STUDY QUESTIONS

Kenneth R. Stow, "The Consciousness of Closure: Roman Jewry and Its Ghet" in David B. Ruderman, ed., Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (New York, 1992)

In 1555, Paul IV enclosed the Jews of Rome within the walls of what would eventually be known as the Roman Ghetto. A ghetto already existed, of course, that of Venice, established by the Serenissima in 1516. Yet, although the Venetian area of forced Jewish residence was called from the start "the ghetto" -- clearly after the previous name of the place (meaning foundry) where this residential area was established -- in Rome, the name ghetto was not at first used. Originally, in fact, Jews did not abstractly conceive of their residential area as a place and a space requiring a name. The first documented Jewish reference known to me, to the new residential situation -- which occurred in September 1555 -- noted simply (in Hebrew) that "the Pope has ordered the Jews to live [lit., to be] together."

Jews and other contemporaries normally called the new residential zone the serraglio, or, more specifically, the serraglio degli hebrei -- incidentally, the same name used to refer to the area near the Roman Porta Ripetta, previously known as the Ortaccio, where Pius V and Sixtus V intended to enclose Roman prostitutes. The name serraglio was widely accepted. Isaac Piatelli, the Jews' own notary, who drew his acts in Hebrew and whose career spanned 60 years, used serraglio until the end of his days in 1605. However, in May 1589, Rabbi Pompeo del Borgo, also a Jewish notary, who had been drawing acts (in Italian) since I578 -- that is, already for more than a decade -- dropped the customary serraglio, and, in its stead, he referred to nostro (our) Ghet. Pompeo repeated this usage on other occasions, sometimes spelling the word gette. Following his example, a third Jewish notary, Simone de Castelnuavo, spoke of the gete, gette, ghet, even the ghetto. To be sure, these notaries, in particular, Pompeo never completely deserted serraglio, but some form of ghet or gette became the established norm. For Roman Jewry, the serraglio had become the ghetto, or, more simply -- and frequently -- the ghet.

Admittedly, the name ghetto had previously been used to specify Jewish quarters beside those in the original Ghetto of Venice. As early as 1536, Rabbi David ha Cohen of Corfu applied the name to the quay (jetty, getto) in Genova where Jews fleeing Spain in 1492 were retained in quarantine. This usage has led to the speculation that the name may actually come from gettare, or the Latin jactare, (to throw). More probably, R. David was making the specific Venetian name into a generic one referring to any area of enforced Jewish residence. The same process -- applying the specific to the general -- might also explain Pompeo del Borgo's usage. But should we draw this facile conclusion, we would be ignoring why it took Roman Jews thirty-four years (from 1555 to 1589) to switch from serraglio to some form of ghetto, and why Pompeo himself did not make the switch until he had been at work as a notary for over ten years. Perhaps, therefore, some event occurred in the year 1589, which may more properly account for Pompeo's switch. Moreover, why did Pompeo adopt specifically ghet, gette, etc. -- forms that in terms of both their spelling and their then current Italian pronunciation were homologous with the Hebrew word, get (with a hard g), meaning a bill of divorce? Could it be that in the Jews' initially casual reference in 1555 to their residential district -- saying that the pope simply willed that the Jews live together -- they were optimistically hiding from the truth; by switching to the pointed ghet -- a switch that was of course made by others than Pompeo alone -- the Jews were signifying a new awareness? Namely, that they had finally understood that there was to be no going back: The ghetto was to be a permanent institution and fact of life; and the Jews themselves had been given a bill of divorce, at once physical and emotional, relegating them to the margins of Roman Christian society.

