SALERNO

SALERNO, city in Campania, S. Italy. A Latin tombstone of the daughter of a rabbi called Abundantius shows that a Jewish settlement existed in Salerno as early as the 3rd or 4th century. In the Middle Ages the town was the seat of a famous medical school founded in about 800. According to tradition, its founders included not only an Arab, a Greek, and a Latin, but also a Jewish teacher. Jews are mentioned in the town from 872, and the Jewish quarter (Judaica) of Salerno in a document of 1005. benjamin of tudela , who visited Salerno around 1159, found there about 600 Jews, including several scholars. As a result of the persecutions in south Italy around 1290–94, 150   Jewish families were converted, but many continued secret allegiance to Judaism. In 1485 R. Obadiah of bertinoro was for some months in Salerno and apparently frequented the medical school. With the expulsion of the Jews from the Kingdom of Naples in 1510 , the much-reduced Jewish community of Salerno also ceased to exist. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Milano, Bibliotheca, index; Milano, Italia, index; Roth, Italy, index; Roth, Dark Ages, index; N. Ferorelli, Ebrei nell' Italia meridionale… (1915), passim; Carucci, in: Archivio storico della provincia di Salerno, 1 (1921), 74–79; Cerone, in: Studi… Michelangelo Schipa (1926), 59–73; Marongia, in: Archivio storico per le provincie napoletane, 62 (1937), 238–63; Frey, Corpus, no. 568. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: C. Gambardella, "Gli ebrei a Salerno," in: Architettura Giudaica in Italia. Ebraismo, sito, memoria dei luogh (1994), 269–83; N. Pavoncello, "Epigrafia ebraica nel Museo Duomo di Salerno," in: Istituto Universitario Orientale: Annali, 18 (1968) 198–203; M. Galante, "Tre nuovi documenti sui cristiani novelli a Salerno nei secoli XIII–XIV," in: Sefer Yuhasin, 9:1–3 (1993), 3–14; D. Abulafia, "Il mezzogiorno peninsulare dai bizantini all'espulsione," in: Storia d'Italia. Annali 11, Gli ebrei in Italia. Dall'alto Medioevo all'età dei ghetti (ed. Corrao Vivanti) (1996), 5–44. (Ariel Toaff / Nadia Zeldes (2nd ed.)