DIVIDED BY FAITH
Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe
Benjamin J. Kaplan
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2007
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ELEVEN
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The Invention of the Ghetto
From sunset, or a little after, to the ringing of the Maronga bell at dawn, the gates of the Venetian ghetto were locked shut. Paid by the very Jews whose confinement they secured, Christian guards kept a close and constant watch over the gates that gave access to the city's renowned Jewish quarter—not quite the first ghetto in European history, but the paradigmatic one, the one that gave us the word ghetto. In Venetian dialect, ghet meant "foundry," which is what formerly had stood on the little island, a peripheral bit of industrial brownland, onto which several hundred Jews were corralled in 1516 and forced to live. Harsh as this sounds, for Venice the creation of the ghetto was a liberalization of policy toward Jews, who in the fifteenth century had not been permitted to reside in the city. In 1509, though, the Venetian government, la Serenissima, had honored an obligation to give refuge to Jews who resided in the Veneto, the city's subject territories on terraferma, when the territories were invaded by a hostile army. Horrified friars thundered from the pulpits against this innovation, blaming it for bringing down God's wrath on the city and causing its military defeats. "It would be good," argued a magistrate, "to expel [the Jews] from the whole world, and God would prosper this Republic as he did the King
of Portugal, who, on expelling them, discovered the new route to India, and God made him the King of Gold."1 But the Jews were useful; indeed, the city's poor could scarcely do without their small loans, while its military machine needed all the tax revenues that could be squeezed out of them. And so the ghetto was created, a compromise between allowing the Jews to live freely in Venice and expelling them. Its purpose: to make a Jewish presence acceptable to the Christian community.
The sine qua non of this presence was segregation. Jews were allowed to come and go freely in daytime so they could engage in those activities from which the city benefited. For the "German" Jews who formed the original core of ghetto inhabitants—Ashkenazim, many of whose ancestors had lived for generations in Italy—that was lending money. Ashkenazim also traded in "strazzaria," secondhand clothes and household goods. From the 1540s this group was joined by "Levantines" from the Ottoman Empire and "Ponentines" from Spain and Portugal—both Sephardic Jews with Iberian roots. They engaged in long-distance trade, some of it very lucrative, and by the 1590s most of Venice's trade with the Balkans and Constantinople passed through their hands. To the Sephardim an additional parcel of land was allocated, and in 1633 yet another parcel was appended. With each addition, the ghetto's gates were moved and buildings were adapted to block all other access. Even visual access was blocked to some extent, so Christians could not see Jews or vice versa. Whenever they left the ghetto, Jews had to wear special headgear, so they could be immediately recognized: Levantines, who dressed in Turkish mode, wore a yellow turban; other Jews wore a yellow, later red, hat. Above all, they were forbidden to mix with Christians at nighttime, when the gates of the ghetto were locked shut and patrol boats cruised the dark canals to ensure that, without special permission, no Jew could get out and no Christian could get in.
This enforced nocturnal segregation was what made the European ghetto different from other residential quarters inhabited by a particular group. Jewish quarters had existed for centuries in Europe, as they had in North Africa and the Middle East. The ghetto, though, was essentially new to sixteenth-century Europe. Pioneered by Venice, ghettos multiplied in Italy from 1555, and new ones continued to be founded there to the end of the Old Regime. They were designed to prevent Christians and Jews from socializing—from mingling during those hours given over not to labor and business but to eating and drinking, amusements and conviviality, sleeping
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and sex. They evinced a fear of the intimacy and influence that socializing and cohabitation might produce. Most importantly, the segregation of Jews into ghettos declared to God and the world that they were a people apart—a nation whose members, though they might reside in a city, were not of the city: they did not belong to its community.2 Symbolically, the ghetto prevented Jews from tainting and corrupting the corpus Christianům. This was an essential precondition for the toleration of these "infidels" in early modern Europe.
In Christian teaching, Jews and Muslims were both infidels, that is, unbelievers. Unlike heretics, they were not deemed traitors to the Christian faith, willful rejecters of a truth they themselves had once professed and, in their hearts, still recognized. They stood outside the faith, which in this context Christians defined ecumenically to include its varied confessional strains. More precisely, they stood outside the Christian community, for ultimately it was not what they believed or disbelieved that made them infidels but the fact that they had never, through the sacrament of baptism, become members of the body of Christ. From a Christian perspective, Jews and Muslims were the quintessential religious outsiders. Unlike pagans, the last of whom in Europe, the Lithuanians, had been converted to Christianity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Jews and Muslims did not live in distant lands that Europeans could hope to exploit or even conquer. They were both, in different ways, an immanent presence and perceived threat to Christian society.
There were special reasons to tolerate Jews. To be sure, this toleration was in large part a devil's bargain, a way to reconcile religious impulses with economic needs. But a Jewish presence also had religious justifications. Their banking activity prevented Christians from having to commit the sin of usury, and Jewish wealth could be tapped for the good of Christendom. Countering the argument based on Portugal's experience, Venetian senators pointed to Spain's: When its Jews were forced in 1492 to accept baptism or flee, many went to Istanbul, where their riches helped the great Sultan, Suleiman, conquer Syria and Egypt. How much better, senators suggested, if that wealth were available to Christian states like Venice, which was locked in an epic struggle with the Muslim Ottomans for control of the Mediterranean. More fundamentally, it was a central plank or Christian dogma that the Jews and their Torah were, despite themselves, witnesses to the truth of Christianity. They offered "proof of our faith
from its [very] enemies," representing "to us, as it were figuratively, what we believe."3 It was the duty of Christians to try to convert the Jews, and, as the Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius (among others) would argue, that would not be possible "if one cut the Jews off from conversation with Christians."4 Until Christ's Second Coming, when the sight of the true messiah would convert the remnants of their nation, they would always be with us. Until then, wrote Blaise Pascal, "it is necessary as a proof of Jesus Christ, both that [the Jews] should continue to exist, and that they should be miserable because they crucified him."5
Ghettos were intended to increase this misery. Kept small, they were invariably overcrowded, forcing even rich Jews to live in a squalid, unsanitary environment in buildings that were chopped and spliced and, in Venice, built up to six or seven stories, their spaces jury-rigged like Moscow apartments in the days of the Soviet Union to accommodate too many families. In this sense, the ghetto itself was a punishment, its discomforts a daily humiliation to remind Jews of their servitude and an incentive for them to convert.
Yet early modern Jews did not see the ghetto as all bad. For one thing, with its gates and walls, and in Venice the equivalent of moats, it had something of the character of a fortress, protecting them against popular violence and plundering. Venice's magistrates had such protection in mind when establishing their city's ghetto. So did the authorities of Verona, where a ghetto was established in 1599 in the wake of anti-Jewish riots. For the next two hundred years, the Jews of Verona actually celebrated the anniversary of the founding of their ghetto with joyous song and a brightly lit procession in their synagogue. Writing to them in 1599, the Venetian rabbi Leon Modena (Figure 11.1) found another reason why they should welcome its founding: he called their "dwelling together in the ghetto ... a portent of the gathering of the Diaspora."6 Suffused with messianic expectations, early modern Jewry looked eagerly to the day when the true messiah would come and the tribes of Israel would gather again in the Holy Land. The ghetto could thus have positive meaning in Jewish as well as Christian es-chatology.
In practice, the ghetto was anything but a prison and the segregation it encouraged anything but complete. During daylight hours Christians and lews came and went freely in Venice, via the canalside quays as well as gates. Scores of Christians were in the Venetian ghetto at any given mo-
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merit: shoppers to buy strazzaria, landlords to collect rents (Jews not being allowed to own outright any real estate), the poor to take out loans or, if fortune smiled on them, redeem pledges, porters, street cleaners, water carriers, attendants of stalls and pitches, wandering vendors, lackeys of the magistrates, laborers employed by Jewish printers and jewelers. Christian children entered the ghetto to work and perhaps also play, until authorities forbade them in the early eighteenth century. Christian tourists visited the ghetto just to look. Leon Modena taught Hebrew to Christian as well as Jewish students, some of them foreigners who came to Venice to master the biblical tongue. His sermons attracted local friars, with whom he engaged in scholarly dialogue, and foreign dignitaries like the brother of the French king, whose attendance Modena proudly recorded in his autobiography. With shame he recorded also his compulsive gambling, which often took place in religiously mixed company.
