Judaism and the City, Judaism in the City: A Historiographical Journey.

The theme 'Jews and the city' is a relevant research topic in the field of Jewish Studies, and in the last decades it has been also invested by the epistemological debate enhanced by the spatial turn. Although this relationship is strongly emphasized in the historiography on Judaism, the focus is often, as we shall see, on the modern period, thus associating it with the processes of modernization and secularization (often dubbed 'assimilation' in Jewish historiography). As part of the research project on Religion and Urbanity this article attempts to highlight the development of a few 'urban themes' in the historiography of Judaism and enucleate trajectories that might be pursued in future research projects. Its structure falls into three different sections: The first one introduces some perspectives on historiography of Judaism from the Wissenschaft des Judentums; the second explores some themes that are distinctively linked to Jewish history, specifically the notions of ghetto, port-Jews, and religious minorities. The third section attempts to delineate some potential new directions to highlight how the focus on urban and spatial theories might shed new light on the historical evaluation of different forms of Jewish religion.

Our history is antistatic and anti-spatial.

(Zevi in Brauch, Lipphardt, and Nocke 2008 , 5)

The historiographical model introduced by Josephus Flavius, whose Jewish War and Antiquitates offered the non-Jewish public of antiquity a thorough and nuanced historical narrative about the Jews, their society and religion, was revived in the eighteenth century. The Huguenot historian Jacques Basnage (1653 – 1723), whose historical narrative embraced a history of the Jews in a broad diasporic context, was inspired by the famous ancient Jew and by his enterprise. Basnage succeeded in offering a vision of Judaism that relied upon information gathered from different Jewish and Christian sources, a collaborative effort that implied the use of many informants around Europe. The mindset behind this enterprise, however, was the millenarian belief according to which knowledge about Jewish settlements was pivotal to the notion of the ingathering of the exiles and the second coming of Jesus. Despite this theological leaning, his historical work, which allowed for the Jews to be treated as any other group, indicated an increasingly secular approach to the study of religion in the early modern period ([8]; [37]; [76]).

This model was influential for the Jewish historians and theologians who founded the Wissenschaft des Judentums at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The scholarly enterprise launched by this small community of scholars is important in terms of spatial perspectives and urban history for two different reasons. First, it was rooted in distinctive local contexts: German states, Eastern European cities (namely the Russian empire and inter-war Poland), and the United States. Much like Basnage, whose urban environment also determined the topics of his research, many scholars of the nineteenth century were indebted to their local environments for bolstering their cultural agenda.

Moreover, following in the footsteps of Basnage's model, many of these general historical narratives, which covered the entire history of the Jews and Judaism, used a spatio-temporal narrative that emphasized the role of distinctive geographical areas and cities. Traveling in time implied visiting places where Jewish life had thrived under different social and political conditions. The best image to capture this multivocal story is a map which highlights the different settlements and simultaneously captures the diversity and the unity. A collection of traveler's snapshots would point out differences and similarities, distinctive cultural patterns, religious practices, spatial arrangements, and architecture. This narrative also implied a journey through time which required the ability to detect historical dynamism and change. Each scholar had his own agenda and criteria which enabled a certain narrative to be told and a certain set of urban cases to become significant. For example, Heinrich Graetz (1817 – 1891), whose history of the Jews exerted a relevant influence in the nineteenth century and beyond, paid attention to urban contexts; cities like Venice and Amsterdam, or urban areas where important religious ideas appeared. In the same fashion Berlin arose as an urban setting where the Enlightenment (Jewish Haskalah) prompted a great change toward modernization. In Graetz's work geographical areas and cities light up when they become beacons of high culture and intensive creative religious, philosophical and theological production, and they switch off when the rise of movements detrimental to reason and culture appear. One case in point is exemplary: the rise of Chassidism in some areas of Eastern Europe, which signaled the dissemination of Kabbalah and its pernicious influence on Judaism.

Other great global historical narratives, such as the Social and Religious History of the Jews by Salo W. Baron (1895 – 1989), who taught at Columbia University, followed a similar pattern, although with different cultural assumptions ([17]). Baron was born in the Habsburg empire and studied in Vienna, where he trained in different disciplines. Part of his immense work is imbued by his personality, his experience as a Jew who emigrated from Europe to become the chair of Jewish history at Columbia University. Baron's global history of the Jews, much like the one penned by Simon Dubnov (1860 – 1941), is a comprehensive project that incorporates different geographical areas and urban contexts. Instead of looking at persecution or at moments of light and darkness, Baron focused on the positive interaction between Jews and other cultures while elaborating the concept of "Jewish community", through which he connected Jewish religious life to different spatio-temporal contexts. The "community" is the recurring institutional feature of Judaism through the ages and in distinctive geo-political contexts. Its ties with urban elements are, in my opinion, visible and quite relevant, as the community is often a comprehensive differentiated local institution where religious elements are organized ([6]; [24], 417 – 421; [17]). Baron should also be mentioned for his novel interpretation of the "ghetto", a notion that by the time his article appeared had undergone seismic semantic changes and gained intellectual visibility ([4]).

