On August 9, 1617, Michele Sanguinetti, a thirty-seven-year-old Jew appeared spontaneously before Fra Massimo Guazzone, the Inquisitor General of Modena, with a fabricated charge against a co-religionist, the wealthy Jewish banker, Simon de Sanguinetti (no relation). In his denunciation, Michele reported that when he had gone to pledge in de Sanguinetti's bank, the banker had “in a scornful fashion” blatantly broken open a crucifix filled with relics in front of him and tossed the relics out of the window.Footnote 1 Giovanni Spaccini, a local chronicler, who rarely commented on the local Inquisition's prosecution of converted or practicing Jews, chose to mention Michele Sanguinetti's false allegation with these words:
If the Jews had been charged with the desecration of Christian images there would have been a general rising against all Jews, these Jews would have been killed and their possessions burned, and all other Jews would probably have been permanently banned from Modena.Footnote 2
Although Spaccini undoubtedly exaggerated the potential consequence of this trial, Michele Sanguinetti's choice of image desecration as the accusation against his co-religionist is significant. It raises questions concerning the Jews' attitude towards Christian images and the widespread belief that Jews did in fact desecrate them. In early modern Italy, Christian statues and paintings were commonly found in communal places, not only because the faithful were expected to acknowledge and contemplate them, but because their being carried through city streets in processions celebrated communal piety or communitas as Edward Muir has described it, the sense of belonging that was so much part of early modern civic existence.Footnote 3 The ubiquity of these images created a landscape in which reverential behavior was expected and any deviance was immediately noticed. The search for significance and meaning of accusations of Jewish image desecration rests on the assumption that as a historical phenomenon it uncovers an uneasy equilibrium between fear of idolatry and popular practices of veneration in Christian society. These accusations become a paradoxical and bivalent reflection of the way early modern Jewish existence was embedded in that of the surrounding Christian culture. At the same time, they illustrate an unstudied aspect of hidden Jewish violence and the actualization of emotions that might otherwise remain unnoticed.
The dossier of Simon de Sanguinetti's trial is not the only image desecration trial that exists in the Inquisitorial archive in Modena. Here there are at least twelve trial proceedings (6%) out of a total of 186 against professing Jews, during its most active period of prosecution between 1598, the year the Holy Office was raised to full Inquisitorial status, and 1638, the year Modenese Jews were confined to a ghetto. Besides image desecration, the Roman Inquisition was authorized to judge Jews for nine other offences.Footnote 4 These included denying belief in one God, sacrificing to demons or causing Christians to dabble in diabolism, devil worship, blaspheming Christ and the Virgin, proselytizing Christians or neophytes, dissuading or abusing potential converts from baptism, sheltering heretics, possessing blasphemous books, and housing Christian wetnurses or servants in their homes.Footnote 5 The Inquisition's intention was not to encourage the Jews' conversion or expulsion but to try and keep Jews apart from Christians and so purify Catholic society. In the twelve proceedings for image desecration, Modenese Jews were accused of removing crucifixes from walls, stoning, defacing or ridiculing religious paintings and failing to show the necessary respect to images carried through the streets. Half of these processi (and four of the six completed) involved Jewish suspects who lived not in the city capital, but in smaller Jewish communities scattered through the countryside. Here, the political and religious decentralization may well have generated retaliatory hostility between Jews and Christians more spontaneously than in the city. Altercations seemed to flare up and settle down quickly, as Jews struggled or negotiated for their own spatial autonomy.
In order to place Sanguinetti's accusation in its historical context this essay begins with the historical background of the allegation against Jews and then argues that by the early modern period the ubiquity of images and their desecration in Italy had removed the allegation from a specifically Jewish context. By the late sixteenth century, Protestants or Jews were accused of image desecration; (even Catholics, but from entirely different motives—chiefly out of frustration and resentment, because a saint or image has failed to give them the help which they required).Footnote 6 Drawing heavily on Inquisitorial records, trial activity in Modena is analyzed in order to reconstruct the Inquisition's policies and administration over the Jewish community for this offense. Finally, instigators and victims of the offenses are considered as well as Christian imaginings of how Jews behaved toward images of the sacred.
I. The Initiation of an Allegation
There is disagreement among scholars as to the date and provenance of the first Christian allegations of Jews desecrating images. Some suggest that these stories originated in the sixth century in the west, since tales of Jews desecrating images and then converting to Christianity upon realizing their power appear in Gregory of Tours's Glory of the Martyrs.Footnote 7 Others argue it was eighth-century Byzantium, torn by the iconoclastic controversy, which disseminated similar narratives.Footnote 8 Although both Judaism and Christianity shared an elementary fear of idolatry, the point of these stories was to disseminate the fact that Jews absolutely rejected images as props to facilitate devotion. The Third Commandment refuted the suggestion that images had any power of their own. Catholic authorities, on the other hand, encouraged image adoration, and relied on images as mediums of mass veneration, seeing them as forms by which to reach God, so long as the created objects were not treated as idols.