In fact, the Venetian ghetto saw considerable coming and going even at
Figure 11.i. Portrait of Venetian rabbi Leon Modena. In an extraordinary accommodation to his Christian audience, the rabbi has himself portrayed bareheaded. Detail from the title page of his Historia de riti hebraici (Venice, 1638). Courtesy of the Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford, CHC Spec. Coll. AF.8.i2(i).
night. Christian lawyers entered it to attend Jewish courts, Christian couriers to fetch Jewish letters. In 1628 the multi-talented Modena organized an unusual service for Simhat Torah featuring choral singing. It must have attracted a crowd of Christians, since "many captains and police-officers had to be stationed at the gates so that they could pass through peacefully."7 Jewish musicians enjoyed a high reputation, and a singer named Rachel was granted special dispensation to leave the ghetto at nights to perform in the homes of "nobles, citizens, and other honorable persons."8 Jewish doctors also were much in demand, and despite the intimacy of the doctor-patient relationship, which made authorities nervous, they were allowed to make house calls on Christian patients at night. As a mark of special eminence, some were even allowed to wear the black hat of a Christian. Even the Jewish poor were allowed out of the ghetto to purchase oil and other essential goods.
The ghetto, then, did anything but cut off relations between Christians and Jews. To the contrary, it put those relations on a new footing that made them in some respects easier and freer than they had been before. The walls and gates of the ghetto gave powerful form, at once physical and symbolic, to the separateness of the Christian and Jewish peoples. In the process, it quelled some of the anxieties Christians had about the presence of Jews in their midst. In this way, it established a new set of terms on which Christian-Jewish relations in Italy would henceforth be conducted.
The invention of the ghetto came at a turning point in the history of Christian-Jewish relations generally. For more than a century, Europe's Jews had been subjected to persecution fiercer than they had ever previously experienced. In Spain, where earlier they had achieved an unmatched prosperity and cultural brilliance, tens of thousands had been converted to Christianity at swordpoint. Those who had persisted in their faith had finally been expelled in 1492. Jews had been driven out of one land after another, until by the middle of the sixteenth century few Jews remained in western or central Europe. At that juncture, Christian communities both north and south of the Alps began to insist on new arrangements as a precondition for continuing to tolerate, or for tolerating once again, a Jewish presence in their midst. These arrangements articulated in new ways, and in some respects enhanced, the separateness of the Jewish people from the Christian communities that hosted them. From a modern perspective, these arrangements seem at best profoundly discriminatory, and let me be
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clear that I am not endorsing them as a solution to modern religious conflicts. From the perspective, though, of the preceding period, they brought advantages and even improvements in the conditions of Jewish life. The alternative to them at the time was not emancipation and integration, but rather pogroms, expulsions, and forced baptism.
If Muslims had been allowed to live in early modern Europe on the same terms that Jews were, they would have been far more numerous and comfortable than they were. Venice created for Muslim merchants a walled compound not altogether unlike its Jewish ghetto. Known as the Fondaco dei Turchi, it too had a guard who locked its doors at night and opened them at dawn. But whereas the Venetian ghetto became a model for Jewish communities elsewhere, the Fondaco remained exceptional. Few Muslims ventured voluntarily into what they called dar al-Harb, the territory of war. In Lithuania and Spain, on Europe's periphery, there lived Muslims whose communities predated the Christianization or re-Christianization, respectively, of those lands. But Spanish Muslims suffered one of the most notorious episodes of persecution in early modern history, and by 1614 their descendants, the Moriscos, had been expelled from Christendom. Elsewhere, Muslims were slaves or isolated individuals. No arrangement sufficed to make an organized presence of these other infidels acceptable in most parts of Christian Europe.
God's Scourge
Whereas the Jews of the diaspora were a scattered people, a vulnerable, weaponless minority without a land or state of their own, Muslims had a civilization and empire that, from the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, represented a powerful rival to Christian Europe. Above all, the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453 turned "the Turk" into "the normative foe of Christendom."9 Sweeping away the remnants of the Byzantine Empire, it left no buffer between Western Christendom and an expansionist Muslim state. On land, it presaged a struggle that was to devastate central Hungary and bring Ottoman armies twice, in 1529 and 1683, to the gates of Vienna. Until they were decisively driven back in the 1680s and 1690s, Ottoman armies would threaten central Europe directly, generating a fear that pervaded the region. At sea the Ottomans emerged as
a major naval power, by the 1530s winning dominance over the eastern Mediterranean. Venice was forced to yield most of its seaborne empire and pay tribute to the Ottoman sultan. On both these fronts, emperors and popes had to rally the forces of Christendom to repel the infidel.
Farther west, Muslim forces of a different sort had a powerful presence. Almost as epochal as the Muslim conquest of Constantinople, the Christian conquest of Granada in 1492 abolished the last Muslim state on the Iberian peninsula. It only shifted, though, what remained an active military frontier. Thousands of Spanish Muslims fled to North Africa, where some joined the Moroccan army; others swelled the ranks of the Barbary corsairs. Embittered by the loss of their Andalusian home, these corsairs waged "holy guerrilla warfare" against Europe generally and Spain in particular.10 For revenge and profit, they seized Christian ships, their cargos, crews, and passengers. At the height of their activity, in the first half of the seventeenth century, corsairs seized 466 English vessels in just nine years. Corsair ships ranged from Arabia to the English Channel, and in 1617 one of them gave Londoners a jolt of fright when it was caught in the River Thames. In fact, the corsairs' prime objective was often to capture Christians, whom they took back to North Africa and held for ransom or sold as slaves. Nor did the corsairs confine their attacks to the high seas: both they and the Ottoman navy raided Christian coasts, one assault on the Bay of Naples in 1544 netting no fewer than seven thousand captives. The scope of :his activity and consequent dimensions of Christian slavery in North Africa have not always been recognized. A reasonable guesstimate puts the average number of slaves in Barbary at any one time at perhaps thirty-five thousand until the 1680s, when the figure drops. All in all, over the whole earlv modern period, more than a million European Christians may have tasted the bitterness of slavery at Muslim hands.11
No wonder the "Turk" and the "Moor" were fearsome figures in European culture, present on stage, in print, and in sermon. "God's scourge" is
- -t Luther and other preachers called the Turks, a whip with which the _ 'C chastised his people for their sins. Until they repented and reformed,
c-   the message, they could not expect him to stop brandishing it. No der also that Europeans thirsted for information about these enemies. - r-ench travel literature of the sixteenth century, twice as many works -._ .d the Ottoman Empire as treated the Americas. Some of these works, Les miseres et tribulations que les Christiens tributaries & esclaves tenuz
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to bring suspicion on a person. This was not a situation where the privacy of the family home enjoyed official sanction. Still, it was to some degree a reality: the home offered a physical and social space in which Muslim rituals and customs could be performed covertly. Thus the practice of Islam in Aragon ended up bearing some resemblance to the "domestic devotion" of dissenting Christians in some parts of Europe. And like such devotion, or the house chapels that grew out of it, it accorded an important role to women, who became in this environment the primary preservers and transmitters of Islam. Secluded in their houses, they cooked and cleaned and ordered the daily life of their families in accord with Muslim practice. They even led certain rites, such as the fadas, and of course they taught their children. Christian officials tried, increasingly with time, to intrude into this realm, but did so only with difficulty.
Moriscos fell under the jurisdiction of the Holy Office because, technically speaking, they were not infidels but heretics. When they followed Muslim practice, they betrayed a church that, despite many misgivings, had to regard them as members, since it considered baptism an irreversible sacrament. In reality, the categories of heretic and infidel blurred with the Moriscos, and most authorities sanguinely accepted that they were still, to all intents and purposes, Muslim. This made them at once like and unlike another Iberian group, the Conversos, who were also New Christians, but whose religious sentiments were more varied. Much more than the Moriscos, they threatened the Church religiously, with treachery and corruption from within.
