Jewish Tuscany (Part 2 of 2)

During the visit of Susan from Houston, we were strolling casually in Florence when we happened upon a temporary exhibit.  The exhibit focused on the lives of Jews in Tuscany during the last and current centuries.  It was hosted in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi.  The exhibit was well researched and very informative, covering many aspects of Jewish life in Tuscany using photos, video, letters and music, along with detailed descriptions. 

From the website:  "Jewish communities have lived in our area since the Middle Ages, contributing to the local culture and economy. Pisa, Lucca, Florence, and many smaller towns housed communities of varying sizes. Livorno was particularly important, as the only city in Italy that never shut Jews into a ghetto. Livorno never had a ghetto in the first place. Jews began to settle there in the sixteenth century, and prospered in its climate of great religious and legal tolerance, to the point that in the 1700s they made up 25% of the entire population. One ought to recall that through the “Livornine” laws passed by the Medici in 1591 and 1593, Tuscany drew Sephardic Jews and Arabs to help build and launch Livorno practically from scratch, in short order making it one of the leading ports in the Mediterranean. Elevated to the rank of a city on March 19, 1606, Livorno was the first community to champion human rights, and served as a model in this field from both a legal and a cultural standpoint due to the peaceful coexistence of many different faiths: the “Livornine” laws and the establishment of a free port had opened up the town to people of all languages, “races” and religions, which fostered trade, turning Livorno into a cosmopolitan marketplace."

     Florence became a very significant hub of cultural and political debate, while Pisa, at least until World War II, was the primary home of the Jewish industrial class, although it also existed elsewhere. There were also small family groups scattered throughout the region, as there still are today."

(Click here and here for more information.)

The entrance to the temporary exhibit

In the space where the exhibit was hosted, there is a permanent memorial with "the names of 1,821 people: Tuscans who were arrested by the Nazis and their Fascist collaborators under the Italian Social Republic and German occupation, from the autumn of 1943 to the spring of 1945. They include 857 Jews and 964 political deportees." 

The vast majority of Jews deported from Tuscany were sent to Auschwitz and murdered there. 

Flowers were placed at the memorial.  The flowers were likely placed on International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2017 (January 27, 2017).

Discovering the exhibit and the memorial was a fortuitous event and a timely and moving experience.