Mediterranean Enlightenment: Livornese Jews, Tuscan Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Reform

By Francesca Bregoli

The Mediterranean port of Livorno was home to one of the most prominent and privileged Jewish enclaves of early modern Europe. Focusing on Livornese Jewry, this book offers an alternative perspective on Jewish acculturation during the eighteenth century, and reassesses common assumptions about the interactions of Jews with outside culture and the impact of state reforms on the corporate Jewish community. Working from a vast array of previously untapped archival and literary sources, Francesca Bregoli combines cultural analysis with a study of institutional developments to investigate Jewish responses to Enlightenment thought and politics, as well as non-Jewish perceptions of Jews, through an exploration of Jewish-Christian cultural exchange, sites of sociability, and reformist policies. Mediterranean Enlightenment shows that Livornese Jewish scholars engaged with Enlightenment ideals and aspired to contribute to society at large without weakening the boundaries of traditional Jewish life. By arguing that the privileged status of Livorno Jewry had conservative rather than liberalizing effects, it also challenges the notion that economic utility facilitates Jewish integration, nuancing received wisdom about processes of emancipation in Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9780804791595

Book preview

One

The Nazione Ebrea and the Tuscan State

A Fruitful Symbiosis

In February 1770, Livornese high society was treated to a sumptuous event: the weeklong festivities in honor of the wedding between the most rich Jewish merchant, Jacob Aghib, and his fiancée, Anna Aghib. The governor of the city of Livorno, its officials and notables, and the most esteemed merchants, all flocked to Aghib’s mansion, adorned with pictures and furniture in the latest fashion, each of its halls lit up with crystal and silver chandeliers. The Aghibs had arranged every detail with great care, intent on showcasing their generosity no less than their opulence and refinement. An orchestra entertained the merry crowd of Jews and gentiles, who feasted on sorbets and fruit preserves until a lavish dinner was served. On the last day of the festivities, the Aghibs delighted their guests with a musical academy. Renowned musicians and singers, one of whom was at the service of the Grand Duke in Florence, performed during the first part of the evening. The bride too, an amateur singer, showed her good disposition for music. The celebration was capped off with a ball, all the more pleasurable as liqueurs, fruit preserves, and sorbets were served all night long to the guests.¹

Less than a month later, notice of another bountiful feast caught the attention of Livornese chronicler Pietro Bernardo Prato, who had reported on the festivities at the Aghib mansion. This time the host was Maria Elisabetta, widow of Captain Santo Anton Mattei. The guest of honor was Ventura Velletri, a Jewish woman, previously wife of Joseph Ancona, who on that day celebrated her conversion to Catholicism under the new name of Maria Elisabetta Fortunata, after her godmother.²

These two episodes, separated by only a few weeks, capture some of the complex and contradictory aspects of Livornese life in the eighteenth century. On the one hand, one of the city’s wealthiest trading families could liberally display their grandeur for seven days before fellow Jewish merchants as well as Christian authorities and notables. The Aghibs’ sophistication showed that little difference existed between Livornese Jews and non-Jews when it came to matters of art, music, furniture, or food. Christian guests shared the same dance floor as the port’s Jewish notables; they ate the same fruit preserves; they attended a musical performance by young Mrs. Aghib. On the other hand, an otherwise unknown Jewish woman, alone after the end of her marriage, made it to the local chronicle because of her decision to convert to Catholicism in the very city where Jews enjoyed liberties unparalleled elsewhere in Italy.³

The tension between integration and separation, toleration and prejudice was at the core of early modern Livornese Jewish life. Livorno, one of the most animated and dynamic mercantile centers in western Europe, offered unprecedented opportunities for religious and ethnic minorities in Catholic Europe, above all Jews. Literary descriptions of the city never failed to mention its peculiar assortment of different national groups, emphasizing its large Jewish population, with its ostensible control over the port’s trade. By the end of the century, Ann Radcliffe immortalized Livorno’s atmosphere as a carnevalesque masquerade of persons in the dresses of all nations, in her gothic romance Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).⁴ Exaggerated figures, circulated by French, German, and English authors without firsthand knowledge of the city’s demography, estimated that its Jewish inhabitants ranged from twenty-two thousand to ten thousand individuals, out of a total population of approximately forty-five thousand.⁵ The actual numbers were much lower, in fact, and the port’s Jewish residents did not surpass forty-five hundred souls.⁶

