Italy: New Publication about Padua Cemetery and Renaissance Gravestones

Padua, Italy. Jewish cemetery.  Gravestone of Leb Lodi, ca. 1545.  One of many similar portico front stone from the mid-16th century.  Photo: David Malkiel (see below).

Italy: New Publication about Padua Cemetery and Renaissance Gravestones

David Malkiel, “Renaissance in the Graveyard: the Hebrew Tombstones of Padua and Ashkenazic Acculturation in Sixteenth-Century Italy": AJS Review 37:2 (November 2013), 333-370. 

You can read the article here

David Malkiel has published a thoughtful and detailed article based on the nearly 100 sixteenth-century Hebrew gravestones extant at the Jewish cemetery in Padua.  This is the second Jewish cemetery of the famous university town and Jewish center located close to Venice.  The first was destroyed in the war of the League of Cambrai in 1509, the same war that brought so many Jewish refugees to Venice and thus stimulated the creation of the first official Italian ghetto in 1516.

In Padua, where more than 1200 Jewish funerary inscriptions survive from between 1530-1860, Malkiel is able to use both the architectural form of the stones and the commemorative and literary content of their inscriptions to trace a pattern of accommodation and acculturation between Italian Jews (italiani) and Ashkenazi Jews (tedeschi) during the 16th century.

Malkiel summarizes his findings thus: "The literary features of the inscriptions indicate a shift from a preference for epitaphs written in prose, like those in medieval Germany, to epitaphs in the form of Italian Jewry's occasional poetry.  The art and architecture of the tombstones are part and parcel of the renaissance ambient, with the portals and heraldry characteristic of Palladian edifices.  The lettering, too, presents a shift from the constituency's medieval Ashkenazi origins to its Italian setting."

This is a very rich article - and there is a lot more in it regarding the relationship to tombstone design to formal designs for Arks in synagogues interiors, for parochets and for title pages for Hebrew printed books.  

Malkiel writes: " Architectural frames were conventionally used in early modern Europe to structure a broad range of objects, including mantels, moldings, candelabra, and illuminated documents. The classical portico, with pediment, entablature, columns, and portal, began appearing in Italy in the early fifteenth century. The portico became extremely popular, and served to ornament the title pages of books, as well as actual buildings.  Italy’s Jews, too, applied the portico to Hebrew title pages, in print and manuscript, and also to the illuminated ketubah, or marriage contract.  In the graveyard, the gable represents the portico, especially when accompanied by entablature and pilasters. A series of portico tombstones from the latter half of the sixteenth century have a distinctly Palladian character.

Importantly, the author is emphatic in stating "it is certain that Catholic tombstones could not have inspired the Jewish gravestones. The Jewish gravestone had no analogue in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, including the 16th-century.  This claim surprised me - and if true it is very important for identifying a unique development of style and taste for Jewish art.  I'll have to check around at Italian Christian graves. 

Malkiel also writes at length about the many personal and family emblems that decorate stones and place the deceased within the local social structure, and he writes how Ashkenazi Jews gradually - or sometimes not so gradually - accepted Italian language and social mores. I hope this study proves a model for work elsewhere in Italy.  The stones of the Venice cemetery have been fully published, and so are ready for deeper analysis.  I don't know about the state of work on the many other Italian Jewish cemeteries...I'll report back!