Shiltei ha-Gibborim, Jacob ben Joab Elijah da Fano, Ferrara: Abraham Usque, 1556

Vinograd, Ferrara, 44; "ha-Defus ha-Ivri be-Ferrara," Zeitschrift für hebraische Bibliographie,1904.

An extremely rare copy of a condemned Hebrew book

Jacob ben Joab Elijah da Fano (16th century), a scholar and poet in Cento, Ferrara, and Bologna composed both the poetic works printed in this small volume.  The first of these is a response to Judah Sommo’s contemporary apologetic in defense of women.  Fano’s rejoinder was this satirical poem which directly refers to both Sommo and his work and even obliquely hints at the identity of Sommo’s muse, Anna Rieti.  Fano’s title Shiltei Gibborrim (Shields of the Brave) is designed as a pun on Sommo’s title Magen Nashim, (In Defense of Women), since in Hebrew both shelet (the root of shiltei)  and magen are words connoting a protective shield.

The second work included here is an unnamed elegy written to commemorate the deaths of twenty-four Jewish martyrs, who had met their deaths the previous year in Ancona.  In the years following the expulsion from Spain in 1492, a number of Iberian Jews found refuge in the Italian port city of Ancona. In the ensuing decades many Jewish merchants took advantage of its excellent harbor facilities to trade with the Levant. In 1532, however, the papacy assumed authority in Ancona, in the person of the papal legate.  At first mercantile interests prevailed in papal policy and Pope Paul III invited merchants from the Levant to settle there regardless of their religion. In 1541 he encouraged the settlement of Jews expelled from Naples and in 1547 extended the invitation to Marranos, whom he promised to protect against the Inquisition. Pope Julius III renewed these guarantees, and about one hundred Portuguese Marrano families settled in Ancona. In 1555, however, Pope Paul IV began to institute anti-Jewish measures in the Papal States, and Marranos, seen by this Pope as nothing more than faithless Christians, were singled out for persecution. Some of the Marranos managed to escape to Pesaro, Ferrara, and elsewhere, but between April and June 1555, fifty-one were arrested and tried and twenty-four were burned at the stake.

Their martyrdom in 1555 became a cause célèbre across the Jewish world of the sixteenth century, inspiring a number of touching elegies such as the one composed by Fano.  The events moved Dona Gracia Nasi to organize a boycott of the port of Ancona.  While the boycott was ultimately unsuccessful, owing to fears of papal retaliation against the rest of Ancona Jewry, the tragedy nevertheless occasioned the first organized attempt by Jews to utilize economic power as a weapon against persecution.

The printer of this volume , Abraham Usque was born in Portugal to a Marrano family and known there as Duarte Pinel (Pinhel). Himself a refugee from the Inquisition, he catered in many of his printed works to the Marrano community, seeking to facilitate their return to Judaism. Best known for his famous Bible translation of 1553, the so-called Ferrara Bible, Usque printed more than thirty books in Ferrara–each with his distinctive printer’s device comprising an armillary sphere adorned with biblical verses.  However, this paean to the martyrs of Ancona so angered the Pope that he gave instructions to the duke of Ferrara, ordering that the author be punished and the volume burnt.  This accounts for the extreme scarcity of this edition.