ABSTRACT
The common wisdom is that Roman Jewry in the early sixteenth century underwent a period of ethnic disorientation. Hundreds if not more of Sephardi Jews entered Rome about that time, bringing their customs and their recently assaulted pride. This assumed ethnic disorientation and the further presumed ethnic friction that was its alleged by-product has provided the grist for various studies. Attilio Milano presumed this friction to be the source of the division of Rome's Jewish council into Italiani and Ultramontani; Moses Avigdor Shulvass had reservations. Simon Schwartzfuchs devoted a long essay to the subject of ethnic feuding in the volume dedicated to the memory of Enzo Sereni. And Ariel Toaff used ethnic differences as the basis for his analysis of the Gemilut Hasadim confraternity in the sixteenth century, a thesis he has subsequently renewed in essays in the Storia degli ebrei edited by Corrado Vivanti and in the volume Oltre il 1492, which was volume 58 of the Rassegna Mensile di Israele. 1
This approach should be reconsidered. Ethnic differences there were, or at least friction between long-time residents and newcomers. But the dimensions and longevity of these frictions is another matter. First, therefore, some general observations and, then, to a more particularized study concerning the matter of inheritance, and to some extent guardianship, which will illustrate the larger point, that frictions large
or small were eventually submerged by a demonstrable need for amalgamation. In particular, by the 1540s, Jews of all stripes in Rome were devolving their property uniformly. A prime illustration is their resolution of the important question of the return of the dowry to her paternal family in the case of a wife's demise, and regardless of whether the late wife was Ashkenazi, Sephardi, or Italian in origin. A similar uniformity is observable with respect to women's rights of agency, whether as guardians or testators. In addition, communally appointed guardians, chosen to protect the best interests of minors, were named with apparently no regard for their ethnic origin. Driving this process were the exigencies of Jewish life in Rome, whose power was such that ethnic frictions, to the extent they once truly existed, were forced into the background, if not to dissolve.
