The Ghetto community of Rome, which stretches back in time to dim antiquity, is described by a student of anthropology and freelance writer who lived for almost a year within its confines, studying its population. 

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The light of Rome is supposed by enthusiasts to be different from that of any other place on earth. During the seven months of my stay there, I often debated with myself whether this was true or merely a tourist’s fable. The conclusion I finally reached was that the light was one of the elements of an atmosphere which made everything at least look different from the same thing anywhere else; here, normal standards are suspended and the improbable can happen and be believed without mental effort or strain. The air, mellow but crystalline and absolutely free—at least to the senses of a city-dwelling American—of soot or smog, bathes objects and people in a diffused and peculiar radiance. Present and past interpenetrate each other, and at last cannot be distinguished: the same sun which shines on that young Italian riding his motorscooter to work, and on that tourist seeking his pleasure, shone on Cicero as he campaigned in the Forum, and on the sturdy Goths of Alaric’s army as they walked around surveying their new conquest.

There are indeed many improbable places to be seen in Rome, and many more improbable people to be found there, but of all the curiosities and relics of a buried or half-buried past which greet the visitor’s eye, one of the strangest is the district still generally called “the Ghetto,” although its walls and gates—the physical ones, that is—were torn down over a century ago. Here we are confronted, not only with an assemblage of ruins such as we may see in any corner of Rome by looking a little below the surface of things, but also with a numerous and crowded community maintaining a sort of fossilized existence, more or less cut off from the strong and complex currents of modern life. This community, as it stands today, is the product of social forces which are not, I think, peculiar to this special place and time, but which have operated here in more clean-cut and obvious fashion than anywhere else: hence its interest for the sociologist.

The Ghetto area proper extends from the southwestern base of the Capitoline Hill to the Tiber, and for something less than half a mile along the river front. It is very small—less than ten square blocks, as a New Yorker would reckon it. This is the oldest continuously inhabited part of the city, having been used without interruption ever since Neolithic times; it was probably the meeting place and battleground for people from the three ancient villages—on the Capitoline, Palatine, and Esquiline Hills—from which Rome was formed three thousand years ago. It is also the lowest part of the city—below river level in a wet year—and therefore, until the Tiber was diked up in the middle of the last century, the unhealthiest. During classical times it formed part of the Suburra, even then a notorious slum. In the 14th century, at the low point of Rome’s trajectory, when it was only a large and disorderly village, with livestock pastured in the Forum and vineyards planted on the Palatine Hill, this area was still the center of its population. Later, when the city began to recover its population and prosperity, many of its noble families built handsome palazzi here. But the district has long since sunk into a sort of venerable squalor, vividly lit here and there by gleams of antique beauty. Between the columns of the portico built by Augustus Caesar for his sister Octavia, behind the typical beaded curtain of an Italian shop door, the kosher butcher plies his trade. Entering a small, dingy restaurant, one may see, built into the wall behind the bar, a marvelous frieze of gamboling beasts, carved no doubt by some exiled and long forgotten Greek. The lovely early Renaissance façade of the Palazzo Cenci—built by and named for the doomed and bloody family of Shelley’s play—hides dozens of one-room dwellings, without running water, toilets, or separate cooking facilities, which are inhabited by as many as nine people.

There have probably been Jews in Rome since 167 B.C.E., when the newly established Maccabean dynasty in Palestine concluded a treaty of peace, friendship, and trade with the Roman Senate, and exchanged envoys with it. The first large nucleus of Jewish population, however, arrived during the period of the Roman protectorate over Palestine—69 B.C.E. to 80 C.E.—and particularly after the final fall of the Temple, which ended this period. Many Jews came as slaves and prisoners of war, others of their own free will, mostly as merchants. Settled in Rome, they were not only tolerated by the government, but granted significant privileges—exemption from direct worship of the Emperor (incumbent upon all others), from military service, from jury service and the like on their holidays, and so forth. In the tolerant, cosmopolitan atmosphere of Rome, their stern, Jahvistic religion softened its outlines and threatened to wither away altogether. The so-called Jewish catacomb of Porta Portuense bears eloquent witness to the crumbling of Judaism as a faith—as well as to the material prosperity of its adherents: two conditions which seem often to go hand in hand. In the inscriptions, we find almost no Hebrew, unless it be the common word shalom, or one of the names for God; on the other hand, we do find quotations from the pagan poets (in Latin or Greek), and sentiments such as this (over the tomb of a four-year-old boy): “Weep not, Samuel; no one is immortal.” In the murals which decorate the tombs, we may see representations of pagan deities, or symbolism borrowed from one or other of the mystery cults prevalent at the time.

