In 1945, Vittore Colorni, an Italian Jewish historian from Mantua, published the volume Legge Ebraica e Leggi Locali [Jewish Law and Italian Local Laws] (Milan: Giuffrè). The aim of the work was to systematically record for the first time the relationship between Jewish law, which regulated the public and private life of Italian Jews, and the general law of the “Ancien Régime.” The term Ancien Régime refers to the European society of the late 17th century and distinguishes it from the new social structures that emerged during the French Revolution and paved the way for today’s society. Colorni’s work, which represents the culmination of extensive research that was also carried out during the difficult years of 1938–1945, was published immediately after the Second World War. It was included in the series of the Institute of Roman Law of the “Reale Università degli Studi di Roma” [Royal University of Rome, now Sapienza University of Rome]. The decision to publish this text in such a prestigious place came at a time of complex transition from Fascist Italy to a new, still undefined Italy.72 During this period, the question of the legal status and self-regulatory systems of Jews in the past went beyond academic interest and acquired great importance both for the author, who had devoted himself to this topic since his formative years in Bologna, and for the publisher, who had taken up and supported this innovative proposal.
A few years later, Colorni took up the subject again with a second volume entitled “Gli Ebrei nel sistema del diritto comune fino alla prima emancipazione” [The Jews in the system of common law up to the first emancipation], which was again published by Giuffrè (1956). This work aimed to provide a systematic synthesis of a complex subject. Building on his earlier research, this follow-up volume offered a comprehensive reflection and presented a plausible and convincing interpretation based on recent research on the history of the Jews in Italy. The centrality of the relationship with the Catholic Church, an enduring experience unbroken by expulsions, and the myth of the Italian Renaissance as a time of coexistence and friendship – celebrated by Cecil Roth in his “The History of the Jews of Italy” (Philadelphia, 1946) – made Colorni’s analysis particularly timely. Criticism of this idealized view was soon voiced, notably by Isaiah Sonne, an exceptional scholar and pioneer in the study of Jewish books and contemporary critical philology.73 In the meantime, Attilio Milano had begun his research into Italian Jewish history with a series of articles on the ghetto in Rome, which he had published in La Rassegna Mensile d’Israel before the Second World War and which he later extended on.74
Compared to these main lines of research, Colorni took a unique path that was of great interest, although he remained somewhat isolated. After the Second World War, studies on the history of the Jews in Italy were influenced by the fundamental work of Salo W. Baron. As a result, historians focused mainly on the group’s relations with the surrounding society, with particular attention to the economic and social perspectives rather than the history of institutions.75 The researchers shed light on the widespread presence of Jewish communities throughout the Italian peninsula until 1492 and the subsequent expulsions from the south and the islands by examining local and central documents. This mapping of the Jewish presence was accompanied by studies of moneylending, material life and everyday Jewish existence, focusing on the networks and on the ability of individual Jews to establish and maintain relationships with local authorities.
The evolution of Catholic thought, theology, and legislation regarding the Jews has been a fundamental theme in reconstructing the history of Italy. The Papal State, one of the ancient Italian states, played an essential political and diplomatic role until the Unification in 1861. Since the annexation of Rome to the Kingdom of Italy in 1870, it has remained a significant, albeit hostile, interlocutor for both the monarchy and, after 1948, the republican governments. Over the centuries, Jews were permitted to reside within the Papal State under varying rules and discriminations, but there was never a general expulsion order. This range of restrictions and humiliations was underpinned by an extensive theological framework, which has been the subject of in-depth studies. The insoluble contradiction between the Christian-origin anti-Judaism – with its long history of persecution, censorship, ghettos, inquisition, forced baptisms, and more – and a practice of uncertain, fluctuating, and involuntary tolerance has intrigued scholars. Attention to the history of Jewish communities in the Papal State, particularly in Rome, has driven a long and still vibrant period of research. Overall, this rich historiographical field has explored the history of Jews in Italy through the lens of relationships: the dynamic between the oppressed minority group and the Christian world, as well as the internal dialectics within the Jewish community, marked by continuous tensions and social and cultural hierarchies.76
As we have seen, Vittore Colorni was concerned with an even broader topic. He sought a systemic reading of Jewish history through a legal-historical analysis of Jewish law within the framework of the ius comune. Methodologically, this approach required an examination of the history of Italy as a whole, thus calling into question the legitimacy of a unified Italian history for centuries in which the country as such did not exist. The analysis of customary law, particularly in the formulations of the Bolognese jurists, partially solved this problem by incorporating Justinian and canon law into its classical definition while taking local customs into account. However, this interpretative choice tended to downplay certain aspects related to the marginalization of Jews and Jewish-Christian relations in unfavorable circumstances – issues on that historian of Jewish societies and specialists in the history of anti-Semitism focused. By questioning the nature of customary law, its hierarchical, exclusionary and class-based structure became the necessary and obvious starting point for any further consideration. Since both of Colorni’s works limited their temporal scope to the pre-emancipation period, they did not have to deal with the inequalities and privileges that formed the backbone of this legal system.