From the twelfth century, accusations spread as the veneration of sacred images particularly of the Passion became increasingly popular in the Catholic west.Footnote 9 Impressive Romanesque churches began to house large numbers of sumptuous images, objects, and utensils that not only decorated and enhanced altars, but were dispersed throughout these consecrated buildings, absorbing the sacred powers traditionally ascribed to relics. Life-size graphic and gruesome crucifixes were erected to stand on the choir screen or hang from the chancel arch. A century later, icons (those images with standard compositions, whose didactic messages would be easily understood by people who saw them) were brought out of the church, and erected in public and communal spaces in the hope that their ideas would be contemplated daily, thereby blurring the boundaries between holy and secular spaces.Footnote 10 In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Franciscans, more in touch with developing popular opinion, propagated the use of images which depicted Christ as a defenseless victim to stimulate affective piety.Footnote 11 Ivory, metal and wooden statues, and carved and painted panels with scenes from the Gospels or other select holy figures isolated from larger narratives began to appear in domestic homes, where individuals and families of varying rank and spiritual standing enjoyed the intimate and tactile contemplation of these moveable items.Footnote 12 In sparsely decorated domestic spaces, Madonna images were hung predominantly in the antechambers and bedrooms of urban homes, where they sometimes served as substitute for church attendance.
As the miracle tale genres of host desecration increased in Europe from the thirteenth century, it is not surprising that traditional stories of Jewish mistreatment of Christian icons also multiplied. Jews were seen as the murderer and torturers of Christ, re-enacting his passion—by scourging crucifixes, torturing consecrated hosts, or murdering Christian children at the time of the Passover. Accusations spread that Jews desecrated Christian images such as paintings or crucifixes (either by stealing them from churches or uncovering them in their own homes). The offended images then revealed their miraculous and retaliatory power, resulting in the conversion, execution or death by other means of the Jewish persecutor. These allegations rested on the belief that a sacred image, just like a consecrated host, displayed its miraculous powers by bleeding or weeping as a result of being hammered, pierced, or scourged.Footnote 13 One case in thirteenth century Cologne reported in the chronicles of Abbot Richer of Senones, local Jews (particularly women) were accused of stabbing a painting of the Passion and icons of the Virgin and Child hidden on the interior walls of a house they were renting. These images began to bleed so profusely that the offense was uncovered by neighboring Christians. The Jews were arrested, their goods confiscated, some baptized, others were executed or exiled. A church was constructed on this site, and as Julius Aronius, the nineteenth-century German historian notes “here the highly respected painting was preserved.”Footnote 14 In these tales generally, little description is made of the purported damage done to the sacred image or of any attempts to repair it. Its sanctity seemed to lie in its defaced appearance.Footnote 15 Caroline Walker Bynum argues saliently in her study of blood piety in late medieval Germany, that the appearance of blood in these accusations was not random.Footnote 16 It seems that Jews, by providing miraculous blood, humanized the images, and confirmed for the Christian that the sanctity of their images could only be maintained in their own hands.
The Jews' association with miraculous images would also emerge in more sophisticated ritual murder and host desecration discourses toward the end of the medieval period. Mitchell Merback's detailed study of the “Man of Sorrows altar” (a statue of a suffering Christ holding the chalice or the host) in Pulkau, Lower Austria, shows how the image was seen to bleed after a host desecration charge resulted in the massacre of its Jewish community in 1338.Footnote 17 This bleeding was seen as a purification process, turning the place where sacrilege had been committed into one of atonement, and, then, into a hallowed and prosperous pilgrimage site.Footnote 18 Dana Katz points out that as the cult of the two year-old Simon of Trent (allegedly murdered by local Jews during Easter 1475) spread at the end of the fifteenth century, images of the “Blessed Simon,” particularly printed ones in the Tridentine and Valcamonica regions, were also believed to possess miraculous powers.Footnote 19
Image desecration allegations could also arise from the fear that Jewish money-lenders naturally chose to profane church images and objects that came into their hands as collateral for credit pledged by impecunious clergy. Here Jews were seen as iconoclasts unwilling to tolerate graven images and believed to be seizing opportunities of defacing or defiling them. Jews were known to accept these items as pawns, even though the Church and numerous rabbinical authorities continually prohibited such dealings.Footnote 20 Philip Augustus's ecclesiastical chronicler Rigord argues that one of the reasons why Jews were expelled briefly from France in 1182 was that a Parisian Jew had taken ecclesiastical objects as pledges and then thrown them into a latrine.Footnote 21