At first glance, such a suggestion seems to be preposterous. Pompeo del Borgo, as already mentioned, began to use ghet in May 1589. This was immediately after an important event; however, that event was one which should have buoyed up Jewish spirits, not made Jews think in terms of a "divorce." For in February 1589, the then reigning pope, Sixtus V, had enlarged the Roman ghetto, adding to it the sector that eventually was called via Fiumara. And the pope had acted ostensibly to relieve the ghetto's unbearable overcrowding. In addition, to suggest that the Jews were irrevocably "divorced" from Christian society during the reign of Sixtus V seems contrary to fact. Historians have invariably described as moderate the main lines of Sixtus V's policies toward the Jews. They were a respite from the draconian precedents set by Paul IV and Pius V, not to mention from the actions of Sixtus' immediate predecessor, Gregory XIII. In particular, Sixtus cancelled Pius V's 1569 decree expelling the Jews from all places of the Papal State except Rome and Ancona. And a number of Jews, who received banking licenses, did reestablish residences in various papal State localities. Sixtus also eased many commercial restrictions imposed by Gregory and Pius V, and he further seems to have encouraged some notable Jewish business ventures. A somewhat shadowy figure known as Magino was even given an exclusive patent on a glass-making process, and he, together with other Jews, was also called upon to increase the production of silk worms and cloth.

Furthermore, we do not have to view these programs as acts of papal magnanimity; no papal Jewry policy, for that matter, should ever be viewed in such moralizing, rather than historically proper, analytical terms. Rather, Sixtus' actions, as just described, correspond to his overall policies, and they fit in well with his image as politician and head of state. It was his desire, as is so well known, to expand wherever possible the financial base and independence of the Papal State. Sixtus was also a practical man, seeking to keep the poor out of debt. And that included the Jews, whose ability to meet tax payments was rapidly deteriorating thanks to previous papal financial sanctions. To avoid the embarrassment of supporting the Jewish community with ecclesiastical charity, it was necessary to allow Jews to grow economically, even if that entailed raising the permitted interest rate to as high as 24 percent. Even Paul IV,  after all, had only regulated interest rates, not cancelled them entirely. Why should Sixtus V not follow suit? Besides, the regrowth of Jewish banking and the new revenues it generated did more than aid the Jews to liquidate their debts -- which the papacy, and Sixtus in particular, once again in accord with his overall programs had otherwise begun to fund by having Jews invest in various governmental securities known as Monti. The revenues of Jewish banking also allowed Sixtus to impose new business taxes, which he indeed did collect from Jews who opened loan banks outside of Rome. More importantly, the banks scattered throughout the Papal State provided agricultural credit to poor farmers, a group Sixtus was especially concerned to assist, just as he also emphasized that Roman Jewish bankers were to supply credit to poor urban wool workers.

Even the expansion of the ghetto may be said to have accorded with Sixtus' broader political needs. One of his aims had been to revive the sluggish Roman wool industry. Toward this end, he had appointed Cardinal Santa Croce as chief administrator. As it turned out, however, the cardinal was also the prime owner of real estate -- 27 percent of it, in fact -- on the land that in 1589 was to be enclosed within ghetto walls. This enclosure was a godsend to owners. Eventually ghetto rents were regulated. But in these early ghetto years, rents steadily increased. Furthermore, there was immediate profit in leasing houses to Jews, who scrambled to purchase a long-term lease, the cazaga -- actually the name of an old Jewish leasing device -- but still had to pay the owner (either directly or through a subtenant) an annual rent. Most of all, as soon as a house was placed within ghetto walls, its own walls rose higher -- by as many as three or four stories -- to accommodate the numerous applicants for previously unavailable housing. Jewish notarial texts describe this building activity in detail. Against this backdrop, one may easily venture that one reason behind the expansion of the ghetto, and particularly on the via Fiumara site, was Cardinal Santa Croce's direct urging and Sixtus V's reciprocal sense of obligation to a devoted civil servant. The expansion of the ghetto also profited another papal faithful, namely, the architect Domenico Fontana, who planned and executed so many of Sixtus' grandiose projects. Fontana built the ghetto's new walls and gates, and in return was given an annual stipend that his heirs continued to collect through the end of the ghetto period in 1870. Finally, although only indirectly related to the ghetto's expansion, we should not be surprised to find as an owner of property there one Camilla Peretti -- Sixtus' sister! -- who was the titular owner of property originally purchased by the pope himself. If this was so, then Sixtus' attitude toward the Jews and the ghetto was also integral to his policy of Peretti familial aggrandizement. Camilla certainly was supposed to benefit from Magino's silk enterprises. The letter granting Magino his franchise also awarded Camilla one-half of all Magino's profits.
 

