Trade contacts between Prague Jews and Northern Italy and their engagement in the Italian commodity trade in the 16th and early 17th centuries, (original) (raw)

maintained contacts with their coreligionists who had settled in neighbouring and more distant lands of Europe throughout the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the Early Modern Period. 1 To a certain extent, this was due to the political situation of the last third of the 15 th century, which had brought significant changes for Jews in many Central European lands as a result of the hostile atmosphere towards the Jewish population. 2 These persecutions were a continuation of the anti-Jewish pogroms that had occurred in a number of lands in the Middle Ages, but during the 15 th century they appeared with a new intensity. 3 After a series of anti-Jewish pogroms and court trials that had engulfed various places (e.g. Trent, Venice, Regensburg, Berlin) in the last third of the 15 th century 4-during which the Jews were accused of capital crimes such as desecrating the host and murdering children-there followed an avalanche of expulsions from a number of lands. In the last decades of the 15 th century, there was an intensive wave of Jewish expulsions from the German lands, 5 and after 1492/1498 the Jews also had to leave the Iberian Peninsula. 6 A number of these emigrants subsequently headed precisely for the Italian Peninsula. New communities of Ashkenazi Jews from the German lands and Sephar-Marie Buòatová-Trade Contacts between Prague Jews and Northern Italy 5 1) This study was done within the research project GAÈR 16-09489S Zahranièní obchod mezi Prahou a Itálií v pøedbìlohorské dobì [Foreign Trade between Prague and Italy in the pre-White Mountain Period].