Despite its reputation as a beacon of toleration for all minorities, Livorno was a town with a deeply devout Catholic population, whose hostility to the visible Jewish enclave could flare up during Christian festivals or in moments of economic crisis. While the Papal Inquisition had limited reach in eighteenth-century Livorno in contrast to Rome or Mantua, Jews had to comply with its requirements in several matters. Christian wet nurses had to petition for a special ecclesiastic dispensation in order to work for a Jewish household, as in Mantua or Modena.⁷ So did Christian patients wishing to rely on Jewish doctors.⁸ Anti-Jewish incidents were relatively rare compared to other European contexts, but angry mobs attacked the Jewish neighborhood in 1722 and 1751.⁹ Political instability and the economic downturn that accompanied the revolutionary periods of the end of the century resulted in large-scale riots against Livornese Jews in 1790 and 1800.¹⁰ These grave episodes notwithstanding, Livornese Jews generally found sympathetic protectors in the Tuscan administration, willing to safeguard Jewish legal prerogatives and to actively defend the lives and homes of Livornese Jews.

Complexities and contradictions extended to the fabric of Jewish life itself. The Livornese community included widely diverse social components. It was home to the very rich and the very poor; to rabbis and doctors, to criminals and prostitutes; to merchants who gathered in one of the coffeehouses of the port before heading to the theater; to porters who worked in the docks; and to saintly kabbalists who spent their ascetic days in prayer and study.¹¹ A high level of mobility characterized Livornese Jewish society. Itinerant religious figures and merchants passed through Livorno on their way to the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, or northern Europe. Levantine Jews wearing turbans and caftans mingled in the busy streets of the port with clean-shaven Western Sephardim in breeches and powdered wigs.¹² Jewish observance defined family and communal life, yet some rabbis accused Livornese Jews of impiety because of their acculturation and economic prosperity.¹³ Social tensions within the nazione ebrea ran deep, although class differences did not engender radical ruptures in the communal fabric until the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods.

Through an examination of the nazione ebrea within both the Sephardi and the Tuscan contexts, this chapter investigates the tensions between Tuscan acculturation and Jewish specificities and the close utilitarian bonds that connected Livornese Jews with the Tuscan state. The exceptional status of Livornese Jewry explains its far-reaching integration and its simultaneous segregation.

Livornese Jewish Integration: Ideal or Reality?

The Jews of Livorno live together in peace and safety in fine homes among the nobles of the land. Their houses are made of stone; most of its people are merchants and notables. Most of them shave their beards and style their hair, and there is no difference between their clothes and those of the rest of the people. They speak the common language correctly and fluently. . . . They dwell peacefully and quietly, and pursue every occupation and business they desire. My heart gladdens and I am proud to see my brothers living securely in the midst of their [gentile] neighbors, without enemy or troublemaker.¹⁴

With these words Isaac Euchel (1758–1804), one of the leaders of the Prussian Haskalah, described the Jews of Livorno in a fictional travelogue published in the journal Ha-Measef in 1790. In Euchel’s depiction, Livorno was above all a place of freedom and opportunities, where Jews and gentiles coexisted peacefully as Livornese Jewry fulfilled its social potential in the pursuit of useful occupations. In the 1780s and 1790s, Livornese Jews, portrayed as the peak of Jewish social, economic, and cultural prosperity in Europe, turned into a model of the twin ideals of acculturation and retention of Jewish specificity promoted by the Haskalah. For Prussian maskilim like Euchel, the vision of Livorno provided a symbolic inspiration.¹⁵

Euchel’s perspective was not unique. Among non-European Jews, too, Livorno came to epitomize Western civilization, either desired or decried. For Sephardi modernizers like the Sarajevo-born, Livorno-based David Attias, thanks to their ability to embrace secular European culture the integrated Livornese compared favorably against Levantine Jews, whom he accused of backward ignorance and traditionalism.¹⁶ The Italian Jewish elite known as Francos, primarily of Livornese origin, was indeed instrumental in introducing Western values into Ottoman Sephardi society.¹⁷ In Tunisia, the flourishing mercantile community of expatriate Livornese Jews (known as Grana, from the Arabic name of Livorno), who retained a keen distinction from the indigenous Jews (Twansa), to the contrary earned a reputation for impiety and freemasonry among devout Tunisian Jews.¹⁸

Since the early seventeenth century, non-Jewish travelers too had marveled at the freedom of the Jewish inhabitants of the port. An early eighteenth-century French visitor called the city paradise of the Jews.¹⁹ Edward Gibbon described Livorno as a veritable land of Canaan for the Jews, while the Encyclopédie stated that the Jews . . . regard Livorno as a new promised land.²⁰ Similarly to Jewish observers, the integration of Livornese Jews assumed different meanings, depending on the ideological leanings of non-Jewish authors, who were skeptical or supportive of such exceptional liberties but seldom indifferent to them. By the late eighteenth century, a local commentator remarked half-jokingly that it would be less risky to beat the Grand Duke of Tuscany than a Jew in Livorno.²¹ French and English writers noticed Jewish material success with surprise, fascination, and at times aversion.²² Still, for Giuseppe Gorani (1740–1819), a champion of Jewish integration, the freedom of Livornese Jews, who enjoyed the same prerogative rights enjoyed by the other citizens, turned them into highly regarded members of society, distinguished by all the virtues pertaining to universal morality.²³

By the end of the eighteenth century, the nazione ebrea of Livorno had come to embody a story of effective Jewish integration into European society for both Jewish and gentile critics. Even more than early modern English or Dutch Jews, who enjoyed equally generous social and economic privileges, it was the community of Livorno—a thriving hub, but no London or Amsterdam—who epitomized the successful Jewish appropriation of values and behaviors associated with European civilization: social usefulness, morality, rationality. In the Mediterranean region, among the Sephardi communities of North Africa and the Balkans, Livornese Jews were perceived as truly European up to the early twentieth century. Even Italian historian Attilio Milano presented Livorno, in his monumental history of the Jews in Italy, as the sole oasis of Jewish toleration during the Counter-Reformation.²⁴

Was this ideal of integration grounded in concrete facts? How many of these accounts were depictions exaggerated by foreign observers or distorted by ideological goals, and how much were they an accurate representation of Livornese reality? The origins, nature, and development of this community explain the role it came to play in Jewish imagination.

Jewish Freedoms in Livorno: The Livornina

Undoubtedly, the privileges enjoyed by Livornese Jews were extraordinary. These unique freedoms resulted from the transformations of early modern Tuscany and the growth of its Mediterranean maritime trade. It was the perceived commercial usefulness of Jewish traders that led the Medici government to invite them to settle in Livorno at the end of the sixteenth century, in the hope that their presence would boost the port’s economy.²⁵ As other states, Tuscany recognized the global importance of Sephardi economic networks, ranging from the Ottoman Empire to northern Africa, and from northern Europe to the colonial world. Sephardi Jews and Iberian New Christians (the descendants of Jews who had been baptized in the Iberian Peninsula, also known as conversos) were respected as accomplished merchants endowed with large capital and part of a well-established trading diaspora.²⁶

The establishment of a Jewish community in Livorno was a specific instance of a phenomenon evolving on a much grander scale, influenced by mercantilism, the prevalent economic doctrine during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Attracted by authorities that sought to control foreign trade and emphasized the economic interest of the state over the theological and legal qualms that had shaped Jewish policies in earlier periods, Jews of Iberian descent established new communities in port cities such as Livorno, Hamburg, Amsterdam, London, Recife, and New Amsterdam, a phenomenon which in turn drew New Christians wishing to revert back to the religion of their ancestors. Over the course of a hundred years, roughly between 1530 and 1650, this process brought about the successful settlement of Sephardi Jews in most of western Europe, as well as their arrival in the New World.²⁷

