ABSTRACT
Mediterranean and European diasporas and changing urban dynamics created new interfaith configurations, reinforced older ones, and generated new responses to non-Christian minorities in early modern cities. This essay examines reformations in interfaith relations at Florence by examining how Jews and Christians negotiated urban space and residence prior to the building of the Ghetto in 1571. By the late 1560s, in contrast to an earlier pattern of marginalization, Jewish settlement concentrated at the Old Market in the city centre, an area affiliated with crime, prostitution, and animal husbandry, and the location where the Medici dukes would locate the Ghetto in 1571. These patterns were at once a function of long-lived discourses about Jews as abject and polluted and the result of a pronounced effort on the part of the Medici Dukes to reshape the city and its spaces.
