Das jüdische Wochenmagazin August/September 2015, 81. Jahrgang, Ausgabe 4 Ausgabe: Nr. 4 » 12. August 2015 BACKGROUND ROMAN JEWRY The Popes and the Ghetto Kenneth Stow, 12. August 2015 Jewish presence in Rome goes back to Antiquity. With the rise of Christianity, Popes came to determine the fate of the community. WARM RESPONSIVENESS Pope Francis putting his arms around the Argentine Rabbi Abraham Skorka (middle) as well as Omar Abboud, the leader of Argentina’s Muslim community (left) at the occasion of his visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem in May 2014 – on the right is Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch Four distinct moments, or periods, delineate the Roman Jewish past: the Roman Empire until Gregory the Great (590-604 C.E.) and the start of the medieval papacy; Pope Gregory to 1555, the establishment of the Roman Ghetto; 1555 to 1962 and Vatican II; and 1962 until today. The turning points in this unorthodox division – rather than ancient, medieval, and modern – are defined by historical moments in the history of the popes. Jews came to Rome about 200 B.C.E. Politically identified with Julius Caesar, they were despised by supporters of the Republic like Cicero. Later, the historian Tacitus heaped scorn on the masses of Jewish slaves who arrived in Rome following the failed Judean revolt of 70 C.E. and created a community of the impoverished. However, in 212 C.E., Jews, like all the Empire’s residents were denominated “citizens,” a status they never lost; jurists as late as the eighteenth century were still affirming the Jews’ civil rights. But by the late fourth century, the empire had become a Christian one, and the Theodosian and Justinianic Codes of law, of 438 and 527 C.E., respectively, demanded that Jews be subservient, depriving them of rights, like the right to possess honores as civic officials and judges. The canons of Church law, too, could restrict them freely. Canons and real life Symbolically, the Roman period ends with Gregory the Great. Gregory, who was the administrator for the Byzantine rulers of Rome, issued about twenty-five letters concerning Jews. They were not to be forcibly baptized, and Judaism was permitted, following Pauline theology. It was Pauline, not Augustinian thought that guided the Church. Nobody mentioned Augustine with regard to the Jews until the late twelfth century. Gregory the Great’s letters, too, though often called pace-setters, were not cited after his death until 938. It was canon law that affected Jewish life in Rome in the earlier Middle Ages, which was ever more limiting freedoms. Christians were particularly warned not to participate in Jewish rituals. The laws promulgated in 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council, by Pope Innocent III made the past ecumenical. Incorrectly, they have been called innovative and a turning point. The one exception was the infamous rule of special clothing, which, however, was established prevent “overly close contact” between Christians and Jews, a bugbear of the Church since the early Middle Ages. Yet regulatory canons and real life were distinct. Rome was small, and contact between Jews and Christians was constant. Roman Jews were neither immigrants, nor newcomers. Their language, dress, and customs, including most culinary ones, were virtually identical to those of other Romans. All the more reason to worry about contacts, which were said to have the power to pollute and make individuals unworthy to receive the Eucharist. It was no coincidence that the 1215 decree on clothing was issued by the same Council that made the annual taking of the Eucharist obligatory. Still, close relations continued. In the eleventh century, Jews were the clients of nobles, like the Pierleoni, whose founder was a converted Jew. Jews very likely pressed their protectors to ask for papal support, and why not; the popes themselves were highly dependent on the Roman nobility. The result was the crucial decree of Alexander II in 1062 saying Jews might live peacefully in Christendom, for “everywhere, they were prepared to accept [Christian] rule [especially that of the canon law].” More than any other, this text, known as Dispar nimirum est would protect Jews against excesses, certainly by ecclesiastical authorities. It was being repeated by both Jews and the popes in the later eighteenth century. As echoed in a mid-thirteenth century Hebrew text, Alexander’s decree set the precedent: when Jews, especially “the pope’s Jews” in Rome, needed help, the pope would speak out. History´s strange twists About Jews themselves at this time, we know little. Jews were always urban, practicing trades, artisanry, even food wholesaling; a few lent money, the profits of trading. Jews did not engage in agriculture. The idea to send Jews into the fields was a product of the late seventeenth century and was part of a millenarian hope that, restored to the purity of Adam and Eve by physical work, Jews would convert. That the idea was adopted by social reformers and the early Zionist movement is one of history’s strange twists. There was a glimmer of intellectual life in the thirteenth century, but little more. Rabbinical authorities were few. Most indicative was the late seventeenth century Tranquillo Corcos, who mastered Latin rhetoric and ius commune (Roman law), as well as the halakhah, Jewish law, he was able to glean from digests of the Talmud, itself forbidden since 1555. With one exception, the burning in 1298 of Elia de Pomis for a reason still unknown, Jewish life in Rome continued without crisis until the early sixteenth century, when our third moment was ushered in by upheavals in both Church and the Jewish Community. Decades before Martin Luther, voices within the Church were calling for reform. This included the conversion of the Jews. As a sign of victory over Lutheranism, but, even more, to hasten the end of days through mass Jewish conversion, in the year 1555, Pope Paul IV adopted, and adapted, the model of the ghetto established in Venice in 1513 (the original name of the Venetian island where Jews were forced to live). In the Roman Ghetto, Pope Paul uniquely applied what Gregory the Great had called piis verberibus, pious lashes administered by heaven to lead sinners back from error, which he did through heightened legal enforcement, ruining the Jewish economy, burning the Talmud, and instituting sermons. A House of Converts was established to recruit, house, and instruct catechumens. By 1555, the Jewish population had grown. Its numbers swelled from approximately 1000 native Roman Jews to 1,800, as hundreds of Jews escaping Spain and Portugal after the expulsions and forced conversions of 1492 and 1497, arrived in the city. Hundreds more came from Aragonese ruled Sicily and, eventually, the Kingdom of Naples (the Italian South). A bit earlier, Jews had reached Rome fleeing German expulsions and violence. Amalgamation was rapid. By mid-century, marriage between different Jewish groups had reached the very high over-twenty-percent. By the end of the century, 3000–3500 Jews, eventually to stabilize at 4000, were occupying a ghetto space no larger than two-and-a-half modern city blocks. Ritual life took place in a single structure housing five synagogues, the Cinque scole, which perpetually litigated with each other about every inch of space. Communal leadership was vested formally in three Fattori and two councils of twenty and sixty, as specified in the 1524 Charter drawn up by Daniel da Pisa. But these institutions, with very limited powers, were overshadowed by the new one of Jewish notaries. From about 1536, Judah and his son Isaac Piattelli began applying the Christian ars dictaminis, the notary’s art, in formal Jewish documentation, especially wills and testimony in litigations. The Piattelli’s success was in maintaining intra-communal harmony though the gaining the assent of Roman Jews to air differences within communal forums, countering the papal will to destabilize and create tension. The popes responded by putting the Jewish notaries out of business by 1640. In 1621, they made Jews dependent on papal courts; Jews were forbidden by the Rota, the Roman high court, to settle even internal disputes by ius commune, not halakhah. Ghetto life as a whole was becoming increasingly difficult. Roman Jews called the ghetto nostro ghet, “our bill of divorce, get.” They had been expelled into the ghetto, a limbo, until they converted. They were also pressed for space; starting a family became difficult. But when they did, Jews kept their families small. Communal institutions were failing and the community itself was deeply in debt. Even confraternities, mutual aid and social bodies, lost their punch. Only the family could sustain individual members. Small families offered protection. Conversionary pressures had expanded, and converted relatives were “offering” family members to the Church. Those “offered” were literally kidnapped and held in the House of Converts, where most broke down. The person “offering” had to be a parent, but the definition of parent was continually broadened. By 1783, a parent might be an affine, a relative by marriage. Smaller families meant fewer; distant cousins, one of whom might convert and betray the others. A harsh century The eighteenth century was harsh. “Offerings” increased, as did the attack on communal finances. An attempt was made to force the Cinque scole to merge, destroying the ritual distinctions Rome’s different Jewish groups had maintained. And Pope Benedict XIV approved, for the first time, a charge of ritual murder. Toward the end of the century, Pius VI renewed all past restrictions and added more. Most sharply, he forbade laundry women to enter the ghetto and remove soiled clothing for washing; the ghetto lacked both space and sufficient running water for this task. The Jews, who had long struggled to maintain ghetto sanitation – they built sewer lines and other appurtenances and ensured that buildings had latrines – were devastated, fearing sickness and plague. Had Napoleon not entered Rome in 1797, the situation would have deteriorated into chaos. After the Napoleonic period, the ghetto returned. After the Revolutions of 1848, the walls came down, but the basic rules changed only when on September, 20, 1870, when the Papal State fell, and the united Italian monarchy took its place. Abruptly, the era of the Ghetto ended – in fact, but not in the papal mind. As he passed through the city in 1871, Pius IX remarked that he heard the Jews “barking through the streets.” For him, the ghetto had been a kennel: had not Jews been called thieving, polluting dogs for centuries. When asked in 1893 to renew the thirteenth century Innocent IV’s rejection of the charge of ritual murder, Leo XIII refused. What had put the Jews of Rome into a ghetto and held them there was the papal conception of the state as an instrument of religion. And whereas the heads of the French Revolutionary regime and the fathers of the newly minted United States had (in law) broken the bond between state and religion, the popes held on. As late as 1946, Pius XII was arguing that control over marriage was the province of God, administered by the Church; the states of Western Europe had been saying otherwise since 1791. Not speaking out Pius XII was hanging onto the past. Would he do the same when Jews very lives were threatened in 1943 and ’44? Specifically, would he maintain past teachings and protect “his” Jews from the Nazis, as Alexander II had decreed in 1062? To modern ears, phrased in these terms, this question no doubt sounds preposterous, but within a Church bound up with traditions, and its canon law, it is anything but that. Protection was given; up to 5,000 Roman Jews were shielded in churches and convents. Yet as Alexander II and the thirteenth century Hebrew text mentioned above had ordained, the pope was required to speak out. Many arguments have been made about why Pope Pius did not. Yet for the Jews of Rome, this pope had abandoned an obligation that even Pius VI, a true enemy, had fulfilled when he halted the siege of the ghetto in 1793. The memory of this failure, however justified, does not easily fade. It would take John XXIII in 1962 to begin restoring Jewish trust – our fourth moment – followed by John Paul II, and today, Pope Francis. In their hearts, these popes felt, and feel, great warmth toward Jews. Nor have they been alone. And about papal attitudes, the Jews of Rome care. They are still the “Pope’s Jews.” To be sure, after 1870, Jews became equal citizens in a secular Italian state, who rapidly merged with the rest of the population, some occupying important governmental positions and others finding places in the professions and universities. Still others served as officers in the military. After all, for over two thousand years, apart from religion and Jewish culture, their mentality and practices been fully Italian. Some left the ghetto area; the irreparably squalid ghetto itself was razed before the end of the nineteenth century. Others stayed on the periphery, many of whom were arrested and deported to Auschwitz. The racial laws of 1938, in vigor until the Allied liberation in June, 1994, have left their own, still smarting scar. Today, for Rome’s approximately 15,000 Jews, the old ghetto areas has become a source of pride and a place of cultural renewal. Our division of Roman Jewish history into four distinct moments, each marked by a chapter in papal history, indeed makes sense. A leading expert on Jewish history in the Mediterranean, Kenneth Stow has lectured at numerous universities world wide, while teaching at the University of Haifa. As an Emeritus there, he continues to publish the journal «Jewish History» he founded. Among his many groundbreaking books are: “Popes, Church, and Jews in the Middle Ages.”, Ashgate: Variorum, 2007; “Jewish Dogs, An Image and Its Interpreters.” Stanford University Press, 2006; “Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century,” University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2001 and “The Jews in Rome” (two vols.), Brill, Leiden, 1995–1997. Gefällt mir Teilen 0 0 Kommentare Kommentar hinzufügen ... Facebook Comments Plugin » zurück zur Auswahl Sortieren nach Beliebteste