Customer Reviews

Love, Work, and Death: Jewish Life in Medieval Umbria

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This book is compelling social, cultural and economic history that reads like a novel. It is beautifully translated. An exciting, stimulating read.

Yes indeed, but not many! Not more than 500 people at any time in the period of this study, from the 14th to the early 16th Centuries, with the only large community in Perugia and with several smaller cities boasting just a single Jewish family. That amounts to less than 0.2% of the population of the province. Umbria was a portion of the Papal States, the region governed and taxed directly by the Vatican. As might be expected, Umbrian Jewry was an offshoot of the Roman Jewish community, with which it retained close ties, familial, economic, and cultural. Small as it was, Umbrian Jewry consituted a microcosm of the Italian Jewish world of the late Medieval era, and it left behind enough personal documents, civic records, and legal transcripts to form the basis of this careful, dispassionate study by professor Ariel Toaff. Examined from such an intimate, ground-level perspective, Toaff writes: "The picture of medieval Italian Jewry...is lively and varied: full of subtleties and contradictions and thus more difficult to interpret [than the standard historiography], but ultimately far more revealing. Here the moneylender is no longer the undisputed protagonist, but plays second lead; money is handled not only in banks, but in shops and worksplaces, at markets and fairs; and anti-semitism is hardly ever endemic..."

Some points I found interesting:

* The priories of towns and villages often recruited Jews who would lend money to the commune and facilitate marketplace financial transactions. Often such communes made special concessions to the Jews, and offered protections, to keep them in place.

* Italian Jews were ravenous carnivores. Of course, so were most Italians of any prosperity at all. But the Jews required very special circumstances to guarantee enough fresh meat to support their family diets, chiefly concerned with kosher ritual slaughter. This urgent need for meat was one of the limiting factors in Jewish settlement, and unfortunately one of the first areas of conflict that might arise with their Christian neighbors.

* Jews played significant roles in the cartage/transportation and shoe-making crafts as well as the more prominent businesses of banking, medicine, and cloth import/export.

* Inter-faith sexual activities were neither unknown nor especially horrifying to either side, but they were often cloaked behind fraudulent marriages of convenience.

* Wine played the biggest role in social contect between Jewish and Christian neighbors, especially because Jewish rituals concerning food made mealtimes unappropriate. Jewish wines were highly reputed.

* The Monti di Pieta lending institutions slowly emerged as the doom of Jewish banking on the small scale required by villages. That much I already knew; what I didn't know was the role of the Franciscans in the foundation and expansion of 'pawn shops' as a means of purging sommunities of the Jewish presence.

* Also as a result of the persistent antagonism of the Franciscans and other preaching friars, accusations of witchcraft, sacrilege, and ritual murder began to circulate in the middle of the period under study and swelled to a violent torrent of persecution by the 16th Century, leading eventually to Papal expulsion of the Jews from Umbria.

Thus we come to the aspect of Toaff's research which will discomfit more than a few readers: the suggestion that members of the Observant orders of Catholicism were the most virulent propagators of anti-semitism in communities that had previously enjoyed a measure of multi-cultural tolerance. I'll leave that thesis for the reader to confront, but I warn you Toaff's evidence will be hard to refute.

As a reading experience for arm-chair historians, among whom I proudly count myself, "Love, Work & Death" is first-rate, written and translated with a light academic touch, replete with anecdotes and picturesque details, sounds and scents, revealing the lives of everyday people in Orvieto, Todi, Spoleto, Assisi and all those lovely, rocky hill-towns of central Italy that so delight us tourists today.