ABSTRACT
The city of Mantua’s Association of Jewish Culture in Italy (Associazione di Cultura Ebraica) makes use of an intriguing image for its website. The image, split into two sides, presents a silhouette of the cityscape of Mantua in the background. On the right-hand side, the text is in Hebrew, and on the left, in Italian. On the right-hand side the word Mantova (Mantua in Italian) in Hebrew is written as: man tova ir shel man, which translates to “Mantova, a city of good manna.” The play on the word man in Mantova refers to manna, the food nourishment God provided to the Israelites while they were wandering in the desert on their exodus from slavery in Egypt. This reference invokes the city of good manna as a nourishing, safe haven for Jews. On the left-hand side, Mantova is written in Italian, but the “Man” portion is spelled with Hebrew letters, which resemble their Italian counterparts. “La Città della mana buona” explains what the Hebrew lettering and the Hebrew text suggest: this is a refuge for Jews. There is truth in this statement. For Jews, beginning in the late Middle Ages, the Northern Italian city of Mantua and its surrounding regions known as the Mantovano, all under the rule of the Gonzaga Marques and later dukes, openly accepted Jews, allowing them to have work and protection in exchange for certain benefits that the Jews would provide for the rulers and for the people of the region. The Jewish community emblem indicates this symbiosis by stylistically drawing on Italian and Hebrew and fusing the two into a hybridized language in which Italian is written with Hebrew script. The hybridized use of languages is not original to Mantova: Sephardic (exiled from Spain) Jews developed Ladino as a language that fused Spanish and Hebrew, and the Ashkenazi (East European) community did the same with the language of Yiddish, which fused Hebrew and German and used Hebrew letters to write in a German dialect. The emblem, with its fusion of languages, calls attention to the symbiotic nature of the cultures who were cohabiting in Mantua and recalls the degree to which cultural production in this region was a product of this intermingling. Indeed, some of the arts created in Mantua fused languages in this manner. The work of the famous playwright Leone de’ Sommi often drew on both influences. In his bilingual poem “Magen Nashim” (In Defense of Women), de’ Sommi explicitly played with just how closely he could stitch together the two languages, cultures and worldviews when he ensnared his reader in the stanzas – right to left in Hebrew and then left to right in Italian, Hebrew and Italian puns mixed together to communicate to a bilingual audience and encourage a bicultural sensibility. 1