Conversion, Sex, and Segregation
Conversos were baptized Jews and the descendants of such Jews.24 Tens of thousands of them had been created in the horrific wave of pogroms that had swept Spain in 1391, when a third of Spanish Jewry had been massacred and another third "dragged forcibly to the baptismal font."25 In following decades their ranks had swelled, and in 1492 they were joined by thousands who chose baptism over exile. Unlike Moriscos, some Conversos accepted their new faith quite sincerely, assimilated into Old Christian society, and raised their children as Christians. Paradoxically, this only fueled Old Christians' anxieties. Some of the greatest figures of Spanish Catholi-
cism—the mystic Teresa of Avila, the humanist Juan Luis Vives, the Jesuits Salmeron and Laynez—came from families of Converso background. Many government officials similarly had Jewish ancestry, as Conversos proudly noted in the Green Book of Aragon (1507). So did Spain's first Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada himself. Such facts only confirmed the worst fears of Old Christians, who persisted in seeing all Conversos as Jews at heart, and Jewish influence as permeating Spanish society through them. It was to combat this nebulous threat that Old Christians issued "purity of blood" statutes. Defining Jewishness not on the basis of belief or practice but of ancestry, these statutes turned the Conversos into a hereditary caste. They made it possible to stigmatize even the assimilated as Jews and exclude them from institutions and positions of power.
Other Conversos remained true "sons and daughters of Israel."26 After decades of toleration, in 1481 the Spanish Inquisition was set up to root out their covert "Judaizing," and for the first fifty years of its existence it concerned itself overwhelmingly with this form of heresy: 95 percent of its defendants were accused of it. This group included Conversos who actually did not practice Judaism as a religion but who held fast to Jewish customs, like cooking with olive oil rather than lard, changing their bedsheets on Friday, and giving their children Old Testament names: inquisitors made no distinction between faith and ethnic culture. A striking proportion of their defendants were women, who played crucial roles in crypto-Jewish practice, just as they did in crypto-Muslim. Indeed, the more inquisitors strained to suppress Judaizing, the more the home became "a bastion of cultural resistance" and the more women became "the central bearers of the Jewish heritage."27
Spanish authorities were convinced that such Judaizing was aided and abetted by openly professing Jews. Living still in the old Jewish quarters of cities, many Conversos rubbed shoulders every day with neighbors, friends, and even relatives who were Jews, who instructed them in Jewish practice and made them feel they were still part of the Jewish people; in some places, Conversos and Jews even worshipped together. As early as 1393, therefore, the Dominican Vincente Ferrer had urged the need to separate Conversos from Jews, and in the 1470s and 1480s attempts were made to do so in some locales. The primary goal of the 1492 expulsion decree was to radically segregate these two groups. To extirpate the insidious internal threat of heresy, Ferdinand and Isabella had to ensure that Jews would no
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longer "attract and pervert [New Christians] to their damned faith and opinion."28
No doubt, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain was a key event in Jewish history. In its day, though, it was just the largest in a series of expulsions that fundamentally altered the geography of European Jewry.29 True, Jews had been excluded from England as early as 1290 and from the French kingdom since 1394, and in the wake of the Black Death they had suffered many attacks. But until the late fifteenth century there had been sizable Jewish communities in German, Austrian, Czech, Italian, and southern French, as well as Iberian, lands. Then, for reasons that are only partly understood, a protracted phase began in which Jews were brutally expelled from one city and territory after another. A first wave of expulsions, peaking in the 1490s, was driven forward in northern Europe by popular demand emanating from townspeople, especially guildsmen, and lower clergy, especially friars. In the south, it included expulsions from Sicily and Sardinia (1492) and Provence (1498), and a planned expulsion from Portugal that ended in 1497 with the forcible baptism of some seventy thousand Jews, mostly Spanish refugees. After a lull, expulsions picked up pace again in the 1530s, with Lutheran princes, popes, and other rulers taking the lead. By the 1570s there were few openly professing Jews left in western or central Europe.
Where did they go? Some to North Africa, others to Italy. But by far the largest numbers went east, Ashkenazim to Poland-Lithuania, Sephardim to Ottoman territories in the Balkans and the Levant. In both places they were welcomed. To be sure, in Poland's royal cities, Christian merchants and guildsmen resisted admitting Jews to their trades and crafts, and cities such as Warsaw that enjoyed the privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis tried to keep Jews out altogether. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, the crown broke down some of these barriers. From the beginning, though, the Commonwealth's nobles had the opposite attitude. Especially in the east, in Lithuania and Polish Ukraine, where magnates held vast, underpopulated, underdeveloped estates, they were happy for Jews to settle, appreciative of the commercial and industrial skills Jewish immigrants brought to a region with few native merchants or craftsmen. Jewish managers and leaseholders ran magnates' estates, arranging for the export of timber and massive grain surpluses. Jewish craftsmen developed industries such as soap making, fur processing, and distilling.
These immigrants had a different relationship to Christian society than that of earlier Jews in Poland. They were "westerners bringing western techniques and languages, and these they now adhered to in their changed milieu."30 In the Middle Ages, while Jews had used Hebrew for religious purposes, generally they had spoken the language of the Christians among whom they dwelled. In the early modern era, the Jews of Poland-Lithuania spoke Yiddish, a dialect of German. Like the "Saxons" who had immigrated from Germany centuries earlier and who with the Reformation embraced Protestantism, or like the Orthodox peasants of Ruthenia or numerous other groups, they had neither language, culture, nor ancestry in common with Polish Catholics. As clearly as could be, they constituted a "foreign nation," and as we have seen, Europeans could often tolerate religious difference in such a group more easily than they could among their own kind. That was especially true in eastern Europe, where since the Middle Ages states had been multinational, multireligious entities. The situation was similar in the Ottoman Empire, where Sephardim spoke Ladino, a dialect of Spanish, and held fast to many Iberian customs.
By the 1570s, Italy was the chief exception to this pattern of Jews being foreigners. Here, after the expulsions, substantial Jewish communities remained in eleven cities: Rome, Ancona, Venice, Mantua, Ferrara, Verona, Padua, Casale Monferrato, Florence, Modena, and Parma. Although these communities included Sephardic refugees and Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim, the majority of their members were Italian speakers who could trace their families' residence on the peninsula back at least several generations. It is no coincidence that ghettos were essentially an Italian invention and that they began to multiply at precisely this time.
Venice acquired its first imitator in 1555, when Paul IV issued the bull Cum nimis absurdum ordering the confinement of Jews in the papal states, including Rome's ancient community One of the most militant Counter-Reformation popes, Paul did not believe in patiently awaiting the conversion of the Jews at Christ's Second Coming: he thought he could hasten that day by pressuring the Jews to convert now. In this way he hoped to eradicate Judaism more thoroughly than any expulsion could. Hope of :; averting the Jews was strong in mid-sixteenth-century Italy, as it was in Lutheran Germany in the late seventeenth century under the influence of J_e::sm. In neither case was great success achieved. In Rome, where a :y.us catechumenorum was established in 1543, some ten Jews (not all of
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them local inhabitants) converted on average per year. Each conversion, though, was prized as a victory, and converts from Judaism included some notable polemicists who used their intimate knowledge of Judaism to attack it, as did Johannes Pfefferkorn and Anthonius Margaritha. At the other end of the spectrum, as the reforming bishop Carlo Borromeo observed, many poor converts desperate for Christian charity proved unreliable adherents of their new faith. All the ambiguities that surrounded the status of converts from one Christian confession to another, as well as the lurking anxieties that affected the behavior of some of them, can be seen also in Jewish (and Muslim) converts to Christianity. Among them, as among Christian converts, we find "the zealot who allies aggressively with his adoptive church" and, by displaying an extraordinary fervor, "tries to win acceptance and disarm suspicion of himself and his motives."31
North of the Papal States, a desire to convert Jews may have been less a motivation in the erection of ghettos than a desire to segregate them. Even though this segregation was far from complete, the symbolism of it was powerful, helping to quell Christian anxieties about the effects of a Jewish presence. Those anxieties focused especially on two possibilities, one of which was sex between Christians and Jews. To prevent this possibility, the Fourth Lateran Council had introduced in 1215 the requirement that Jews wear a distinctive badge so that Christians could identify Jews and thus avoid any "abominable miscegenation."32 This was also one of the reasons canon law had forbidden Jewish households to have live-in Christian maidservants. In fourteenth-century Aragon, nothing in Christian-Jewish relations had caused as much strife as Jewish men having sex with Christian women. Venetian magistrates expressed their fear of miscegenation repeatedly in regulations concerning their city's ghetto, implying that any cohabitation between Christians and Jews would inevitably lead to sex. The same concern filled many pages in the 1558 treatise by Marquardus de Susannis that laid out the rationale for establishing ghettos. To explain why "too much familiarity and conversation" with Jews was dangerous, he quoted Deuteronomy 7—the passage forbidding intermarriage and warning of its consequences.33
Christian anxiety focused also on the possibility of conversions to Judaism. This was no real social threat—the number of Christian converts to Judaism in the early modern period was tiny—except with regard to one
group, Christians of Jewish ancestry. For Conversos who fled Portugal, Italy offered an opportunity no other Christian land did in the sixteenth century: to embrace openly the faith of their ancestors. Many were drawn to Venice as a center of international commerce, but upon arrival they faced some difficult decisions. For "the choice between Christianity and Judaism was not only a choice between faiths"; it was a choice between freedom and restriction, power and humiliation.34 To embrace Judaism a male Converso might have to sacrifice inheritance, career, or occupation, while if he ever returned home he risked death. There were understandable reasons why some hesitated. Others who left Iberia had no intention of reverting to Judaism, only of escaping persecution or pursuing business opportunities. Jews could not assume that Conversos would come around on : - eir own. First in Italy, therefore, and later also in northern Europe, Jewish
- 2:: Mars published an ample instructional and apologetic literature di-
~ed at this group. Ordinary Jews appealed to the bonds of family and .r.cestry in urging Conversos to repudiate Christianity. Efforts were even r-.zde to coax Conversos still in Iberia to leave the "lands of idolatry": the _T. :ar, for example, a charity established in Amsterdam in 1615, offered 2 a ries to poor Converso girls if they would do so.
