places in Europe where printing was done in Hebrew characters. The adventure began there in the earliest decades of Western typography. The physician Abraham Conat began printing there as early as 1476, when he produced the Tur Orah Hayyim. This enterprise was also a couple's affair, which makes Mantua an exceptional milestone in the history of women in the book: a Hebrew printing press was established in Mantua — the second most important in Italy after Venice — by the physician Abraham ben Solomon Conat and his wife Estellina.

The Mantuan Hebrew printing house subsequently experienced vicissitudes that revealed the intense competition that prevailed in this new trade. Hebrew printing resumed in Mantua in 1513 with Samuel Latif, who appears to have been driven out of business a year later by competition from the Soncino family. The Soncino family, whose name remains synonymous with typographic excellence, held a central place in this landscape: the Soncino family was responsible for printing approximately 135 Hebrew books between 1483 and 1547. Originating from the small town of Soncino in Lombardy, these Ashkenazi printers flourished throughout Italy and beyond, bringing the quality of Hebrew composition to a level that remained unequaled for a long time.

A remarkable feature of Mantuan printing was the collaboration between Jews and Christians. The subsequent printers of Hebrew books were Christians — the Rufinelli and the Philipponi families (1561-1597); their printer's mark was a peacock. From these presses came works destined for enormous influence. Mantua notably played a decisive role in the diffusion of Jewish mysticism, since it was there — together with nearby Cremona — that the great book of the Kabbalah was for the first time delivered to the printing press. As Gérard Nahon reminds us, it is in Italy that the Zohar is printed, first in Mantua and Cremona, between 1558 and 1560, then in Venice, in 1563, thus making itself known to an entire people. This editorial event transformed access to kabbalistic texts, until then reserved for an elite reading rare manuscripts, and contributed to the European diffusion of a spirituality that was then intensely cultivated in Safed.

The effervescence of printing was merely the most visible manifestation of an intellectual life of exceptional density. Mantua was a site of activity for scholars whose work left a lasting mark on Jewish thought. The most famous among them, Azariah dei Rossi, composed there in the sixteenth century his Me'or Enayim ("The Light of the Eyes"), a monument of critical erudition that applied to rabbinic sources and Jewish chronology a philological and historical method of stunning modernity for its time. The work, which confronted the Talmud with the testimonies of Greek and Latin historians, moreover provoked lively controversies among the rabbis, revealing the internal tensions of a Jewish culture shaped by humanism.

This culture was fully inscribed in the movement described by Robert Bonfil, for whom the Italian Jewish Renaissance was characterized by a fruitful porousness between traditional learning and humanist disciplines — rhetoric, philosophy, history, medicine — cultivated in the university and Christian court [Bonfil, 1994]. The Jewish physicians of Mantua, trained in Padua, embodied this dual belonging: heirs of the talmudic tradition and practitioners of a science shared with their Christian contemporaries.

The Mantuan pulpit also produced an eloquent sacred oratory of high caliber. Judah Moscato, rabbi and preacher of Mantua in the sixteenth century, left in his sermons, gathered under the title Nefutsot Yehudah, a model of preaching that blended biblical exegesis, Neoplatonic philosophy, and musical theory, testifying to the impregnation of Jewish thought by the intellectual currents of the Italian Renaissance. Through these figures, Mantua appears as a laboratory where was negotiated, text after text, sermon after sermon, the balance between fidelity to tradition and openness to the learning of the age — the very trait, precisely, that Bonfil identifies as characteristic of Italian Judaism of this period [Bonfil, 1994].

Nowhere was the insertion of Jews into the high culture of the Renaissance more brilliant than in music. At the court of the Gonzaga, where Claudio Monteverdi worked, a Jewish musician, Salamone Rossi (Salomone de' Rossi, called "l'Ebreo"), held a place of prominence during the first decades of the seventeenth century. Violist and composer in the service of the duke, he published collections of madrigals and instrumental music that rank him among the pioneers of the nascent Baroque style in Northern Italy.

His most memorable gesture was, however, of another order. Rossi composed Ha-Shirim asher li-Shlomo ("The Songs of Solomon"), a collection of polyphonic Jewish liturgical music in several voices, printed in Venice in 1622-1623. In transposing the techniques of learned Christian polyphony — multi-part writing, the contrapuntal art of the late Renaissance — to Hebrew texts intended for synagogal service (psalms, hymns, prayers), Rossi accomplished an artistic revolution and religious audacity: introducing into the synagogue an art deemed foreign to its tradition. The undertaking, supported by the rabbi Leone de Modena who defended it on halakhic grounds, embodies perfectly this dialogue between Jewish identity and surrounding culture that scholarship has placed at the heart of the Italian Jewish Renaissance [Bonfil, 1994].

