The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova (37 page)

The coexistence and coming together of Jewish indigenous mores and Venetian culture (itself a blend of Italian and Byzantine sources) would prove a forcing ground for a number of remarkable figures. One of the earliest of these was the larger-than-life figure of Leon da Modena (Judah Aryeh mi-Modena), a rabbi who became renowned as a poet, scholar, part-time iconoclast and full-time gambler. Da Modena was born in Venice in 1571 of a distinguished family of French Jews: his grandfather, a noted physician, had been knighted by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Young Leon was brought up in prosperous circumstances and quickly showed exceptional mental powers allied to the emotional instability of genius. By the age of twelve he had translated the first canto of Ariosto’s
Orlando Furioso
into Hebrew, and a couple of years later completed an exemplary dialogue against gambling, a work intended to dissuade his two elder stepbrothers from this vice. Yet within a short time he too had become addicted to gambling, a flaw that he ascribed to the astrological sign under
which he had been born. By now the family fortune had been lost, owing largely to a ruinous dispute in which his father had become involved with a Ferrarese nobleman. In 1591, at the age of nineteen, Leon was married to his cousin Rachel, and two years later, after a period of intensive study, he became a rabbi. But his quest for knowledge was not limited to religious matters, or even orthodox intellectual studies. As he would later confess, ‘even if I have not been able to learn any more than a man who attempts to drink all the water in the sea, I have never hindered my intellect from seeking to understand anything I wished’. This included the books of heretics and unbelievers, sorcery, magic and even what he regarded as the profound theological understanding acquired by other religions. But all this was not undertaken indiscriminately: his search was for the truth, justice and the distinction between good and evil – even if such researches did mean investigating the banned, the forbidden and the sacrilegious.

This was evidently not a man who studied with the aim of gaining himself a respectable position in society. Even so, Leon’s preaching soon began attracting such attention that his audiences included leading figures from all sections of the ghetto. And as word spread, his public orations were even attended by Christian priests and distinguished nobles from outside the ghetto. A combination of factors appears to have contributed to his appeal. These included the sheer brilliance of his intellect, his astonishing depth of learning and the power of his arguments against cant and empty ritual in the practice of any religion, as well as the poetic force of his language – all this combined with a charismatic element in his unstable genius. He also wrote voluminously, especially essays and poetry, which soon found him gaining admission to the leading literary salons in Venice. The charismatic element in his character also made him a superb teacher, and after gaining a reputation within the ghetto he was soon in demand amongst the nobility in Venice, who had a tradition of continuing to receive instruction in intellectual matters throughout their life.

All this should have made Leon a rich, successful and admired figure, but this was not the case. The flaws in his character ensured this. His energetic pursuit of learning was accompanied by an equally energetic pursuit of gambling, in all its forms, from cards and chess to simple coin-tossing, which he continued to pursue on a heroic scale – matched only
by his similarly brilliant contemporary, the mathematician Cardano. And this was not the only similarity between these two highly gifted mavericks: just like Cardano, Leon would also in his later years write a remarkably frank autobiography in which he spared few detrimental details of his life – especially with regard to gambling. As he confessed at one point, ‘the devil mocked me and harmed me not a little for I lost 100 ducats’. This was no mean sum: equivalent to the annual income of a middle-ranking civil servant in the administration. Yet worse was soon to follow. He then mentions losing 300 ducats, followed by a period of intense study and teaching in order to pay off his debts, only to be followed by another disastrous bout that lost him 300 ducats. This was a full-blown addiction from which he could not be cured by astrology, religious practice, magic or will-power (all of which he studied in some detail). The ineradicable underside of his obsessive thirst for learning was an obsessive attraction to risk-taking. As a result of his gambling he soon became so unreliable and disreputable that his lucrative teaching and preaching engagements dried up and he was forced to take on any work he could find. And this he did with characteristic gusto. It says much for his enthusiasm (and unpredictability) that he worked at more than two dozen different professions. These ranged from interpreter to bookseller, from alchemist’s assistant to public storyteller, being also at various times ‘a merchant, rabbi, musician, matchmaker and manufacturer of amulets’. Despite his misdemeanours he remained proud to be a rabbi, and the ghetto’s religious authorities never forbade him from using this title.

