The Ugly Renaissance (49 page)

Such tolerance often found expression in the visual arts, and during the lifetimes of
Salomone di Bonaventura and
Filippo Lippi it was not uncommon for Tuscan churches to contain devotional works that not only testified to the shared features of Judaism and Christianity but also evidenced the cultural impact of social and legal integration. Of particular interest are depictions of the purification of the
Virgin Mary and the presentation of Christ at the temple. This episode from biblical history was important in two respects. The story centers on a distinctively Jewish ritual. In contrast to Christian traditions, all Jewish women were required to go with their child to the temple to be purified in the eyes of the Lord within forty days of giving birth, and it was to fulfill this obligation as a dutiful Jewish mother that Mary took the baby Jesus to the temple. It was also a crucial moment in Christ’s life.
In the eyes of Christians such as Jacopo da Voragine, the presentation of the child symbolized the Virgin’s humility before God, Christ’s fulfillment of the Old Law, and the beginning of the Christian purification drama that was explicitly marked by the celebration of Candlemas. It was with an acute sensitivity for this bivalent meaning that Renaissance artists used this story as an opportunity both to underscore Christ’s role as a bridge between Jews and Christians and to display an intense sensitivity for the norms of Jewish culture. Indeed, the Christian import of the scene relied on the artist’s ability to emphasize the “Jewishness” of the drama. In the strikingly similar renditions by
Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1342) (
Fig. 35
) and
Giovanni di Paolo (1447–49)—both of which were painted in Siena but which are now in the Uffizi in Florence and the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena, respectively—the Virgin and Child are surrounded by key figures from Jewish history and practice. Preparing the offering in the center of Lorenzetti’s painting stands a distinctively dressed high priest; above Mary appears a statue of Moses (who is also depicted on her left), bearing the tables of the Old Law; while above Christ can be seen a statuette of Joshua, the Jews’ traditional deliverer, and to his left,
Malachi, who holds a scroll proclaiming his role as the promised son of God. Mary herself is endowed with identifiably Jewish characteristics that are shown in a markedly sensitive manner. In Lorenzetti’s scene, she wears a richly embroidered dress in the Eastern style and carries a swaddling cloth that bears a passing resemblance to Jewish prayer shawls. Most important, Lorenzetti depicts the Virgin wearing earrings.
Rarely worn by contemporary Christians, these were a visible sign of her belonging to the Jewish community, and of her being grounded in Hebraic law, while simultaneously bringing forth the Christian Messiah himself. Judaism and Christianity were thus woven together in a visual expression of tolerance and acceptance.

B
ERNARDINO’S
R
AGE

Despite the recognition of the common heritage of Judaism and Christianity, the source of Renaissance
anti-Semitism remained religious in character. As far as churchmen like
Filippo Lippi were concerned, it simply wasn’t enough that Christianity grew out of Judaism: the Jews would always be different. Indeed, the very closeness of the two faiths emphasized that the Jews would forever be the “other.” Although the Jews were believed to have stood witness to the truth of Christ’s coming, the fact that they refused to accept Jesus as the Messiah who had been sent to fulfill the Old Law set them at an impossibly vast distance from the Christian faithful. As
the rabidly anti-Semitic San Bernardino of Siena and his followers among the Observant
Franciscans repeated ad nauseam from the pulpit of Florence’s cathedral, no matter how much Judaism might otherwise have in common with Christianity, it would always be inferior, false, and even heretical so long as Christ’s divinity was denied. It was a stain that could never be removed, and the metaphor of an impure mark was even written into artworks—like Lorenzetti’s depiction of the presentation at the temple—that ostensibly presented Judaism in a positive light. While the whole point of Lorenzetti’s altarpiece was to underscore the fact that Christ came forth to fulfill the Old Law that Moses had brought to the Jews, Mary’s obviously Jewish appearance marked her out as standing at a distance from her own son and in need of purifying herself of the “stain” of her Hebraic heritage.