A distant and curious echo of the Mantuan music of that time even transmitted itself to us by unexpected paths. A melody widespread across Europe bore precisely the name of the city: it is found, notes Zakhor Online, in Italy, around 1600, transcribed by Giuseppe Cenci, with the words of the canzonetta Fuggi, fuggi, fuggi da questo cielo; it is also found under the title La Mantovana. This same melody was to enjoy considerable posterity by becoming the adopted air of the Israeli national hymn, the Hatikva — a sublime paradox by which a Lombard Renaissance song joined the Jewish national destiny.

The age of cultural flourishing coincided paradoxically with the hardening of the legal condition of Jews, under the effect of pressures from the Catholic Reformation and the papacy. The bull Cum nimis absurdum of 1555 had given the signal, in the Papal States, for the confinement of Jews to closed quarters. In Mantua, governed by more tolerant princes, the movement was later but inevitable. Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga decided that a ghetto should be established in the capital in 1602; this project was begun in 1610.

Material closure followed shortly after, imposed by the Roman Curia more than desired by the prince. It was only in 1612 that, following solicitations from the Roman Curia, Francis, son of Duke Vincent, ordered the creation of the gates that confined the Jewish community within the "ghetto". A notable fact in the geography of Italian segregation, the Mantuan community was the last of the great communities of Northern Italy to be thus subjected to closure, a sign of the protective particularism of the Gonzaga.

Confinement in the ghetto did not mean the extinction of communal life, but it reconfigured it profoundly. As Robert Bonfil has analyzed, the ghetto was not only an instrument of humiliation and control; it became also, paradoxically, a space where Jewish life intensified, where synagogues, pious confraternities and internal institutions multiplied, and where a certain communal autonomy could be exercised sheltered by the walls [Bonfil, 1994]. The gates of separation remained in place for nearly two centuries, until their abolition in favor of revolutionary upheavals: they were demolished on January 21, 1798 in the Napoleonic era.

The seventeenth century brought Mantua a devastating trial, incomparable to the legal vexations that had preceded it. On the occasion of the War of Mantuan Succession, the city was besieged, then taken and pillaged by the imperial troops of the Habsburgs in 1630. The sack was accompanied, as was often the case, by an epidemic of plague that decimated the population. For the Jewish community, the event was a catastrophe: the Jews, accused and ransomed, were expelled from the city, their possessions pillaged, their institutions ruined. A substantial portion of the material wealth accumulated during the golden age of the Renaissance — libraries, objects of worship, the fortunes of bankers — vanished in this upheaval.

The community was not, however, entirely destroyed: authorized to return after the end of hostilities, the Jews gradually reconstituted their collective life in the ghetto, under Austrian domination that now succeeded the main lineage of the Gonzaga. But Mantua never quite recovered the creative brilliance that had distinguished it in the preceding century. The modern history of the community was one of slow reconstruction, punctuated by the great transformations of the period: integration into the Habsburg possessions of the Habsburgs, then the decisive rupture brought about by French occupation and the ideal of emancipation.

It is in this context that the demolition of the ghetto gates in 1798 is inscribed, a symbolic gesture that inaugurated, for the Jews of Mantua as for those of all Italy, the era of citizenship. This turning point is part of the vast movement of emancipation that, from the French Revolution to national unifications, redefined the place of Jews in European societies [Neher-Bernheim]. The ancient city of the Gonzaga, which had once sheltered printers, kabbalists and musicians, was becoming a city where Jews would gradually gain access to the status of full citizens.

The history of the Jews of Mantua condenses, in a single place, the major lines of force of Italian Judaism. One sees at work there princely protection and its precarious counterpart; cultural excellence born from exchange with the surrounding civilization; and vulnerability to ecclesiastical pressures and the violences of war. Cradle of Hebrew printing with Abraham Conat and Estellina from 1476, place where the Zohar and so many foundational works were printed, city of Azariah dei Rossi and Judah Moscato, musical homeland of Salamone Rossi, Mantua was one of the summits of the Jewish Renaissance.

This trajectory verifies in an exemplary manner the analysis of Robert Bonfil: far from living on the margins, the Jews of the Italian Renaissance participated intensely in the culture of their time while maintaining, sometimes at the price of internal tensions, their own identity [Bonfil, 1994]. In Mantua, this participation reached a rare intensity — until the closure of the ghetto in 1612 and the sack of 1630 broke its momentum. What remains of this history are monuments of paper, a melody become hymn, a medieval cemetery that one endeavors today to preserve, and the memory of a moment when, in the shadow of a Lombard court, Jewish genius dialogued as equals with European humanism.