Preachers of the Italian Ghetto

Book excerpt: By the middle of the sixteenth century, Jews in the cities of Italy were being crowded into compulsory ghettos as a result of the oppressive policies of Pope Paul IV and his successors. Forced to listen to Christian preachers seeking their conversion, they flocked to hear the Jewish preachers who regularly delivered sermons designed to uplift and educate them. The sermons of these Jewish preachers provide a remarkable vantage point from which to view the Jewish social and cultural landscape of the early modern period. Exploring the fraction of this vast literature that remains to us and that has been generally neglected, six leading scholars of Italian Jewish cultural history find treasures of information and insight. Their essays show how, in various times and places, a number of ghetto preachers interpreted reality for their constituencies. They illuminate from varying perspectives the transformation of Italian Jewish culture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century; the adjustment of a beleaguered but proud minority to its ghetto segregation; the openness of Jews and their surprising appropriations of the regnant cultural tastes of the surrounding society; and the restructuring of thought processes, ritual practices, and social organization engendered by the new urban neighborhoods. What was the role of the preacher as a shaper of Jewish culture? How did he present his ideas to the audience? In what way did he serve as a bridge between the ghetto and the world outside, between old and new conventions, and between elite and popular modes of thought? Judah Moscato in Mantua, Judah del Bene in Ferrara, Azariah Figo in Pisa and Venice, Leon Modena in Venice, Samuel Judah Katzenellenbogen in Padua, Abraham of Sant'Angelo in Bologna, and Isaac de Lattes in Mantua, Venice, and elsewhere are the rabbis whose published sermons the authors investigate. Among the subjects they consider are the influences of Renaissance and Baroque thinking on the content and style of the sermons, the interplay of ideas and speaking techniques with the Christian world, the "popularization" of the kabbalah, and the eulogy as a successful new form of sermon in Jewish society. The story of how these preachers reflected and shaped the culture of their listeners, who felt the pressure of cramped urban life as well as political, economic, and religious persecution, is finally beginning to be told.