Yesterday morning I took a tour of Rome’s Jewish ghetto. I wanted to write about it while it’s still fresh in my mind, but the day got away from me yesterday. Today I have nothing scheduled until late this afternoon, so I’m going to use the time to catch up on rest and on writing.
I’m way behind in my blogging. I’ve seen and done a lot of awesome things in the last seven days. But yesterday’s tour was one of those memorable experiences that filled my heart and my brain, and it’s already starting to leak out. So if I don’t put pen to paper, as it were, quickly, I’ll lose it forever.
I’ll get back to the other stuff later.
Micaela Pavoncello
I heard about Micaela from Rick Steves. Here’s an excerpt from his TV show:
I contacted her through her website and signed up for what I thought was going to be a private tour. But it turned out to be a group tour, which saved me a lot of money. And it turned out to be one of the best tours I’ve ever taken anywhere. I’d put it on a par with Amir in Sarajevo and Mateusz in Wrocław.
It wasn’t really a tour. We visited the Jewish Museum, where she mostly told us stories about the Jews in Rome. Then we visited the Tempio Maggiore, where she told us more stories. And then we walked around a little as she told us still more stories.
Micaela is a brilliant storyteller. I expected the tour to be a lot like what she and Rick did and what they talked about. But that excerpt gives no hint of what it was actually like. So I just want to share some of the stories.
Most of what I’m writing is based on Micaela’s stories, so for simplicity’s sake, I won’t keep saying, “Micaela told us…” Just assume that’s the case, though I may supplement her stories with details from online research.
Origins
In the video Micaela alludes to the origins of Jews in Rome, but there’s more to it than that, which she shared with us yesterday.
When the Jews from Jerusalem came to Rome in 161 BCE, they were trying to forge an alliance. The Maccabees had just a few years earlier defeated the Seleucid king Antiochus and rededicated the Temple, and now they wanted Rome’s help.
The help they got wasn’t the help they needed. Roman defeated the Seleucid Empire, and for a while the Kingdom of Judea had a degree of autonomy under the Hasmonean dynasty (the family of Judas Maccabeus). But in 63 BCE the Roman Republic conquered Judea. The deaths of Pompey (48 BCE) and Julius Caesar (44 BCE) relaxed Rome’s grip on the Hasmonean kingdom, but in 37 BCE Herod the Great became king, and Hasmonean rule ended. In 70 CE, when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, and the diaspora began. Jews were expelled from Judea and dispersed around the ancient world.
Except they were already in Rome.
Roman Jews, as Micaela explains to Rick in the video, are neither Sephardic nor Ashkenazic. Their traditions, their style of worship, even their language (Giudaico-Romanesco, still spoken by a few elderly Jews in Rome) are unique to Rome. Micaela’s father tells her their family was in Rome before Julius Caesar. I don’t know whether she can trace her lineage all the way back over 2000 years, but that is certainly a heritage worthy of recognizing. (I can barely trace mine back three generations.)
Myth: Jewish slaves built the Colosseum
When I took the tour of the Colosseum the other day, our guide told us that it was built by 50,000 Jewish slaves brought back by Titus after his plunder of Jerusalem. That’s what all the history books say as well, going all the way back to Josephus. But Micaela says no. She told us the plunder Titus brought back from Jerusalem funded the construction of the Colosseum. The actual labor was carried out by Roman citizens and by slaves from many regions of the empire.
The Ghetto
Papal decrees protected the Jews from persecution in the middle ages. The Jews were entitled to liberty and property and freedom to worship.
Everything changed in 1492, when Spain expelled its Jews. The Jewish population of Rome swelled with refugees. And now there was a new enemy: Protestantism. As a result of the Reformation, the Roman church set out to protect itself against the heresy of anything that was not Catholic, and the Jews got swept into that.
In 1555 Pope Paul IV forcibly moved all of Rome’s Jews into the flood zone across from Trastevere, creating the ghetto. There they lived, walled in, crowded, for three centuries. Their numbers grew but the size of the ghetto didn’t. They could go out by day but had a curfew every night. They had to wear yellow scarves and caps.
Churches in the ghetto
Unlike in Spain, where th punishment for heresy was hanging, the Pope wanted to convert the Jews. (To help us, Micaela said with an eyeroll.) At all the gates were churches. The churches had Hebrew scriptures engraved on their facades. Jews were forced to attend Mass and were exhorted to convert.
Of course, the Jews didn’t want to listen to sermons telling them they should convert or be condemned to hell. So they stuffed wax in their ears. Sometimes they would nod off, and the Church instructed police to wake them up, which they did by beating them. Today Italian mothers tell their disobedient children, “You’d better behave, or I’ll wake you up.” They probably don’t know the origin of this expression.
