Jews And Magic In Medici Florence

Author : Edward L. Goldberg
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1442613335
Total Pages : 369 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jews and Magic in Medici Florence written by Edward L. Goldberg and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the seventeenth century, Florence was the splendid capital of the Medici Grand Dukedom of Tuscany. Meanwhile, the Jews in its tiny Ghetto struggled to earn a living by any possible means, especially loan-sharking, rag-picking and second-hand dealing. They were viewed as an uncanny people with rare supernatural powers, and Benedetto Blanis—a businessman and aspiring scholar from a distinguished Ghetto dynasty—sought to parlay his alleged mastery of astrology, alchemy and Kabbalah into a grand position at the Medici Court. He won the patronage of Don Giovanni dei Medici, a scion of the ruling family, and for six tumultuous years their lives were inextricably linked. Edward Goldberg reveals the dramas of daily life behind the scenes in the Pitti Palace and in the narrow byways of the Florentine Ghetto, using thousands of new documents from the Medici Granducal Archive. He shows that truth—especially historical truth—can be stranger than fiction, when viewed through the eyes of the people most immediately involved.

Author : Edward L. Goldberg
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1442660139
Total Pages : 369 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jews and Magic in Medici Florence written by Edward L. Goldberg and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2011-08-06 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the seventeenth century, Florence was the splendid capital of the Medici Grand Dukedom of Tuscany. Meanwhile, the Jews in its tiny Ghetto struggled to earn a living by any possible means, especially loan-sharking, rag-picking and second-hand dealing. They were viewed as an uncanny people with rare supernatural powers, and Benedetto Blanis—a businessman and aspiring scholar from a distinguished Ghetto dynasty—sought to parlay his alleged mastery of astrology, alchemy and Kabbalah into a grand position at the Medici Court. He won the patronage of Don Giovanni dei Medici, a scion of the ruling family, and for six tumultuous years their lives were inextricably linked. Edward Goldberg reveals the dramas of daily life behind the scenes in the Pitti Palace and in the narrow byways of the Florentine Ghetto, using thousands of new documents from the Medici Granducal Archive. He shows that truth—especially historical truth—can be stranger than fiction, when viewed through the eyes of the people most immediately involved.

Author : Benedetto Blanis
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781442698017
Total Pages : 351 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Jew at the Medici Court written by Benedetto Blanis and published by . This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edward Goldberg shares his sensational discovery of the largest body of surviving correspondence from any Jew in Early Modern Europe. Over the course of six years, Benedetto Blanis -- a scholar and entrepreneur in the Florentine Ghetto -- wrote nearly 200 letters to his princely patron Don Giovanni dei Medici. For the first time, these letters are available in a definitive critical edition -- with full transcriptions in the original Italian, English language summaries, and explanatory notes. This book is a companion volume to Jews and Magic in Medici Florence, in which Goldberg narrates Blanis's startling rise and fall. Readers can now take a step closer and hear Blanis's compelling story in his own words -- tracing his fraught relations with Jews and Christians, his desperate (and often illegal) business schemes, his disastrous strategies for advancement at the Medici Court, and his pursuit of arcane knowledge, including astrology, alchemy, and Kabbalah.

Author : Stefanie Beth Siegmund
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780804750783
Total Pages : 656 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence written by Stefanie Beth Siegmund and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the decision of Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici to create a ghetto in Florence, and explains how a Jewish community developed out of that forced population transfer.

Author : Benedetto Blanis
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1442643838
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Jew at the Medici Court written by Benedetto Blanis and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edward Goldberg shares his sensational discovery of the largest body of surviving correspondence from any Jew in Early Modern Europe. Over the course of six years, Benedetto Blanis — a scholar and entrepreneur in the Florentine Ghetto — wrote nearly 200 letters to his princely patron Don Giovanni dei Medici. For the first time, these letters are available in a definitive critical edition — with full transcriptions in the original Italian, English language summaries, and explanatory notes. This book is a companion volume to Jews and Magic in Medici Florence, in which Goldberg narrates Blanis's startling rise and fall. Readers can now take a step closer and hear Blanis's compelling story in his own words — tracing his fraught relations with Jews and Christians, his desperate (and often illegal) business schemes, his disastrous strategies for advancement at the Medici Court, and his pursuit of arcane knowledge, including astrology, alchemy, and Kabbalah.