Yet should we not be warned by what Paolo Prodi has so recently affirmed? The Papal State was a Tempelstadt, and its head was a religious leader. Aims of statecraft and faith often intertwined; they became indistinguishable and naturally reinforcing. I have indirectly supported this argument in a book that appeared more or less simultaneously with Prodi's, in 1982, arguing that modes of papal taxation of the Jews were dependent on papal conversionary goals, as well as on fiscal ones. The policies of Sixtus V, whether they were those related to the Jews, the Church, or the Papal State, were no exception to this schema. Indeed, our discussion here would be faulty were it to insist that purely pragmatic political or economic motives alone governed Sixtus' policies toward the Jews.

The concept of an enclosed ghetto was highly compatible with the sixteenth-century papacy's overall program of reform. The otherwise massively threatened Catholic world had to be defended, not only from the Lutherans, but also from the so-called "Jewish contamination" that ecclesiastical radicals had always feared. The surest way to this end was through segregation and enclosure. The ghetto thus responded to St. Paul's warning in Galatians that a little leaven sours the dough, that too much contact with Jews imperils Christian salvation, and that given too much Jewish provocation, it was best to dismiss Esau, the son of the servant woman Hagar, in order to protect Isaac, the son of Sara the freewoman (Gal. 4:2I-5:13), that is, to dismiss the Jew, whom the Church had persistently identified with Esau; the Church, of course, being Jacob, Israel -- indeed, the Verus Israel. And when the Ghetto proved insufficient to enclose all the Papal State's Jewries, the excess Jewish population was to be expelled, as in fact it was, by Pius V, in 1569.

At the same time, the ghetto was pictured as the locus of a massive conversionary program. It made the Jews a captive audience for the obligatory sermons initiated by Gregory XIII, the first pope ever to make attendance at such sermons truly compulsory. Gathered into the ghetto, Jews might also be more easily controlled, ensuring that they would have no access to their supposedly blasphemous Talmud (which was said to dissuade them from seeing Christian truth). Such control further ensured that any unfortunate who even breathed a word about a Catholic preference could be whisked straightaway to the Domus cathecumenorum (the House of Converts). Most of all, the ghetto was the scene where canon law could be unmitigatedly enforced, to convince the Jews through the application of "pious lashes" -- a term first used by Alexander of Hales in the thirteenth century, revived by the convert Abner of Burgos in the fourteenth century, and adopted by the Camaldulese monks Quirini and Giustiniani in the sixteenth -- that Christianity was the more worthy faith. To apply such "lashes" was also the undoubted vision of Paul IV, the ghetto's founder. I personally am convinced that Paul IV took this drastic action in the belief that he was living in an apocalyptic moment, certainly in one of total social ruin. The time for the Jews' conversion had at last arrived. If not actually that, the ghetto allowed for a by now necessary fiction. The centuries-old ecclesiastical policy of living with the Jews could theoretically be maintained, even though, with the exception of the ghetto, the Jews had been shut out from the Christian fold. Alternately, the ghetto was a way to pretend openly that all had changed, even though it could be argued that what had changed in fact was only the Jews' physical circumstances and the degree to which they must bow before canonical limitation.

The probability that sixteenth-century popes following Paul IV would have identified with any, or all, of these goals is extremely high. As Paolo Simoncelli is now arguing, subsequent to Paul IV's election in 1555, and perhaps more precisely from 1549, with the election of Julius III, the papacy was ever more dominated by inquisitors and friars; and Counter Reformation, or Catholic Restoration (to avoid arguments over terms) programs were becoming identifiable with those of the Roman Inquisition itself. Notably, the one rent in this fabric was Pius IV. Pius had sharp differences with the Inquisition, and it was precisely Pius IV who mitigated the harshest restrictions imposed by Paul IV's bull establishing the ghetto, Cum nimis absurdum.