II. Sacred Images or Images of the Sacred?
In Spain, the association of Jews with miraculous image desecration charges continued well into the seventeenth century.Footnote 22 In 1630, Portuguese new Christians in Madrid were accused of ritually beating an image of the Cristo de la Paciencia in the home of Miguel Rodriguez. The image was alleged to have bled and wept on several occasions. Seven conversos were punished with life imprisonment and six were burnt at the stake.Footnote 23 The Jewish philosopher, physician, and polemic writer, Isaac Cardoso complained in Las excelencias de los Hebreos of 1679 that Jews alone were continually accused of destroying miraculous images or hosts, because they had no power to dispute these false allegations:
when Calvinists or the Protestants or the Muslims drag Christs on the ground, trample hosts, destroy images or demolish altars, no miracles are invented claiming that the statues speak or the hosts leap or shed blood, but it is only when those [deeds] are attributed to the Jews, who are like shorn sheep and tame lambs. There is no one to protect or defend them, and they lack the power to defend themselves, and the voice with which to complain.Footnote 24
In Italy iconoclastic charges against Jews that mention thaumaturigcal powers of desecrated images are harder to find. According to Censius Camerarius (the chamberlain of Pope Clement III [1187–1191] who wrote his Liber Censuum, in 1192), papal inaugurations in Rome included a procession from St. Peter's to the Lateran basilica after the installation of the new pope.Footnote 25 An image of Christ was engraved on the main arch of the Lateran Basilica, which had been allegedly struck on the forehead by a Jew and had consequently bled. Bitterness regarding this misdeed was, according to Adriano Prosperi, still felt during such papal processions in the seventeenth century.Footnote 26 Another iconoclastic case against a Jew involving a miraculous image occurred in August 1493 in Florence; a young marrano, Bartholomew de Cases, was accused of slashing three Marian images, one of which was credited with miraculous powers, and was stoned to death by an enraged crowd before the Otto di Guardia e Balìa could have him executed.Footnote 27
The reason why iconoclastic charges against Jews in Italy rarely mentioned the thaumaturgical powers of desecrated images in the early modern period needs to be asserted. It seems that the Catholic Church had become so fearful of Protestant iconoclasm reacting forcefully to the materialism of Catholic piety, that Jewish image desecration was no longer a primary concern. Protestantism argued that since the end of the Apostolic era, it had become impossible to persuade saints to intercede with God and bring about miraculous events (that is interruptions of the ordinary course of nature), while the Council of Trent vigorously endorsed and affirmed the value of venerating images and relics associated with cults that dispensed favors.Footnote 28 Some forms of Protestantism, especially Zwinglianism and Calvinism, were fiercely iconoclastic and wanted to see churches and public places purged of images, so that worshippers could concentrate on the Word of God alone, as preached from the pulpit.Footnote 29
At this time too, popular religious folktales in Italy continually transmitted stories of the veneration of miraculous images, (more often on the edicole or porticos of buildings where people congregated and passed through).Footnote 30 Here too Jewish offenders were replaced by Catholic ones, whose own desecration of miraculous images reflected their frustrations that sacred images were unhelpful. Michael Carroll has shown the popularity of tales involving the playing of a game near a sacred image, which in anger one of the players strikes. The image then bleeds and the offender dies, after which the figure begins to dispense divine favors. In fact, the Papal Inquisition dealt with a number of miraculous image cases in the decades from the mid-sixteenth century.Footnote 31 Chiara Franceschini counts thirty cases in the peninsula that were investigated by the Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome from 1607 to 1723, particularly between 1637 and 1639, concerning at least eight wooden engraved crucifixes in Assisi, Pesaro, Cagli, and Rome that had miraculous tendencies. By policing the boundary between orthodox piety and popular veneration, ecclesiastical tribunals tried to take control of the adoration of sacred images and prevent miracles from backfiring badly against the Catholic church. None of these cases involved allegations against Jews.
Outbreaks of popular fury against Jews for image desecration did continue as both the work of Michele Luzzati and Dana Katz have shown. But these cases against the prominent moneylenders, Isaaco di Vitale of Pisa in 1467 and Daniele di Leone da Norsa of Mantua in 1493, involved non-miraculous images both inside and on outer walls of their own homes. Dana Katz has shown in her recent monograph just how awkward it was for Jews who uncovered Christian images on or near their premises.Footnote 32 These Jews were often in trouble even if they had obtained official permission to remove them. Their cases were also regulated by the ducal courts, able to judge lawsuits involving religious offenses attributed to Jews and led by dukes keen to protect their Jews rather than expose them to perilous allegations.Footnote 33 What is fascinating, as Luzzati points out, is that these particular Jews were confident enough to believe that they would be able to have Christian images depicted on the walls of their homes removed without endangering their positions.Footnote 34 Such too was the conviction of Simone de Sanguinetti, a Jewish banker who lived in Spilamberto, a small town in the duchy of Modena in 1635 who when summoned before the Inquisitor regarding an image of the Blessed Virgin and Child that had been damaged in a spinning mill he was renting, anxiously testified that he had appealed to both secular officials and the local Archpriest, Filippo Mossa to whiten the wall because he hoped in this way to prevent an accusation of desecration against him: “because I knew from experience that Jews can be tricked, by someone or other damaging the painting and then blaming us [Jews].”Footnote 35
Did these cases lead governments and ecclesiastical courts to ensure that the enclosure of Jews in sixteenth and seventeenth century Italy did not house any Christian images that Jews might desecrate? In the effort to separate Jews from Christians, it would be natural to remove or obliterate Christian images found in an area designated as a ghetto. In Bologna on the eve of the expulsion of the Jews in 1557, the ecclesiastical authorities had removed an image of St. Christopher from their ghetto, and whitened another eight images that were within the enclosure.Footnote 36 Michele Luzzati has confirmed that measures were also taken to remove or cover such images in the ghettos of Cremona in 1580 and Mantua in 1613.Footnote 37 But it cannot be established at this stage whether this was standard practice for all the ghetto enclosures in Italy.