Like other European aristocrats, the Medici family ruling over Tuscany promoted the establishment of a Jewish community in Livorno as an integral part of the state’s strategy of Mediterranean expansion, and it vied, particularly with the Republic of Venice and papal Ancona, to attract Sephardi Jews with extensive economic and religious privileges. Tuscany had already invited Portuguese New Christians and Jews to settle in Pisa and Florence in 1548 and 1551. The founding document of the productive synergy between Livornese Jewry and early modern Tuscany was a charter promulgated by Grand Duke of Tuscany Ferdinand I (r. 1587–1609), in 1591, which granted extensive concessions to foreign merchants who settled in the port.²⁸ The edict, later known as Livornina, was reissued with slight changes in 1593 and routinely confirmed, retaining its validity almost uninterruptedly until 1861.²⁹ Formally directed to merchants of any nation, Levantine, Ponentine, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, German and Italian, Jewish, Turkish, Moorish, Armenian, Persian and others,³⁰ this charter in fact intended to attract primarily Spanish and Portuguese New Christians and Jews of Iberian and Levantine origin.³¹

Other Italian principalities granted privileges to Iberian and Ottoman Jews and New Christians before the Tuscan state did. Papal Ancona offered charters to Jews in 1534, Ferrara attracted Jews and conversos in 1538, Savoy welcomed Jews to settle in the port of Nice in 1572 (this edict was short-lived), and Venice extended generous charters to Ottoman Jews and Iberian New Christians in 1589.³² Clearly, the Medici were not alone in competing for the attention of Sephardi merchants.³³ Still, thanks to the generosity of the Livornina and the subsequent flourishing and demographic growth of the community, the Tuscan port became an exceptional center for Jewish life in Europe.

Among other privileges, the edict offered former conversos relative protection from the Holy Office, at a time when the Roman and Venetian inquisitions were actively pursuing Judaizers (New Christians accused of maintaining some Jewish practices in secret).³⁴ Jewish children under the age of thirteen, often victims of the conversionary zeal of pious Christian servants and wet nurses, were legally protected from baptism and kidnapping by devout Christians.³⁵ In Counter Reformation Italy, this practice of forced conversion directed to the most vulnerable members of the Jewish community was commonplace in the Papal States, and it routinely occurred in other principalities. Children stolen after being surreptitiously baptized and taken to a house of neophytes outside of the ghetto were almost never returned, despite their families’ vocal protestations.³⁶ Unlike Rome or Turin, when Livornese Jewish children were baptized in secret their parents had a chance of getting them back.³⁷

The charter ensured security to Jews in additional ways at a time of great political uncertainty and religious unrest. Jews who formally settled in Livorno gained the status of Tuscan subjects, which led to enhanced protection also when they traded outside the Tuscan state, in North Africa or the Ottoman Empire. The Livornina provided Jewish merchants with economic incentives and gave them the same freedoms as Christian traders, including the ability to pursue whatever profession they chose (except for stracceria, the retail of secondhand clothes that was traditionally associated with poor Jews in the Roman ghetto).³⁸ Setting once again the nazione ebrea apart from the rest of Italian communities, the Livornina also granted its leaders significant jurisdictional autonomy. Robert Bonfil has shown that early modern Italian communities were unable to establish proper rabbinic courts.³⁹ While in Rome and Venice the Jewish religious and lay leaders were able to discipline members of the community and adjudicate internal cases through voluntary arbitration, their legal power never replaced the jurisdiction of the state authorities over Jewish inhabitants.⁴⁰ In Livorno, the lay leaders of the community were invested by the Grand Duke with the power to settle civil disputes and to adjudicate lower-level charges in criminal cases among Jews in an ad hoc court (tribunale dei massari). Sentences issued by the Jewish authorities could be appealed before the municipal court of Livorno, which oversaw all cases involving Jews and non-Jews.⁴¹

The Livornina offered further exceptional privileges, exempting Jews from wearing distinguishing signs, which were the norm in Rome, Venice, and Mantua, and allowing them to buy real estate.⁴² Livornese Jews were never legally confined to a ghetto, unlike those living in the rest of Italy.⁴³ Although most members of the nazione ebrea resided within a small quarter located behind the cathedral, which was far away from the main square (Piazza Grande) and Via Ferdinanda, the city’s principal artery, exponents of the Jewish commercial elite purchased properties in more central and fashionable areas, as well as villas and vineyards in the countryside surrounding the port.⁴⁴ In the middle of the seventeenth century, only 137 out of 207 family units lived in the primarily Jewish neighborhood.⁴⁵ By 1749, the area had increased in size to include 145 houses, mostly owned by Jews. Jewish landlords were allowed to rent out apartments to Christian tenants, and vice versa. It was not unusual for Jews and Christians to live in the same building, despite the authorities’ anxieties about social and physical interactions in domestic spaces.⁴⁶ In 1708 the Tuscan government forbade Christians from living on the same streets as Jews. That the edict was repeated in 1764 is evidence of the limited success of these efforts.⁴⁷

