Padua פדובה
Hundreds of Jewish physicians from across Europe passed through the Padua medical faculty; from its yeshiva came the Maharam of Padua and, two centuries later, the Ramchal.
The first Paduan Jew known by name is the physician Jacob Bonacosa, 1255. By 1432 seven Jewish loan-banks worked in a city of seventeen thousand; through the fifteenth century the community was expelled and readmitted under Franciscan pressure, and in 1491 a *monte di pietà* was founded — a Christian pawn-bank designed precisely against Jewish credit.
The heart of Padua is the university. It is the one university in Catholic Europe that granted Jews the doctorate in medicine without interruption: eighty graduates between 1517 and 1619, and a hundred and forty-nine between 1619 and 1721. A humiliating levy was charged — a hundred and seventy pounds of sweets for the student nation. Nearly the whole educated medical class of Italian Jewry, and a good part of Ashkenazi Jewry, passed through Padua; Joseph Solomon Delmedigo studied here and heard Galileo lecture.
The rabbinic academy matters no less: Meir Katzenellenbogen, the Maharam of Padua (d. 1565), Samuel Archivolti, Isaac Hayyim Cantarini, Isaiah Bassan. From here came the 1550 quarrel over the reprinting of the Mishneh Torah, out of which grew the first Jewish ruling on a publisher's rights — and, two centuries later, the Ramchal affair.
A ghetto was demanded from 1541, the Senate assented in 1581, and it was instituted in 1602: four gates and insulting inscriptions. On 20 August 1684 — 10 Elul — townsmen and peasants rushed the ghetto on false news from the siege of Buda; the community was saved, and the day stayed in the calendar as the *Purim di Buda*.
On 28 April 1797 the French destroyed the gates, and on 28 August of that year the ghetto street was officially renamed *Via Libera*.
On the timeline
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Isaac Hayyim Cantarini, Pahad Yizhak, Amsterdam 1685 — an eyewitness account of the attack of 10 Elul 1684
Documents of the period
- The matriculation registers of the Padua medical faculty — eighty Jewish physicians in 1517–1619 and a hundred and forty-nine in 1619–1721
Scholarship
- N. Netanel, Maharam of Padua v. Giustiniani, Houston Law Review 44 — the 1550 ruling on reprinting — not copyright but a prohibition on encroachment
Basis: documents and evidence.