Those who came to Venice and there hesitated between faiths risked
- ..-ring foul of the Inquisition. In 1556 Paul IV declared that all persons ; r- in Portugal were to be regarded as baptized Christians. That meant
22: if they embraced Judaism, they were guilty of apostasy. Venetian mag--...es never agreed with this new policy, and from around 1590 they -:2ted as Jews, not apostate Christians, all who, from the moment of their --.-■il in the city, lived as Jews. That meant donning the yellow hat and re-:.r.g in the ghetto. Alternatively, arrivals could comport themselves as . 2 Christians and avoid mingling with Jews. What authorities, both ec-2-tic and secular, could not abide was ambiguous conduct, uncertain . 222nce, or any violation of the boundaries, social and physical, that di-2,2 Jews from Christians.
yd fences, they say, make good neighbors: so the erection of ghetto improved relations between Christians and Jews in Italy. By giving -: -t, clearer form to the boundaries between the two, it eased Christian ;.rns about miscegenation and the "seduction" (note the sexual lan-..„2:  of Jewish proselytizing. It removed Jews from the body of the
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Christian community, even as it allocated to them a space in the middle of the city. It thus made expulsion unnecessary, establishing conditions under which Jews could remain in a city, be readmitted, or even be allowed to settle for the first time. In medieval Spain, barring sex between Christians and Jews not only prevented immediate clashes, it "defused the tensions in other types of interaction and exchange."35 The ghetto, one may suggest, had a similar effect: segregated at night, Jews and Christians could have better relations during the day. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Jews had been allowed to reside in hundreds of Italian towns and villages, yet had been forced to earn a living by pawnbroking, an activity that had brought odium on their heads and fueled religious conflict. Concentrated in ghettos, they were allowed to pursue a wider range of occupations. This new economic freedom was both symptom and cause of a more varied and harmonious engagement between Christians and Jews.
Ghettoization turned out to have another advantage for Jews as well: it stimulated the development of a richer, more comprehensive, more distinctly Jewish culture. It forced Jews to spend evenings together, entertaining themselves with music, poetry, and dramatic performances. It encouraged them to form confraternities and study groups, many of which immersed themselves in the mysticism of the Kabbalah. Concentration and segregation prompted Jews to organize communal services, ranging from education and poor relief to burial and the provision of kosher meats. Jewish communities developed more elaborate and powerful institutions of self-government. "Psychologically and culturally . . . the Jews now turned in on themselves and became more distant from non-Jewish society.... Jewish society, indeed Jewish nationhood, as something distinct from Jewish religion, now emerged as much more definite realities than before."36
The ghetto was not alone in having this effect. If the internal exile it imposed stimulated Jewish culture and nationhood, so too did the external exile that drove Ashkenazic Jews to Poland and scattered Sephardic Jews in a new diaspora. In Poland, Jewish learning thrived at famous yeshivas while Jewish self-government developed into an elaborate, sophisticated system. In Palestine, study of the Kabbalah produced a new form of Jewish mysticism. Everywhere, the bitterness of exile fed hopes that a messiah would come to gather God's chosen people and lead them to the Holy Land. In exile, Jews developed a whole range of new expectations, capaci-
ties, and cultural assets. These they brought with them when they returned, gradually, to western and central Europe.
Strangers in Strange Lands
Nationhood was a complex thing for early modern Jews. On the one hand, formed what they and Christians both called the Jewish or Hebrew ""ion," a single people descended from the ancient Israelites. On the "ier hand, long residence in different lands gave Jews different languages,
- -ures, diets, dress, and liturgies, dividing them into distinct "nations."
- ~ie of these nations were Ashkenazic, others Sephardic. Even when they cc together in the same quarter or ghetto, they preferred to worship
at-art in separate synagogues. Then there was the legal "nation," a self-_   erning corporation of resident aliens. It might include multiple ethnic ons or split single ones, as in Venice where Italian and German Jews tether formed the "German nation" but Jews of Iberian origin were _ .ded into Ponentines and Levantines. Jews belonged to a web of over-mng communities, and their identities were correspondingly complex. The Conversos who emigrated from Portugal and Spain to northwestern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were arguably as -rrian as they were Jewish. (Their attachment to Spain and to Portugal --"not be neatly separated: most Converso families in Portugal came orig-- _>/ from Spain, having fled there in 1492, while some of them returned ..rsequently to Spain, in a reverse flow that began in the 1540s, after a Por-_;uese office of the Inquisition was established, and swelled after 1580, r:~ Portugal was annexed to the Spanish crown.) Castilian Spanish was at; language they used for literary and intellectual writing, while in ev-. ■ aav life they spoke mostly Portuguese. Many had family members who *..~.r.ned in Iberia and served as their partners in commerce. Adapting the - -taaratic ethos of the hidalgo, the emigrants took pride in their "noble" .: a^trv. claiming descent from the prophets, the royal tribe of Judah, the -aan Mary, or other illustrious ancestors. Echoing the very statutes that
■ _ -i.amatized them, some even boasted of the "purity" of their Jewish
■ - ~i Converso emigrants often referred to themselves as the "Portuguese
n : it was as such, not as Jews or would-be Jews, that they initially pre-. -irii themselves and were allowed to settle in western France and in a
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321
string of cities farther north, most notably Antwerp, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and London.
To be sure, the Jewish ancestry and inclinations of these emigrants were widely known—the terms Spaniard and Marrano were practically synonyms in France. But nowhere in the region was Judaism officially tolerated before the 1610s. Conversos who migrated northward in this period rather than to Italy or the Muslim world were choosing to live, at least publicly, as Christians, as they had done in Iberia. For emigrants who lacked financial resources, France was simply the closest refuge, so they had to make the best of the situation there. Most Converso emigrants, though, were merchants who spotted golden opportunities in the corridor of maritime trade that ran along Europe's northwestern coasts from Iberia to the Baltic. Here they could make fortunes as purveyors of goods from Portugal and its overseas colonies—sugar, spices, precious metals and stones, brazilwood; later coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco. They chose the north over the Mediterranean in a conscious compromise that sacrificed religious freedom for profit. That, at least, is the cynical view of their decision. A more nuanced view must take into account what it meant religiously to be a Converso. In the decades that followed the forced conversions of 1497, generations of Conversos had developed in Portugal a unique form of piety. Losing contact with rabbinic Judaism as a coherent set of beliefs and practices, they had been deeply influenced by the Christian education they received and the Christian culture in which they participated. Their beliefs had become a syncretistic hybrid that combined diverse elements, often holding fast to Jewish specifics but recasting them in a Christian light. Conversos took the biblical figure Esther, for example, as their patron saint; they celebrated the victims of the Inquisition as holy martyrs; and they came to believe that it did not matter whether they conformed to Christian practice, so long as they had "faith" in the Law of Moses. Some, like Isaac Orobio de Castro, adopted neoscholastic forms of theologizing; others, like Juan de Prado, moved in a deistic direction. Conversos were not simply would-be Jews, and even for those who left Iberia firmly resolved on returning to their ancestral religion, the transition to Judaism could be difficult. It required them, in the first place, to learn what orthodox Judaism really was. Submitting to rabbinic authority, they had to repudiate long-held beliefs and habits. Men had to undergo circumcision, a painful procedure that would mark them irreversibly as Jews and make a return trip to
Iberia even more perilous. Not all Converso emigrants were convinced that ail this was necessary to achieve what, in Christian manner, they called the salvation of their souls.
