TOP STORY: JUDAISM AND HISTORY: Rome’s ancient Jewish ghetto to be studied anew

c. 1996 Religion News Service ROME (RNS)-How many more revelations could possibly be unearthed about one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities whose past has been thoroughly picked over and examined? Jewish leaders say that a private $50,000 grant to modernize their archives dating to 1555 could, in fact, fill in historical and biographical gaps […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

ROME (RNS)-How many more revelations could possibly be unearthed about one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities whose past has been thoroughly picked over and examined?

Jewish leaders say that a private $50,000 grant to modernize their archives dating to 1555 could, in fact, fill in historical and biographical gaps and shed light on the daily affairs of a people forced into a ghetto for 300 years.”What I think will be interesting is to learn about the day-to-day life of the people,”said Claudio Fano, president of Rome’s 15,000-member Jewish Community.”Far from being folkloric, it was a world of misery,”he said.”It was an extremely painful life there. That’s what you read in those small stories.” Fano said most historical details of Rome’s Jewish community are well known, from the Jews’ arrival as slaves in 70 A.D. following the sack of Jerusalem, through their flourishing years during the Middle Ages and their forced confinement beginning in 1555 under Pope Paul IV.


But he said an estimated 30,000 pages of handwritten correspondence, marriage certificates and other legal documents that have never been fully examined or catalogued could”fill in the gaps of what life was like there.” Fano said he suspects the dusty and frayed papers will assist biographers and historians fill out family lineages, better understand business affairs and more fully appreciate the lives, thoughts and emotions of a people who were forced to inhabit an area of about 7.5 acres.

The research could also offer new insight into Jewish relations with the Catholic Church, particularly the church’s efforts beginning in the 16th century to convert Jews to Catholicism by forcing them to attend weekly sermons.

The Jewish community previously has received some state funds to organize its museum and the archives, both housed in the main synagogue. But the grant, from the Italian insurance company Ina, was made as part of an effort to open the archives to the public.

The project, expected to take about 18 months to complete, will finance computer equipment to store abstracts of the information and pay for the renovation of a room in the main synagogue for the material.

Simona Foa, a doctoral candidate in Italian literature, will have the task of weeding through the documents and collating them according to subject and the period in which they were written.”We’re sure that we can get a better idea of the conditions of the Jews in the community,”she said, adding that”much of the material is from the 18th century.” Italy’s Jewish archives have been an abundant source of information, offering scholars valuable material about historical events, from the Catholic Church’s forced confinement of Jews under Pope Paul IV in response to the Protestant Reformation in 1555, to the Nazis’ expulsion of some 7,000 Jews to concentration camps during their nine-month occupation of Italy, beginning in September 1944.

Liliana Picciotto Fargion, author of”The German Occupation and the Jews of Rome,”published in 1979, recalls finding several key documents in the Rome and Milan Jewish archives showing that many Jews who were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland had been originally ordered to other camps where death rates were considerably lower.”This was very surprising because the Jews were sent to Auschwitz,”she said. The documents”show that the Germans possibly changed their plans about where to send them,”or deliberately deceived Italian authorities as to where they would be sent.

MJP END HEILBRONNER

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