Renaissance Jews
The Jews in the Renaissance.
by Cecil Roth.
The Jewish Publication Society of America. 380 pp. $5.00.
In the dismal chronicle that records the existence of Jews among their host peoples, the age of the Italian Renaissance stands out as a period of uncommon liberality. Cosmopolitan in outlook and experimental, the Renaissance held out a hand—at arm’s length, to be sure—to European Jewry, inviting collaboration in fashioning the new society. The Jews, stemming from an ancient people, and traditionally masters of certain arcane sciences, could serve their Italian patrons as guides to the disciplines of philology and mathematics. For a time philo-Semitism invaded the palazzi of the rich and the powerful, of rulers and popes; in the case of the popes, such philo-Semitic sentiment has never ceased to cause dismay in certain quarters. As late as the 1920’s Ludwig Pastor, the great Catholic historian of the papacy, could still speak of the “great and in many cases certainly excessive, indulgence which the Popes of the Renaissance period, especially Alexander VI, Leo X, and lastly Paul III, had shown to the Jews.” But the reaction was not slow in coming. It began under Julius III (1550-1555), who ordered the Talmud committed to the flames, and it reached its climax with the Bull of Paul IV, issued in the first year of his reign, 1555, which instituted the ghetto system in the papal territories. Jews were specifically commanded to live apart from Christians, in an area that had only one entrance and egress. Personal contact between Christians and Jews was almost impossible.
What had happened was, of course, the Protestant Reformation and the general truculence, intolerance, and doctrinal rigor it brought on. The trend toward religious universalism, so noticeable in the thought of Renaissance intellectuals, came to an end—a laissez-faire attitude in religion was no longer thinkable. The Jews were among the victims of the new rigidity, and though the marks of their acceptance during the brief Renaissance never altogether disappeared, their era of good feeling with the Gentile world was over.
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Cecil Roth, the well-known historian of Jewish life, has written in The Jews in the Renaissance the account of the “reciprocal process” (as he puts it) which made it possible for Jews to share in and contribute to the intellectual efflorescence of the short-lived Italian Renaissance. Roth limits his description to an area in Italy bounded by Rome and Milan, Genoa and Venice, with only an occasional excursion to France and Iberia. In the Italian peninsula, the historical tradition of Jewish settlements was unbroken—expulsion and persecution could only be local in non-unified countries like Italy; and the imaginative, mercurial spirit of Renaissance Italy provided an ideal milieu for the unfolding of Jewish gifts.
The book begins with the transfer, in the 14th century, of Jewish activities from the southern part of the peninsula to the central and northern parts. The traditional textile trades continued to engage Jewish interest, but the age that follows is, of course, dominated by the well-known figure of the moneylender, usually invited by civil authorities to set up his loan bank in town. Around a family or two of such loan bank proprietors, the Jewish community clustered. These business magnates determined the group’s assimilation. Roth describes them: “Like the merchant princes of the Italian city-states, the loan bankers sat at home and waited for the profits to accrue. Meanwhile, they had ample leisure to busy themselves with cultural matters and, encouraged all the more by the example of their Gentile neighbors, they did so with all their might.”
By the time of the high Renaissance, Jews reflected their environment in almost all its aspects. Roth’s book shows us Jews as printers, musicians, art patrons, and even as artists. They were scholars and physicians, of course, but also imitators of Dante, scenic designers, rhetoricians, alchemists and astrologers, and architects. Some latinized their names, or imitated their confreres’ farfetched etymological experiments, such as deriving Accademia from the Hebrew Eked (assembly) and Adam, in order to approve a pagan title for a Jewish institution. The incredible Gracia Mendes, a Marrano Jewess from Portugal, managed one of the great banking houses of the time, patronized artists and scholars, and employed her business agents in the operation of a vast underground railway which moved Marranos from Spain and Portugal to havens in Italy and Turkey. Representatives of the English crown consulted Jewish experts about the validity according to Biblical law of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. We learn, too, about the incidence of crime in Jewish communities, and Roth reports the remark of some wit made shortly after the condemnation of the Talmud, that now that their own laws had been declared blasphemous, Jews were free to live by the code of the Decameron. One becomes aware, as in all Jewish history, of the extraordinary dependence of Jewish life and culture on the environment, on specific external factors—the Jewish community regularly followed the Medici in and out of Florence, as the fortunes of that family fluctuated.
Renaissance Italy provided the stage for a sustained and largely successful act of assimilation; in fact, there was achieved for a time—particularly in Mantua—a kind of coherence of Hebrew and Italian culture. But remarkable as it was, it was far from a synthesis. Roth writes on his very last page: “We have to remember that [friendly relations between Jewish and non-Jewish circles] were, if not the exception, certainly not the rule—and without this atmosphere the common cultural tradition could not produce perfect fruits.”
Roth’s book itself falls somewhat short in its failure to probe into this basic discordance between Christians and Jews. The gulf was obviously a religious, not a social or ethnic, one: “A permanently close relationship in the modern sense between followers of opposing faiths was then out of the question, or nearly so.” But the historical record demands that this fact be placed in proper perspective, which Roth fails to do. His book suffers from a singleness of viewpoint. He evinces, for example, a certain naivety about the period, the bibliography alone revealing that his view of the Renaissance has hardly been formed by modern scholarship.
While this may be distasteful only to the Renaissance specialist, a more serious objection is that the author’s almost exclusive concentration on the Jewish heroes of his narrative often blurs the historical picture after leaving us with an altogether out-of-balance view of the Jewish role in Renaissance culture. Some topics cry out for a comparative study: translations from Arabic and Hebrew, geography and travel descriptions, etc. Concentrating on the Jewish role, moreover, can run to the kind of conjecture that seeks to identify “Jewish types” in Renaissance paintings. This serves only a parochial interest, while doing nothing to increase historical understanding.
Finally and most seriously, the Christian religious judgment of Jews and Judaism receives no mention. Yet it is Christian intolerance and abhorrence, based on articles of faith, which determined the relations of Jew and non-Jew and fixed the place of Jews in the Gentile world. Without a consideration of this question the ethos of Jewish-Christian associations in early modern times must remain a mystery. How was it, for example, that the Hebrews of the Old Testament were admired and the Jews in contemporary society disdained? How could it be said (in a history of the Hebrews printed in Basel in 1515) that Livy offered no example of virtue which the record of the ancient Hebrews does not improve upon, while in contemporary pamphlet literature Jews were placed below infidel Turks in degradation? Roth calls it “paradoxical” that Italian cities, having excluded Jews from residence while they practiced respected occupations, willingly let them return to engage in the unlovable and unloved trade of usury. But there is nothing paradoxical about it, once the Christian religious attitude toward Jews is grasped. The Jews of the Renaissance seem to have realized the special nature of their alienation from Christian society, hence their readiness (which Roth deplores) to overlook what they had suffered and to come to terms with their oppressors, for example to serve Spanish lords and English sovereigns. But the historian tends not to lean to value judgments, and Roth renders none. If his study is somewhat parochial in approach, it is nevertheless exhaustive within its own purview. It draws a compelling picture of the Jewish experience during the Italian Renaissance—we are not likely soon to have a better book of its kind.
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