The crucial difference was that in northwestern Europe there was no In-cuisition to pry into what they thought or did privately. Only in the Habs-Netherlands did Conversos have to show as much caution as in ~='\Cl. Elsewhere, they could follow in relative safety Jewish household "_c:ices with regard to food and cleanliness, and pray and celebrate Sab-~ - and holidays at home with their families. This is precisely what we ■~a ihem doing in France, whose royal government invited "the mer-- ■   :s and other Portuguese called New Christians" to settle, offering ".naturalization papers in 1550 and assurances that they "may live in "..com and security, without any enquiry being made into their lives or " ^rwise."37 With this encouragement, thousands of Converso emigrants _ ::.ed in western France, forming their largest, most vibrant communities rdeaux and Bayonne. Here we can trace an evolution in Converso re-_ - ..s life from crypto-Jewish household practice in the sixteenth century -emiclandestine congregational worship in the seventeenth. Such wor-" : rook place in house-synagogues similar to the ones in Hamburg and : -c'.vhere. As long as they worshipped privately and made no public ges-„ - rejecting Catholicism, France's Sephardic Jews (as they deserve to be _ ^c from this point) were left unmolested. So secure did they feel by the -- - and 1650s that some began to put Hebrew inscriptions on their stones. Complaints later reached authorities that on Friday evenings lie's Jews left their windows open, so that one could see the Sabbath
- _ es burning in their homes. With the connivance of cures, Sephardim --:nce continued to register baptisms, marriages, and deaths with their
.   r irish until around the 1720s, when they finally cast off all pretense of
-------; Catholic. In 1723 a royal document referred to them for the first time
evs, recognized and established in our kingdom under the title of
- _;uese, formerly New Christians."38 To the end of the Old Regime, - -11, their synagogues continued to look on the outside like ordinary
i" e Conversos who began arriving in Amsterdam in the 1590s found
....._:r. greater freedom. Here there was, from the beginning, not only no
-irlon but no established church to which they were required to confer did it make sense for them to pretend to be Catholics, since the
322 INTERACTIONS
official faith of the Dutch Republic was Protestant. Indeed, as Catholics their loyalty to the Republic might be suspect—doubly so as Spanish or Portuguese Catholics, so long as the Republic was at war with Spain. Amsterdam's Sephardim thus began as those of France and Hamburg did, as a colony of Portuguese New Christian merchants, offered citizenship "on the understanding that they are Christians."39 With scant knowledge of orthodox Judaism, they received their first instruction from an Ashkenazic rabbi who arrived in 1602. By 1616 their congregations had multiplied to three, one of which worshipped in a member's house, another in a warehouse; the third had a purpose-built house-synagogue with a hall on the upper floors and dwellings for two families on the ground floor. Like the schuilkerken of Christian dissenters, these structures did not look like places of worship. By 1639, though, Amsterdam's Sephardim felt no need to maintain a fiction of privacy: uniting in a single congregation, they had the synagogue on the Houtgracht dramatically modified and enlarged. Its new neoclassical facade announced with style and self-assurance the presence of Jews in the city. This synagogue, which received a visit from Stadholder Frederick Hendrik in 1642, was closed in 1675 oruy to make way for the even grander and more prominent Portuguese Esnoga (Figure 11.3), which still stands today. Thanks to religious and political circumstances, Amsterdam's Sephardim could worship publicly as Jews. In this respect, they enjoyed more freedom than did most Christian dissenters in the Republic.
Taking Venice's Ponentine congregation as their model, Amsterdam's Sephardim established an orthodox Jewish community. Their Mahamad, or governing board, enforced halakhic law. In disputes, they consulted Venetian rabbis, including Leon Modena. Their intellectuals debated with Christian scholars, wrote anti-Christian apologetics, and produced a stream of legal and devotional works, including of course Bibles and Talmuds. They proselytized among Conversos who remained in "lands of idolatry," smuggling prayer books into France and even Iberia. Through the Dotar, they offered Converso girls dowries if they would come to Amsterdam and embrace Judaism. Amsterdam's Sephardim arranged for poor brethren to emigrate to Palestine or the Caribbean. And in 1655 they sent the delegation, headed by their famous rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, that convinced Oliver Cromwell to "readmit" the Jews to England (a step that sounds more dramatic than it was: Cromwell merely allowed Sephardim in London to hold services in a house-synagogue and lease land for use as a ceme-
UN i KKAL 1 lUiNS
Infidels
325
tery; typically for such semiclandestine arrangements, Cromwell refused to put his concession in writing).
Paradoxically, though, the same freedom that made Amsterdam the capital of the Portuguese diaspora made it also a center of dissent from Jewish orthodoxy. Converso modes of thinking did not simply disappear among those who, in a flow that continued into the early eighteenth century, left Iberia for Amsterdam. Some never embraced Judaism—nor did they have to, as membership in a synagogue was as voluntary in the Republic as was church membership for Christians. Others attempted to lead a double life as Christian and Jew; against these it was decreed in 1620 that no uncircumcised males would be admitted to synagogue. Still other former Conversos adopted a critical, independent stance toward Jewish teaching. From Juan de Prado to Spinoza, a series of heterodox thinkers challenged rabbinic orthodoxy in Amsterdam. Even propagators of that orthodoxy, though, attached to membership in "the nation" an importance that had no basis in halakhic law. That importance was reflected in the eligibility rules of the Dotar: while "poor orphans and poor maidens of this Portuguese Nation, and the Castilian," could receive dowries regardless of whether they were practicing Jews, girls from non-Sephardic families were excluded.40 Blood, apparently, was thicker than belief.
As Iberians, members of the Portuguese diaspora were a profoundly foreign element in the Netherlands, France, Germany, and England. In other respects, though, many were quite assimilated. They dressed as Christians did, and the men conformed to Christian fashion in their facial hair. Their intellectuals participated in the learned culture of the day, reading classical and Renaissance literature, collecting art and exotica, and following developments in philosophy. Their physicians practiced the same medicine as Christian ones—hardly surprising, given that many had studied at a (Christian) university. The rich among them bought country houses, acquired titles of nobility, and played host to magistrates and princes. Their women wore low-cut dresses and let their hair show in public. Wealthy, refined, and experienced in the ways of the world, their leaders knew how to appeal to the mercantilist mindset of Christian rulers, offering them new veins of commerce and new industries in exchange for toleration.
