Jewish Books and the Creation of Civil Society in the Early Modern Ghetto of Venice

• In Event: Early Modern Jewish Books in the Mediterranean

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between Jewish textual culture and civil society in a transformative period of the Venetian ghetto’s history. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Venice was a center for Hebrew publishing and home to a constant influx of immigrant Jews, Jewish scholars in Venice produced thousands of texts - some in Hebrew, some in vernacular languages - that were eventually disseminated throughout the Mediterranean and Europe. These works show how Jews engaged deeply with life in and out of the ghetto. Writers such as Leon Modena produced materials that gave detailed instruction and guidance to Jewish beliefs, observances, and practices, while figures such as Simone Luzzatto cast wider nets to political and commercial questions of self-governance, trade policy, and state loyalty. Still others such as Sara Copia Sullam and Moses ben Mordecai Zacuto debuted poetry, literature, and mystical works to diverse Jewish and Christian audiences.
These authors and their texts arguably contributed to a kind of civil society in the Venetian Jewish community, one shaped by the absorption of Jewish immigrants of all kinds into the ghetto environs but also geared toward creating a common Jewish collective. This paper challenges scholarly assessments that emphasize how immigrant diversity in the ghetto, including the eventual immigration of conversos and Jews from Muslim lands, was mirrored in the internal community segregation of their homes, schools, and synagogues, among other distinctions. As these writers were also engaged in dialogue with the Christian majority in Venice, their works reflected a new awareness among Jews and Christians of one another. These Jewish works are often described as apologetics made in the serve of greater toleration of Jews in Venetian society. This paper contends that they also served a more tendentious purpose: to encourage a greater social integration of Jews into the Venetian state apparatus by unifying Jewish communal positions.

Author

• Daniel James Clasby, King's College