Author : Joseph R. Hacker
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 081220509X
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Hebrew Book in Early Modern Italy written by Joseph R. Hacker and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-08-19 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of printing had major effects on culture and society in the early modern period, and the presence of this new technology—and the relatively rapid embrace of it among early modern Jews—certainly had an effect on many aspects of Jewish culture. One major change that print seems to have brought to the Jewish communities of Christian Europe, particularly in Italy, was greater interaction between Jews and Christians in the production and dissemination of books. Starting in the early sixteenth century, the locus of production for Jewish books in many places in Italy was in Christian-owned print shops, with Jews and Christians collaborating on the editorial and technical processes of book production. As this Jewish-Christian collaboration often took place under conditions of control by Christians (for example, the involvement of Christian typesetters and printers, expurgation and censorship of Hebrew texts, and state control of Hebrew printing), its study opens up an important set of questions about the role that Christians played in shaping Jewish culture. Presenting new research by an international group of scholars, this book represents a step toward a fuller understanding of Jewish book history. Individual essays focus on a range of issues related to the production and dissemination of Hebrew books as well as their audiences. Topics include the activities of scribes and printers, the creation of new types of literature and the transformation of canonical works in the era of print, the external and internal censorship of Hebrew books, and the reading interests of Jews. An introduction summarizes the state of scholarship in the field and offers an overview of the transition from manuscript to print in this period.

Author : David B. Ruderman
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 9780812237795
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.9X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cultural Intermediaries written by David B. Ruderman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2004-04-23 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on an epoch of spectacular demographic, political, economic, and cultural changes for European Jewry, Cultural Intermediaries chronicles the lives and thinking of ten Jewish intellectuals of the Renaissance, nine of them from Italy and one a Portuguese exile who settled in the Ottoman empire after a long sojourn in Italy. David B. Ruderman, Giuseppe Veltri, and the other contributors to this volume detail how, in the relative openness of cultural exchange encountered in such intellectual centers as Florence, Mantua, Pisa, Naples, Ferrara, and Salonika, these Jewish savants sought to enlarge their cultural horizons, to correlate the teachings of their own tradition with those outside it, and to rethink the meaning of their religious and ethnic identities within the intellectual and religious categories common to European civilization as a whole. The engaging intellectual profiles created especially for this volume by scholars from Israel, North America, and Europe represent an important rereading and reinterpretation of early modern Jewish culture and society and its broader European intellectual contexts.

Author : Judith Roumani
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1793629803
Total Pages : 227 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jews in Southern Tuscany during the Holocaust written by Judith Roumani and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-12-02 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The province of Grosseto in southern Tuscany shows two extremes in the treatment of Italian and foreign Jews during the Holocaust. To the east of the province, the Jews of Pitigliano, a four hundred-year-old community, were hidden for almost a year by sympathetic farmers in barns and caves. None of those in hiding were arrested and all survived the Fascist hunt for Jews. In the west, near the provincial capital of Grosseto, almost a hundred Italian and foreign Jews were imprisoned in 1943–1944 in the bishop's seminary, which he had rented to the Fascists for that purpose. About half of them, though they had thought that the bishop would protect them, were deported with his knowledge by Fascists and Nazis to Auschwitz. Thus, the Holocaust reached into this provincial corner as it did into all parts of Italy still under Italian Fascist control. This book is based on new interviews and research in local and national archives.

Author : John Davis
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300160364
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Jews of San Nicandro written by John Davis and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-26 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intimate story of an Italian peasant community’s unique conversion to the Jewish faith, and its links to major changes that swept twentieth-century Europe Not many people know of the utterly extraordinary events that took place in a humble southern Italian town in the first half of the twentieth century—and those who do have struggled to explain them. In the late 1920s, a crippled shoemaker had a vision where God called upon him to bring the Jewish faith to this “dark corner” in the Catholic heartlands, despite his having had no prior contact with Judaism itself. By 1938, about a dozen families had converted at one of the most troubled times for Italy’s Jews. The peasant community came under the watchful eyes of Mussolini’s regime and the Catholic Church, but persisted in their new belief, eventually securing approval of their conversion from the rabbinical authorities, and emigrating to the newly founded State of Israel, where a community still exists today. In this first fully documented examination of the San Nicandro story, John A. Davis explains how and why these incredible events unfolded as they did. Using the converts’ own accounts and a wide range of hitherto unknown sources, Davis uncovers the everyday trials and tribulations within this community, and shows how they intersected with many key contemporary issues, including national identity and popular devotional cults, Fascist and Catholic persecution, Zionist networks and postwar Jewish refugees, and the mass exodus that would bring the Mediterranean peasant world to an end. Vivid and poignant, this book draws fresh and intriguing links between the astonishing San Nicandro affair and the wider transformation of twentieth-century Europe.

Author : Kenneth Austin
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300187025
Total Pages : 331 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Jews and the Reformation written by Kenneth Austin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judaism has always been of great significance to Christianity but this relationship has also been marked by complexity and ambivalence. The emergence of new Protestant confessions in the Reformation had significant consequences for how Jews were viewed and treated. In this wide-ranging account, Kenneth Austin examines Christian attitudes toward Jews, the Hebrew language, and Jewish learning, arguing that they have much to tell us about the Reformation and its priorities—and have important implications for how we think about religious pluralism today.