Francesca Bregoli
I am an Associate Professor of History at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. My research concentrates on early modern Sephardic and Italian Jewish cultural and social history.
My current work focuses on the creation and preservation of ties of affection and obligation in geographically dispersed Jewish merchant families, particularly in the eighteenth-century Mediterranean area. With special attention to father-son relations, I investigate the role of emotions in family business correspondence, intimacy-sustaining practices that Jewish merchants employed to bridge physical separation, and anxieties about commercial ruin tied to family dissolution.
I am the author of "Mediterranean Enlightenment: Livornese Jews, Tuscan Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Reform" (Stanford University Press, 2014). The book shows that Livornese Jewish scholars engaged with Enlightenment ideals without weakening the boundaries of traditional Jewish life, and that the economic utility and privileged status of Livorno Jewry had conservative rather than liberalizing effects, thus nuancing received wisdom about processes of emancipation in Europe.
I am currently serving as director of the Center for Jewish Studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Phone: 718-997-5410
Address: Powdermaker Hall 352YY
65-30 Kissena Blvd.
Flushing, NY 11367
My current work focuses on the creation and preservation of ties of affection and obligation in geographically dispersed Jewish merchant families, particularly in the eighteenth-century Mediterranean area. With special attention to father-son relations, I investigate the role of emotions in family business correspondence, intimacy-sustaining practices that Jewish merchants employed to bridge physical separation, and anxieties about commercial ruin tied to family dissolution.
I am the author of "Mediterranean Enlightenment: Livornese Jews, Tuscan Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Reform" (Stanford University Press, 2014). The book shows that Livornese Jewish scholars engaged with Enlightenment ideals without weakening the boundaries of traditional Jewish life, and that the economic utility and privileged status of Livorno Jewry had conservative rather than liberalizing effects, thus nuancing received wisdom about processes of emancipation in Europe.
I am currently serving as director of the Center for Jewish Studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Phone: 718-997-5410
Address: Powdermaker Hall 352YY
65-30 Kissena Blvd.
Flushing, NY 11367
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Books by Francesca Bregoli
edited by Francesca Bregoli and David B. Ruderman
Whether forced by governmental decree, driven by persecution and economic distress, or seeking financial opportunity, the Jews of early modern Europe were extraordinarily mobile, experiencing both displacement and integration into new cultural, legal, and political settings. This, in turn, led to unprecedented modes of social mixing for Jews, especially for those living in urban areas, who frequently encountered Jews from different ethnic backgrounds and cultural orientations. Additionally, Jews formed social, economic, and intellectual bonds with mixed populations of Christians. While not necessarily effacing Jewish loyalties to local places, authorities, and customs, these connections and exposures to novel cultural settings created new allegiances as well as new challenges, resulting in constructive relations in some cases and provoking strife and controversy in others.
The essays collected by Francesca Bregoli and David B. Ruderman in Connecting Histories show that while it is not possible to speak of a single, cohesive transregional Jewish culture in the early modern period, Jews experienced pockets of supra-local connections between West and East—for example, between Italy and Poland, Poland and the Holy Land, and western and eastern Ashkenaz—as well as increased exchanges between high and low culture. Special attention is devoted to the impact of the printing press and the strategies of representation and self-representation through which Jews forged connections in a world where their status as a tolerated minority was ambiguous and in constant need of renegotiation.
Exploring the ways in which early modern Jews related to Jews from different backgrounds and to the non-Jews around them, Connecting Histories emphasizes not only the challenging nature and impact of these encounters but also the ambivalence experienced by Jews as they met their others.
Contributors: Michela Andreatta, Francesca Bregoli, Joseph Davis, Jesús de Prado Plumed, Andrea Gondos, Rachel L. Greenblatt, Gershon David Hundert, Fabrizio Lelli, Moshe Idel, Debra Kaplan, Lucia Raspe, David B. Ruderman, Pavel Sládek, Claude B. Stuczynski, Rebekka Voß.
Articles and chapters by Francesca Bregoli
également les inquiétudes qui entourent le pouvoir présumé des Juifs et leur rôle ambivalent dans le commerce et le rachat des captifs. Les relations étroites nouées entre Livourne et l’Afrique du nord permettent ainsi de mieux saisir le discours public sur la condition des Juifs en Toscane. Cette perspective méditerranéenne complexifie à son tour notre compréhension des relations entre minorités et majorités, à une époque où les débats des Lumières sur la tolérance et l’intégration des Juifs se multipliaient en Europe occidentale.
eighteenth-century Mediterranean area to sustain familial and commercial
obligation over time and space. Primarily based on the correspondence
of Tunis-based Joseph Franchetti to his sons and associates in Livorno
and Smyrna, this investigation shows that the intersection of family and
trade was both a constructed practice and a deeply held moral belief.
Strategies employed to preserve a feeling of familial commitment and to
educate younger relatives – such as the circulation of gifts, the emphatic
identification of love with obligation, and the reliance on surrogate kin
– are examined alongside parental fears regarding the risks that young
merchants away from home could pose to a family’s reputation and credit.
edited by Francesca Bregoli and David B. Ruderman
Whether forced by governmental decree, driven by persecution and economic distress, or seeking financial opportunity, the Jews of early modern Europe were extraordinarily mobile, experiencing both displacement and integration into new cultural, legal, and political settings. This, in turn, led to unprecedented modes of social mixing for Jews, especially for those living in urban areas, who frequently encountered Jews from different ethnic backgrounds and cultural orientations. Additionally, Jews formed social, economic, and intellectual bonds with mixed populations of Christians. While not necessarily effacing Jewish loyalties to local places, authorities, and customs, these connections and exposures to novel cultural settings created new allegiances as well as new challenges, resulting in constructive relations in some cases and provoking strife and controversy in others.
The essays collected by Francesca Bregoli and David B. Ruderman in Connecting Histories show that while it is not possible to speak of a single, cohesive transregional Jewish culture in the early modern period, Jews experienced pockets of supra-local connections between West and East—for example, between Italy and Poland, Poland and the Holy Land, and western and eastern Ashkenaz—as well as increased exchanges between high and low culture. Special attention is devoted to the impact of the printing press and the strategies of representation and self-representation through which Jews forged connections in a world where their status as a tolerated minority was ambiguous and in constant need of renegotiation.
Exploring the ways in which early modern Jews related to Jews from different backgrounds and to the non-Jews around them, Connecting Histories emphasizes not only the challenging nature and impact of these encounters but also the ambivalence experienced by Jews as they met their others.
Contributors: Michela Andreatta, Francesca Bregoli, Joseph Davis, Jesús de Prado Plumed, Andrea Gondos, Rachel L. Greenblatt, Gershon David Hundert, Fabrizio Lelli, Moshe Idel, Debra Kaplan, Lucia Raspe, David B. Ruderman, Pavel Sládek, Claude B. Stuczynski, Rebekka Voß.
également les inquiétudes qui entourent le pouvoir présumé des Juifs et leur rôle ambivalent dans le commerce et le rachat des captifs. Les relations étroites nouées entre Livourne et l’Afrique du nord permettent ainsi de mieux saisir le discours public sur la condition des Juifs en Toscane. Cette perspective méditerranéenne complexifie à son tour notre compréhension des relations entre minorités et majorités, à une époque où les débats des Lumières sur la tolérance et l’intégration des Juifs se multipliaient en Europe occidentale.
eighteenth-century Mediterranean area to sustain familial and commercial
obligation over time and space. Primarily based on the correspondence
of Tunis-based Joseph Franchetti to his sons and associates in Livorno
and Smyrna, this investigation shows that the intersection of family and
trade was both a constructed practice and a deeply held moral belief.
Strategies employed to preserve a feeling of familial commitment and to
educate younger relatives – such as the circulation of gifts, the emphatic
identification of love with obligation, and the reliance on surrogate kin
– are examined alongside parental fears regarding the risks that young
merchants away from home could pose to a family’s reputation and credit.
Studying testaments has been a crucial component of late medieval and early modern European social, cultural, and legal history since the 1970s. By attending to a man’s or woman’s last will, historians probe qualitative and quantitative topics ranging from conceptions of family and children to personal piety, from demographic changes to women’s agency, from approaches to property devolution to the history of death and funerary practices. Except for important early studies of colonial wills, Jewish historians in the US have begun to turn to large bodies of testaments only more recently. This session intends to contribute to this growing scholarship. What can we learn about the choices, ambitions, and limitations experienced by medieval and early modern Jews in the Mediterranean area by considering last wills as our main body of evidence? How can we use these texts, defined by specific formulae and conventions, to probe the ways in which men and women thought about their families, social networks, and positions within the larger community?
Rachel Richman’s paper, drawing from her doctoral work on women’s economic activities in the medieval Mediterranean, considers Geniza wills to explore the ways in which Jewish women in Egypt acquired and donated property. Through a study of bequests, Richman will address conceptions of family, society, and charity and explore differences between male and female testating patterns. Rena Lauer’s presentation, based on the digital Jewish Women’s Wills project (www.jewishwomenswills.org), will probe the tensions between women’s agency and the demands and limitations that informed their testating decisions. By considering several centuries, Lauer additionally explores the degree to which Jewish female wills were locally defined, and if there are generalizable patterns across time and space. Francesca Bregoli’s paper will present a database of eighteenth-century Livornese Jewish wills dictated before Christian notaries, offering a preliminary quantitative assessment. Focusing on merchant households, Bregoli will also shed light on the choices testators made when orderly family and patrimonial relations were threatened by a son’s incompetence or apostasy. Stanley Mirvis will draw on his expertise of Jewish testamentary culture to offer a response.
Parental anxieties about family dissolution and ruin feature prominently in Jewish merchants’ letters, lawsuits, supplications, and wills, highlighting not only generational strife, but also the overlap of material interests and affective ties that characterized the experience of the family firm. In this paper, I explore further the critical intersection between business and emotions by focusing on eighteenth-century Jewish merchants in Italian lands.
Drawing on controversies between fathers and sons which rocked the Bassani (Mantua), Bassano (Livorno), and Baruch Caravaglio (Pisa and Livorno) families between the 1760s and the 1780s, I aim to shed light on an emotional rhetoric of disquiet and anguish articulated around threats to Jewish paternal authority and credit, on the one hand, and on the available legal strategies that the pater familias could employ to protect his household’s capital and reputation in the case of rascal or apostate male relatives, on the other. Particular attention will be devoted to two sets of sources: a long court case (1778-1785) that tore apart the Bassani family of Mantua, revolving around claims over patria potestas and the inheritance rights of a converted son; and wills from the Livornese Bassano and Baruch Caravaglio patriarchs (1760s) that included provisions for disinheriting or severely curtailing sons as a result of conversion or filial incompetency, as a way to prevent the threatened loss of domestic stability and prosperity. By investigating Jewish merchant conflicts with attention to historically situated emotional discourse, I suggest that we can overcome a narrow understanding of pre-modern business as based purely on economic self-interest and explore the oft-neglected affective components of trade.