Sienne

At the heart of Tuscany, where the brick-paved lanes climb toward the Piazza del Campo, lives one of the region's oldest Jewish communities. The Jewish community of Siena is among the oldest in Tuscany, the earliest documents attesting the presence of Jews in Siena dating back to 1229. Other sources place the first documentary mentions slightly earlier still: the strong Jewish presence in the city is attested by documents from the early thirteenth century that mention a universitas iudaeorum.

This Great Book sets out to retrace seven centuries of a presence at once continuous and fragile, marked by the age of the medieval bankers, the closing of the ghetto under the Medici, the Baroque splendor of a synagogue concealed behind anonymous façades, the blood shed in 1799, and the collapse of the twentieth century. Siena offers a textbook case in which stone, archive, and transmitted memory answer one another — sometimes to confirm, sometimes to contradict. The "probable" status of this introduction reflects the synthetic and interpretive character of an account that anticipates demonstrations developed further on.

Jewish presence in Siena precedes confinement in the ghetto by several centuries. In 1571, the Grand Duke of Tuscany Cosimo I de' Medici extended to the State of Siena the restrictive measures already in force in Florence, although Jews had been present there since the twelfth century. The mention of a universitas iudaeorum — an organized and recognized community — as early as the beginning of the thirteenth century indicates a structured settlement and not the mere passage of isolated merchants.

The economic activity of the Sienese Jews is rooted in lending and banking, in a city that was itself one of the great financial centers of medieval Europe. Intellectual life was no less present: a yeshiva was founded in Siena, making the town the center of Jewish religious studies for central Italy. This scholarly vocation would endure long after the establishment of the ghetto.

The year 1348 marks a tragic rupture common to all of Europe. In 1348, the flourishing banking city fell victim to the Black Death, which wiped out roughly 80% of the population; the lie that the Jews were its origin spread like the plague itself, and as a consequence they were banished to live outside the city center. Thus a logic of spatial exclusion began, two centuries before the formal closure of the ghetto.

The year 1571 marks the turning point of Sienese Jewish history. The Siena ghetto was created at the same time as that of Florence, in 1571. This decision was not a local whim but a calculated political act: in 1571, Duke Cosimo of the Medici family wished to receive the title of Grand Duke; he therefore complied with the wishes of the Church and established a Sienese ghetto where all the Jews of the city had to live, regardless of their income or status.

To the spatial constraints were added distinctive marks and exceptional taxation. They had to wear distinctive clothing — a yellow cap for men and a scarf for women — and were forced to pay a special tax. The location of this enclosure has remained legible in the urban topography: the Jewish quarter lies at the heart of the city, near the Piazza del Campo, between the present-day Via San Martino and the Via di Salicotto.

Despite the confinement, the community did not decline. In 1571, Cosimo I de' Medici established the ghetto, which remained in use until 1859, forming a city within the city where Jewish daily life unfolded for hundreds of years.

The ghetto was a place of constraint, but also a space of dense life where a confined culture took shape. Despite the limitations and heavy restrictions imposed, the Jewish community of Siena grew, numbering up to more than 400 members, and its activities contributed significantly to the economic and cultural growth of the city.

This vitality was particularly marked in the religious and charitable spheres. The presence of ancient charitable confraternities and rabbinical schools, active until the nineteenth century, ensured that the Jewish community of Siena was particularly vibrant on the cultural level and could make a significant contribution to the economic and cultural growth of the city. Here one measures the paradox of the ghetto: physical confinement nourished a concentration of communal institutions.

The legal grip gradually loosened. Additional anti-Jewish legislation was adopted, eventually prohibiting Jews from practicing banking, from employing Christian workers, and allowing merchants to sell only second-hand goods; by the eighteenth century, these restrictions had relaxed. The "probable" status of this chapter stems from the fact that the detail of daily life — neighborly relations, sociabilities, domestic economy — rests as much on deduction from clues as on direct documentation.

The edifice that remains today is the architectural expression of this confined yet prosperous community. The synagogue of Siena, located just a few steps from the Piazza del Campo, rises at the heart of the former Jewish ghetto, where the Sienese Jews remained confined until 1859. It was raised upon an older place of worship: the present synagogue was built in 1786 on the site of the former synagogue.

Its appearance follows a logic of exterior concealment typical of the period. The relatively plain outer façade and, by contrast, the elegant and richly decorated interior are characteristic of synagogues built in the age of the ghettos, before the Emancipation of Italian Jews, which came in the wake of the Unification of Italy in 1861. This discretion is confirmed by the official tourist documentation: the typology is that of the ghetto synagogues, devoid of distinctive exterior signs, yet richly decorated within.

