THE VIA DI PORTICO D’OTTAVIA is one of the most suggestive and memory-filled streets in Rome. Its southern end faces the river and Ponte Fabricio, also called the “Quattro Capi” Bridge after the ancient milestones decorated with four faces at each corner, and in more ancient times as the pons Judaeorum, or Bridge of the Jews. There, on the right, is the small church of San Gregorio della Divina Pietà, a name derived from the legend that Saint Gregory the Great was born nearby. Despite its eighteenth-century facade, the building itself is much older. Its most interesting feature is the inscription over the doorway with a passage from Isaiah (65:2-3), written both in Latin and Hebrew: “All day long I have held out my hands to an obstinate people, who walk in ways not good, pursuing their own imaginations—a people who continually provoke me to my face.” The church of San Gregorio stood just outside one of the gates to the Jewish ghetto, and was used for the forced sermons meant to convert the “wretched Jews” to Catholicism. Four or five times a year the Jews of the ghetto were escorted to the nearest church (either San Gregorio, Sant’Angelo in Pescheria, Santa Maria del Pianto, or one of several others) to listen to preachers who tried to convince them to abandon their religion. Those who didn’t want to attend the religious services had to pay a fine, and anyone caught sleeping during the sermon was roused by a lash of the whips wielded by the Swiss Guards keeping watch.
A few steps down the street, between the church of Sant’Angelo and the Theater of Marcellus, the road widens into a broad plazalike space. A stone tablet mounted on the wall of an old building marks this as the spot were the Nazi trucks waited, on October 16, 1943, to haul away Roman Jews, an infamous page in the history of Nazi Fascism I’ll return to later. A bit farther along is a majestic arch framing a large portal flanked with columns. The arch is all that remains of the ancient Portico of Octavia, and the door is the entrance into the church of Sant’Angelo in Pescheria, also called Sant’Angelo in foro piscium. The street signs note that the Via del Portico d’Ottavia used to be called the Via della Pescheria.
The church’s ancient foundations date back perhaps as far as the reign of Pope Boniface II, around 530, or of Stephen II, around 770. One of these popes had it built in the ruins of the portico, using the ancient monument’s grandiose propylaeum as the new church’s pronaos. The portico was a gigantic square construction decorated with over three hundred columns that Emperor Augustus had built in 33–23 BC in memory of his sister, Octavia, over a smaller pre-existing structure. In addition to serving as the public entrance to the nearby Theater of Marcellus, the portico was a meeting place, and enclosed two temples, two libraries (one Greek, the other Latin) and numerous works of art, including a bronze statue of Cornelia, matron of the Gracchi family and the first woman in Rome to have a statue erected in her honor (Cato thought this an intolerable gesture and vehemently protested, but in vain). The magnificent statue known as the Medici Venus was also found in the ruins of the portico, and gives us a good idea of the high-quality art treasures it contained.
The church of Sant’Angelo is famous not only for its unique location, inside an ancient monument, but also for a famed historical event. In 1347, on the eve of Pentecost and after long prayer, Cola di Rienzo set off from here, sword in hand and to the tolling of the church bells, to capture the Capitoline Hill and restore Rome to the grandeur of the ancient Republic. A few meters to the right of the church a small, elegant seventeenth-century facade embellished with stucco decorations marks the entrance to the Oratory of Sant’ Andrea dei Pescivendoli.
Before moving on to the other surprises that await us in this neighborhood, you might understandably be wondering why so many places here refer to fish—the terms pescheria and pescivendoli, as well as others, all derive from the word pesce. The real reason is the most predictable one; the fish caught in the river, as well as those brought up the Tiber from the Tyrrhenian Sea, were unloaded by night on the banks of the Isola Tiberina. At dawn the fish market opened, selling both wholesale and to individuals. The fishmongers used slabs of marble taken from nearby temple facades as display counters, a long-standing practice visible in late nineteenth-century photographs of the market.
Farther down the street, at 25 Via del Portico d’Ottavia, there is an extraordinary example of a shop where fragments of ancient monuments were reused as building material. The doorjambs and entablature are finely worked ancient Roman marbles, and the wall around them was originally part of the thirteenth-century Torre dei Grassi, a tower that belonged, not surprisingly, to a family of fishmongers. Thus we have a working, twenty-first-century shop in a medieval building decorated with first-century marble—a layering of history possible only in Rome. Continuing along, two extremely narrow parallel streets lead off the right side of the Via del Portico d’Ottavia—the Via Sant’Ambrogio and Via della Reginella. These tight spots give us a good idea of what the ghetto was like before the old, insalubrious neighborhood was razed and almost completely rebuilt according to the plans of a project begun in 1888.
Passing by the two little streets we come to a corner building constructed at roughly the same time Columbus discovered America. This residence is known as the Casa di Lorenzo Manilio or Casa dei Manili. Its enlightened owner wanted to decorate the facade of his house with marble fragments of finely carved Latin and Greek inscriptions. He wanted to contribute to an urban renewal by embellishing his house ad forum Judaeorum (in the Jewish ghetto) with Roman sculptures, including a funerary relief with four portrait busts and another relief of a lion attacking a deer. The overall effect is a touching testament to Manilio’s dedicated humanism.
Just around the corner is the Piazza Costaguti and a small eighteenth-century chapel known as the Tempietto of Carmelo, another place designated for the coercive sermons intended to convert Jews. The Via del Portico d’Ottavia then ends in a wider stretch of road that corresponds to the ancient Piazza Giudea, a square immediately outside another of the gates that enclosed the segregated space of the ghetto. The rather drab sixteenth-century fountain here was designed by Giacomo Della Porta, and not far away, in the Piazza Mattei, is the graceful Turtle Fountain, which is also by Della Porta and is one of the city’s most famous fountains.