These historical projects were very much indebted to the program of modernizing Jewry and played different roles that functioned to 'lodge' the Jews in their territories, national states, empires, and cities. They often aimed to demonstrate that (1) the Jews (and their religion) are part of the national community (Graetz, Geiger, and others); (2) the Jews are a national minority entitled to autonomy within an empire or a nation-state; (3) Furthermore, the rise of Zionism as a national movement and the need to regain political sovereignty and territorial autonomy greatly influenced conceptions of space and place. The national project, which in due time led to the birth of modern Israel, had an ambivalent attitude toward the urban element. On the one hand, many Zionists from Eastern Europe, influenced by Russian movements and narodnik culture, were committed to a return to agriculture and against the ailment of the urban condition. Anti-urban ideologies embedded in some Zionist currents aimed at the collectivization of agriculture and supported anti-urban lifestyles ([9]). At the same time, some features of the new state envisioned by Theodor Herzl, the father of the Zionist movement, were based upon the urban models of Europe. In his Altneuland ([54]), a text infused with a utopian vision, he imagines cities in the Jewish state (Judenstaat) modeled after Vienna. Tel Aviv, the Hebrew title of the book, later known as the "white city", became a model of super-modern urbanism ([89]; [86]). (4) The parallel development of a sizable Jewish diaspora in the United States as the result of mass migration from Eastern Europe had a twofold result: it organized Jewish life against the backdrop of American institutionalized religious diversity, strengthening an internal process of differentiation along with the transformation of American Jewry into a full-fledged urban religious minority ([30]). Likewise, a similar process was underway in Western, Central and Eastern Europe.

One should add that European history (at least until the Shoah), Eastern European history and American history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries prove to be fascinating ground for exploring the relationship between religion and the city as it applied to Judaism, conceived in its many different organizational settings, postures, and ideologies. Vienna, Berlin, Paris, New York, Odessa, Salonica, Jerusalem, Kiev, and Vilnius represent a long list of "Jewish cities" that historians have studied in these decades. Joachim Schloer reminds us that the study of the city is well established in the field of Jewish Studies ([90] in [15]). Methodological perspectives are often indebted to archival, archeological, documentary and/or literary sources, whereas theoretical approaches are becoming more nuanced and refined in recent years, incorporating spatial theories but also the methods of cultural history ([15]; [66]; [44]).

In the following pages I will discuss some topics that have shaped Jewish historiography and still play a relevant role in the scholarly debate about Judaism.

The ghetto, as it is here conceived, owes its existence, not to legal enactment, but to the fact that it meets a need and performs a social function. The ghetto is, in short, one of the so-called "natural areas" of the city.

(Park in Wirth 1956 , VIII)

As mentioned above, Salo [4] where he questioned the negative perception of the ghetto, which had become a symbol of persecution and segregation in Europe before the emancipation ([4]). A book devoted to the same subject, The Ghetto (1928), was also published that year by a German born Jewish member of the Chicago school of sociology ([115]; [116]; [116]; [47]). A pupil of Robert E. Park, Louis [117]; [47]). Both authors have influenced the numerous interpretations of the ghetto that have appeared over the twentieth century: Baron more directly on Jewish historiography, Wirth on themes about segregation in the city.

Daniel Schwartz offers a valuable analysis of the many metamorphoses the notion of the ghetto underwent in different periods and geographical contexts, from the Italian cities where the term first appeared to the negative overtones it gained among Jewish and Gentile intellectuals in the eighteenth century, to the powerful image of the 'opening' and 'tearing down' of the gates of the ghetto which accompanied French troops during the campaign of Napoleon. In many Italian towns rituals of liberation (riddance rituals) were established to install the new regime and the novel liberties: "[...] the planting of a liberty tree, and even the renaming of a nearby street or quarter in honor of concordia or libertà were part of a ritual marking the sudden and far-reaching upheaval of the old order" ([93], 51). Paradoxically, as Schwartz poignantly argues, in the nineteenth century the ghetto became a metonymy for the past, both as the nostalgic setting of a lost authenticity and a horrid site of misery, poverty and ignorance. The semantic expansion of the term ghetto in this period transformed this relatively unknown term into a container of various urban experiences that incorporated Jewish neighborhoods (juiveries, Judengasse), ethnic segregation and "a conceptual package of legal compulsion, total residential segregation, and physical separation via gates and walls" ([93], 78).

Inspired by Reinhart Koselleck's notion of the "temporalization of concepts", Schwartz claims that the ghetto was likewise temporalized, becoming a counter-concept that exemplified the evil of the pre-modern world. It was also spatialized as it travelled with migrant Jews to places where the passage to modernity instantly became an urgent objective.

By the end of the nineteenth century the term entered American culture through several types of communicative strategies: investigative journalism, fiction, photography, poetry, social sciences. In the American parlance the ghetto symbolized the many problems that mass immigration had provoked in American cities, where spatially segregated ethnic communities had sprung up all over. Jews arriving from Europe seemed to settle in distinctive zones where their religious and ethnic habits became publicly visible. The ghetto was then conceptualized in three distinctive types of discourse: 1. for some Jewish writers and poets the ghetto was turned into a symbol of the memory of a lost past, whereas for the political activists it was the space of capitalist exploitation, poverty, and misery. 2. For anti-immigration intellectuals, the ghetto was a dangerous site of immigrants who were unable to assimilate and integrate in the new society, the visible radical otherness of a savage culture. 3. A third interpretation, advocated by Jews who had integrated in American society, claimed that the ghetto was a "transitional site", a place among different cultures, situated between Jewish backwardness and modern civilization ([93]; for a different reading [35]).

Drawing from fieldwork, interviews and historical data, Wirth's study was somewhat indebted to the debate that animated the American scene, and it succeeded in turning a local site into a sociological concept. His 'natural history' of the ghetto was aimed at identifying the consequences of cultural and social isolation over long periods of time. On one hand, he affirmed that patterns of segregation were established voluntarily, arising from the combination of cultural features associated with religious norms and hostile perceptions from the outside rather than superimposed external legal restrictions. To him,

the introduction of the compulsory ghetto in the late medieval period mainly formalized and further ratified this preexisting accommodation: 'The ghetto wall, the gates, the Jewish badge ... became the physical symbols of the social isolation which manifested itself in the social distance between Jews and Christians'. (Schwartz 2019 , 117)

As Schwartz indicates, Wirth was convinced that under cultural and social conditions promoting interactions among different ethno-religious groups, the ghetto would disappear. However, when Jews started to move socially upward and left the ghettos of American cities, they recreated ethnic neighborhoods with a certain Jewish flavor, allowing religious norms to be implemented. Somehow the ghetto seemed to be more than a spatial accommodation: it would also reflect a spiritual/cultural condition.

