The Medieval Salento. Linda Safran
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either sex, and in all Christian lands, and at all times, shall easily be distinguishable from the rest of the populations by the character [qualitate] of their clothes; especially since such legislation is imposed upon them also by Moses.162
No specific marks are prescribed to deter potential miscegenation, but only some unspecified distinction in clothing.
The degree to which the council’s injunctions were enforced varied widely across Europe, and it is not possible to discern any repercussions in the Salento. I would argue that a visible Jewish identity was not locally mandated until after 1400. This information is recorded a century later by a Franciscan monk, Roberto Caracciolo, who preached in Lecce in the 1490s and was largely responsible for the destruction of its giudecca and the transformation of its synagogue into a church (resulting in the reuse of its building materials in a toilet [56]). Jews were important in the economic life of Lecce in the fifteenth century; they were routinely called cives, citizens, and we know some of their names and have an inventory of one of their libraries.163 Fra Roberto approvingly cited a law from the time of Maria d’Enghien, whose reign in Lecce in the late fourteenth to early fifteenth centuries marks the end of the period under consideration in this book. Recorded in volgare and thus intended to be understood and easily applied, it is worth quoting in full:
And for some errors that often occur, the said Majesty wants and commands: that all Jewish men or women from the age of six, whether foreigners or citizens of Lecce, the men must wear a red sign in the form of a round wheel [a rotella] on the chest over the breast the width of one palm in the form and size written by the court. And the women a round red sign over the chest and breast the width of one palm, wearing it over all the other clothes so that everyone is able to see, and indicate this is a Jew or Jewess, even if they go [out in public] wearing a cloak or a juppa or in a jupparello and a woman’s gonnella. And whoever does the contrary will pay the penalty of one ounce [of gold] for each offense. And if someone is so accused and does not have even a tari with which to pay the penalty he will be whipped around [throughout] Lecce.164
The two images of Jews torturing Saint Stephen at Soleto [113.sc.1; Plate 14] suggest that these later, local injunctions were being enforced in the 1430s. Later fifteenth-century travelers’ accounts either fail to mention such distinguishing markers or note actively that there were none, so enforcement either waned in later decades or was sporadic and local.165
There are no indications in pre-fifteenth-century wall paintings of a specific required element of dress to separate Jews from their neighbors. Yet there was some distinction previously, for the Lateran canon refers to self-imposed Jewish legislation going back to Moses and other sources refer to “Jewish clothing.”166 In the previous chapters I cited midrashic texts that maintain that the Jews merited liberation from Egypt because they kept their Jewish names and Hebrew language (and also avoided slander and maintained chastity). In the Middle Ages, another reason for divine salvation was added: that the Jews did not alter their Jewish clothing. Already in the nineteenth century, Solomon Buber asserted that clothing was not part of the original midrash, but only recently have the medieval sources for this popular misquotation been traced. The earliest citation appears to be an eleventh-century text by Tobias ben Eliezer, a Byzantine anti-Karaite polemicist who lived in Kastoria, in northern Greece. In the thirteenth-fourteenth century it was being repeated by a Spanish Talmudist, and by the fifteenth century the midrash had mutated definitively to include names, language, clothing, and religion as reasons for Jewish liberation and signposts of Jewish identity.167 We should ask, then, what the medieval commentators meant by “Jewish clothing” and why it was important to add dress to the earlier formulation.
“Jewish” Clothing
For Jews, clothing had always been significant. Several biblical books contain instructions about dress that were intended to sanctify male Jews’ external appearance and remind them of the mitzvot (the 613 commandments that pious Jews are supposed to observe). The prophet Zephaniah (Sophonias) declaimed against “all those who don foreign vestments,”168 and the Babylonian Talmud states clearly that “The glory of God is man and the glory of man is his clothes.”169 This statement did not refer to opulent, extravagant garments and finery of the sort to which later Jewish and Christian moralists would strenuously object. Rather, it referred to appropriate, decent, modest attire. Complaints preserved in the Cairo Genizah correspondence about being naked or having nothing to wear are concerns about the appropriateness of one’s clothing rather than its absence.170 Respectable dress was the most immediate signifier of a respectable man: Jews who lacked decent footwear were instructed to sell their roof beams to get money to buy shoes or risk estrangement from heaven.171 Everyone who could afford it owned weekday wear, a change of clothes for nighttime, and another outfit for the Sabbath and festivals.172 That this requirement was in force in medieval Italy is clear from Shibolei ha-Leqet: those who lacked special Sabbath clothes were enjoined to rearrange their weekday garments in order to look and feel different on the Sabbath.173 Moreover, clothing was to be kept clean; a scholar with a greasy spot on his garment ostensibly merited the death penalty,174 although there is no evidence that this was ever carried out. The Jews in the Pilate scene at San Paolo in Brindisi are well dressed in a variety of colorful dyed garments [Plate 3].
Textual evidence for the particulars of Jewish male dress is limited and we should not assume that biblical or Talmudic injunctions were being practiced in medieval southern Italy. Yet if a garment or practice is included in the eleventh-century Otranto Mishnah glosses or the fourteenth-century Roman glossary on Maimonides, these garments or practices are likely to be contemporary. These vernacular glosses were added specifically to clarify terms for a contemporary local readership. Shibolei ha-Leqet is a more problematic source because it depends on earlier opinions as well as contemporary ones, but a careful sifting of context and language enables us to use this text as well. For the most part, these medieval Jewish sources confirm that Jews looked like their neighbors of comparable social status.
Shibolei ha-Leqet refers to a piltaro hat, made of felt, and to peacock feathers attached to hats worn outdoors on the Sabbath and secured with a strap under the neck so they won’t blow away. It also states that one may wear a “borita” or “bavarita,” even without such a strap.175 This is the biretta widely worn by Italian men of style in the fourteenth century.176 The Maimonidean glossary includes the term cappuçço, cappuççu, referring to a turban or head wrap in which one might wind phylacteries rather than the “hood” implied by the Italian homonym cappuccio; it states that women should take care not to wear such masculine ornaments as a turban or biretta (or, for that matter, a cuirass).177 A pointed hood was supposed to be characteristic of respectable fourteenth-century men, but one source laments that even unworthies, including Jews, wear one.178 Many Trecento laws reveal severe punishments for striking off a man’s hood. Clearly, well-to-do Jews wore a variety of hoods and other types of head coverings [Plate 3] and not just the white head scarves seen at San Cesario di Lecce [108.sc.1] and Acquarica del Capo [Plate 1].
Zidkiyahu Anav, the author of Shibolei ha-Leqet, records a practice he witnessed in Speyer that was unfamiliar to him in Rome: during prayer, men wrapped themselves in their tzitzit, shorthand for the fringed prayer shawl (tallit), during the fast day of Tisha b’Av.179 Anav’s northern contemporary, Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, indicates in one of his responsa that this practice of wrapping was widespread among the Pietists, the so-called Hasidei Ashkenaz, who preserved many southern Italian (originally Palestinian) practices.180 This statement, by an authority often cited in Shibolei ha-Leqet, clarifies the cappuçço glossed by Judah Romano as being used as a head covering, though not as a body wrap, in the thirteenth century. The practice of covering the head had fallen out of favor elsewhere but was still practiced by the Pietists. Anav also cites Rashi’s injunction that Jewish men cover the head every day, but he notes that in thirteenth-century Rome many Jews are not doing this because the “nations of the world” are laughing at them, and even some fellow Jews, “people of the house,”