As for Sixtus V, was he not a Franciscan, the general of the order, appointed by the one-time chief inquisitor, Ghislieri (Pius V); and was he not previously a devoted follower of that other chief inquisitor, Carafa (Paul IV)? One must logically expect that Sixtus would follow the lead of these two in heavily restricting the Jews, just as he otherwise pursued their initiative to restrain the exuberance of Roman society as a whole. And, indeed, this is precisely what happened. Moreover, Sixtus quite likely viewed his restriction of both Romans and Jews as being two sides of the same coin. Hence, if he insisted that even visitors to Rome be bound by the city's sumptuary laws, he also required Jews to wear the yellow Jewish biretta (as Paul IV had first ordered), except while on journeys. Similarly, his austere new ghetto walls mirror the grandiosity and cold formality with which he invested all his architectural projects -- both executed, as we have already noted, by the same architect. Sixtus further ordered that within Roman prisons, Jews be relegated to special cells, apart from Christian prisoners. For like other contemporary popes, Sixtus perceived prisons as places of penance and reform; he may well have seen the Jews' special cells as an extension of the "penitential" ghetto itself.

One may further point to the parallel between Sixtus' attitude toward unorthodox Catholic books -- ratified at the Council of Trent and concretized in the well-known "Index of Prohibited Books" -- and his approach to the Jewish Talmud. Here, as in the first condemnation of the Talmud in the thirteenth century, as well as of suspect Christian literature -- the ultimate object was to turn readers away from heresy and channel them toward approved doctrines and right belief. Thus, reversing the decree of 1553 that led to the Talmud's burning in various Italian cities, Sixtus authorized the publication of a censored version of its text. This censored version, however, never materialized. Following the admonitions of Cardinals Bellarmine and Sirleto, the utopian Tommaso Campanella, the humanist Andrea Masio, and the devoted converts and teachers of Jewish converts, Fabiano Fioghi and Fino Fini, the aim was to produce a text purified of so-called false rabbinic accretions whose remaining purportedly Christological teachings, it was hoped, would induce Jews to convert. Such a sophisticated level of textual manipulation was never achieved.

Where Sixtus' attitudes toward Jews and non-Jews most directly intersected was in the matter of prostitutes. Just as Sixtus enlarged the ghetto, so he revived Pius V's intention of enclosing prostitutes within the ortaccio of the Campus Martius. Prostitutes were also to be forced to attend morally uplifting sermons, much as Sixtus remedied the imprecision of Gregory XIII's original edict concerning sermons delivered to the Jews. The latter had only indicated that these sermons were to be delivered weekly in a central location. Attendance was left unregulated. Sixtus decreed that all male Jews must attend these sermons at least six times a year. Like Jews, too, prostitutes were not to appear in public during Holy Week, and they were to wear a special garb, the spurniglia. Nor were they to mix in church with honest Christian women, bathe publicly in the Tiber, or ply their trade in taverns and restaurants. All of these restrictions had parallels in the canons governing Jewish behavior. The issue was one of contamination, and it is noteworthy that although Sixtus widened Jewish business opportunities, he prohibited Jews from resuming the purveying of foodstuffs to Christians -- a once important source of Jewish livelihood that Paul IV, in 1555, had cut off. To sell food to Christians bordered on violating the canons condemning the mixed dining of Christians and Jews. Even more threateningly, Sixtus' prohibition recalls late thirteenth-century Southern French laws forbidding Jews from touching food in the marketplace, lest what they touched and left unpurchased might later contaminate a Christian consumer.

Sixtus V's policies toward the Jews were thus only superficially permissive ones. Instead they were as austere -- and as full of Catholic Restoration fervor -- as were his policies toward the entire Roman population. Even Sixtus' apparent attempt to aid the Jews financially by admitting them to participate in various Monti ultimately achieved the precisely opposite end; the Jewish community was saddled with an ever larger debt, which its ever-dwindling resources could not service. Once again, Sixtus was following the lead of Paul IV and Pius V, both of whom had weighed down the Jews with numerous fines and monetary penalties. And this Sixtus surely knew, just as he must have known that these penalties had first been imposed in the hope of bringing despairing Jews to convert.