At the center of the Jewish neighborhood was a magnificently decorated synagogue, visited by Christian rulers on their official sojourns in the city (along with the flourishing, Jewish-owned coral factories in the port), as a way to demonstrate their approval and favor.⁴⁸ The synagogue of Livorno stood as an architectural monument to the community’s prosperity and prerogatives, a public display of Livornese Jewry’s national pride.⁴⁹ By serving the entire nazione ebrea, it functioned as a symbol of its unity, despite the community’s ethnic diversity due to waves of immigration from other Italian regions and North Africa, which intensified from the 1730s.⁵⁰ First established in a private home in 1595, the synagogue was replaced with a new building in 1607 and completely remodeled in 1642 along the lines of the grand Amsterdam synagogue of 1639. The building underwent further renovations and embellishments in the following century. These included the 1742 addition of a lavish marble Torah ark created by the renowned sculptor Isidoro Baratta of Carrara (1670–1747), who also designed the altar of Livorno’s cathedral, and, in 1745, a new tevah (pulpit), designed by David Nunes.⁵¹ Severely damaged during World War II, it was only amid great controversy that the Livornese Jewish community decided to tear the ancient synagogue down and replace it with a modern building in 1962.

The Port of Livorno Between Tuscany and the Mediterranean

While Jewish residential and occupational opportunities were restricted in much of Italy and the rest of Christian Europe, this was not the case in Livorno. This uniqueness ought to be studied in conjunction with the refashioning of the port itself.⁵² If the unprecedented liberties that the Livornina provided to Jews and former conversos rendered the port of Livorno a remarkable center of toleration in western Europe, the city’s exceptionality had not started in 1591. Since its very inception, Livorno’s urban structure and model of governance were radically new in comparison with the rest of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.⁵³ Livorno’s commercial activity also clearly separated it from the rest of the Tuscan state, which based its livelihood on manufacture and agriculture.

This originally small and insalubrious fortified village, known as Porto Pisano, had served as Pisa’s harbor up to 1421, when the Florentine republic absorbed it. Pope Pius V’s 1569 conferral of the title of Grand Duke on the Medici bolstered Tuscan ambitions of expansion,⁵⁴ and in 1575 Grand Duke Francesco I entrusted architect Bernardo Buontalenti with a revolutionary project to design an entirely new city over the grounds of the original port, according to an efficient, though somewhat artificial, urban plan.⁵⁵ Its strategic position on the Tyrrhenian Sea put Livorno at an advantage vis-à-vis centers on the Adriatic, such as Venice and Ancona, because it was more convenient for ships coming into the Mediterranean from Atlantic ports to sail to the Tuscan coast rather than to circumnavigate the entire Italian peninsula.⁵⁶ The Medici were determined to take advantage of this geographical opportunity. For this reason, unlike ancient and medieval towns, the Tuscan government first planned the urban unit of Livorno and only later shaped its social texture by promoting specific economic and social policies that would attract a work force and international traders.⁵⁷

Because Livorno did not have a glorious past as an independent comune (city-state), as did other towns acquired by the Tuscan state in the early modern period, it was more easily molded into an emblem of the power and aspirations of the Medici administration.⁵⁸ The Livornina stemmed from the same governmental will to confer a privileged status on this Tuscan city, in order to increase the state’s economic potential by creating a maritime trade center. The declaration in 1646 of the port’s neutrality and the edict in 1676 that turned Livorno into a free port reflected a similar impulse.⁵⁹

The uniqueness of the port determined the city’s exceptional demographic composition and institutional structures. Unlike the rest of Tuscany, Livorno’s population was mostly made up of immigrants, including members of religious minorities that were unwelcome in the rest of Catholic Europe, alongside debtors, outlaws with a criminal past, and hopeful youth looking for brighter economic prospects. Initially, the bulk of the immigration comprised petty merchants and craftsmen from central Italian regions and the Tyrrhenian basin (Genoa, Corsica, and Provence). When the activity of the port took off in the course of the seventeenth century, increasing numbers of international traders from the Levant and northwestern Europe settled in the city, contributing to its diverse character.⁶⁰

