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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

This narrative history surveying one thousand years of Jewish life integrates the Jewish experience into the context of the overall culture and society of medieval Europe. It presents a new picture of the interaction between Christians and Jews in this tumultuous era. Alienated Minority shows us what it meant to be a Jew in Europe in the Middle Ages. The story begins in the fifth century, when autonomous Jewish rule in Palestine came to a close, and when the papacy, led by Gregory the Great, established enduring principles regarding Christian policy toward Jews. Kenneth Stow examines the structures of self-government in the European Jewish community and the centrality of emerging concepts of representation. He studies economic enterprise, especially banking; constructs a clear image of the medieval Jewish family; and portrays in detail the very rich Jewish intellectual life. Analyzing policies of Church and State in the Middle Ages, Stow argues that a firmly defined legal and constitutional position of the Jewish minority in the earlier period gave way to a legal status created expressly for Jews, who in the later period were seen as inimical to the common good. It was this special status that paved the way for the royal expulsions of Jews that began at the end of the thirteenth century.

Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe

Americas

Harvard University 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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Books by Stow, Kenneth R.

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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

Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe

Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy 1555 -1593