An irregular space called the Piazza delle Cinque Scole opens to the left; its name refers to the five synagogues that once stood in the ghetto: the Temple, Sicilian, Castilian, Catalan, and New Synagogues. There is a lot to notice in this square, beginning with the steep, dark little hill called the Monte dei Cenci, shaped by underlying Roman ruins, that closes one end of it. The space is also defined by the unfinished church of Santa Maria del Pianto, dedicated to a fresco of the Madonna in an aedicule of the Portico of Octavia which is said to have shed tears over a murder committed right in front of the painting.
Ferdinand Gregorovius found it particularly appropriate that there was a church dedicated to a weeping Virgin at the edge of a neighborhood marked by the humiliation imposed on its inhabitants. In his major book of 1853 there’s a vivid description of the miserable spectacle that was the mid-nineteenth-century ghetto:
Walking down one of the streets of the ghetto we come across Israello working hard in front of his dilapidated house. The Jews sit on their stoops or just outside them, in the alleyways, where there is a little more light than penetrates their damp, smoky rooms. They sort out rags and sew. It is impossible to describe the chaos of rags that accumulate there. It is as if the whole world has been pulled into pieces and now lies at the feet of the Jews. There are heaps of them, of every manner and colour of material, in front of the doors: gilt fringes; pieces of silk and velvet brocade; fragments of red, light and dark blues, yellow, white, and black; and old, torn, stained cloths. I have never seen so many old things. The Jews could dress up all of creation as harlequins. They sit there now, adrift in that sea of rags, as if they are searching for some sort of treasure, or at least some little snippet of gold brocade.1
To talk about the Roman ghetto is to talk about the oldest Jewish community in the West. Its people survived centuries of persecution and misunderstanding, dominated first by the ancient Romans, followed by medieval, inquisitorial, papal, and finally Nazi Fascist oppressions. For generations the ghetto was a concentration of people compressed by insurmountable barriers, characterized by great heroism alongside the basest degradation imaginable. It was an amazing symbol of the human ability to adapt to the most extreme living conditions. For centuries the Jews of Rome lived on these four streets, narrow as the hold of a ship, amid a pervasive and unbearable stench. Forced to suffer privations they were forbidden to alleviate, they were persecuted for the sake of alternating advantages—political, religious, and sometimes merely capricious—to benefit various popes.
The first documented presence of Jews in Rome dates back to 159 BC, when an embassy sent by the Israelite general Judas Maccabeus arrived to negotiate an alliance with the government. With some reluctance and ambiguities the pact was finally concluded, making Jews the first Eastern people to sign a treaty that recognized them as the (near) equals of the greatest imperial power of the day. In the Republican and Imperial periods of Roman history the relationship between the Jewish community and city authorities had highs and lows, but even in the worst times it never sank to outright persecution. There were frictions and misunderstandings, like the one over ritual circumcision, which the Romans confused with castration and therefore wanted to ban. There were also, of course, wars. Pompey the Great conquered Jerusalem in 63 BC, and about a century later, in 70 AD, Titus sacked and destroyed the Temple of Solomon, an act that signaled the end of the Jewish nation, which was only resurrected from its ashes in 1948, nearly two thousand years after it had first disappeared. The disastrous sacking of the temple was interpreted as divine justice wrought by the Roman armies on the Jews for killing Christ. The spoils of war Titus brought back to Rome from Jerusalem became the foundation of the Imperial capital’s largest museum collection. A relief panel in the Arch of Titus records the despoiling of the temple and the theft of the sacred menorah. This treasure stayed in Rome until the barbarian kings Alaric and Gaiseric sacked the city and stole it.
The relationship between the Jewish community and the Roman emperors also had its ups and downs, but the Jews were generally treated with the same tolerance Romans granted most foreign religions. Their relationship with Julius Caesar, for example, was excellent; he defended their rights and even allowed them to rebuild Jerusalem’s city walls after they’d been partially destroyed during Pompey’s siege. In his Lives of the Caesars, Suetonius wrote that upon Caesar’s death, in 44 BC, “at the height of the public grief a throng of foreigners went about lamenting, each after the fashion of his country, above all the Jews, who even flocked to the place for several successive nights.”2
One of the most important documents to survive from the ancient Greco-Roman world was penned by a Greek historian known by the Romanized name Dio Cassius. It’s interesting to note, reading his Roman History, which single characteristic of the Jewish religion particularly struck him: “They are distinguished from the rest of mankind in practically every detail of life, and especially by the fact that they do not honour any of the usual gods, but show extreme reverence for one particular divinity. They never had any statue of him even in Jerusalem itself, but believing him to be unnamable and invisible, they worship him in the most extravagant fashion on earth. They built to him a temple that was extremely large and beautiful, except in so far as it was open and roofless, and likewise dedicated to him the day called the day of Saturn [the Sabbath, Saturday], on which, among many other most peculiar observances, they undertake no serious occupation.”3 With extraordinary acuity, Dio Cassius encapsulated the intellectual abstraction of Jewish spirituality into two words—unnamable and invisible. Tacitus arrived at the same conclusion in his Annals, remarking, “the Jews have purely mental conceptions of Deity, as one in essence. They call those profane who make representations of God in human shape out of perishable materials.”4 It would be hard to find a starker contrast to the sumptuousness of Roman religion, in which statues of the gods were erected, covered with garlands, and brought very earthly offerings. It’s not surprising that in the frenzy of their religious ceremonies the simulacrum, rather than the god, was often worshiped. This pagan characteristic recurs, to a certain extent, in Christianity, especially in some of its gaudier manifestations.
On the whole Jews succeeded in maintaining a dignified relationship with the Romans, barring just a few sanguineous exceptions. It was only with the advent of Emperor Constantine’s reign, in the fourth century, that edicts began to label them a base, bestial, and perverted sect.
