Alghero 375
Alghero,38 and in 1473, the notarial acts of Alghero also attest to the use of the
measurement unit cane from Montpellier.39 Among the Jews of French ori-
gin, the Carcassona family, originally from Languedoc,40 the most illustrious
and economically powerful Jewish family in Sardinia, played a decisive role
in the concession of institutional appointments.41 The Carcassona enjoyed
privileged relations with the Aragonese court and thus must have upset the
rest of the Jews of Alghero, who were being ever more discriminated against
by the Crown of Aragon in the fifteenth century. In Sardinia, as in the rest of
the kingdom, this repression culminated with the expulsion of Jews and other
non-Christians decreed by Ferdinand the Catholic in 1492.42
The aljama ( Jewish quarter) of Alghero (also, infra Tasca) was situated in
the vicinity of the port, in the northwest section of the city (Fig. 14.9). The area
was surrounded on three sides by civic walls, but due to the good relationship
that the community had always enjoyed with Christians, the Jewish quarter
(juharia, kahal in Alghero) does not seem to have been cut off from other zones
of the city by precise borders,43 and thus followed the known unsegregated
model.44 Its position within the city’s topography is attested by the conver-
gence of written and toponomastic sources, as well as by local tradition. The
aljama coincided with the area of the present Piazza di S. Croce and that of
Alghero’s old civic hospital. Today, this vast sector of the historical city is un-
dergoing an extensive urban transformation, which is still in progress, and thus
it is the subject of a preventative, emergency, urban-archaeological program.
38 Marco Tangheroni, “La Sardegna e Alghero nel sistema dell’economia catalana,” in
Mattone and Sanna, Alghero, la Catalogna, il Mediterraneo, p. 184.
39 Cecilia Tasca, Ebrei e società in Sardegna nel XV secolo: fonti archivistiche e nuovi spunti di
ricerca (Florence, 2008), p. xliii.
40 Gérard Nahon, “Condition fiscale et économique des Juifs,” in Juifs et judaisme de Languedoc,
XIIIe siècle–début XIVe siècle, eds M.-H. Vicaire and Bernhard Blumenkranz (Toulouse, 1977),
p. 52; Danièle Iancu, Etre Juif en Provence: au temps du roi René (Paris, 1998).
41 Sorgia, “Una famiglia di Ebrei.”
42 Béatrice Leroy, Les édits d’expulsion des juifs, 1394–1492–1496–1501 (Biarritz, 1998).
43 Cecilia Tasca, “Una nota sulla presenza ebraica in Sardegna,” in XIV Congresso di storia
della Corona d’Aragona: Sassari-Alghero 19–24 maggio 1990 sul tema La Corona d’Aragona
in Italia (secc. XIII–XVIII), eds Giuseppe Meloni and Olivetta Schena, 4 vols (Sassari,
1993–1997), vol. 2 (1995), p. 885; Cecilia Tasca, “Ebrei in Sardegna nel Basso Medioevo,” in
Immagini da un passato perduto. Segni della presenza ebraica in Sardegna (Cagliari, 1997),
pp. 14–20.
44 Yves Dossat, “Les Juifs a Toulouse: un demi-siècle d’histoire communautaire,” in Vicaire
and Blumenkranz, Juifs et judaisme de Languedoc, p. 127; Gilbert Dahan, “Quartiers juifs et
rues des Juifs,” in Art et archeologie des Juifs en France medieval (Toulouse, 1980), pp. 22–28.