has survived the fall of kingdoms and empires without end, with singular
integrity of original faith and most extraordinary tenacity of tradition
and custom, together with the most unbounded ambition and very superior
mental gifts, never produced a single family of powerful men able to
maintain their position more than a century or two, when the nations of
Europe have produced at least half a dozen that have lasted a thousand
years? If there be any answer to such a question, it is that the pursuit
and care of money have a tendency to destroy the balance and produce
degeneration by over-stimulating the mind in one direction, and that not
a noble one, at the expense of the other talents; whereas the struggle
for political power sharpens most of the faculties, and the acquisition
and preservation of landed property during many generations bring men
necessarily into a closer contact with nature, and therefore induce a
healthier life, tending to increase the vitality of a race rather than
to diminish it. Whether this be true or not, it is safe to say that no
great family has ever maintained its power long by the possession of
money, without great lands; and by 'long' we understand at least three
hundred years.
With regard to the Jews in Rome it is a singular fact that they have
generally been better treated by the religious than by the civil
authorities. They were required to do homage to the latter every year
in the Capitol, and on this occasion the Senator of Rome placed his foot
upon the heads of the prostrate delegates, by way of accentuating their
humiliation and disgrace, but the service they were required to do on
the accession of a new Pope was of a different and less degrading
nature. The Israelite School awaited the Pope's passage, on his return
from taking possession of the Lateran, standing up in a richly hung
temporary balcony, before which he passed on his way. They then
presented him with a copy of the Pentateuch, which he blessed on the
spot, and took away with him. That was all, and it amounted to a
sanction, or permission, accorded to the Jewish religion.
As for the sumptuary laws, the first one was decreed in 1215, after the
fall of the Pierleoni, and it imposed upon all Jews, and other heretics
whomsoever, the wearing of a large circle of yellow cloth sewn upon the
breast. In the following century, according to Baracconi, this mark was
abolished by the statutes of the city and the Jews were made to wear a
scarlet mantle in public; but all licensed Jewish physicians, being
regarded as public benefactors, were exempted from the rule. For the
profession of medicine is one which the Hebrews have always followed
with deserved success, and it frequently happened in Rome that the
Pope's private physician, who lived in the Vatican and was a personage
of confidence and importance, was a professed Israelite from the
Ghetto, who worshipped in the synagogue on Saturdays and looked with
contempt and disgust upon his pontifical patient as an eater of unclean
food. There was undoubtedly a law compelling a certain number of the
Jews to hear sermons once a week, first in the Trinita dei Pellegrini,
and afterwards in the Church of Sant' Angelo in the Fishmarket, and it
was from time to time rigorously enforced; it was renewed in the present
century under Leo the Twelfth, and only finally abolished, together with
all other oppressive measures, by Pius the Ninth at the beginning of his
reign. But when one considers the frightful persecution suffered by the
race in Spain, it must be conceded that they were relatively well
treated in Rome by the Popes. Their bitterest enemies and oppressors
were the lower classes of the people, who were always ready to attack
and rifle the Ghetto on the slightest pretext, and against whose
outrageous deeds the Jews had no redress.
[Illustration: THEATRE OF MARCELLUS]
It was their treatment by the people, rather than the matter itself,
which made the carnival races, in which they were forced to run after a
hearty meal, together with a great number of Christians, an intolerable
tyranny; and when Clement the Ninth exempted them from it, he did not
abolish the races of Christian boys and old men. The people detested the
Jews, hooted them, hissed them, and maltreated them with and without
provocation. Moses Mendelssohn, the father of the composer, wrote to a
friend from Berlin late in the eighteenth century, complaining bitterly
that in that self-styled city of toleration, the cry of 'Jew' was raised
against him when he ventured into the streets with his little children
by daylight, and that the boys threw stones at them, as they passed, so
that he only went out late in the evening. Things were no better in Rome
under Paul the Fourth, but they were distinctly better in Rome than in
Berlin at the time of Mendelssohn's writing.
Paul the Fourth, the Carafa Pope, and the friend of the Inquisition,
confined the Jews to the Ghetto. There can be no doubt but that the act
was intended as a measure of severity against heretics, and as such Pius
the Ninth considered it indefensible and abolished it. In actual fact it
must have been of enormous advantage to the Jews, who were thus provided
with a stronghold against the persecutions and robberies of the rabble.