By 1589, therefore, the Jews had good reason to be suspicious of Sixtus' intentions. Even any initially positive reaction to Sixtus' reversal of Pius V's (1569) decree of expulsion and to the possibility of resettlement in the Papal State must by then have been tempered. Sixtus did allow Jews to reestablish small centers of residence outside of Rome. But the conditions of resettlement were notably vague. Sixtus spoke of "entering" or 'dwelling," and also about reopening synagogues closed in 1569. Yet, he did not presuppose actually founding new "communities." Instead, identical or entry patents issued by the papal chancellery, requiring orders to pay an entry fee of 2 scudi and an annual poll tax of 1.2 scudi, imply instability. Most importantly, these patents, as revealed by Ermano Loevinson's study sixty years ago (which concerns other Jews beside the bankers, who were Loevinson's particular interest), clearly distinguish between "entrance" and "dwelling." In fact, more than one third of the three-hundred patents issued between 1587 and 1590 specify: "entrance with no permission to reside." Moreover, the number of specifically mentioned Roman Jews who received these patents, especially to open a bank (which admittedly covered the banker, his family, and his assistants was a small one. Banks, in any case, and irrespective of any residence permit -- were always chartered for a precisely limited duration. Thus, it would appear that the Jews in the revived settlements were either actual, or potential, residents of the Papal State's ghettos. And the continued existence of these ghettos in Rome and in the port city of Ancona was never doubted. Sixtus' eventual solution to overcrowding in the ghetto -- to expand its area rather than to grant exemptions from ghetto residence, let alone to consider the Roman Ghetto's abolition -- thus hammered the proverbial nail into the coffin. No matter how overpopulated the ghetto was, Sixtus had obviously decided that Roman Jews were going to live exclusively within its walls.

It was at this point that Jews first referred to our Ghet. They could no longer doubt that they had permanently been separated -- or, as they themselves put it, "divorced" -- from Christian society, and they were at last ready to verbalize an awareness that had previously been suppressed. And suppress their awareness is indeed what they had done. Certain events of everday ghetto life reveal this fact most clearly.

To be sure, daily events in the ghetto usually do not bespeak tension or a sense of urgency. After all, whatever were its real goals, papal policy toward the Jews failed. The Jews lost relatively few of their numbers to conversion, and paradoxically, under pressure, their society immensely solidified. Ghetto neighborhoods, for one, operated effectively. A Jew trying to prove in court his father's identity called twenty-one neighbors as witnesses -- in preference to a living uncle and aunt. Similarly, ethnic divisions were giving way before a more homogeneous communal body. Jews of varying ethnic backgrounds, for example, were increasingly choosing at random their place of prayer among the ghetto's synagogue which, in theory, represented Jews who distinctively followed the Italian, Ashkenazi, or Sephardic rite. Jews even maintained a limbo relationship with neophytes, did business with them, and occasionally displayed parental concern -- despite latent antipathies. On the level of the individual, too, there was continuity and normality. Acts drawn by Jewish notaries in the years 1585-90 include contracts with musicians to teach grooms dancing and singing in preparation for their nuptials, as well as agreements to form catering firms that provided refreshments at festivities. Jews were apprenticed to other Jews to work as artisans and shopkeepers, rabbis and teachers of the young were hired, and games of chance were highly -- some said overly -- popular. Jews were ready, it seems, to wager on anything, even, for instance, as they not infrequently did, that the first of three friends to marry would buy the others a hat or a shirt. This is a matter to which we shall shortly return.

On the other hand, the problem of overcrowding left definite traces. The simple act of renting an apartment or a store became a complex ritual. From the time of Sixtus V's pontificate, in particular, departing tenants were obliged to make a formal rinunzio, stating that they were leaving of their own free will and that their apartment or store was hence available for rental according to the edict issued by the eleventh-century rabbinic sage, Gershom of Mainz, which stipulated that no Jew may rent a dwelling owned by a non-Jew, if a previous Jewish tenant had been evicted for refusing to pay a higher rent. The tight housing supply was clearly making rent gouging a reality. The number of housing disputes that went to arbitration was also extremely large, especially over questions of who owned the leasing rights (the cazaga) to a particular space. When the houses on via Fiumara became available, disputes immediately broke out. And even the relatively strong community, which had been given a hand in the distribution of these dwellings, was unable to resolve them. The new housing was successfully apportioned only when the papal vicar stepped in. If panic is too strong a word to use, we may certainly speak of an acutely perceived housing shortage. The Jews of the Roman Ghetto had sensed that both physically and temperamentally they were being squeezed ever more tightly together.

