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Edward Goldberg shares his sensational discovery of the largest body of surviving correspondence from any Jew in Early Modern Europe. Over the course of six years, Benedetto Blanis -- a scholar and entrepreneur in the Florentine Ghetto -- wrote nearly 200 letters to his princely patron Don Giovanni dei Medici. For the first time, these letters are available in a definitive critical edition -- with full transcriptions in the original Italian, English language summaries, and explanatory notes. This book is a companion volume to Jews and Magic in Medici Florence, in which Goldberg narrates Blanis's startling rise and fall. Readers can now take a step closer and hear Blanis's compelling story in his own words -- tracing his fraught relations with Jews and Christians, his desperate (and often illegal) business schemes, his disastrous strategies for advancement at the Medici Court, and his pursuit of arcane knowledge, including astrology, alchemy, and Kabbalah.
In the seventeenth century, Florence was the splendid capital of the Medici Grand Dukedom of Tuscany. Meanwhile, the Jews in its tiny Ghetto struggled to earn a living by any possible means, especially loan-sharking, rag-picking and second-hand dealing. They were viewed as an uncanny people with rare supernatural powers, and Benedetto Blanis—a businessman and aspiring scholar from a distinguished Ghetto dynasty—sought to parlay his alleged mastery of astrology, alchemy and Kabbalah into a grand position at the Medici Court. He won the patronage of Don Giovanni dei Medici, a scion of the ruling family, and for six tumultuous years their lives were inextricably linked. Edward Goldberg reveals the dramas of daily life behind the scenes in the Pitti Palace and in the narrow byways of the Florentine Ghetto, using thousands of new documents from the Medici Granducal Archive. He shows that truth—especially historical truth—can be stranger than fiction, when viewed through the eyes of the people most immediately involved.
Edward Goldberg shares his sensational discovery of the largest body of surviving correspondence from any Jew in Early Modern Europe. Over the course of six years, Benedetto Blanis — a scholar and entrepreneur in the Florentine Ghetto — wrote nearly 200 letters to his princely patron Don Giovanni dei Medici. For the first time, these letters are available in a definitive critical edition — with full transcriptions in the original Italian, English language summaries, and explanatory notes. This book is a companion volume to Jews and Magic in Medici Florence, in which Goldberg narrates Blanis's startling rise and fall. Readers can now take a step closer and hear Blanis's compelling story in his own words — tracing his fraught relations with Jews and Christians, his desperate (and often illegal) business schemes, his disastrous strategies for advancement at the Medici Court, and his pursuit of arcane knowledge, including astrology, alchemy, and Kabbalah.
This book explores the decision of Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici to create a ghetto in Florence, and explains how a Jewish community developed out of that forced population transfer.
The Medici Archive Project Inc. highlights Jewish history and culture in the Tuscany region of Italy during the two centuries of Medici rule (1537-1743). The project states that the Jewish people prospered when favored by the Medicis. In the 1590s, many Jewish merchants settled in Livorno, Italy, having been granted free residence and extensive self-government by Ferdinand I de' Medici (1549-1609), the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Livorno soon became an important center of commerce.
Dana E. Katz reveals how Italian Renaissance painting became part of a policy of tolerance that deflected violence from the real world onto a symbolic world. While the rulers upheld toleration legislation governing Christian-Jewish relations, they simultaneously supported artistic commissions that perpetuated violence against Jews.
The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence is a work about Italian Jews, Christians, and the institutions and policies that organized their relationship. It sets the 1570 decision of the Medici government to ghettoize the Jews of Tuscany in the context of early modern statecraft and in the climate of the Catholic (or Counter-) Reformation. While readers have had access to studies of the ghettos of Rome and Venice, this is the first study of the Jews of Tuscany available in English, and the first and only study of the Florentine ghetto based on sustained archival research. The story of the forced ghettoization of Tuscan Jews allows the author to explore the "spatialization of power," the construction of Jewish community, and the reorganization of gender roles, leading to three broad arguments of great significance to readers interested in Italian history, Jewish history, urban history, and the history of women.
Mining the rich documentary sources housed in Tuscan archives and taking advantage of the breadth and depth of scholarship produced in recent years, the seventeen essays in this Companion to Cosimo I de' Medici provide a fresh and systematic overview of the life and career of the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, with special emphasis on Cosimo I's education and intellectual interests, cultural policies, political vision, institutional reforms, diplomatic relations, religious beliefs, military entrepreneurship, and dynastic concerns. Contributors: Maurizio Arfaioli, Alessio Assonitis, Nicholas Scott Baker, Sheila Barker, Stefano Calonaci, Brendan Dooley, Daniele Edigati, Sheila ffolliott, Catherine Fletcher, Andrea Gáldy, Fernando Loffredo, Piergabriele Mancuso, Jessica Maratsos, Carmen Menchini, Oscar Schiavone, Marcello Simonetta, and Henk Th. van Veen.