Mantua: The Gonzaga Court and Its Jewish Golden Age

Jews are documented in Mantua from 1145, well before the Gonzaga seized the city in 1328. Through the fourteenth century the community was small: a handful of families running loan banks, whose ledgers were kept at home because nobody yet needed an archive.

The Gonzaga changed the scale. They actively encouraged Jewish settlement, partly for the obvious reason (access to credit) and partly because the court's appetite for talent was omnivorous. By the late fifteenth century the Mantua Jewish community was producing not only bankers and physicians but musicians, dancing masters, and performers who worked directly for the ducal household.

The family that captures this moment best is the Norsa. Daniele Norsa was a banker who, in 1495, bought a house on the site where the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria now stands. He was accused of removing a Marian image from its façade. The house was demolished by ducal order, and a church built in its place to commemorate the Gonzaga victory at Fornovo. A painting from the Mantegna circle, today in Sant'Andrea, shows Norsa and his family kneeling below the Virgin, wearing the yellow badge. It is one of the earliest surviving portraits of an Italian Jewish family commissioned, in effect, as a public humiliation.

That double register: patronage and constraint, proximity and marking, is the whole story of the Gonzaga Jews in miniature.

Mantua's Jews did something almost no other Italian community did. They ran a theatre.

From the early sixteenth century the community staged plays for the court, initially as an act of homage. The figure behind this was Leone de' Sommi (c. 1525 – c. 1590), a Mantuan Jew who wrote comedies in Italian, directed productions for the Gonzaga, and composed the Dialoghi in materia di rappresentazioni sceniche. It was one of the first European treatises on stagecraft, covering lighting, casting, and direction. He was, by any reasonable definition, a professional theatre director a generation before the term existed.

What began as a gift hardened into an obligation. By the early seventeenth century the annual performance had become a compulsory and expensive levy on the community. The tradition ended only when the War of the Mantuan Succession made performance impossible.

The name most people associate with Jewish Mantua is Salomone Rossi (c. 1570 – c. 1630). He was probably born in the city, a birth date of 19 August 1570 is often cited, but it is a scholarly inference from an acrostic in his first publication, not a record. And he spent his entire working life there.

Rossi entered the court's payroll in 1587 and stayed for forty-one years, serving Dukes Vincenzo and Ferdinando as violinist, concertmaster, and composer. He worked alongside Monteverdi through the years when opera was being invented in Mantua. His secular output: canzonettas, madrigals, and instrumental trio sonatas that helped define the early Baroque and earned him enough standing that in 1606 the duke exempted him from wearing the yellow badge.

His most enduring work, though, was written for the synagogue. Ha-Shirim asher li-Shlomo ("The Songs of Solomon"), printed in Venice in 1622–23, set Hebrew psalms and liturgical texts in polyphony for three to eight voices. Nothing like it had been published before. It was defended in a preface by Rabbi Leon Modena of Venice, who argued that art music had a legitimate place in Jewish worship, and it remains the earliest surviving collection of polyphonic Hebrew liturgical music.

His sister sang at court under the name Madama Europa. Both disappear from the record around 1630. Whether Rossi died of old age, of the plague that swept the city that year, or in the sack of the ghetto, no document says.

Mantua was also a printing town. Abraham Conat set up a Hebrew press there around 1474–77, one of the earliest anywhere in Italy. In the mid-sixteenth century the city's presses produced the first printed edition of the Zohar (1558–60), and in 1573–75 they printed Me'or Einayim, the controversial historical work of the Mantuan physician-scholar Azariah de' Rossi. Some later writers assumed Azariah was Salomone's father; he had no sons, and the connection is a family one at most.

By 1610 the community numbered more than 2,000 people, around 7.5 per cent of the city's population, with several synagogues and a dense network of confraternities, schools, and charitable institutions.

The golden age did not end in a single blow. It narrowed.

In 1590 Duke Vincenzo I expelled foreign-born Jews. In 1602 he forbade Jewish physicians from treating Christians without special permission. In 1610, after decades of pressure from Rome, he decreed a ghetto, and in 1612 he enforced it, requiring all of Mantua's Jews to live within an enclosed quarter bounded by the streets now called Dottrina Cristiana, Pomponazzo, Calvi, Spagnoli, and Giustiziati. Four gates closed it from dusk to dawn, each with a Christian keyholder.

Unlike Venice or Rome, the Mantova ghetto was imposed on a community already at the centre of the city's cultural and financial life, in an area where many of them already lived. It was not an expulsion to the margins. It was a wall built around the middle.

The Gonzaga main line died out in 1627, and the succession dispute that followed drew France and the Empire into a war fought partly over Mantua itself. In 1629–30 the city endured months of siege and an outbreak of plague. Jews helped fortify and defend it, working through the Sabbath.

In July 1630 the city fell and was sacked for three days by imperial mercenaries. The ghetto was looted and largely destroyed. Around 1,800 Jews were expelled and their property seized. The community's return, and the misery of the interval, was recorded by one of its members, Abraham Massarani, in Ha-Galut ve-ha-Pedut ("Exile and Redemption"), printed in Venice in 1634.