Indeed, for Christians like Filippo Lippi, the “problem” with the Jews was not simply that they denied Christ’s divinity but that they bore
an inherited responsibility for Christ’s persecution and death. The Passion drama—ritually and dramatically reenacted by Christians every Eastertide—revolved around Christ’s betrayal by Judas and his unjust condemnation by the Sanhedrin. Since it had been unbelieving Jews who had tortured and killed the Son of God in antiquity, it was self-evident to Renaissance Christians that contemporary Jews—who also refused to accept Jesus as the Christ—bore the guilt of his suffering.

Yet the perception that Judaism was a wellspring of heretical untruth and inherited guilt did not exist merely as an abstract point; the very existence of Jewish “error” was thought to pose a pernicious threat to the Christian faith, and it was this that formed the basis of a more active variety of religious hatred. In the eyes of contemporary churchmen, Judaism was a disease that could all too easily spread throughout Christendom.
Even if their influence on finance, culture, and medicine made them, in some sense, a “necessary evil” comparable to prostitutes, their presence in a Christian society was nevertheless held to be, at best, a serious risk to the integrity of the faith and, at worst, a malign cancer on the body social. It was this that was undoubtedly in the minds of
Salomone di Bonaventura’s unknown “enemies” in the years before his prosecution.

Inspired by the virulently anti-Semitic preaching of San Bernardino and his followers in the early fifteenth century, Florentine humanists believed it was incumbent upon them to find the right intellectual “medicine” with which to treat the Jewish “infection,” and despite happily receiving loans, education, and treatment from the city’s Jews, they devoted themselves to exposing and extirpating the falseness of Jewish belief. Even those Christian humanists who devoted most effort to learning Hebrew and who showed the most interest in the
Kabbalah sought to annex the most sophisticated elements of Jewish thought to their own philosophy while acquiring an arsenal of knowledge that could be used to attack Judaism itself, both for the sake of encouraging conversion and for the purpose of downright persecution. In 1454—the very year in which the Florentine Signoria encouraged the Jews to take part in the carnival celebrations—
Giannozzo Manetti penned the
Contra iudeos et gentes
, an unabashed attempt to use close biblical scholarship to attack the basic tenets of Hebrew thought and persuade the Jews of Florence to convert to Christianity. Later,
Marsilio Ficino mined the Talmud, the
Seder ‘olam
, and a selection of notable commentaries on
Hebrew theology for his
De religione christiana
but, like Manetti, did so primarily to hoist the Jews with their own petard, as he saw it. Though densely argued, the treatise was vituperative in the extreme and left no doubt about Ficino’s belief in the absolute sinfulness of Judaism and the importance of stamping out the Hebrew faith for the sake of Christian truth. Jews, he claimed, had no excuse for their “heresy” and could expect mercy neither from God nor from man, for in the Mosaic Law they had been given the message that Christ came to fulfill, in the words of the prophets they had received foreknowledge of his coming, and in the signs attendant upon his incarnation they had seen clear evidence of God’s will.

Yet while it was widely believed that invectives against the “errors” of Judaism could go some way toward staving off Christian apostasy and encouraging Jewish conversion, many of Salomone di Bonaventura’s contemporaries felt that the threat posed by Judaism was more complex and subtle than it originally appeared. As San Bernardino continually stressed, it was not merely Jewish ideas but also—and more worryingly—the character of Jewish
practices
that endangered the Christian faith. Like a true disease, the “perfidious lies” of the Jews could, Bernardino stressed, be spread through contact with their daily habits.

Even to the most ignorant Renaissance observers, it was evident that the patterns of Jewish life were shaped by the complex series of rites set out in the books of the
Talmud, many of which (particularly circumcision and food laws) were entirely alien to the Christian tradition, and all of which were thought to have the capacity to communicate the “illness” of Judaism to unsuspecting Christians, even though they were designed to protect the purity of the Jewish faith.

