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Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century

History

Stow, Kenneth R.

Europe

University of Washington Press

Generations of tourists visiting Rome have ventured into the small section between the Tiber River and the Capitoline Hill whose narrow, dark streets lead to the charming Fountain of the Tortoises, the brooding mass of the Palazzo Cenci, and some of the best restaurants in the city. This was the site of the Ghetto, within whose walls the Jews of Rome were compelled to live from 1555 until 1870. Kenneth Stow, leading authority on Italian Jews, probes Jewish life in Rome in the early years of the Ghetto. Jews had been residents of Rome since before the days of Julius Caesar, but the 16th century brought great challenges to their identity and survival in the form of Ghettoization. Intended to expedite conversion and cultural dissolution, the Ghetto in fact had an opposite effect. The Jews of Rome developed a subculture, or microculture, that ensured continuity. In particular, they developed a remarkably effective legal network of rabbinic notaries, who drew public documents such as contracts, took testimony, and arranged for disputes to go to arbitration. The ability to settle disputes relating to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and other internal matters gave Jews the illusion that they, rather than the papal vicar, were running their own affairs. Stow applies his concept of “social theater” to illuminate the role-playing that Jews adopted as a means of survival within the dominant Christian environment. He also touches briefly on Jewish culture in post-Emancipation Rome, elsewhere in Europe, and in America, and points the way toward a comparison with the acculturational strategies of other minorities, especially African Americans.

Generations of tourists visiting Rome have ventured into the small section between the Tiber River and the Capitoline Hill whose narrow, dark streets lead to the charming Fountain of the Tortoises, the brooding mass of the Palazzo Cenci, and some of the best restaurants in the city. This was the site of the Ghetto, within whose walls the Jews of Rome were compelled to live from 1555 until 1870. Kenneth Stow, leading authority on Italian Jews, probes Jewish life in Rome in the early years of the Ghetto.Jews had been residents of Rome since before the days of Julius Caesar, but the 16th century brought great challenges to their identity and survival in the form of Ghettoization. Intended to expedite conversion and cultural dissolution, the Ghetto in fact had an opposite effect. The Jews of Rome developed a subculture, or microculture, that ensured continuity. In particular, they developed a remarkably effective legal network of rabbinic notaries, who drew public documents such as contracts, took testimony, and arranged for disputes to go to arbitration. The ability to settle disputes relating to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and other internal matters gave Jews the illusion that they, rather than the papal vicar, were running their own affairs.Stow applies his concept of "social theater" to illuminate the role-playing that Jews adopted as a means of survival within the dominant Christian environment. He also touches briefly on Jewish culture in post-Emancipation Rome, elsewhere in Europe, and in America, and points the way toward a comparison with the acculturational strategies of other minorities, especially African Americans.

Univ of Washington Pr

The “1007 Anonymous,” an imaginative if brief text composed in the third or early fourth decade of the thirteenth century, illustrates the proper relations between Jews, their lay rulers, and the pope. The pope, consistent in applying laws that both restricted and protected Jews, is seen as a just ruler. Kings and dukes, by contrast, were inconsistent and capricious, threatening Jewish life.    This message had to be conveyed indirectly, and the “1007's” vehicle for doing so was a fictional story of murderous attack and forced conversion known as “The Terrible Event of the Year 1007.” Yet an examination of the details of this story—which include a direct borrowing from The Quest of the Grail composed in 1221, and a reference to coinage that could only have been made during the early thirteenth century—reveals the actual time of the “1007's” composition was later.             Similarly, the fact that the veracity of the “1007'” cannot be proven through a comparison with the earlier chronicles of Raoul Glaber and Ademar of Chabannes—as students have wrongly attempted in the past—was also demonstrated by the great French scholar Israel Levi at the turn of the twentieth century. No one paid him heed— regrettably, although he was absolutely correct. This book is therefore appropriately named Levi’s Vindication.

Levi's Vindication: The 1007 Anonymous "as It Really Is"

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Hebrew Union College Press

In 1555 the Roman Catholic papacy announced major innovations in its Jewry policy. Previously, despite the existence in theory of repressive canonical legislation, Jews living under direct papal rule had enjoyed relative freedom of movement and numerous exemptions from legal restrictions. The many papal expressions concerning the hoped-for conversion of the Jews had also remained no more than a pious wish. From 1555, however, and for the next three hundred years, the papacy insisted on the enforcement of all the repressive Jewry laws, and required Jews to live bound in ghettos. More threatening, it launched an active and by no means unsuccessful conversionary program. The present study examines the underlying causes and ideology of these actions. Based in part on documentation from the papal archives and from various publicist writers of the period, it concentrates on the De ludaeis et Aliis Infidelibus by Marquardus de Susannis, a core text which clearly illuminates the motives behind the new policy. This legal-polemical tract, dating from 1558, is also the first synthetic exposition of medieval Roman and canon Jewry law. The author has examined this text for its own merits, and an index of the laws and commentaries cited in the tract have been appended here as an introduction to the significant, yet all but neglected, subject of the Jews in medieval law. Because it reviews in detail a substantially unknown facet of the sixteenth-century papacy, and of canon law in general, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy merits the attention of both Jewish and Christian scholars.

Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy 1555 -1593

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

The Jewish Theological Seminary Press

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Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century

Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century

Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century

Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century

Levi's Vindication: The 1007 Anonymous "as It Really Is"

Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy 1555 -1593