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Bologna is famous for having been one of Europe’s leading cities in the Middle Ages. Thanks to its large population living within its walls, the wealth of local agriculture, the development of trade with the other cities of Emilia-Romagna, but also and perhaps above all to the dynamism provided by its university, the oldest in Europe. History of the Jews of Bologna The first traces of a ...
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The rich region of Emilia-Romagna is definitely worth a two or three-day visit. Located on the south of the floodplain of the Po River, it includes cities like Bologna, home to a museum that is a model of modern installation techniques and location of the ruins of an ancient ghetto in the heart of the city, and above all Ferrara, once a very important center of Italian Judaism. A leisurely ...
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A visit to Livorno is required in the name of remembrance, even if the urban renewal projects of the early twentieth century around the port and the bombings of the Second World War in 1943-1944 have destroyed most of the old city center, including Jewish Livorno’s Grand Synagogue. In no other Italian city did the Jews have such a significant role as in Livorno, where they were never ...
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Siena’s ghetto was created at the same time as that of Florence in 1571. The large Jewish presence in the city is verified by documents from the beginning of the thirteenth century that mention a universita iudarum. The Jewish quarter is in the heart of the city, near the Piazza Campo and between the present-day Via San Martino and Via di Salicotto. The narrow little streets and tall ...
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Locates at the extreme south of Tuscany among the hills and cypresses, the borough of Pitigliano rises from a rocky pinnacle. Once called “little Jerusalem” by Tuscan Jews, the nickname points to the historical importance of Pitigliano’s Jewish community here, formed by those fleeing the Papal States after the edicts of 1555. The Jews remained here for almost four centuries, ...
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The former ghetto of Florence was located in the heart of the old city center near the market in a zone totally destroyed and the end of the twentieth century, situated today between Via Brunelleschi, the Piazza della Repubblica, and Via Roma. Bernardo Buontalento, the grand duke’s architect, was commissioned to design the ghetto. The streets accessing the residential blocks were ...
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With cities like Livorno and Florence, Tuscany represents an important part of the history of Jewish life in Italy, although evidence of the longstanding Jewish presence here is less abundant than in Venice and Piedmont. The large free port city of Livorno was the largest Jewish city of Italy between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The powerful Spanish-Portuguese community had what ...
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The Jews in the capital of Italy are perhaps the oldest Romans of all. They have settled in the same ancient neighborhoods in the heart of the Eternal City for 2000 years, making their homes in the former ghetto, in Trastevere, and on both sides of the Tiber River where it is crossed by the Ponte Fabricio or Ponte Quattro Capi. Not only one of the oldest communities of the peninsula, Roman ...
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The Jewish presence in Bern probably dates from the 6th century. Jews are mentioned in the legal texts. During the Middle Ages, as in many other cities in the region, the situation of the Jews varied between reception, persecution (which began in Bern in 1294) and expulsion, depending on the power in place. In the wave of great expulsions that took place between the end of the 14th and the ...
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The Jewish presence in Zurich probably dates back to the 13th century. During the Middle Ages, as in many other cities in the region, the situation of the Jews varied between reception, persecution and expulsion, depending on the power in place. In the wave of major expulsions that took place between the end of the 14th and the end of the 15th century, the Jews of Zurich were expelled in ...
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The history of the Jews in Speyer reaches back over 1,000 years. In the Middle Ages, the city of Speyer (formerly Spira), Germany, was home to one of the most significant Jewish communities in the Holy Roman Empire. Its significance is attested to by the frequency of the Ashkenazi Jewish surname Shapiro/Shapira and its variants Szpira/Spiro/Speyer. The community was totally wiped out in 1940 ...
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The independent city of Frankfurt has welcomed Jews since 1150. However, from 1460 until their emancipation at the end of the seventeenth century, the Jews were confined to Judengasse (alley of the Jews), a ghetto that became quickly overcrowded. In 1720, moneylender Meyer Amschel Rothschild, his wife, Gütele, and their eighteen children moved into one of the houses in the area. Meyer’s ...
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It was around 1298 that the Jews settled in Pézenas, coming from Spain, Portugal and Italy. In the trade of clothes and cattle, they added the activity of the sale of wool and sheets. In 1332, a law imposed on the Jews crossing Pézenas or coming to sell there, a right of “leude” (a grant, or a toll). Jewish families disappeared from the city in 1394, during the expulsion of the ...
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Below the bell tower of Prague's Jewish city hall, there are two clock faces. One displays Roman numerals, and the other Hebrew letters. The hands of the first clock revolve in the normal clockwise direction while those of the second turn counterclockwise, following the customary manner of reading Hebrew right to left. Such clocks are rare, and this is the only one of its kind adorning a ...
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A Slavic land under Germanic rule for many centuries, Slovenia finally gained independence in 1991. The fate of the Jewish population here depended largely over the years on the good will of its princes. Nonetheless, the Jewish presence in the region goes back to antiquity. Archaeological digs have revealed a tomb engraved with a menorah at the Skocjan site, which likely dates back to the ...
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The excavations at Ostia, once the great imperial port of ancient Rome, have revealed the remains of an antique synagogue whose columns support capitals adorned with menorot, the traditional seven-arm candelabra of the Jews. Constructed toward the middle of the first century, perhaps even before the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, the synagogue attests to the more than 2000 of Jewish ...
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