May we properly speak of a “haskalah” in eighteenth-century Livorno? Can we find evidence for internalization of “gentile” norms and values or for a resulting struggle to legitimize “Jewish” knowledge? Can we find evidence for a breakdown in religious practice or for an ideologically justified secularization? Francesca Bregoli answers in the negative. She tells us about prominent “enlightened” Jews who acquired scientific knowledge and university training. She describes acculturation in the city's Jewish “high society” as evidenced by their private entertainments and in their love for theatre. And she documents economic and legal changes that opened up new opportunities for contact across religious boundaries in coffee houses and gambling dens. And yet, she tells us, the individual and collective identity of Livornese Jews remained stable. The shocks that led to the rejection of the Jewish religious leadership in central (and later, in eastern) Europe were absorbed and diffused by Livorno's commercial oligarchy and its large, wealthy, and collectively privileged community. “Livornese scholars,” Bregoli tells us, “did not yearn to creatively revisit Jewish culture in light of European ideas” (7–8). In the end, she feels, “Livornese Jews were oblivious to or actively ignored the maskilim's efforts in the 1780s” since they “had little reason to view Jewish life as being in need of improvement” (240). Even the response to liberalizing political and economic reforms was surprisingly negative: corporate status guaranteed by the sixteenth-century Medicean edict of tolerance was ultimately preferable to “French-style equality” (246).
Bregoli details her tale of modernization on two levels. First she focuses on enlightened individuals who acquired secular knowledge and had various degrees of access to the intellectual life of the outside society. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Joseph Attias. Bregoli builds on the discoveries of Lucia Frattarelli-Fischer to describe Attias's astonishingly large library of non-Jewish books, his contacts with important Tuscan and Italian Christian intellectuals, and the broad and “enlightened” range of his intellectual interests. Chapters 4 and 5 turn to medicine as a measure of modernization—its study, its professionalization, and its support through charitable confraternities. Describing the publications of several Jewish medical practitioners in the city, Bregoli weaves together reports of a major earthquake in 1742 and a model sermon composed for a bar-mitzvah boy in 1751 to paint a picture of modernizing ideas and new concepts intertwined with traditional practice.
Discussion of the confraternal organization of medical care leads the book from individual enlightenment to communal and structural aspects of modernization. Chapter 6 surveys government and communal regulation of coffee houses. (In Italy, it should be noted, these were often the site of alcoholic indulgence, gambling, and illicit sexual contacts.) Chapter 7 explores the licensing of Hebrew printing in Tuscany. In both areas Bregoli concentrates on licenses and legal monopolies, but also seeks evidence for new attitudes to leisure and socialization, interethnic contact, intellectual freedom from religious supervision, and increased cultural production as a result of the Lorraine government's liberalization of commercial policies. As noted, her account emphasizes the surprising absence of substantive change.
Finally, in the last chapters Bregoli examines Jewry policy in Livorno. She casts her investigative net widely: a witty French-language Livornese pamphlet on Lessing's play, Die Juden; debates over Jewish representation in municipal government under the liberalizing regime of Pietro Leopoldo; a court struggle over Jewish membership in a local academy tied to theatrical productions. Bregoli tries to identify the importance of “economic utility” for Jews’ legal status. Though acculturation, especially among wealthy Jews, is evident, here again Jews’ corporate privileges are so substantial as to work against efforts for individual rights and equality.
Bregoli should be commended for bringing these phenomena to the attention of the English-reading audience and moving Livorno to a more prominent position in the discussion of Jewish modernization. I do not think it an exaggeration to say that henceforth no synthetic or analytic treatment of Haskalah and Jewish modernization will be able to ignore this large and wealthy port community. But in a sense, Bregoli has opened up as many questions about Jewish cultural modernization as she has answered. The paradox of this book lies in its very success in challenging the supposed inevitability of religious and communal breakdown as a result of Enlightenment. What was it in the Livornese situation that made that community so successful at tolerating new ideas and resisting their broader impact? Did modernizing ideas themselves have a different valence in this Mediterranean and Catholic city than they had further north and east? How did the social and political realities of the small port neutralize the power of the new ideas that the foreign merchants brought along with their less “incendiary” trade goods? Bregoli's case studies challenge us to go beyond polarized dichotomies (traditional vs. enlightened; authoritarian vs. independent; communal vs. individual) in order to explore further the halakhic, kabbalistic, and poetic creativity of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Livorno.
To comprehend the cultural world of Joseph Attias, for example, we must remember that he was a ḥakham in Livorno, a respected member of its communal court, and an active halakhic judge who authored, or was signatory to, rabbinic responsa, at least some of which have survived. His library undoubtedly included a large number of Hebrew works whose titles we do not know only because they were not included in the sale catalog prepared for potential non-Jewish customers. When it came to critical scholarship Attias focused primarily not on natural science but on biblical studies and oriental languages. It is specifically in these fields that he wrote brilliant essays, as we hear from his Christian friend and admirer, Giovanni Alberto de Soria. The nature of Attias's enlightenment is difficult to assess unless contextualized by comparison with the careers and intellectual concerns of his rabbinic colleagues (Rephael Meldola, Joseph Ergas, Malakhi ha-Cohen, etc.), as amply documented in their published writings.
The complexity of Livornese Jewish culture at the time could have been investigated in other ways as well. Abraham de Bargas, treated for his views on the earthquake of 1742 and for his reworking of a Spanish-Christian pietistic narrative into a Jewish morality tale, was also the author of a substantial biblical commentary (Pensamientos sagrados y educciones morales, Florence: 1749) that Bregoli does not mention. Thanks to the anthologist Abraham Piperno (Kol ‘ugav [1846]), we know a great deal about the biography of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Castelli, whom Bregoli presents only briefly to suggest he rejected Wessely's campaign for curricular reform (even though he read Voltaire). She devotes more attention to the rabbi's eldest son Joseph, first as a medical student and then as a young doctor. Unmentioned is the fact that both men, and especially the father, were active Hebrew poets. Their poems, preserved and eventually published in Livorno, are marked by a positive attitude towards both secular and traditional learning as well as earnest calls for social and moral reform. Certainly not irrelevant is the fact that the two Italiani intellectuals shared an ambivalent, indeed an actively hostile, relation to the Sephardic Jewish leadership of the city, perhaps because both depended so heavily on communal support for their education and careers.
Bregoli has also left considerable room for further exploration of social realities and practical considerations shaping Jewish medical practice, coffee houses, printing businesses, theatre memberships, and the like. To note only one example, I suspect that the community's concern over coffee houses had more to do with the deleterious impact of gambling than with inter-religious socialization. (Livornese Jews had been frequenting non-Jewish taverns and hostels since their community was first founded, and the issues of social control described by Bregoli were by no means new ones for the massari.)
Bregoli's pioneering book has revealed that an eighteenth-century port community built upon international trade was also a meeting point for multiple cultural worlds. Building on the work of local scholars, she has opened the door wide to show us the extensive and innovative levels of cultural exchange possible in Livorno. She has challenged us to continue the investigation of this alternate path to modernity.
