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This book explores two areas of interest: the Papal Inquisition in Modena and the status of Jews in an early modern Italian duchy. Its purpose is to deepen existing insights into the role of the former and thus lead to a better understanding of how an Inquisitorial court assumed jurisdiction over a practising Jewish community in the seventeenth century. The book highlights one specific aspect of the history of the Jews in Italy: the trials of professing Jews before the Papal Inquisition at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Inquisitorial processi against professing Jews provide the earliest known evidence of a branch of the Papal Inquisition taking judicial actions against Jews on an unprecedented scale and attempting systematically to discipline a Jewish community, pursuing this aim for several centuries. The book focuses on Inquisitorial activity during the first 40 years of the history of the tribunal in Modena, from 1598 to 1638, the year of the Jews' enclosure in the ghetto, the period which historians have argued was the most active in the Inquisition's history. It argues that trials of the two groups are different because the ecclesiastical tribunals viewed conversos as heretics but Jews as infidels. The book emphasizes the fundamental disparity in Inquisitorial procedure regarding Jews, as well as the evidence examined, especially in Modena. This was where the Duke uses the detailed testimony to be found in Inquisitorial trial transcripts to analyse Jewish interaction with Christian society in an early modern community.
_TextAll.indd 87 18/02/2011 14:22 88 a study of jewish offences enter without permission, is central to this study. Although there were fifty-two processi against Jews for hiring Christian servants in our period, only five concerned wetnurses. The positions of Christian wetnurses varied, and in each Jewish household different ages as well as different economic circumstances created diverse relationships between master and servant. Calman de Sanguinetti, a Jew prosecuted in one of these processi, had a large household of seventeen people. When a Christian wetnurse was
was Aron-Beller_01_TextAll.indd 125 18/02/2011 14:22 126 a study of jewish offences blurred by a secularizing process, whereby, as Michel Foucault has shown, rebellion against God was seen as disobedience to the state.4 Blasphemy, primarily a spiritual sin, developed into a civil crime, which on the basis of superstition and the need to control disruptive behaviour was seen as harmful to secular authority and became a civic obsession.5 It is not suprising then that accusations were laid before and prosecuted by both secular and ecclesiastical courts, since, as
Inquisition was re-established there had been no need to incorporate Jewish offences into its jurisdiction. Instead, Pope Paul IV (1555–59) insisted in a Papal bull of 1555, Cum nimis absurdum, that Jews throughout the Italian peninsula be separated from Christians by being forced to live in ghettos. In the course of the three sessions of the Council of Trent (1545–48, 1551–52, 1562–63), no new canons were issued on Inquisitorial authority over or procedure against Jews. But during the 1550s Marquardus de Susannis, the Udinese jurist, wrote De iudaeis et aliis infidelibus
blasphemy and its application to Jewish offences, see Chapter 3. c. The offence of sexual intercourse with a Christian had originally been discussed in the 1267 bull Turbato corde, reissued twice by later pontiffs in the course of the thirteenth century. See Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, Vol. 2, p. 15. Marquardus de Susannis wrote of sexual contact between a Christian and Jew endangering ‘the entirety of Christian society, not only the individual offender’. See Stow, Catholic Thought, pp. 105–6. d. See ASMoFIP 17 f.8, for the 1601 trial against Allegra, wife of