But let us return to the issue of the marriage wagers. Much more than playful diversions, these were symbolic indicators that Jewish men were putting marriage off -- as indeed they were, which was quite a novelty. Where past records are available, it is clear that marriage was a nearly universal Jewish institution; among Jews, there had never existed incentives not to marry -- or even not to remarry -- such as those which Christian society and its leadership had fostered. Jewish males in sixteenth-century Rome were also marrying relatively early, on average at about age 24, which is somewhat below the age of marrying Rennaisance male Christians. Any change in the Jewish marriage pattern could thus be expected to be the product of outside stimuli. And this seems to have been precisely the case. In the years preceding Sixtus' pontificate, Jewish marriages in Rome occurred on an average of twenty-two per year. During Sixtus' reign, this ratio fell by a full 13 percent to less than nineteen. Moreover, this lower ratio remained steady in each of Sixtus' five regnal years. At the same time, during these five years -- when the Jewish population of Rome and its environs certainly did not shrink -- the ratio of Jewish males per family remained virtually constant. This constancy may be seen from the oaths brothers of grooms regularly swore to free the latters' (potentially) childless widows from the obligation of Levirite marriage (see Devt. 25:5-10). For the oath was sworn (directly, or indirectly by their fathers or elder brothers, should they have been minors) by all brothers of the groom. Taken together, these figures mean that the total number of Roman Jewish males of potentially marriageable age remained the same. Yet the number of these males who actually married had decreased. Something other than demographic factors must have been responsible for this downturn.

Ascertaining what actually was responsible is no easy task. Changes in marriage rates like this one normally are produced by complex forces. In our particular case, we must also ask whether the phenomenon being described is the postponement of marriage or a result of Jewish movement to localities outside Rome after 1585. More than likely, it was the former. As we just said, the Roman Jewish population did not shrink during Sixtus' reign; indeed, there was always movement of Jews in and out of the ghetto, guaranteeing a steady demographic level. If anything the Roman Jewish population may have increased, meaning that the drop in the marriage rate was even greater than that which we report. Moreover, Jews living, since 1585, in the various localities of the Papal State continued to record their prenuptial agreements before a Roman Jewish notary. Hence, their marriages were included in the above calculations. There is, finally, no evidence of -- nor some natural reason like the severe outbreak of illness and death among adult childbearers to account for -- a temporary drop in birth rates about 1560-65, which, might have meant a constant number of male children per family, but a decrease in the number of those who reached the normal marrying age of 24 by 1565-90. What then caused the nuptial postponements? Quite clearly, we must avoid drawing facile conclusions. But perhaps we will not err in proposing that any hopes aroused among the Jews by the election of the astute, commercially-minded Cardinal Montalto (Peretti) to the papal throne as Sixtus V were quickly shattered. It became immediately evident that the new pope planned no relaxation of existing controls. With the exception of those relatively few Jews who could attach themselves to the strictly limited number of banking firms that established extra Roman branches (and settlements), the vast majority of Jews were forced to remain in the extraordinately overcrowded Roman Ghetto. Those who had planned to marry, or at least some 13 percent of them, thus were forced to relinquish their marital plans. They simply had no available physical space in which to initiate their domestic life.

Whatever else Sixtus V did, therefore, it is certain that among prospective Jewish spouses, and probably their parents as well, he succeeded in generating frustration and despair. Jews no longer had the capacity to create marriages at will. And the express cause of this incapacity was their unremitting segregation in the ghetto. Here, nobody needed to tell them, they were certainly different from Christians. Innately, therefore, in 1585 the Jews must have sensed their particularity and the distance separating them from Christian society. In 1589, the ghetto's enlargement raised that sense from a suppressed, or even unconscious level, to one that was unambiguously verbalized. No wonder that Pomdel Borgo chose precisely this moment to speak of nostro -- our -- Ghet. Eventually, as we learn from the diary of a young girl involuntarily held in the Domus cathecumenorum, the equation of ghetto and get was to become a matter of common, everyday usage.