Discovering Benedetto Blanis

Full-blown Eureka! moments are rarer than most people imagine in the course of archival research. Almost never do we come upon a single document that instantly transforms our understanding of the world—or even an historical personality or a particular moment in the past. 

I mostly sift through stacks of papers, parsing them one at a time, while months and years pass. I see things, I remember things and I take lots of notes. Sooner or later, seemingly random pieces click into place, somewhere in the back of my mind. Then I take a deep breath, shake my head and mumble to no one in particular, “So...this is what has been staring me in the face, all this time!” 

Take Benedetto Blanis Hebreo. Take that volume of letters in the Florentine National Archive. Take the whole tragicomic world to which Benedetto Blanis holds the key. ASF MdP 5150 (Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato numero 5150—to spin out the full shelf number) contains two distinct sets of letters, directed to Don Giovanni dei Medici by two of his protégés. One is Flaminio Scala, an influential actor, playwright and theatrical impresario. The other is Benedetto Blanis Hebreo, an aspiring scholar from a distinguished Ghetto dynasty who was also a cut-throat money lender and a daring practitioner of the occult.   

Hidden in plain sight doesn’t even begin to describe the Blanis letters, which researchers staunchly ignored for more or less ever. About thirty years ago, I remember a whole team of local theater historians crawling over the Flaminio Scala side of ASF MdP 5150, preparing a now much-cited edition of documents relevant to the Commedia dell’Arte. Apparently no one thought to turn the page and ask the obvious question, “Who is this other guy?! The one who signs himself L'Ebreo?” That happened only years later when I needed to double-check a Flaminio Scala reference. 

For some of us, a clean run of two hundred letters from a denizen of the Florentine ghetto in the early Seventeenth Century is enough to send our minds reeling. As far as I can tell, we don’t have two hundred letters from all the Jews in all the Ghettos in Italy during those same years—and these are addressed to a Medici prince, no less. 

The relentless rhythm of the Blanis Letters is what I remember best—slogging through a dense sequence of weekly missives, one after another. Like it or not, I was keeping pace with the desperate strategies of a gifted, ingenious and fatally self-destructive individual. Again and again, in the hushed precincts of the Florentine National Archive, I found myself wanting to scream out loud, “Stop, you fool! Don’t do it!” But as we know—all too well—Benedetto Blanis was neither the first nor last beleaguered Jew to engineer his own tenuous rise and precipitous fall.  

I describe the first steps of my journey in The Blanis Letters and The Story Begins, posted right here on this website. After many years of research and writing, I eventually published two books: Jews and Magic in Medici Florence: The Secret World of Benedetto Blanis and A Jew at the Medici Court: The Letters of Benedetto Blanis Hebreo,1615-1621 (both University of Toronto Press, 2011). If you have questions or comments, please get in touch by clicking the CONTACT ME link (above and below).