The Ugly Renaissance (50 page)

T
HE
G
REAT
C
RIME

Regardless of how well he had been integrated into Tuscan society,
Salomone di Bonaventura would have been aware of a powerful sense of religious resentment against him whenever he traveled to Florence.
Forced to wear a large yellow
O
on his left breast, he was marked out as a Jew and, even if he paid no heed to the jibes of the citizenry, would have been the unfortunate recipient of considerable prejudice. Yet what really paved the way for his ultimate persecution by the courts was a highly specific and extremely prominent refinement of growing anti-Semitic attitudes.

If the beliefs and rituals of Judaism were thought to pose a covert threat to the health of Christianity during the Renaissance, the Jews’ commercial activities were perceived as an active danger to the well-being of Christian society.
Money lending and usury were the greatest worry, even though it is somewhat surprising that Jews should ever have wanted to lend money to the Christians who regarded them with such hatred. Prejudices against Jewish moneylenders had existed in Europe since the Middle Ages, and the willingness to tar Jews with crude accusations of greed were decidedly old hat even by the early fourteenth century. In the thirteenth century,
Saint Thomas Aquinas’s ardent opposition to lending money at interest had given a theological basis to the widespread prohibitions on usury (see
chapter 7
and above), and since money lending had become a business particularly favored by Jewish communities, such injunctions had often been the basis for waves of persecution. On at least two occasions during his reign, Louis IX of France ordered Jewish moneylenders to be arrested and their property confiscated to pay for the Seventh and Eighth Crusades, while Philip IV expelled all Jews from his kingdom on the basis of religious attitudes toward usury in 1306. So, too, Edward I of England’s
Statute of the Jewry (1275) forbade Jews to “blasphemously” lend money at interest, and the subsequent
Edict of Expulsion (1290) was justified primarily with reference to the continuation of the practice. But the sudden and dramatic rise of money lending and merchant banking in early Renaissance Italy had given a new potency to this particular branch of bigotry, and the suggestion that by charging high rates of interest, Jews were somehow seeking to exploit “good” Christians out of a sense of religious or ethnic hatred acquired a distressing new vigor.

In the early fifteenth century, Observant
Franciscans such as
Giacomo della Marca (1391–1476),
Giovanni da Capistrano (1386–1456), and
Bernardino da Feltre (1439–1494) led the way in attacking Jewish usury and in giving this form of anti-Semitism a hideous veneer of public respectability. Once again, however, San Bernardino of Siena stood out
both for the viciousness and for the popularity of his diatribes.
In one particularly vitriolic sermon, he condemned the “concentration of money and wealth” into “fewer and fewer hands,” and inveighed against Jews as the archetypes of anti-Christian usury with a fervor that would perhaps have made even medieval anti-Semites blanch. Firebrand sermons such as this set the tone for political action, and the Church’s approval provided Florentine oligarchs with precisely the excuse they needed to make war on those Jewish moneylenders whom they viewed as dangerous business rivals or to whom they were indebted. Without sparing a thought for the hypocrisy of such policies, a campaign of political persecution was unleashed. In 1406—the year of Filippo Lippi’s birth—the
Signoria promulgated a decree that categorically forbade any Jews to lend money at interest, a provision that was subsequently reissued for the sake of preventing “the poor people of Florence” from being “ruined” in 1430.

In practice, such decrees often proved unworkable. By placing harsh restrictions on usury, the Signoria unwittingly caused itself considerable financial damage. Without Jewish moneylenders keeping the economic wheels turning, the supply of credit quickly dried up, and the machinery of commerce groaned under the strain.
Almost as soon as the decrees had been passed, exemptions were issued to allow some Jewish usurers to trade under license, while others were simply allowed to go on trading irrespective of legal restrictions, albeit with certain limitations on commercial practices and property ownership. It was these exemptions that permitted
Salomone di Bonaventura to set himself up in business in
Prato, and which created the conditions for the fateful partnership between
Abraham Dattili and Salomone’s sons in 1439. But far from restraining the vehemence of anti-Semitic sentiments, such experiences only compounded the hatred that was felt, and it was the visceral dislike of Jewish moneylenders that laid the foundations for Salomone’s ultimate prosecution.

Later, however, even such monstrously disproportionate penalties were insufficient to sate the public passion for “vengeance.” The mood was turning ugly.
In March 1488, a vitriolic attack on usury by
Bernardino da Feltre in the Duomo prompted a group of young men to launch a violent attack on a neighboring Jewish pawnshop, catalyzing a riot that was suppressed only with some difficulty. In such a febrile atmosphere, it was clear that more direct and wide-ranging measures
were called for, and during the ascendancy of
Girolamo Savonarola the
monte di pietà
was established in December 1495 as the first truly systematic effort to stamp out the “stain” of Jewish money lending once and for all. Modeled on the identically named bodies that had been set up throughout northern Italy since their first appearance in Perugia in 1462, the Florentine
monte di pietà
was essentially a state-run lending institution that offered loans to any reasonably respectable citizen who might apply.
Its goal was to undercut the city’s Jews without restricting the supply of credit, and so successful (if that is the right word) was the new strategy that Savonarola felt able to appropriate the worst forms of the rival
Franciscans’ arguments and to call for the outright expulsion of the Jewish population. Even at the time of
Salomone di Bonaventura’s prosecution in 1441, Christian artists such as Filippo Lippi would probably have seen a great deal of sense in such arguments, and would have found little to criticize about proposals for far-reaching reforms aimed at eliminating the “stain” of Jewish usury.

F
ROM
H
UMILIATION AND
V
IOLENCE TO THE
G
HETTO

As an expression of the virulent, hypocritical anti-Semitism that was endemic to early-fifteenth-century Florence, the trial and condemnation of Salomone di Bonaventura stands out as a powerful illustration of the cruelty that underpinned Renaissance perceptions of the “other.” It was a short step to take from social stigmatization and economic marginalization to outright persecution. The casual hatred that was felt by so many fifteenth-century Italians, and that found expression in the art of Lorenzetti and Uccello, was shortly to metamorphose into something more chilling.

Thanks to the preaching of
Observant Franciscans like
Bernardino da Feltre, the prevalence of increasingly harsh anti-Semitism ensured that the limited tolerance of the past was replaced with a willingness to intimidate and humiliate Jews in an almost ritualized manner, and it became “fun” for Christians to torture the Jewish population in a grotesquely public fashion. Throughout the fourteenth century, for example,
Jews had been integral to the celebration of the annual Roman
carnevale
and had been obliged to pay a special tax in atonement for the betrayal and persecution of Christ. But by the second half of the fifteenth century, anti-Jewish sentiments were sufficiently high for Pope
Paul II to introduce an entirely new means of debasing the Jews into the carnival program in 1466. As the highlight of the five-hundred-meter races that were thenceforth held along the via Lata (now known as the
Corso, literally “the Race”), Romans were treated to a special competition specifically for Jews. The “competitors” were obliged to run barefoot, wearing only a thin vest resembling a modern T-shirt. To ensure that Christian onlookers found it suitably amusing, the Jews taking part were frequently force-fed for hours before the race so that they would end up being sick and possibly even collapsing. As the years went on, further innovations were introduced to heighten the “entertainment.” By the 1570s, as an English visitor later recorded, the Jews

runne starke naked … And all the way, [the Roman soldiers] gallop their great Horsses after them, and carie goades with sharpe pointes of steele … wherewith they will pricke the Iewes on the naked skin … [T]hen you shall see a hundred boyes, who have provided a number of Orrenges … [and] will … pelt the poor Iewe[s].

Worryingly, degrading episodes of public humiliation were just the thin end of the wedge.

Renaissance anti-Semitism was a powder keg, and it only took the smallest and most irrational of sparks to ignite a towering inferno of brutality. So intensive was the hysteria that had been stimulated by talk of strange rituals and heretical beliefs that violence was never very far from the surface of urban society, and Salomone was perhaps perversely fortunate that he lost only his fortune. But it was toward the end of the fifteenth century that the sporadic bursts of open aggression finally coalesced into a systematic pattern of persecution.

