Preachers Of The Italian Ghetto

By the middle of the sixteenth century, Jews in the cities of Italy were being crowded into compulsory ghettos as a result of the oppressive policies of Pope Paul IV and his successors. Forced to listen to Christian preachers seeking their conversion, they flocked to hear the Jewish preachers who regularly delivered sermons designed to uplift and educate them. The sermons of these Jewish preachers provide a remarkable vantage point from which to view the Jewish social and cultural landscape of the early modern period. Exploring the fraction of this vast literature that remains to us and that has been generally neglected, six leading scholars of Italian Jewish cultural history find treasures of information and insight. Their essays show how, in various times and places, a number of ghetto preachers interpreted reality for their constituencies. They illuminate from varying perspectives the transformation of Italian Jewish culture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century; the adjustment of a beleaguered but proud minority to its ghetto segregation; the openness of Jews and their surprising appropriations of the regnant cultural tastes of the surrounding society; and the restructuring of thought processes, ritual practices, and social organization engendered by the new urban neighborhoods. What was the role of the preacher as a shaper of Jewish culture? How did he present his ideas to the audience? In what way did he serve as a bridge between the ghetto and the world outside, between old and new conventions, and between elite and popular modes of thought? Judah Moscato in Mantua, Judah del Bene in Ferrara, Azariah Figo in Pisa and Venice, Leon Modena in Venice, Samuel Judah Katzenellenbogen in Padua, Abraham of Sant'Angelo in Bologna, and Isaac de Lattes in Mantua, Venice, and elsewhere are the rabbis whose published sermons the authors investigate. Among the subjects they consider are the influences of Renaissance and Baroque thinking on the content and style of the sermons, the interplay of ideas and speaking techniques with the Christian world, the "popularization" of the kabbalah, and the eulogy as a successful new form of sermon in Jewish society. The story of how these preachers reflected and shaped the culture of their listeners, who felt the pressure of cramped urban life as well as political, economic, and religious persecution, is finally beginning to be told.

From Ghetto to Glory is a biographical story of a boy raised in dysfunction, prophesied to be a failure before he could finish school. Its about a boy who suffered beatings for his faith and dismissed from his family because he chose Christ over the religion of his father. The story is somewhat graphic, but the pain in each page culminates in a glory unexpected by the reader. Read the book and walk with Bishop Ellis from water to solid ground, and you will appreciate his need to praise God at every circumstance. You may just find yourself praising God along with him.

Judah ben Joseph Moscato (c.1533–1590) was one of the most distinguished rabbis, authors, and preachers of the Italian-Jewish Renaissance. This volume is a record of the proceedings of an international conference organized in Mantua and consists of contributions on Moscato and his intellectual world.

Printed editions of midrashim, rabbinic expositions of the Bible, flooded the market for Hebrew books in the sixteenth century. First published by Iberian immigrants to the Ottoman Empire, they were later reprinted in large numbers at the famous Hebrew presses of Venice. This study seeks to shed light on who read these new books and how they did so by turning to the many commentaries on midrash written during the sixteenth century. These innovative works reveal how their authors studied rabbinic Bible interpretation and how they anticipated their readers would do so. Benjamin WIlliams focuses particularly on the work of Abraham ben Asher of Safed, the Or ha-Sekhel (Venice, 1567), an elucidation of midrash Genesis Rabba which contains both the author's own interpretations and also the commentary he mistakenly attributed to the most celebrated medieval commentator Rashi. Williams examines what is known of Abraham ben Asher's life, his place among the Jewish scholars of Safed, and the publication of his book in Venice. By analysing selected passages of his commentary, this study assesses how he shed light on rabbinic interpretation of Genesis and guided readers to correct interpretations of the words of the sages. A consideration of why Abraham ben Asher published a commentary attributed to Rashi shows that he sought to lend authority to his programme of studying midrash by including interpretations ascribed to the most famous commentator alongside his own. By analysing the production and reception of the Or ha-Sekhel, therefore, this work illuminates the popularity of midrash in the early modern period and the origins of a practice which is now well-established-the study of rabbinic Bible interpretation with the guidance of commentaries.

Musical culture in Jewish communities in early modern Italy was much more diverse than researchers originally thought. An interdisciplinary reassessment, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy evaluates the social, cultural, political, economic, and religious circumstances that shaped this community, especially in light of the need to recognize individual experiences within minority populations. Contributors draw from rich materials, topics, and approaches as they explore the inherently diverse understandings of music in daily life, the many ways that Jewish communities conceived of music, and the reception of and responses to Jewish musical culture. Highlighting the multifaceted experience of music within Jewish communities, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy sheds new light on the place of music in complex, previously misunderstood environments.

Analysing well-known Hebrew medieval poets from a new, refreshing standpoint and focusing on less known authors and periods, this book shows the maturity of the research in this field. Written in English (and French) the articles make the Hebrew texts more easily available to scholars of comparative literature.

This book discusses more general consideration of marginalized urban spaces and peoples around the globe. It considers the question: Is the formation and later dissolution of the Jewish ghetto an appropriate model for understanding the experience of other ethnic or racial populations?

Socrates, Or On Human Knowledge, published in Venice in 1651, is the only work written by a Jew that contains so far the promise of a genuinely sceptical investigation into the validity of human certainties. Simone Luzzatto masterly developed this book as a pièce of theatre where Socrates, as main actor, has the task to demonstrate the limits and weaknesses of the human capacity to acquire knowledge without being guided by revelation. He achieved this goal by offering an overview of the various and contradictory gnosiological opinions disseminated since ancient times: the divergence of views, to which he addressed the most attention, prevented him from giving a fixed definition of the nature of the cognitive process. This obliged him to come to the audacious conclusion of neither affirming nor denying anything concerning human knowledge, and finally of suspending his judgement altogether. This work unfortunately had little success in Luzzatto’s lifetime, and was subsequently almost forgotten. The absence of substantial evidence from his contemporaries and that of his epistolary have thus increased the difficulty of tracing not only its legacy in the history of philosophical though, but also of understanding the circumstances surrounding the writing of his Socrates. The present edition will be a preliminary study aiming to shed some light on the philosophical and historical value of this work’s translation, indeed it will provide a broader readership with the opportunity to access this immensely complicated work and also to grasp some aspects of the composite intellectual framework and admirable modernity of Venetian Jewish culture in the ghetto.

The volume explores the stone carved shrines for the scrolls of the Mosaic Law from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century synagogues in the former Polish Kingdom. Created on the margin of mainstream art and at a crossroad of diverse cultures, artistic traditions, aesthetic attitudes and languages, these indoor architectural structures have hitherto not been the subject of a monographic study. Revisiting and integrating multiple sources, the author re-evaluates the relationship of the Jewish culture in Renaissance Poland with the medieval Jewish heritage, sepulchral art of the Polish court and nobles, and earlier adaptations of the Christian revival of classical antiquity by Italian Jews. The book uncovers the evolution of artistic patronage, aesthetics, expressions of identities, and emerging visions among a religious minority on the cusp of the modern age.

Drawing from Hebrew civil documents, a U. of Haifa authority on Italian Jews applies his "social theater" concept to explain how Roman Jews survived 300 years of enforced ghetto living. Stow also touches briefly upon modern American Jewish and African American life. Includes period and modern Roman ghetto area illustrations. Based on lectures at Smith College in 1996. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR