Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century (review)

“All the world’s a stage,” as Shakespeare put it at the turn of the seventeenth century. It is not too surprising that scholars would eventually co-opt the metaphor to contemporize their investigations of the sixteenth century. The charming frame of these lectures that the author delivered at Smith College, a verdant oasis of Thespians nestled in a bucolic valley of five colleges, reflects the delightful atmosphere of its Attic setting. How else could one put a happy face on the vile degeneration that Roman Jewry underwent at the hands of a virulent papacy entering into the Counter Reformation, if not as a classic comedy?

The ghettoization of Roman Jewry by Pope Paul IV in 1555 was a concretization of ancestral papal claims to control the fate of the Jews in Latin Christendom. And that claim, which had been challenged by Holy Roman Emperors during the generations preceding the First Crusade and following it, and had been won de iure if not de facto by the papacy, was now to be challenged by the Protestant Reformation and its peculiar approaches to the Jews.

Fortunately the author is aware of the limitations of his metaphor. Yet from it emerge the themes of drama and emotion that sustained the act of remaining sane during the three centuries wherein the Jews lived a divorced but parallel life as ghettoized Romans. It is the process of accommodation to their new situation, a process that took several generations, that is the basis of the author’s inquiry in this interesting survey and summary of the Roman Jewish historical experience.

Stow has already shown himself to be a master of sources and their interpretation. He brings this experience to bear on the transitional period between the quiescence the Jews experienced under Pope Martin V and the increasing aggression that characterized Pope Paul IV and his successors. Martin V must have seemed an oasis in retrospect. He followed on the beginnings of racist massacres in the Catholic Spains that continued even after the expulsion of the Jews from the united kingdom, culminating in the forced baptisms in Portugal. The ensuing Inquisition would continue to burn suspect conversos, even after the demise of that Holy Office (still effective in Mexico in the 1850s); and the Jews of Rome—as elsewhere in the Papal Estates—would bear the brunt of the declining authority and influence of the Papacy until its own ghettoization in the Vatican. If the Theater of Acculturation is a comedy, it is a dark one indeed.

Stow’s four chapters explore and explain with broad sweeps of his pen the reality of sixteenth-century Rome. How many Catholics and Jews understand the Roman cultures—both their own and the others’—that emerged from their respective religions? Stow provides some of the clearest summaries of both Judaism and Catholicism in their practical life. With respect to the Jews, he shows to what extent Jewish notaries adapted and adopted contemporary notarial patterns and thus were instrumental in forging the successful accommodation that characterized Roman Jewish life. He is able to elucidate for the reader how notarial documents can be properly used and critiqued by scholars and students of the period. Despite the caveats regarding generalizations, a useful pattern does emerge.

Here women’s history comes into its proper focus as an integral part of the general continuum, and not as a special entity that survives on its own rhythms. He includes their successes and failures, their loves and losses. He introduces us to the foods they cooked and the patois they created, some of which is the unique survival from classical Roman times. For, as he reminds us, Roman Jewry along with its prerogatives antedated the Papacy in Rome. They were already Romans of long experience when a Jew named Peter was crucified in the city. Thus they had the skills to ride out the vicissitudes of papal brinkmanship throughout...