Baron's interpretation of the ghetto focused exclusively on Jewish history. His main goal was to positively reconsider the pre-emancipation period, which linked, as mentioned above, the age of the ghetto to social and religious oppression. For Baron, the 'ghetto' coincided not so much with its physical and historical reality but was rather conceived as a foil for the corporate organization of society, when Jewish life enjoyed autonomous jurisdiction on religious and civic matters.

A phase of this corporate existence generally regarded by emancipated Jewry as an unmitigated evil was the Ghetto. But it must not be forgotten that the Ghetto grew up voluntarily as a result of Jewish self-government and it was only in a later development that public law interfered and made it a legal compulsion for all Jews to live in a secluded district in which no Christian was allowed to dwell. (Baron 1928 , 55)

He also linked the rise of compulsory Jewish segregated urban areas with the rise of the counter-Reformation and the Inquisition.

At this period there was no systematic historical research available on distinctive urban environments and their Jewish settlements. Baron and Wirth's assessments on the 'ghetto' were partly inaccurate: whereas the latter aimed to show that the formation of segregated neighborhoods was a general urban pattern that could be solved through policies of social integration, the former highlighted the corporate autonomy of pre-modern Jewry. In the second half of the twentieth century the term became associated with Nazi policies and more generally with ethnic and racial segregation ([35]; [93]; [48]).

The debate over this topic has been renewed in recent years, after decades of specialized research on different urban environments. Several different theories that have appeared in the last decades have been historically grounded on research devoted to Italian cities in the early modern period, or more generally to works by urban historians. Historical interpretations of the ghetto differ in theoretical approaches and methodology. They also vary in relation to the special local context. The cities that have been mostly studied in the anglophone sphere are Venice (where the term 'ghetto' originated), Rome, Florence, and most recently Modena. There is also an extensive literature in Italian on many other cities: Turin, Mantua, Padua and Ferrara, to mention just a few. Given the wide semantic meaning associated with the term it is helpful to highlight a minimal, historically grounded definition which starts from Venice and explores those spatial configurations that were conceived in similar ways and later implemented in many Italian cities. As Ravid has stated on many occasions, the term is associated with the area in the city of Venice where in 1516 a first group of Jews was allowed to establish residence through a temporary charter that endowed them with several privileges, and which would be progressively expanded to accommodate waves of Sephardi Jews from the Levant and conversos from the Iberian empires. Normative pragmatism and theological preoccupations accompanied the formation of this settlement in a city that secured religious pluralism through spatial hierarchical organization and control ([61]).

Jewish spatial segregation would soon be associated with Catholic policies. Kenneth Stow, the eminent scholar of the ghetto in Rome, claims that the rise of religious segregation is rooted in Christian theology dating back to Paul. Using anthropological perspectives, he focuses his attention on doctrines of purity and claims that the rise of the ghetto was officially implemented to protect the Christian body politic from pollution with non-Christian elements. Moreover, when referring to the Roman ghetto, it has been suggested that spatial segregation was accompanied by policies to promote conversion which were structurally linked to other places, like the houses of the catechumens. Historians who subscribe to this interpretation argue that during the Renaissance and in the aftermath of the Reformation, the policing of religious borders defined the organization of space in the urban environment. On the opposite side, functionalist interpretations of the ghetto reject all religious or theological perspectives and claim that the 'ghetto', in its broadest meaning, was the result of demographic changes and a pragmatic way to allow Jews in the cities, even if they were cordoned off from Christian groups.

How do we evaluate these different interpretations of spatial segregation in relation to Judaism and religion? I offer two possible interpretative options. The first one questions Christian interpretations of space, how they changed over time and how they incorporated religious diversity, including the presence of the Jews. Spatial arrangements for Jews should be interpreted against the background of types of urban settlements (port-cities, capital cities, independent cities, market cities, and so forth). The religious culture of the city's leadership and institutions should likewise be taken into consideration, along with the public deployment of religious rituals. Christianity, both in its Catholic and Reformed guises, was not irrelevant when it came to the organization of the city and its space. Kenneth Stow is therefore right when he insists on the relevance of theological conceptions and canon law ([105]), and so are other scholars who have documented a culture that praised separation and physical containment ([52]). However, the impact of plague on cities should also be considered ([100]). Furthermore, the study of spatial politics as applied to Jews would benefit from comparative approaches that illustrate how other religious groups were placed and accepted in the city, and how diversity was managed in more general terms (there are some insights in [88]).

The second interpretative option explores how Jewish religion adapted to bottom-up spatial arrangements in the city. Did these spatial arrangements influence religious life? Did the city itself provoke changes in traditional religious patterns? There are many answers to these questions that depend upon numerous cultural, social, and political variables. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the idea that social segregation played a role that was detrimental to Jewish religious tradition, including theology, philosophy, literature and so forth was strongly supported by many scholars. Decline – both cultural and social – was a recurrent term that described the age of the ghettos. Nowadays our picture of the period is much more nuanced. The era of the ghettos did not eliminate interactions between different religious groups and individuals of different faiths despite the fact that it increased religious animosity, conflict, and persecution. Scholars have described several types of cultural interactions, including the appropriation of Christian literary models (for example in preaching), the knowledge and use of the vernaculars, and confrontations about philosophical, theological, and biblical topics. Urban institutions bolstered ambivalent practices between the city and ghetto because they were required to sustain several types of negotiation between the different parts, whilst often also nurturing religious suspicion and fear.

