ABSTRACT
This chapter is intended to provide a general picture of Italian Judaism in Early Modern Italy in terms of demography, geographical distribution, and legal status. Between the end of the 15th century and the first decades of the 16th century, close to 50,000 Jews lived across Italy. In those decades, the geography of the Jewish presence changed completely after the expulsions from the Iberian Peninsula and the arrival of the refugees in Italy, along with the disappearance of the settlements in the South, including Sicily. From that point on, all of the Jews concentrated in the small and large cities of central and northern Italy, from Rome on, where bankers practiced lending at interest (usury), regulated by contracts with the local authorities (the condotte). They were subject to the laws of the secular and ecclesiastical tribunals under whose dominion they lived, and so exposed to a plurality of jurisdictions, among which, starting in 1542, was the Roman Inquisition. The entanglement and competition between the different jurisdictions was actively exploited by the Jewish communities to negotiate and contain the interventions of the authorities.