III. Trial Activity
Unlike books, religious images were never considered sufficiently dangerous to compel the Counter Reformation papacy to create a disciplinary congregation for the offense of desecrating them. Nor was the control of Christian images ever placed officially under the jurisdiction of the early modern Roman Inquisition, re-established by the Papal bull Licet ab initio in 1542, despite Francesco Peña's 1607 commentary on Nicolau Eymeric's manual Directorium Inquisitorum, which defined the “destruction of images” as a heresy or deviant behavior.Footnote 38 Nevertheless, as Chiara Franceschini has shown, from the late sixteenth century Inquisitorial tribunals in Italy together with episcopal courts conducted judicial proceedings against those who attacked sacred images or crafted suspect images that could potentially foster deviant piety.Footnote 39 In 1593, the Bolognese Inquisition promulgated an edict on the subject in reaction to an incident of vandalism against images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. Further edicts were issued in 1622 and 1637.Footnote 40
In Rome, the Papacy had exclusive legal authority over Jews, and the latter were subject to the papal vicar, the Tribunale criminale del Governatore and the Senatore. Although, as Marina Caffiero has shown, Jews were summoned before the Holy Office, the loss of processi makes it impossible to quantify the number of trials.Footnote 41 Antje Bracker argues that the tribunal in Rome focused its efforts more upon the annual censoring of Hebrew books, the number and size of synagogues in the Papal States as well as the supervision of Jewish cemeteries.Footnote 42 But Simona Feci has uncovered two cases where Jews were actually caught desecrating images.Footnote 43 The Tribunale Governatore in Rome prosecuted in 1625 a case in which an image of the Virgin and Child in the alley of the Savelli in the ghetto of Rome had been badly damaged either by shoes or stones thrown at it.Footnote 44 That such images existed inside the Jewish enclosure seemed to be a surprise to the court; it would have been logical to remove them all from the ghetto, from the time of its establishment in 1555. The Jews' guilt was unambiguous in a second case that Feci discusses. In the spring of 1611, a group of four Jews had dined in the tavern next to S. Paolo in Rome outside the walls of the ghetto. On their way back, probably inebriated, they had begun to throw stones at the effigy of a Madonna depicted on the gate of a vineyard in the vicinity of Monte Testaccio. Their punishment was very severe. The two younger Jews were whipped “through Rome” and the older two sent to galley service for ten years.Footnote 45
In Modena, the Inquisition handled its cases of Jews in a restrained and non-persecutory manner—a combination of its own legalism and its position vis à vis the secular power which prevented it from assuming full jurisdiction over the Jewish community.Footnote 46 In 1598, Jews who had previously lived in Ferrara followed Duke Cesare d'Este, attracted to Modena because they preferred the relative tolerance of the Estense family to the harsh and often unpredictable policies of the papacy.Footnote 47 The Jewish population in the city increased, reaching 750 in December 1638 on the eve of the creation of the ghetto, almost the same number (700) as had entered the Venetian ghetto in 1516. As noted above there are twelve processi between 1598 and 1638 against professing Jews for this offense in the Inquisitorial archive of Modena.Footnote 48 The Modenese tribunal showed itself as a court which focused on efforts to ascertain the truth by seventeenth-century standards, which meant distinguishing between innocence and guilt, and, within the category of guilt, recognizing the difference in degree of transgressions and framing the punishments of Jews according to those gradations alone. Its control was tight and regulated, but it was also checked by competing jurisdictions and even more intensively by its own legalism, a paradox Inquisitorial research has affirmed time and again.Footnote 49
For Christians, Inquisitorial procedure was didactic and corrective, with the intention of providing the Christian with spiritual penances and sanctions, as well as tools to reenter Christian society at large. When in 1623 a twenty-two-year-old Christian painter, Julio Cesare Mellato admitted that he had soiled an image of San Sebastian that had been recently painted on the main door of the new church of that name, he told Inquisitor General Fra Giacomo Tinti di Lodi that he had intended only to soil the words written underneath the image and not the image itself. He requested a pardon for his actions and a series of penances were considered a sufficient punishment for his misdeed.Footnote 50 For Jews the process remained a disciplinary one as set out in the papal bull of 1581, Antiqua iudaeorum improbitas, to ensure that they would be wary of breaking ecclesiastical regulations and offending Christian piety.Footnote 51 When the Inquisition promulgated its edicts against Jews in Modena in 1603, not only did they prohibit Jews from selling, holding, or pawning objects of the church, they also demanded that no Jews should be present when religious processions passed through the duchy.Footnote 52
It is interesting then that most allegations against Jews in seventeenth-century Modena usually revolved around inexpensive images, such as small silver, gold, or wax crucifixes or reliquaries and broadsheets of the Passion scene, rather than large crucifixes or panel paintings that had been the object of allegations in earlier periods. (Only one trial involved the painting of the Virgin on the outside wall of a building, and another the Virgin and Child in the inside of a spinning workshop). The invention of the printing press and the distribution of paper as an inexpensive medium facilitated the production of pictorial broadsheets depicting the stages of the passion, to be pinned up in domestic homes and used by the clergy to disseminate religious content as channels of sacred power.Footnote 53 This shift from the stable to the mobile, from the permanent to the transient was brought about by the proliferation of small, portable devotionalia and paraphernalia which were on occasions allegedly or actually broken, damaged, or verbally attacked as the result of altercations between Jews and Christians.
