The prominent Medici banking family ruled Florence for most of the time between 1400’s-1700’s. Under their rule the Jews of Florence flourished as moneylenders, bankers, physicians, commercial traders and engaged in the arts in Renaissance Florence. The Medici’s eventually segregated Florence’s Jews into a ghetto in 1571, adding further discrimmanatory restrictions as time went on. On the other hand, the Medici rulers had an incentive to develop the nearby city of Livorno into a Medittereanean port city. To this end they invited Jewish merchants and commercial traders to settle there with a wide range of privileges. With no restrictive ghetto in Livorno, along with religious and commercial freedom, Livorno’s Jewish community emerged as one of the largest and most important Jewish communities of its era. This contrast of two nearby Jewish communities, under the same Medici rulers, developing in two different trajectories as a result of different governmental policies and conflicting external needs, is a fantastic case study, as to how Jewish communities developed over the course of centuries.
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