Drawer 9 has a lot of pretty things like this:
Image copyright Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Used with permission. Click to see bigger.
They’re mostly in Italian or Latin, and they have the most lovely illuminated borders, with coats of arms of cardinals.
What they are are testimonials. When you supplied things such as furniture to cardinals’ households in seventeenth-century Rome, they might give you a testimonial, which you could use to secure business from other households. JTS has lots of these from a family named Ambron, who were merchants supplying a lot of things to a lot of people.
The testimonial might also give the holder permissions and privileges for other things. You might be allowed to be treated as a member of the cardinal’s household (“don’t mess with this person or I the cardinal will mess with you”), or to live in a fancy district outside the Jewish ghetto, or to travel freely and trade within the Holy Roman Empire. All things that regular Jews couldn’t necessarily expect. The Ambrons supplied the Vatican’s army, as well as the cardinals at home and abroad, so after a time they were guaranteed a market as well.
I admit that my eye was caught mostly by the prettiness of these, but they are also very interesting. This family, the Ambrons, eventually built up a whole network of merchant trading across Europe, part of the Jew-as-trader narrative.
I don’t know what happened to them eventually. There’s one testimonial issued in 1804 “during the Napoleonic occupation of Tuscany,” saying that they have the job of supplying the military there. I suppose that when Napoleon broke the power of the Pope and emancipated everyone including the Jews, Jews who relied on papal preference didn’t fare too well. And then when the papacy’s power came back I suppose they were much more anti-Jew than before, even if the Ambrons had been in a position to supply them with stuff, but war doesn’t always treat networks of merchants kindly.
Other pretty elements from various testimonials, which I’d like to adopt into calligraphy pieces sometime or other:
