Jews of Early Modern Venice

Robert C. Davis is an associate professor of Italian history at the Ohio State University. His publications include Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal, The War of the Fists, and (coedited with Judith Brown) Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy. Benjamin Ravid is Jennie and Mayer Weisman Professor of Jewish History at Brandeis University. He is the author of Economics and Toleration in Seventeenth Century Venice: The Background and Context of the Discorso of Simone Luzzatto.

• Contents and Contributors: Introduction, Robert C. Davis I. Settlement The Venetian Government and the Jews, Benjamin Ravid * The "City of the Jews," Donatella Calabi II. Ethnicities and Identities Jewish Banks and Monti di Pieta, Brian Pullan * Jews in International Trade: The Emergence of the Levantines and Ponentines, Benjamin Arbel * Jews, Crypto-Jews, and the Inquisition, Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini * The Ghetto Republic, David J. Malkiel * Jewish Women and Family Life, Inside and Outside the Ghetto, Howard Tzvi Adelman III. Cultures A Cultural Profile, Robert Bonfil * Medicine and Scientific Thought: The World of Tobias Cohen, David B. Ruderman * Jewish Musical Culture: Leon Modena, Don Harran * Processions, Piety, and Jewish Confraternities, Elliott Horowitz

[ The Jews of Early Modern Venice] is a particularly good study of how a minority group can fit into a general culture, yet retain its identity and develop new forms of culture. -- Donald B. Epstein History: Reviews of News Books The Jews of Early Modern Venice is a rich anthology of essays on ethinicity and identity, commerce and culture, and other matters relating to a time well before the great wooden gates of the ghetto of Venice were taken down. -- L. R. N. Ashley Bibliotheque d'Humanism et Renaissance [This volume] contributes to an enhanced understanding of the varied social groups, the traditions of faith and thought, and the art produced in the Venetian ghetto... These essays demonstrate the remarkable cultural and religious complexity of Jewish life in early modern Venice. -- Stephen D. Benin Religious Studies Review We have reason to welcome this collection of essays on the Jews of Venice... [ The Jews of Early Modern Venice] offers a unified portrait that poionts the way toward understanding modes of acculturation: how Jews might be insiders and outsiders at the same time. -- Kenneth Stow Renaissance Quarterly This unusually coherent collection of essays on the theme of Jewish community life in early modern Venice deserves a wide readership. -- John K. Brackett H-Net Reviews The essays in this fine volume are the result of years of intensive research of a diverse collection of source materials by a cadre of some of the most renowned scholars in numerous fields within the history of early modern Venice and early modern Judaism... The volume eloquently contextualizes the history and development of Jewish settlement in Venice and the role of the Jews in the broader city and its territories. -- Dean Phillip Bell Historian