But if the places whereto men are driven of necessity to fly have in them besides their safety any commodity of importance, it will be an easy thing for them to increase, both with people, and with riches, and with building. In this matter the cities of the Levant and Barbary became great through the multitude of Jews that Ferdinand the King of Spain and Emmanuel the King of Portugal cast out of their kingdoms, as in particular Salonica and Rhodes.

(Botero 1588 [English edition 1606])

The port-city functions as a sort of antonym of the ghetto. The historiographical debate initiated by American scholars David Sorkin and Lois Dubin introduced the notion of "port-Jews" and aimed to explore alternative paths to modernity ([32]; [102]; [101]; [28]; [27]; [34]). This notion analyses special types of Jewish environments based in cities that specialized in trade, and it explores whether the link with commerce is a potential route to religious modernization ([102]; [32]; [103]; [101]).

The importance of the term 'modernization' is key to understanding this historiographical debate, which aimed at investigating the kinds of religious lifestyles that port cities enhanced and how they differed from other types of urban environments, most specifically the central and eastern European villages (shtetl) or the cities of Central Europe. The focus on port-cities also aimed to revise an established historiographical tradition that focused on the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), the intellectual movement located in Central and Eastern Europe, as the starting point of a new modernized conceptualization of religion which initiated the path to social integration and political emancipation in Jewish history.

According to Dubin, the attention to port-cities and port-Jews also contributed to turning attention to a neglected and misinterpreted period in Jewish history. The presence of Jews and other religious groups in port-cities depended upon the concept of economic usefulness, usually labelled raison d'ètat. This political practice, which appears repeatedly to support the settlement of Iberian conversos, was widely used in both Catholic and Protestant areas in the age of the confessional divide. In his famed book on the "Greatness of the Cities" (1588), Giovanni Botero (1544 – 1617), the influential theoretician of raison d'ètat, claimed that the cities of the Levant had been improved by the trading abilities of the Jews who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal ([12] [[11]], 97).

According to David Sorkin, the "port Jew" may be conceived as a social type that was only found in specific port-cities of the Mediterranean and Atlantic shores. "Sorkin attributed five characteristics to the port Jew type" summarizes Dubin. Its relevant features are:

(1) migration and commerce; (2) the valuation of commerce; (3) legal status: that is, voluntary associations or merchant corporations rather than autonomous corporate Jewish communities; (4) re-education and Haskalah avant la letter, that is, education of former conversos and their descendants about normative rabbinic Judaism in tandem with intellectual-cultural involvement with surrounding non-Jewish society; and (5) identity and belief: that is, adherence to ethnic identity and non-religious forms of communal solidarity rather than strict religious observance, an identity at times accompanied by skeptical and rationalist challenges to Jewish belief of the sort associated with Uriel Da Costa and Benedict [sic] Spinoza. (Dubin 2017 and Sorkin 1999 , 87 – 97)

Sorkin's definition values the religious component of this type of urban Jewish settlement, paying due attention to religious education blended with secular studies (natural philosophy, medicine, and other subjects) and a religious identity not exclusively defined by strict halakhic adherence. Plus, according to this definition, port-Jews were more likely to develop critical attitudes toward religious traditional lifestyles. He also elaborated a spatialized template to interpret the process which led to Jewish political integration in Europe, thinking of "three regions of Emancipation" that do not follow the political borders of established states, but an inner cultural logic attached to Jewish social and cultural practices ([102] and [103]).

As the notion of "port-Jews" gained traction among historians and new case-studies were added, some of its conceptual shortcomings emerged. Whereas the earliest models explored by Dubin (Trieste) and Sorkin were limited to Italian cities or Iberian conversos in port cities of the Mediterranean and European Atlantic shores, several new studies on port-cities in Asia, Africa, and on the American Atlantic shore appeared ([28]; [27]; [34]). New issues emerged, among which were

(1) the practices and discourse of race and slave-holding among the early modern Atlantic Sephardim; (2) cautionary notes about assuming toleration and cosmopolitanism in heterogeneous port cities, and the need to pay heed to interethnic and majority–minority relations and group competition, as well as different political contexts, such as capital city, empire, or emerging nation-state; (3) tensions in stations of mass migration. (Dubin 2017 , 566)

Port cities might indeed have nurtured violence, supported slavery, preached religious conservatism and even been detrimental to religious pluralism or certain types of cosmopolitanism ([72]; [70]; [120]; [53]). Yet, the port-city stood out as a space welcoming religious refugees in the early modern period and morphed into a model that would be replicated in the eighteenth and nineteenth century: Trieste and Odessa are good examples of top-down engineered port-cities modelled after the ones from the earlier period ([42], see also [107]).

There are three intertwined themes about the study of "port Jews" and Judaism of the early modern period:

(1) The first one revolves around the legal models of converso settlements. There is scholarly consensus around the claim that most of the time conversos were allowed in towns as Catholics (Antwerp, Bourdeaux, Amsterdam, Nice), using the charter for merchant nations and a set of urban privileges. In some instances, their secret religious identity was acknowledged (Ancona, Livorno). Iberian conversos returned to Judaism at different times and in various modes, but in the port-cities where they settled as a merchant nation religious identity was always a matter of complex allegiances. In some instances, the presence of an established Jewish community would guide the process of integration into the urban fabric, as was the case in Venice, a port-city with a ghetto that played a pivotal role in supporting the formation of other Jewish urban settlements. Cities influenced by different legal and theological traditions contributed to forging the type of "Jewish community" that emerged. Amsterdam is probably a good example of a city with a community that started as Catholic and became Jewish, implementing strict disciplinary norms to clearly delineate the boundaries of orthodoxy. The Calvinist urban elite made sure that religious strife did not erupt, allowing the community a significant amount of power to control its members and suppress religious deviance. In Catholic cities, on the other hand, other types of problems might have stemmed from the interference of the Iberian and local Inquisitions. In cities like Livorno, whose normative charters were mostly liberal in reference to 'religious freedom', and where no ghetto was established, informers and spies could be detrimental to a smooth process of integration, creating anxiety and fear for families of conversos living in Portugal or Spain ([67]). The presence of families divided by faith in the same city is a subject that still needs to be fully explored.