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In a sense, it can almost be said that the advent of Christianity saved Roman—and thereby perhaps European—Judaism from extinction. It did this by immediately setting up an impenetrable wall between the rest of the community and the Jews, thus removing the pressure toward conformity which had operated in their community for four centuries with such striking results. Although their relations with their Christian neighbors have undergone changes, this wall remained intact for more than fourteen centuries, and it is only now beginning to crumble away. Yet, when we speak of a wall, we must specify what we mean. It is nothing like the phenomenon which appeared in northern and eastern Europe, where the “pale” was a symbol of hatred and rejection in the Christian mind, and, in another sense, a legal and physical protection for the Jew against popular hostility, which might at any moment break forth in pogroms and other acts of persecution. No one is more tolerant and less fanatical about anything—with the notable exception of his own comfort—than your ordinary Italian, and your Roman is the Italian par excellence in this respect, as in some others. Left to himself, he would probably have accepted the Jew as an equal with no reservations whatever. But this could not be. Rome, from the advent of Christianity until that of the Italian Monarchy, except for periods of virtual anarchy and gang rule, was always under the control of a theocratic power, whether Imperial or Papal; indeed, some would say that it still is so. These powers had reasons of their own for putting and keeping the Jews in a particular position relative to the Christian community, and much of the time they had the means of doing so. The Jews, after all, were said to be witnesses, even if involuntary ones, to the truth of the Christian revelation—exhibit A for the defense, so to speak; hence they, alone of all non-Christian—indeed non-Catholic—groups, were allowed to subsist. At the same time, they had to be kept firmly in subjection, so that all could see that they were being punished for having rejected Jesus.

Under the Christian Emperor Theodosius they were speedily demoted to second-class citizenship, or rather—since in my opinion citizenship is an all-or-nothing matter—to non-citizenship. They were barred from public office, and prohibited from engaging in the liberal professions and in various other trades and occupations, especially including those having anything to do with foodstuffs which might eventually be consumed by Christians. These restrictions gradually became a constant preoccupation in Roman legislation concerning the Jews. They were also required to wear a distinctive sign on their persons—again the first of many such ordinances. With the barbaric invasions we lose sight of the Jewish community, as of everything else in the neighborhood of Rome. Nothing more is known for certain about it until in 1170 the Spanish Jewish rabbi and world traveler Benjamin of Tudela passed through Rome and noted that its Jews were few—not more than two hundred males of canonical age, indicating a total population of six to eight hundred—but extremely prosperous. At this time the city was nominally governed by the Senate—an aristocratic body of varying composition, subject to a certain amount of popular control, exercised in a rough sort of way by means of sticks and stones. But in reality anarchy prevailed, and the Jews dealt with all parties impartially in a business way and were often called in as umpires and peacemakers. Still, however, the Jew had no civil rights; unless the Senate or some other authority decided otherwise, he was, as George Orwell put it, an “unperson.”

During the next few centuries, the Popes gradually assumed firm temporal sovereignty over Rome and its environs, reducing the Senate to a rubber stamp and finally dispensing with it altogether. As their power increased, successive Popes proceeded to legislate the Jews into their peculiar position as combined witnesses and scapegoats.

