Cory Holt

Rome's Jewish community is the oldest in Europe. Jews are known to have inhabited Rome since before Christ. They were living in Rome long before Roman emperor Titus destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, long before the descendants of St. Peter proclaimed Rome the holy city of Christendom. The synagogue therefore preceded the Vatican by many years.
Jews were first brought to Rome as slaves by Pompey the Great during the first century BC. They subsequently settled along the banks of the Tiber River. The historian Josephus Flavius, a smart military man who eventually betrayed his own people, estimated at least eight thousand Jews living there in 4 BC, although the actual number may have been much greater.
In 70 AD, Titus brought thousands of Jewish slaves to Rome to march in the triumph held by Vespasian for his son's conquest of Israel. The Portico d'Ottavia was the sight of this triumph. Titus dragged the slaves behind his chariot and carried with him the spoils of the Temple of Solomon. (Ironically, the Roman Empire came to appreciate the Jews for their financial and medical skills.)
During the imperial period, Jews continued to arrive in Rome, peaking at around fifty thousand.
During the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church countered the Protestant Reformation by lashing out against religious heterodoxy in all forms. As the circle against them tightened, some Jews, out of fear, fled to other lands. They were chastised by their brethren, who argued that things which happened to Jews elsewhere, such as Spain (the center of the Inquisition), could never happen in Italy. By the 1550's, many of the Jews who remained were burned alive, or suffered similar fates.
Jews in cities across Europe came to be confined in their neighborhoods. The existence of these neighborhoods gave birth to the term "ghetto." The ghetto originated in Venice's Cannareggio district, where Jews were first confined, then quickly developed in other cities, including Rome. In 1555, Pope Paul IV established the Portico d'Ottavia as the Jewish ghetto in Rome. (By the mid-sixteenth century, and perhaps much earlier, the Portico d'Ottavia had become a predominantly Jewish area.) This period of confinement lasted more than two centuries.
Life in the ghetto was harsh and degrading. As late as the second half of the nineteenth century, some of the most oppressive Jewish ghettos in the world existed in Italy. Jews were even forced to wear yellow badges on their clothes as identification. In many cities, Jews could work only as street peddlers, hawkers, rag-pickers, dealers in second-hand merchandise, and pawnbrokers. Women were not allowed to make and sell new clothes, so they mended old clothes for the men to sell. Poverty was widespread. The housing was wretched. The stench was appalling. Because the population continued to grow within the limited space of the ghetto, buildings were continually built upward, often collapsing.
Streets along the ghetto were therefore dark and narrow. German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius, writing in 1853, described the Roman ghetto as "the dreariest quarter in Rome, a corner of filth and poverty…." Ghetto houses stand in a row, tower-like masses of bizarre design, with numerous flowerpots in the windows and countless household utensils hanging on the wall. The rows ascend from the river's edge, and the Tiber's dismal billows wash against the walls…. Squeezed into a dismal and depressing corner of the city of Rome, across the Tiber from Trastevere, Rome's Jewry lives as it has from antiquity, virtually shut off from humanity.
Whereas many of the ghetto laws in the Italian city-states had been applied with a certain leniency, in Rome they were enforced with increasing vigor. Italian Jews paid extremely high taxes with, obviously, no hope of appeal. Police could enter their homes and confiscate their property at will.
Jews often dealt with their isolation and despair by educating themselves. Illiteracy in northern ghettos was surprisingly rare at a time when it was otherwise the rule in cities. (During the coming years of assimilation, these Jews would become highly cosmopolitan and distant from Jewish orthodoxy, whereas the Jews of Rome would remain hardly literate, deeply religious, and strongly linked to the life and traditions of their community.)
Permanent emancipation from the ghetto did not occur in Italy until unification. The process began around the middle of the nineteenth century. The Roman ghetto was the last to be emancipated, in 1870, following the defeat of Vatican forces and Italian unification.
Afterward, Jews began almost immediately to appear in positions of prominence and distinction (suggesting both the capabilities of the Jews and that the general Italian population had not shared the prejudices of its rulers). Jewish assimilation into the Italian mainstream extended well into the years of fascism. (Still, a census taken in 1938 by the Fascist government showed that more than half of Rome's 12,000 Jews remained in the ghetto, or just across the Tiber River in the working-class neighborhood of Trastevere.)
