Kol Iśra’el ‘Arevim Zeh la-Zeh (“All Israel Are Mutually Responsible”): The Rise of New Diasporic Centers

The chapter delves into Jewish communal life, including the dynamics of settlement and resettlement, self-government and self-help, commerce and cultural exchange. Serena di Nepi explores life in the Ghettos of the Italian Peninsula. She shows that ghettoized Jews stood at the center of international networks as a mobile and adaptable cohort despite the hardships of Ghettoization. Jews adapted to those hardships by creating unique instruments and modalities of intra-communal administration that ameliorated the flow of Jewish refugees to Italy; allowed Jews to operate as merchant consortia, and to defend Jewish culture against conversionist pressure. Jessica Roitman focuses on the creation of new Jewish centers in Europe and the New World under the impact of mercantilist policies and attendant concepts of religious tolerance. Roitman pays attention to the Western Sefardim as a network of tradesmen who straddled and transcended the Catholic-Protestant divide. She shows that the roles of these subjects were founded on unstable rights of settlement and commerce that permitted Jewish culture to exist in far-flung places in relative peace. Those places were arenas of intense imperial competition, and thus exposed the Jewish grantees to political and social perils in addition to economic opportunities.