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“The bull required seclusion in the ghetto”

Interview with Giacomo Mariani about the papal persecution of Ancona’s Jewish community

The expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in the 1490s marked a turning point for Jewish life and Jewish identity in Europe. Historian Giacomo Mariani takes a local approach to the Sephardic community of Ancona, which belonged to the Papal States in the 16th century. He sheds light on their changing relationship with the popes, focusing on the protection the community enjoyed at first as well as the radical change under Pope Paul IV. In the interview, he talks about the historical background, the legal framework in the Papal States and Paul IV’s policy of persecution.

Dr Mariani, your research project deals with the papal control over Jewish communities in the specific case of the ‘Portuguese’ Jews of the city of Ancona. How can the Jewish community of Ancona be described up to the middle of the sixteenth century?

Up to the mid-sixteenth century, Ancona was a flourishing port city of the Papal States. It held a strategic position along the routes that connected north-western European commerce with the East, across the Adriatic Sea and through the Balkans to the heart of the Ottoman Empire and beyond. As such, it hosted a number of different ethnic and religious communities of merchants and travellers: Turks, Greeks, Armenians, as well as different communities of Jews (Italian, Ashkenazi, Levantine, and Sephardi) who had progressively settled there. My research concerns in particular, the Sephardi – i.e. of Iberian origin – Jewish community that grew in Ancona in the second quarter of the sixteenth century under the special protection of two popes, Paul III (1534–1549) and Julius III (1550-1555). During their pontificates, the community of Sephardi Jews grew quickly in wealth and importance and saw the presence of important families and individuals, such as Gracia Nasi (one of the richest merchants and bankers of her time) and Amatus Lusitanus (a renowned physician). Aiming at exploiting their mercantile activities to stimulate the growth of the commercial hub of Ancona, the two aforementioned popes granted the Iberian Jews living in the city with protection from inquiries into their ambiguous religious status.

Indeed, in 1492 the Jews of Spain had been forced to choose between conversion and expulsion, while in 1497 the King of Portugal had compelled all of his Jewish subjects to receive baptism. Therefore, all Jews of Iberian origin that scattered throughout Europe in the following decades could be suspected of being apostates: people who, despite having received baptism and having become Catholics, had then abandoned Catholicism to return to Judaism. This is precisely the issue that brought the life of the Sephardi community of Ancona to its abrupt end.

The Sephardi Jews were accused of having reconverted” Giacomo Mariani

This end came under the reign of Pope Paul IV (1555–1559). What happened?

Following the death of Pope Julius III and the brief pontificate of Marcellus II (who was pope for less than a month), in May 1555, the Cardinal of Naples, Gian Pietro Carafa, was elected as the head of the Roman Church. This elderly man, who was close to turning 79, had, before his election, been the main animator of the Congregation of the Holy Office. He had very precise ideas about how to intervene in the Catholic societies directly subject to his secular as well as spiritual rule, including the cohabitation of Jews and Christians. Among the very first decisions he took was that of naming a special commissioner of the Inquisition  entrusted with the task of persecuting the Sephardi Jews living in Ancona, who were now accused of having reconverted to Judaism after receiving baptism. The pope thus decided to abrogate all privileges issued in their favour by his predecessors. As well, less than two weeks earlier, Paul IV had issued a famous bull, known by the title Cum nimis absurdum, which severely impinged on the lives of  Jews living in the Papal States. Among other things, this bull prohibited them from possessing immoveable goods and required the seclusion of their communities in a specifically identified space inside cities: the Ghetto.

What lies behind the classification as “Portuguese” within the Jewish community of Ancona?

Pope Paul IV (1476-1559) © Wikimedia Commons

During the last decades of the fifteenth century, the Jewish population inside the Portuguese Kingdom had grown to reach a state of incredible importance and wealth. It counted among its members some extremely influential and powerful figures, who covered important positions in the political and fiscal institutions of a country that was in the midst of opening  new global commercial routes, from Brazil to India. Due to the forced conversions of 1497, and the increasingly hostile surrounding Christian society, these individuals and groups expanded their networks well outside the Portuguese Empire. They traded, in the main centres in the Mediterranean and in global markets, giving life to a valuable and unique commercial network.

During the persecution of the Sephardi Jewish community of Ancona in 1555 and 1556, the classification as Portuguese was used to distinguish the individuals who could be prosecuted. These individuals – who almost certainly could be considered to have received baptism, since there had not been Jews in Portugal for the last sixty years – were set apart from other Sephardi Jews who had been living for a long time under Ottoman rule, and could therefore now identify themselves as Levantine Jews, or subjects of the Ottoman Sultan.

Map of the port city of Ancona around 1600 © Wikimedia Commons / BnF

What was the judicial landscape like in the Papal States at this time and how did it affect the fate of the Jews?

The judicial landscape of the Papal States in the mid-sixteenth century was a very complex one, made up of a stratification of powers and opposing struggles of centralization and resistance to it. It was also complicated by the concurrence of different jurisdictions, such as, in this case, the local and central lay courts, and the capillary religious court of the Holy Office. It seems clear that in the case of the persecution of the Portuguese Jewish community of Ancona – as in other cases – Pope Paul IV attempted to bring order to this judicial and jurisdictional knot by elevating the Holy Office to the position of supreme court in the Papal States and therefore subjecting all other jurisdictions to it. Yet, there were some struggles to resist. For example, the city council of Ancona hurriedly entrusted its representative in Rome to make an attempt at mediation, but this was not enough to defend the Portuguese Jews living in the Adriatic port.

Another case is that of the Duchy of Urbino, geographically very close to Ancona. The Duke of Urbino was a feudatory of the pope and as such enjoyed some amount of freedom from papal decisions. So much so, that a number of Portuguese Jews who were able to escape from Ancona found refuge in the territories of the dutchy and were protected from the efforts made by the Holy Office to request their extradition.

How did you become aware of this case and what sources do you use to research it?

The story of how this research began might make a very compelling argument in favour of the concept of “serendipity”. Indeed, I started working on this case after a group of completely unknown sixteenth-century documents bearing the seal of the Inquisition were discovered by my good friend, and excellent archivist, Dario Taraborrelli in a place where they were absolutely not “supposed” to be. The documents were uncovered in the archive of the civil courts of the city of Ravenna and of the Legation of Romagna (an administrative entity of the Papal States). Together, we started looking into the documents and realised what we had found.

The truth is, however, that discoveries of this sort only occur to those that are curious and patient enough to go through huge amounts of unexplored archival records and who are also prepared not to let the discovery go by unnoticed. My part in it, I believe, is the ordinary work of the historian; pulling on the different threads that such an extremely relevant and multifaceted case seems to offer, and following these trails in as many different directions as my energies and competences will allow.

The questions were posed by Emily Todt.


Cite as:

Giacomo Mariani/Emily Todt: “Die Bulle verlangte die Absonderung im Ghetto”. Interview, EViR Blog, 22.08.2024, https://www.evir.uni-muenster.blog/interviewmariani/.

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​​This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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