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In 1555 the Bull Cum nimis absurdum was issued by Pope Paul IV (called by the German Jewish historian Abraham Berliner “der Allerschrecklichste”—“the most terrible of all”); this was certainly one of the most ferocious pieces of anti-Semitic legislation ever carried through anywhere before 1933. By the provisions of this Bull all Jews in the Papal states were confined to ghettos in either of two cities, Rome or Ancona, and were placed under a curfew. They were forbidden to engage in any occupations except those of refuse-collecting and trade in secondhand goods (which, significantly, are still the predominant occupations among the Ghetto community); they were forbidden to own real property, to associate with Christians in any number of ways—attending them as physicians or midwives, employing them as servants in any capacity, eating or drinking or conversing familiarly with them, and so on. Various limitations were also placed on their religious and ceremonial life. In subsequent Bulls the Popes relaxed all these restrictions somewhat in detail, for they found that if they bore down too hard on the Jews the economic life of the city suffered. The main lines, however, had been set. About a century after Cum nimis absurdum, a Bull was issued by Urban VIII perpetually freezing rents on all premises in the Ghetto—which were, of course, owned by Christians, since Jews were forbidden to own real estate. Thenceforth anyone who held a building or an apartment in gazzaga, as it was called (from an Aramaic word meaning a perpetual leasehold), could sell it, sublet it, give it in gift or in dowry, bequeath it, mortgage it, or lose it for debt, exactly as if the premises were his property. Furthermore, if any building were destroyed, the right of gazzaga applied equally to whatever might be put in its place. The landlords meanwhile were obligated to keep the premises in repair—an obligation more honored in the breach than in the observance, as the present condition of the buildings shows. The role of such a law in fixing the population geographically is obvious enough.

Not only were the Jews legally forbidden to live outside the Ghetto, but certain historical events combined to increase the already serious overcrowding. In 1492 the Jews were expelled from Spain and shortly afterward from the Spanish territories in Italy. Many of the expelled Sephardim, as they were called—native Italian Jews being known as Italiotes—settled in Rome, whose Jewish population thereby doubled. The resultant congestion and economic competition led to the setting up of a detailed and sophisticated written constitution for the Jewish community. This document remained operative in amended form until the end of Papal rule.

The stage is now set. For three hundred years the pattern of Jewish life worked itself out within this squalid and constricting setting. The Papacy, chronically in want of funds, bled the community white with special taxes and forced loans which were never repaid. Rome became a byword among Italian Jews for social and intellectual backwardness. Finally, in 1848, the great year of revolutions—after the Jews were abortively liberated by Napoleon’s troops in 1803—a crowd of Christians, fired by the eloquence of the liberal priest Ambrogio Ambrosoli, tore down part of the Ghetto wall. The following year the Tiber overflowed, making the Ghetto uninhabitable, and its residents were dispersed to various parts of the city, from which many of them never returned. In 1870 Garibaldi’s troops entered Rome and the political power of the Papacy was ended. All Bulls and other Papal regulations were abrogated, and the Ghetto ceased to exist officially. What actually happened at this point was that the Roman Jewish community split in two: those of its members who had a little more initiative than the others, or a little tree capital, moved out of the Ghetto area and set themselves up in business or in the professions elsewhere; there they were joined by immigrant Jews from other parts of Italy, from North Africa, and from the Near East. Together, these now form a loosely knit group or congeries of groups, representing every economic level and every degree of religious commitment and social participation. On the other hand, the poorer, more conservative elements of the community stayed behind: these people still inhabit what used to be the Ghetto, as well as—to a smaller extent—a contiguous area across the Tiber, and some settlements in the borgate (suburban slums) which may properly be considered colonies of the Ghetto. These people now form a tightly knit, economically specialized and depressed, highly tradition-minded group.

