The issue of special clothing for medieval Jewry was a preoccupation for Jews from 1215, when Pope Innocent III introduced the idea at the Fourth Lateran Council. Innocent’s intention was to provide a visual reminder that close contact with Jews was contaminating. The kings of France and England promptly employed the device, in 1215/16 and 1217, respectively. But what of Italy? The records are patchy. It is not clear a badge or segno, the markings Jews wore on their clothing, was demanded even in Rome, and, if so, the insistence was spotty. By the sixteenth century, the badge was converted into a hat, and, therefore, the Jews’ identity becomes more visible. In Venice, from 1496 the hat was usually yellow, and from the seventeenth century it turned to red. In Rome, the yellow hat was authorized in the papal bull Cum Nimis Absurdum of 1555. The Jews responded by trying to rationalize the demand legally (Halakhically), by asking whether it could be worn on the Sabbath, when carrying was forbidden. The response was, yes, it was sewn on and integral to one’s garb.

Flora Cassen presents the badge (the yellow O) or hat as a “marking” of “anti-Jewish discrimination” (3). This fits in with the above characterizations of the badge. She concentrates her study on the small and unstable Jewries in the duchies of Milan and Piedmont-Savoy and the republic of Genoa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although she does not document the archives used, and her manuscripts do not appear in her bibliography, Cassen uses the same material on badges already referred to in the series A Documentary History of the Jews in Italy, in volumes edited by Shlomo Simonsohn on Milan, Renata Segre on Piedmont, and Rossana Urbani and Guido Nathan Zazzu on Genoa. She provides more details (for example, the trial documents of Jo Treves and the negotiations between Angelino and Lazaro Nantua and the governing authorities in chapter 5) and sometimes more precise references. However, some of her spellings differ from the original texts, and consistent cross-references to the Documentary History are missing in her footnotes. In chapter 5, she mistakenly calls the ASG (Archivio di Stato di Genoa) AGS (which earlier in the book she abbreviates the Archivio General Simancas) on a number of occasions, and confuses the reader by calling what Urbani and Zazzu call the Senato Litterarum, the Senarega.

Chapter 1 gives an overview of the badge’s history. Chapter 2 discusses the fifteenth-century badge regulations during the Viscontin and Sforza ducal dynasties in Milan. These first appear in the 1430s, but Jews used the badge as a “bargaining chip” (57), continually paying for personal exemptions, despite pressures from Franciscan friars. By the end of the century the badge had been imposed in a number of areas. Chapter 3 turns to the stricter implementation of badge legislation in the sixteenth century and in particular from 1512 to 1597 during the Spanish occupation, which Cassen argues fractured the Jewish community along class lines. This chapter is Cassen’s best, as she exploits her material to the full, describing the meticulous and complex negotiations between the Jews, the Spanish kings who used the badge to track Jews, the Senate who used it to resist growing Spanish power, Milanese local authorities, and Cardinal Carlo Borromeo who demanded its strict application.

In chapter 4, Cassen uses the fiscal records of the small scattered communities of Jews of Piedmont and Savoy to reveal their well-organized attempts to exempt all Jews in the duchy from the Jewish badge, although, as she argues, this level of cohesion and efficiency encouraged ducal extortion. From 1430, the badge was a “round red and white patch sewn on their outer garments at the level of the left shoulder” (132), an interesting deviation from the traditional yellow badge. From 1551 it even took the form and shape of a money bag of “yellow and black color” (142). Although the Jews preferred black, which really meant that the badge was unnoticeable, by 1584 it was changed to a yellow stripe to be sown on the collar. Chapter 5 concentrates on five prominent Jewish individuals who remained in Genoa after the Jews’ expulsion by the Spanish Habsburgs in 1567, personifying the anxieties caused by local authorities who offered no coherent badge policies. These men—moneylenders and physicians—were often supported in their pleas for exemptions by Christian neighbors anxious to keep these useful professionals in town. In 1587, Jews were finally ordered to wear a yellow badge (and not a hat) or leave.

Although the book highlights local economic and political motives for Jewish badge laws and how these compromised the Jews’ safety especially when they traveled, one comes away with a sense of disappointment that Cassen’s study does not reveal more and that her conclusions are not stronger. We are no wiser as to whether the badge had different associations for women who, as Cassen argues, were already distinguishable by their ornate headwear. Because of the narrowness of her finds, it would have probably been beneficial, at least in a final chapter, to compare them with those of the larger Jewish centers in Venice and Rome, where it is assumed that ghettoized Jewries had far fewer opportunities to maneuver badge regulations.