Abstract
Among the many theatrical personae that one encountered in the streets, piazzas, and church portals of late medieval and early modern Europe were the Iucchi. These were alleged recidivist baptized Jews, a recognized subgroup within the wide universe of professional beggars and knaves. In his 1485 Speculum Cerretanorum [Mirror of Beggars], a guide to the underworld of vagabonds and charlatans, the otherwise unknown author Teseo Pini, a doctor in canon law and a vicar to the bishop of Fossombrone (near Urbino), described the Iucchi as follows:
They are called Iucchi, or Rebaptized because they repeat baptism; they pretend they were once Jews grown fat upon usurious lending. But they also say that after seeing terrible visions and scarcely credible miracles, they abandoned all their wealth. Inspired in the manner of the apostles, they chose to follow the poor Christ in poverty and perfection. […] in every city they come to, they get baptized all over again, and then […] go about fishing for other people’s goods and money.1
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Notes
Thus, A. Toaff (1989), Il vino e la carne: Una comunità ebraica nel Medioevo (Bologna: Il Mulino): 187, assumes that (at least in Umbria) all the Iucchi were Christians.
D. Graizbord (2005), ‘A Historical Contextualization of Sephardi Apostates and Self- Styled Missionaries of the Seventeenth Century’, Jewish History, 19, 287–313.
C. Meek, ‘Men, Women and Magic: Some Cases from Late Medieval Lucca’, in: C. Meek (ed.), Women in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000): 44–46;
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H. Beinart (2001), ‘From Constantinople to Madrid via Rome: A Chronicle on the Peregrinations of Carlos Ménez’, Italia: Studi e ricerche sulla storia, la cultura e la letteratura degli Ebrei d’Italia, 13–15, 89–108 (in Hebrew).
Mercedes García- Arenal and Gerard Wiegers (2003), A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
J.A. Armstrong (1982), Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press): 6;
E.R. Dursteler (2006), Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press): 104.
P. Berek (1998), ‘The Jew as Renaissance Man’, Renaissance Quarterly, 51, 128–162;
Y. Kaplan (2000), An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden: Brill);
Y. Yovel (2009), The Other Within: The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
D. Graizbord (2004), Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–1700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).
See also E.N. Rothman (2012), Brokering Empire: Trans- Imperial Subjects Between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press): 122–123.
R. Segre (1972), ‘Il mondo ebraico nel carteggio di Carlo Borromeo’, (letter 181 of 5th March 1584), Michael: On the History of the Jews in the Diaspora, 1, 254.
P. Zagorin (1990), Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press);
Eliav-Feldon (2012), Renaissance Impostors, 16–67;
L. Stelling, H. Hendrix and T. Richardson (eds, 2012), The Turn of the Soul: Representations of Religious Conversion in Early Modern Art and Literature (Leiden: Brill).
K.P. Luria (1996), ‘The Politics of Protestant Conversion to Catholicism in Seventeenth Century France’, in: P. van de Veer (ed.), Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity (New York: Routledge): 23–46;
K.P. Luria (2005), Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early Modern France (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press).
E. Carlebach (2001), Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press); GraizbordSouls in Dispute, 116–120.
R. Segre, ‘Neophytes during the Italian Counter- Reformation: Identities and Biographies’, Proceedings of the Sixth World Congress of Jewish Studies, 13–19 August 1973 (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1975): 131–142; Graizbord, ‘Historical Contextualization’, 289–290.
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© 2015 Moshe Sluhovsky
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Sluhovsky, M. (2015). Recidivist Converts in Early Modern Europe. In: Eliav-Feldon, M., Herzig, T. (eds) Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137447494_7
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