Das Ende der doppelten Schutzherrschaft: Der Heilige Stuhl und die Juden am Ubergang zur Moderne (1775-1870) (review)

This is a learned book, especially in the Vatican Archives, but also from the Holy Office, which was the principal authority concerned, and the ministry of the interior from the archives of the city of Rome. Its subject is the situation within the Papal States of the Jewish population, which had lived there since the Middle Ages and from Pope Gregory XIII in the Counter-Reformation was ordered into ghettos. Here are a mass of illuminating legal cases. Someone bought property outside the ghetto; could he keep it or rent it out? To travel within Italy one needed a visa; was that really necessary over a short distance? A well-to-do Jewish family employed in the market a nurse or a midwife who in the circumstances was very likely to be a Christian and quite likely to become a beloved member of the Jewish family. Was it permissible for a Christian to work in a Jewish family? Could a Jewish child attend a Christian school? Was it possible for a Jew traveling outside the ghetto to take lodging with a Christian?

The strength of this book, apart from its information, is its ability to portray the sense of responsibility in the organs of papal government. They did not realize it, but they were in an impossible situation. It was not that a minority in the State lay under legal disadvantages, for minorities were under disadvantage all over Europe. Protestants, who were a substantial minority in France, were not legally tolerated there till 1787. Roman Catholics suffered various forms of disadvantage over Protestant Europe. But the papal government had accepted that it had a duty toward its Jews, the duty of protection. It simultaneously believed that the State which it ruled was specially a religious State, with an element of sacredness about its being. The more sacred it felt to be, the more likely to misgovern those not of its own religion. The force of this feeling depended both on circumstances and on personages.

On circumstances: the revolution in France produced French conquest in Italy and applied doctrines like liberty and equality in the various Italian States. In the northern Papal States, the Legations, there were soon no ghettos and in theory no disabilities for Jewish citizens. The Jewish authorities tried to live with this new atmosphere, and in 1807 a great Sanhedrin in Paris praised the new Pope's policy. During the five years 1809-1814, with more French occupation in Italy, there was nominally more emancipation, but the problem was not solved because these years were too few to persuade the general public to accept Jews as equal members of society.

Then Cardinal Consalvi returned to Rome from the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and Pope Pius VII returned from exile in 1815 and over Europe there was return and reaction. This Pope was no rigid reactionary, but popes and their servants were wrapt in tradition. It was more the circumstances than the persons which brought back ghetto and Jewish disadvantage.

Two popes of the nineteenth century helped to sully the reputation of the Papacy in liberal Europe. Neither was Gregory XVI (1831-1846), who won the name of a political reactionary because he needed to cope with liberal revolutions in his northern States. He treated the Jews with moderation and sense and had regular meetings with representatives of the Roman Jews, who thought about him as "tolerant enough." The northern revolution abolished the ghettos and though the revolutions failed those ghettos were never revived with locked and guarded gates. The Bishop of Imola, the future Pope Pius IX, tried to revive the locked ghetto at Lugo, and failed, both through the protests of the Jews who lived there, and from the disagreement of his own vicar and from the refusal of the local lay authority. In Ancona the...