A list of Jewish communities in Italy, 1671

The Universal History devotes a whole section to the “Dispersion of the Jews”. Below is a snapshot of communities in Italy. This might be limited to Spanish and Portuguese, excluding the indigenous Italian Jews.

"The reader may further consult the last will of Zachariah a Porto, a rich Jewish merchant of Urbino, that died at Florence, an. 1671, after he had compiled a concordance on the comments of the thalmud, which he left at his death to the rabbies at Rome, and his library to the academy of it. He bequeathed moreover 24,000 piastres to his nation; one-fourth part of which he divided between the academies of Leghorn, Venice, Jerusalem, and of the Holy Land. The other 18,000 piastres were to be distributed to serve for dowry to the Jewish daughters of the synagogues of Rome, Ferrara, Ancona, Urbino which was his native place, Pesaro, Cesano, Venice, Padua, Verona, Rovigo, Florence, Siena, Pisa, Leghorn, Mantua, Modena, and Reggio; which shews how numberous they are still in Italy."

The modern part of an universal history. 1759. Page 409

Jews of Venice, 1766

“There are about 4000 Jews, who have seven synagogues, and live at the farther end of the city in three ghetto or streets, which are shut up, each with two gates.”

Source: John Northall. Travels through Italy. 1766.

Patras and the Albanian trade, 1813

At various points Patras, situated on the northern Peloponnese on the Gulf of Corinth was ruled by the Genoese and Venetians. Apart from 1687–1715, when the Venetians re-established themselves, this area was ruled by the Turks and their vassals. Possibly the Jews arrived during the Venetian rule and remained.

"Patras is governed by a bey, subject to the pasha of the Morea; the town contains a great number of Jews, who are the principal commercial agents; almost all business in this way passes through their hands. France names a commercial agent who receives no salary, but all ships of the country which stop here make him some present; they also pay an anchorage, though it cannot be exacted. The drogmans are all Jews, who eagerly seek after an office which they know very well how to turn to a good account. To judge by one of these good people, by name Solomon, they do no great honour to the languages they pretend to speak: the French, as he called it, which he spoke was a terrible mix of the Provençal and Barbary languages, pronounced with so strange and discordant an accent, that it was no very easy matter to comprehend what he meant to say."

Pouqueville comments that French trade has done very well in Albania over the preceding ten years. The merchants of Ancona and Sinigaglia pass their shoddy products off as French. While the locals still prefer Venetian-supplied muskets from Brescia to the French product, the Jews can’t compete with the French. I suspect the situation changed within the year once formerly embargoed British products entered the market.

François Charles Hugues Laurent Pouqueville. Travels in the Morea, Albania, and other parts of the Ottoman empire. 1813

Livorno

On 10 June 1593 Jews received rights in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. In showing the Jews more respect than their rival states, the Medici attracted Jewish settlement and commerce to the city of Livorno (then called Leghorn in English). Tuscany quickly became a player in the East-West Mediterranean trade that had formerly been dominated by Genoa and Venice. Regardless of who dominated the seas – Dutch, French or English – the trade still flowed.

I used to think that the decline of this trade was a consequence of all the wars. The Mediterranean was no longer safe for shipping. I begin to wonder if the absolute and relative economic decline of the Ottoman Empire was the real cause. Once, spices and other exotic items came from the eastern Mediterranean. By the 18th Century there were trade routes that circumvented the Ottoman Empire. Perhaps the defeat at Vienna in 1683 marked the moment at which the Turks went into decline. Economic growth in Europe and new markets in the Americas and Asia meant that the Turkish trade became a backwater. For Jews, who operated as middlemen in this trade, the options were to accept this change in circumstances or leave. The Jews of Livorno lived by this trade. Certainly a number of Livornese Jews moved to Amsterdam and London in the late 17th and early 18th Centuries. Others seem to have moved to Arab ports such as Alexandria or Tunis, perhaps to use their skills in the local market.

Maybe the last gasp of Livorno as a major port was the Napoleonic Wars. I have seen that Tunis was France’s main market in Africa, and it seems likely that (notwithstanding the British naval blockade) much of this trade passed through Livorno.

The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was overrun by the French revolutionary armies in 1799. It was then abolished. Between 1801 and 1807, Livorno was part of the short-lived Kingdom of Etruria, a French client-state. That state was then abolished, and territory became part of metropolitan France. Livorno was made capital of the new département of Méditerranée which, incidentally, included the island of Elba to which Napoleon was exiled in 1814.

The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was reconstituted after Napoleon’s defeat. The Government was overthrown by a popular revolution in 1859. Livorno was briefly part of the short-lived United Provinces of Central Italy, but voted for annexation by Piedmont-Sardinia in 1860. Italy was unified around Piedmont-Sardinia. With Italian unification, Livorno became just one of many Italian ports.