Tribal loyalty, freethinking, and assimilation to Christian culture were characteristic features of the Portuguese diaspora. None were as strong, a;
least initially, among the Ashkenazim who, beginning in the late sixteenth century, also returned in rising numbers to central and northwestern Europe. These reverse migrants were never as numerous as the Jews who remained in Poland-Lithuania. The freedom that allowed Jews there to be peasants and craftsmen, engaging in occupations from which they were elsewhere barred, set off a demographic explosion: no more than 24,000 in the late fifteenth century, the Jewish population of the Commonwealth rose to perhaps 170,000 by 1648. A century later, it reached some 750,000, constituting "perhaps half the world's Jewish population."41 As early as 1600, though, enough Jews had returned from the east to restore the communities of Prague and Frankfurt to their medieval splendor. Over the seventeenth century, the number of Jews grew rapidly in Czech, Austrian, and German lands. Not that ordinary Christians there showed a new inclination to tolerate Jews. Popular anti-Semitism, manifested in riots and demands for re-expulsion, seems if anything to have spiked again in the latter half of the century. Among imperial cities, Frankfurt and Hamburg were the only major ones to readmit Jews; the vast majority of lesser ones continued to exclude them. Local authorities in Vienna, where in 1624 a new Judenstadt had been founded, succeeded forty-five years later in pressuring Emperor Leopold I to dissolve it and banish its inhabitants. As in Poland, in Germany resistance to a Jewish presence remained most powerful, as always, among urban craftsmen. Along with other foreigners, Jews found themselves favored in the seventeenth century by princes who found it advantageous, both politically and economically, to weaken or circumvent the power of guilds. By princely fiat, Jews were allowed to settle in small country towns and villages and to take up a range of occupations there. They were invited to settle in many of the new cities founded by German princes, which lacked entrenched organs of Christian communitas. Jews were invited to settle also in garrison towns such as Philippsburg, where princes depended on them to provision their armies. German princes came to depend even more on the capital of Jewish merchants to finance their wars, which is why the Thirty Years' War proved such a boon to Jews in central Europe, who were often repaid in privileges rather than cash.
In the seventeenth century, Ashkenazic communities in most parts of Europe had, either on the local or some higher level, powerful institutions of self-government. Jewish law and customs shaped daily life, and rabbinic
326
INTERACTIONS
Infidels
327
authority ran high. However much interaction took place between Ashke-nazim and Christians, it did not lead to much assimilation, especially in the middle ranks of society. To be sure, the "Court Jew" who served his prince as financier, army contractor, and discreet back-channels diplomat became in this period a prominent figure. Like Sephardic elites before them, Ashkenazic elites began to hanker after the status and lifestyle of Christian elites, and some attained a semblance of them. But in fact, the bottom rung of the social ladder was where Ashkenazim and Christians mixed most freely. A large and growing mass of peddlers and Betteljuden joined Christian vagabonds, beggars, and petty thieves in their harsh life on the road. This mass grew even larger in the eighteenth century, when Jews failed, on the whole, to participate in Europe's new economic upswing. By the middle of the eighteenth century over half of all Jews in Germany and Bohemia were indigent. This was one of several factors that increased a tendency among Ashkenazim as well as Sephardim in the eighteenth century to integrate and, in some respects, assimilate.
Nowhere was this tendency stronger than in England. After the "read-mission" of Jews in 1655, England's Jewish population remained small until the 1720s, when waves of immigrants began to arrive, so that by mid-century the community numbered seven or eight thousand, of whom some three-quarters were Ashkenazic. Continually reinforced by new immigrants, the majority of this community (or communities) held firm to Jewish law and custom. But English Jewry never constituted a self-governing "nation" or corporation, as was normal on the Continent, and its leaders, rabbinic and lay, had no authority in secular affairs. It was therefore easy for a sizable minority to become increasingly Anglicized. Its upper ranks, consisting of loan contractors, merchant bankers, bullion brokers, and the like, attended theater and opera, had their portraits painted, and took the waters at Bath. Naturally they spoke English, not Yiddish. That was generally true too of the assimilated middling sorts, who, like their betters, dressed in Christian fashion and wore no beards or wigs. Again, the process may have been most widespread among the lower ranks, who by midcentury lived commonly in the same buildings as Christians. Not that many English Jews gave up their membership in a synagogue or failed to bury their dead in a Jewish cemetery. But many did grow lax in their observance of Jewish ritual life. Assimilation had more radical consequences for
2 few who married Christians and raised their children as Christians, or even went themselves to the baptismal font.
in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Jews had been expelled from
- _ h.r.d after another, until few remained in western or central Europe. By
- er.d of the sixteenth century, the flow had reversed. Jews were return-r 1 they were being attacked far less often than they had been, and in the .; r.omic and intellectual spheres, Jews and Christians were interacting
one another more intensively than ever before. What caused this pro--. _r.i change? A definitive answer may be impossible, but two factors de-e Highlighting.
F.rst, the splintering of Western Christendom gave Europeans a whole -. set of enmities. Away from the front line of conflict with Islam, the --r.;ers posed by infidels came to seem distinctly less urgent than the ones
•ei bv other Christian confessions. Jews and Muslims were not diseased -t> of the corpus Christianům, they simply stood outside it. They had
- : betrayed the truth or attempted to pervert it, they simply refused to -:;;inize it. They were the most religiously alien groups Christians en-; _r.:ered on their home turf. Their patent otherness was now in sharp ..-trast to the more insidious, pernicious otherness of rival Christians.
"her. properly confined and controlled, infidels did not seem to threaten •. -h.vation of individuals or the health of the corpus Christianům, as did
- -rctics. This was a widespread sentiment in Europe by the seventeenth .. - :_rv. Certainly the Oberalten of Hamburg, spokesmen for the city's intrant Lutheran guildsmen, shared it: "One need fear no seduction on
-r art of the Jews," they suggested in 1647, "while Calvinism always takes •   •. For Hugo Grotius, this was reason to allow Jews to settle in the _t:- Republic: "We [already] have many [religions] here, and the least -.-car is from the one that is most different: acerrima fratrum odia, et : s ex proximo lapsus [most bitter are the hatreds of brothers, and easy is hi from nearby] "42 By this reckoning, Jews were simply too alien, their _h too different, to pose a religious threat, and if Muslims had not
- - r tt a military one, their presence too would have been tolerable.
-. rond, non-Christians had become foreigners in ways they had never before. Of course, Jews and Muslims had never merely been ad-
328
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Infidels
329
herents of a religion. Even in the Middle Ages, they had been perceived as constituting "nations," as the use of ethnic terms to denote them— "Hebrews", "Turks", "Saracens", "Moors"—testifies. But their foreignness had been sharply accentuated by the expulsions, after which Iberian Jews (practicing ones) lived everywhere except in the lands whose languages they spoke. Ashkenazim spoke Yiddish, whether they lived in Poland, Bohemia, or the Dutch Republic. Even those who returned to German-speaking lands were more distinct from Christians culturally than their ancestors had been. In all these settings, accentuating the foreignness of Jews—whether as Jews or "Portuguese"—opened up possibilities, making their presence more acceptable and suggesting new arrangements for accommodating them. In Italy, where an unbroken presence made some Jews less foreign, a different approach was adopted, a new and extreme, though far from absolute, form of segregation.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the position of Jews in Christian Europe was predicated, in ways it had never been before, on the principle of their constituting foreign nations. Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reality came to depart somewhat from this principle, as economic, social, and cultural trends encouraged in many places a degree of Jewish assimilation. By the end of the eighteenth century, most intellectuals rejected the principle outright, and in the French Revolution it was finally abolished.
The "emancipation" of the Jews that took place in France in 1790-91 and the similar moves that followed, sooner or later, in other European lands were part of a much broader project—a project inspired by the Enlightenment and its vision of human progress. Those who pursued it sought the dissolution of all corporate entities and with it the abolition of all special privileges and discrimination—in short, they sought the equality of all citizens before the law. No more than Louis XIV, though for entirely different reasons, could they brook a "state within the state" or, as the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre recast it, "a nation within the nation."43 For the same reason that nobles had to be stripped of their privileges and guildsmen of their monopolies, and provinces uniformly governed, the Jews had to be dissolved as a separate, autonomous people (or in France two peoples. Sephardim in the west, Ashkenazim in Alsace). Only so could they be integrated into the modern state and assimilated as full, active citizens into
rhe body of the nation. "One must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation, and give everything to the Jews as individuals," declared Clermont-Tonnerre.44 According to this line of thinking, for Jews to be freed as individuals, they had to cease to exist as a people.
