Ferrara פירארה

Jews are attested at Ferrara from 1088; a charter of settlement was granted in 1275. On 1 February 1493 Duke Ercole I formally admitted twenty-one families of Spanish exiles landed at Genoa, with rights of trade and craft. Under Ercole II, from 1534, the city began to receive Portuguese New Christians and — alone in Italy at the time — allowed them to profess Judaism openly. Nothing comparable existed in Italy before the Livorno charters.

So Ferrara became the chief reception point of the Marrano diaspora. Here in 1553 Abraham Usque and Yom Tob Athias printed the Ferrara Bible, the Spanish translation that is the monument of the Sephardi dispersion; in the same year the Talmud was burned here on the order from Rome. Doña Gracia Nasi lived here from 1549 to 1552.

On 17–18 November 1570 an earthquake struck the city: some two hundred dead. Azariah dei Rossi, whose house was partly destroyed, wrote Kol Elohim about it — and, living in a village during the aftershocks, translated the Letter of Aristeas into Hebrew in twenty days at a Christian scholar's request. Out of this grew Me'or Einayim. He recorded that no Jew perished and that Jewish householders took in as many as a hundred refugees each.

In 1598 the Este line failed, Ferrara passed to the Papal States, and a constitution of February that year imposed the badge, banned Jewish banking and cut back trade. The ghetto was decreed in 1624 and closed in 1626–27, five gates, built at the Jews' expense. The descendants of those Ferrara had received went on to Venice and Livorno.