Papal attitudes toward the Jews were inconsistent. Gregory the Great, who reigned from 590 to 604, ruled with a balanced tolerance. Following the great tradition of Roman law, he declared, “Just as no freedom may be granted to the Jews in their communities to exceed the limits legally set for them, so they should in no way suffer through a violation of their rights.”5 Other popes were less tolerant, and a habit developed—one that would prove hard to break—of disparagement and persecution.
Among the copious documentation of their condition, some of which we’ll return to shortly, I want to highlight an eloquent sonnet by Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, dated May 4, 1833, which describes with brutal frankness an outrageous custom of the time. The title of the poem is L’omaccio de l’ebbrei, a play on words between omaggio, an homage (as this piece is, after all, a tribute), and omaccio—a bad man. The poet was referring to a custom also described by Massimo d’Azeglio in his book Miei ricordi (Things I Remember): “On the first day of Carnival there was a noteworthy ceremony at the Capitoline. The Senate met, and the Senator was seated on the throne. The Chief Rabbi, accompanied by a delegation of Jews from the ghetto, came forward and kneeled before him. The Rabbi then made a speech full of humble declarations of devotion and subjection to the people elected to the Roman senate. Once the address was finished, the Senator extended his foot and kicked the Rabbi, who backed away, expressing his gratitude.”6 This is how Belli described that tradition in his verses:
I wanna tell you a little tale, I do:
In Rome, on the first day of Carnival,
The Jews go into one of the halls
Of the Magistrates at the Campidoglio;
And once they’ve paid a heavy tribute
To ransom themselves from an old imbroglio,
The Grand Rabbi weaves a pretty speech
of chatter with a moral woven in to boot.
The moral’s that the whole ghetto
Swears allegiance to the Laws ‘n’ acts
Of the Senate and the Roman People.
Then, of those three powder-wigged old toads
The most senior big-wig
Gives ’im a kick and answers: “Go!”7
Nevertheless, in every epoch of the city’s history there were Jews who managed to achieve economic success despite the difficulties they faced. This was particularly true in the trade and importation of highly coveted items from the East. The large synagogue discovered in excavations at the old port city of Ostia Antica revealed a sizeable local community active in maritime trade. Other Jews became bankers and often rose to the level of financing papal enterprises just as they had, years before, provided the capital for imperial campaigns. The management of Tiberius’s family businesses, for example, had been entrusted to the heads of the Alexandrine Jewish community. But these were rare exceptions, and the vast majority of Roman Jews, originally ensconced in Trastevere, worked as small-scale artisans, merchants, and itinerant peddlers; there were a few painters among them, and even actors. One such actor, Aliturno, introduced Josephus Flavius, author of several books on Jewish history, to Nero’s wife Poppea. The Roman poet Juvenal wrote about Jewish women who earned their living by interpreting dreams. Literary texts, funerary inscriptions, and a few precious documents portray an industrious community, rich in ingenuity, fairly well integrated, and welcomed with tolerance throughout the ancient city—only rarely were Jews treated with open hostility or ridicule.
The relationship between the Church and Roman Jews began to worsen after the Protestant Reformation. The spread of Lutheranism in Europe forced the pope to take strong repressive actions. Pope Paul III (Alessandro Farnese) officially recognized the counter-reformation Society of Jesus—the Jesuits—in 1540. In 1542 he instituted the supreme inquisitorial tribunal of Rome, also know as the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and nominated the austere cardinal Gian Pietro Carafa to preside over it. In 1553 Church authorities ordered that the Talmud be destroyed on the Jewish New Year in the Campo de’ Fiori in a bonfire stoked with other Jewish books, beginning with religious titles. This was the beginning of a dark period destined to last a long time.
In May 1555 Carafa rose to the papacy as Paul IV, and things grew decidedly worse. The Venetian ambassador described him in his first dispatch after the election as a man with “a violent and fiery temperament … he is impetuous in dispatching his business, and he doesn’t want anyone to contradict him.” The pope published the index of banned books in 1559, and it even included parts of the Bible and some texts by Church Fathers. The Inquisition quickly became his favorite court of law. On July 17, 1555, less than two months after he was elected, the new pope issued a bull, Cum nimis absurdum, which was a heavy blow to the Jews and officially confined them to the ghetto:
Both in Rome and other cities in the lands that belong to the Roman Church, all Jews must live together exclusively on one street, or, if this is impossible, in two or three or four as necessary. These spaces must be contiguous and easily distinguished from the places Christians live … [and] they must have only one ingress and exit.
The first Italian ghetto was established in Venice in 1516; forty years later Paul IV’s bull turned it into an institution governed in every smallest detail by strict laws. The exclusion of the Jews not only forced them into ghettos, but also required they wear a glaring sign of identification, which served the double purpose of making them recognizable and perpetuating their public humiliation (a lesson the Nazis diligently applied later on):
Men and women alike will be obliged to wear an easily visible hat, or some other obvious sign. It should be blue, and will prevent the Jews from hiding and otherwise pretending. No one may be exempted from this requirement for any reason, including the pretense of high rank, the importance of his title, or any privilege, nor may he acquire any dispensation or exemption.
The Roman ghetto was separated from the rest of the city by a high wall commonly known as the “serraglio,” “cloister,” or “Jewish jail.” The five main access gates were built in 1603, and were shut an hour after sunset each evening between Easter and All Saints’ Day, two hours after sunset for the rest of the year. They were opened again at dawn, at the first stroke of the morning bells. The scarcity of space within the gates (about seven acres) and a growing population meant that the ghetto’s buildings were built ever higher and the area of each home was reduced; it wasn’t unusual to have one or two families share a single room. The narrow streets, barely graced by sunlight, made the area unhealthy. Making the situation even worse was the fact that the buildings facing the Tiber, not yet contained by its current embankments, were repeatedly flooded, both by rising water and whatever was backed up and poured out through the storm sewers. Ghetto families eked out livings as small-scale artisans (leather tanners, haberdashers, and cobblers) or as merchants specializing primarily in fabrics (sometimes rags) but also wine and grain. Two of the few careers papal law permitted them were dealing in second-hand items and money lending.