Around 1900, as part of an urban renewal plan aimed at improving hygiene and sanitation, the Roman ghetto was demolished and rebuilt. Old tenement buildings were leveled. Narrow, crooked streets and courtyards were replaced by broader, straighter, and fewer streets. The Tiber River, once the cause of frequent flooding within the ghetto, was channeled between tall embankments to prevent flooding. Finally, of the old ghetto, only Via del Portico d'Ottavia and a few buildings remained. Via del Portico d'Ottavia became the boundary between the old and the new, for along one side stood medieval buildings, on the other side stood the contemporary. As part of the urban renewal plan, the great synagogue, bearing a distinctive square dome, was constructed.
Meanwhile, Benito Mussolini's rise to power in 1922 brought not the slightest change to Italy's treatment of Jews. In fact, many Jews became loyal Fascists from the party's inception. This suggests two things: that Jews had been thoroughly integrated into Italian society, and that Mussolini's movement was originally as free of anti-Semitism as any other political party in the country. (In fact, Mussolini's mistress and influential associate for many years, Margherita Sarfatti, was Jewish.)
Fascism in Italy triumphed during the decade of the 1920's and most of the 1930's. As well, most Jews during this era were middle-class professionals and had lived in Italy for many generations. They also tended to be very patriotic. Yet as early as 1934, events occurring in Italy foreshadowed the persecution of Jews which would ensue the following decade.
In 1934, Mussolini still regarded Austria within his own realm of influence, and he intended to resist German desires of expansion there. Yet Mussolini was reluctant to alienate the German dictator Adolf Hitler. It was this reluctance which would eventually lead to the Duce's reversal in policy toward Italy's Jews. One method Mussolini discovered of appeasing Hitler, while still resisting him, was to implement his own anti-Semitic campaign in Italy.
In 1936, Mussolini appointed his pro-German son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, as foreign minister. Soon Mussolini aligned himself undeniably with Hitler.
Anti-Semitism was clearly growing in Italy (and independently of the Nazis).
Many media attacks began to center on foreign Jews, citing them as the cause of housing shortages, high rent, high prices, food scarcities, high unemployment, low wages, crowded schools, crime, and many other social and economic ills. In Manifesto of the Racial Scientists, a group of "scientists" attempted to justify the coming racial laws. The manifesto claimed that "…the population and civilization of Italy today is of Aryan origin…," that "…there exists a pure Italian race…," and that "…Jews do not belong to the Italian race…." (Interestingly, during the German occupation of Rome a few years later, the Germans would be unable to recognize the Italian Jews on sight. Because they had lived in Rome for more than two thousand years, they were pure Italians.)
Finally, on November 17, 1938, Fascism became officially anti-Semitic. On this day, the bulk of what would be known simply as "the racial laws" became effective. These laws greatly limited the rights of Italy's Jews. In short, the racial laws decreed that marriage between Jews and non-Jews was illegal, that Jews were prohibited from owning or managing companies involved in military production, or factories which employed more than one hundred people or exceeded a certain value. Jews could not own land more than a certain value, serve in the armed forces, employ non-Jewish Italian domestics, or belong to the Fascist party. Jews were also forbidden from working in banks, insurance companies, and the government. The laws also attempted to resolve the question of precisely who was Jewish. Since the Jews of Rome had been assimilating into the general Italian populace for sixty-eight years, inter-marriage and conversion had become common. The result, obviously, was confusion.
Following the racial laws of 1938, many Jews either emigrated or converted. By July, 1943, at least twelve thousand Italian Jews (about twenty-one percent of Italy's total Jewish population) had done so.
Among those Italian Jews who remained, the racial laws abruptly terminated most jobs and education. Some two hundred teachers, four hundred government employees, five hundred private employees, one hundred and fifty military personnel, and twenty-five hundred professionals lost their jobs. Two hundred university students, one thousand students in secondary schools, and four thousand four hundred in elementary schools were also affected.
In 1939, a series of subsequent decrees further degraded Italian Jews. They had become victims of senseless harassment. Jews could no longer own radios, place advertisements or death notices in newspapers, publish books, hold public conferences, list their names and numbers in telephone directories, or visit popular vacation areas. (This last act was initiated during the summer, when many were already vacationing. They had to return home.)
In June, 1940, the government (for reasons of "national security") revoked the vending licenses of Jewish street peddlers, thus depriving ghetto Jews of even meager livelihoods.
