the european renaissance and the new world 365
Kingdom of Naples also came under Spanish rule and expelled most of
its Jews. In central and northern Italy, by contrast, the popes and the
city states, not least the Medici in Florence, welcomed the refugees for
the first part of the sixteenth century. But the welcome did not last. As
part of the struggle of the Counter- Reformation the pope began to
impose restrictions on Jews, and in 1533 Pope Julius III ordered the
burning of all copies of the Talmud in Italy on the grounds that it blas-
phemed Christianity.
From 14 July 1555 Jews were obliged by Pope Paul IV to lock them-
selves at night into ghettoes. The original ghetto had been established in
Venice in 1516 in a quarter near a foundry (ghetto ) which was declared
by the authorities to be the only area of the city where Jews were per-
mitted to settle. By the end of the sixteenth century most cities in Italy
had such Jewish quarters, generally locked at night. Sometimes (as in
Rome) they were desperately overcrowded and unhealthy, but in other
cases the ghetto became a centre for intensive Jewish cultural activity
encouraged by the mixture of different sorts of Jews in a confined space.
In Venice, for instance, alongside the Italian community which dated back
at least to the eleventh century, there were communities from the Levant
and from Germany as well as the newcomers from the Iberian peninsula.
The Levantine and western Jews, in particular, enjoyed some protection
from the Venetian Republic, despite occasional orders of expulsion under
pressure from the Inquisition, because of their connections with Jewish
communities overseas and their role in the encouragement of trade.^5
If the social isolation enforced on Italian Jews did not cut them off
entirely from the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance, this was in
large part because of the fascination of Christian humanist scholars in
obtaining knowledge of ancient Hebrew traditions to place alongside
the new Greek learning which had been opening up to them since 1453.
The search for Hebrew learning was spurred on specifically by the hope
of Pico della Mirandola and other Christians in the late fifteenth cen-
tury that it would be possible to unearth the secrets of the kabbalah,
which was thought by Pico to prove the divinity of Christ. The claim
stimulated the German humanist Johannes Reuchlin to publish in 1494
the first Latin book on the kabbalah and in 1517 a full treatise On the
Art of the Kabbalah, which tried to demonstrate the origins of Neo-
platonism and the kabbalah in the same mystical doctrines through which
the name of Jesus (in the idiosyncratic Hebrew spelling postulated by
Reuchlin, the Tetragrammaton with the addition of the letter shin, sig-
nifying the Logos) had been revealed. The motivation of these Christian