handsome sum for the privilege.38 However, there is no indication that Jews were restricted to this particular livelihood or that non-Jews could not participate in textile production outside the city of Taranto. The fulling mills at Racale and Ostuni were not associated with Jews.39 It is likely that Jews were active in the dyeing industries at Otranto, Oria, and other cities in southern Italy, as was the case around the Mediterranean.40
We possess written sources that have not been used previously to confirm the archaeological and historical evidence for cloth manufacturing in medieval southern Italy. Glosses in the Salentine dialect found in the margins of the eleventh-century Mishnah manuscript now in Parma clarify many of the terms found in the Hebrew text related to the production and sale of cloth. In these marginalia are such terms as kui karmena, he who dyes wool its most common color, red; raiiu, from Latin radius, the weaver’s spindle; savani, from the Greek σάβανον, sabanon, a thick linen cloth.41 The uniquely Jewish prohibition against mixing together fabrics obtained from animals and plants, specifically wool and linen (sha’atnez), is reiterated in these glosses with the injunction to weave each fabric on its own loom to avoid any accidental mixing42 and the warning that one who weaves or wears “impure” fabrics will bring upon himself the wrath of God.43 The local Christians’ tendency to combine different fibers may lie behind the Salentine Jews’ concerns in this regard.44 The medieval glossator cites the Palestinian rather than the Babylonian Talmud, which is important evidence for the continued use of that source in southern Italy in the eleventh century.
Judah Romano’s glossary, another heretofore unused source, also sheds light on fourteenth-century Italian textiles and practices. For the entry cuffia, coife, referring to a hair covering, Judah notes that one is permitted on the Sabbath to transport a quantity of nuts or pomegranate peels or skins, or indigo or madder or other colors, sufficient to color a small garment such as a girl’s bonnet.45 These materials for dyeing were thus known and available in fourteenth-century Italy.
The most common dyestuffs in medieval Europe were vegetal: woad, from which indigo was derived and which did not require a mordant to make the color adhere, and madder, which yielded red.46 According to a Jewish midrash, the madder plant is called
In the fifteenth century, some Jews were distinguished by color appliqués: the red rotella is visible in two narrative scenes at Soleto [113.sc.1; Plate 14],53 and it may have been the clothing of Jews in late medieval Gallipoli that inspired the local name of a fish, the sciudeo (literally, “Jew-fish”), distinguished by its red and yellow stripes.54 Red and yellow stripes are worn by servants—horse grooms—at Santa Maria del Casale near Brindisi [28.H, V; Plate 7]. The two colors are juxtaposed but not striped on the ceiling at Li Monaci [Plate 9] and on the walls and ceiling at Ugento [151.B, C, st.1], all datable to the early fourteenth century.55
The poor wore undyed fabrics, and we see two of them, dressed in grayish tones, holding candles in the crypt church of San Nicola at Mottola [76.E; Plate 13]. Yet these are not the individuals who are most often shown in small village churches. Modest as they or their contributions may have been, these supplicant figures usually wear dyed garments that would have communicated a more elevated social identity to contemporary viewers. I do not suggest that this identity was real, or that people actually wore the specific garments shown; more likely these garments are stylistic syntheses, idealizations effected by artists eager to please and open to inspiration from varied sources. I agree with those historians of dress who argue that in commemorative images of people, unlike narrative religious images, artists did not simply work from a prototype, but there is a high degree of sameness among the humble Salentine supplicants.56 While blue, greenish gray, white, and yellow are occasionally worn, red (or reddish brown) is by far the color most commonly worn by a painted human figure in the Salento across the Middle Ages. This is the case in Santi Stefani at Vaste [157; Plate 18] and Santa Maria del Casale [28; Plates 5–7], two otherwise very different fourteenth-century monuments. At Vaste, nine different figures are shown in virtually identical red garments. Only the wealthiest patrons could afford richer, more costly dyestuffs like kermes and fine cloths like imported “scarlets,” printed silks, and furs. A few supplicants, mostly in fourteenth-century Roman-rite churches, are shown wearing such obvious luxuries; otherwise, only painted saints and ancillary figures in Christian narrative scenes are depicted in luxurious garments.
Certain special days were occasions for wearing garments of a particular color, which at times distinguished Christians and Jews. The Shibolei ha-Leqet treatise of practical halakha (Jewish law) illuminates this in its discussion of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year:
The custom in the world [ba’olam] is that when a man knows he will be judged he wears black and covers himself in black and grows his beard and does not cut his nails because he does not know what the judgment will be. Jews [Yisrael] do not do this: they wear white and cover themselves in white and shave their beards and cut their nails and eat and drink and are happy during Rosh Hashanah because they know that God is making miracles for them and is judging them favorably. These are the reasons why it is not allowed to fast on Rosh Hashanah.57
The supposed black clothing of Christians on Judgment Day is not supported by extant wall paintings, where the damned and the saved in those scenes at Santa Maria del Casale [28.sc.1] and Soleto [113.B] wear many colors, with the same preference for red that characterizes the depictions of supplicants. Perhaps real people did wear dark hues on penitential occasions, however. There are a few more differences in clothing and hairstyles with a religious rationale, but the vast majority of distinctions in clothing depend on gender, age, and social status rather than on faith.
Infants’ and Children’s Clothing
Infants are seldom depicted in extant Salentine wall paintings, except for the Christ child in the Nativity scene and the infant Virgin held by her mother or, in the form of a swaddled soul, by Christ at her dormition [Plate 15]. An infant is recognizable by its tight herringbone swaddling;58 regardless of season, strips of white linen were wrapped tightly around the body, mummylike, with only the face left free. Such swaddling was still done in the Salento a century ago59 and is an example of medieval realia when found in religious scenes. In nonnarrative images this realistic swaddling is uniformly suppressed, as when Anne holds the infant Mary [32.B] or in countless scenes of Christ in the lap of his mother; this indicates that Mary and Jesus were understood not as infants but as children. Corroboration that swaddling of newborns was also done in Jewish families is found in the fourteenth-century Maimonidean glossary from Rome, where anfasciatu, “bound in strips” (fascie), glosses the Hebrew equivalent.60 The same source gives the motive for such wrapping: “one wraps and ties so that the legs and arms are long and straight and not curved and distorted”; moreover, it is permitted to do so on the Sabbath because not doing so endangers