Foreign groups known as nazioni (lit. nations, a term used in its medieval meaning to refer to colonies of international merchants) handled international and internal commerce in Livorno.⁶¹ Greek, French, Flemish, British, and Armenian traders settled in the port starting from the early 1570s. These foreign groups were organized along corporate lines, although the Tuscan government did not regard them as proper political bodies. They enjoyed consular representation and, for the non-Catholics, religious toleration, and were allowed to elect their own deputies and to tax their members for the purpose of communal administration and welfare. Alongside yet separate from these foreign corporate groups, as we will see below, was the nazione ebrea, which soon became the largest and most influential ethnic-religious minority in town.

Livorno’s very uniqueness was also bound to create conflicts between the city and the rest of the Grand Duchy. With the decline of Tuscany’s general economy over the course of the seventeenth century, tensions arose between the centrifugal, local forces of the port and the centralizing authority of the ruler. Given the circumstances of the city’s establishment and the state’s focused endeavors to promote its growth, the Grand Duke actively intervened in civic and economic matters when petitioned by his Livornese subjects.⁶² Yet, despite governmental regulations, Livorno’s economic activity partly escaped the ruler’s control. As foreign merchants forged transregional and transnational bonds that could bypass the state’s laws and boundaries, a flourishing contraband trade developed between the Mediterranean port and the Tuscan inland.⁶³

The bustling nature of the free port and the vast commercial networks that converged there fostered the development of an open city and determined the transient character of Livornese society. Its colorful atmosphere struck travelers visiting Tuscany as well as authors fantasizing about it. In Montesquieu’s fictional travelogue Lettres persanes (1721), Usbek described Livorno as a testimony to the genius of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany, who transformed a swampy village into the most flourishing Italian city.⁶⁴ Literary accounts of Livorno’s diversity and prosperity consecrated it as a modern city in an early modern state.⁶⁵

As the Medici had hoped, Jewish merchants were crucial in ensuring the port’s commercial success. By the middle of the seventeenth century, at the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), Livorno had emerged as the chief Dutch and English commercial hub in the Mediterranean and one of the most important centers for the distribution of wares from northern Europe and the American colonies to the Maghreb and the Ottoman Empire, and from the Levant to Amsterdam or London.⁶⁶ Sephardi merchants based in the port acted as the chief agents of the resale of these goods in North Africa and the Levant.⁶⁷ Despite the increasing prominence of Atlantic trade for world markets in the course of the eighteenth century, a high proportion of Dutch and English Mediterranean commerce continued to pass through Livorno. Moreover, the Mediterranean region never lost global relevance for the exchange of Tyrrhenian coral and Indian diamonds. Livornese Jewish firms dominated the commerce of these luxury goods, which led them to create trade networks with both Jews and non-Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, and as far away as the Indian subcontinent.⁶⁸

Commerce at all levels featured prominently among the activities pursued by Livornese Jews. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, about 42 percent of the active Jewish population worked in professions related to aspects of international and local trade. This included not only actual traders, cashiers, financial intermediaries, and interpreters, but also a Jewish working class employed as storage, packing, and shipping professionals, and as porters.⁶⁹ Although the vast majority of Livornese Jewry were earning low wages or living in poverty, as was the case in any sizable early modern Jewish community, the small but visible group of prosperous international merchants came to represent the commercial success of the entire community.

Early nineteenth-century data also show the key role played by the Jewish community in offering a framework for productive activities, guaranteeing the welfare of its members, and providing necessary resources. About 23 percent of active Jews supplied services to the community, as petty merchants, grocers, tailors, printers, or secondhand clothes retailers. Another 6 percent of Livornese Jews depended directly on the community itself, from which they received a salary. This latest group included rabbis, preachers, teachers, and public health care professionals.⁷⁰ Similarly to any other sizable Jewish community in Europe, a number of benevolent societies (sing. hevrah, pl. hevrot) provided Livornese Jews with social services essential for the functioning of communal life. Jewish confraternities in Livorno, as in Amsterdam, were modeled after those of the Venetian community. Among them were the confraternities known as Baale Teshuvah (Penitents), whose members took care of burial needs,⁷¹ and Malbish Arumim (Clothing the Naked), which supervised the distribution of clothes and shoes to the poor.⁷² The aim of the Hebra de Cazar Orfas e Donzelas (Society for Marrying Orphan Girls and Maidens), also known as Mohar ha-Betulot (Dowry for the Maidens), was to provide a dowry for needy girls of marriageable age.⁷³ The community ran a public school (Talmud Torah), which all boys up to fourteen were required to attend lest their parents be excommunicated.⁷⁴ Along with it, private studies and oratories formed the backbone of the religious life of the nazione ebrea.