The interior unfolds a refined decorative program. The sanctuary, roughly rectangular in shape, is lined with rows of benches along the sides, while at the center stands the podium — the tevah of the Sephardim or bimah of the Ashkenazim — adorned with nine eighteenth-century candelabra, each with nine branches; the center of the ceiling is adorned with the Tablets of the Law painted in blue and ringed with white stucco. Baroque art here converses with Neoclassicism: the synagogue of Siena, a magnificent example of architecture both Rococo and Neoclassical, was inaugurated in 1786.

The authorship of the design is attributed to a Florentine architect. The beautiful Neoclassical synagogue was built after the design of the Florentine architect Giuseppe Del Rosso, and its construction lasted thirty years. The décor blends sacred texts with ornamentation: the windows are surrounded by moldings in the form of Ionic columns, and amid the Baroque stuccowork, the walls bear fourteen verses from the Bible, while the beautiful eighteenth-century aron is surrounded by Corinthian columns of marble.

In front of the synagogue remains an emblematic feature of ghetto life, around which a story has been woven that reveals the internal tensions within Judaism. Facing the synagogue, in the Via degli Archi, stands the old fountain of the ghetto, which once bore a statue of Moses.

The fate of this statue illustrates the confrontation between the surrounding Christian aesthetic and Jewish law. The statue was removed in the twentieth century under pressure from indignant Orthodox Jews, who saw in the statue a transgression of the law forbidding the representation of the human figure; it is now housed in the local museum. This chapter belongs to the intersection between tradition and archive — an episode whose factual outline is established but whose motivations belong to transmitted narrative — hence the « transmitted » status.

The end of the 18th century first brought the hope of freedom. In March 1799, the Jews received full emancipation, when Napoleon's troops occupied the city. But this liberation was immediately followed by a massacre. Their joy was short-lived: in June of the same year, rioters from Arezzo looted and burned the ghetto, killing nineteen Jews; to this day, the Jews of Siena commemorate this dreadful event with an annual fast.

The violence of 1799 began a slow demographic erosion. In the wake of the riot, many Jews left Siena; the Jewish community went from 500 members in the 18th century to 300 in the 19th century. The decline continued in the following century: the community shrank still further in the early 20th century, down to 200 members, and by 1968 only 100 Jews remained in the city. The ghetto itself ceased to exist in the mid-19th century, and was then partially erased from the urban fabric. The ghetto existed until 1859 and, in 1935, it was partially demolished, with some street plaques remaining.

The twentieth century dealt the weakened community its most brutal blow. In 1943, German troops, with the authorization of the Italian Social Republic, stormed Siena and arrested nearly a quarter of the remaining Jewish population, deporting them to Auschwitz. The synagogue preserves the trace of this mourning: Outside the synagogue, a plaque on the left side commemorates those deported during the Second World War, and another plaque on the right side recalls those who died during the First World War.

The urban fabric of the ghetto, deeply reshaped, nonetheless retains islands of memory. A large part of the area was restructured in 1935, but certain sections — the Temple, the ghetto fountain, and the Jewish cemetery — have been preserved and remain recognizable today. The alleyways have partly kept their physiognomy: the small narrow streets and the tall houses were partly destroyed during the urban renewal projects of 1935, but some retained their original appearance, such as the buildings on the Via delle Scotte near the synagogue and the street names such as the Vicolo della Fortuna and the Vicolo della Manna.

The cemetery, a centuries-old place of memory, remains active. Jews were buried in this cemetery, located outside the gate of San Viene, for many years; documents dating from 1661 reveal that they were interred there for a long time, and this large cemetery is still in use.

Today, the monument itself is under threat. In April 2024, the building was listed among the seven most endangered heritage sites in Europe, and in August 2024 the synagogue was closed for restoration work. This fragility has triggered a mobilization: in 2024, the Jewish community of Florence organized a fundraising campaign to save the synagogue, which had been severely damaged by the earthquake of February 2023.

The Jewish history of Siena unfolds like a long thread stretched between presence and erasure. Born in the thirteenth century from a community of bankers and scholars, structured as a universitas, it endured the catastrophe of 1348, the Medicean enclosure of 1571, the paradoxical flourishing of a ghetto culture that gave rise to the splendid synagogue of 1786, then suffered the massacre of 1799 and the Nazi annihilation of 1943-1944. From this thousand-year journey, a few stubborn signs remain: a temple hidden behind silent façades, a fountain deprived of its Moses, a still-living cemetery, the names of narrow streets.

The Baroque synagogue, ranked among Europe's most endangered heritage sites and closed for restoration, distills all this tension: it is at once the masterpiece of a constrained community and the fragile vessel of its memory. The "probable" status of this conclusion acknowledges that every historical synthesis remains a reading—grounded in the archive, yet open to revision.