Jews in Livorno
Tuscany was ruled by the Medici family. In the early 16th Century, two Medici Popes had been relatively liberal towards the Jews. The Medici were suspicious of Spanish/Imperial power in Italy. They will have seen the advantages that Sephardic Jews brought to Ferrara and Venice.
On 10 June 1593 Jews received rights in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. In showing the Jews more respect than their rival states, the Medici attracted Jewish settlement and commerce to the city of Livorno (then called Leghorn in English). Tuscany quickly became a player in the East-West Mediterranean trade that had formerly been dominated by Genoa and Venice. Regardless of who dominated the seas – Dutch, French or English – the trade still flowed.
I used to think that the decline of this trade was a consequence of all the wars. The Mediterranean was no longer safe for shipping. I begin to wonder if the absolute and relative economic decline of the Ottoman Empire was the real cause. Once, spices and other exotic items came from the eastern Mediterranean. By the 18th Century there were trade routes that circumvented the Ottoman Empire. Perhaps the defeat at Vienna in 1683 marked the moment at which the Turks went into decline. Economic growth in Europe and new markets in the Americas and Asia meant that the Turkish trade became a backwater. For Jews, who operated as middlemen in this trade, the options were to accept this change in circumstances or leave. The Jews of Livorno lived by this trade. Certainly a number of Livornese Jews moved to Amsterdam and London in the late 17th and early 18th Centuries. Others seem to have moved to Arab ports such as Alexandria or Tunis, perhaps to use their skills in the local market.
Maybe the last gasp of Livorno as a major port was the Napoleonic Wars. I have seen that Tunis was France’s main market in Africa, and it seems likely that (notwithstanding the British naval blockade) much of this trade passed through Livorno.
The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was overrun by the French revolutionary armies in 1799. It was then abolished. Between 1801 and 1807, Livorno was part of the short-lived Kingdom of Etruria, a French client-state. That state was then abolished, and territory became part of metropolitan France. Livorno was made capital of the new département of Méditerranée which, incidentally, included the island of Elba to which Napoleon was exiled in 1814.
The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was reconstituted after Napoleon’s defeat. The Government was overthrown by a popular revolution in 1859. Livorno was briefly part of the short-lived United Provinces of Central Italy, but voted for annexation by Piedmont-Sardinia in 1860. Italy was unified around Piedmont-Sardinia. With Italian unification, Livorno became just one of many Italian ports.
The image of Livorno above is somewhat romanticised, but note the two men in the right foreground. One merchant is in European dress and the other oriental. I draw your attention to Francesca Trivellato’s book, The Familiarity of Strangers, that studies the records of Ergas and Silvera, a firm that went bankrupt in 1747. They had multiple branches, including Aleppo and links reaching as far as India.
The city of Pisa was eclipsed by Livorno as a centre of Jewish settlement, but is reported to have had 600 Jewish residents (presumably not all Sephardim) in the early 17th Century. Some of these seem to have made their way to Mexico before the autos-da-fe there in the 1640s.
Sephardic Jewish Genealogy in Livorno
A beautifully produced two-volume book on the Ketubbot Registers of Livorno was published in 2020 by the Cercle de Généalogie Juive. Registres de ketubbot de la nation juive de Livourne was researched by Alain NEDJAR, Gilles BOULU, Liliane NEDJAR and Raphaël ATTIAS.
Below is Alain Nedjar’s Sephardic Genealogical Society talk in May 2021 on the ‘Registres de ketubbot de la nation juive de Livourne (1626-1890) : Généalogies et itinéraires familiaux’ co-written by Gilles Boulu, Liliane Nedjar and Raphaël Attias.
Below are links I have collected. I haven’t visited any of these archives. A member of my family history group commissioned a local genealogist to research in the Livorno Jewish archives. He did a solid piece of work, but I suspect it wasn’t cheap. Having researched in the equivalent London archives, I suspect the work may not have been as difficult as the genealogist represented.
Florence State Archives. Livorno belonged to Florence. Relevant files include: LCF = Libri di commercio e di famiglia MP = Mediceo del principato NMP = Notarile moderno. Protocolli NMT = Notarile moderno. Protocolli (Testamenti) TF = Testamenti forestieri
State Archives of Florence – Archivio di Stato di Firenze. The port of Livorno belonged to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, of which Florence was the capital. There may be relevant documents here.
Online Archives of Livorno
http://sdp.comune.livorno.it/opac/archivi_c/arc_s/arc_storico_storia.html
Livorno Jewish Archives – Archivio storico della Comunità Ebraica di Livorno
http://sdp.comune.livorno.it/opac/cataloghi_speciali/arc_ebraica.html
Inventory of the Historic Archive of the Jewish Community of Livorno (Reordering cards contemporary 1900 – 1964/5)
Livorno Library of the Jewish Community – Biblioteche della Comunità Ebraica
http://sdp.comune.livorno.it/opac/biblioteche/bib_ebraica.htm
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/012105813
I Manoscritti della Biblioteca del Talmud Torah di Livorno – 1997
http://sdp.comune.livorno.it/opac/album/I MANOSCRITTI DELLA BIBLIOTECA TALMUD TORAH DI LIVORNO/index.htmlby Mauro Perani (Author)
Also contains a bibliography of the Jews of Livorno
http://www.maas.ccr.it/PDF/Livorno.pdf
Page 536
Livorno State Archives – Archivio di Stato di Livorno [228]
http://www.archiviodistatolivorno.beniculturali.it/
Leghorn Merchant Network
Minhag Fiorentino is website of Florentine Jewish religious music.
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