Roman' Among the Jews

It was Friday night at the great synagogue in Florence, Italy. The rabbi, an orthodox Italian from the Florentine tradition, invited us to join other congregants for Kiddush after services, and in accented but excellent English he welcomed us. And then he said, “I heard that just a couple of weeks ago in San Diego the head of the Reform movement called on even Reform Jews to celebrate Shabbat day. You see, Shabbat has something for everyone!”

Having been at the URJ biennial conference and heard Rabbi Yoffie’s speech, we had a certain experience that you can only have during Jewish travel—that amazing sense that you are in a completely different environment with varying customs, and that you are simultaneously connected profoundly with religiously active Jews everywhere in the world. I should also note that, although the congregation was small on a cold, wet Shabbat eve we met a couple of other Tucsonans present in the congregation. It is a small Jewish world.

Italy is known for great food and great art, and traveling there on vacation, in spite of the weakness of the dollar these days, is great fun. But in addition to pasta, Italy has an extraordinary Jewish living history that is nearly 2200 years old, and can teach important lessons about our own identity, and future, as a Jewish community. We’ll explore them over the next couple of months here in the Temple Times—Rome this month, Florence and Venice in March.

The Jewish community of Italy dates back to Roman times, and there are many reminders of that ancient presence in important places. Judah Macabee sent the first permanent legation to Rome in the second century BCE to seek military aid against Antiochus at the time of the Chanukah events, and Roman Jews were particularly conspicuous in mourning the death of Julius Ceasar in 44 BCE, for he had treated us well. In the very back of the Vatican Museum’s Pio Christiani Lapidarium Hebraica section there are two walls of 2000+ year old stones with Jewish inscriptions and ritual symbols on them, ranging from menorahs to lulavs. These inscriptions are clear and obvious representations of a thriving Jewish community, probably the oldest continuous one in the world.

Of course, they keep this incontrovertible hard evidence of a nearly eternal Jewish presence in the Eternal City at the very back of the enormous Vatican Musuem… interesting. The huge Coliseum was built, in part, by the slave labor of captured Jewish warriors taken during the Great Revolt against Rome in the war of 67-70 CE. The infamous Arch of Titus, commemorating the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, preserves the oldest and most complete image of the sacred menorah; by tradition, until the founding of Erets Yisrael, any Jew who walked through this arch was automatically excommunicated. There were perhaps 50,000 Jews living in Rome in the first and second centuries, fully 5% of the population of the largest city in the world in those days. We were a big deal in Rome.

Over time the Roman Jewish community organized into five scuolas, five different synagogues for Jews who came to Rome from different places, and preserved their own slightly different legal customs and more varied musical traditions. It was an important Jewish community, and through centuries of persecutions it remained a vital place of learning and practice. Although located in the heart of Christianity, the Jewish community of Rome was treated fairly well until the time of the Counter-Reformation in the 1500’s.

The Roman Jewish community lived in the shadow of the Vatican—after all, this was the heart of all Christendom for over a thousand years, and it remains at the center of Roman Catholicism today—and in one very practical way it still does. The Jewish ghetto in Rome was located directly across the Tiber from Castle San Angelo, the Papacy’s military headquarters in Rome, meaning that Jews were literally under the watchful eyes of the Vatican from the creation of that ghetto in 1555 until full emancipation in 1870. It was as though the Jews’ very presence in Rome was troubling to the Church—but they nonetheless wanted to keep their Jews very close at hand, a pattern repeated in Florence and elsewhere in Europe.

When the ghetto was fully emancipated after Italian unification in 1870, Jews were permitted to live anywhere in Rome, and did so. The old ghetto buildings, decaying tenements, were demolished and the beautiful free-standing synagogue was erected where it still stands. Today’s Roman Jewish population is about 13,000, and it is an active, interesting Jewish place. We ate the spectacular carciofi ala Giudia at a fine—and crowded—kosher restaurant in the ghetto area, and thereafter tried to eat them at nearly every meal. If only we could get them like that in Tucson… Roman Jews are proud, but fairly quiet about their Jewish identity, representatives of a uniquely authentic and remarkable tradition.

Interestingly, there are currently about 30,000 Jews in Italy—about the same Jewish population we have in Tucson. We both have fine historical traditions, although they trump ours. We will proudly celebrate our Temple’s 100^{th anniversary in 2010—but Rome could justifiably celebrate its own community’s 2200th anniversary soon.}

The most important lesson we can gain in Tucson from the Roman Jews is that we certainly have the critical mass of Jews, and the resources, to build a really great Jewish community here, one whose accomplishments in learning and religious life we can bequeath to subsequent generations, as our Roman cousins have done. And we have far more freedom and flexibility to do so than they ever have.

But we also must understand that we need to constantly replenish and reinvigorate our Judaism, and our community, by regularly incorporating new faces and voices, lest our Judaism become merely of museum quality, and devoid of vitality and heart. When we choose to bring creative and inspirational energy to our more liberated Tucson Jewish community we can bring blessing, growth, and depth—and in doing so, holiness.

And perhaps some great artichokes to boot.