ABSTRACT
The occasional presence of Jews in Venice prior to 1508 and to their segregation in the ghetto in 1516 remains a topic of unsure contours. 1 While Jewish merchants came and went and Jewish medical doctors can sometimes be found practising, the only sector of economic activity in which one can clearly define the periods and nature of the Jewish presence is that of moneylending. The prohibition of pawnbroking in Venice itself was a pluri-secular tradition. A Venetian law of 1254 forbade ‘manifest’ usury tout court in the city and in about 1301 Doge Pietro Gradenigo boasted that Venice and Venetians were more free of the taint of usury than other peoples 2 — and that in a period when the pawnbrokers were Christians and were relegated to nearby Mestre, then still foreign soil. In 1483, well over a century after Jews had been invited to lend money in Mestre and in many other cities and towns of the Veneto where they took the place of Christian usurers, Marin Sanudo wrote of the castle of Mestre: ‘Qui sta molti Zudei et à una bella sinagoga; et quivi se impegna, perchè Venitiani non vol Hebrei stagi a Veniexia’; and a decade later he again noted, with undisguised satisfaction, that Jews were prohibited from lending in Venice: ‘Et nota una eccellente cosa di Venetia che niun Zudio, sotto grandissime pene, puol tegnir banco d’imprestar qui a Venetia danari, ma ben a Mestre’. An anonymous French tract of about 1500 similarly points out that Jews did not live in Venice but in Mestre, where they lent at usury of 15 per cent on the security of pawns. The lenders were permitted to come to Venice periodically only to oversee the sale of unredeemed pawns left by Venetians, at auctions organized by the magistracy of the Sopraconsoli dei Mercanti? 3 The only period in the Middle Ages during which Jews were invited to lend in Venice, an exception to the rule, were the years of the economic crisis following the war of Chioggia, a short period of fifteen years, 1382-97, governed by two charters or condotte. That interlude has been studied primarily on the basis of laws and of notarial acts. 4 The scope of the present note is to add to the picture as it is known from the testimony of correspondence, business accounts, and criminal records on two unconnected themes, the dissatisfaction of the Jews in 1388-89 and their readiness to abandon Venice, and the intercultural tie between Venice and the Jews of Spain, victims of the ‘pogroms’ of 1391.