Since Jews had such strict dietary regulations, especially with regard to the preparation and consumption of meat, for example, it was thought that any Christian who inadvertently purchased animal flesh from a Jewish butcher ran the risk of being “contaminated” by the vendor’s religion, and for this reason many cities legislated to ensure that each faith maintained its own, separate butcheries. Sex was no less pronounced an issue. The strictness of Jewish marriage rituals and the Hebraic preoccupation with purification ceremonies were turned back on the Jewish population to produce a total ban on sexual relations between Jews and Christians.
And though prosecutions for this sort of “offense” appear to have been rare, the trials of those who were the victims
of judicial attacks—such as Consilio, the son of Musetto, who was tried for having sex with prostitutes in Bologna in 1456 and in Lucca in 1467—indicate that Christian society was permeated by a latent sense of hysteria about cross-cultural promiscuity.

But in some instances Jewish ritualism was deliberately misrepresented as the already irrational sense of alterity was perverted yet further by the febrile imaginations of hate-fueled Christians. The most frighteningly absurd fabrications were invented, all of which were put to dangerous purposes and many of which found expression in the literary and visual arts. Among the more notorious stories was that recorded in
Giovanni Villani’s
Nuova cronica
and enshrined in
Paolo Uccello’s
Miracle of the Profaned Host
(ca. 1465–68), which was itself commissioned by Federico da Montefeltro as part of a broader campaign of anti-Semitic persecution (
Fig. 36
). In this patently ridiculous tale—which was itself a re-elaboration of the accusations of host desecration that had been leveled against Jews across Europe since at least 1247, and that had been a major feature of urban life in Germany throughout the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries—a Jewish moneylender was supposed to have stolen a piece of the consecrated host from a nearby church and taken it home to cook for his family. On performing this most profane of actions, however, he was dismayed to find that blood miraculously poured forth from the bread and spread across his floor until it spilled out into the street. The sinister exsanguination having been spotted by passersby, soldiers were called to break down the door of the Jew’s home while he and his impious family cowered in fear within. For all its falsity, Salomone’s contemporaries felt that this story provided a clear illustration of the threat that Jewish rituals posed to Christian life.

For Franciscan anti-Semites like San Bernardino, the dangerousness of Judaism necessitated both the marginalization of the Jews and the strict segregation of Christian life from Hebraic traditions. This went far beyond the prohibition of sexual relations and the establishment of separate butcheries. Preaching in Padua in 1423, San Bernardino made the following, terrifying statement of his belief in the dangers of coming into contact with Jewish practices:

I hear that there are many Jews here in Padua; hence I want to state several truths about them. The first truth is that you commit a cardinal sin if you eat or drink with them; for just as they
are forbidden to eat with us, so we must not consume food with them. The second truth is that a sick man seeking to regain his health must not repair to a Jew; for this, too, is a cardinal sin. The third truth is that one must not bathe together with a Jew.

Raging violently against the Jews of northern Italy, Bernardino and his followers asserted that it was necessary not only for Christians to avoid all contact with Judaic practices but also for Jews themselves to be marked out with sufficient clarity that all Christians would know to steer clear of them. This was, of course, not an altogether new idea.
Since the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the Church had ordered that all Jews be required to wear a distinctive dress, and by 1257 the Jews of Rome (excepting doctors and a few other protected professionals) were obliged to wear circular yellow badges on pain of a hefty fine. Such early attempts to mark Jews so publicly were, however, rather halfhearted and never rigorously enforced. Finding it all but impossible to push through its designs, the papacy let things drop, and the cities of northern Italy were generally happy to forget all about it. But the vitriolic preaching of San Bernardino and the Observant
Franciscans changed everything. Whipped into a frenzy of hatred for Jewish beliefs and practices, the cities of northern Italy hurried to enact a flurry of new anti-Semitic legislation. In 1427,
Ancona forced all Jews to wear a yellow sign in response to the preaching of Fra
Giacomo della Marca. Tracing the course of
San Bernardino’s itinerant preaching,
Padua followed suit in 1430, and in 1432
Perugia, too, imposed tough dress laws.
In 1439—the same year Salomone made his fateful agreement with Dattili—Florence itself was persuaded to introduce the same legislation, which was repeatedly reissued at various points after that, each time with greater severity. Indeed, in the next century, this frightening presentiment of the horrors of the twentieth century was to become so widespread that it would appear even in
Michelangelo’s depiction of Aminadab in one of the lunettes of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.