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Any consideration of this “nuclear community,” as I call it—in contradistinction to the somewhat larger and less compact “peripheral” Jewish group living outside the Roman Ghetto—must necessarily bristle with contradictions. The very exist-tence of the community itself is a matter of question: Jews who do not live in the Ghetto area or its outliers insist that there is no such thing, while those who do live in the Ghetto are equally sure of the opposite. One informant in the first category announced to me solemnly, with the air of someone who has just unearthed a profound truth, that there were and always had been two kinds of Jews in the world—those with and those without money—and that this was the whole explanation of the matter. The historical shortcomings of such a hypothesis are obvious. Again, anything which would tend to emphasize the separateness and social autonomy of the nuclear community is likely to be slurred over or conveniently forgotten. For instance, the characteristic Jewish social institutions—those which handle the expenses of circumcision, marriage (including the granting of dowries), and other religious observances for the poor—are commonly supposed, by the peripheral community, to be extinct, and to have had their functions completely taken over by charitable bodies directed from the peripheral community—and even, in a few cases, from abroad. Yet I interviewed several people who claimed to be members of the circumcision-society (called Societá dei Compari, or Society of Godfathers), and to have used its services in recent years—presumably since the war. The time-honored Jewish custom of giving dowries, too, is denied in the peripheral community, but is very much alive, at least psychologically, in the nuclear one: almost everyone here thinks there should be dowries, although no one whom I encountered was in a position to do anything about it. The truth seems to be that the well-to-do, educated Roman Jew is profoundly ashamed of his less fortunate brethren, and would deny their existence entirely if he could. The nuclear-community person, on the other hand, knows this and resents it, consciously or unconsciously, so that he feels almost as separate from a wealthy Jew (with at least one important exception which I shall describe later) as from a Christian or a foreigner, if not more.

As I have said, junk-collecting and peddling from pushcarts are the chief occupations in the nuclear community; together they account for about 70 per cent of the men in my sample. There are also some shop assistants and other lower-echelon, white-collar personnel, but these are found mostly in outlying districts, not in the Ghetto area proper. This specialization reflects, and is reflected in, a part of the nuclear community’s system of values which in its turn is expressed in a curious item of linguistic usage. When the returns started to come in from a preliminary questionnaire which I had administered to members of the community, I was surprised to find that the vast majority of them had listed themselves as “unemployed” (disoccupati) . I later learned that to these people the word “employed” (occupato or impiegato) carried either one of two unexpressed qualifications—and sometimes both: “at manual labor” and “for wages or a salary.” “Unemployed” did not therefore mean that the person in question did nothing, or had no source of income, but simply that he did not—technically speaking—work with his hands, and that he had no employer; a busy doctor or lawyer would have been equally “unemployed”—although the word was not applied to those who owned shops. The cardinal fact about the nuclear community is that its members—the core, that is—would rather starve on their own, doing something which can be classified, however speciously, as trade, than make a living by any other method.

Given hard work and a good deal of luck, ragpicking and peddling will support a bare existence. As practiced, they usually amount to begging, and this shows up another salient characteristic of the nuclear community: its main resource is charity. This charity must come from outside itself, and the community must therefore, and to that extent, be called parasitic. Nevertheless, its members consider that the institutions by which charity is dispensed belong to them, in a very real sense, more than to the patrons and administrators from the peripheral community. Thus the very mechanisms by which their essentially dependent status is exemplified become means of binding them more firmly together. This is a frequent and interesting social phenomenon, but in few settings is it shown so strikingly as here.

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During my interviews I asked the informants, most of whom were women, whether they traded by preference at Jewish-owned shops. Some answered without hesitation that of course they did. Others, however, drew my attention to the curious fact that there are no Jewish-owned shops dealing in staple foods in the Ghetto area. This rule does not apply to food in general: there are in the area two Jewish restaurants, one of which is internationally famous; a “bar”—for coffee, pastries, aperitifs, and the like, and not to be confused with its American namesake; a tavern; and a candy store, well known throughout Rome, in Christian as well as Jewish circles. However, nuclear-community people, like members of most low-income groups, spend a large proportion of their budgets for staple provisions—especially, in this case, the various forms of pasta, on which they chiefly live—and for these they must go to Christians, even in the heart of the Ghetto area. This seems to be a holdover from the days when Jews were officially forbidden to trade in staples; it illustrates the strong grip of tradition, in trivial as well as in major matters.

