From ghetto to emancipation: the role of Moisè Formiggini

The move toward emancipation of the Jewish ghetto society of late eighteenth-century Modena can be traced by studying its leader, the merchant Moisè Formiggini, and his advocacy of full political rights following the Napoleonic conquest of October 1796. Though not unprepared to deal with the novel freedom Napoleon brought, Modenese Jewry’s path toward emancipation was not straightforward. Officially, in Modena, there had been no Jewish question, no public debate. Yet though the Este Dukes granted the Jewish elite extensive liberties, they refused to give them civil rights. In a speech delivered in front of the new Modenese government, Formiggini drew from earlier Jewish apologetic works by Simone Luzzatto, Isaac de Pinto, Jacob Saraval, Benedetto Frizzi, and Isaac Valabrègue extolling Jewish commercial utility. But Formiggini did not discuss Jewish regeneration and never distinguished between Ashkenazim and Sephardim. He asked that Jews be recognized as “active citizens,” which included the responsibility of voting, the ability to hold public office, and access to university education and the liberal professions, and demonstrated awareness of legal rights obtained by Jews in 1791. Yet Formiggini and other leading Jews acted from within the community and held fast to their Jewish identity. By negotiating between gradual civil modernization and maintaining traditional communal networks and institutions, Modenese Jews moved gradually toward a new civil world.