The image of Livorno above is somewhat romanticised, but note the two men in the right foreground. One merchant is in European dress and the other oriental.

Judeo-Spanish Balkans, 1849

A report from a Mr Parsons, quoted by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1849. I suspect the respondent may be the Rev. Justin W. Parsons who was resident with his wife in Salonica.

The report suggests that Spanish was the Jewish culture in the Balkans, except in those territories that had been long held by the Austrian Hapsburgs.

The Jews of Seres [Serres, Greece], as also those of the other cities of Macedonia, and of the cities of Bulgaria, Servia [Serbia] and Wallachia [more or less southern Romania] seem to have gone forth originally from Salonica. They have the same language [Spanish]; while the Jews of the southern provinces speak Greek. But all have the same blind submission to the rabbies, the same prejudices, the same evasions of the truth, the same subterfuge. “Gold is their god, and traffic is their religion,” one would say who should meet them only in their fair. But in their prayers, and their observance of the Sabbath, the Deceiver causes them to appear, to themselves at least, devout and holy, separate from all the nations, the favorites of heaven.

Parsons perhaps overlooks the former influence of Spanish Jewish communities in what were Venetian enclaves along the Adriatic coast.

Jews of Split, Dubrovnik and Kotor - remnants of Venice's Adriatic empire - in 1844

Sir John Gardner Wilkinson, F.R.S., later described as "the Father of British Egyptology", travelled down the Adriatic coast of what is now Croatia and Montenegro in 1844. The ports along the coast had formerly guarded Venice’s trade route to the East. By the time Gardner Wilkinson visited the Venetian Empire was long gone. In passing he mentions remnant Jewish communities in Split, Dubrovnik and – possibly – Kotar. A little over 500 Jews remained in these towns, stranded by history.

In 1833 there were reported to be 510 Jews in the Circoli of Dalmatia. These were mainly Spanish and lived at Spalato [Split] and Ragusa [Dubrovnik]. Today these cities are in Croatia. Formerly they had been Venetian colonies. By 1844 their numbers had reduced to 483.

“The inhabitants of Spalato are nearly all Roman Catholics; but some are of the Greek church, and thirteen are Protestants. There are also about three hundred and twenty Jews, many of whom wear the turban and oriental costume; and in place could a better study for Shylock be found than at Spalato [Thanks!]. They are mostly descendants of the Jews who were expelled from Spain, in 1493 [sic], and who established themselves in Smyrna, Salonica, and other places in Europe and Asia. One colony then settled at Spalato, notwithstanding the rigid restrictions imposed upon them by the Venetians, who obliged them to live in a particular part of the town, as at Venice, called the Ghetto. The same name is applied to the Jews’ quarter at Rome, to which they are confined even at the present day, as in the East; though the present enlightened Pope intends to remove the restriction. To the credit of the Austrians, it has long been abolished in Dalmatia, where the Jews enjoy the same privileges, as in the most civilised towns of Europe.”

Ragusa is reported to be in a reduced state with a total population of only 6,318, of whom 146 were Jews.

Gardner Wilkinson reports that there was a Spanish-Jewish cemetery near Castel Nuovo which is the largest town, but not the capital of the Circoli of Cattara [today Kotor in Montenegro], which was another Venetian outpost on the Adriatic. The commune of Cattaro had a population of 3,550 which included just nine Jews.

Source: Sir John Gardner Wilkinson, F.R.S., Dalmatia and Montenegro: with a journey to Mostar in Herzegovina, and remarks on the Slavonic nations; The History of Dalmatia and Ragusa; the Uscocs; &c. &c. Vol 1 (of 2). Published by John Murray, London, 1848.

There is more information on the Republic of Ragusa on my Jewish Genealogy website.

Jews in the Ionian Free States, 1850s

The Ionian Islands had been a Venetian outpost for almost five hundred years. They fell to France when Napoleon occupied Venice in 1797. They were briefly occupied by the Russians before being returned to France in 1807. The British took the islands in 1809. Once Greece became independent in 1830 the Greek islanders wanted to join that country, which did not actually happen until 1862.

The report below is from the last days of British rule. No longer on one of the world’s major trade routes, between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, bullied by the majority Greek population and perhaps aware the British are leaving, the small Jewish community was in a sorry state.

Mr. Chazan spoke of the very sad condition of the Jews in the Ionian Free States. There were four thousand of them in Corfu, and two thousand in the Island of Zante. Most of them are engaged in trade; only a few support themselves as mechanics. Scarcely any of them are in comfortable circumstances, and notwithstanding the proud title, Ionian Free States, and the Protectorate of England, they neither enjoy liberty not are they free from oppression.

Jewish children are mocked at in the schools, girls altogether excluded. The Jews of Zante had just drawn up a representation to the Government, begging that their deplorable social condition might be ameliorated.
…

“Better a learned heather than a high priest who is an idiot,” quoted Mr. Chazan, from the Talmud.

