Show notes

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Edward Loss 00:00

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We've got all sorts of criminal cases. 27, for example, consist cases of theft,

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but we also have murder or assault, jail breaks, customs fraud, counterfeit coinage.

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Shaina Hammerman 00:13

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That was Edward Loss, visiting professor of European History at Stanford in the

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winter of 2025. Loss is discussing some of the remarkable discoveries he has made

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studying fragments of documents now held in Stanford's archives about the Jews of

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15th century Bologna. I'm Shaina Hammerman and this is Cite and Sound, the Stanford

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Jewish Studies Podcast. Here, we host conversations with scholars and artists as we

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explore Jewish scholarship, culture and history. Listen to the voices shaping the

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Jewish Studies conversation at Stanford University and beyond.

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Loss joins us in conversation with Professor Rowan Dorin, a member of the Jewish Studies Core Faculty and Director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Together, they

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explore how these scraps of parchment from 500 years ago come to us at Stanford,

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what they reveal about Jewish life and Christian-Jewish relations in their context,

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and how artificial intelligence can be a useful tool for understanding the world of

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medieval Europe. And now, the conversation.

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Rowan Dorin 01:19

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Welcome everyone, we're here talking today about an amazing collection that we have

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here at Stanford that arrived in two caches, two bundles of documents. The first

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came in fall 2018, and then the second came in the summer of 2020, and they were

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acquired by our wonderful curator of Judaica, Eitan Kensky, at the Stanford Libraries. But it turns out they were woefully misdescribed by the dealer, but that just gave us

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an opportunity to do even more explorations. So when they arrived at Stanford, they

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record as being records of the Jewish Inquisition in 15th-century Bologna. Now they

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are indeed from 15th-century Bologna, but they are not in fact records of the

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Jewish Inquisition as became clear when I started looking through them. Instead, they

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turn out to be court documents from secular courts that were simply following what's

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called the inquisitorial process. So the word inquisition is all over the place, it's

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very clear how they ended up being understood as being inquisition, and there were

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certainly lots of Jews in these documents, as Edward is going to say a bit more

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about. Now I could read some of these documents as I began looking at them, but

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the writing is often really nasty, and I don't usually work on this place and

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period. But fortunately, I was already working with Edward on something else and he's

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really, really, really good at working these documents and indeed his area of

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specialty has been late medieval Bologna. So I asked him if he might be able and

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willing to transcribe them and I drew support from the Taube Center's Reinhard fund

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to hire him to do that. And so he transcribed all of them and then he is now

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here at Stanford working with me as we begin to explore what's in them and why

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they're interesting for understanding Jewish history and Jewish society in pre -modern

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Europe. So Edward, tell us a bit about what these documents actually are.

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Edward Loss 03:07

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Okay, Rowan, so what we have in front of us are miscellaneous acts from the ad maleficia courts. As you mentioned, they are lay courts responsible for the most

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heinous crimes against the community, such as theft and homicide. Again, the word

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inquisition appears all over them because these are acts from the inquisitory

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procedure which I can generally define as trials in which the authorities in these

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cases and the judges hold complete control over the development of the procedure. The

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important element that you already stressed is that these are secular courts and they

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did not only exist in Bologna but we can find similar institutions all over central

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and northern Italy after the 13th century even though our documents are from the

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15th. They are miscellaneous acts and they are also temporary records in a sense

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that these were not supposed to have lasted after being properly copied into a

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register.

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And we can actually see the material support possesses a series of holes.

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These are filter holes, so places in which one would insert a string–a filza–of

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parchment or thread, and they should hold all these documents together before they

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were actually given to the Camera Actorum of the city archive to be reused because paper

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and parchment was very expensive in the period. And that's fascinating because the

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documents we do have here at the Stanford Special Collections, they survived for

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random reasons.

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Rowan Dorin 04:33

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So really we're looking here at scrap papers or a scrap parchment that happens to survive in the 15th century. So how did it end up surviving until now?

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Edward Loss 04:45

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Well, that's actually quite an interesting story because it all dates back to the Second World War. I mean, these documents remain in the state archive after they were deposited in the 15th century, and there they remained right before the conflict. But a few months before the city was bombarded, they decided to move everything to a villa in the countryside, Villa Taloni, to actually protect these documents from the incoming bombs. But curiously, this was the building that was actually occupied by the German soldiers who misused this information. We find

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lots of details about what they did with the documents in these director diaries

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that tried to retrace these documents and one of the things they so just did is

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that they started changing some bundles of these manuscripts with the local shops in

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exchange for beer for food and so the ad maleficia series to which these fragments

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belong to were among the series that Germans used.

