| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Stefanie B. Siegmund. The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community. (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture.) Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 2006. Pp. xxiv, 624. $70.00.
This book's central argument is that the ghetto of Florence is to be perceived as an instrument of early modern state building. This squares with the argument already made that the Roman ghetto responded to both the civic and religious needs of the papal domains. Yet, as presented by Stefanie B. Siegmund, the thesis linking ghetto and state is forcefully articulated and thus merits careful attention.	1
The problem sixteenth-century rulers faced, as has been explained with respect to the Roman ghetto, is that the old medieval structures no longer worked. In a unified Catholic world, it had been possible "to retain and restrain" Jews by applying canon law without isolating them physically. The new, divided, post-Lutheran world, where religious lines had become commensurate with political ones, required a more radical solution. In the papal state, this was as part of a policy that perceived the ghetto as a limbo until the Jews converted. But Florence was not the papal state, and Cosimo de Medici, this new book argues, had no need fully to identify with papal aims, allowing him to bend papal policies to suit political ends. In Venice, fears of divine retribution, and the perception of the state as a religious body, were more evident in the decision, in 1516, to use the locale long known as the "ghetto" as a holding space.	2
Yet Siegmund admits that religious issues shaped the early modern state. Although she cogently presses her case about the civil state, her argument hesitates to say exactly how religious elements fit in. Similarly, the challenge is never openly expressed to the position taken nearly a century ago by Umberto Cassuto that Cosimo was out to appease the pope in order to be recognized as grand duke, a position Cassuto bolstered by pointing to Pius V's call for erecting ghettos throughout Italy. Cassuto's study as a whole is never directly engaged, and readers may wonder whether his thinking would be better modified rather than rejected. A close comparison of the clauses of the ducal order of ghettoization in 1570 with those in the bull Hebraeorum gens issued by Pius V in 1569, which expelled Jews from all parts of the papal state save Rome and Ancona (and the French papal domains), shows that the two texts are nearly identical, certainly more so than is acknowledged. A comparison of Cosimo's pursuit of Jewish bankers with the similar campaign of Paul IV that levied heavy fines on Jews for charging what the pope called "excessive interest" might also have been worthwhile. One could argue that both the popes and the Medici dukes were out to consolidate their states in an early modern atmosphere where the borders between religion and state were porous. But this would only make papal and ducal actions so much the more alike.	3
There is the matter of ius commune. Legal determinations based on this law, which were patently applied in the papal domains and no doubt present in Medici calculations, too, limited the state's dealings with Jews. As medieval and contemporary legists had repeatedly made clear, it was nearly impossible to expel Jews legally, at least not in their entirety. Ius commune also considered Jews cives, who were no less entitled to due legal process than they were subject to civil rules. Yet the recognition of this substratum is absent, removing ius commune as an important dimension in assessing overall policies, whether papal or ducal. The Medici are portrayed as initiating the formation of Jewish self-government. More likely, their insistence on rules and officials in the ghetto was intended to subordinate the Jews along the lines of ius commune's denial of true corporate status to the Jews. The popes, in Rome, did the same.	. . .

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