Description

From the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, there was a gradually increasing integration of Jews into systems of ius commune, loosely, the law of the land, but actually a legal tradition based on Roman law, which subsumed local law, usually called ius proprium. The integration might be purely theoretical or in fact, as certainly occurred in the papal state and it seems elsewhere in Italy, too. This legal integration prepared the way for the major legal upheaval worked by the French Revolution. The implications are many. The details mostly unresearched. The Tractatus de Iudaeis of Giuseppe Sessa (Turin, 1713) is the fullest introduction to the issues. The Tract on Jews of Giuseppe Sessa is a watershed text. It lauds the medieval restrictions on Jews, perceives them in the most negative theological terms, yet equally anticipates full Jewish participation as citizens of a state, living under the identical laws as do others. The tradition of Jews as cives, citizens, actually began in the ancient world, but was properly resurrected only in the early fourteenth century in the writings of the major legal scholar Bartolus. The passage from Bartolus to full emancipation, however, took four centuries. The special worth of Sessa’s tract is that writing in 1716, he was on the edge, looking backward and forward simultaneously, intimating, but never quite reaching. We see in him, therefore, the final resistance to the passage from the restricted Jew, living in a confessional state, where religion determines politics, to the Jew made a fully fledged citizen in a deconfessionalized, modern, post-emancipatory civil unit, where the secular government determines the state’s direction.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

  • Tractatus de Iudaeis (Tract on the Jews) by Giuseppe Sessa

Event Website

http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/emw/emw2008/

Start Date

19-8-2008 1:00 PM

Location

Yeshiva University, New York

Share

COinS
 
Aug 19th, 1:00 PM

The Jews and Ius Commune

Yeshiva University, New York

From the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, there was a gradually increasing integration of Jews into systems of ius commune, loosely, the law of the land, but actually a legal tradition based on Roman law, which subsumed local law, usually called ius proprium. The integration might be purely theoretical or in fact, as certainly occurred in the papal state and it seems elsewhere in Italy, too. This legal integration prepared the way for the major legal upheaval worked by the French Revolution. The implications are many. The details mostly unresearched. The Tractatus de Iudaeis of Giuseppe Sessa (Turin, 1713) is the fullest introduction to the issues. The Tract on Jews of Giuseppe Sessa is a watershed text. It lauds the medieval restrictions on Jews, perceives them in the most negative theological terms, yet equally anticipates full Jewish participation as citizens of a state, living under the identical laws as do others. The tradition of Jews as cives, citizens, actually began in the ancient world, but was properly resurrected only in the early fourteenth century in the writings of the major legal scholar Bartolus. The passage from Bartolus to full emancipation, however, took four centuries. The special worth of Sessa’s tract is that writing in 1716, he was on the edge, looking backward and forward simultaneously, intimating, but never quite reaching. We see in him, therefore, the final resistance to the passage from the restricted Jew, living in a confessional state, where religion determines politics, to the Jew made a fully fledged citizen in a deconfessionalized, modern, post-emancipatory civil unit, where the secular government determines the state’s direction.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

  • Tractatus de Iudaeis (Tract on the Jews) by Giuseppe Sessa

https://research.library.fordham.edu/emw/emw2008/emw2008/14