For the past two decades in Italy, Jewish history has emerged as a cen- tral research preoccupation – even as it lags behind the historiography of other countries in this regard. From the standpoint of the relations between ghettoized people and the “ghettoist” Christians – the inventors of the ghetto – new researchs centered on the early modern period and on the moment of reclusion and confinement (16th-19th centuries) represent a case of a major interest and historiographical innova- tion. These are amply cited in the notes of the works that we present here, and to which we have hitherto referred. On the basis of thorough documentary surveys carried out in archives that have been neglected so far in this area and for this period, it is possible to look at the history of the Jewish minority from a new perspective. Indeed, unexpected results emerge to challenge the most common, but incorrect, interpretive paradigm of Jewish separation and insularity.

This essay presents episodes, mostly from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, that demonstrate how Jews existed within the spatial framework of Rome and elsewhere in medieval Christian Italy, straddling social, economic, and spatial boundaries. Using a variety of sources to physically locate Jews in Italian urban culture allows a better understanding of the civic space available to them in Italian cities in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. Stretching from just before the promulgation of anti-Jewish decrees at the Fourth Lateran Council until the creation of the Venetian ghetto in 1516, this was a tumultuous but transformative period of Italian and Jewish history, in which Jewish communities settled and thrived throughout the entire peninsula.