Political thought in the Jewish communities of the early modern Venetian Republic

• Applicant: Dr. Martin Borysek
• Subject Area: Early Modern History ; Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 512100720

During the early modern period, the Republic of Venice was – without much exaggeration - the stuff of legend. Among the most influential manifestations of this legendary status was the “myth of Venice”, a conviction shared by many European intellectuals of that time that among existing political entities, the Venetian Republic was as close as possible to being the ideal state. This perception resonated also with Jewish intellectuals active in the republic, many of whom reflected in their own ways the abstract notion of the ideal state, describing the ways in which the Venetian realm resembled this ideal. However, they had generally little to say about the actual Jewish communities under Venetian reign, and when they did say something, like Luzzatto in his 1638 Discourse on the state of the Jews, the picture they painted was quite pessimistic. This situation gave rise to a commonly accepted notion that the practical functioning of Venetian Jewish communities held little interest for leading Jewish intellectuals of the day and, conversely, was little influenced by their works. My research aims to critically examine this assumption. Based on my preliminary research, I have formulated the hypothesis that a palpable connection between the discourses of “major” and “minor politics” (i.e. the theoretical treatises on the nature of state and political power on the one hand and everyday political reality on the other) in Jewish political thought and practice indeed existed. I will test this hypothesis by studying three specific Jewish communities, namely Venice itself, Padua and the island of Corfu. The selected localities represent the Republic’s various constituent parts and provide a representative specimen of Venice’s diverse Jewish population, which included Jews of Italian, Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Byzantine heritage. I focus on the period between the years 1516 and 1669, i.e. the time between the settlement of the Jews in the city of Venice and the Venetian defeat by the Ottomans in the War of Candia. For my research, I will study a text corpus of published and unpublished sources, both literary and archival. I will use political treatises and rabbinic texts written by the foremost Jewish intellectuals, as well as proceedings of communal councils in the studied communities, and other non-literary texts relevant for the realm of “minor politics”. I will also research archival texts of non-Jewish provenience to provide evidence on the state’s reflection of the development within Venetian Jewish communities. The innovative study of the hitherto unresearched connections between political theory and practice in the cultural history of Venetian Jews, as well as the “pan-Venetian” perspective of my project, promise to shed new light into the character of political thought of early modern Jewry. Its interdisciplinary nature makes my study relevant for cultural historians, historians of ideas as well as scholars of Jewish literature and religion.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants