Narrating Over the Ghetto of Rome

Abstract

For three centuries a walled ghetto separated the city's Jews from the rest of the population, its gates opening at dawn and closing at dusk. 1 In the form of a rectangular trapezoid, the ghetto contained two main streets running parallel to the Tiber, several small streets and alleys, three piazze and four piazzette that together occupied a third of the seven-acre enclosure. The space was densely populated, and extraordinary measures had followed population growth: additional stories perched atop row houses with annex constructions protruding every which way. (See Figure 1.) Except for interludes under Napoleon and the Roman Republics (1798-99, 1808-15, 1849), the ghetto operated under papal control until the unification of Rome with Italy in 1870. 2 Even under the new regime, the quarter remained the center of Jewish life in the city. Shops lined the streets, and many Jews, especially the poor, continued to reside within the old confines, together with a religious school, a rabbinical college, benevolent aid societies, and five small synagogues in a single edifice called the Cinque Scole. 3 (See Figure 2.) Then, in 1885, 330 years after Paul IV ordered local Jews into the ghetto, the City of Rome ordered them out.