False Hope and Squalor on the Banks of the Tiber
How the Jews of Rome were forced back into the Ghetto
By the middle of the 16th century, many European cities had confined their Jewish population into a ghetto, a slum bounded by walls and gates in which only they were permitted to live. Cities like Frankfurt and Prague had long set aside areas where Jews were obliged to live but it was in 1516, in Venice, where the first formal ghetto was established, a prison-city which no Jew was allowed to leave at night.
The ghetto in Venice was a miserable place but the presence of so many people cloistered together in their own cultural bubble led to a remarkable creative renaissance[*]. The ghetto in Rome, the second of 41 to be established in Italy, was very different. Sited on the banks of the River Tiber, it was a truly unhappy place. Rome’s ghetto was established in 1555 by Pope Paul IV as the most severe of several discriminatory measures that included a ban on Jews owning property, trading in foodstuffs and employing Christians. Jewish doctors were forbidden to treat Christian patients and Christians were not allowed to greet Jews using a courtesy title like signor or signora. The Pope, who had been the driving force behind the public burning of the Talmud in Rome two years earlier, issued his decree in a papal bull entitled cum nimis absurdum. The name means ‘just as it is absurd’ and is taken from the opening words of the bull which declares it absurd that Jews, “whose own guilt has condemned them to perpetual servitude” should live side-by-side with Christians and have equal rights.
The city erupted in celebration. Riots broke out, shots were fired, a prelate was shot dead and bullets were fired from the street through the window of the Pope’s antechamber. Terrified, the Pope made a run for it
As well as dwelling in grossly overcrowded conditions and living in abject poverty due to restrictions on the types of work they could do, the Jews of Rome were subject to ritual humiliations. The most conspicuous of these was the conversionary sermon in which every Shabbat, selected Jewish men and women were obliged to enter a church to hear a sermon urging them to convert to Christianity. The sermon was often preached by a Jewish convert to Christianity. Officers armed with sticks would walk among the Jews to check that they had not plugged their ears and were paying attention. The French essayist, Michel de Montaigne, was present at one such sermon. On that occasion, the preacher used such abusive and violent language that the Jews appealed to the Vatican for protection.
As the years went by, the humiliations became worse. At carnival time, Jews were forced to take place in a race, like horses, in front of a jeering mob. Eventually this was replaced by a ceremony in which a rabbi and two communal leaders knelt in front of city officials, declared their humility towards the Church, the Senate and the Roman people, begged for their benevolence and wished the Pope a long and peaceful reign. An official would then kick the rabbi in the backside and demand a substantial payment.
The practice of kicking the rabbi died out but the ceremony did not. In 1847 the leaders of the Ghetto wrote to Pope Pius IX telling him that the ceremony remained “as painful to those who offer it as it is null and insignificant to those who receive it.”
The following year, 1848, has gone down in history as a year of revolution in Europe. For the first and only time, uprisings and revolts broke out across the continent. From Spain and Portugal to Moldavia and Greece, from Scandinavia to Sardinia, monarchs, princes and rulers found themselves confronted by populations calling for social and political change. The demands and shape of the revolutions varied from one place to another, the uprisings were not coordinated, rather they spread from state to state as radicals heard what was going on elsewhere. Like most revolutions they failed to achieve as much as was hoped but the net result was the gradual introduction of constitutional government across Europe, in place of the absolutist rule of kings. The Jews of the Rome Ghetto were too downtrodden and fearful to play any great part in their local revolution, but it did touch them, and it didn’t do them much good.
An early indication that the Jews of Rome might see some benefit from the revolutionary mood came in 1847 when the Pope removed some of the restrictions on the press. Several new liberal newspapers were founded, some published letters advocating equal rights for the Jews. In an essay addressed to the Pope, the liberal, aristocratic statesman Massimo d’Azeglio declared that “It is our fault that the Israelites have been reduced to these sad and abject conditions.” He described in detail the squalid conditions in the Rome Ghetto and urged the Pope to free the Jews. He insisted that Christians had a moral obligation to grant Jews the freedom that they themselves had. D’Azeglio’s arguments were not new, many other liberal thinkers were making them at the time, but his name carried weight and his opinions were more influential than most.
The calls for freedom for the Jews caused a predictable backlash among the Roman population. To try to diffuse simmering resentments, one of the local Christian leaders, a wine wholesaler named Angelo Brunetti copied an idea that had worked fairly successfully in France. He organised formal lunches for Jews and Christians where representatives from both sides would speak, participants would be encouraged to get to know each other and they would finally all walk together in a torchlit procession through the Ghetto. Then, in March 1848, Canon Ambrogio Ambrosoli delivered a sermon telling his congregation there must be an end to persecution, that the Jews must not be ‘abandoned in the vestibule’ to nibble on ‘crumbs from the banquet of civilization’. Even though he closed his sermon with a prayer that the Jews would soon find a way to convert to Christianity, his sermon was a notable turning point in the history of Christian-Jewish relations in Rome.
Tolerance, however, was not the only item on the agenda. An abbot published a paper rejecting any call for reform. He said that the degraded condition of the Jews was not because of Christian intolerance but because of divine providence. The only way for Jews to become emancipated, he said, was through conversion. It was the abbot’s inflammatory message, rather than Canon Ambrosoli’s emollient sermon, that struck a chord with the Roman population; anti-Jewish protests broke out, notices were posted calling for a massacre and Jews were attacked in the street. Far from doing anything to quell the trouble, members of the Civic Guard were often identified among the rioters; one was seen cutting a Star of David with his knife into the shoulder of a Jew.
All this though was a sideshow to the revolution that was gathering strength in Rome. In November 1848, Pellegrino Rossi, the Pope’s friend and confidante who he had recently appointed to be Minister of the Interior, was assassinated as he entered Chancellery Palace. The city erupted in celebration. Riots broke out, shots were fired, a prelate was shot dead and bullets were fired from the street through the window of the Pope’s ante-chamber.
Terrified, the Pope made a run for it. Changing out of his papal robes, he dressed as a country priest and tiptoed down to a courtyard in the Vatican where a carriage was waiting for him. He left a colleague in his chamber who spoke in a loud voice for 45 minutes so that nobody in the vicinity would suspect that he had left the building. He fled to Naples.
The revolution appeared to have succeeded. The Council of State announced the end of the Pope’s rule over the city, elections were held and three months later Rome was declared to be a Republic. Among the first things that the new republican government did were to abolish the Inquisition, end clerical censorship, open up the ghetto and grant full citizenship to its residents. Jews were allowed to live anywhere and to work in whatever trade or profession they chose. The campaign, in which Massimo d’Azeglio’s and Canon Ambrosoli had played such an important part, had borne fruit. The emancipation of the Jews had finally come.
Or so they thought. But this wasn’t the end. The Pope’s supporters wanted him back in the city and it was the French, for their own geopolitical reasons, who came to his aid. On July 3, 1849, the French army entered Rome. They restored the Vatican’s rule, brought the Pope back from Naples and urged him to compromise with the leaders of the now overthrown republic.
The Pope was in no mood to do so. He had been humiliated and he would have no truck with those who had shamed him. The revolutionaries were thrown into dungeons, the Inquisition was reinstated, the Jews were stripped of their freedom and ordered back into the Ghetto. They would remain there until 1870, when the Italian states were united into the Kingdom of Italy. The Rome Ghetto, which had been the second to be established in Europe, was the very last to be finally abolished.
[*] My book, Shylock’s Venice, telling the story of the Venice ghetto will be published next year.
Terrific.
(small typo, penultimate paragraph. Wrong century.)
Thanks, should read 1849. I have updated it on the website, https://harryfreedman.substack.com/p/false-hope-and-squalor-on-the-banks