Mantua מנטובה

Jews are attested at Mantua from the twelfth century — Abraham ibn Ezra finished a grammatical work here in 1145. From 1476, when Abraham Conat began to print, and on into the eighteenth century, Hebrew presses worked in the city almost without interruption; the Zohar was printed here in 1559/60 (simultaneously with Cremona) and Azariah dei Rossi's Me'or Einayim in 1573–75.

Between 1550 and 1630 Mantua was the cultural capital of Italian Jewry. Salamone Rossi printed Ha-Shirim asher li-Shelomo, the first polyphonic music written for the synagogue; Leone de' Sommi kept a Jewish theatre company at the Gonzaga court; Azariah dei Rossi, Abraham Portaleone, Judah Briel, the Rama mi-Pano were all Mantuans or of the Mantuan circle. There were over two thousand Jews in the city — some seven and a half per cent of the population, the highest proportion of any major Italian city.

The ghetto came late: Duke Vincenzo I decreed it in 1610, the move was enforced in 1612, four gates. The community lived under the *Tolleranza generale*, a privilege renewed every eight years down to 1791.

The end came not from a pope but from a war. In the War of the Mantuan Succession Imperial Landsknechte stormed the city on 18 July 1630 — the Ninth of Av. Three days of sack, plague behind it, and within days the Jews were driven out: about a thousand to San Martino dall'Argine, about a thousand down the Po toward Ferrara. Roughly a third of the community died. They were permitted to return that same autumn and the community rebuilt itself — but the printing, the music and the theatre never came back.

In 1779 the badge and the disabilities were abolished under Joseph II; in 1798 the gates came down; in 1799 the Austrians returned.