The sack of Mantua: the end of the capital of Italian Jewish culture

By 1630 Mantua was the most creative Jewish community in Italy. Printing had gone on here since 1476; from here came the Zohar of 1559/60 and Azariah dei Rossi's Me'or Einayim; here Salamone Rossi printed the first polyphonic music for the synagogue and Leone de' Sommi kept a Jewish theatre company at the Gonzaga court. There were over two thousand Jews — about seven and a half per cent of the city, the highest proportion in any major Italian city. The ghetto, decreed in 1610 and occupied in 1612, had not stopped any of it.

The end came from the War of the Mantuan Succession: Imperial armies besieged the city to block the French-backed Gonzaga-Nevers claim. On 18 July 1630 — the Ninth of Av — the Landsknechte breached the walls. Three days of sack; the ghetto was stripped, and the community's libraries, the ducal collections and the city's wealth were carried off. Plague ran alongside — the same epidemic Manzoni describes at Milan.

Within days the Jews were driven out by Imperial order. About a thousand went to San Martino dall'Argine, about a thousand down the Po toward Ferrara. Roughly a third of the community died — some thousand out of two and a half to three thousand. The city as a whole fell from thirty-five thousand inhabitants to sixteen and a half.

They were permitted to return in the autumn of 1630, under the restored Charles I Gonzaga-Nevers. The community reassembled — but it never recovered its primacy: no printing, no music, no theatre at the former level ever returned to Mantua.

Three corrections. This was not a papal persecution: the agent was Imperial mercenaries in a war of succession, and the Jews were plundered first and expelled after, as the most portable wealth and the least protected people. "Eighteen hundred were expelled" counts those who left under escort, not the community and not the dead. And the expulsion was not permanent: they were back within months. What ended was not the community but Mantua's role as the capital of Italian Jewish culture.

The coincidence with the Ninth of Av is not homiletics: 18 July 1630 by the Gregorian calendar, in force at Mantua since 1582, really is 9 Av 5390, and so Abraham Massarani, who was there, recorded it.