Jewish travelers in early modern Italy: Visible and invisible resistance to the Jewish badge

Sartorial discrimination was one of the ways that pre-modern European rulers sought to define and demean Europe's Jews. The Jewish badge was an external mark placed on the Jews' bodies to identify them; however, it was a removable or "mobile" mark. As a result, whatever the badge did to or commu¬nicated about the Jews was usually not permanent and often was subject to nego¬tiations among Jews, their neighbors, and the authorities. Using examples from the Duchy of Milan in the second half of the sixteenth century, a time of increas¬ingly strict enforcement of anti-Jewish sign regulations, this essay focuses on how traveling Jews in particular were harassed for not wearing the yellow badge or hat. It explores how sartorial discrimination threatened these Jews' freedom of movement as well as their ability to choose how to represent their own identity. And it shows that the Jews resisted the authorities' attempts to stigmatize them in a variety of ways, including, counter-intuitively, by being recognizably Jewish.