In 1620, Isacco Sacerdote (the future rabbi of Finale), Giuseppe Melli and Abramo Collorni were accused of showing contempt to a broadsheet sold by a local book vendor in a Finale piazza, in particular a drawing that depicted Jesus being crowned with a crown of thorns.Footnote 54 The three young men were accused of ridiculing the image with the words “Queste sono favole che contano quelli del l'historia!” (These are fables they recount about the history!). The three Jews were quickly imprisoned and interrogated in Modena, but their sentence of a year's imprisonment was commuted to a fine, due to the aid of ducal officials who accepted the plea of Isacco's father, Salomone.Footnote 55 In 1607, Abraam de Sacerdote had discovered a similar broadsheet depicting the crucifixion with John the Evangelist at Jesus's feet attached to the entrance of the shop that he was renting in Modena. It was in an effort to protect himself from allegations of image desecration that Abraam appeared before Inquisitor General Fra Serafino Borra, who immediately sent one of his ministers to remove the image. The investigation was discontinued.Footnote 56 The actual broadsheet is affixed to the back of the processo in the archive.
In seven of the proceedings, the delators were neighboring Christians, who had been encouraged by their local priests to denounce the Jews for this offense. Local priests also occasionally delated Jews themselves although their testimony was not always reliable. In July 1627, a priest, Father Dominico Bartholomeo, denounced Simone Camerino of Modena and Zaccharia Sano for failing to report the fact that there was a Christian image on the walls of a house that they rented.Footnote 57 The allegation proved false and the Jews were neither imprisoned nor punished.
Six of the twelve proceedings were discontinued due to lack of evidence. Another three resulted in the acquittal of the Jewish suspects and the remainder being fined, with amounts ranging from 50 to 80 scudi. The fine of the Jew was almost a standardized penalty, a punishment for bad behavior and a form of retribution that meant financial benefit for the Holy Office, which used these fines to help construct and then maintain the Inquisitorial headquarters and prison in the city.Footnote 58 Jewish offenders were usually transformed into debtors without any costly sanctions needing to be applied, or the involvement of the secular arm in the Jew's punishment. Only one Jew, Alessandro de Sanguinetti of Spilamberto was sentenced to imprisonment by the Inquisition because he was believed to be guilty of removing and destroying images from a tavern room where he had lodged in Piumazzo in 1635. Nor is it clear for how long he was imprisoned for.Footnote 59
In general when fined, the Jewish offenders were told that they were being punished not necessarily because their guilt had been proven, but because there was a suspicion that they had committed the offense. Suspicion was in itself an offense punishable both by spiritual and by physical penalties, and it was a charge suitable to persons who (however compelling the judges' belief in their guilt) could not be conclusively shown to have committed the deed with an altogether evil intent.Footnote 60 When in 1606, the teenager Columbino was accused of having threatened to beat Joannes Magnanini, a Christian teenager who was selling crucifixes made of white wax, he was also blamed for snatching and trampling one of the crucifixes, since Jacob, the young Jewish boy who had allegedly broken the crucifix, had died suddenly before the investigation was initiated. After being imprisoned for two months, (April 28 to June 20) Columbino was forced to pay a fine of 50 scuti.Footnote 61
Two of the twelve proceedings were opened ex officio which means that the Inquisitor did not need a delator to start the proceedings, but decided on the strength of a “common report” to investigate the matter himself. Under this procedure, Salvatore de Modena was accused in 1619 of moving and tampering with a statue of the Holy Virgin, but the testimony of Hercules de Coccopani was considered improbable and the Jew was not even summoned for investigation.
Another way in which Jews could offend religious images was by their physical presence as witnesses to the holy processions that moved through city streets and towns. Christians were required to doff their hats and bow to the image, while Jews were expected to move away, since their presence was interpreted as polluting the sanctity of the procession and its images.Footnote 62 Father Jacobus de Lauda came before the Inquisition in 1636 to express his annoyance at seeing the Jewish banker Jacobo Donato and his wife Stella, as well as their Christian wetnurse, standing at the window of their house while the Feast of the Holy Rosary procession had passed by their home. His expectation of finding a Jew present at the procession is even suggested in his testimony: “I looked at the window of the said Jacob to see if some Jew was at the window while the procession passed.”Footnote 63 Nevertheless, Inquisitor Tinti concerned himself with the more serious crime of Jacobo Donato's hiring of a Christian wetnurse and the Jew was given a six-month prison sentence for this offense alone and warned not to appear during processions in the future.
Let us return to Michele Sanguinetti whom we left delating before the Holy Office on August 9, 1617 at the beginning of this paper.Footnote 64 Even though within a few days the Inquisition had received two further delations from fellow conspirators, Abramo Sanguinetti and Giuseppe Pontasso, which would have ensured the indictment of the wealthy Jewish banker, the court neither interrogated nor imprisoned Simon de Sanguinetti, clearly unwilling to risk wrongfully accusing a prominent member of the Jewish community. Michele Sanguinetti's iconoclastic accusation transpired to be the main component of a wide-scale fabricated accusation against the wealthy Jewish bankers with the intention of irreparably damaging their reputation and prominent position, not only in Modenese society but in the neighboring cities also.Footnote 65 When on October 10, 1617, Inquisitor General Massimo Guazzoni interrogated Doctor Camillo Jaghel da Correggio, a neophyte and corrector of Hebrew books, who had willingly agreed to act as the spokesperson for the massari (lay leaders) of the Jewish community, he confirmed that the conspirators' false accusation was being investigated by one Rondanelli, an ordinary judge of the Palazzo, who had accepted their request for action against these Jewish conspirators.Footnote 66 Although Michele Sanguinetti and Giuseppe Pontasso had fled in time, Abramo Sanguinetti was left standing trial alone and was tortured during one of his interrogations. Since he did not confess, Rondanelli accepted his story that he was not part of the conspiracy and released him. The Jewish community clearly preferred secular jurisdiction and envisaged themselves under the protection of the Duke and outside the jurisdiction of the Church—whatever the Holy Office had to say about the matter.
