Patterns of inheritance among Italian Jews in the late Middle Ages

This paper will focus on the hereditary models of Italian Jews between 13th and 15th centuries. It is only taken into examination the groups of the bankers and of the wealthy merchants: these are, in fact, the only groups we have a fairly large number of documents for; the only groups, therefore, for which makes sense to talk about a widespread “model”. In this paper, I will mention only the Jews dwelling in the regions of central Italy, providing some examples from Tuscany (more precisely, from the territories ruled by Florence) and from the territories ruled by the Montefeltro family, i.e. those forming the County – and later the Duchy - of Urbino. I will deal here only with the Jews of Italian tradition, the so-called italkim, ignoring the interesting issue of the Ashkenazi Jews, who immigrated towards the Italian peninsula in the last decays of the 14th century, and established their own communities. In fact, their patterns of inheritance seem to be more differentiate, probably also because the Askenazi women enjoyed usually a higher degree of independence than the Italian ones