Flora Cassen's excellent book revisits a familiar topic: the discriminatory marks that Jews were sometimes forced to wear or display in premodern Europe. Taking late medieval and early modern Italy as her test case, she shows how the subject is complicated and multifaceted. There was a variety of hats of different styles and colors; and there were badges and rings and other markings that varied according to time and place. Careful to avoid the temptations of anachronism and teleology, Cassen describes these markings as “complex devices,” rather than “one more example of a growing hatred of the Jews in Europe” (10).
The book's stated aim is to explore “what the Jews’ distinctive signs meant in a variety of contexts, how they molded Jews’ and Christians’ interactions with each other, and what [this] tells us about relationships between different groups in society” (2). The story Cassen tells is “not one of simple victimhood and suffering” (49). On the contrary, Marking the Jews in Renaissance Italy stresses Jews’ agency, and explains how they “used and refused sartorial devices to negotiate their place in society” (19). True, the Jewish badge did brand Jews as such; however, it was also a “remarkably complicated and flexible device of power and control” (10). Discriminatory marks functioned as a way for states to negotiate control, for Jews to resist or sidestep state pressure, and for rulers to enrich their treasuries. Cassen explains that a decree forcing Jews to wear a badge could have many results: these range from nothing, to the extraction of capital, to Jewish disobedience with or without legal repercussions (189).
The book has three main settings: the Duchy of Milan, the Republic of Genoa, and the Duchy of Piedmont-Savoy. Northern Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries presents a bewilderingly complicated mosaic of duchies, republics, and principalities. Making matters even less tractable, there was a constant and altering presence of foreign powers—Valois, Habsburg, and others—who laid claim to northern Italy's rich agricultural and commercial economy. Cassen avoids drowning readers in a deluge of political and administrative detail, but never oversimplifies her subject. The places she studies were host to very small Jewish settlements, which are understudied by historians of the Jews compared to more famous Italian cities like Rome, Venice, and Florence. The evidentiary base this book deals with is formidable: Cassen conducted archival research in at least four cities (Genoa, Milan, Turin, and Salamanca), in two countries (Italy and Spain), and works not only with Latin texts but with the unstandardized and shifting vernaculars of northern Italy and the Spanish empire. She's also in firm control of the multiple historiographies that help tell her story: premodern antisemitism, discrimination against religious minorities in Italy, French and Spanish imperial struggles, and, of course, the history of the Jews. Cassen has clearly mastered and integrated Italian and Spanish sources, both primary and secondary; she's comfortable chopping through the dense thicket of overlapping jurisdictions and political imbroglios that characterizes the setting of her book.
In Cassen's telling, the fall of independent northern Italian city-states to foreign powers had direct consequences for the Jews: once this occurred, during the first half of the sixteenth century, the Italian “ruling class tried to retain jurisdiction over the Jews as a way to cement its social and political authority” (190). Following regnant trends in Italian as well as anglophone historiography, this book argues that Jews, in essence, were better off before foreign powers intervened in peninsular affairs: the “complexity” of fifteenth-century Italian politics helped to preserve “the multiplicity of Jewish identity.” Centralization under Spanish or French control, however, tended to “occlude that multiplicity” (82). Furthermore, stricter enforcement of badge legislation fractured the Jewish community along class lines, since wealthier Jews could pay for exemptions and poorer Jews could not (87, 124). When Jews were allowed to maintain and project multiple identities, we learn, they fared better as individuals and communities, and suffered less from the tension born of socioeconomic inequalities.
The book is short (198 pages) and highly readable. There is little to no cumbersome jargon; the sentences are crisp and clear; scholarly interventions are presented respectfully and without rancor; and the argumentation of the book is sweetened and substantiated by a wealth of anecdotes drawn from archival sources. We meet physicians, lawyers, civil magistrates, Jewish community leaders—even a brave elderly Jewish woman who refuses to display an identifying mark. In short, Cassen excels at writing social history that is firmly rooted in the sources. At the same time, she doesn't shy away from taking on weighty issues such as whether or not the Jews were perceived as a “race” in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy—they were not.
Cassen demonstrates that the badge ultimately failed: the Jews could not be uniformly forced to outwardly display their faith and ethnicity. Among many other factors at play, Italian Christians’ views of Jews were too flexible. As long as some Christians welcomed Jews in their midst and were indifferent to their physical labelling, the badge was doomed to fail. No governing entity, religious or secular, could force its subjects to feel a certain way.
The press and its editors are to be commended for publishing a clear, readable text that is largely free from typographical errors. The book should be of interest to experts in medieval and early modern Jewish history, to Italian Renaissance historians, and to anyone curious about the intersection of fashion, theology, and society—a nexus pioneered, in Anglophone historiography, by Diane Owens Hughes's brilliant work. Anti-Jewish legislation and Jewish-Christian relations in early modern Italy are compelling subjects. Marking the Jews in Renaissance Italy is a valuable contribution to several fields, and has much to teach students of the premodern Jewish past.
