Papers by Angela Scandaliato
I prodromi delle confraternite ebraiche di età moderna : Ṣedaqah, assistenza e apparati comunitari per l'aiuto ai poveri nella Sicilia medievale, 2019
Le radici familiari e culturali di Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada, ebreo converso nella Sicilia del sec. XV., 2004
Judaica Terre Salem : gli ebrei a Salemi nelle fonti notarili dei secoli XIV e XV., 2017
In this text, the authors offer the first contribution to the history of Jews who lived in the Si... more In this text, the authors offer the first contribution to the history of Jews who lived in the Sicilian city of Salemi for about a century and a half, from 1349 - the first document attesting the presence of Jews in that town - until the expulsion of 1492. Although several documents relating to the Jewish community of this city have been reported, both in the Diplomatic Code of the Jews of Sicily compiled by the Lagumina Brothers and in the vast repertoire of eighteen volumes The Jews of Sicily edited by Shlomo Simonsohn, there was no specific study so far dedicated to the Jews of Salemi. A new search recently carried out by the authors in Salemi\u2019s Notarial Archive has thrown new light on the life of this Jewish community. From some documents we know that on the eve of the expulsion, Salemi\u2019s Jews had reached the number of about 150 people, a small group in comparison to the larger number of Jews living in Sicily at that time, namely between 20,000 and 30,000. The small community had the kosher slaughterhouse and a cemetery, and was organized into a collegium judeorum led by leaders or in Sicilian proti, and by a General Sicilian Judge named Dienchelele (from Hebrew Dayan kelal) role, covered in Salemi by Maurice de Bonavoglia. Yona de Yona bought a synagogue - in Sicilian called meskita (from Arabic Mosque) \u2013 with a ritual bath or Miqweh. As usual practice, in the year of the expulsion 1492, the synagogue was transformed into the church of Santa Maria della Catena. The main economic activities of Salemi\u2019s Jews, as that of Sicily in general, were the production and sale of wheat, cheese and cloth, and the trade of horses. Some Jews were moneylenders, practicing the loan on interest, like the Yonah and Gabrieli families. On September 27 1437, Salemi Aron ben Gershon Abu al-Rabi was present, he was a leading scholar and commentator of Rashi\u2019s commentary. After the expulsion, several families of Salemi\u2019s Jewish aristocracy moved to the Kingdom of Naples and to other regions of southern Italy
Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada e il suo background culturale: un caso siciliano esemplare di interculturalità tra ebraismo e islam, 2004
Rediscovering and highlighting the architectural traces that testify to the past of a community d... more Rediscovering and highlighting the architectural traces that testify to the past of a community does not necessarily translate into the recovery of large monumental complexes. Frequently, the imprint of history can be found in more ‘humble’ public buildings which, once ceased their original functions went out of use and then gradually abandoned. This fate unites numerous Monti di Pieta: public establishments that developed throughout Europe since the Renaissance period. In Sicily, until the first decades of the 20th century, together with numerous charitable practices, these institutions carried out lending activities on the pledge of precious and non-precious objects, offering an indispensable service to the less wealthy population. Of these bodies, today remains the memory of the social task covered, certainly not without its shadows, but essential for the suffering class, often cruelly exploited by the phenomenon of the loan sharking. A role whose implications appear to be of gre...
Giuseppe Sicari, che si era già cimentato sul tema degli ebrei siciliani con il suo racconto Il S... more Giuseppe Sicari, che si era già cimentato sul tema degli ebrei siciliani con il suo racconto Il Santo Marrano, offre con questa recente pubblicazione lo spaccato di una parte dell'élite ebraica siciliana, quella dei medici vissuti tra il XIV e il XV secolo. Argomento che da alcuni anni suscita un certo interesse negli studiosi, sia per quanto riguarda gli studi sulle oligarchie ebraiche nella Sicilia medievale, sia per gli aspetti in senso lato culturali e scientifici, o per le relazioni con le universitates e con il potere politico, e dunque di grande attualità. Non sono mancati gli studi e le relazioni in occasione di convegni sulle famiglie ebraiche di medici nella Sicilia sia orientale che occidentale, sulle scuole di medicina: tuttavia un lavoro di sintesi come questo, agile e fruibile per lettori non specialisti, appare senz'altro utile. Le basi da cui l'autore è partito sono i volumi della storia documentaria di S. Simonsohn, The Jews in Sicily (Brill, Leiden 1997-2011), opera ormai indispensabile per qualsiasi ricostruzione della storia degli ebrei siciliani; e l'elenco di 150 medici ebrei siciliani registrati dal 1362 al 1492 nel Codice Diplomatico dei Giudei di Sicilia di G. e B. Lagumina. Viene preliminarmente sottolineata l'importanza dei medici di corte in qualità di copisti, traduttori, scrittori, scienziati-come Anatoli o Farag de Girgenti-e chiarito il ruolo dei medici fisici e cirurgici la cui formazione avveniva in famiglia o presso altri medici, rispetto ai doctores artium et medicinae che acquisivano la libera docenza nelle università di Napoli, Salerno, Padova, Bologna. L'autore cita, fra i pochi casi di lauree conseguite da ebrei nelle università d'Italia, quella del dienchelele Mosè Bonavoglia, archiatra di Alfonso il Magnanimo e dell'ebreo convertito Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada, il quale seguì studi di medicina nello Studio di Napoli alla fine degli anni '70 del Quattrocento. I medici ebrei godevano, in virtù del loro ruolo e della possibilità, di fatto consentita, di poter esercitare la medicina tra i cristiani, di numerosi privilegi ed esenzioni fiscali, oltre che della possibilità di diventare "familiari" dei sovrani con incarichi di fiducia. Sporadica è la presenza di ebree medichesse nei documenti, anche se probabilmente dovevano essere ben più numerose, specie le ginecologhe, le quali esercitavano senza licenza. Alla fine del volumetto è fornito un elenco dei medici ebrei e conversi condannati dal tribunale dell'Inquisizione in tutta l'isola. ANGELA SCANDALIATO
The identification through a notarial contract of the medieval synagogue of Syracuse with the chu... more The identification through a notarial contract of the medieval synagogue of Syracuse with the church of San Giovanni Battista in Ortigia, the discovery in the hypogeum of the White House of one of the oldest ritual baths in Europe, an integral part of the synagogue complex, as well as inscriptions Jewish, led the authors to investigate the theme of the Jewish quarter in the context of medieval Syracuse
The volume collects historical research carried out on the documents of the Sicilian archives fro... more The volume collects historical research carried out on the documents of the Sicilian archives from 1992 to 2006 which led to new discoveries on the history and culture of Jews in Sicily in the Middle Ages.
