Professor Cassen's 2017 book, Marking the Jews in Renaissance Italy: Politics, Religion, and the Power of Symbols, published by Cambridge University Press, offers an analysis of the discriminatory marks that the Jews were compelled to wear in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy.
Her second book project studies how Italian Jews became subjects of the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth century, and how they understood the empire’s colonial endeavors in the Americas.
Marking the Jews in Renaissance Italy: Politics, Religion, and the Power of Symbols (Cambridge UP, 2017)
What might appear a straightforward task of archival documentation proves remarkably protean, slippery, and challenging, as Flora Cassen, in Marking the Jews in Renaissance Italy: Politics, Religion, and the Power of Symbols, seeks to trace the history of the badge—usually a yellow circular patch or hat—that Jews were required to wear in public in areas of northern Italy during the early modern era. This stimulating book has highlighted the complexity of the issue without, of course, being able to resolve all of the questions it raises.