The boundaries of civitas in the ancien régime are the basic theme of Colorni’s reflections, which center on the idea that the Jews possessed a weak civitas, but were not completely excluded from it. On the basis of the principles formulated in the Edict of Milan, the iudaei continued to be part of the civitas, albeit with certain restrictions, as they had chosen to remain outside the Christian community. This borderline status was ascribed to the Jews and repeatedly confirmed in the legal glosses of medieval jurists and treatise writers up to Giovanni Battista de Luca.
The recognition of this negatively conditioned difference corresponded to the logic of ius comune, which did not aim for anachronistic ideals of equality. This system recognized different iura gentium (specific law for specific people) and local customs, which paradoxically ensured the preservation of essential features for Jewish survival. These included family law and the always recognized possibility of resolving disputes through internal arbitration, at least in the first instance. In addition, the basic Jewish principle of dinà demalkutà dinà (the law of the king is the law) facilitated the adaptation and continuation of their minority status and reduced tensions between one law and the other.77
In a society characterized by inequality, this was simply in the nature of things. As Tamar Herzog has recently shown, belonging to Christianity was a prerequisite for full inclusion in the civitas.78 The political sphere was reserved for true faithful, and those who did not wish to belong deliberately chose to forego it. The Enlightenment called into question the appropriateness of this concept of society. The religious wars that had ravaged Europe for a century and a half made it clear that there was an urgent need to conceive and regulate a heterodox society. The debate about tolerance took place primarily within the Christian world and for a long time did not extend to the question of the place of non-Christians. Revolutions, Jacobin republics, Napoleonic codes and emancipation were necessary to bring about change. The equality guaranteed by these new rights brought unprecedented awareness and the challenge of maintaining religious differences in private life while respecting the rules of the new states, which nevertheless retained their Christian character in their legal systems.
In Italy, the profound contradictions of the time, the emergence of a new form of anti-Semitism and the seizure of power by the fascist regime culminated in the racial laws and the modern system of exclusion and persecution of the Jews. Colorni experienced this first-hand. As a college graduate, he was expelled and spent the months of the Nazi occupation in hiding in Rome, where he continued to develop his research. His work, which is undoubtedly imbued with personal nuances, reflects a civic consciousness that deserves reflection.
“The first volume, entitled Legge Ebraica e Leggi Locali [Jewish Law and Italian Local Laws], was already completed in 1942 – “hard times for everyone and impractical for the Jews,” Guido Lopez recalled in 1984 in a concise but thorough review of the Mantuan author’s works on Jewish studies.79
Colorni’s history of Jewish law had the merit of combining questions about the internal legal system with its interactions with the outside world, offering a perspective that simultaneously addressed elements of cultural, social and political history. The Jews in Colorni’s work, despite their discrimination, were portrayed as active agents capable of negotiating with the surrounding society. They asserted their otherness while finding autonomous and negotiated ways to deal with their situation. This comprehensive and nuanced analysis moves skillfully between religious history and broader political and institutional history – an approach often lacking in Jewish historical scholarship in recent decades. Colorni’s work reminds us how important it is to regain this integrative perspective.
Umberto Gentiloni Silveri. The History of Contemporary Italy (1943–2019) (New York and London: Palgrave, 2019): pp. 5–53.
Serena Di Nepi. “Jews, Italy, Renaissance. Parole antiche e nuovi paradigmi per una storiografia internazionale in movimento.” Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni, 2021: pp. 737–745.
Attilio Milano. Il ghetto di Roma. Illustrazioni storiche (Roma: Staderini, 1964).
Salo W. Baron. A Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965, 2nd edition).
See the classical work: K. R. Stow. Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry policy, 1555–1593 (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminar of America, 1977); S. Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews (Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies: 1988–1990). And more recently: Germano Maifreda. Italya. Storie di ebrei, storia italiana (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2022) and Marina Caffiero. The History of the Jews in Early Modern Italy – From the Renaissance to the Restoration (London and New York: Routledge, 2022).
See also the “Introduction” by Ariel Toaff to the thematic dossier “Tra legge ebraica e leggi locali.” Zakhor II (1998): pp. 5–8.
Tamar Herzog. Defining Nations. Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) and more recently A short history of European Law. The last two and a half millenia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
Guido Lopez. “Vittore Colorni: L’uomo che cerca le radici.” La Rassegna Mensile d’Israel 50 (1/4, 1984): pp. 53–57.