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Rowan Dorin 05:47

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And so somehow they left the archives basically before the war, before the bombardment of the city, rather, during the war, they end up leaving the archive somehow, probably through German soldiers’ mistreatment, and then somewhat at some point, goes through stacks and stacks and

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stacks of these miscellaneous documents and begins pulling out every miscellaneous

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document that has the word "Hebrew" or "Jewish" on these papers.

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And so, it turns out that eventually these made their way into a couple collections.

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We had two of the caches end up here at Stanford, and it turns out that another

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cache was acquired at Columbia at around the same time. And we know this because

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our curator, Eitan, was chatting with the curator at Columbia, Michelle

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Margolis, and he was like, "We just bought this," and she said, "We bought some of

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these things, too," and fortunately, now they've now all been digitized. And that was

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important because, as you discovered, Edward, cases that we have here in some cases

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other parts of the same cases are at Columbia, so digitizing these two collections

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at Stanford and Columbia has allowed us to begin reconstituting this cluster of

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miscellaneous and fragmentary documentation. But what kinds of cases do we actually

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have here? As you've already picked up, I already mentioned these cases come from

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sort of a criminal court. What kinds of crimes do we find in our cash at Stanford?

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Edward Loss 07:05

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That's actually fascinating because we've got Jews mentioned in

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this documentation in a variety of roles from indicted victims, witnesses and

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collaborators. They also appear as geographical points of references and,

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you know, 49 pieces that, as you just mentioned, are divided into two different

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caches. We've got all sorts of criminal cases. 27, For example,

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consist of cases of theft, but we also have murder, assault, jail breaks, customs

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fraud, counterfeit coinage, and also some very peculiar ones concerning people that

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were throwing garbage out of their windows. And also one of them concerns a

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Christian religious procession. So basically they were throwing garbage out the window

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just when a procession went by. Bad timing. Yes, indeed. And now the interesting

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thing is that in these 49 different pieces, we've got 65 defendants,

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but only half of them are Jews, so they are not the main element being prosecuted.

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The majority of them are actually covering these other rows I just mentioned. And

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it's interesting, I also said that they were functioning as geographical points of

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reference because in some cases we have crimes happening in front of a synagogue

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where Jews are actually seen. So they appear mostly as unwitting accessories. They're

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running the pawn shops where these goods were being fenced by Christian thieves. So

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it gives us a broad picture of the Jews interacting with the justice system in 15th

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century Bologna.

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Rowan Dorin 08:44

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Right. This was interesting in some ways that whoever was going

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through these miscellaneous documents around World War II or afterwards wasn't looking

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just for cases in which Jews were actually appearing as criminals. They were

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interested in any time the word sort of "Ebreus” Jew appears anywhere on a page

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and then pulled it out. So as you said, we get not just Jewish crime, but also

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all the different ways in which Jews might be engaging with the justice system in

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15th century Bologna. What else does it tell us about sort of Jewish life in this

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period?

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Edward Loss 09:12

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One of the things I think is very peculiar is that we have also references of Jewish festivities, of Jewish eating habits too, and there is this case concerning a gambling trial that took place in 1475, in which the note describes that everything happened festa carnis privii hebreorum, which means the meatless Jewish holiday. It's a striking for me that the notary

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actually noted that which would not have changed or altered anything concerning the

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lay Christian procedure that we had in these courts, but it signifies that the

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notary not only thought that that was relevant to describe this as a specific

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individual, but that he was also very knowledgeable of this community in Bologna.

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Rowan Dorin 09:58

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Now one of the things that I found looking through these documents is sort of this

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window into Jewish money lending. As you noted, a lot of the cases concern instances

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in which there's theft and then sort of a criminal fences the goods at a Jewish

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pawn shop. And we end up occasionally also having theft crimes from pawn shops in

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which there were detailed discussions of all the things that were stolen from the

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pawn shop. So we have this incredible window into, let's say, the material culture

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associated with Jewish life in the mid-15th century in Italy. And, of course, more

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generally, this is the window into Jewish criminality, which interestingly is a topic

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that really hasn't actually been explored much in Jewish history, as my colleague

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Effie Shoham-Steiner wrote about in a recent book on Jews and Crime in Medieval

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Europe. There's a lot of reasons why historians of Jewish life were kind of reticent

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to talk about Jewish criminality in the past. Some of it came from traditions of

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Orthodox historiography that were reluctant to to the sort of the dirty laundry of

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the community in the past or maybe aspirationally choosing to focus on piety as

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opposed to misbehavior. And of course there's also been fears of fueling anti

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semitism that if one does too much focus on these Jewish crimes that might give

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voice, that might lend fuel to those who were already tainted by antisemitic

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sentiments. And of course there's also the general fear of undermining the halakhic

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expectation which these cases clearly undermined and which was repeatedly undermined to

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the premodern period, the disputes between Jews should be handled within the

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community because some of these cases do involve disputes between Jews that are then

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being brought forth, being presented to the secular authorities, which is clearly not

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how it's supposed to happen according to sort of halakhic norms. Is there anything

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here that you might have expected to see that you don't find in our collection?

