Leonardo da Vinci was not Jewish
Speculation needs to be reported as speculation, not as fact
Modern Medieval
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
Let’s start with the spoiler: there is no evidence that Leonardo da Vinci was Jewish. There is also no evidence that his mother was Jewish. But if you read The Tablet, an influential Jewish American magazine, you’d get this:
Let’s back up. As we’ve covered in The Bright Ages and beyond (including here on Modern Medieval), the so-called Italian Renaissance holds a claim over the modern imagination. It’s the “good” period to the medieval “bad” period, a claim pushed as a piece of propaganda by Petrarch and others starting in the late 14th century.
Subsequently, moderns liked the idea. They liked to look back at the brilliant artists and scientists and see their own origin stories, see people with whom to identify, see the beginnings of art and science that match our own aesthetic and intellectual values. And in so doing, they ignore the intense violence, political chaos, newly crystallizing forms of bigotry, and more that made Renaissance Italy, especially Florence, a terrible place to live. In other words, they want Leonardo to be “just like us.” That’s where this story really begins - in a dream of the past that models a form of acceptance and tolerance modern liberal societies idealize.
But here’s what we know about Leonardo da Vinci’s mother:
Her name was Caterina
She wasn’t married to Leonardo’s father
That’s it
This hasn’t stopped the speculation. Most recently, Carlo Vecce, a literature professor in Naples, Italy, found a document in which Leonardo’s father purchased then freed an enslaved woman named Caterina (owned by someone else) about seven months after Leonardo was born. This woman had previously been employed by a different Florentine knight as a wet nurse, according to the document.
Interesting? Yes. Conclusive? Nope.
Let’s be clear: Caterina could have been Leonardo’s mother. But there were lots of Caterinas, both enslaved and free. Vecce, however, took the document as evidence of maternity, then wrote a novel about this Caterina, and now has gone on a media tour touting his discovery.
CNN had pretty good coverage of both the finding and the doubts.
"I discovered the document about a slave named Caterina five years ago and it became an obsession for me," Vecce, professor of Italian literature at the University of Naples "L'Orientale," told CNN. "I then searched and found the supporting documents. In the end, I was able to find evidence for the most probable hypotheses. We can't say it is certain, we don't look for the absolute truth, we look for the highest degree of truth, and this is the most obvious hypothesis."
The biggest problem is that Vecce’s hypothesis is not, in fact, the most obvious here. Vecce wants this to be true. In the piece on The Tablet, we get, “The date on the document is underlined several times, as if da Vinci’s hand was shaking as he proceeds to the liberation of the woman who just gave him a child.” That is a wild piece of speculation that makes a lot of sense as a plot point in a novel, but just shouldn’t be reported as anything real.
For example, another plausible - perhaps even likely - reading is that freeing this woman was not the sign of a sexual relationship, but rather that Caterina was Leo’s wet nurse, which would speak against the likelihood of her also being Leo’s mother.
The speculation gets worse:
The official version of da Vinci’s birth is that it was the fruit of a brief fling between the Florentine solicitor Piero da Vinci and a young peasant from Tuscany called Caterina, of whom almost nothing was known. Yet there had long been a seemingly unfounded theory that Leonardo had foreign origins and that Caterina was an Arab slave. Six years ago, professor Vecce decided to kill the rumor for good. “I simply found it impossible to believe that the mother of the greatest Italian genius would be a non-Italian slave,” he told me. “Now, not only do I believe it, but the most probable hypothesis, given what I found, is that Caterina was Jewish.”
First, Vecce here is clearly coming at the project from a racist nationalist perspective, which should immediately call his credibility into question. But the statement that Caterina (and hence Leonardo) was Jewish is, in some ways, even more baffling (if less racist):
“Traveling from Russia… [Caterina] certainly passed through the Taman peninsula, near Crimea, which opens on the Azov sea.” The peninsula owes its name to David of Taman, the king of the Jewish Khazar kingdom that briefly existed there during the seventh to 10th centuries. “It seems that some traces of the Khazar kingdom still existed in the 15th century, when the peninsula was controlled by the Genovese Jewish Ghisolfi family. The region was ruled by Jewish consuls until the Ottoman Empire put an end to it at the end of the 15th century.”
Please note that while these facts are more or less true (putting aside the debates about Khazar Judaism), there is zero evidence here to support a claim about Caterina. There may have been a Jewish kingdom five hundred years previously in the region. There were Jewish elites serving the Ottomans at the time of her trafficking.
That’s the evidence.
That’s all the evidence.
That’s not a lot of evidence.
There’s a lot to say about pre-modern Mediterranean slavery, drawing both parallels to the more familiar (in our country) North American traditions, showing how more recent slavery did not emerge in a vacuum, but also how the race-based practices in this country was especially pernicious with consequences that remain with us today. For example, Mediterranean slavery, like most systems of slavery in world history prior to colonial North America, assumed that manumission would happen reasonably often, so Caterina’s freedom was not unusual. But note too that Mediterranean slavers, like most slavers in world history, routinely raped their slaves (especially but not exclusively women). They also erased their histories.
Dr. Ada Palmer wrote me over email that “[enslaved women] were usually re-baptised and renamed when they were sold or re-sold, even if they had already had Catholic baptisms. Enslaved women were practically always named Caterina, Lucia, Maria, Marta, Margherita, or Maddalena,” citing the work of Steven Epstein on Renaissance Italian slavery (I also recommend Hannah Barker’s That Most Precious Merchandise.) Palmer added
Maddalena was usually specifically given to women whose enslavers intended to use them sexually, so the woman's identity was actually overwritten with a name coding her as a sex worker, and associating her with the sexually active Mary Magdalene instead of the virgin saints whose names were preferred for enslaved women expected to be chaste. Names also had ethnic association: the name Caterina predominated with [North African] and Turkish enslaved women, Marta among tartars, Margherita among Abkhazian women, but again all of these are the names being given to them by Italian slaveholders, so slaveholders associated particular ethnicities with particular saintly role models…The idea of having one's name and identity overwritten with the label of sex work is horrifying, but the re-baptism also shows how Renaissance Italians used their religion as a framework to help them understand, express, and justify the practice of slavery.
In The Bright Ages, we frequently talk about pre-modern slavery, trying both to identify the horrors, analyze the historical consequences. Slavery in 12th- and 13th-century Egypt, for example, instead of erasing identities, tried to preserve Turkish identity as a kind of slave caste to isolate them from the Arab population. This proved disastrous for the rulers when the Turkish slave-soldiers and the Turkish concubine Shajarr-al-Durr rose up and took over the kingdom. Here, Caterina serves as another kind of evidence, another story, one worth telling and one that I’m glad Vecce found preserved in the archives.
But that doesn’t justify making the kind of historical claims that he and the journalists covering him are doing. They are building what we’ve called a “rainbow connection,” an attempt to forge a glossy bind between now and then in ways that serve modern agenda. The Tablet wants to claim Leonardo for the Jews. Vecce wants to sell books.
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