Preachers of the Italian Ghetto

By the middle of the sixteenth century, Jews in the cities of Italy were being crowded into compulsory ghettos as a result of the oppressive policies of Pope Paul IV and his successors. Forced to listen to Christian preachers seeking their conversion, they flocked to hear the Jewish preachers who regularly delivered sermons designed to uplift and educate them. The sermons of these Jewish preachers provide a remarkable vantage point from which to view the Jewish social and cultural landscape of the early modern period. Exploring the fraction of this vast literature that remains to us and that has been generally neglected, six leading scholars of Italian Jewish cultural history find treasures of information and insight. Their essays show how, in various times and places, a number of ghetto preachers interpreted reality for their constituencies. They illuminate from varying perspectives the transformation of Italian Jewish culture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century; the adjustment of a beleaguered but proud minority to its ghetto segregation; the openness of Jews and their surprising appropriations of the regnant cultural tastes of the surrounding society; and the res