The little quarter was enclosed by strong walls with gates, and if the
Jews were required to be within them at night, on pain of a fine, they
and their property were at least in safety. This fact has never been
noticed, and accounts for the serenity with which they bore their
nightly imprisonment for three centuries. Once within the walls of the
Ghetto they were alone, and could go about the little streets in perfect
security; they were free from the contamination as well as safe from the
depredations of Christians, and within their own precincts they were not
forced to wear the hated orange-coloured cap or net which Paul the
Fourth imposed upon the Jewish men and women. To a great extent, too,
such isolation was already in the traditions of the race. A hundred
years earlier Venice had created its Ghetto; so had Prague, and other
European cities were not long in following. Morally speaking their
confinement may have been a humiliation; in sober fact it was an immense
advantage; moreover, a special law of 'emphyteusis' made the leases of
their homes inalienable, so long as they paid rent, and forbade the
raising of the rent under any circumstances, while leaving the tenant
absolute freedom to alter and improve his house as he would, together
with the right to sublet it, or to sell the lease itself to any other
Hebrew; and these leases became very valuable. Furthermore, though under
the jurisdiction of criminal courts, the Jews had their own police in
the Ghetto, whom they chose among themselves half yearly.
It has been stated by at least one writer that the church and square of
Santa Maria del Pianto--Our Lady of Tears--bears witness to the grief of
the people when they were first forced into the Ghetto in the year 1556.
But this is an error. The church received the name from a tragedy and a
miracle which are said to have taken place before it ten years earlier.
It was formerly called San Salvatore in Cacaberis, the Church of the
'Saviour in the district of the kettle-makers.' An image of the Blessed
Virgin stood over the door of a house close by; a frightful murder was
done in broad day, and at the sight tears streamed from the statue's
eyes; the image was taken into the church, which was soon afterwards
dedicated to 'Our Lady of Tears,' and the name remained forever to
commemorate the miraculous event.
Besides mobbing the Jews in the streets and plundering them when they
could, the Roman populace invented means of insulting them which must
have been especially galling. They ridiculed them in the popular
open-air theatres, and made blasphemous jests upon their most sacred
things in Carnival. It is not improbable that 'Punch and Judy' may have
had their origin in something of this sort, and 'Judy' certainly
suggests 'Giudea,' a Jewess. What the Roman rabble had done against
Christians in heathen days, the Christian rabble did against the Jews in
the Middle Age and the Renascence. They were robbed, ridiculed,
outraged, and sometimes killed; after the fall of the Pierleoni, they
appear to have had no civil rights worth mentioning; they were taxed
more heavily than the Christian citizens, in proportion as they were
believed to be more wealthy, and were less able to resent the
tax-gatherer; their daughters were stolen away for their beauty, less
consenting than Jessica, and with more violence, and the Merchant of
Venice is not a mere fiction of the master playwright. All these things
were done to them and more, yet they stayed in Rome, and multiplied, and
grew rich, being then, as when Tacitus wrote of them, 'scrupulously
faithful and ever actively charitable to each other, and filled with
invincible hatred against all other men.'
[Illustration: SITE OF THE ANCIENT GHETTO]
The old Roman Ghetto has been often described, but no description can
give any true impression of it; the place where it stood is a vast open
lot, waiting for new buildings which will perhaps never rise, and the
memory of it is relegated to the many fast-fading pictures of old Rome.