His family life was tragic, although his instability without doubt contributed to this sorrowful state of affairs. Over the coming years several of his daughters are known to have died, and his sons seem to have acquired some of their father’s less positive characteristics. One was murdered in a gang brawl, another poisoned, another ran away to sea, whilst yet another simply took ship to Brazil, never to be seen again. Only his eldest son Marco (sometimes known as Mordecai) seems to have acquired a measure of Leon’s talent, becoming his father’s favourite. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), Marco fled to Vienna in 1609 at the age of eighteen. However, six years later he returned, having acquired an extensive knowledge and expertise in the practice of alchemy. He soon persuaded his father to set
up a small laboratory in the Old Ghetto, where the two of them set to work on the time-honoured alchemical quest to turn base metals into gold. This did not go quite according to plan, but eventually achieved a lesser success when they apparently managed to transmute nine ounces of lead and one of silver into ten ounces of pure silver. Writing of this achievement Leon claimed, ‘Twice I myself have seen this happen, and I myself and no other sold the silver after having assayed it in the crucible.’ Whoever bought this ‘silver’ appears to have been quite satisfied with his purchase, and Leon was convinced that his financial worries were at last at an end. According to Riccardo Calimani, ‘He was convinced that he had found an inexhaustible source of wealth, which he estimated would bring in a thousand ducats a year.’

Not only did this not come to pass, but it soon became evident that Marco’s many hours spent labouring day and night amidst the arsenic fumes and noxious chemicals of their alchemists’ den had poisoned his health. After two years of increasing decrepitude and haemorrhages, Marco died at the age of twenty-six. Later, the son who had run away to sea returned to Venice, but the captain of the ship refused to allow him ashore without the payment of a large ransom to cover debts that he had incurred ‘in the East’. It comes as little surprise that some years later Leon’s wife Rachel went insane and would remain so for the rest of her life.

Meanwhile Leon’s literary output continued apace, its volume, controversy and ingenuity undimmed by his passing years. In 1631, when Leon was sixty, the leaders of the Jewish communities in the ghetto issued an edict against gambling of any sort, with excommunication being the punishment for transgressors. Whereupon Leon summoned his considerable scholarship to refute this edict, pointing out that it did not concur with biblical teaching, and that the authorities themselves were breaking the Law by issuing such an edict without consulting the entire community. More pertinently, he argued that gambling was frequently expected of Jews when they encountered Venetian noblemen in the course of their business, such meetings often taking place in gambling houses. Indeed, such an edict could easily lead to the ruin of the Jewish community. And so forth … Leon’s arguments won the day, and he was thus able to continue along the road to ruin.

He had in fact long been an expert on the interaction between the Jewish and Christian communities. As early as 1616 he had been commissioned by the English ambassador to produce a work entitled
Historia de’ Riti Hebraici vita e oservanza
, describing the history of Jewish religious rites, life and observances. Because this manuscript was intended as a private personal gift from the ambassador to King James I of England, Leon felt safe to embark upon his description with some enthusiasm, at the same time adding a number of derogatory remarks about the Inquisition, whose malign influence was now reaching its climax in Rome. His later, somewhat feeble justification for this incautious lapse was ‘because this work was a manuscript that was not to have been read by anyone connected with Papal influence’. After all, the Church of England had now been entirely independent of the Roman Catholic Church for more than eighty years.

Leon would live to rue his cavalier attitude towards the Inquisition, when word reached Venice that without either his knowledge or his permission an edition of his manuscript had been published in Paris. On hearing this news Leon became extremely frightened: ‘Because of this I felt ill, tore my beard and was numb and dispirited for I knew that, when this book reached Rome, it would harm all Jews.’ Indeed, he was not the only one to realise this: his few friends avoided all contact with him and he was regarded as an outcast in the ghetto. No one wished to be associated with this heretic who was liable to be burned at the stake.

