Jewish Space and Spiritual Supremacy in Eighteenth-Century Italy

This primary text, dated 11 October 1720, is taken from a pinkas belonging to the Jewish community of Padua. It concerns the establishment of an eruv hatserot, a boundary covering most of the city in which Jews would be permitted to carry possessions on the Sabbath. References to contemporary eruvin ordinarily appear in responsa literature. Perhaps uniquely, this document provides communal context for the construction of the Padua eruv. In so doing, it sheds light on the social and religious lives of Italian Jewry in the first half of the eighteenth century. The document’s appearance as a copied text in a manuscript owned by the Pesaro rabbi Isaiah Romanin, who had been a member of both Mevakshe Hashem and Luzzatto’s circle, suggests that this eruv was deeply significant to kabbalists in Padua. Luzzatto himself considered it to be Bassan’s great tikun. As such, the document reflects the nexus of general communal behavior and a rabbinic attempt at religious rectification. It may also elucidate a mentality that (self-) identified rabbis as mystically responsible for communal spiritual welfare