time to time, Jews were completely ex-
pelled by decree of a prince or city coun-
cil. Their property was confiscated and the
debts owed to them were cancelled—in
this way, expulsion was often a convenient
way for a prince or monarch to relieve a
debt from his treasury. Expulsions oc-
curred in France in 1394, in Portugal in
1497, in the southern French duchy of
Provence in 1502, and from southern Italy
in 1541. Jews were completely forbidden
to live in England throughout the Renais-
sance, a restriction that dated to the year
1290 and did not end until the middle of
the seventeenth century. The most impor-
tant expulsion of this period occurred in
Spain in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isa-
bella expelled Jews as well as Muslims from
their united kingdoms of Castile and Ara-
gon. Jews who claimed to convert to Chris-
tianity in order to keep their homes and
property were known asmarranosorcon-
versos. Such converts were under constant
suspicion and often prohibited from leav-
ing the confines of the cities where they
lived. They were often brought to trial for
heresy; the Spanish Inquisition was estab-
lished in the late fifteenth century for the
express purpose of testing the sincerity of
conversosand rooting out the insincere.
Jews were often restricted in the cloth-
ing they could wear and in their general
appearance; in fifteenth-century Spain Jew-
ish men were forced to grow their beards
long. In some cities they were forced to
wearacircleofyellowfelttoidentify
themselves as Jews; other places required
wide-brimmed hats or a long dark cloak.
The professions available to them were also
limited. Jews were banned from traditional
artisanal guilds, but permitted to work as
moneylenders and as dealers in second-
hand goods. Many Italian communes
granted charters allowing Jews to settle for
a limited time, for the purpose of serving
as lenders to the poor of the city.
In the literature of the time, including
works of Christopher Marlowe and Sir
Francis Bacon, Jews were often depicted as
greedy and villainous. Shakespeare’sThe
Merchant of Venicepresents one of the
most memorable Jewish villains, the mon-
eylender Shylock. European Christians
branded Jews with sinister libels, such as
claiming that they made their ceremonial
food with the blood of Christians. These
libels could sometimes lead to violence
and massacre, occasionally with the ap-
proval of the city authorities. In 1475 the
city of Trent arrested every Jewish male on
the suspicion of carrying out the ritual
murder of Christian children, and put the
captives to death.
At the same time, however, Hebrew,
the language of the Jews, became a re-
spected subject of interest to many schol-
ars, including the Protestant scholar Jo-
hannes Buxtorf, who taught at the
University of Basel in Switzerland and
published Hebrew dictionaries and gram-
mars. Jewish texts were translated into
Latin, and several universities established
departments of Hebraica, or Jewish stud-
ies. The study of the Jewish kabbalah, a
medieval system of symbols and esoteric
knowledge, was undertaken by humanist
scholar Giordano Bruno, Giovanni Pico
della Mirandola, and others interested in
systems of thought that lay outside tradi-
tional Christian teachings.
In 1516, the first Jewish ghetto was es-
tablished in Venice, in a quarter known as
the Ghetto Nuovo. The Jewish ghetto be-
came a neighborhood cordoned off from
the Christian population, often with a sys-
tem of walls and gates. In 1555 the Catho-
lic Church began enforcing a twelfth-
century law that prohibited Jews fromJews