Mobility and Creativity. David de’ Pomis and the Place of the Jews in Renaissance Italy

Many scholars believe that mobility was one of the elements that characterised the history of the Jews in the early modern period. They also maintain that this movement from one country to another influenced the cultural productivity of many Jewish intellectuals. David de’ Pomis was one of the most important figures in the Jewish community of the Italian Renaissance. After being expelled from the State of the Church, he moved to Venice in 1569, where he wrote his works. Throughout his life, he attempted to find a way to recover from the trauma of expulsion, and he did so by explaining Judaism to a Christian audience through a variety of means: translations from Hebrew into the vernacular; speeches to Christian authorities; a trilingual dictionary; and a Latin apologia of Judaism. The languages that de’ Pomis used and the works he decided to write were the daughters of his experiences, which gave birth to an entirely new body of work. Thus, if the combination of the two experiences—mobility and creativity—underlies the history of European Jewry in the early modern period, then de’ Pomis’s story and work represent a recognisable but as yet unexplored fragment of the broader history of the Jews in Italy during the Renaissance.