(2) The second question points to the physiognomy of Judaism that developed as a result of this complex historical process that tied new Christians and new Jews to port cities. It is of course difficult to summarize a multi-layered historiographical debate that spans over a century. It will suffice to note the most relevant topics that have animated the academic debate. The hybrid identity of many Iberian conversos has attracted a great deal of investigation. The "Marranos of reason", to borrow a phrase from the title of a famous book ([118]), attracted investigation in intellectual history which focused on the rise of rational critique of religion, skepticism, and biblical criticism as paving the way to modernization (also [75]). Moreover, a new interest in Jewish culture spurred by 'these intellectual environments rooted in several European cities', developed among Christian scholars, whereas streams of apocalyptic thought influenced Christians and Jews alike ([91]). Cities like Antwerp, Amsterdam, Rome, and Venice were also nodes of communication that gathered enormous amounts of information. These cities were powerful hubs for the printing industry and collecting points for the circulation of clandestine literature. Port-cities, along with other places, were also sites of intense religious polemics. These features of the early modern port-cities help us to understand how religious cultures were formed and established, along with how potential interactions among different urban religious minorities developed and ultimately how religious subjectivity was lived and experienced ([22]).

But there is more. How were religious communities formed? Religious leaders travelled from place to place. Sephardi rabbis who had trained in the Ottoman empire or in Italy arrived in new settlements, where they established and enforced halakhic norms. New communal institutions were founded in those cities. According to Yosef Kaplan, the conversos and new Jews of Iberian heritage underwent a process of confessionalization not dissimilar to the Christian one, even though it reinforced the ethnic side of belonging (and allowed different religious identities). More interestingly, in their theological posture these new Jews mirrored Christian modes of thought, where orthodoxy was more important than orthopraxis: in other words, the belief system became more relevant than the performance of rituals ([57]; [58]).

The network of players involved in the management of these novel urban settlements was made up of different agents: religious authorities, influential merchants and diplomats, members of large family kinships, influential intellectuals schooled in Christian subjects and theology, jurists and poets, whose subjectivity is an important topic of research. As for the ghetto, the role of the port-city within the web of imperial or national constellations of power influenced the fate and role of these new religious communities, supporting or inhibiting the formation of other settlements in colonial territories.

(3) The third question worth mentioning points to the management of religious pluralism in the city and its forms of cohabitation or coexistence with other religious groups ([71]; [59]). In many instances port cities were inhabited by numerous religious groups. Hence, scholars have suggested that a more inclusive approach be applied to describe how these groups interacted with each other, what kinds of relationships they established with the city, and how they contributed to its development and cultural life. The perspective that focuses on one distinctive group – Jews, Greeks, Armenians, and Protestants to mention but a few – usually unearths the multiple links that weave together members of extended families in different port cities; it also offers a multi-layered description of each group within the fabric of the city, but rarely delves into inter-religious and inter-cultural relationships that evolved, or failed to evolve, in the city (Calabi 1999; Calabi and Bottin 1999).

The notion of "port Jews" has been applied to other port-city groups, as in the case of the Armenians, who share some urban features with the Jews ([2] and [3]; [34]). However, Tullia Catalan has recommended applying a wider look at the port-city, suggesting the more apt notion of "port merchants" to include other religious and ethnic groups in port-cities ([25] and [26]). Other scholars have pointed to a different conceptualization for the life of minorities in the city, focusing on the notion of "diaspora". However, as Monge and Muchnik write, not all religious minorities were diaspora communities, and diaspora communities were not exclusively located in port cities. Sometimes they operated in rural environments or small villages ([71]). Although the term diaspora has always been applied to the study of Judaism, a novel conceptualization emerged in the wake of recent processes of globalization ([62] and several specialized journals). This notion conveys transnational movement, flux, migration (voluntary and forced) and it properly catches some nuances of the imagery and symbolism of religious minorities in the city. In the case of the Jews or the Huguenots emic notions of exile, suffering, martyrdom, are better understood when we locate a center that becomes the symbolic point of reference: Jerusalem or Iberian cultures and languages for the above-mentioned new Jews, French culture for the Huguenots. If the notion of diaspora points to the relevance of the economic role of religious groups in the city, it also highlights the role of violence, because diaspora communities are often linked to refugees and displaced people, as pointed out by numerous studies on religious persecution ([108]; [71]; [59]).

Et alcuna volta mi arreccò meraviglia che li Romani conforme alla loro falsa superstitione di errigere altari, e deificare gl'inventori delle giovevoli professioni, e che insino la Fortuna, stimata pure da loro cieca e temeraria, trovò in Roma particolare adoratione, et apritura di molti sontuosi tempii, al bisogno primo stimulatore e sferzatore all'imprese degne, e proffittevoli inventioni, non li fosse giamai da essi instituito culto, né verso di lui osservato alcun rito religioso.

