4: The Myth of Politics in the Jewish Communities of the Italian City-States

Abstract

In 1638, the Venetian rabbi Simone (Simḥah) Luzzatto described the Jewish nation as “a nation incapable of any form of political governance while they are in their current state, [and] so preoccupied [...] with their particular predicament that they fail to take any interest in the universal.”1 A marginal group so completely removed from power and confined to a narrow range of economic activities could hardly concern itself with “the universal.” At an intellectual level, this meant that the Jews had difficulty thinking of the political and social reality of their society as a whole—beyond the confines of the Jewish community—and analyzing these concepts. And yet, as we shall see, between the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries, a few Italian Jews applied themselves to this task, producing interesting works which attempted to represent the universal from the perspective of the particular. During that period, the Italian peninsula was a sort of experimental laboratory for new political ideas and practices. For centuries, its strong commercial, industrial, and financial performance, combined with its almost chronic institutional instability and the extreme political fragmentation of its territory, had laid the ground for major breakthroughs in political thought. In this country, Jews could not truly be said to be foreigners, as their presence predated the fall of the kingdom of Judea. Nonetheless, being well-established had not prevented them from remaining marginalized, as Italy had never had more than 50,000 Jews, and their involvement in its public sphere was very limited. Indeed, even during the period of integration, it was inconceivable that the Jews might actively participate in Italian politics.