Fortunately for Leon, the French publisher had tactfully deleted Leon’s derogatory remarks about the Inquisition and had even gone so far as to dedicate the work to ‘the noble ambassador of the French King who had come to live in Rome’. This had been a lucky escape. Leon was able to cease tearing at his beard, and when the (edited) Venetian edition eventually appeared in 1638 he was persuaded by his friends amongst the ghetto authorities to preface his now-blameless manuscript with a cryptic, but nonetheless suspicious apology that, ‘In writing [this work] I truly forgot I was Jewish, imagining myself to be a mere neutral narrator.’

Despite such difficulties, Leon’s
Historia de’ Riti Hebraici
was to prove influential in an entirely unforeseen way. Prior to its arrival, English knowledge of the Jews and their practices was practically non-existent. Evidence of this is noticeable in Shakespeare’s
Merchant of Venice
, which appeared some
sixteen years before Leon wrote his work. Uncharacteristically, although Shakespeare gives glimpses of an intimate knowledge of Venice (almost certainly gained from an English student who had studied at Padua), any references to Jewish religious practice – to which a realistic Shylock would have made frequent allusion – are to all intents and purposes absent. When characterising Shylock as a Jew, for once Shakespeare literally did not know what he was talking about. However, such ignorance was soon to be dispelled. Leon’s work so impressed King James I that he had copies made of the manuscript, and these were well received in England, leading to a more liberal interest in the Jews and their faith, despite the fact that they remained banned from the country. In part as a result of Leon’s
Historia de’ Riti Hebraici
, some Puritan thinkers in England came to regard Jewish society as a successful working blend of civil and religious laws upon which they should model their own society. Indeed, when Oliver Cromwell took over England after 1649 and wished to establish a theocratic republic, he was said to have sent emissaries to the Jews of Antwerp and Venice for advice on this matter.

Although Leon’s bold remarks in the
Historia
had caused him considerable danger, his appetite for theological controversy remained undiminished. Even before the trouble with the Roman Inquisition had been resolved he had launched into a number of attacks on certain aspects of Judaism and Talmudic interpretation, which only served to make him further enemies amongst the religious authorities in the ghetto. In the main, he attacked Talmudic interpretation that insisted upon the letter of the law, rather than its spirit – which, in his opinion, was frequently relevant only to earlier times and earlier places in Jewish history. He insisted that many rituals and dietary laws should either be simplified or abrogated altogether. Although the ghetto authorities hardly welcomed such attacks, and indeed did their best to refute them, they continued to regard Leon with astonishing leniency, taking no direct action against him. He was lucky: just twenty years later in Amsterdam the philosopher Baruch Spinoza would be excommunicated – bell, book and candle – and cast out from the Jewish community for proposing similarly heterodox theological ideas. The fact is that Jewish thought was entering a time of controversy and uncertainty – which some, such as the Venetian Jews, thought it best to ignore, whilst
those less sure of their position amongst the Christian community sought to eradicate.

An indication of the conflict within Jewish thinking at this time can be seen in the case of the notorious Sabbatai Zevi, whose teachings would spread like wildfire through the Venetian ghetto. Zevi was born in 1626 in Smyrna (modern-day Izmir, in Turkey), and after becoming inordinately attracted towards the mystical variant of Judaism known as the Kabbala, at the age of twenty-two he proclaimed himself to be the Messiah (in the eyes of the Jews, Jesus Christ had been a false messiah). This coincided with a widespread belief amongst Jews that the coming of the Messiah predicted in the Bible was now due, and as a result Zevi soon attracted a widespread following amongst Jewish communities throughout the Levant. Not content with this, he despatched his main disciple, Nathan of Gaza, to Venice, where his preaching caused huge controversy – alienating almost all the rabbis, yet stirring a passionate following in their congregations, especially amongst the poorer Jews. This version of Messianism, which came to be known as Sabbateanism after its founder, soon reached epidemic proportions, its message spreading to Jews throughout Europe, who had been waiting so long for the appearance of the ‘anointed one’, the Jewish king descended from the royal line of David who would lead them back to the Land of Israel to build a new Temple at Jerusalem and usher in an era of peace on Earth.