The Medieval Salento. Linda Safran

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СКАЧАТЬ of a larger discourse in the period after 1204 when Byzantine and Orthodox identity were under pressure, resulting in an increased production of texts and images not only in the Salento but in Greece as well.¹⁵¹ Περì Γενείων circulated widely because it traveled with the Τρία Συντάγματα, three longer discussions about disparities between Salentine Orthodox practices and Roman ones that I examine in Chapter 8. This leads me to conclude that Peter’s ostensibly central role was mainly symbolic: he could serve as a sign for all things “Western.” While Peter, with Paul, was highly regarded in the Orthodox world as koryphaios of the apostles,¹⁵² and a Byzantine imperial monastery dedicated to Saint Peter was established at Taranto, Peter had a special connection with Rome. The papal claim to primacy over other Christian sees dated to the Council of Chalcedon (451), when it was said that “Peter speaks through Leo” because of Pope Leo the Great’s argument for Roman primacy. That connection is implicit in the pairing of Peter and Leo in San Nicola at Mottola. The pope at the time of Περì Γενείων was either Honorius III (r. 1216–27) or Gregory IX (r. 1227–41); Gregory was the more aggressive, criticizing aspects of the Orthodox rite and insisting in 1231 that all “Greeks” needed to be rebaptized by Roman-rite clergy. It is possible that Nicholas-Nektarios was responding to a similar provocation with his Τρία Συντάγματα, although memories of 1204 were probably sufficient. These would have been vivid for Nicholas-Nektarios, who served as translator for the papal legate to Constantinople in 1214–15 and had traveled widely in the former Byzantine Empire.

      The art-historical evidence underscores the discrepancy between individually produced texts and images that spoke mainly to an audience unfamiliar with contemporary texts. If we listened only to selected texts, we would conclude that the “Latins” shaved their heads and chins and that the “Greeks” did not.¹⁵³ If we look at the images, even though none can be specifically related to Nicholas-Nektarios or his copyists, we would expect a visual polemic of the sort that Weitzmann imagined to be played out on the faces of painted males and especially of Saint Peter. But this polemic is not present in paint.¹⁵⁴ As we shall see, this conclusion is not limited to images of Saint Peter.

       Jewish Hair

      That some monks sported a tonsure was evident to Italian Jews. Yet the Latin clerica (tonsure) took on a different meaning in the Roman Hebrew glossary, where clerica, ch(e)lerica refers not to the ring of hair but to a central tuft. Jews are urged not to shave the sides of the head and leave hair in the middle like the Christian “idolaters.”¹⁵⁵ If they were sensitive to others’ hair, we might well ask what kinds of hairstyles late medieval southern Italian Jews had. We lack firsthand pictorial information, given that there are no painted Jewish supplicants, and many (male) Jews depicted in Christian narrative scenes have their heads covered with a scarf. A royal edict of 1222 enjoined Jews not to cut their hair and to let their beards grow, so clearly some were doing the opposite.¹⁵⁶ In the Rhineland, too, rabbis ordered early thirteenth-century Jews not to wear their hair in the Christian fashion.¹⁵⁷ Despite the long-held prohibition on shaving with a razor (reiterated in the Rhenish legislation), no medieval Jews are shown with long side locks.¹⁵⁸ According to Shibolei ha-Leqet, one’s hair was not supposed to get too long; again, we have no objective definition of how long was too long. Even if one had consecutive periods of mourning, during which cutting the hair was discouraged, it was permissible to trim it with scissors.¹⁵⁹

      Representations of Jewish hair do not differ significantly from those of all the other males shown in Salentine wall paintings across the medieval centuries. However, many more Jews are shown with a beard than clean-shaven, the latter being the preference—but not the rule—among other depicted males [Plates 1, 3]. Maimonides codified that a man who read the Torah in synagogue and represented the Jewish community should have a full beard (and a pleasant voice). Particularly pious Jews were supposed to have a beard, and in this way the beard might symbolize all Jewish men. Yet depictions of Jewish hair in Christian contexts are not consistent, not even in late medieval representations executed at a time of hardening attitudes and enforcement of laws about Jewish dress. When Saint Catherine disputes with a group of Jews at Santa Maria del Casale [28.sc.2], three are bearded but four are not, and when Christ dines in the house of the Pharisee in Lecce’s Torre di Belloluogo in the late fourteenth century, the pictorial host is unbearded.¹⁶⁰ The head covering, not the beard or hair itself, was a much more characteristic way of indicating a male Jew. It was a signifier of status that functioned much like female head coverings and was probably intended to suggest Jewish male effeminacy at the same time as it indicated their otherness.

      Legislating Appearance

      While recording contemporary realia was not the goal of Christian church painting, it is precisely in such ancillary details that an artist’s observations of the world around him, rather than mere imitation of iconographic models, come into play. The presence of iconographic details known to have been introduced at a certain historical moment removes the scenes in which they appear from the repetitive conventions of narrative imagery and makes it legitimate to read them as reflecting current local attitudes and realities. The depiction of Jews wearing a distinguishing emblem—the rotella—in two scenes of the martyrdom of Saint Stephen at Soleto [113.sc.1; Plate 14] provides a point of entry into an investigation of Christian attempts to legislate Jewish appearance and of Jewish clothing more generally.

       Enforcing Jewish Difference

      Legislation regarding Jewish clothing was intended to underscore Jewish identity and distinguish it from that of the surrounding dominant culture. This had already occurred by the ninth century in the Muslim world,¹⁶¹ and in 1215, canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council decreed that:

      Whereas in certain provinces of the Church the difference in their clothes sets the Jews and Saracens apart from the Christians, in certain other lands there has arisen such confusion that no differences are noticeable. Thus it sometimes happens that by mistake Christians have intercourse with Jewish or Saracen women, and Jews or Saracens with Christian women. Therefore, lest these people, under the cover of an error, find an excuse for the grave sin of such intercourse, we decree that these people [Jews and Saracens] of either sex, and in all Christian lands, and at all times, shall easily be distinguishable from the rest of the populations by the character [qualitate] of their clothes; especially since such legislation is imposed upon them also by Moses.¹⁶²

      No specific marks are prescribed to deter potential miscegenation, but only some unspecified distinction in clothing.

      The degree to which the council’s injunctions were enforced varied widely across Europe, and it is not possible to discern any repercussions in the Salento. I would argue that a visible Jewish identity was not locally mandated until after 1400. This information is recorded a century later by a Franciscan monk, Roberto Caracciolo, who preached in Lecce in the 1490s and was largely responsible for the destruction of its giudecca and the transformation of its synagogue into a church (resulting in the reuse of its building materials in a toilet [56]). Jews were important in the economic life of Lecce in the fifteenth century; they were routinely called cives, citizens, and we know some of their names and have an inventory of one of their libraries.¹⁶³ Fra Roberto approvingly cited a law from the time of Maria d’Enghien, whose reign in Lecce in the late fourteenth to early fifteenth centuries marks the end of the period under consideration in this book. Recorded in volgare and thus intended to be understood and easily applied, it is worth quoting in full:

      And for some errors that often occur, the said Majesty wants and commands: that all Jewish men or women from the age of six, whether foreigners or citizens of Lecce, the men must wear a red sign in the form of a round wheel [a rotella] on the chest over the breast the width of one palm in the form and size written by the court. And the women a round red sign over СКАЧАТЬ