The communal system of collective taxation, combined with the presence of wealthy donors from the trading elite who supported academies, confraternities, and individual scholars, turned Livorno into a lively center of both Talmudic and kabbalistic studies.⁷⁵ Livornese rabbis were known for their participation in European legal controversies. Among the most illustrious representatives who flourished in the Tuscan port during the eighteenth century was Joseph Ergas (1685–1730), active popularizer of kabbalistic doctrines and one of the protagonists of the anti-Sabbatean movement in the early eighteenth century.⁷⁶ His disciple Malachi ha-Cohen (1700–1771), author of numerous halakhic opinions and a kabbalist in his own right, was dubbed by Heinrich Graetz, with some exaggeration, the last rabbinic authority in Italy.⁷⁷ The art of preaching was formally cultivated in the advanced grades of the city’s Talmud Torah. Abraham Isaac Castelli (1726–89), who rose to fame for his cantorial abilities and became one of the principal preachers and rabbis of the Livornese community, obtained renown for his Spanish sermons.⁷⁸ Castelli is also emblematic of the multifaceted and multilingual nature of Jewish culture in Livorno—he not only spoke Spanish and Italian, but read French, Latin, and Arabic—and of the interest in the broader domain on the part of Jewish scholars, to which we will return. A pious Jew, he was known as an admirer of Voltaire and the French philosophes.⁷⁹ He is likely to have conversed with German playwright Lessing during the latter’s 1775 stay in Livorno, and is reputed by some to have been the original inspiration for Nathan the Wise.⁸⁰ Lessing’s companion, the Prince Maximilian von Braunschweig, described him as greater than Mendelssohn, and of far purer metaphysics.⁸¹ Castelli’s dual knowledge of Torah and Voltaire hints at shifts and tensions in the intellectual sensibilities of educated Livornese Jews as Enlightenment texts made their way into Tuscany.

A Sephardi Community in a Tuscan Key

Livornese Jews were not considered foreigners. Unlike any of the other nazioni that resided in Livorno, the Tuscan authorities legally recognized the nazione ebrea as a subject nation because of its economic merits, a status that granted it semi-independent jurisdiction. Under this definition, Livornese Jews were officially recognized as Tuscan subjects, and the community enjoyed the right to organize itself as a political body, autonomous yet dependent on the government of the city.⁸² Because of such a configuration, the nazione ebrea’s relationship with the Tuscan state was particularly strong.⁸³ This connection lies at the heart of the political and institutional development of Livornese Jewry and sets it apart from other early modern Sephardi communities.

Whereas Livornese Jewry had initially depended on the nearby Portuguese community of Pisa for administrative purposes, by 1597 the Grand Duke granted a small oligarchy of twelve Sephardi merchant families (known as the Government of the Twelve) the right to select five lay leaders (parnasim, or massari) from their midst. The massari were to be accountable directly to the governor of Livorno, who was the Grand Duke’s representative in the port city, and to the Grand Duke himself.⁸⁴ Over time, the Jewish community’s governing structures were integrated into the bureaucratic machinery of the Grand Duchy and the lay council (governo) supervising Jewish communal administration turned into an instrument of control in the broader administrative plans of the Tuscan state.

