"Disagreements Will Arise:" Housing, Law, and the Formation of the Jewish Ghetto of Mantua, 1610-12

Established in 1610, the ghetto of Mantua enclosed the fourth largest Jewish community in Western Europe. Although Mantua was not the first city to forcibly seclude its Jewish residents, only in Mantua did the ducal chamber assume full control over the allocation of houses and shops and the resolution of disputes among Jews during ghettoization. Already before 1610, most Mantuan Jews had already lived in the area designated for the ghetto in shared housing. It was not uncommon for Jewish leaseholders and subtenants to get into arguments and disputes with one another. By the ghetto’s completion in 1611, Mantuan Jews submitted over four-hundred petitions to the city. More than seeking housing assignments, Jews asked for governmental help resolving a wide range of housing disputes.
Why did Jews bring their communal quarrels before a Christian government, instead of developing their own methods of negotiation and arbitration, as they did in other Italian cities? By answering these questions, my dissertation challenges old historiographical assumptions about apparent communal autonomy and current scholarly views on aspirational communal autonomy. Jews turned to the ducal government because they believed it was in their best interests. Since the eleventh century, European Jews developed the law of non-eviction – known as chazakah in Hebrew or ius cazakà in Italian. The law forbade Jews from evicting their coreligionists from houses that they had rented from Christians, providing Jewish tenants with the right of perpetual tenancy. During ghettoization, the Duchy of Mantua suspended the law to allow free reign in assigning houses. The city also granted Jews the right of perpetual tenancy over assignments made by the ducal administration. For many Jews, the suspension of housing laws was an opportunity to attain better accommodation and rid themselves of fraught housing arrangements. Jews petitioned the city to remove their fellow Jews from their units, hoping to take over the unit themselves or offer it to other Jews. As such requests would not have been granted under Jewish Law, it was not feasible for Jewish petitioners to take their disputes to Jewish tribunals or arbitration. It was only the state administration that could grant Jews their wishes. Jews exercised their agency not by fostering some sort of communal autonomy, but rather by working with the central authorities and through their tribunals.