The area chosen to contain the Jews is now outlined by the Lungotevere, the Via del Portico d’Ottavia, and the Piazza delle Cinque Scole. For three centuries life in the Roman ghetto bustled in the narrow roads and alleys of this area. The neighborhood’s main street—its version of the Corso—was the Strada della Rua, which corresponds to what is now the Via Catalana. The ghetto eventually did increase in area over the years as the number of residents grew, and the number of gates rose to a total of eight. As Paul IV’s ordinance made clear, this area was designated as the Jewish ghetto in part because the river offered a natural boundary, but also because a number of Jewish families, originally living in Trastevere, had moved across the river and settled near the Isola Tiberina. Only a few Christians had to be removed to make the population of the neighborhood homogeneous. From a commercial point of view the area also offered some strategic advantages. By the end of the war between the Goths and the Byzantine Empire in the middle of the sixth century, a conflict fraught with plundering and sacking, the city had retreated to the places where its first settlements had begun, such as the lowlands between the Isola Tiberina and the Capitoline Hill. This stretch of river allowed for the unloading of cargo, some of the abundant ruins nearby were transformed into residences, and a market on the Capitoline Hill stimulated the local economy. The future site of the ghetto was also ideal from a logistical point of view; the large fortified remains of the Theater of Marcellus marked its southeastern boundary, what remained of the two imposing porticos (dedicated to Octavia and Philip) lent themselves to multiple uses, and the ruins of various temples served as quarries for building material. Its location halfway between the river and the Capitoline market also made it convenient for financial and commercial activities.
The periodic issuance of various papal ordinances imposed severe restrictions on the community. Jews were prohibited from having Christian nursemaids or servants, and Jewish doctors were not allowed to treat Christians or be respectfully called dominus by them. It was also illegal for them to work in public on Sundays or operate any business except for selling used goods (strazziariae seu cenciariae—literally “tearing up their rags,” or hawking second-hand wares). Jews weren’t allowed to own property, and even had to pay rent for their ghetto homes to Christian landlords or the government. They could make loans, and occasionally buy and sell jewelry. These loans ranged from small sums lent at interest for the needs of individual families to large-scale financial operations.
An incident involving an ancestor of the painter Amedeo Modigliani illustrates how this financial world worked and what the limits on the Jews were. This branch of the Modigliani family moved to Rome, attracted by the lively commerce there, and Amedeo’s ancestor was a well-to-do man, perhaps a banker, but more likely the owner of a pawnshop. He had one important client, a cardinal in financial distress whose situation was resolved with such mutual satisfaction that Modigliani imprudently thought he might challenge the papal ban on owning property by investing his earnings in a vineyard on the slopes of the Alban Hills. Upon finding out about this the Curia ordered the “insolent Jew” to divest himself of the vineyard, and threatened him with heavy sanctions. Having saved a prince of the Church was clearly not enough to warrant purchasing a piece of property. Modigliani obeyed, but shortly afterward moved his family to Livorno, which (along with Pisa) was the only Italian city never to expel or segregate its Jewish population. Modigliani’s descendant Amedeo was born in Livorno in 1884.
Large-scale banking operations were obviously quite different from the business Modigliani was in, and for centuries before the relationship between the two communities deteriorated these financial dealings went smoothly. This was especially true throughout the medieval period, but, interestingly, there was still a Jewish banker at the Vatican during the reign of fickle Pope Clement VII (Giulio de’ Medici) from 1523-1534. This banker, Daniele da Pisa, was one of the most influential men of his day, and even earned the honorary title mercatores romanum curiam sequentes. He enjoyed several rare privileges, including tax exemption from all customs duties throughout the Papal States.
Loans at this level were sometimes handled directly, but more often they went through Florentine intermediaries with ties to the Curia, who then arranged to partner with one or two judei de Urbe, the Jewish financiers in Rome. As Ariel Toaff noted in his essay “The Jews of Rome,” “the Roman Curia turned to the Jewish bankers of the city to keep control of the local banking sector, in such a way as to manipulate the political levers of the city.” Shared interests, which at times were remarkably close, reinforced ties between Roman bankers and the Curia, creating strong business connections between them. A loan to the city of Todi, for example, called for that city’s government, should it fail to live up to the terms of the agreement, to pay a large penalty, half of which would go to the judei de Urbe, half to the Roman Curia. One of the most enterprising of the Roman Jewish banking firms, owned by Fosco della Scola, made loans to a number of communities in the Papal States, including the Sabine territories, the Duchy of Spoleto, Perugia, and the marches of Ancona.
The mid-sixteenth-century ghetto and accompanying institutions embittered these business relationships, but the crisis in the Roman Jewish community had actually begun some time earlier. The second half of the fourteenth century was marked by a severe economic downturn following the devastating outbreak of the Black Plague, an event vividly recounted by many authors, including Boccaccio, and Rome was hit particularly hard by this crisis. The plague, accompanied by famine, floods, an endemic state of anarchy, and widespread violence, reduced peoples’ ability to make their living there and convinced many of them to leave and seek their fortunes elsewhere. That terrible century was also marked by a religious schism in the West (1378), which had a lasting impact on the Church, and the brief but significant career of Cola di Rienzo.
Cola was born “amid the Jews,” in the Via della Fiumara, a lane destroyed when the quarter was rebuilt in the nineteenth century. There’s a plaque in the Via di San Bartolomeo dei Vaccinari, named after an ancient church frequented by leather tanners, that tells us the Roman Tribune was born somewhere nearby. It’s just behind the church of San Tommaso de’ Cenci, a few steps from the old synagogues. The extraordinary Life of Cola Di Rienzo, written by an anonymous author, is one of the most important texts to survive from the Middle Ages; written in a vivid style, it offers a ruthless portrait of a city plagued by violence.8 According to its unnamed author, “Cola di Rienzo was of humble origins. His father was an innkeeper, and his mother, Maddalena, made a living washing clothes and carrying water. He was born in the district of Regola and raised by the river, among mill workers, on the street that goes through Regola to the church of San Tommaso, in front of the temple of the Jews.”
His humble beginnings weighed on him so much that even as a boy he pretended he was the illegitimate son of Emperor Henry VII. Stubborn, ambitious, and obsessed with the vanished glory of Rome, “he loved to tell stories about how great Julius Caesar was. He spent long days looking at the marble reliefs that lay around Rome, and was the only one who knew how to read the ancient inscriptions.”
Cola managed to get an education and became a notary. Shortly after his thirtieth birthday he was sent to Avignon as ambassador to Pope Clement VI (Pierre Roger) to beg him to return to Rome. The pope refused—the city was too troubled and its political situation too uncertain, poisoned as it was by continuous fighting among the baronial families. The pope was nonetheless struck by the ambassador’s eloquence, and sent him back to Rome with the title “Notary of the Capitoline Chamber.” This was the first step in a brilliant political career—perhaps too brilliant. Cola envisioned a humanistic utopia; he wanted to restore the ancient glory of the city and make Rome once more the world’s capital.
To realize his dream Cola first had to subdue the barons, especially the Colonna family, who fought amongst themselves for power and tore each other to pieces in the process. He also needed allies, including the Jews, and made a spectacularly ruthless gesture to win their favor. Several killers, who’d been convicted four years earlier for killing a Jewish banker and his wife in Perugia, were still languishing in prison, almost forgotten. One of the first things Cola did when he came to power was to order their execution, offering “justice” to the Jewish community and thereby garnering their support. When it was time to ring the bells of Sant’Angelo in Pescheria as Cola marched to the Capitoline Hill, it was a Jew who did it; in the voice of a contemporary witness, “The bells of Santo Agnilo Pescivennolo rang for a night and a day. A Jew rang them.”
Yet there was something wrong with Cola’s notion of state, and this became glaringly clear in the majestic ceremony he held on August 1, 1347, to have himself declared Tribune of Rome, assuming the high-sounding and rather ridiculous title of Candidatus Spiritus Sancti miles, Nicolaus severus et Clemens, liberator Urbis, zelator Italiae, amator orbis et tribunus augustus. He orchestrated opulent and elaborate ceremonies, processions, and banquets throughout the city, and became a daily spectacle himself, always donning splendid new fashions, resembling a reincarnated Nero. Cola was so carried away by his own performances that his contemporaries saw him as a veritable “Asianic tyrant.”9
The pope grew uneasy in the face of Cola’s antics, and the cities of Central Italy (which he hoped to federate) greeted his project warily. His plans failed. The Colonna family fomented a rebellion, and, his theatrical eloquence notwithstanding, Cola was forced to flee in 1350. He returned in 1354, in a pathetic attempt to retake the reins of government, but he couldn’t even count on the support of the Jews, who’d since discovered how unrealistic his political ideals were. He became arrogant, unreasonably cruel, and capricious; the weaker he proved to be, the more persistent his delusions. When the Capitoline was stormed in an uprising, he decided to die, weapon in hand like the hero of an ancient bas-relief, in the manner of a majestic and imperial man. But he was also a mere mortal, and feared death as much as the next guy. He disguised himself, shaved off his beard, stripped himself of the symbols of his office, and hid his features by carefully blackening his face. Near the small apartment where the porter slept, he went in and took a cloak of rough cloth, like something a shepherd from Campania would wear, and put on the plain cloak.
This shepherd’s disguise did him little good. Cola was recognized and dragged to the spot where justice was meted out, a fateful place inhabited by nothing but silence, where no one dared touch him. This incredible scene lasted for an entire hour—Cola stood silent, arms folded, surrounded by an enormous crowd of men who wanted to kill him but didn’t yet dare, until someone named Cecco dello Vecchio grabbed a sword and stabbed him in the belly. As if a spell had been broken, a hail of blows followed the first strike, and his body was pierced a hundred times, ending up like a sieve. He was beaten, bound by his feet, and horribly mutilated. The mob hung his corpse from a balcony for two days and a night; people heaped abuse on it, and youths pelted it with stones. His body was then dragged once again through the streets, this time to the Mausoleum of Augustus, where all the Jews had gathered. There they lit a fire with dry paper, and his body set atop it all. He was fat, so his corpse burned easily. The Jews stayed there, busy, overheated, with sleeves rolled up. They poked at the paper so it would burn. Thus the body was completely burnt and reduced to mere ashes. The Jews were among the Romans most betrayed by Cola’s broken promises, and the macabre fury with which they burned his body, isn’t all that surprising.
For many decades—centuries, really—the Jewish community in Rome experienced economic ups and downs, and its relationship with the Curia was characterized by a formal respect that masked mutual mistrust. Their considerable financial dealings, as we have seen, caused both sides to act cautiously and cooperate with one another. The papal physicians, too, were often Jewish, and because the pope entrusted his health to a Jewish doctor, he also often made his physician governor of the Roman community, since the man’s professional prestige might help him govern better. Like any other, the Jewish community also had prolonged and intense internal debates, and there was fierce competition for the official positions of power. It also unequivocally refused to harbor refugees from other countries, including those who came from Spain after Queen Isabella’s expulsion of all non-Catholics in 1492 (the same queen who gave Columbus the ships he needed to sail to the New World).
According to Ariel Toaff the intellectual climate of Rome’s fifteenth-century Jewish community was “depressing, and got no better in the following centuries.” The final blow came when the city was sacked by Imperial troops in 1527. This traumatic event was followed by a general downturn in the economy that soon proved catastrophic, as recorded by David de Pomis, a learned doctor in Spoleto (originally from Rome):
In the year 5287 [1527] fine gold disappeared opening the way for a baser metal. When the lansquenets sacked Rome, that powerful and famous city, the Imperial soldiers took everything we had, forcing us into bankruptcy.
Pope Sixtus V (Felice Peretti), who ruled from 1585–1590, was among the most open minded of the late-sixteenth-century popes. He was also one of the few who really paid attention to the city’s living conditions, clearing new streets and improving conditions in the countryside. He allowed the Jews to pursue whatever craft or career they wanted, exempted them from wearing distinctive badges, and allowed them to build schools and synagogues as necessary. After his reign, however, things again went sour. No hint of change came until the eighteenth century, and even then there were still many contradictions in the treatment of the Jews. In 1791, French Jews were the first in Europe to be emancipated from their ghettos, and the Roman community began to have a glimmer of hope. Unfortunately, the whole of Rome—not just its Jews—suffered from the rapid and chaotic chain of events in 1798–1799. Pope Pius VI (Giovanni Angelo Braschi) fled the city as Napoleon’s army approached, and was then deported across the Alps. French troops invaded the city, and a short-lived republic came and went. Napoleon established an Israelite Consistory, but did little else for the Jews—he didn’t want to offend the pope, as he’d later need his help to be crowned emperor.
The consistory didn’t last long. The Congress of Vienna and restoration of the papacy in 1814–1815 brought the pope and his absolute power back to Rome. For the Jews this meant an anguishing return to the ghetto. Pius IX (Giovanni Mastai Ferretti), who rose to the throne in 1846, experimented at first with more liberal policies. He abolished the forced homage performed atop the Capitoline, and ended required sermons, although this had little real impact. More importantly, he ordered that on the evening of April 17, 1848—Passover—the gates of the ghetto, which had had been closed every evening for about three centuries, be demolished; even this didn’t last long. After the brief interlude of the Roman Republic (discussed in Chapter XII), Pius IX returned to Rome profoundly changed. He took back the reins of government embittered by the trauma he’d endured, worried about the future, and disgusted by freedom of thought and the other trends he believed represented an intolerable dissolution of morality. He’d suffered through the unification of Italy, and now seemed unable to suffer the Jews, who he began to humiliate and treat harshly. Even if the gates of the ghetto could no longer be closed, he reinstated the ban on owning real estate, investing in mortgages, and doing business with Christians. He also imposed the payment of tributes and reinstated the practice of forced baptisms.
A serious incident occurred over this last imposition. At eight o’clock in the evening on June 20, 1858, five policemen and a monk of the Inquisition burst into the home of the Mortara family in Bologna and kidnapped Edgardo, their six-year-old boy. The authorities claimed Edgardo had been baptized two years earlier, by a Christian servant named Anna Morisi, when he was gravely ill. The boy was brought to Rome, where he was placed in the Institute for Neophytes, given a Catholic education, and later became a priest. This case caused great uproar, and influential individuals and representatives of foreign governments protested against the violent act. Young Edgardo was taken through the poorest and dirtiest streets in the ghetto to see the sad fate he’d escaped. Every Jewish community in Italy protested—except the Roman community, for clear reasons of political prudence. But abstaining from the protest still wasn’t enough to shelter it from the pope’s fury. On February 2, 1859, and for about six months after the fact, a group from the Roman community held audience with the pope. The secretary of the delegation, Sabatino Scazzocchio, had just finished his opening remarks when the pope attacked him, “Yes, yes, you gave a lovely demonstration of your faithfulness last year when you threw all of Europe into turmoil over the Mortara case.” The secretary tried to reply, but the pope, now furious, interrupted in ever more acerbic tones: “You, yes you, poured oil on the fire and fanned the flames … this was your gesture of appreciation for all the benefits you have received from me. Be careful, I can still hurt you, and hurt you very deeply. I could force you to go back into your hole … but such is my goodness, and so strong the piety I feel for you, that I forgive you, indeed I must forgive you.”
Abraham Berliner reported these words in his Geschichte der Juden in Rom (History of the Jews of Rome), based on notes taken at the time by one of the participants at the audience.10 He added that the pope, who quickly regretted venting his anger, turned to his chamberlain once the meeting was over and spoke “flattering words about Secretary Scazzocchio in a voice loud enough that the delegates, who were already out in the hall, could hear him.”
Even during the audience the tone calmed considerably, mostly because the delegates behaved cautiously and waited for their chance to speak, and the pope avoided using such abusive language in later meetings. On the other hand, Pius IX never missed the chance—at any encounter with a Jew, albeit in milder terms—to reassert his disapproval of the sin of a people he considered guilty of deicide. One example occurred on May 29, 1868, when delegates from the Jewish community visited the pope to thank him for the eleven silver medals awarded to Jewish doctors in recognition of their selflessness during the cholera epidemic. The pope answered them, “He who elevates us with his wonders can also bring us down. He can illuminate your mind so that you honor the pope as a sovereign and pastor, but only He, only God, can work the miracle of your conversion.”
The Jews of Rome had to wait until they became part of the Kingdom of Italy for full recognition of their rights. On October 13, 1870 (twenty days after the city was taken), two of them, Samuele Alatri and Settimio Piperno, were named city councilors, and another nine were elected to the national parliament. The Kingdom of Italy granted Jews full citizenship, and they could also now work as university professors, magistrates, and officials, and became some of the most influential leaders of the new country. They could also serve in the military; Jews had already fought with the Garibaldini to defend the Roman Republic in 1849, and later they were among the troops that disembarked in Libya in 1911 and fought in the trenches of World War I.
In 1885 the houses of the Jewish ghetto began to be demolished. This was part of an urban renewal effort accompanied, it must be said, by rampant real-estate speculation—as common in Rome as anywhere else, if not worse. Wider streets and dignified residences took the place of the unhealthy, humble dwellings that had been there before. In 1904 the new Jewish Temple on the Lungotevere de’ Cenci was completed; designed by architects Osvaldo Armanni and Vincenzo Costa in a style reminiscent of Assyrian and Babylonian art, the synagogue, with its cloister cupola set on a square drum, immediately became a prominent part of the Roman skyline. Some of the decorative elements from the older temples were preserved in its interior—including the seventeenth-century benches and niches made by Roman marble cutters and the Ark, which came from the Castilian synagogue. Today the synagogue also holds exhibitions about Rome’s Jewish community.
This peaceful coexistence lasted for thirty years, and many Jews abandoned the ghetto, moving to other parts of the city. It all came to an end when Benito Mussolini, head of government and the Fascist Party, broke the truce with one of his most shameful pieces of legislation—the racial laws of 1938. Why did Mussolini stain his record with such a crime, and what was his political rationale? Historians agree that Hitler put no direct pressure on him, even if in Germany the social marginalization of Jews had become widespread after the Nuremberg laws of 1935.
The Fascist leader perhaps thought it would be useful to create the specter of an “enemy” to help consolidate his regime, and profited from an anti-Semitic current that had begun to move across Europe—not just in Nazi Germany, but also in Austria, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. An anti-Semitic campaign was launched in Italian newspapers and “specialized” journals that republished, among other things, the famous Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1937. It was accompanied by a preface by Julius Evola, a phony sensationalist historian used by the regime to nourish a hatred most Italians didn’t really feel. But creating a “Jewish enemy” out of thin air served other purposes as well, including distracting public attention from colonial enterprises that had resolved none of the country’s many problems. Suggestions of Italians’ “racial purity” also helped combat the danger of mixed marriages between soldiers and colonial subjects. A very harsh law promulgated in 1937 made it punishable by three, four, or even five years in prison for an Italian citizen in the “territories of the Kingdom or the colonies to have a conjugal relationship with a subject of Italian East Africa.”
On July 13, 1938 the Manifesto della razza (Manifesto of Race), a theoretical basis for claiming the existence of an “Italian race,” was published, and Mussolini was apparently one of its editors. The text, presented as a “manifesto of racist scientists,” was signed by a group of “Fascist scholars” who proclaimed:
The present population of Italy is of Aryan origin, and its civilization is Aryan.… It is only legend that a huge number of people emigrated here in historical times.… A pure Italian race exists.… This proposition is based on the pure blood relationship that unites today’s Italians with past generations and millennia of the Italian people.… The time has come for Italians to declare themselves openly racist.
The manifesto’s concluding lines were explicit: “Jews do not belong to the Italian race.” On October 6, 1938, the Grand Council of Fascism (the same council that, five years later, toppled Mussolini’s reign) issued a “Declaration on Race”; it was a preview of the provisions that became law on November 17, 1938:
Marriage between any Italian man or woman and a member of non-Aryan races is forbidden; Jews shall be expelled from the National Fascist Party; Jews may not own or direct any kind of business, nor own more than 120 acres of land; they are excluded from military service; they will be removed from public sector jobs and schools in the Kingdom; there will be special regulations for the right to practice professions.…
Enzo Collotti, in his Il fascismo e gli ebrei (Fascism and Jews),11 explored the hypothesis that Mussolini’s behavior was influenced by psychological components: “He must have had the need, as he approached the politics of the Third Reich, to rid himself of a sense of inferiority.… Uncovering the Roman origins of the Italian people, he was convinced that ‘we are Mediterranean Aryans, pure.’ … He stoked a campaign of hatred against the Jews even though he was perfectly aware of what was happening in Germany. He knew exactly what the implications of persecuting the Jews were, and embraced even the most brutal aspects of that policy.”
And there was no shortage of brutal aspects: first came humiliation, misery, and exclusion from normal public life; then, after September 8, 1943, open persecution by the Nazis; the culmination arrived on Saturday, October 16, 1943, with the dramatic sacking of the Roman ghetto. On this day 2,091 Jews—including women, the elderly, and children—were rounded up, loaded onto armored cars, and sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Birkenau. That tragic day is reconstructed in a splendid short story by Giacomo Debenedetti titled 16 ottobre 1943.12
The roundup’s sinister preamble had already occurred. On the evening of September 26 the presidents of the Roman Jewish community and the Union of Jewish Communities were called to the German Embassy, where the SS Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Kappler, speaking with a feigned affability to mask his terrible ferocity, declared the Jews of Rome guilty on two accounts: first as Italians, for the betrayal of Germany; and second as Jews, members of the racial archenemy of all Germans. The German government then demanded a tribute of fifty kilos of gold to be delivered by eleven o’clock on the morning of September 28. They had thirty-six hours to gather over one hundred pounds of gold. In the event they should fall short, two hundred Jews would be rounded up and deported to Germany. When the representatives of the Jewish community asked if gold might be combined with cash, Kappler replied that he wouldn’t know what to do with banknotes and, in any case, he could easily have cash printed as necessary.
In the short time available a strong solidarity developed both in the Jewish community and with many non-Jewish Romans. According to Debenedetti, “The collection area was established in one of the community’s offices. The police precinct, which had finally begun to listen to us, provided regular patrols and extra security. A flood of people began to arrive, and it was remarkable. A trustworthy person was sitting at a table; next to him a goldsmith tested the offerings, and another weighed them.” Even the Vatican was moved, officially announcing that it had fifteen kilos of gold available should it be needed.
The amount demanded (and a bit extra) was collected and delivered on time, despite the Germans’ last-minute trick of making one of the ten five-kilo packages of gold disappear. There was no need of additional help to fulfill this task, but even their adherence to Kappler’s orders didn’t save the Roman Jews from the October 16 roundup.
It began at dawn on an autumnal day, drenched and slippery with rain. Shootings, breathless screams, lugubrious shouts, and doors kicked in with the butts of rifles resounded through the neighborhood’s streets—sounds of the roundups Rome has experienced so many times throughout its history. At five thirty in the morning almost four hundred German soldiers commanded by fourteen officers and noncommissioned officers—Italian Fascists were considered untrustworthy (in this case, rightly so) for this operation—were mobilized to hunt down the Jews. A hundred soldiers surrounded the ghetto, and the others were set loose to cover addresses outside the ghetto that had been identified with the help of Raffaele Aniello and Gennaro Cappa, two Fascist police officers. According to Debenedetti’s account:
A mix of screams and shouts reached the Via del Portico d’Ottavia: Mrs. S. appeared at the corner where the Via Sant’Ambrogio meets the Portico. It’s true that they took everyone, really everyone, worse than you can imagine. The families that had been rousted passed down the middle of the street in single file line, straggling a little. There was an SS soldier at the head of the line and one behind. Guarding the little groups, they kept them more or less in line, and pushed them forward with the butts of their machineguns, even though no one put up any resistance other than cries, moans, pleas for mercy, and bewildered questions.
Successive roundups yielded more Jews. In the end 1,067 men, 743 women, and 281 children were taken. These poor souls were loaded into an armored convoy that left Rome on Monday, October 18, at five after two in the afternoon, and arrived at Auschwitz at eleven o’clock Friday night, the 22nd. The prisoners—exhausted, thirsty, and in some cases dying—stayed locked in the trucks until dawn the next day, exactly a week after they’d been captured.
The troops who carried out this terrible task were sent to Rome expressly for that purpose, and some of the truck drivers took advantage of the opportunity to see Saint Peter’s. While the soldiers, wholly unconcerned about their human cargo, took in the basilica’s majesty, cries and pleas to the pope to intervene, to help them, came from inside the vehicles. Then the trucks started off again, and even that last hope was lost. There was no reaction from the pope, despite the fact that the crime took place almost “right under his window,” as the German ambassador to the Holy See, Ernst von Weizsäcker, wrote. On the 28th he sent a telegram to his ministry, satisfied that “the pressure on him notwithstanding, the pope was not moved to issue any protest against the deportation of Rome’s Jews.”
I’d like to cite two brief episodes from Debenedetti’s story that document, with the ruthless clarity details can often convey, the mood of that day, and what a major role the capriciousness of chance played in those hours. One tells of a young man who went for a coffee before he was dragged off with the others:
With a sort of a timid and tired smile he asked the man making the coffee, “What will they do with us?” These poor words are among the few left behind by the people as they left, and in them we hear the voice of someone who has returned for a moment to our regular, everyday life. He was among us, but our normal life was no longer his, and he had already entered a new, dark, terrible existence.
The second episode is even more touching in the horror it evokes:
Another woman thought she was safe by then. They had already taken her husband away; he had been hiding in the water cisterns. She and her four children, two of whom had diphtheria and high fevers, were fleeing and had gotten as far as Ponte Garibaldi. She saw a truck pass carrying her relatives, and let out a cry. The Germans pulled up beside her, seizing her and her children. An “Aryan” intervened and managed to save one of the girls, protesting that she was hers, but the child began to cry because she wanted to be with her mother, and she too was taken away.
Of the 2,091 deported, only seventy-three men and twenty-eight women returned alive, and all of them profoundly scarred by the inhuman experience of the death camps. On March 23, 1944, another seventy-five Roman Jews were shot to death, along with another 260 innocents, at the Fosse Ardeatine.
The most recent tragedy staged in the Roman ghetto happened five minutes before noon on Saturday, October 9, 1982. It was Shemini Atzeret (Hebrew for “eighth day of assembly”), following the seven-day celebration of Sukkoth, or Feast of the Tabernacles. The faithful were leaving the synagogue through the small iron gate onto the Via Catalana. A young man of Middle-Eastern appearance stopped on the sidewalk across the street, put his hand into a bag, smiled, and threw a grenade. Many fell, and then came a burst of machine-gun fire from about a dozen attackers. The police arrived immediately, but the terrorists managed to get away. The only commando successfully identified was Jordanian-Palestinian Osama Abdel Al Zomar, who was later condemned to life in prison by an Italian court. In the meantime, however, he’d taken refuge in Greece, and the Greek government refused the plea for his extradition. Sometime in late 1988 he boarded an Olympic Airlines flight from Athens to Tripoli and vanished into thin air.
The morning of the attack thirty-five people were wounded and one died, a three-year-old named Stefano Tachè, the first victim of anti-Semitic violence in Italy since the defeat of Nazi Fascism in 1945.
1. See also Ferdinand Gregorovius, The Ghetto and the Jews of Rome, trans. M. Hadas (New York: Schocken Books, 1948).
2. Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1913), 117.
3. Dio Cassius, Roman History (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1914), 128–29.
4. See also Tacitus, “The History,” in The Complete Works of Tacitus, ed. M. Hadas, trans. A. J. Church and W. J. Broadribb (New York: Modern Library, 1942).
5. Solomon Katz, “Pope Gregory the Great and the Jews,” in Jewish Quarterly Review, no. 24 (1933), 120–21.
6. See Massimo d’Azeglio, Things I Remember (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).
7. This sonnet, previously unpublished, appears here in a translation by Daniel Seidel.
8. See the English edition of The Life of Cola di Rienzo, trans. J. Wright, ed. A.M. Ghisalberti (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1975).
9. “Asianic” is used here in the stylistic sense, referring to the opposing Asianic and Attic styles of rhetoric in ancient Roman public speeches.
10. See Abraham Berliner, Storia degli Ebrei di Roma (Milan: Rusconi Editore, 1992), originally published as Geschichte der Juden in Rom (Frankfurt am Main: J. Kaufmann, 1893).
11. Enzo Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei. Le leggi razziali in Italia (Rome and Bari: Editore Laterza, 2003).
12. Giacomo Debenedetti, 16 ottobre 1943 (Turin: Einaudi, 2001).