The walls of the ghetto were finally torn down in 1848, but only after Italian unification in 1870, when the secular Kingdom of Italy replaced religious rule by the Vatican, were the Jews granted full rights and citizenship. The city tore down the old ghetto buildings and rebuilt the district on a new street plan. Today it’s considered a desirable upscale neighborhood.
The Temple
The former ghetto continued to serve as the center of Jewish life in Rome, and when the time came to build a grand synagogue, the Jewish community chose to put it in the ghetto. Construction began in 1901 and it opened in 1904.
The basement of the Temple now houses the Jewish Museum, but when Micaela was young, they held youth services downstairs. Of course, you walked to synagogue on the Sabbath. But they would ride the bus and get off several blocks away and then walk the rest of the way.
World War II
Mussolini encted a number of racial laws limiting the freedom of the Jews, but there were no Jewish abductions in Italy. After he was deposed in July 1943, Italy joined the Allied Powers and declared war on Germany. But on September 9, the Nazis occupied Rome. The new king, Victor Emanuel III, fled to the south, leaving Pope Pius XII more or less as the de facto Italian leader. Herbert Kappler, SS Lieutenant Colonel Commander of the Gestapo in Rome, met with Jewish leaders on September 26 and demanded a payment of 50 kg of gold within 36 hours or he would deport 200 members of the Jewish community to the death camps.
The chief rabbi went to the Vatican to ask for help, and the Pope offered a loan with no interest and no deadline for repayment. But the Jews came up with the gold on their own from jewelry and other valuables and made the payment on September 28.
Nevertheless, on October 16, 1943, the Germans surrounded the Jewish neighborhood and began rounding up Jews. They took over 1,000 to Auschwitz. Few survived.
According to Micaela, the Pope did not nearly enough. There is significant evidence that the Pope disapproved of using the Vatican and other church property to hide the Jews.
Emanuele
She told us the story of Emanuele. We were standing outside an apartment building where, she told us, Emanuele lives.
Emanuele was 12 years old on October 16, 1943. He was asleep in the morning when the Germans came. Emanuele looked out the windows and saw his mother being loaded into a truck by soldiers with machine guns. He ran down after her, and the Germans put him in the truck. She kicked him, pushing him out of the truck and said, “He’s not Jewish.” He quickly ran away.
That was the last time Emanuele saw his mother.
He didn’t know where to go. He boarded a tram and told the ticket-taker what happened. The ticket-taker allowed him to ride on the tram for several days, and spread the news among all the ticket-takers. They all helped Emanuele with blankets and food, they kept him safe and they kept him hidden. He lost track of time.
After several days he was reunited with his father. His mother was killed at Auschwitz. Only one woman returned to Rome after the war.
He still lives in the same apartment in the same building. He is 93 years old.
A little further on, we ran into Emanuele in the street. He was heading to the Jewish bookstore where we were going to finish our tour.
There is a book about Emanuele’s story.
Popes
Three popes have visited Tempio Maggiore.
John Paul II
John Paul II visited in 1986. It was an unannounced visit. The rabbi was not prepared. No one knew the proper protocol. Do I shake his hand? Call him “Signor Papa”?
When the Pope entered he walked to the rabbi and embraced him. He whispered in his ear, “You are my elder brother.”
When the rabbi told congregants later what the Pope had said, some responded, “In the Bible, the younger brother always kills the older brother.”
Benedict XVI
Previously his name was Joseph Ratzinger. Micaela said she and others have a nickname for him. (I originally published it here, but I invited Micaela to read this, and she asked me to remove it “Just if you care for my life.” I’ll just say it rhymes with Ratzinger.)
Benedict XVI received an invitation from the congregation shortly after his investiture in 2005. He finally came in 2010 and sat on the bimah. In the congregation right in front of him were a group of Holocaust survivors. Micaela was sitting in the women’s section in the balcony.
Benedict got up to speak and defended the church’s role in saving Jews during World War II. Micaela was disgusted, and wished she had the nerve to lead the Holocaust survivors out of the synagogue.
Francis
Pope Francis visited in 2016. Micaela had nothing nice to say about him. She talked about how Argentina, where Francis is from, opened its doors to Nazis after World War II.
As I feared, I no longer remember the vivid, charming, funny and sad stories Micaela shared with us. I just remember walking away feeling so exhilarated.
And hungry for fried artichoke and cheesecake from Pasticceria Boccione.
Check out all my photos from the day (including from the pasta cooking class I took in the evening).
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