Persius tells how, on Herod's birthday, the Jews adorned their doors
with bunches of violets and set out rows of little smoky lamps upon the
greasy window-sills, and feasted on the tails of tunny fish--the meanest
part--pickled, and eaten off rough red earthen-ware plates with draughts
of poor white wine. The picture was a true one ten years ago, for the
manners of the Ghetto had not changed in that absolute isolation. The
name itself, 'Ghetto,' is generally derived from a Hebrew root meaning
'cut off'--and cut off the Jews' quarter was, by walls, by religion, by
tradition, by mutual hatred between Hebrews and other men. It has been
compared to a beehive, to an anthill, to an old house-beam riddled and
traversed in all directions by miniature labyrinths of worm-holes,
crossing, intercommunicating, turning to right and left, upwards and
downwards, but hardly ever coming out to the surface. It has been
described by almost every writer who ever put words together about Rome,
but no words, no similes, no comparisons, can make those see it who were
never there. In a low-lying space enclosed within a circuit of five
hundred yards, and little, if at all, larger than the Palazzo Doria,
between four and five thousand human beings were permanently crowded
together in dwellings centuries old, built upon ancient drains and
vaults that were constantly exposed to the inundations of the river and
always reeking with its undried slime; a little, pale-faced,
crooked-legged, eager-eyed people, grubbing and grovelling in masses of
foul rags for some tiny scrap richer than the rest and worthy to be sold
apart; a people whose many women, haggard, low-speaking, dishevelled,
toiled half doubled together upon the darning and piecing and smoothing
of old clothes, whose many little children huddled themselves into
corners, to teach one another to count; a people of sellers who sold
nothing that was not old or damaged, and who had nothing that they would
not sell; a people clothed in rags, living among rags, thriving on rags;
a people strangely proof against pestilence, gathering rags from the
city to their dens, when the cholera was raging outside the Ghetto's
gates, and rags were cheap, yet never sickening of the plague
themselves; a people never idle, sleeping little, eating sparingly,
labouring for small gain amid dirt and stench and dampness, till Friday
night came at last, and the old crier's melancholy voice ran through the
darkening alleys--'The Sabbath has begun.'
And all at once the rags were gone, the ghostly old clothes that swung
like hanged men, by the neck, in the doorways of the cavernous shops,
flitted away into the utter darkness within; the old bits of iron and
brass went rattling out of sight, like spectres' chains; the hook-nosed
antiquary drew in his cracked old show-case; the greasy frier of fish
and artichokes extinguished his little charcoal fire of coals; the
slipshod darning-women, half-blind with six days' work, folded the
half-patched coats and trousers, and took their rickety old
rush-bottomed chairs indoors with them.
Then, on the morrow, in the rich synagogue with its tapestries, its
gold, and its gilding, the thin, dark men were together in their hats
and long coats, and the sealed books of Moses were borne before their
eyes and held up to the North and South and East and West, and all the
men together lifted up their arms and cried aloud to the God of their
fathers. But when the Sabbath was over, they went back to their rags and
their patched clothes and to their old iron and their junk and their
antiquities, and toiled on patiently again, looking for the coming of
the Messiah.
And there were astrologers and diviners and magicians and witches and
crystal-gazers among them to whom great ladies came on foot, thickly
veiled, and walking delicately amidst the rags, and men, too, who were
more ashamed of themselves, and slunk in at nightfall to ask the Jews
concerning the future--even in our time as in Juvenal's, and in
Juvenal's day as in Saul's of old. Nor did the papal laws against
witchcraft have force against Jews, since the object of the laws was to
save Christian souls from the hell which no Jew could escape save by
conversion. And the diviners and seers and astrologers of the Ghetto
were long in high esteem, and sometimes earned fortunes when they hit
the truth, and when the truth was pleasant in the realization.
They are gone now, with the Ghetto and all that belonged to it. The Jews
who lived there are either becoming absorbed in the population of Rome,
or have transferred themselves and their rags to other places, where
lodgings are cheap, but where they no longer enjoy the privilege of
irrevocable leases at rents fixed for all time. A part of them are
living between Santa Maria Maggiore and the Lateran, a part in
Trastevere, and they exercise their ancient industries in their new
homes, and have new synagogues instead of the old ones. But one can no
longer see them all together in one place. Little by little, too, the
old prejudices against them are disappearing, even among the poorer
Romans, whose hatred was most tenacious, and by and by, at no very
distant date, the Jews in Rome will cease to be an isolated and peculiar
people. Then, when they live as other men, amongst other folks, as in
many cities of the world, they will get the power in Rome, as they have
begun to get it already, and as they have it already in more than one
great capital. But a change has come over the Jewish race within the
last fifty years, greater than any that has affected their destinies
since Titus destroyed the Temple and brought thousands of them, in the
train of Pompey's thousands, to build the Colosseum; and the wisest
among them, if they be faithful and believing Jews, as many are, ask
themselves whether this great change, which looks so like improvement,
is really for good, or whether it is the beginning of the end of the
oldest nation of us all.
