What is it about?
Medici policies toward Jews from Rome, Portugal, and Spain c. 1500-1700 were deeply ambivalent. Displaying diverse degrees of anti-Semitisim and hopes for conversion, Medici rulers used spatial-geographic regulation and other strategies to control Jews and keep them both close at hand and at arm's length. With the Livornina of 1593, rulers embraced a practical mercantilism, deploying emigrant Iberian Jews to further Tuscan commercial interests in the Ottoman (Muslim) east. Yet this policy too contained characteristic hallmarks of distrust and suspicion.
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Why is it important?
The article clarifies the contradictory positions which early modern European Christians adopted relative to Jews as they moved throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. It tracks migration patterns, changes and reversals in attitudes over time, and introduces new archival material. Key locales: Spain, Portugal, Tuscany, Rome, Amsterdam, Constantinople, Salonika, Ottoman empire, the Levant.
Perspectives
The article gives both local and global perspectives. By looking at letters, we get a granular glimpse of how Tuscany and the Medici court and its appointees operated, key 'Court Jews', etcetera. But we also come to understand broader phenomena, namely the global movement of Jewish diaspora throughout the Mediterranean and how creative emigre responses to crisis reshaped attitudes and policies of European rulers. The article also summarizes much of the scholarly corpus on Jewish diaspora and Sephardim.
Justine Walden
Harvard University, Center for Advanced Studies in the Italian Renaissance
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Global and the Local: Jews in Florence, Sephardic Diaspora, and the Ottomans (16th Century), November 2024, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004714274_013.
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