In interviewing informants, I was struck by the extent to which the women of the nuclear community apparently took the initiative in holding families together, and even sometimes in keeping their members alive. It is largely due to the women that the community is such a stable one. As for the man of the Ghetto, twenty generations of grinding poverty and social isolation cannot but have left their mark on him. I do not think that the Ghetto man creates this weak and spiritless impression merely because he is usually a beggar. In Italy this is a recognized occupation, and no moral stigma attaches to it there, any more than in the Orient. As a handicapped person in a wheelchair, I was myself given money spontaneously several times while I was in Rome; what would certainly have seemed a deadly insult in this country hardly even surprised me, after the first time—except perhaps as an implied comment on the way I was dressed!

Many of the women, on the other hand, show some of the same elemental sturdiness which one finds in long-established peasant populations. I was interviewing an incredibly ancient Ghetto woman, and asked her whether she had any friends or relatives who visited her regularly. “Eh, no, son quasi tutti morti—No , they’re almost all dead,” she replied, with a typically Roman tone and gesture expressing half-humorous resignation mixed with a sort of astonishment. Such ways of talking and acting are in fact standard lower-class Roman and not Jewish at all, except as the Jews are the oldest identifiable element in the population. These people are basically urban peasants, millennia removed from the slick operators of the Corso and the Via Veneto, only a mile or so away.

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The nuclear community’s experience with Zionism is highly revealing on a number of counts, and will also serve to introduce us to the attitudes of other Roman Jews toward the nuclear community, with which they must somehow deal. First, it may be well to say a few words about Italian Zionism in general. This has always been more or less of a hothouse plant. Because of the special situation in Italy—the small number of Jews (never in modern times more than 40,000), and the relatively small amount of pressure under which they were placed, except for the brief period of actual German occupation at the end of the war—emigration to Israel never seemed to them, as it did to their confrères elsewhere in Europe, a simple and obvious solution to a pressing problem. Instead, the Zionist tradition has been kept up by a handful of dedicated people from the upper middle class, proudly conscious of their Jewish heritage, and looking around for a dramatic way of expressing this consciousness. The impulses which might have turned it into a genuine, large-scale popular movement were abortive.

From 1947 through 1949, many people from the nuclear community went to Israel. All of them of whom I have any knowledge—except for one woman, whom I shall describe later, and her husband—were back within a year, and usually less. Many reasons were given for this, both by those who had been through the experience and by others who had not: simple homesickness; disappointment at the hard conditions of life encountered; disorientation aggravated by the language-problem and the immigrants’ lack of technical skills of any kind. The first two of these were probably the more serious, since the third could always have been overcome given the will to do so. One of my informants summed up the matter with characteristic earthy common sense by saying: “Here you don’t work and you don’t eat; there you work—and you still don’t eat. So—we stay here.”

But the trouble went deeper than this. I was frequently told by informants from the peripheral community—particularly those with Zionist sympathies—that people such as the woman I have just quoted lacked the necessary intellectual and spiritual preparation for the experience; they were simply not of the stuff of which pioneers are made. Again the question remains: why? Here is where a historical point of view may help us. Although the people of the nuclear community know that they are Jews and are proud of it, they know very little about Judaism, and it means, essentially, very little to them. (This applies to those over about twenty; with the children the situation is different, for reasons which I shall show later.) Remember that religion is not emphasized in Italy as it is here. It is not necessarily one of the first things you know about a person; until informed otherwise, you assume that he is a Catholic, and that is that. Also, perhaps because constant Papal inter ference forced Roman Jewry to keep its religion, and the rest of its cultural life, under wraps, it never developed the concentrated, almost fierce intellectual tradition of the Ashkenazim. In fact, the Roman community was cut off even from the Jewish intellectual life of the north Italian cities, exemplified by such men as the philosopher Leone Ebreo (in Hebrew, Yehudah Abbrabanel), author of the Dialogue on Love, the Aristotelian scholar Leone da Modena, friend and collaborator of Pico della Mirandola and others, and the Biblical and Talmudic scholar Azariah de’ Rossi. Roman Ghetto Jews remain to this day largely cut off from the main current of Judaism, which, since the final triumph of the Inquisition and the expulsion of Islam from Europe, has flowed increasingly through Ashkenazic channels. By the same token, they are not now visible as Jews to Jews from other countries. Thus it can be seen that, as far as emigration to Israel is concerned, the Italian Jew in general, and the nuclear-community person in particular, lacks not only the preparation but the raw materials for success.

