Today was a great day in Tuscany! We spent the first half of the day exploring a small Italian town called Pitigliano, a town of about 4,000 inhabitants that sits a top a cliff overlooking a vast and green countryside. The most interesting part of our time in the small town was our visit to the Jewish Ghetto. According to my article, Jewish families played a very prominent role in many Italian communities throughout the 15th century. They often supported the community and their neighbors in one of the most fundamental ways, by giving loans. Because of Catholic doctrine and many religious restrictions, Christian families were not allowed to lend money with interest, making money lending very unfeasible for Christians. Jewish people however, did not have to abide by these laws and were not only allowed, but often encouraged, to lend money to people throughout the community as well as the communal government.

            The Jewish Ghetto that we visited was established by the Medici Family in 1622 about 25 years after the Synagogue of Pitigliano was erected. Because nearly one fourth of the community was Jewish, the town soon became known was “Little Jerusalem.” The remnants of the ghetto that we were able to explore consisted of various rooms and chambers used in everyday life by the Jewish community. They had a ritual bath used to baptize new converts, a kosher cellar and butcher to handle food, a bakery for unleavened bread, and a special room for dyeing textiles. Next to these remains was a Synagogue that is still used today. Such ghettos, or Jewish quarters, were very common throughout many Italian villages in the countryside.

            During this time, over two-thirds of citizens in any given town had some form of a loan, and Jewish loans accounted for 20-30 percent of the local credit market. Jewish lenders had two distinct competitive advantages that allowed them to secure roughly 10 percent of the total debt of all households. The first was that their wealth was often very liquid, meaning they had large amounts of cash or easy to sell items. Their second advantage was that they had strong economic and social ties among themselves throughout the community and surrounding towns allowing them to share the risk of lending with numerous individuals.

            Jewish lending helped households to smooth consumptions, buy working capital, and provide dowries for daughters. They also often helped finance large, expensive governmental projects. In order to secure such public finance, city governments often required Jewish lenders to agree to lend favorably to governmental institutions and projects before they were granted a charter. Further, governments allowed Jewish lenders to charge high interest rates and then taxed them on their earnings, placing an indirect burden on the citizens who were borrowing money. This system provided steady revenue for governments without having to upset the general public by directly taxing them.

            It was really interesting to experience the community Jewish families inhabited, keeping in mind the integral role they played in their communes despite not being fully integrated into the community. It’s also important to note that indirect tax schemes, like those used by the Italian government through Jewish lending, still exist today. Our class discussed modern day examples of indirect taxes such as the alcohol tax or requiring people to get new license plates every seven years, as examples of how our government still tries to generate revenue from its citizens without directly collecting taxes from them.