Standing in the Jewish Ghetto in Rome
The ghetto was glittering. I was standing in the Piazza Giudea in Rome waiting for a tour to begin, and the sun was glinting off of the cobblestones in an unnatural way. When I got closer to one of the stones that was shining, I looked down and saw words engraved on a burnished bronze block. It had a name, a birth date, a death date, the date they were taken, and where they were murdered. I realized with a jolt that I was being dazzled by the reflections of dead Jews.
I would soon learn that these blocks are called “stumbling stones,” and you can find them in over 1200 cities throughout Europe. As of 2019, there were 70,000 of them installed across the continent to memorialize Jews murdered in the Shoah. Since I hear cheap references to the Holocaust every day, let me remind us: those 70,000 stones represent just 1.17% of the Jewish people murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in six years.
But I digress. Here I was in Rome, encircled by dead kin — those stolen in World War II, and those who had perished in the more than 300 years that the ghetto stood by papal decree. On the 14th of July, in the “year of our Lord” 1555, Pope Paul IV issued Cum Nimis Absurdum or rather “because it is absurd” in English. Guess what he thought was absurd? “Jews (whose guilt — all of their own doing — has condemned them to eternal slavery), access our society and even live among us.”
These words opened a document that would systematically strip Jews in the city of every right they had. The Jewish community in Rome was one of the oldest outside Southwest Asia. They had been there since the Romans carted them off from Judea in the aftermath of the Bar-Kokhba revolt in 138 CE. Historians estimate that the Roman Empire murdered, stole, or enslaved 580,000 Jews after the defeat.
It would be false to claim that the Jewish community had many rights in the 1400 years between that forced exile and this papal bull. Still, the decree fell like a hammer. Immediately, authorities herded thousands of Jews from throughout the city into a strip by the Tiber River, which flooded regularly. Once the Jews had been rounded up like rats, the Church set about seizing any property the Jews had held outside the ghetto and demolishing every synagogue they could find.
The Church then had the new ghetto walled off. The Pope demanded that the ghetto had only one way in and one way out. The Church forced the Jews to pay for the wall’s construction (unlike some, the Pope had the power to follow through on such a threat). At sundown each night, every Jew was required to be inside before they locked the gate until morning. The overcrowding was immense. 3 Jewish people lived on each square meter of the ghetto, roughly one person on every square foot. And each of the up to 10,000 Jews who lived there were required by the Pope’s decree to wear an emblem of yellow (the color of prostitutes), sewn to their clothes as a sign they were Jewish.
I learned much of this history, and more that I won’t share here, on the tour that day. But what got me the most — what still gets me today — is how I learned nothing new at all. Everything the guide described was familiar. Was the yellow emblem that different from the signs Jews were commanded to wear by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215? Hadn’t I heard of the Catholic Church stealing babies and raising them forcibly as Catholics in religious schools before? Hadn’t I heard about crowding a people group into small, unsanitary areas and forbidding them from being in a city at sundown? Hadn’t I seen photos of children starving in ghettos? I had heard all of this across time and the globe. The perpetrators had almost always been the same, but of course those on the receiving end of this divinely appointed mercy to save our souls and protect innocent Christians from our bestial contamination had changed with whatever wind was blowing the Empire’s sails.
Yet another thought rose inside me that still haunts the most Jewish corners of my own heart: how much the Jews of that ghetto must have celebrated when the Risorgimento came in the 1870s, after three centuries trapped inside it. What a shout for joy must have risen. Never mind that the vast majority of Rome’s Jewish population continued to live within the ghetto after that — they were free! Locked in no more. A new day had dawned for the Jews in Rome.
It’s an echo of a memory that isn’t mine. And whenever I remember it, a sunbeam flashes in my eyes. In an instant, I can see the booths that must have been erected around the ghetto on the day the Nazis came. After all, the 16th of October in 1943 was the middle of Sukkot. The Jews may have been hosting each other as guests in the booths or waving the lulav while they were quietly surrounded. The Nazis re-sealed the ghetto for the last time. Two days later, they loaded Jewish women, men, and children onto trains and sent them to Auschwitz. The light striking my eyes is now all that is left of those Jews.
Jew-hatred, much like Jews, somehow manages to live on. And I cannot discern if Antisemitism is a black mold within the house of Christ or if it’s the cornerstone. For wasn’t the Christian Church inaugurated with the death of an insignificant Jew? Didn’t the gentiles, too, jeer at him and poke him with sour wine, perhaps wishing he would just suffocate a bit faster? Could it be that the Church has tormented us for millennia as some cruel attempt at extracting divine power? If one dead Jew could redeem the world, what could the blood of millions of Jewish bodies do for Christendom’s insatiable maw?
It was in that ghetto that I finally made sense of every antisemitic comment I had heard in the Church. How unbearably redundant Christians are! Every insinuation that my God is dead or bloodthirsty. Each comment saying my covenant with God is broken or obsolete. That surely, the Church is the new Chosen One because of my ancestors’ sins. That surely, God has abandoned these vile Jews to be the oppressors of the marginalized. How absurd it is that Jews would access the beloved society as they cling to the ways of the Pharisees. How absurd it is that these two-bit white colonizers would live next to us in the fight for liberation. Everything I have heard recycles the Pope’s own hackneyed claims, for he did not come up with them, either.
Today, I live within the walls of a Christian nation. More Christian than it cares to believe, for hating the Jew is the most Christian of habits. Here on these hills, the Christ-followers mock us saying, “You can’t save yourselves, yet you say you are Israel! Let God deliver you if God wants you. For you say that you are the sons of God.”
It’s the most familiar thing in the world. But I’m comforted by the thought that one day, I too will shine like the sun in my descendants’ eyes. I will shine in the place where they tried to extinguish me.