LOOMING ABOVE Dukes Guglielmo, Vincenzo, and Ferdinando’s reigns, and over the productive work by De’ Sommi and Basilea, was the Counter-Reformation. This Catholic resurgence, a response to the Protestant Reformation, began with the meetings of the Council of Trent, known in Latin as the Concilium Tridentinum (1545– 1563), and lasted until the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1648). The period had tremendous consequences for the Jewish community, ones that influenced every aspect of their lives: what they could read and publish, whom they could meet with and live next to, and how safe they felt. A time of increased restrictions and rules, this was also a period that recent scholars have recast as paradoxically both productive and collaborative, punctuated by high levels of Jewish-Christian dialogue. Evidence from performances at this time reveals a high degree of artistic exchange that took place, notably, in theatre-making. This productivity was nevertheless conditioned by the terms of the Counter-Reformation, and, therefore, while there was productive exchange, it was at times onerous. For example, the Jews undertook increasingly costly productions— which included a mechanism of self-taxation that became increasingly difficult for the community to bear.

Notwithstanding the burden that performance now represented, performance production in this period also “recast” the Jews’ role more broadly within the professional world of theatrical production, chiefly that of the commedia dell’arte. It was during this period that the Jews of Mantua evolved a unique way of using performance strategically as a type of currency— both cultural and actual— that could serve them especially well during. Part of that “currency” was the ability to serve as “contractors” for performance: ones who could create tremendous stage spectacles based on the know-how that would be passed down from generation to generation. Another asset that the Jews had was their ability to draw on their own intracommunal resources, including a stock of clothing that could serve as costumes and a variety of props (the costumes and stocks, collectively, were known in Italian as robbe) that were important in production. Indeed, in Mantua, the Jewish economy was founded on banking, the strazzaria, and goldsmithing and metal work.