(Luzzatto 1638 [ed. 2019])

Several other significant contributions published in the last decades aroused controversy and discussion. The book published in 2004 by Yuri Slezkine, whose expertise is on the Russian empire, linked the question of modernity and Judaism by focusing on certain elements of 'urbanity' and processes of urbanization. Slezkine interrogates Jewish history from an innovative standpoint and proposes a social theory grounded in the idea that the Jewish experience is somewhat universal. The chapter that is most salient to our discussion is entitled "Mercury's Sandals: the Jews and Other Nomads", where he describes the traditional position of the Jews within European society and their relationship to the rise of modernity. The chapter intersects some of the themes we have mentioned above, but it specifically emphasizes the notion of religious minority. The concept of "Mercurians" clearly depends on the interpretation of the God Mercury in western culture and was also used by Lois Dubin to elaborate on merchants and port cities ([33], 14 – 30). It might also be of interest to observe that Jewish intellectuals in the early modern period had thought of this association as well ([64] in the footnote; [39]).

In this contribution, Slezkine aims to describe a number of religious and ethnic groups, including Jews, which might be conceived as 'guest groups' that provide the host society with crucial services, such as moneylending or medicine ([99]). The Mercurians are "service nomads", performing vital functions for the host society traditionally devoted to agriculture and war, the "Apollonians."

Europe's Mercurians were primarily Jews, Greeks, and Gypsies, but "service nomads" are common in world history: Parsis in India; Indians in Africa; Chinese throughout Asia; Lebanese and Syriac Christians in western Africa, Caribbean and America; Armenians and Fanariot Greeks in the Ottoman empire (but also very present in Christian Europe). In other words, inspired by Nietzsche's dichotomy between the Apollonian and Dionysian and Ruth Benedict's patterns of culture, Slezkine offers a theory on religious (and ethnic) minorities and their role in bringing about modernity, and therefore urbanization processes. A close reading of the chapter also indicates that he engages with some influential theories of religions, in particular Max Weber and Werner Sombart's discussion about the role of Calvinists or Jews in the rise of western capitalism (see also [112]; [119]).

According to Slezkine, despite being separated by history and geography, Mercurians have developed similar strategies to differentiate themselves from Apollonian societies: doctrines of pollution, such as food taboos; culturally exclusive languages, such as Roma and Yiddish, which are often linked to the preservation of a sacred tongue; and an emphasis on family-kinship ties over pride of place (which was the case for the conversos and the new Jews of Iberian descent, who praised language and kinship).

As he says at the outset: "Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is about learning to cultivate people and symbols" ([99], 1). Modernization, in other words, is all about "becoming Mercurians." Modernity and capitalism require Mercurian attributes like literacy, mobility, and expertise.

Slezkine's theory links religious minorities to the process of urbanization, whilst substantiating the idea that the difference between urban and rural environments is paramount. He also offers an interpretation of diasporic lifestyles and religion that values the rise of doctrines of purity, the formation of sacred languages, and the importance of kinship beyond location. Hence, he elaborates a theory of Judaism which might be applied to other similar religious groups: Parsis, Armenians, Greeks, and so forth. As suggestive as it sounds, this interpretation did not go unchallenged. For one thing, it conceives of religious groups as closed communities, their boundaries sealed. Francesca Trivellato, for instance, has shown that interreligious and inter-ethnic cooperation did in fact take place during the early modern period, and challenged his representation of religious minorities as self-referential islands with defined borders ([111]).

Slezkine's second chapter might be of some interest for the understanding of religion in the nineteenth century, or to use his phrase, in the age of ripe modernity. "Swann's Nose: Jews and Other Moderns," is inspired by Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temp perdu. It is a scholarly and ironic journey through the landmarks of nineteenth century culture: nationalism, Marxism and Freudianism conceived as forms of secularized religions or surrogate religions that undermine the idealized belief in individualism. Unlike the early modern period, at the end of the nineteenth century the extraordinary social, political and cultural achievements of the Jews became a matter of debate – and, I would add, an occasion for the kindling of new forms of anti-Jewish hatred ([99], 72; [38]). Jewish success was judged in the light of attitudes towards modernity in general. If the critic's outlook on the modern world was positive, then the Jewish achievement was celebrated. If, on the other hand, the critic feared modernity, as in the case of Houston Stewart Chamberlain or Werner Sombart, Judaism was seen as strange and dangerous. American sociologist Thorstein Veblen instead attributed Jewish preeminence not to the Jewish religion, but precisely to its radical rejection (Slezkine 2004, 56 – 60). Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, a French intellectual of Catholic liberal leaning, in a famous book against anti-Semitism, stressed that Jews, by virtue of the rejection of their religious identity, became the best practitioners of modernity. He insisted that modernity started, in fact, with Christians of varying beliefs ([63]; [38]).

In Slezkine's work, as in other historiographical traditions, the topic of religion and modernity is paramount, but he also proposes a new general interpretation of the role and function of 'religious minorities' beyond the specific Jewish experience. What is worth noting is that, according to Slezkine, becoming modern implies being urban, whilst his notion of 'urbanity' comprises abilities that are strictly linked to the rise of capitalism, which in turn enhances urbanization.

Works that embrace the long sweep of Jewish history, or even the whole notion of Judaism, are much rarer in the context of contemporary scholarship. However, some recent publications are worth mentioning with regard to our theme. The book The Chosen Few by Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein portrays a study that encompasses the history of the Jews from the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) to the expulsion from Spain in 1492. Whilst we wait for the sequel to appear, this book investigates the entanglement of literacy and religion, attributing a performative role to religious norms in readdressing the whole social and religious system. The Chosen Few deals with the relationship between religious rules and literacy, and it accordingly attempts to investigate the formative period of rabbinic Judaism and its historical institutionalization.

