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Stefanie B. Siegmund. The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. xxiv, 624 pp.

In October 1570, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo I, issued an edict expelling all Jews, be they bankers, merchants, or peddlers, from their homes in the villages and towns of the Florentine domain. The same edict allowed those who so decided to remain, under the condition that they relocate to the capital city. A segregated Jewish quarter—a ghetto—was set apart and built not far from the old market in the center of Florence, the third such urban enclosure to be created in a sixteenth-century Italian state. While the history of the ghettos of Venice (1516) and Rome (1555) has been explored widely by scholars of Italian Jewry, Stefanie B. Siegmund’s The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community, a long and ambitious monograph, provides the first full-length study of the ghettoization of Tuscan Jews. In contrast to the classic work by Umberto Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze nell’età del Rinascimento (1918), who considered Jewish life in the ghetto of Florence “obscure and miserable,” Siegmund sees the ghettoization process as an opportunity for exploring the politics and effects of population transfer, as related to a religious minority in early modern Italy. The work, based on an impressive array of previously untapped archival sources, attempts to do many things at once: It engages with the origins of ghettoization within the context of state building in the early modern period; it analyzes the actual construction of the enclosure; and it explores its repercussions for the development of the Florentine Jewish community. Accordingly, the book is divided into three sections, which explore how Jews fit into the Tuscan world before ghettoization and the changes caused by their spatial relocation and reorganization. The first section, “The Segregation of the Jews and the Spatialization of Power,” considers the origins and the policy of ghettoization from the perspective of the rulers and administrators of the Medici state. The second section, “The Construction of the Ghetto,” explores the ghetto itself. It provides an interpretation of its actual building and a study of the people who decided to settle in it, considering its physical and fiscal dimensions. Finally, the third part, “A New Tuscan Commune and Religious Community,” looks at the inner structure of the ghetto community. It explores the phenomenon of the reintegration of the new (and old) Florentine Jews into the Tuscan state through the institutionalization of the Book Reviews