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Edward Loss 11:41

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Actually, it's quite shocking that we find no sexual crimes in these cases and if

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one studies the historiography concerning Jewish criminality or Jewish criminal

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persecution in the 15th century Italy, the cases concerning forbidden sexual relations

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between Jewish men and Christian women tended to be the most important ones. So we

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also have a peculiar element of these documents here.

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Rowan Dorin 12:10

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So we don't have sex. Do we have women in these documents at all or is it sort of just sort of male criminals, male thieves?

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Edward Loss 12:15

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No, actually it's fascinating because women are everywhere

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and mostly they are not the object of sexual violence or violence at all in this

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very patriarchal society. They mostly appear tangentially in the documentation which is

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interesting because it gives us an element of their social environment, of the way

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that these women are interacting with other elements of the Jewish community too. And

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I wanted to cite this peculiar case of Alegra, who appears in this trial involving two Jewish men. They were hitting themselves in a brawl, and her insertion in this case is the fact that she owned the house where the whole incident appeared, and by reading the document, we realized that both men were her servants. So we also have this small glimpse into the economical and

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social ability of this specific woman in this context.

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Rowan Dorin 13:12

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There's also one document that I love that mentions two Jewish converts, one of whom, the wife, actually sort of writes this document begging for alms from the local bishop or to the suffragan bishop of Bologna because she and her children were destitute. And so it's a story

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in which they've converted to Catholicism. I have no idea how this particular

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document ended up mixed in with these other sort of court criminal cases. But

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basically she's writing and saying, you know, we recently converted from Judaism to

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Catholicism and were destitute and asking for help. So one can also get a sense of

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sort of what happens when one leaves the community and the sorts of economic traits

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the one could find oneself in. Now, when I think about that particular document,

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it's so fragmentary. I mean, we have no idea as far as I can tell anything else

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about this woman, her life, what happens to her, whether the request is granted. And

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so many of the documents that we have in this collection are fragmentary. And I

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might have assumed that we couldn't know much more than what we have here. But

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you've been doing amazing work connecting our fragments that we have at Stanford and

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the Columbia to the very very very rich archival collections in Bologna. So can you

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tell us a bit about what that has looked like and what you've been discovering from

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that?

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Edward Loss 14:17

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Well actually it's a work in progress and I followed some very specific steps.

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So after completely transcribing them I summarized some of its details which I

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posteriorly used to move myself to move inside this collection. Because there are no

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thematic inventories and no inventories specific to the Jewish community that would

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guide us to consult these series in the State Archive of Bologna. So these fragments

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could also act as some sort of context for someone who's interested in these

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topics. And they also…

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Rowan Dorin 14:52

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So rather than having to sort of just spend three or four lifetimes flipping through hundreds of thousands of pages trying to find references to the word “Jew,” we now have these wonderful little sort of magnetic things and you can say, "Oh, well, we know that on this day, before this judge or in this particular set of setting…” and then you can then hopefully have a slightly faster time finding the corresponding documents.

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Edward Loss 15:16

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Yes, and we can go even further because what I realized trying to compare these fragments with the main series is that they cover sometimes entire gaps we have in the documentation. And to be more specific, just to give you and the listeners a few examples, 12 out of 49 pieces alone can span the period from 1458 to 1462, which are completely missing.

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So this is also new material and is very available because it provides us with new

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names, new facts, new networks of this Jewish community in 15th century Bologna.

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Rowan Dorin 15:52

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Which is quite exciting because one of the scholars who has studied Jewish crime in

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Bologna, Trevor Dean, in fact, in his article, notes kind of regretfully that a

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number of the registers that would be most interesting for studying this were missing.

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And then lo and behold, it turns out that while we don't have the full registers. We do

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have miscellaneous documents that correspond to those cases. So at least some of the

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things he was missing as a scholar, it turns out, you know, we now have at

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Stanford, which is exciting. And so how else might you use these to kind of go

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looking for other connections?

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Edward Loss 16:25

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Well, the good thing is that with the set of information I just mentioned, we can cross reference the ad maleficia with many others in the state archive. For example, we can look into notary records, we can look into all the fiscal sources, and also they allow us to pay attention

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to specific procedural concessions that exist in the sources. For example,

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we often find expressions such as iuravit in scripturis ebraico more,

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which means the fact that the Jews could swear their oath on Jewish Scripture

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instead of the Bible. We have references to contracts written in Hebrew, all elements

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which indicate a certain pragmatism of authorities of economic agents in this social,

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in this context.

