Dangerous readings in early modern modena: Negotiating jewish culture in an italian key

In the fall of 1614, two Jews, the banker Raffaele Modena of Sassuolo and the physician and philosopher Abraham ben Hananiah Yagel de Gallichi (1553-ca. 1623), paraded with the state troops in the streets of Modena, the capital city of the Este Duchy. This procession emphasized the authority of the Duke Cesare (1562-1628). The Jews were beneficiaries of his glory: because of his intervention, Abraham Yagel and Raffaele Modena had been released from some kidnappers.1 Three years later, in December 1617, a new procession went across the streets of Modena and arrived before the duke: representatives of all Modenese guilds asked for the seclusion of the Jews in a ghetto.2 They succeeded and the ghetto was ultimately established in 1638, after some delays due to economic and political agreements between the duchy and the Jewish community.3 We can easily recognize in this kind of "ritual" procession a way to emphasize the identity of the city, to protect its political body (which was always conceived as a transposition of the Corpus Christi), and to present "holy" rogations.4 Within this social order, Modenese Jews were accepted, even if only in a position of subjection, as in other Italian cities at that time. In the cultural and political framework of the so-called Counter-Reformation, however, after the devolution of Ferrara to the Papal State and the election of Modena as the capital city in 1598, it became increasingly difficult for them to maintain their previous social position.5 In November 1636, two years before the ghetto was established, another peculiar procession involved the Modenese Jews again: The most influential Jewish scholars and merchants, among them the famous kabbalist Aaron Berechiah Modena (1578-1639) and the banker Viviano Sanguinetti, were brought before the Holy Office of the Inquisition and accused of owning forbidden books. Significantly, this procession filed in front of the inquisitor (Giacomo Tinti da Lodi) shortly before the establishment of the ghetto: This accusation of owning forbidden books was the strongest attack of an inquisitorial campaign against the Modenese Jewish community that lasted for decades.6 This article will look at Jewish books as instrumental to internal cultural transformation and to the negotiations of Modenese Jews with the authorities from 1598 to 1638, after the political changes of the 1550s and the promulgation of the Index of Prohibited Books by Clement VIII in 1596.7 In my analysis, I look in particular at the books (mostly printed) and libraries of Modenese Jews as seen mainly through a corpus of unpublished inquisitorial sources; specifically, I analyze a few complete proceedings that are both representative of and complementary to these social and cultural dynamics.8 Following recent historiographical and methodological shifts, my study does not consider trial dossiers and lists of books in isolation, but rather it looks within the context of the available pertinent documentation, as proposed by early modern Italian scholars. Not only does this extra effort help place the trial in question in a proper judicial and historical context, but it prevents factual errors and historical misinterpretations.9 Moreover, this research allows for a reconsideration of the recent claim that Italian Jewish cultural activity was based almost exclusively in texts written in Hebrew and was unquestionably modeled on religious literature.10 Through the Modena case, the present article is aimed at contributing to a new evaluation of Italian Jewish culture, conceived as a milieu composed by both secular and sacred works, written in Hebrew and vernacular languages. Finally, this chapter addresses the increased level of literacy in the Jewish community, moving beyond the elite of scholars, by exploring the intellectual world of Jewish merchants, a group usually difficult to penetrate due to the lack of self-written works. During the first and third processions mentioned above, Jewish intellectuals and merchants were associated; in the latter case, this was because books brought them together. Addressing the question of how to define Jewish authors in early modern Europe, David Ruderman has recently distinguished five main elements of Jewish intellectual life: mobility, patronage, the centrality of the rabbi as the cultural producer, the mediating role of the Jewish magician/doctor, and the enrichment of print. In the early modern period, Jewish authors- whether they wrote in Hebrew, Italian, or Latin-assumed that Jewish culture was becoming an "open book" and no external sources were prohibited, regardless of their provenance.11 Their cultural formation was primarily based in disciplines such as Kabbalah, rhetoric and historiography, scholastic and Neoplatonic philosophy, magic, medicine and the sciences, and music.12 One of the protagonists of our first procession, the well-known scholar Abraham Yagel, read and copied Cornelius Agrippa. But what do we know about the reading of his neighbor, the banker Raffaele Modena? While scholars have investigated the culture of some well-known and outstanding Italian Jewish figures related to the Modenese Jewish community, the broader Jewish social and cultural context of books and reading in Modena is still an untapped topic.13 This essay will suggest that this idea of the "open book" within Jewish culture was shared not only by outstanding intellectuals, but by teachers, rabbis, merchants, bankers, and converts who worked as censors for the Holy Office. The ultimate goal of this article is to offer an in-depth view into the complexities of both early modern Italian Jewish culture and Jewish-Christian relations.