[Illustration]
REGION XII RIPA
In Italian, as in Latin, Ripa means the bank of a river, and the Twelfth
Region took its name from being bounded by the river bank, from just
below the island all the way to the Aurelian walls, which continue the
boundary of the triangle on the south of Saint Sebastian's gate; the
third side runs at first irregularly from the theatre of Marcellus to
the foot of the Palatine, skirts the hill to the gas works at the north
corner of the Circus Maximus, takes in the latter, and thence runs
straight to the gate before mentioned. The Region includes the Aventine,
Monte Testaccio, and the baths of Caracalla. The origin of the device,
like that of several others, seems to be lost.
The Aventine, ever since the auguries of Remus, has been especially the
refuge of opposition, and more especially, perhaps, of religious
opposition. In very early times it was especially the hill of the
plebeians, who frequently retired to its heights in their difficulties
with the patricians, as they had once withdrawn to the more distant Mons
Sacer in the Campagna. The temple of Ceres stood in the immediate
neighbourhood of the Circus, on the line of approach to the Aventine,
and contained the archives of the plebeian AEdiles. In the times of the
Decemvirs, much of the land on the hill was distributed among the
people, who probably lived within the city, but went out daily to
cultivate their little farms, just as the inhabitants of the hill
villages do today.
If this were not the case, it would be hard to explain how the Aventine
could have been a solitude at night, as it was in the time of the
Bacchic orgies, of which the discovery convulsed the republic, and ended
in a religious persecution. That was when Scipio of Asia had been
accused and not acquitted of having taken a bribe of six thousand pounds
of gold and four hundred and eighty pounds of silver to favour
Antiochus. It was in the first days of Rome's corruption, when the
brilliant army of Asia first brought the love of foreign luxury to Rome;
when the soldiers, enriched with booty, began to have brass bedsteads,
rich coverlets and curtains, and other things of woven stuff in their
magnificent furniture, and little Oriental tables with one foot, and
decorated sideboards; when people first had singing-girls, and
lute-players, and players on the sharp-strung 'triangle,' and actors, to
amuse them at their feasts; when the feasts themselves began to be
extravagant, and the office of a cook, once mean and despised, rose to
be one of high estimation and rich emolument, so that what had been a
slave's work came to be regarded as an art. It was no wonder that such
changes came about in Rome, when every triumph brought hundreds and
thousands of pounds of gold and silver to the city, when Marcus Fulvius
brought back hundreds of crowns of gold, and two hundred and eighty-five
bronze statues, and two hundred and thirty statues of marble, with other
vast spoils, and when Cnaeus Manlius brought home wealth in bullion and
in coin, which even in these days, when the value of money is far less,
would be worth any nation's having.
And with it all came Greek corruption, Greek worship, Greek vice. For
years the mysteries of Dionysus and the orgies of the Maenads were
celebrated on the slopes of the Aventine and in those deep caves that
riddle its sides, less than a mile from the Forum, from the Capitol,
from the house of the rigid Cato, who found fault with Scipio of Africa
for shaving every day and liking Greek verses. The evil had first come
to Rome from Etruria, and had then turned Greek, as it were, in the days
of the Asian triumphs; and first it was an orgy of drunken women only,
as in most ancient times, but soon men were admitted, and presently a
rule was made that no one should be initiated who was over twenty years
of age, and that those who refused to submit to the horrid rites after
being received should perish in the deepest cave of the hill, while the
noise of drums and clashing cymbals and of shouting drowned their
screams. And many boys and girls were thus done to death; and the
conspiracy of the orgies was widespread in Rome, yet the secret was well
kept.