When I brought up matters connected with Zionism, many of my informants from the peripheral community seized the occasion to abuse the Ghetto Jews for the same kind of faults of which Negroes and poor whites are commonly accused in this country: laziness, shiftlessness, provincialism, lack of pride, lack of practical and financial sense.

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What follows is a fairly typical though somewhat elaborate expression of this attitude. The speaker is a woman who had emigrated to Israel in 1948 and made a good adjustment there and was now back on a brief visit. Though she had been born and brought up in the Ghetto area, and though her sister lived there at the time, she was somewhat detached from its modes of life and thought. This was presumably due to experience at the Jewish orphanage in Rome in early youth and in a Zionist training program later. My general impression of the informant was of a rather rigid personality with a positive, doctrinaire approach to life and a limited emotional range.

“Look, now I’ll tell you: the poor part, the Jews of the Ghetto, are of such a restricted mentality as is difficult to find among other European Jewish peoples. Why? They don’t get away from this environment; only the rich ones, their money makes them rise up a bit; not even the elderly ones, but their children get away from that environment. And for the matter of Israel there are few willing to suffer, to do jobs that here they consider unworthy, not respectable, willing to work that way, because in Israel every kind of work is respectable, because even if a woman goes out to do any kind of work, the important thing is that she earns her own bread; . . . and really to suffer hunger, because there living is very low, so low that it’s difficult to say, and to suffer for the bare necessities, because life is difficult even for the adults. There is the matter of getting used to the climate, which is severe; not everyone is prepared for the conditions; you have to go there with a certain idealism, then you can go there.”

In a reply to a remark of mine about the financial habits prevalent in the nuclear community, she commented:

It’s true: for you know they say that the more money a person has the less he spends. The person who has little money says: I have little; if I put it aside the little I have won’t help me any; so he spends it.

It is, of course, not the investigator’s job to allot praise or blame. Neverthless, it would seem that, to the extent to which such characteristics as this informant described exist in the nuclear community, they are the result, rather than the cause, of extreme and long-continued poverty. I asked several informants what they would do if they were suddenly to win a large sum of money, as one may do every week in Italy, on the soccer-pool, or the government-sponsored lottery. Most of them said either, “Get the children settled,” (i.e., with dowries) or, “Buy a house”—replies which indicate at least some grasp of the principles of money and property; the latter, of course, in nuclear-community terms.

On the whole, however, it is futile to expect middle-class virtues of a group which is not and never has been part of the middle class. Besides, it is doubtful whether, even if the nuclear community’s common prejudice against wage-labor were overcome, its situation would be improved much. Rome has a curious, top-heavy economic structure. It is not an industrial city, or a center of trade as such; vast numbers of people are occupied with government service, and most of the rest seem to live by taking in each other’s washing. Under these conditions, under-employment is and must be a chronic problem. It is my impression—which, like much of what I have said, borders on what is called a “value judgment,” and therefore would be out of place here if this were intended as a purely scientific treatment of the matter—that the strictures leveled against the Ghetto people are an expression of a collective guilt-complex on the part of their critics. There are some well-to-do Jews, including one of the most beloved and respected members of the community, a lifelong resident by choice in the Ghetto area, who did not join in the criticism. Whether this stemmed from conviction or from natural mildness and sweetness of temper, I could not tell.

