In 1516, an Ottoman diplomat named Hasan al-Wazzan was captured by a Spanish pirate of Jewish ancestry who had once been a Dominican friar. Delivered to Rome, Wazzan was imprisoned by the pope, but treated respectfully; two years later, he converted to Catholicism and was released. The newly minted Giovanni Leone set about studying manuscripts in the Vatican library, improving his Italian and Latin, and instructing his godfather, Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo, in Arabic. Natalie Zemon Davis notes that da Viterbo’s education didn’t stop there:
Teaching the cardinal Hebrew and Kabbala at the same time was a gifted Yiddish poet and Hebraist from Germany. He was known as Elye Bokher to his fellow Yiddish-speaking Jews; as Eliyahu ben Asher Halevi in presenting himself in his early publications in Hebrew; as Elia or Elias Levita to Italian Christians who would soon be reading his Latin books on Hebrew grammar; and by scholars today as Elijah Levita. In their conversations, Elia and Giovanni Leone probably used these Italian names.
By 1523, Giovanni Leone was free to leave Rome and travel in Italy, making his way from Venice down to Naples. His most important stop was Bologna, where he collaborated on an Arabic-Hebrew-Latin dictionary with a learned Jewish physician and Orientalist, Jacob ben Samuel Mantino. The two men discovered they had much in common, both of them sons in refugee families escaping forced conversion, the Mantinos fleeing to Italy from Tortosa in Catalonia about the same time the Wazzan family had fled to Fez from conquered Granada.
But one should not take the respected status of Levita and Mantino to mean that Jews were well treated in Renaissance Italy. After the annual Good Friday passion play, put on by the Gonfalone fraternal organization, notes Zemon Davis,
performers and other Gonfalone members . . . went to the Jewish quarter to stone the houses. . . . At least Levita, Egidio’s instructor in Hebrew and Kabbala, could stay safely indoors in the cardinal’s own dwelling, where he and his family had been given lodging. Still, humiliation for the Jews had already begun in Rome several weeks earlier as a custom established by Pope Paul II for Carnival in 1466. On the ninth day before Lent—sometimes a cold season in Rome—Jewish men, in ridiculous hats and naked from the chest down, were compelled to run before the pope and the public. Elderly Jews were part of the race as well, and the audience laughed as they struggled and fell. The Jewish footrace was thought a high point of Carnival comedy.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/leo-africanus-discovers-comedy