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Preachers of the Italian Ghetto

University of California Press

When in 1581 the English cleric Gregory Martin published his personal reflections on Rome, he singled out the Italian preachers whose activity he had observed:

And to heare the maner of the Italian preacher, with what a spirit he toucheth the hart, and moveth to compunction, (for to that end they employ their talke and not in disputinge matters of controversie which, god be thanked, there needeth not) that is a singular joy and a merveilous edifying to a good Christian man.1

Father Martin’s panegyric on the pleasure of listening to a moving sermon was surely not an atypical response to the phenomenon of preaching in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Hilary Smith remarks, the same scenario was reported all over Europe: “large congregations sitting (or standing) spellbound at the feet of a preacher who, by the sheer power of his eloquence and personal magnetism, was able to hold their attention for an hour or possibly longer.”2 Of course, the good friar meant Christian preachers and their sermons, those he seemed to encounter wherever he wandered in Rome: in the major churches, in the hospitals and convents, and even in the piazzas. There is no doubt that he also noticed a community of Jewish residents in the city of the popes during these meanderings. He acknowledges hearing “the voices of the holy preachers” in their regular weekly meetings with the Jews, exhorting them to convert to Christianity.3

One wonders if Father Martin could have also known that, besides that painful obligatory hour of Christian proselytizing to which the Jews of the Roman ghetto were subjected, they, too, willingly flocked to their own predicatori on Sabbaths and on special occasions. It was not uncommon for some curious Christians to be present in ghetto synagogues during the delivery of the sermon. The Jews, like the Jesuits Martin described, might have expounded in their own manner, of course, on “some good matter of edification, agreable to their audience, with ful streame of the plainest scriptures, and piked sentences of auncient fathers, and notable examples of former time, most sweetly exhorting to good life, and most terribly dehorting from al sinne and wickedness, often setting before them the paines of hel, and the joyes of Heaven.”4 Most probably, such a scenario was invisible to the pious Christian gentleman who, like many of his contemporaries, had little reason to intermingle with Jews in their own houses of worship, and who could not deem them worthy of his attention except as potential candidates for the baptismal font.

In reality, however, the period of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not only an age of the sermon for Catholics and Protestants but for Jews as well. Just as Christian preachers were increasingly committing their most effective homilies to print for an enthusiastic reading public, so their Jewish counterparts were similarly inclined to polish their oral vernacular sermons, to translate them into elegant Hebrew prose, and thus to satisfy the equally voracious appetite of their Hebrew reading public. In Italy, in Amsterdam, in the Ottoman empire, and in Eastern Europe, the Jewish preacher assumed a status unparalleled in any previous age, and the interest of a Jewish laity in hearing and reading sermons reached unprecedented heights.5 This new role of the darshan, the Jewish counterpart to the “sacred orator,” as mediator between Jewish elite and popular culture, effected through the edifying delivery and eventual diffusion of his printed sermons, undoubtedly closely approximates similar cultural patterns emerging throughout early modern Europe. Yet Jewish preachers and their sermons, particularly those emerging in the Italian ghetto, also reflect a cultural ambiance unique to Jews, emanating from the special characteristics of their cultural heritage and the specific circumstances of their social and political status in Italy.6

A book exclusively devoted to Jewish preachers and their sermons delivered in the Italian ghetto is surely a novelty even in our present day, one of dramatic proliferation of books on Jewish studies in Israel, the United States, and Europe. Indeed, with few exceptions, the historical study of Jewish homiletical literature in all periods, despite its centrality and pervasiveness within Jewish culture, is still in its infancy. Surely this deficiency follows the general pattern: the history of Catholic and Protestant preaching in early modern Europe still remains a relatively underdeveloped field. Whether the state of research on Jewish preaching is the same or worse is a matter of conjecture. What is clear, however, as Marc Saperstein amply relates in his essay below, is that even the major Jewish sermon collections in print have not been adequately studied. Thousands of sermons still in manuscript, primarily in Hebrew but also in Italian, have been almost completely neglected, and historians have only infrequently utilized this material in reconstructing the social and intellectual world of Italian Jewry in this period.

This modest volume does not purport to correct these deficiencies. It considers only a handful of well-known Italian preachers, and only a small sampling of their prodigious literary corpus. But as a beginning, it highlights several salient features of Jewish preaching within the context of the Italian ghetto in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and it attempts to extrapolate from this context something more about the nature of the Jewish cultural ambiance in general. Before introducing the larger social and cultural context of Jewish life in the ghetto period, and before highlighting some of the major themes discussed in the essays below, a few words of explanation about the genesis of this project are in order.

The idea of this book grew out of an invitation I extended to three scholars in the field of Renaissance and Baroque Italian Jewish intellectual and social history to join me at Yale in a faculty seminar during the spring of 1990 on the subject of Jewish preachers of the Italian ghetto. Moshe Idel, Robert Bonfil, and Joanna Weinberg graciously accepted my invitation. Each of us decided to select a distinguished preacher of the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century and to explore the larger Jewish cultural landscape of his age from the vantage point of his sermons. We had all written considerably on this period but had rarely approached our subject exclusively from the perspective of sermons and their cultural setting, and we had never worked in concert. We agreed not to impose on our sessions any defined agenda; each researcher would decide independently which features of the sermons to stress, whether their content or form, or both; their connection to larger cultural issues, to Jewish-Christian relations, to popular culture, to the diffusion of kabbalah, and so on. Each of us presented an original paper in the seminar and engaged in a most stimulating and fruitful discussion with the others and with other invited Jewish historians and colleagues at Yale. In addition, I invited Marc Saperstein, the author of a recent volume on Jewish preaching, to offer a general overview of our subject from the comparative perspective of preaching in other Jewish communities. Finally, I asked Elliott...