Shortly before Easter in 1475—that is, thirty-four years after Salomone’s trial—a two-year-old Christian lad named Simon suddenly went missing from his home in Trent. His family was hysterical, and a huge search was initiated. But when little Simon’s dead body was found in the cellar of a Jewish family’s home on Easter Sunday, what had already become a tragedy metamorphosed into violent madness. Accusations of what was known as
blood libel had been common in Europe since at least the early twelfth century, and having listened to a series of viciously anti-Semitic sermons delivered by
Bernardino da Feltre only
a few days before, Simon’s father came to the conclusion that his son had been kidnapped by Jews, killed, and drained of his blood to use in certain, unspecified Passover rituals. All too ready to believe his accusation as a result of the historical fears of ritualized murder by Jews and the virulent prejudices with which Bernardino da Feltre had filled their minds, the city authorities immediately instigated an anti-Semitic manhunt. Eighteen Jewish men and five Jewish women were arrested and charged with ritual murder. The men were then subjected to months of horrific torture until, unable to bear the pain any longer, they “confessed.” Thirteen of them were subsequently burned at the stake.

For his part, little Simon was later canonized, and the Church did its utmost to foster the growth of his cult. A spate of similar witch hunts against Jews up and down the Italian peninsula followed almost immediately. In common with many other cases of blood libel in earlier centuries (particularly in Germany), Simon’s “martyrdom” served to validate all of the fears that Observant
Franciscans like Bernardino da Feltre had been trying so hard to drum into a credulous populace, and effectively authorized the brutal and open persecution of the Jews. Indeed, the tragic story that unfolded in Trent was frequently commemorated in paintings and illustrations—for example,
Gandolfino di Roreto d’Asti’s
Martyrdom of Simon of Trent
(Israel Museum, Jerusalem)—as a means of ensuring that the perceived criminality of the Jewish “heretics” was ingrained in every Christian’s mind and in the hope of guaranteeing that anti-Semitism would almost be consecrated as an article of faith. Preemptive violence was viewed with a certain measure of knowing approval.

More thoroughgoing attempts to marginalize, contain, and even exterminate the perceived Jewish “threat” were in the air.
In the midst of the War of the League of Cambrai in 1516,
Venice—the most cosmopolitan city in Italy—declared that Jews were to be confined within a new ghetto, which was the first of its kind in Europe and still stands as a visible witness to what would become more than four hundred years of continuous persecution. This trend only grew worse. As cities throughout Italy followed Venice’s lead, Jews were expelled en masse from Naples in 1533. On Rosh Hashanah in 1553, all the copies of the
Talmud in Rome were burned in public. Having banned them from
all
professions,
Pope Paul IV used Jews as slave laborers in Rome, and as Luther’s pernicious treatise
On the Jews and Their Lies
(1543) began to
circulate, even those with protestant tendencies in Italy began to call for synagogues to be burned and Jewish houses to be destroyed.

Leaving the Palazzo Vecchio a ruined man,
Salomone di Bonaventura walked out into a city that was basking in the radiance of Renaissance culture. It was a bustling urban metropolis, made rich by commerce, thronging with immigrants, and pullulating with artists like
Filippo Lippi who were changing the world with their works. It was, moreover, the capital of a thriving territorial state that had gained much from cultural exchange between Jews and Christians. It would have been impossible not to have been dazzled by its sheer magnificence. But as Salomone’s trial had illustrated, it was also a city in which wanton prejudice was growing in step with artistic innovation. Tolerance was little more than a facade that was kept in place only insofar as it satisfied the self-interest of Christians. No matter how much Jews like Salomone brought to Florence, they were regarded with disdain, contempt, and outright hatred, forced to wear humiliating yellow signs, pushed to the margins of society, and persecuted with complete disregard for justice. Indeed, Florence even seemed to revel both in its hypocrisy and in its bigotry. Churches were packed with altarpieces that showed Jews as strange, foreign, and reprehensible, while the city’s monastic cloisters thronged with humanists who sucked Hebrew texts dry only so that their vitriolic pamphlets would meet with greater acclaim. In more senses than one, anti-Semitism was becoming an art form in Renaissance Florence.