The Livornine: the town where former anusim were not asked about their past

There are two charters. The first, of 19 February 1591, called craftsmen and settlers to the new port town Bernardo Buontalenti had been laying out since 1577. The second, the Costituzione Livornina of 10 June 1593, is the definitive one, and it is addressed "to all of you merchants of whatsoever nation: Levantines, Ponentines, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, Germans, Italians, Jews, Turks, Moors, Armenians, Persians." Valid for twenty-five years and renewable — and renewed it was: 1618, 1643, 1668, 1693, 1715, 1740, 1765, 1790.

What is in it. A general amnesty for the past; and the decisive clause — a guarantee that former New Christians would not be prosecuted, denounced or investigated for their past life as Christians. That is what made Livorno the one place in Catholic Europe where an *anús* could return to Judaism openly and safely. Then: Tuscan subjecthood after ten years' residence; the right to own houses, warehouses and shops; exemption from the distinguishing badge; the right to employ Christian servants and wet-nurses; freedom of worship, a synagogue and a cemetery; freedom from forced baptism and from compulsory conversionary sermons; communal self-government under elected *massari* with jurisdiction in civil and minor criminal matters; a favourable customs regime.

It worked as calculated. There were a hundred and thirty-four Jews in Livorno in 1601, twelve hundred and fifty in 1645, three thousand four hundred and seventy-six in 1738, four thousand three hundred and twenty-seven in 1784 and about five thousand under Napoleon — nine to twelve per cent of the whole city, a proportion no other western European city knew. The synagogue was begun in 1603 and enlarged three times.

Why there was no ghetto. The town was new: no medieval Jewish quarter to enclose, no guild corporations demanding segregation, no cathedral chapter with claims of its own. The charter was the inducement, and a ghetto would have voided it — the Medici were selling not toleration but trade. Tuscany lay outside the Papal States, so Cum nimis absurdum had no force there. And the Inquisition's competence in the free port had been curtailed in advance.

Three corrections. There are two Livornine, and the first is of 1591; the "1590" in the literature is the Florentine year, which began on 25 March. It is not a charter "for the Jews" but for merchants of any nation and faith: one of the founding documents of the European free-port system, and its logic is mercantilist. And "Tuscany had no ghettos" is false: Cosimo I enclosed the Jews of Florence and Siena in 1571. Livorno was the exception within Tuscany, not the Tuscan norm: one dynasty ran a ghetto in its capital and a free port on its coast.