The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence PDF Download

Author: Stefanie Beth Siegmund
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804750783
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 656

View

Book Description
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.

Author: Edward L. Goldberg
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442613335
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

View

Book Description
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.

Author: David J. Wertheim
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9052603871
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

View

Book Description
This study explores the shifting boundaries and identities of historic and contemporary Jewish communities. The contributors assert that, geographically speaking, Jewish people rarely lived in ghettos and have never been confined within the borders of one nation or country. Whereas their places of residence may have remained the same for centuries, the countries and regimes that ruled over them were rarely as constant, and power struggles often led to the creation of new and divisive national borders. Taking a postmodern historical approach, the contributors seek to reexamine Jewish history and Jewish studies through the lens of borders and boundaries.

Author: Dana E. Katz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316738566
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 203

View

Book Description
Dana E. Katz examines the Jewish ghetto of Venice as a paradox of urban space. In 1516, the Senate established the ghetto on the periphery of the city and legislated nocturnal curfews to reduce the Jews' visibility in Venice. Katz argues that it was precisely this practice of marginalization that put the ghetto on display for Christian and Jewish eyes. According to her research, early modern Venetians grounded their conceptions of the ghetto in discourses of sight. Katz's unique approach demonstrates how Venice's Jewish ghetto engaged the sensory imagination of its inhabitants in complex and contradictory ways that both shaped urban space and reshaped Christian-Jewish relations.

Author: Flora Cassen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107175437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235

View

Book Description
This book examines the discriminatory marking of Jews in Renaissance Italy and the impacts this had on the Jewish communities.

Author: Caroline P. Murphy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199839896
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

View

Book Description
In Murder of a Medici Princess, Caroline Murphy illuminates the brilliant life and tragic death of Isabella de Medici, one of the brightest stars in the dazzling world of Renaissance Italy, the daughter of Duke Cosimo I, ruler of Florence and Tuscany. Murphy is a superb storyteller, and her fast-paced narrative captures the intrigue, the scandal, the romantic affairs, and the violence that were commonplace in the Florentine court. She brings to life an extraordinary woman, fluent in five languages, a free-spirited patron of the arts, a daredevil, a practical joker, and a passionate lover. Isabella, in fact, conducted numerous affairs, including a ten-year relationship with the cousin of her violent and possessive husband. Her permissive lifestyle, however, came to an end upon the death of her father, who was succeeded by her disapproving older brother Francesco. Considering Isabella's ways to be licentious and a disgrace upon the family, he permitted her increasingly enraged husband to murder her in a remote Medici villa. To tell this dramatic story, Murphy draws on a vast trove of newly discovered and unpublished documents, ranging from Isabella's own letters, to the loose-tongued dispatches of ambassadors to Florence, to contemporary descriptions of the opulent parties and balls, salons and hunts in which Isabella and her associates participated. Murphy resurrects the exciting atmosphere of Renaissance Florence, weaving Isabella's beloved city into her story, evoking the intellectual and artistic community that thrived during her time. Palaces and gardens in the city become places of creativity and intrigue, sites of seduction, and grounds for betrayal. Here then is a narrative of compelling and epic proportions, magnificent and alluring, decadent and ultimately tragic.

Author: Hasia R. Diner
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496206118
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 378

View

Book Description
The history of the Jewish people has been a history of migration. Although Jews invariably brought with them their traditional ideas about food during these migrations, just as invariably they engaged with the foods they encountered in their new environments. Their culinary habits changed as a result of both these migrations and the new political and social realities they encountered. The stories in this volume examine the sometimes bewildering kaleidoscope of food experiences generated by new social contacts, trade, political revolutions, wars, and migrations, both voluntary and compelled. This panoramic history of Jewish food highlights its breadth and depth on a global scale from Renaissance Italy to the post–World War II era in Israel, Argentina, and the United States and critically examines the impact of food on Jewish lives and on the complex set of laws, practices, and procedures that constitutes the Jewish dietary system and regulates what can be eaten, when, how, and with whom. Global Jewish Foodways offers a fresh perspective on how historical changes through migration, settlement, and accommodation transformed Jewish food and customs.

Author: Benedetto Blanis
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442643838
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

View

Book Description
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.

Author: Benjamin J. Kaplan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000922189
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

View

Book Description
This book examines the practice of toleration and the experience of religious diversity in the early modern world. Recent scholarship has shown the myriad ways in which religious differences were accommodated in the early modern era (1500–1800). This book propels this revisionist wave further by linking the accommodation of religious diversity in early modern communities to the experience of this diversity by individuals. It does so by studying the forms and patterns of interaction between members of different religious groups, including Christian denominations, Muslims, and Jews, in territories ranging from Europe to the Americas and South-East Asia. This book is structured around five key concepts: the senses, identities, boundaries, interaction, and space. For each concept, the book provides chapters based on new, original research plus an introduction that situates the chapters in their historiographic context. Early Modern Toleration: New Approaches is aimed primarily at undergraduate and postgraduate students, to whom it offers an accessible introduction to the study of religious toleration in the early modern era. Additionally, scholars will find cutting-edge contributions to the field in the book’s chapters.

Author: Kathleen Comerford
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004300570
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 332

View

Book Description
In Jesuit Foundations and Medici Power, 1532-1621 Kathleen M. Comerford traces the rise of the Medici Grand Dukes and three Jesuit colleges in Tuscany. The book focuses on church/state cooperation in an age in which both institutions underwent significant changes.