The revolutionaries who championed emancipation "saw in it a liquidation of Jewish history and a termination of the existence of the Jewish community."45 Legal integration was supposed to lead to full assimilation, indeed, this was its chief selling point, eagerly anticipated and prematurely heralded by reformers and revolutionaries across Europe. For if there was one thing on which contemporaries agreed, it was that the Jews were a vice-ridden, degenerate people in need of what the Berlin Aufklärer Christian von Dohm called "civic improvement."46 Above all, their "usurious" lending of money at interest was perceived as a dishonest, abusive, lazy way or making a living. The only question in dispute was whether the vices of the Jews were inherent traits or the product of circumstances. Those who shared the Enlightenment's optimism felt sure of the latter. They spotted the vicious circle in the accusation: barred from honest trades, how could ■ ews be blamed for making a living in the only way left to them? In a 1788 report, the secretary of the French Royal Society declared, "Our prejudices ... iare] the primary cause of their vices.... We reduce them to the impossibility of being honest: how can we expect them to be so?"47 If circumstances could be changed, reformers expected Jewish behavior to change. Once bars were dropped, most assumed (wrongly) that Jews would rush to become peasants and craftsmen, in the process adopting the customs ond virtues of gentile society. Others thought, in a Rousseauian vein, that vicious habits sank deep roots and one might have to use coercion to reeducate Jews. The Abbé Gregoire, for one, proposed that the government forbid Jews to live together, promote intermarriage, and require Jewish children to attend Christian schools.
opponents of emancipation, such as the Orientalist scholar Johann Da-:d Michaelis, doubted whether Jews could ever really assimilate. How, they asked, could Jews live with Christians or serve with them in the army - c would not eat the same food? How could they work with Christians ~c  observed a different Sabbath? And how could they give their alle-_       to the state if they hoped one day to erect a state of their own in the _and? How, in other words, could they be fully integrated unless they
330
INTERACTIONS
abandoned essential elements of their religion? The realities of Jewish-Christian relations in the eighteenth century in fact belied such acute skepticism. Yet with their questions, opponents did put their finger on a dilemma inherent in the modern, integrationist model of toleration. It is a dilemma that Jews have long faced, and that Muslims and Christians, in their mutual relations, are struggling with today.
380
Notes to Pages 277-287
Notes to Pages 287-297
381
Hollandiae et Foederati Belgii: Et Acta in Sacra Congregatione . . . Cardinal:: Sacri Concilii Tridentini Interpretům, coram SS. D.N. 13. Maii 1741. exfob-(Louvain, 1742), 7-8; see H. F. W. D. Fischer, "De gemengde huwelijken tusse-katholieken en Protestanten in de Nederlanden van de XVIe tot de XV""-eeuw," Tijdschrifi voor rechtsgeschiedenis 31 (1963): 471- Henceforth, the chur.-recognized as valid Protestant-Catholic and Protestant-Protestant mama;, that had been solemnized by a magistrate or Reformed minister in the Un.'= 1 Provinces or one of the "barrier cities" manned by Dutch troops.
19. J. Reitsma and S. D. van Veen, eds., Acta derprovinciale en particuliere sync.:-: gehouden in de noordelijke Nederlanden gedurende de jaren 1572-1620, 6 ■ . (Groningen, 1892), 2:147.
20. S. Zijlstra, Om de ware gemeente en de oude gronden: Geschiedenis van dd dopersen in de Nederlanden, 1531-1675 (Hilversum, 2000), 307.
21. Philip E. Hughes, ed. and trans., The Register of the Company of Pastes : Geneva in the Time of Calvin (Grand Rapids, 1966), 345. Theodore Beza counseled similarly in Tractatus de Repudiis et Divortiis . . . (Leiden, 1651), 246.
22. William Gouge, Of domesticall duties, 2nd ed. (London, 1634), 275.
23. F. L. Rutgers, ed., Acta van de Nederlandsche synoden der zestiende tv:. (Utrecht, 1889), 161; Reitsma and Veen, Acta der provinciale en particu'.:-:: synoden, 2:439-440, 3:446.
24. André Benoist, "Catholiques et protestants en 'Moyen-Poitou' jusqu'ä la Re-.: -cation de 1'Édit de Nantes (1534-1685)," Bulletin de la Société historiqu; r scientifique des Deux-Sevres 2, no. 16 (1983): 329.
25. Robert Sauzet, Contre-réforme et reforme catholique en Bas-Languedoc: Le --cěse de Nimes au XVIIe siěcle (Paris, 1979), 165-167, 266-269.
26. Roodenburg, Onder censuur, 158-159.
27. As noted by Kevin Herlihy in The Irish Dissenting Tradition, 1650-1750 (Dub. -1995). 94-
28. Archief voor de geschiedenis van het Aartsbisdom Utrecht 33 (1907): 50.
29. Fr. Marcellinus a Civetia and Fr. Theophilus Domenichelli, eds., Epistolae - .-úonariorum ordinis S. Francisci ex Frisia et Hollandia (Quaracchi, 1888 . (#425,5 May 1660).
30. Rutgers, Acta van de Nederlandsche synoden, 273.
31. Wouters and Abels, Nieuw en ongezien, 1:245.
32. Jacob Cats, Houwelyck, dat is De gantsche gelegentheyt des Echten-S:.:-:^ (Middelburg, 1625), Vrijster, 2:33.
33. Quoted by, among others, Franciscus Duysseldorpius, Reverendi ...ED Í [Francisci Duysseldorpii Lugdunensis] tractatus de matrimonio non ir.c:, cum his, qui extra ecclesiam sunt (Antwerp, 1636), 353, 362; Christianus olicus [Johannes Watelaar], Körte ende waere uytvaert, Van alle oncatk:'.. .
-cligien: Dienende tot eeuwige welvaert van alle Christelijcke zielen . . . Toe-ge-■r.gent aen alle de Catholijcken, die aen oncatholijcken getrouwt syn (Roermond, 1651), 9; rebutted in Ben Israels [Yeme de Ringh], Tractaet Teghen het straffen hr Buyten-getrouden, sonder onderscheydt: Dat is: Verantwoordinge, op eenen Brief, geschreven (van een Dienaervan Lenaert Klock: of Jan Schellinghwous [sic] ;':-:-inde) aen een Broeder der Vereenighde Gemeente. aengaende het bannen :ver den buyten-ghetrouden (Amsterdam, 1628), 11,15-16. Cited also in Ireland: Alan Ford, "The Protestant Reformation in Ireland," in Natives and New-;o>ners: Essay on the Making of Irish Colonial Society, 1534-1641, ed. Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie, 50-74 (Dublin, 1986), 70. : - Molina, Mondt-Stopper, 180.
: 5. 3ergsma, Tussen gideonsbende en publieke kerk, 337.
':-. Tean-Paul Pittion, "L'affaire Paulet (Montpellier 1680-83) et les conversions
fbrcees d'enfants," in La conversion au XVIIe siede: Actes du Xlle Colloque de
Marseille (Janvier 1982), 209-229 (Marseille, 1983). .•Benoist, Histoire de L'Edit de Nantes, vol. 3, pt. 1,142-144.188, 250, 296, 547; vol.
3. pt. 2,19, 20, 71-73,174, 229-230, 243-247, 299» 334.338-339. 445. 449-452, 510-
511; vol. 3, pt. 3,1003. }: Chätellier, Tradition chretienne et renouveau catholique, 278.
William P. Burke, The Irish Priests in the Penal Times (1660-1760) (Waterford,
1914), 194.
-.".. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, second part of the second part, Q. 11, art. 4. See Ernest W. Nelson, "The Theory of Persecution," in Persecution and Liberty: Essays in Honor of George Lincoln Burr, 3-20 (New York, 1931), 13-
11. Infidels
1. Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620 (Oxford, 1971). 489- The magistrate's argument was inaccurate in representing the events of 1497 as an expulsion.
2. Paraphrasing Brian Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 1550-1670 (London, 1997). 153-
3. Marquardus de Susannis, De ludaeis et aliis infidelibus, circa concernentia origi-nem contractuum, bella, foedera, vltimas voluntates, iudicia, & delicta Iudae-orum & aliorum infidelium, 6- eorum conuersiones ad fidem (Venice, 1558), 8r.
4. Hugo de Groot, Remonstrantie nopende de ordre dije in de landen van Hollandt ende Westvrieslandt dijent gesteh op de joden, ed. J. Meijer (Amsterdam, 1949). 110.
5. Leon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, vol. 1: From Roman Times to the Court Jews (London, 1974), 201.
r. Leon Modena, Leo Modenas Briefe und Schriftstücke: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte
382
Notes to Pages 299-313
Notes to Pages 313-329
383
der Juden in Italien und zur Geschichte des hebräischen Privatstiles, ed. Ludwig Blau (Budapest, 1905), 151.
7. Benjamin Ravid, "Curfew Time in the Ghetto of Venice," in his Studies or. Jews of Venice, 1382-1797 (Aldershot, 2003), 251.
8. Ibid., 247.
9. So characterized by Norman Housley in Religious Warfare in Europe, 1400-:?. (Oxford, 2002), 131.
10. The phrase of Pullan in Jews of Europe, 192.
11. Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Basingstoke, 2003), 3-26.
12. Cemal Kafadar, "A Death in Venice (1575): Anatolian Muslim Merchana Trading in the Serenissima," in Merchant Networks in the Early Modern Ua'l; ed. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 97-124 (Brookfield, Vt, 1996), 103.
13. Giorgio Vercellin, "Mercanti Turchi e Sensali a Venezia," Studi Veneziani, raa -(1980): 48 (a 1622 ordinance).
14. Paolo Preto, Venezia e i Turchi (Florence, 1975), 130, as translated in Kafad-.r Death in Venice," 108.
15. Kafadar, "A Death in Venice," 130.
16. Ugo Tucci, "Tra Venezia e mondo turco: I mercanti," in Venezia e i Tu~: Scontri e confronti di due civiltä, 38-55 (Milan, 1985), 52.
17. Kafadar, "A Death in Venice," 108.
18. Ahmad ibn Qasim al-Hajari, Kitab nasir al-din 'ala Jqawm al-kafirin ~r. Supporter of Religion against the Infidel), ed. and trans. P. S. van Konings, a 1 Q. al-Samarrai, and G. A. Wiegers (Madrid, 1997), 195.
19. Thomas Fuller, The History of the Holy Wane, 4th ed. (Cambridge, 1651 . aa..
20. Salvatore Bono, Schiavi musulmani nellTtalia moderna: Galeotti, vu cu—.~' domestici (Naples, 1999), 243.
21. Alessandro Stella, Histoires d'esclaves dans la peninsule iberique (Paris. a.: 56-57-
22. E. William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the 3.a Lands to Sicily (New York, 1990), 215.
23. Catherine Gaignard, Maures et Chretiens a Grenade, 1492-1570 (Paris, 199" , :: -
24. Like many historians currently, I use the term Converso rather than M.:~-because the latter implies a crypto-Judaizing that was not common tr them.
25. According to Jonathan I. Israel in European Jewry in the Age of Merza-r 1550-1750 (Oxford, 1989), 6.
26. Phrase adapted from Renee Levine Melammed, Heretics or Daughters : ..■ The Crypto-Jewish Women of Castile (New York, 1999).
1~. As characterized by Melammed, ibid., 168, the first phrase being a quotation
from Mary Perry, who was speaking of Moriscas. la Haim Beinart, "The Expulsion from Spain: Causes and Results," in The Se-
vhardi Legacy, 2 vols., ed. Haim Beinart, vol. 2, pp. 11-42 (Jerusalem, 1992), 2:29. 54 On the geography and demography of Europe's Jewish population, I follow
closely Israel, European Jewry. .... According to Israel, ibid., 31, speaking of Jewish immigrants to both Polish and
Ottoman lands. : 1. As described by Brian Pullan in Jews of Europe, 245.
:2. "Xefarie commiscentur"—from Honorius Ill's bull Ad nostram noveritis 1221), ordering the enforcement of the council's decree in the province of Bur-degalen. Antonius Flavius de Sanctis, Church of Rome, and Carlo Cocquelines, eds., Bullarium privilegiorum ac diplomatům Romanorum Pontificum amplis-sima collectio . . . [Bullarium Romanům], 6 vols. (Rome, 1739), vol. 3, pt. 1, a. 221.
5.-. Susannis, De Iudaeis, 14V.
54. So described by Pullan in his Jews of Europe, 168.
55. As pointed out by David Nirenberg in Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1995), 158.
::. According to Israel in European Jewry, 31, 71.
:~. Gerard Nahon, "From New Christians to the Portuguese Jewish Nation in France," in The Sephardi Legacy, ed. Haim Beinart, vol. 2, pp. 336-364 (Jerusalem, 1992), 338.
55. Ibid., 338.
59. R. G. Fuks-Mansfeld, De Sefardim in Amsterdam tot 1795 (Hilversum, 1989), 39.
,5. Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, 1997), 134.
41. So estimated by Anthony Polonsky in his introduction to The Jews in Old Poland: Jewish Community in the Poland-Lithuania Commonwealth, 1000-1795, ed. Anthony Polonsky, Jakub Basista, and Andrzej Link-Lenczkowski (London, 1993). 5-
55. De Groot, Remonstrantie, 113 (adages from Tacitus and Seneca). 45. Lvnn Hunt, ed. and trans., The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (New York, 1996), 88.
44. Gary Kates, "Jews into Frenchmen: Nationality and Representation in Revolutionary France," in The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity, ed. Ferenc Feher, 103-116 (Berkeley, 1990), 113.
45. The conclusion of Jacob Katz in his Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 208.
384
Notes to Pages 329-345
Notes to Pages 345-35d
385
46. C. K. W. von Dohm, Uber die burgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (Berlin, i~5:
47. Paul Meyer, "The Attitude of the Enlightenment towards the Jews," Studies :■ Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 26 (1963): 1198.
12. Enlightenment?
1. Pierre Bayle, A Philosophical Commentary on these words of the Gospel L XIV 23: Compel them to come in, that my house may be full... ,2 vols. (Lone -1708; orig. French ed. 1686), 1:7.
2. Ibid., 1: 273.
3. J. W. Gough, "The Development of John Locke's Belief in Toleration, -Locke: A Letter Concerning Toleration in Focus, ed. John Horton arc ^_ Mendus (London, 1991), 74, speaking of Locke's treatise.
4. David D. Bien, The Calas Affair: Persecution, Toleration, and Heresy in L .. Century Toulouse (Westport, 1979), 3, 5.
5. Bernard Lewis, Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the A-:-. Discovery (New York, 1995), 17.
6. Gilbert Burnet, Bishop Burnet's History of his own time, 3 vols. (London, 3:1120.
7. J. P. Kenyon, The Popish Plot (London, 1972), 13.
8. Sir Henry Capel, in Anchitell Grey, ed., Debates of the House of Commons. the year 1667 to the year 1694,10 vols. (London, 1769), 7:149 (27 April 1670 .
9. Gilbert Burnet, The History of the Persecution of the Valleys of Piedmoti: (London, 1688), 42.
10. Jean Queniart, La Revocation de I'Edit de Nantes: Protestants et cathc France de 1598 a 1685 (Paris, 1985), 123; "Revocation of the Edict of Nan tory.hanover.edu/texts/nonantes.html.
11. This most despicable practice, the separation of children from parent-   . w at this time a common part of religious persecution, especially in
1684 Protestants driven from Defereggental, in Eastern Tyrol, were ___
to leave children under age fifteen behind, to be raised as Catholic-tants forced to leave Durrnberg around the same time faced the same   _. the so-called transmigration, a.k.a. deportation, of Austrian Proto _ Transylvania in the eighteenth century, authorities held back Prote-*_-dren, founding in 1752 four "conversion houses" for them to be raise.. -last of these deportations took place in 1774.
12. Burnet, Bishop Burnet's History, 3:1126.
13. John Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (Indianapolis, 1955), 51.
14. The Spectator, 8 vols. (Dublin, 1755), 6:23 (no. 399); classiclit.abou:.;,.-brary/bl=etexts/apope/.
15. •■ohn Locke, The reasonableness of Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures London, 1695), 266.
-. As accused by Peter Gay in The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York, 1969), 1:343.
1". Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter, eds., Toleration in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2000), 14-15.
Slingsby Bethel, The present interest of England stated (London, 1671), 13. - Voltaire, A treatise on religious toleration: Occasioned by the execution of the unfortunate John Calas .. . (London, 1764; orig. French ed., 1763), 47. 22. As paraphrased by Marisa Linton, "Citizenship and Religious Toleration in France," in Grell and Porter, Toleration in Enlightenment Europe, 170-171.
21. Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, 52, 55.
22. In the words of Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c. 1714-80: A Political and Social Study (Manchester, 1993), 224.
25. Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 240.
24. ;A real friend to religion and to Britain" Fanaticism and Treason; or, a dispassionate history of the rise, progress, and suppression, of the rebellious insurrections in June, 1780, 3rd ed. (London, 1781), 4> 7-