9 - Jewish confraternal piety in sixteenth-century Ferrara: continuity and change

Summary

Shortly before the Jewish New Year of 1515, fifty-seven men and fourteen women gathered together in the synagogue of Ferrara's then still modest Jewish community in order to form, with the consent of the latter's leadership, a pious confraternity which was evidently the first of its kind among Italian Jewry. The synagogue in which they met had been established in the 1480s in a building which had been given to the community for that purpose by Ser Samuel Melli of Rome, who had purchased it from a member of the Norzi family, Ferrara's leading Jewish banking family. The conversion of the building into the first permanent place of worship for the members of Ferrara's Jewish community had been authorized by Duke Ercole I of the House of Este, which had generously (and sometimes bravely) been extending protection and support to both resident and refugee Jews since the middle of the fifteenth century. In 1473 Ercole I had extended such protection to resident Jews in opposition to papal demands, and two decades later he allowed twenty-one families of Spanish exiles to settle in Ferrara under rather favorable conditions. This policy had been reaffirmed by his son, Alfonso, in 1506. Ferrara, in the early sixteenth century, was a modest sized, though fairly heterogeneous Jewish community, which despite periodic tensions with the local Christian populace, had benefited from unusually good relations with the ruling dynasty.

The Gemilut Hasadim (hereafter GH) society founded there is the earliest Italian Jewish confraternity whose documentation has survived.