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There are several forces and institutions now at work which tend or aim to disintegrate the nuclear community and to reintegrate its members either with the population as a whole or with the rest of Roman Jewry. They operate by varying methods and with differing effects. Taking the most obvious of them first, we may say that the Jewish elementary school is on the whole a consolidating influence. This institution was founded in 1922, immediately following the passage of the Gentile Law—so-called after Giovanni Gentile, its sponsor and Minister of Education at the time—which was one of the first measures enacted after Mussolini’s accession to power. This law placed the Italian primary and secondary school systems under the tutelage of the Catholic Church in certain important respects, and made instruction in Catholicism an official part of the curriculum. The Jewish elementary school was founded at this time by a group of wealthy Jews who did not care for this idea. Sometime during the mid-30’s it was granted official parity with the public schools—as had previously been done for the Catholic parochial schools—and, by the Racial Laws of 1938, all Jewish children were obliged to go there rather than to regular public schools. When I came to Rome, I found the Jewish school flourishing: enrollment had increased steadily since the end of the war (during which operations had to be suspended for two academic years), and a newly established bus service was bringing children from remote part’s of the city. The school is part of the government-directed school system, inasmuch as the non-religious part of its curriculum is determined, all its teachers are examined and appointed, and all its examinations set and marked under the supervision of the Ministry of Education. However, all its teachers whom I know of are Jewish and many of them bear surnames characteristic of the nuclear community. The school devotes about four hours per week to instruction in Jewish religion and culture under the supervision of the Chief Rabbi of Rome, but its character as a religious institution cannot be measured by this criterion alone. At every opportunity, the students’ attention is directed to their Jewish heritage, and the entire Jewish ceremonial year is elaborately celebrated.

The schoolhouse is located on the southwestern bank of the Tiber, opposite the Ghetto area, so that anyone coming to it must pass through this area, unless he is coming from the same side of the Tiber—the so-called Trastevere district. Of the school’s approximately 500 students, an estimated 350 come from the nuclear community—a proportion contrasting sharply with the nuclear community’s share of the total Jewish population, which is just over one-third. (Of late years, more children from the peripheral community have been enrolling than was the case in the past; in a short while the student body may be divided equally.) All my informants were agreed that the vast majority of nuclear-community children attended the Jewish school, and furthermore that those who did not attend acquired a decidedly different attitude toward Jewish religion and culture than the others. To this extent, therefore, we must class the school as a nuclear-community institution. However, we must not forget that in intention, and partly also in fact, it cuts across the narrow boundaries of the nuclear community and tends to weld Roman Jewry into an organic whole. Its effect, in sociological terms, seems to be neatly balanced between these two tendencies.

The next Jewish institution in order of social importance is probably the orphanage. This is housed in a handsome old building, the Palazzo Tolemei, located in Trastevere some distance away from the Ghetto area itself. It has room for about fifty children, equally divided between boys and girls. It takes not only orphans in the strict sense but children with one living parent or, if the family situation as it stands is particularly undesirable, children with two living parents. Its director since the war has been a Polish Jew, survivor of a concentration camp—a strong but not intrusive personality, with very definite ideas about the care of children. He told me that at present the severest punishment with which a fractious child at the orphanage could be threatened was that of being sent home. He said further that those who did return to the nuclear-community environment after having been in the orphanage for any length of time were revolted by Ghetto conditions and made every effort to escape. Making all due allowances for the informant’s bias, this appears to be true. Several “graduates” of the orphanage who were among my informants showed very different traits of personality from what was usual in the nuclear community and were mentally and spiritually detached from its life, even when they lived in its immediate neighborhood. Some of them, indeed, attributed their apartness to their special experience: “I spent some time at the orphanage; you get a different viewpoint there,” was a typical remark. The experience of the woman who said this antedated the present director’s tenure; the state of affairs which it indicates cannot, therefore, be attributed to the influence of his personality. The avowed aim of the orphanage is to destroy the nuclear community as such, and there can be no doubt that it has this effect.

