The history of the early modern Italian Jewish ghetto should be of particular interest to modern historians and to all with an interest in the contemporary struggles of local and national governments to knit together people of disparate ethnic and religious affiliations into peaceful, tolerant, respectful, and flourishing states or unions. Specifically, the history of the ghettos, and more broadly of the “space” and places designated for Jews in early modern Europe before a political commitment to religious freedom was fully developed, may help set in perspective a comparative history of European approaches to the incorporation, integration, and toleration of its constituent minorities and to the demographic mobility that is so deeply associated with their history.

The question of locating and defining the place of minority groups, broadly speaking, is related to the specific interest in the early modern world of statesmen – and of church officials – in defining borders and boundaries. As I have argued in a full length Italian case study, the decision of the Medici regime to ghettoize the Jews of Tuscany in 1570-71 is best explained in the context of an early modern statebuilding process that was newly attentive to the incredible potential of spatial organization for the determination and administration of rights and obligations, instead of the formerly status-based organization of the same. I have called this the “spatialization” of early modern state power. A second and related argument that I will discuss here pertains more to the question of Jewishness – the specific shape and form of Jewish identity at any particular time and place. In the process called ghettoization, the spatial reorganization of a population of Jews – that is, their relocation to a ghetto – had an almost immediate and long-lasting impact on them, turning them into the kind of local, self-governing community the existence of which historians previously assumed. Finally, I will discuss briefly a third point, which is that the spatialization of state power was tied to efforts to restrict mobility. Thus mobility itself – such as egress from the spatial restriction of the walled and gated ghetto – may be seen as a form of resistance to state authority, a resistance that marked status within the Jewish community, even when the movement was authorized, nontransgressive, and even monitored.