Such tight interconnection between the governance structures of the nazione ebrea and the Tuscan administration distinguishes Livorno from contemporary Sephardi centers. In both Amsterdam and London, the Jewish community was considered a voluntary religious association, not a semiautonomous political body. No comprehensive edict similar to the Livornina was issued in early modern Holland and England, where a set of laws pertaining to the Jews as a distinct legal category never developed. In the Dutch capital, Jewish communal autonomy was restricted to the administration of internal affairs and religious discipline. Dutch Jews abided by the laws of the States of Holland and the city of Amsterdam, which legislated on issues pertaining to them on an ad hoc basis applying a mixture of explicit restrictions and implicit freedoms, in the words of Daniel Swetschinski, in response to pragmatic demands.⁸⁵ In England, Jewish residence was not sanctioned with an official edict of readmission either. The early modern community grew organically out of informal guarantees given by Oliver Cromwell to Sephardi merchants and it was based on piecemeal judicial rulings. Jewish legal status was particularly ill defined in England until the nineteenth century.⁸⁶

Together with its semiautonomous status, the extensive juridical self-sufficiency of the nazione ebrea further set Livorno apart from comparable Sephardi communities.⁸⁷ The Livornese massari held both judicial and representative roles. As judges, they were to adjudicate in accord with merchant law, common law, or Jewish law, depending on the case.⁸⁸ Rabbis only acted as legal consultants and religious guides in Livorno; the right to excommunicate individuals from the community (herem) was also in the hands of the lay leaders.⁸⁹ As representatives of the nazione ebrea, the massari maintained contact with the Tuscan authorities and carried out negotiations with the governor of Livorno, the Grand Duke, and his ministers, on behalf of the community.⁹⁰ In comparison, the Amsterdam Jewish lay leaders did not hold autonomous juridical powers, although they were responsible for the conduct of the community’s members before the municipal and central governments. They too held the power of excommunication, which they used (more frequently than the Livornese massari) to ensure communal orthodoxy.⁹¹ The English situation was even more radically different from that of Livorno, since Jews were not required to belong to a communal organization and Jewish leaders lacked any means of coercion and discipline.⁹²

In 1614, the Livornese massari acquired another key function, when the Tuscan government invested them with the authority to vote foreign Jews into the community and to grant Jewish immigrants legal recognition as Tuscan subjects. This process, known as ballottazione, was necessary to be admitted to the privileges of the Livornina.⁹³ As a result of the ballottazione system, the Jewish population of the Tuscan port increased exponentially in the first half of the seventeenth century, growing from 134 individuals in 1601 to 1,250 in 1645.⁹⁴ Thanks to its continuous growth, by the mid-eighteenth century Livorno became the second largest Jewish community in western Europe, after Amsterdam, numbering almost forty-five hundred souls by the Napoleonic period.⁹⁵ The port counted a percentage of Jewish inhabitants (9–12 percent of the entire population) perhaps unequaled in any other urban center in western Europe throughout the early modern period. To appreciate this data, it is sufficient to consider that the percentage of Jews living in New York City at the start of the twenty-first century was approximately 13 percent of the entire population in the five boroughs.⁹⁶

Undergoing ballottazione was also necessary to become eligible for any public office within the lay Jewish council. The number of families admitted into the leadership of the Jewish community increased slowly, but significantly. From the initial twelve family heads, the assembly grew to sixty members in 1693 (this was known as Government of the Sixty).⁹⁷ Initially composed of Iberian and Levantine Sephardim, over time the community absorbed a steady flow of immigrants from other Italian centers, as well as from North Africa. However, despite this influx of Italian and North African Jews, an oligarchy of traders of Iberian descent continued to rule the community. Italian Jews were not admitted to the nazione ebrea’s public offices until Grand Duke Cosimo III de’ Medici (r. 1670–1723) radically reformed the community’s administration in 1715; even after this date their access to communal positions remained minimal.⁹⁸

Through his reform of 1715, Cosimo III advocated for himself the right to select the lay leaders of the Jewish community, as well as other governing figures, from a list of designated names submitted by the Jewish council. Twice a year, the names of the proposed massari, drawn at random from a bag filled with the names of eligible candidates, were submitted to the Grand Duke, who confirmed two or three.⁹⁹ The reform greatly consolidated the power and security of the Government of the Sixty by turning the office of Jewish governor into a hereditary position that was valid for three generations and subject to renewal by the Grand Duke. This move further tied the government of the nazione ebrea to the figure of the Grand Duke and to Tuscan politics, strengthening the interconnection between Tuscan and Jewish administration. The decision, stemming from the hope that stable Jewish governance would foster the commercial potential of the port, benefited the Sephardi oligarchy and ensured a protracted status quo, which laid the foundation for a convergence of political goals shared by both the Grand Duchy and the Sephardi ruling