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Rowan Dorin 17:11

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Well, certainly nice to hear, you know, someone here at Stanford,

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and I think, you know, on behalf of our wonderful curatorial team who

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acquired these documents, it's definitely encouraging to hear that what we have here

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is still useful and valuable, even to those who are in Bologna who have access to

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the much, much richer archives there, that the things that we acquired here, the

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things you're studying, the things you're transcribing, do have something to contribute

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to this broader picture. as I mentioned a moment ago for me one of the things I'm

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excited about as you've been transcribing these documents it’s just the richness of

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the material culture that they contain and that they describe with these pawn shop

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records. I mean some of these records are so spectacularly detailed. Do you have any

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favorites?

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Edward Loss 17:50

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Well, actually a couple of them because as you mentioned the objects they

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just surface in hundreds and hundreds. I mean, the amount is really impressive. But

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one case I find interesting is that of a certain Salamon Hebrew in his pawn shop,

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which is the object of this collective theft. And then we've got golden fabrics,

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jewels, pearls, rubies, emeralds, and even a copy of Saint Augustine’s City of God,

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as well as many other books, which could also allow us to reflect on book

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consumption in the period, which is a topic not so easily studied with all those

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types of sources.

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Rowan Dorin 18:25

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That's great. So obviously, we're looking forward to what we're going to do next with these documents. I'm hoping that to gather some more scholars along with Edward in Bologna next fall to present these documents and see what people who have been working on various themes about Jewish life, judicial culture, Jewish-Christian relations, economic ethics and more, all in Bologna to actually sort of think what do our documents have to say that's new about these particular themes. And meanwhile, I've also been using them in my own Stanford classes. One of the challenges of teaching history or Jewish Studies at a place like Stanford is that

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the really, really bright, really ambitious students don't want to work on material

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that's already well trodden. They want to work on stuff that nobody's worked on

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before and see what exciting discoveries are waiting to be made. And you know, for

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obvious reasons, this is hard to do for courses on the Middle Ages. Most of my

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students can't read Latin or Hebrew. Even if they can, reading handwritten Medieval

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Latin or handwritten Medieval Hebrew is a whole different ballgame. But in this case,

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with this cache of documents from Bologna, all of them have now been transcribed

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carefully by Edward reading in some cases what looks like absolute chicken scratch

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and somehow turning it into sort of beautiful beautiful typeset prose, so they're all

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transcribed. And because Chat GPT, Deepl, and other AI tools are remarkably good at

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translating boilerplate legal Latin into English, I was actually able to give these

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documents to a sophomore student in my seminar that I teach on the origins of antisemitism. Now, she had no background in medieval Latin, but using AI tools, she was

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nevertheless able to produce a really terrific comparative analysis of the cases in

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our cache in which Jews appeared as defendants versus those in which they were

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incidental parties to get a sense of, you know, do we see differences in the

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justice system of Renaissance Bologna in how it treats Jews and Christians, at least

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in formal procedural terms. And so that was the sort of thing that, by having

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transcriptions of these documents, by using AI tools, it now makes the past much,

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much more accessible for new research questions to undergraduates at Stanford. So

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it's been exciting to see what's been possible through the work that I've been doing

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with Edward.

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Now, when not working on this particular project, Edward has been

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working on another handwriting text recognition tool that can actually read these

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documents using artificial intelligence. But for now, at least, it's not nearly good

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enough to replace an actual expert. So I'm very grateful to have him as a

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collaborator here, and I'm excited to see what we discover next.

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Now, at the end of all of these podcasts, our fearless convener, Dr. Hammerman, always asks guests to share a quote from the field of Jewish studies, a Jewish text or any other text

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that we find meaningful or relevant to our contemporary moment. So, Edward, do you

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have one in mind?

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Edward Loss 21:08

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Well, when thinking of this documentation, there are endless

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possibilities and the questions that they allow ourselves to ask ask this period,

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I believe a piece of Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star is very

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appropriate, and she says, and I quote, "Enquanto eu tiver perguntas e não haver resposta continuarei a escrever," which roughly translates as, "So long as I

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have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing,” demonstrating

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on how research can be endless and how probably most of our questions concerning

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these documents will never be answered.

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Rowan Dorin 21:45

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But some at least are being answered, thanks to your hard work Edward, so thanks so much. I look forward to where this collaboration takes us.And thanks to all of you our listeners.

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Shaina Hamerman 21:58

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Today’s episode was produced by me, Shaina Hammerman, along with Iva Klemm and Adam Jacobson. Sound design by Romi Chicorean. Original music is by Jeremiah Lockwood. Cite and Sound is a production of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford.