Mantua מנטובה

Jews are attested at Mantua from the twelfth century—Abraham ibn Ezra finished a grammatical work here in 1145. From 1476, when Abraham Conat began to print, and on into the eighteenth century, Hebrew presses worked in the city almost without interruption; the Zohar was printed here in 1559/60 (simultaneously with Cremona) and Azariah dei Rossi's Me'or Einayim in 1573–75.

Between 1550 and 1630 Mantua was the cultural capital of Italian Jewry. Salamone Rossi printed Ha-Shirim asher li-Shelomo, the first polyphonic music written for the synagogue; Leone de' Sommi kept a Jewish theatre company at the Gonzaga court; Azariah dei Rossi, Abraham Portaleone, Judah Briel, the Rama mi-Pano were all Mantuans or of the Mantuan circle. There were over two thousand Jews in the city—some seven and a half per cent of the population, the highest proportion of any major Italian city.

The ghetto came late: Duke Vincenzo I decreed it in 1610, the move was enforced in 1612, four gates. The community lived under the Tolleranza generale, a privilege renewed every eight years down to 1791.

The end came not from a pope but from a war. In the War of the Mantuan Succession Imperial Landsknechte stormed the city on 18 July 1630—the Ninth of Av. Three days of sack, plague behind it, and within days the Jews were driven out: about a thousand to San Martino dall'Argine, about a thousand down the Po toward Ferrara. Roughly a third of the community died. They were permitted to return that same autumn and the community rebuilt itself—but the printing, the music and the theatre never came back.

In 1779 the badge and the disabilities were abolished under Joseph II; in 1798 the gates came down; in 1799 the Austrians returned.