In five of the proceedings the Jewish suspects were imprisoned during their investigations, but requests that they be allowed home on the grounds of ill health made by family members or doctors or due to pressing business concerns were usually treated positively by the Inquisition, as it was for Christians.Footnote 67 Naphtali de Sermide of Finale was accused in June 1631 of a “certain contempt and irreverence for the most holy crucifix” by failing to move away from a procession of the Compagnia della Morte (a procession which accompanied criminals to execution, exhorting them to repent and bear their sufferings patiently).Footnote 68 When the Jew appealed he was released before his sentencing to allow him to attend to his business.Footnote 69
The Inquisition's intention here was to monitor the Jews for simple disrespect for Christianity, construing these incidents as slighting the power of the church rather than symbolizing heretical actions. At the same time it maintained that delicate theological questions did not arise in offences involving physical attacks on images. When over thirty years later, in 1665, ten prominent Jewish bankers of Modena (including Teseo Bandiera, Benedetto Modena, and Abramo Norsia) were accused of casting spells on some small silver and gold crucifixes that were held as pledges in their banks, the Holy Office, after seizing these crosses as well as a medallion depicting Pope Innocent X, nonetheless remained unwilling to prosecute the Jews for sorcery, and instead released them with a caution, to pay 50 aurei if they took such crucifixes again as pledges.Footnote 70
It seems that it was only in cases which involved public paintings or image cults that the Inquisition took investigations of Jewish and Christian suspects more seriously. Here allegations against Jews could potentially get out of hand, causing popular unrest and provocation among the two communities. In a processo against the five Carpi Jews in 1627 for stoning a painting of the Blessed Virgin, Fra Domenico Greco meticulously investigated the case when two Christian witnesses, Theodoro de Theodoro and Gio Batesto Soleri, testified that Beatrice, the mother of two of the young Jewish suspects, had mumbled while standing near the damaged Madonna image: “What does it matter whether that statue bleeds or not? No harm will come of it!”Footnote 71 That Beatrice seemed to be referring to the thaumaturgical powers of the image worried Greco. He decided to imprison her and conduct three interrogations in which Beatrice continually denied that she had spoken such words. At the end of the interrogation, Greco even sent his vicar to study the painting; who noted that there was no evidence of bleeding, thereby confirming that the damaged image was not a miraculous one.
IV. Instigators, Offenders, and Victims
No Jew could walk many steps in any direction in the town or city where he or she lived without being confronted by some kind of representation of Christianity, in the form of a crucifix, a sacred image, a church, or a Christian procession. Rabbinical authorities consistently reminded Jews that they were expected to regard the Christian usage of symbols as idolatry and resist the fascination that some icons might arouse.Footnote 72 But in their contact with these symbols, Jews demonstrated a mixture of reactions. The majority appeared to be cautious and wary around Christians' images of the sacred, conforming to the type of gestures that were expected. Various Jews fell prey to fabricated allegations while a few, on occasions, did actually desecrate them.
Not surprisingly, Jews standing trial before the early modern Inquisition in most cases expressed their absolute respect for and sensitivity to the Christian icons that surrounded them. When in 1613 Raffaello Moreno was brought before the Holy Office in Pisa, accused of defacing an image of a Madonna in the house that he rented, he argued that he and his family understood clearly what an offense it would be to deface a Christian image and that he would never have dared behave in such a manner. As a result of his testimony, he was absolved.Footnote 73 Such statements are similar to our Modenese examples. Here Jewish suspects hid any emotional content towards the purported offense or the image itself. Their concern was to behave in a way that might bring an end to their prosecution as soon as possible with limited damage to themselves. When Emmanuele Rava was accused with other young men of throwing stones at the image of the Blessed Virgin in Carpi, he testified:
God is our guard. We would never do anything to displease the Blessed Virgin, or the other saints.Footnote 74
Naphtali de Sermide who had failed to avoid the oncoming religious procession and had been present as a crucifix passed him, hinted to the Inquisitorial Vicar that he was well aware of the type of behavior that was expected from Jews towards these images:
My Lord, certainly I did not see the crucifix and if I had seen it I would have withdrawn, as is my duty.Footnote 75
Later in the same interrogation he expanded:
Father, I say to your Reverence that if I had known I had committed any fault against the Holy Office, I would of my own accord have come to ask pardon and thrown myself in your arms but I am not aware of having erred.Footnote 76
To show his ignorance of the approaching procession was indeed a safe bet for the Jewish suspect. No Christian witness could confirm that they had told Naphtali to leave, nor did they know the reason why he had tarried. Despite the lack of evidence, it remained difficult for Inquisitor Giacomo Tinti di Lodi to believe that when another Jew had left the scene, Naphtali had remained oblivious of what was going on. Obliviousness to Christian icons was also used by Isaac de Sacerdote, who argued in 1621 that although he had been in a stall buying books, he had never seen nor mocked an image of the crucifixion since:
