Jewish Intercommunal Relations in Early Modern Venetian Terraferma in Light of the Archives of the Inquisitori Sopra L’università Degli Ebrei

The Inquisitori sopra l’università degli Ebrei were established by the government of the Venetian Republic in mid-eighteenth century, as an official body in charge of the city’s Jewish community. Their primary agenda was therefore supervising the community’s management and financial discipline. However, in their archives, now held by the Archivio di stato di Venezia, the Inquisitori kept also a number of copied documents regarding the Jewish community in past centuries, the oldest one being originally issued in 1434. These later copies, originals of which are mostly unavailable, are a valuable source on the social, economic and everyday life of Venetian Jews at the close of the Middle Ages and in the early modern period. In my paper, I shall present a selection of documents from the sixteenth and seventeenth century to demonstrate the promises and challenges this type of sources presents for the study of Jewish social life in early modern Venetian Republic. The particular issues I investigate are the mutual relations between the three ethno-cultural segments of Venice’s Jewish community (the Todeschi, the Levantini and the Ponentini), as well as their contacts and interactions with other Jewish communities of the Venetian terraferma, particularly Padua. I am further interested in investigating the level of insight into the inner functioning of the Jewish communities the authors of the government reports had and what importance they ascribed to the detailed knowledge of the problematic. A detailed analysis of these archival documents and their confrontation with other types of Jewish and non-Jewish sources has the potential to broaden our knowledge of the Venetian Jews political status as well as their individual and collective agency.