The community rebuilt, but at a lower level. The Gonzaga-Nevers dukes ruled until 1707, when the duchy passed to the Habsburgs, who granted the first modest civil liberties. The ghetto gates finally came down with the arrival of Napoleon's troops in 1798. Mantua's rabbi, Abraham Vita Cologna, later sat in Napoleon's Grand Sanhedrin in Paris.

Emancipation opened the city to its Jews and opened Milan, too. Through the nineteenth century the Mantua Jewish community, which for centuries had held steady at around 1,900 people, thinned steadily as families moved to the larger commercial centre. The ghetto streets, no longer required, were simply neglected.

At the turn of the twentieth century the city demolished nearly all of the old quarter to build the Bank of Italy and other public buildings. Of the six synagogues that had stood inside the ghetto wall: three of the Italian rite (Scuola Grande, Cases, and Norsa-Torrazzo) and three of the German rite (Beccheria, Ostiglia, and Porto), five were lost. Their furnishings were given away to other communities, many of them eventually to Israel.

One survived, and the way it survived says something about what Mantua's Jews valued.

The Norsa Torrazzo synagogue, named for the two families who funded it, was first built in 1513, destroyed in 1630, and rebuilt in 1751. When the ghetto was condemned, the community did not simply salvage its contents. Between 1899 and 1902 they dismantled the synagogue and reconstructed it, room and ornament, inside the courtyard of the Jewish retirement home on what is now Via Gilberto Govi 13. The original doors, windows, and marble floor were moved; the eighteenth-century stucco decoration, dense with Hebrew inscriptions, was reproduced from casts taken before demolition.

The result is a faithful recreation of a 1751 Italian-rite prayer hall: carved wooden tevah, wrought-iron gallery railings bearing the family name, that happens to stand a few streets from where it began. It is a national monument and still in use.

The racial laws of November 1938 stripped Mantua's Jews of professions, schooling, and civil rights along with the rest of Italy's. But the decisive turn came after the armistice, when the Italian Social Republic ordered the arrest of all Jews on 30 November 1943.

The following day, 1 December, the Jewish retirement home on Via Govi the same building that housed the synagogue, was converted into an internment camp. Elderly and infirm residents were moved to the attic. The first round-up brought in around ninety people from the old ghetto district; within days 79 arrests had been added to the forty residents already there. The community secretary and the rabbi remained on site, and for a time the conditions were bearable; 55 internees were eventually released as too old or of mixed parentage.

That ended on the night of 3–4 April 1944, when one internee escaped. The next afternoon police came through and struck sixteen names of the bedridden and very old. At 11 a.m. on 5 April a truck took 42 people from Via Govi to the railway station, where a cattle wagon was coupled to convoy number 9 from Fossoli. The oldest was Vittoria Foà, 83. The youngest was Luisa Levi, 14. The train reached Auschwitz on 10 April.

In total 104 Jews from Mantua and its province were deported between May 1943 and December 1944 — 42 from Via Govi, the rest arrested elsewhere in Italy. Five returned. A memorial stone in the entrance hall of the Municipio on Via Roma lists them; four pietre d'inciampo on Via Principe Amedeo mark the Levi family.

Fewer than a hundred Jews live in Mantua today. What remains, physically, is more than the number suggests:

• The Norsa Torrazzo synagogue and community seat, Via Govi 13, visitable by arrangement with the community.
• The old ghetto streets, including the so-called Casa del Rabbino on Via Bertani, one of the few buildings to survive the demolitions, with its late-seventeenth-century façade.
• The Jewish cemetery, outside the walls across the Mincio.
• The memorial stones in the Municipio, one to Mantua's Jews who fought in the Risorgimento, one to the deported.
• The "Madonna of the Jews" in Sant'Andrea — the Norsa family, still kneeling.

For families with roots in the duchy, Mantua is unusually well served and unusually accessible.

The historical archive of the Jewish community, kept in rooms beside the synagogue, runs continuously from 1522 to the post-war period. It includes community minute books and correspondence, records of the confraternities and charitable institutions, the archive of the rabbinical court, and, most useful for family research, civil-status registers from 1750 to the present. The older section (1522–1853) has been digitised in partnership with Mantua's Biblioteca Teresiana: 42 vital-records registers, 75 volumes, dozens of parchments, and tens of thousands of loose documents from the community's filze are now viewable online. Roughly 230 filze still await digitisation, so a complete search still means the reading room.

The Archivio di Stato di Mantova holds the Gonzaga archive itself, the ducal privileges, banking licences (condotte), petitions, and court records in which Jewish families appear from the fourteenth century onward, along with the Napoleonic and Austrian civil registration that begins where the community's own records grow thin.
For the twentieth century, the CDEC in Milan holds the community's own report on the arrests of November 1943 and the individual records of the deported.

The standard scholarly guide to all of this is Shlomo Simonsohn's History of the Jews in the Duchy of Mantua (1977), which draws on the community archive in depth and remains the first book to open.

Mantuan Jewish surnames cluster around a few sources: place names from the duchy and beyond (Norsa from Norcia, Ostiglia, Porto, Finzi, Colorni), Hebrew patronymics (Levi, Foà), and the German-rite families who arrived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A surname alone tells you a direction, not a destination but in Mantua, the direction is unusually well documented.