we [Jews] are not able to look at such images.Footnote 77
When interrogated further, Sacerdote began to suggest that his mocking words might have been misinterpreted by the Christian delator:
It is possible that we said these words speaking of some other picture, but God is my guard, never have we said these words as the witnesses reported.Footnote 78
Not only did Jews face the aggression of co-religionists on this charge, but on occasions, as we have seen, they fell prey to fabricated accusations by their Christian neighbors, keen to absolve themselves of the blame of desecrating images. Investigations in Carpi in 1627 revealed that the five Jews accused of throwing stones at an image of the blessed Virgin were innocent of the transgression. Instead, two poor Christians, Silvestro Bucchina and Vincenzo Stambacino, who had been sleeping under a portico and angered when they were suddenly awoken by the Jews' rushing to nocturnal prayers, had tried to stone the Jews themselves, and missing their targets in the dark had hit the image instead.Footnote 79
When Beatrice, the mother of Emmanuele and Prospero Rava, was imprisoned and interrogated, she reported that not only had one of her sons been hit and wounded by the stones hurled at them by the Christians, but the group of Jews had heroically continued on their way to synagogue to carry out their offices. She provides a vivid picture of the embarrassment she faced the morning after the nocturnal violence, as she passed through the streets of Carpi:
The following day, towards the middle of the morning, I went out on business to visit a Christian laundress and when I passed by the house of one Moriscalco which has a figure painted on it (I do not know which saint it portrays)Footnote 80; there were some people standing on the corner. I heard one of them say, (I do not know who it was who said this) pointing her finger at me. “Here is the mother of those that did the bad thing.” I did not respond at all, but carried on with my errands. When I passed through the street, all of them were saying “Here is the mother of those that have done evil.” I was completely beside myself. I went to the house of one Signora Antonia, a Christian seamstress, and I said to her that I was more dead than alive.Footnote 81
It took some weeks before the Inquisitor was able to track down the two Christian offenders, who were then handed over to the secular authorities for punishment.
One processo hints at a Jew's lack of respect for the Christian veneration of images. When accused of breaking a wax crucifix in 1606, Columbino, a teenage Jew argued that he and his friend Jacob (who had died) were consistently being attacked by poor Christian children and the crucifix had been broken by them and not the Jews.Footnote 82 Although Columbino was probably exaggerating the extent of his victimization, one Christian witness, Antonio, the son of Domino Cristoforo, was able to give testimony about Columbino constantly remonstrating with the youth, and threatening repeatedly to damage his wax crucifixes.Footnote 83 Probably on account of this one eye-witness, and as a disciplinary caution to a defiant lad, Columbino was sentenced to pay a fine.
Another Inquisitorial investigation in Modena does provide compelling evidence of desecration. In 1632, a worrying delation was made by Francisco Bartolomeo de Marco, a Christian artisan to the Inquisitorial vicar of Spilamberto (a small town in the Modenese duchy, about twenty-five kilometers west of Bologna). Bartolomeo denounced Simone de Sanguinetti, a Jewish banker and an important entrepreneur, (no close relative of the above named Jews) who had acquired a silk spinning mill from an insolvent Marchigiano nobleman in 1631 and had, according to him, desecrated sacred Christian images.Footnote 84 Investigations revealed that not only had de Sanguinetti and his sons Alessandro, Raffaele and Buonaiuto run the mill and appointed over thirty Christian laborers to serve them, but there was an image of the Madonna and Child painted on an inside wall of the workshop which had been bordered, locked up and subsequently damaged, to the anger and disgust of the Christian workers who wished to pray before it. Although it was unlikely that the Jews had tampered with this image, De Sanguinetti and his sons were accused of further desecration. Andrea Cavreti, one of the Christian supervisors of the mill, testified that images of saints pasted to a portable altar, which the Christian workers had used for prayer had repeatedly been removed, torn up and thrown across the floor during a Christian festival while the Christian workers were absent.Footnote 85 The Jews were arrested, imprisoned and tortured, although they continually denied all charges. Alessandro de Sanguinetti was also charged with a case of iconoclasm outside the mill. The young Jew had stayed in a tavern in Piumazzo during his travels in 1635, where, according to Thomaso de Garagnana the innkeeper and Caterina his wife, the sacred images of the Blessed Virgin and other saints which had hung on the walls of his room had been removed and taken away. It seemed too much of a coincidence that Alessandro had been accused of the same offense in different settings, and consequently the Inquisition found him guilty and punished him harshly with imprisonment. During this long and complex processo the Jews maintained that they were being unlawfully prosecuted, a consequence of a malevolent conspiracy by their Christian workers.Footnote 86 It is difficult though to believe that the Christians would have repeatedly torn up their own sacred images, and the Jews' desecration might well have been an indirect attack on their Christian workers through their images. If so, this desecration represents a form of conflict, the expression of social and economic tensions between Jews and Christians rather than grievances against the images themselves.
Ioly Zorattini provides us with an interesting insight into the Jews' emotional response to Christian images behind the closed doors of empty Venetian palazzi in the eighteenth century. In his study of Giulio Morosini alias Samuel Nachmias, the neophyte who wrote Derech Emunah: Via della fede to encourage marranos who had reverted to Judaism in Italy to consider baptism, Morosini reported how wealthy Venetian patricians often deposited the keys of their palazzi with Jewish merchants, allowing them to use their homes while they were away. Morosini then described how he and other Jewish merchants had been able to act out aggression to religious images in the rooms of the palazzi: “we acted with as much disrespect as we could, with physical gestures, with shouting and spitting.”Footnote 87 Like many neophytes, Morosini may be a fairly tendentious writer. Nor should we place too much trust in the anecdotes of a neophyte bent on making new converts. But his comments do indicate the basic understanding among Jews that to do any real damage remained an absurdly impolitic thing to do.
V. Christian Imaginings
The search for meaning and significance of allegations of Jewish image desecration rests on the assumption that Christian imaginings rather than the actual behavior of the Jews were the cause of most of these allegations. Hence, one needs to explore the Christian motivations in spreading these rumors and how in particular Christian imaginings and Jewish reality converged and diverged in early modern society.
There is no suggestion in any of the trials that the Christians' community was mobilized by the Church or, in particular, the Holy Office regarding Jewish image desecration. Nor are there any presumptions displayed by Inquisitors in their questionings that Jews would naturally desecrate images. While the Inquisitors showed a measured response, the hostility and suspicion came instead from Christian neighbors, townspeople, and villagers. In 1606 Johannes Caceri in Carpi, with a certain belligerence toward Jews as potential iconoclasts, told the Inquisitor:
I would not have been able to contain myself and would have given that animal Columbino what for.Footnote 88
The purported words of the Jewess Beatrice in 1627 regarding the bleeding of the Blessed Virgin painting in Carpi, in particular, are revealing. Beatrice was said to have uttered words regarding the bleeding of the statue, while standing underneath it the morning after the stoning. This allegation was presented by two witnesses, Theodoro de Theodoro and Gio Batesto Soleri told Theodoro that Beatrice had said:
What does it matter whether that statue bleeds or not? No harm will come of it!Footnote 89
When Soleri gave testimony, he mentioned a slightly simpler utterance. He told Domenico Greco, the Inquisitorial vicar of Carpi:
I saw the Jewish woman, shaking her head and looking at the said Madonna. She said “you will bleed, you will bleed”.Footnote 90
These words provide an image of a Jewess contemplating the statue in regards to its supernatural attributes, its potential means of power. Theodoro had clearly adjusted the expression slightly since hearing it from Soleri. When Beatrice was interrogated on October 9 and 10, 1627, she reacted nervously when the Inquisitor accused her of uttering these words as if she clearly understood the implications of the accusation. The notary recorded that she said while crying:
Never did I say such words. No Jew would ever say such words. If I had said these words, the Christians would have attacked me.Footnote 91
It is unlikely that she would have risked making such a statement in front of Christians, at a time when she was conscious of her sons being suspected of desecrating the image. But if we suggest that these words were transposed by a Christian into the mouth of a Jewess, involving her in an offense she clearly did not commit, the question is why.
The processo makes no suggestion that the Blessed Virgin was known to have previously demonstrated thaumaturgical powers. But at the same time, the image was seen to connect people, their utterances, and the spaces in which they revered and experienced the images. Perhaps these Christians were hopeful, or had emotional or psychological expectations, that the desecrated Blessed Virgin would become a miraculous image? Her bleeding would feed popular hopes of assembling new sources of sanctity. Adriano Prosperi and David Gentilcore have shown how shrine formation in rural areas was particularly frequent from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries since there was a strong need for sacred objects to link devotions to specific rural spaces.Footnote 92 Many shrines started out as images with a reputation for healing which were later substantiated by legends detailing their miraculous discovery and numerous cures. At the same time, these words put in the mouth of Beatrice indicate that deep-seated suspicions that Jews desecrated images were genuinely entrenched in Christian consciences.
VI. Conclusion
Although Jews could react in a demonstrable way to images, both in their public and private behavior, these were spontaneous outbursts of desecration rather than any ritualized destruction of images. Some cases involved carelessness—somebody failed to avoid a religious procession in good time and did not do the correct thing when encountering it—and others in which actual verbal disrespect to, or physical damage to, or removal of images were alleged. The prime movers in the second group of cases seem to be teenagers or other young people, which suggests that juvenile rashness, radicalism, or inexperience may lie at the root of these cases, and that adults generally behaved more cautiously—they knew all too well what the consequences might be of a serious accusation against Jews. The trials also indicate that specific Christian images did not hold inherent or stable meanings for Jews but were rather construed in the context of their apprehension, association and usage. The Roman Inquisition remained skeptical about the allegations of malicious image desecration and, in these twelve cases, was inclined to believe that if a Jew did any damage it was accidental or careless. The trials then reveal a substantial gap in attitudes between the common folk and the more measured response of the Holy Office regarding popular accusations of image desecration. Jews were accused of desecrating cheap images such as broadsheets or waxen crucifixes, or even more substantial wall paintings mainly because neighboring Christians harbored suspicions which were quick to surface. These accusations then prompted the Inquisition to act as a buffer, moderating potential acts of violence against the Jews of Italy in the early modern period.
