Cesena

City of the Pontifical States. In early times a Jewish community existed here, of which the tosafist Eliezer is mentioned in the thirteenth century. The "payyeṭan" Moses de Rossi and the exegete Obadiah Sforno were born in the city toward the end of the fifteenth century; and the rabbi Isaac Joshua b. Immanuel de Lattes officiated there in the sixteenth century. Under the papal dominion the community was subjected to all the exceptional laws, and even to the Inquisition with all its horrors. The Jews amassed so much wealth by their commercial enterprises that in 1514 the people feared that the money so accumulated would enable the Jews to become masters of the whole city. The community was dissolved when the Jews were expelled from the papal dominions.

In 1459 Angiolo de Rossi da Cesena was granted by Pope Pius II. permission to practise medicine, and in 1474 Manuele de Solomone received similar permission from Sixtus IV., and in 1460 was appointed physician and confidant to the duke of Milan.

K.I. E.