… : Studi in onore …, 2004
In this study, the authors describe a Jewish synagogue hand-wash basin, in Hebrew kior, which was... more In this study, the authors describe a Jewish synagogue hand-wash basin, in Hebrew kior, which was discovered in the Sixties of the past century, after having been hidden for centuries. It served for less than fifteen years at the entrance of the synagogue of Agrigento, up to 1492, when the Jews of Sicily were expelled by the Catholic Kings of Aragon, of which the island was a part. On that tragic occasion, it is likely that someone concealed this precious monument in Siculiana or in another place, which contains a dedicatory inscription of the donor dated 1478, Samuel the son of Yonah Shiv\u2018on. Later the precious artefact was reused as a baptismal font and placed in the baptistery of the church of SS. Crocefisso, in Siculiana - a center not far from Agrigento and Sciacca - likely around the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the church was built. In 1966, during a restoration, when the baptismal font was cleaned, the priest of the church saw that it was a washbasin with ...
La Découverte, Feb 1, 2011
The career of Ferdinando Balami, which took place in the shadow of papal power in Renaissance Rom... more The career of Ferdinando Balami, which took place in the shadow of papal power in Renaissance Rome, was unquestionably extraordinary. He was the son of Sicilian Jews, or Jewish converts, who had emigrated to the Urbe following the exile of 1492-93. Balami practised medicine and managed to scale the heights of his profession in the eternal city and the earnings he accumulated enabled him to have a luxurious palace in the centre of Rome, designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger. Balami knew and frequented the academia and the banquets: he, too, composed and exchanged verses of poetry, and, thanks to his established position at the papal court, he managed to exploit this network of friendships cultivated by means of his role as physician and pontifical archiater, maintaining relationships with the greatest cultural and political exponents of the time, united by a shared philo-Medici project. Over the course of his life in Rome, Balami showed himself to be a humanist physician who, f...
The Jewry of Syracuse, hitherto imperfectly known from the documents published by the Lagumina br... more The Jewry of Syracuse, hitherto imperfectly known from the documents published by the Lagumina brothers, was in the Middle Ages the most important after the one of Palermo. The research work in the State archives of Syracuse allowed the discovery of the medieval Synagogue. In fact a notarial act attests that the Church of Saint John the Baptist in Ortigia
Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal, 2012
This article examines Jewish marriage and divorce certificates that were used in Sicily during th... more This article examines Jewish marriage and divorce certificates that were used in Sicily during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Some of these documents in the Sicilian archives, written in Arabic mixed with Sicilian and in Hebrew characters, are of great historic and linguistic interest and constitute the most relevant source for our knowledge of wedding customs and gifts of the Jewish families of the island.
The Italia Judaica Jubilee Conference, 2012
This volume contains the proceedings of the Italia Judaica Jubilee Conference, held at Tel Aviv U... more This volume contains the proceedings of the Italia Judaica Jubilee Conference, held at Tel Aviv University 3-5 January, 2010, on the occasion of the jubilee celebration of outstanding scholarship on the history of Italian Jewry.
Southern Italy as Contact Area and Border Region during the Early Middle Ages
Women in Judaism a Multidisciplinary Journal, Dec 5, 2012
This article examines Jewish marriage and divorce certificates that were used in Sicily during th... more This article examines Jewish marriage and divorce certificates that were used in Sicily during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Some of these documents in the Sicilian archives, written in Arabic mixed with Sicilian and in Hebrew characters, are of great historic and linguistic interest and constitute the most relevant source for our knowledge of wedding customs and gifts of the Jewish families of the island.
Gli articoli sono sottoposti a peer review tramite blind refereeing. I libri per recensione vanno... more Gli articoli sono sottoposti a peer review tramite blind refereeing. I libri per recensione vanno inviati alla redazione.
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Papers by Angela Scandaliato
It is an early example of this type of decoration in Italian Renaissance palaces. The authors retrace the history of the building and of the family of the patrons De Nucito doctors, pharmacists and bankers, members of the city's elite