Source: The Jews of the East, written by Dr. Ludwig August Frankl, an Austrian doctor, and translated by Rev. P. Beaton in 1859

Jews in the Mediterranean, 1818

Letter from Rev. William Jowett to the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews. Malta, August 4, 1818. I think he gives at interesting insight into the state of Jewish communities in the Mediterranean at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

“When I was at Corfu, in the autumn of 1816, I was very intimate with the most learned of the Jews in those parts, rabbi Lazzaro Mordos. He is an old man, nearly blind, and quite deaf, a physician; … He has no Hebrew books of English typography. For this part of the world, Venice formerly, but latterly Vienna, have been the chief place for Hebrew printing: and still more recently, Leghorn.

[He comments on how well the Jews in Ionia got on with the French, and that they are now protected from the Greeks by the British.]
…

I have been credibly informed, that the condition upon which the Jews enjoyed toleration at Rome, was – beside payment of money – an attendance upon a weekly lecture delivered by some learned priest in one of the churches; in which the question between the Jews and Christians was regularly discussed. The attendance of the Jews residing at Rome was obligatory:

…

I would here observe, that beside the thousand Jews at Corfu, they are numerous in Albania, Thessaly, Venice and northwards towards Constantinople. At Salonica they are said by some, to be more numerous even than the Turks and Christians put together. At Yannina, the metropolis of Ali Pasha, they have much influence, a Jew being the treasurer of that Pasha; liable, of course, to heavy exactions, all which however that oppressed people have too long learned to bear. In Athens, where I was lately, they informed me there are no Jews; but in the neighbourhood, in Livadia and northward, they abound.

In Smyrna, the Jews and Armenians are the principal brokers to the Frank merchants, and discharge their trust in such a manner as to raise their character somewhat high. I have heard merchants speak with great respect of their fidelity, as well as diligence. The number of these brokers, however, must be small in comparison with the bulk of the Jewish people there. In must also strike you, that there are often circumstances in which it is more for a person’s immediate interest to be honest, than to be roguish. It is to be lamented that the Jews have seldom been dealt with on this footing: they have been unfairly treated, and have seldom enjoyed the equal rights of humanity.

…

At Scio [Chios] there are not above 60 or 70 Jews; and these live for the sake of security within the walls of the Turkish fortress, They fled thither during some disturbances, in which the Christians were ill using them; and having found safety there, they do not stir out, but give themselves to handicraft trades.

…

The number of Jews in Malta is at present very small; not more I am told than fifteen or twenty families.

…

It is not thus with the Jews of Leghorn and Triest. As far as I have seen or heard of these, they have a liberality bordering on infidelity; something very much of the Sadducee character. There may be 15,000 at Leghorn; they are rich and enterprising. They have a synagogue one of the most splendid in the world. They print largely here, and in all respects enjoy great liberty. At Trieste they had about three years ago a a distinguishing mark of the emperor’s favour: he visited their synagogue in person, which event they commemorated by a Hebrew inscription.

I have received several very interesting notices respecting this people from Dr. Richardson, an English physician, just returned from his travels in Egypt and Syria. At Cairo they have seven synagogues; at Jerusalem they have two, but poor-looking. At Damascus, the population of which he thinks to be upwards of 300,000 the Jews are numerous. At Tiberias – once so highly famed for Hebrew literature – he visited a college which still exists there. Here he found five rabbies (sic), living apparently in learned leasure, with a library of no mean size, well supplied with Hebrew Scriptures and commentators. One of these was in great repute for learning. … The late Djezza, that terrible character, the Pasha of Acre, had a Jew for his principle Minister: with his well known brutality he cut off the man’s nose, put out one eye, and otherwise mutilated and disfigured his face.

…

I will add an article which I received from an English gentleman, intimately acquainted with the state of that regency [Tripoli]. “Their number in Tripoli is estimated at 3,000; they had seven synagogues, and pay an annual tax to the Bashaw of about two thousand dollars. They are governed by their Caid, who is appointed by the prince, but whose power extends to the punishment only of offences, not capital. The Jews in the vicinity are likewise under his authority; but those of Bengazi and Derne have their respective Caids. The number in those places may be reckoned at 1000. The rabbies in Tripoli are about twenty, who are paid from three to four dollars a week. In the vicinity of Tripoli (called the Gardens) there may be about twenty Jews, who have no synagogue, but pray in their houses. An annual visit is paid by a rabbi from Jerusalem, who is appointed by the chief of the holy land for the purpose of collecting money; and who may get in Tripoli a thousand dollars. They have synagogues at Arzon, Tagioura, Tajur, Mesurata, Bengazi and Derne. Their printed books they have from Leghorn, their manuscripts from Tunis.”