How and why did Jews turn to certain specific professions, namely moneylending, medicine, trade, and a few other specialized urban occupations? Jewish historiography in particular has underlined how Jews were pushed by legal restrictions and impediments into despised and risky professions, so-called "polluted activities". This was especially true in Christian societies where some economic activities were forbidden for specific social groups, though often with a certain ambivalence. The authors of The Chosen Few challenge a set of these historical explanations, and expressly claim that they are retroactive historiographical answers that may not be applicable to the history of the Jews in late antiquity and the medieval period. In the span of a few centuries the Jews of the diaspora had dramatically changed their economic and professional position from rural occupations to urban ones. How did that come to pass?

The change is particularly indebted to the introduction of a rule attributed to Yehoshua ben Gamla, a priest mentioned in the early rabbinic texts, according to which a compulsory obligation to teach Torah to children was enforced as a communal regulation. In comparative terms, this norm was introduced in the context of a religious world that was modeled after the practices of ancient religions which focused on sacrificial offerings and temple activities, initiation and magic, fasting and prayers. Despite their different beliefs and ritual structures, Roman and Greek religions, alongside Zoroastrianism, mysteries religions, Orphic and Dionysian cults, and Mithraism never implemented a law that imposed significant textual knowledge of a written tradition. For historians of religion this is an important innovation indeed, even though the imminent spread of Christianity and Islam would introduce a great number of additional transformations to the religious world of late antiquity ([106]). Compulsory Jewish education, the goal of which was primarily religious and not universal, contributed to redefining the borders of Judaism when the "religious market" was fluid and very diverse.

In chapter four, the authors apply some known theories based on rational choice analysis and economic behavior. Moreover, they highlight how a religious system is defined according to its appeal and ability to attract or sustain members. The aforementioned rule required Jewish farmers to send their children to school, where the teaching of Torah was enforced. In other words, it meant they had to invest time and resources in religious literacy, rather than using their children to help work the land. Any farming society would be well-acquainted with this problem. Based on this assumption, the authors elaborate a model which aims to explain the demographic crisis of Judaism between the first and seventh centuries, whilst providing a theory of religious conversion. According to the model, the high cost of the norm was likely to drive away Jewish families that were unwilling to receive such low benefits or that were not wealthy enough to support such a request. The idealized Galilean village of around 200 CE, as it is envisioned by the authors, depicts several situations that are likely to provide an explanation for patterns of conversion in late antiquity. The religious farmer, whether wealthy or less so, would respect the norm because the benefits of belonging to the group were higher than the cost of literacy. Yet both the wealthy and the less affluent farmer might also choose to not obey the norm for a number of reasons, and thus would have to accept the social stigma that came with the label of am ha-aretz. Ultimately, they might decide to convert and join a different religious group, especially one of the many Christian sects that proliferated in the late antiquity period and which were quite familiar, particularly those that still followed certain Jewish rules (as the Ebionites did). Rich and poor were likely to pay the cost of compulsory religious literacy and belong to the group; or, they might avoid the cost and live on the margin of the religious group, ultimately deciding to convert to another religion.

The implementation of the rule requiring religious education spread during the Talmudic period (200 – 650), when the society of farmers became literate. Talmudic literature, Gaonic responsa and archeological evidence from synagogues indicate a strong emphasis on universal education. In the following centuries major changes took place in the religion and culture of the Jews, and the structure of the Jewish diaspora was reconfigured. What were the consequences of this process? The world of literate farmers was destined to develop into a world of urban professionals composed of merchants, doctors, craftsmen, and artisans. As a part of the old diaspora vanished in highly Hellenized areas, a new Diaspora arose in those regions that underwent a religious revolution around the seventh century CE. The majority of Jews now lived in Mesopotamia and Persia, where they slowly abandoned agriculture and moved to villages in order to practice new professions. This transformation reached its apex after the establishment of the Abbasid Empire. "This occupational transition took about 150 years: by 900 the overwhelming majority of the Jews in Mesopotamia and Persia were engaged in a wide variety of crafts, trade, moneylending and medicine" ([13], 124 – 125). The rise of Islam and the establishment of a world-wide, highly urbanized and dynamic empire offered the ideal setting for the benefits enhanced by literacy. The authors claim that, in the changing context of the Muslim caliphate, religious literacy had "spillover effects," meaning that skills acquired by learning to read and write might improve the ability to count, write contracts and letters, and therefore bolster practices of law-enforcement. The improvements in technology, science and art that accompanied the development of a sophisticated empire contributed to the dissemination of literacy at large, and these major changes in society contributed to reinforcing literacy among Jews.

Using ample evidence from the Cairo Geniza and specifically Solomon Goitein's research, the authors highlight the fact that literacy was widespread among the Jewish communities of the Muslim world, where, one should add, seventy percent of Jewry lived. Following Avner Greif, the authors stress how rabbinic Judaism, with Talmudic and responsa literature, was able to build a system of legal protection which operated as a contract-enforcement mechanism, even in the absence of a state. In this sense, a common language and high literacy contributed to radically transforming Jewish settlements and their professional landscape, prompting a change that, according to Botticini and Eckstein, would continue in the following centuries. The chapters that follow are devoted to describing the formation of a voluntary Diaspora and focus on the rise of Western European Jewry. How did Jews arrive in the Christian countries of Western Europe? Chapter seven and eight address the question of how the Diaspora came into being, and how Jews willingly moved from different areas – mainly to cities – in search of better social conditions and professional options. The arrival of Jews in the diverse and parceled Christian kingdoms of the Middle Ages suggests that Jews were invited, in small groups, to offer their highly specialized services. A parallel development in the cultural and religious milieu took place in the same period, with the emergence of the great rabbinic centers of France and Ashkenaz that contributed to normalizing support for these new settlements. An inadvertent revolution was launched by rabbis in the midst of a great trauma; with the collapse of the ancient politeia, and through the compulsory religious education of male children it triggered a great transformation that would subsequently be well-suited for social and economic integration in developed empires and economies. The theory is certainly intriguing and attractive, and at times very convincing. "Lachrymose history" is not part of this story, which instead highlights the positive and creative efforts of Judaism in Muslim and Christian lands. Moreover, a number of historical certainties are challenged, and different explanations are offered, on the basis of microanalysis or detailed accounts of historical material, but might be challenged on many grounds ([40]). In this article it is sufficient to note that in this case the authors aim to provide a theory according to which religious literacy is conducive to a form of urban religion, whose main traits are described above. The type of religion that emerged out of this process is different from its ancient version and is strongly embedded in the imperial urban fabric of the Islamic world or in the resurgent urban civilization of Medieval Europe. Jews have become urban through religious norms.

