Trading beyond the Ghetto: New Perspectives on Jews in 18th-Century Rome

This essay is intended to begin work on the challenges created by the abolition of Jewish money-lending in Rome (1682), outside of the rhetoric of the general and absolute social and economic marginalization of the Jews and starting from the information that previously unexplored sources can offer. The article begins with the examination of a specific case – the adventures of Allegrezza Modigliano and her silver in 1762 – and then addresses, in the second part, the reorganization of the Roman Jewish elites after 1682 and the methodological problems that a study of this type obliges us to confront. The conclusion – thanks to the help of a second Allegrezza, who also found herself in trouble with her jewels – proposes the category of familiar otherness as the key for interpreting the long process of ghettoization and of Jewish-Christian interactions in Italy in the modern age.