Yet at a time when the Jewish population should have been demoralized, a new sense of Judaism began to appear. The Jewish schools and the laws themselves helped to instill an awakening of Judaism into a population that had been highly assimilated and previously indifferent to its Jewishness, a group that had for many decades considered itself Italian and in no way different than any Italian Catholic. This new awareness helped the Jews to appreciate their heritage. Without the racial laws, most would never have made such examinations.
Meanwhile, the morning following Mussolini's declaration of war on the Allies, Italian police began arresting foreign Jews in Italy. In the beginning, they seized only men between the ages of 18 and 60. Many of these Jews were held in internment camps in the north, although a secondary system of detainment was maintained, known as enforced residence, in which entire families were often held under surveillance in their homes, usually in small villages. By September, 1939, about six thousand five hundred of Italy's ten thousand foreign and denationalized Jews had left the country.
While Italian Jews under Fascism were in no danger of deportation, and while their conditions were more favorable than those in other European countries, life remained difficult. Arrests, the internment camps, and enforced residence were not limited to foreign Jews. About two hundred Italian Jews were arrested during the early days of the war, and by 1943, their number had increased to over one thousand.
Because the racial laws prevented Jews from serving in the Italian military, resentment among non-Jews was great, despite the preference of many Jews to serve. In order to mollify this resentment, a decree issued on May 6, 1942 required all Italian Jews between the ages of 18 and 55, without exception, to register for labor service. In August, 1942, with Italy losing the war, and amid increasing resentment, all able-bodied Jewish men were ordered to perform manual labor for virtually no money. Whereas in many Italian cities this order was mostly ignored, in Rome it was widely enforced.
Meanwhile, at around 10:45 on the night of July 25, 1943, a clear, hot night, cries of "Evviva Badoglio!" were heard in the streets of Rome. The people were happy. Mussolini had been removed. (After 1938, Mussolini's popularity had declined steadily.) Marshal Pietro Badoglio was the new prime minister of Italy. Fascist leaders were in hiding. (It was now they, ironically, who were being hunted.) Although Badoglio announced the war would continue, no one seemed to notice, for all of Italy was in celebration.
For all Italians, including the Jews, Badoglio's forty-five days in power provided hope, despite the desperate reality. Six German divisions consisting of about 130,000 men were stationed in Italy that July. By September, the six divisions had multiplied to eighteen. During that span, the seven Italian divisions in place never increased.
Also, Badoglio took virtually no measures to protect Jews from the Germans. Indeed, Badoglio took measures to protect no one, less himself and the king, Vittorio Emmanuele III. This neglect would prove most disastrous, of course, for the Jews. Despite protests by Jewish leaders on behalf of their people, the Badoglio government refused to destroy the many lists in its possession containing the names and addresses of Jews. (Predictably, nearly all of these lists would soon be recovered by the Germans.)
Finally, a core of bitter, unemployed, and ignored Fascists went largely unnoticed. These Fascists were becoming much more fanatical than when their party was in power. Looking for someone to blame for their plight, they became increasingly anti-Semitic, and patiently waited for their time to come.
Since Badoglio failed to provide a defense for Italy, the Allies, alarmed by the massive accumulation of German troops on Italian soil, announced an armistice on September 8, 1943. Badoglio announced the signing of the armistice. Then he and the king fled Rome, leaving no instructions for the Italian army. American and British forces, meanwhile, launched a major landing on the Italian peninsula.
At the time, Rome appeared to be safe. Six divisions of Italian soldiers were stationed in or around the city. On the night of September 8, Rome was deserted and peaceful. Families celebrated quietly in their homes.
But the next day, German troops appeared everywhere. Tanks, armored cars, and machine guns were located at every street corner. It was announced on radio that it was forbidden for Italians to carry arms. Any Italian with a gun would be sent to jail, and the penalty for firing at a German soldier was death. It was forbidden to ride a bicycle, walk along certain sidewalks or cross certain streets, forbidden to telegraph or telephone outside the city, spend the night at friends' houses. It was dangerous for one to carry packages under his arm, walk rapidly, have a beard grown too recently or wear dark glasses. To hide a fugitive or to listen to the Allied radio broadcasts from Bari or Palermo were to risk one's life.
Within two days, the Nazis had taken control of most of Italy and captured entire divisions of well-armed Italian troops. Indeed, the occupation of Rome had begun.