Osservazioni preliminari allo studio del registro di prestito ebraico della Badia di Cava de’ Tirreni

Abstract

Preliminary Information on the Hebrew Register of Loan in the Abbey of Cava de’ Tirreni

The author presents some preliminary information on a manuscript kept in the abbey of Cava de’ Tirreni, containing two Hebrew registers of loan compiled in in the years 1492-1495. After some considerations from a proper historical perspective and having displayed the correct methodology in studying Jewish bankers and lenders, some early fragments of Pinkasim from the 14^th century, discovered in the bindings of Gerona, are mentioned. Then it is given a complete list of all the ten Hebrew registers of loan survived down to us and up to present discovered, which have been compiled in Italy by Jewish moneylenders. As a result of this study, it emerges that this people constituted an élite of high culture among the Italian Jewish bourgeoisie of the 14^th and 15^th centuries. They were able to write fluently in Hebrew, using a technical language full of legal formulas borrowed by the rabbinic normative tradition, arrived to them through the legal compendia of Maimonides. To these moneylenders we owe also the first documentation in the history of lending money.
The Cava de’ Tirreni manuscript is the most complete and comprehensive register in our hands, in which the moneylenders pointed out any new month indicating the calends and accompanying the dating formula with a wish and a prayer. Indeed, at the beginning of each new Jewish year it is added a prayer beginning with the words Avinu Malkenu, ‘Our Father, our King’, that we find at every Rosh ha-šanah. There are many personal names, places, and a specific vocabulary to describe the pawns left as a guarantee, all written in Judeo-Italian. These data deserve an in-depth study, for a better identification of the Italian dialectal variety attested in the text. A careful study of the entire manuscript, to be carried out hopefully in a next future, certainly will provide many new data to this particular field of investigation, to date largely ignored and neglected.