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Another institution in this same class is the trade school. This is conducted by the international organization ORT (Organization for Rehabilitation in Training), with headquarters in Paris. The aim of this organization is to increase the reservoir of technical and manual skills in the Jewish population. In so doing, it runs counter to a long-established tradition in European Jewry as a whole, and in the nuclear Roman community particularly. The effects of this program on the nuclear community are interesting. The nuclear community supplies almost the entire student body, but many of the students have great difficulty in following the courses because of inadequate preparation. One part of the program, however, has produced striking results—up to a point: this is a project for training girls in the needle trades, which have long been traditional among the women of the nuclear community, forming an exception to their general inexperience with manual work. A year or so before I arrived, ORT International had offered a series of scholarships to promising students to learn haute couture in Paris. There were many qualified students, but none of them would accept the scholarships. Paris was too far away; it was not like Rome; how would they get back to Via Portico d’Ottavia (the Ghetto’s main street) every Friday evening to see their friends? It was the Palestine experiment all over again: away from their ancestral home, these people feel lost and their sense of reality is deranged. Another interesting item: when the graduates of this program came to be placed a difficulty was encountered, in that they would not work on the Sabbath. Any Ghetto Jew is willing to collect trash or tend to shop or a pushcart on Saturday, but he is convinced (with no Scriptural warrant as far as those versed in such matters can make out) that working with his hands for wages is contrary to his religion. This illustrates an important aspect of the psychology of nuclear-community people, which I was unable to get to the bottom of, but which is certainly basic: namely, their tendency to emphasize and retain precisely those parts of their religious heritage—as they see it, with or without benefit of Scriptural authority—which make it most difficult for them to adjust to the world around them. I know that this is fanciful psychologizing, but it almost seems as if they desired to retain the familiar comfort of their depressed status, even with its miseries.

With regard to the Jewish social institutions generally, it is important to note an acute problem faced by those who direct them. How can they wean the Ghetto people away from ways of life and thought which are considered undesirable, without at the same time weaning them away from Judaism itself? The rabbi, and other prominent figures, pointed out to me the fact that the devoutest Jews in Rome werealso the poorest and most ignorant—all without seeming to realize in the least the implications of what they were saying.

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Before taking leave of the nuclear community and trying to summarize what we have learned about it, we must say a few words about what is always a burning issue, both socially and sociologically in any situation of this kind: mixed marriage and inbreeding. My original population sample (based on all children treated at the Jewish free clinic since its inception, including automatically all students at the Jewish elementary school), contained 656 families. Of these, more than half bore one of thirteen common surnames, any one of which would be recognized by any Roman Jew as belonging to the core of his community. This indicates a very high “coefficient of inbreeding,” as the biological term has it, for the community in the past, and this is confirmed by other data. In examining official records of marriages at the headquarters of the Jewish Community (a corporate body charged with maintaining Jewish religious life and keeping vital statistics), I did not find more than a handful of mixed marriages among people whom I recognized either by name or residence as belonging to the nuclear community. These findings, however, are not air-tight, because time was lacking in which to complete the check, and because the records themselves were incomplete from my point of view. A high rate of inbreeding is indicated also by the biological data which my father, Professor Leslie C. Dunn, collected at the same time that I was doing the social study. One important blood group gene, the so-called B factor, proved to be twice as frequent among the inhabitants of the nuclear community as in the surrounding population.1

What can we say in summation? The nuclear community as it stands today is the product of a peculiar historical process. In this it resembles, to be sure, every other human group, from the Murngin of the Australian bush to the city of New York. However, in this case, the bare bones of history are neatly laid out for our inspection. The forces of Papal interference and fiscal spoliation, together with the humanitarian efforts of some Popes toward social justice, have stamped an indelible mark on the community, as the die cutter stamps the metal placed in it.

What accounts for the survival of the nuclear community’s peculiar social and cultural features so long after the end of the historical situation which gave rise to them? Partly, of course, mere historical inertia. But partly also the fact that the Ghetto Jew, in the bosom of his community, lives as he and his ancestors have always lived, and is accepted by his peers on that basis. Once he goes outside that community, he is made to feel like a failure, a beggar, and of course no one likes this. No matter how miserable his life may be, he is a person solidly based in a close-knit social unit. In this he differs radically from the usual inhabitant of a slum in this country, or for that matter in any other part of Europe. From this fact arises his deep though primitive and uninformed religious sense and his curiously persistent though rudimentary sense of values. Once in a while, an unusually articulate Ghetto Jew will even tell you that the ways of life for which his forefathers suffered and sometimes died—though by no fault or choice of their own—are good enough for him—though he does have a choice.

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1 See “The Jewish Community of Rome,” by Leslie C. and Stephen P. Dunn, in the Scientific American (March 1957).

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