Now there was a certain youth at that time, whose father had died, and
whose mother was one of the Maenads and had married a man as bad as
herself. He and she were guardians of her son's fortune, and they had
squandered it, and knew that when he came of age they should not be able
to give an account of their guardianship. They therefore determined to
initiate him at the Bacchic orgy, for he was of a brave temper, and they
knew that he would not submit to the rites, and so would be torn to
pieces by the Maenads, and they might escape the law in their fraud. His
mother called him, and told him that once, when he had been ill, she had
promised the gods that she would initiate him in the Bacchanalia if he
recovered, and that it was now time to perform her vow. And doubtless
she delighted his ignorance with an account of a beautiful and solemn
ceremony.
But this youth was dearly loved by a woman whose faith to him covered
many sins. She had been a slave when a girl, and with her mistress had
been initiated, and knew what the rites were, and how evil and terrible;
and since she had been freed she had never gone to them. So when her
lover told her he was to go, thinking it good news, she was terrified,
and told him that it were better that both he and she should die that
night, than that he should be so contaminated. When he knew the truth,
he went home and told his mother and his stepfather boldly that he would
not go; and they, being beside themselves with anger and disappointment,
called four slaves and threw him out into the street. For which deed
they died. For the young man went to his father's sister, and told all;
and she sent him to the Consul to tell his story, who called the woman
that loved him, and promised her protection, so that at last she told
the truth, and he brought the matter before the Senate. Then there was
great horror at what was told, and the people who had been initiated
fled in haste by thousands, and the city was in a turmoil, while the
Senate made new and terrible laws against the rites. Many persons were
put to death, and a few were taken and imprisoned on suspicion, and
many, being guilty, killed themselves. For it was found that more than
seven thousand men and women had conspired in the orgies, and the
contamination had spread throughout Italy.
As for the youth, and the woman who had saved the State out of love for
him, the Senate and the people made a noble and generous decree. For
him, he received a sum of money from the public treasury in place of the
fortune his mother had stolen from him, and he was exempted from
military service, unless he chose to be a soldier, and from ever
furnishing a horse to the State. But for the woman, whose life had been
evil, it was publicly decreed that her sins should be blotted out, that
she should have all rights of holding, transferring and selling
property, of marrying into another gens and of choosing a guardian, as
if she had received all from a husband by will; that she should be at
liberty to marry a man of free descent, and that he who should marry her
was to incur no degradation, and that all consuls and praetors in the
future should watch over her and see that no harm came to her, as long
as she lived. Her people made her an honourable Roman matron, and
perhaps the stern old senators thus rewarded her in order that the man
she had saved might marry her without shame. But whether he did or not,
no one knows.
[Illustration: CHURCH OF SAINT NEREUS AND SAINT ACHILLAEUS
From a print of the last century]
This is the first instance in which a religion, and the orgies were so
called by the Romans, was practised upon the Aventine in opposition to
that of the State. It was not the last. Under Domitian, Juvenal found a
host of Jews established there, on the eastern slope and about the
fountain of Egeria, and thirty years before him Saint Paul lived on the
Aventine in the Jewish house of Aquila and Priscilla where Santa Prisca
stands today. It is worth noting that Aquila, an eagle, the German
Adler, was already then a Jewish name. Little by little, however, the
Jews went back to the Tiber, and the Aventine became the stronghold of
the Christians; there they built many of their oldest churches, and
thence they carried out their dead to the near catacombs of Saint
Petronilla, the church better known as that of Saint Nereus and Saint
Achillaeus. And there are many other ancient churches on the hill, and on
the road that leads to Saint Sebastian's gate, and beyond the walls, on
the Appian Way as far as Saint Callixtus; lonely, peaceful shrines,
beautiful with the sculptures and pavements and mosaics of the Cosmas
family who lived and worked between six and seven hundred years ago. On
the other side of the hill, near the Circus, Saint Augustine taught
rhetoric for a living, though he knew no Greek and was perhaps no great
Latin scholar either--still an unbeliever then, an astrologer and a
follower after strange doctrines, one whom no man could have taken for a
future bishop and Father of the Church, who was to be author of two
hundred and thirty-two theological treatises, as well as of an
exposition of the Psalms and the Gospels. Here Saint Gregory the Great,
once Prefect of Rome, preached and prayed, and here the fierce
Hildebrand lived when he was young, and called himself Gregory when he
was Pope, perhaps, because he had so often meditated here upon the life
and acts of the wise Saint, in the places hallowed by his footsteps.