Ashkenaz in Italy: Some Jewish Families from Germany in Cremona and Milan (Fifteenth Century)

The paper’s aim is to present the first results of a research concerning primarily some Jewish families of Cremona, also active in Milan, in the first decades of the 15th century. In fact, notwithstanding the enormous amount of materail provided by Shlomo Simonsohn in his four-volumes work “The Jews in the Duchy of Milan”, until now, as far as I know, the research involving the Jews of Cremona did not take into account the still avalaible series of notarial registers for the Quattrocento. While the public documentation has been studied by many scholars, the notaries remain almost unsearched; as a consequence, the history of many Jewish groups, their mutual contacts and their internal structures and socio-economic strategies remain almost unknown.

The case of Cremona is very interesting: the finding of a number of notarial deeds, allow us to reconstruct the genealogies of a few families, mostly originally from Germany, so as to better understand the relationships existing among the two Jewish group settled in Cremona (the "Ashkenazim" and the "Italian" Jews), the Duke of Milan, and the Christian population.