There is of course more to say about the medieval period and the parallel appearances of Jews in the revitalized cities of Latin Christendom. Nina [87]) chronicles the impact of Jews in the medieval cities of Reims, Bamberg, and Strasbourg, where three majestic cathedrals were built between 1225 and 1235, bearing a complex visual program of biblical exegesis depicted in refined reliefs. Two majestic personifications of Christianity and Judaism featured prominently, carving Augustinian theology in stone through the images of Ecclesia and Synagoga. It is an extraordinary example of an urban language about the problematic Jewish-Christian encounter. Unlike the ghettos and port-cities, the medieval town used the image of the blindfolded Synagoga as a reminder that even though she is conceived as part of Christian society, she is, in fact, powerless, a relic and witness of a glorious biblical past whose interpretation only Christians are capable of properly disclosing ([87]).

When approached from the perspective of spatial configurations, the articulation between the city and Judaism reveals a wealth of fascinating historical themes, whilst questioning a representation of Judaism based solely on textual evidence. But instead of erasing the term 'Judaism', as suggested by some recent publications ([14]), the approach that emphasizes location, spatial arrangements, and the relationship with the urban (or non-urban) environment helps to unearth the convolutions of religious dynamism and the workings of a 'diasporic religion'. As suggested by the selection of themes that Jewish historiography and social sciences shaped when referring to Jews/Judaism, the city and the 'urban condition' appear prominently in a dialectical dynamism that is grounded in two different types of ambivalences. The first one lies at the heart of the Jewish-Christian confrontation; the second revolves around the notion of modernity.

This contribution has primarily focused on Jews and Judaism within the borders of Christendom. Therefore, much of the urban experience of the Jews of Europe and many features of Judaism are defined by the problematic interaction with Christianity in its manifold guises, but also the way Christianity has conceived and forged the urban environment and its political and civic institutions. In terms of Augustine's theology, the ambivalence of this relationship is mostly visible: how necessary are the Jews in this world for Christian salvation? The ambivalence about their relevance, clearly symbolized in the great architecture of the medieval age, explains the shift from policies of accommodation to expulsion and/or extermination and back. Although Christian society should ideally mirror the notion of the mystical body of Christ, the complexity of urban life allows for the 'incorporation' of aliens in the intricate fabric of the urban environment.

Sorkin suggests that certain urban features of European cities in the medieval and early modern period sustained distinctive policies of incorporation. He writes that

many cities in the urban column, including Venice, Genoa, Florence, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Bruges, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London, were self-governing polities that were allied with the surrounding rural area. These cities functioned as major agents of change, being at the forefront not only of commerce and industry but also the 'growth of literacy,' 'the production of arts,' and, significantly, 'religious toleration.' (Sorkin 2019 , 127)

If this is partially true, what it is not discussed here is how the cities contributed to shaping Judaism in its various forms: both secluded areas and open cities defined the character of the "kahal kadosh" (sacred community), its ability to define borders, and construct a shared identity. But the city also allows for those borders to be crossed, and for rules to be transgressed and negotiated. For this reason, the city is a privileged point of departure for observing the formation and transformation of religious culture.

The second ambivalence of this relationship between Judaism and the city revolves around the very problematic concept of "modernity", a recurring discursive trope in Jewish historiography. If analyzed against the backdrop of the ghetto the Jews are anti-modern, introverted, closed into themselves. If they are placed in the dynamics of economic exchanges and in port-cities, they are often perceived as driving forces of mobility and modernity. This dichotomy describes the wealth of different ways both of being Jewish and of conceiving Judaism, which are probably still operating in our contemporary world. As Wirth suggested, social conditions enhance or inhibit change; I would add that spatial conditions likewise define cultural and religious traits of religious groups and individuals, and these traits in turn shape the urban fabric in tangible ways (in the production of objects, architecture, prints and manuscripts, and so forth). One line of investigation, for instance, would benefit from research which delves deep into how a certain urban environment provides and nurtures also individual trajectories, shaping distinctive religious roles, or inhibiting them. The formation of certain rabbinical figures or the rise and fall of distinctive religious leadership, the role of women, the critique of religion are all elements that are better understood when placed in cities that, in turn, may be relevant or marginal within certain spatial constellation (city-states, empires, nation-states). We should therefore take seriously intellectuals like Louis Wirth and Georg Simmel who both suggested that cities (albeit modern ones) enhance certain types of personality: the "marginal man" for Wirth, and the "blasé" for Simmel. Properly re-conceptualized and applied, these approaches might help to elaborate interpretative models that better highlight the role of individuals in their environment.

Finally, I wish to underline that when Judaism is analyzed against the backdrop of the city it challenges the straight line of periodization. As Koselleck suggested, multiple temporalities are at work; Graetz himself noticed this more than a century ago.

This article is part of the research project 'Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations' funded by the DFG (FOR 2779).