The Jews of Rome

The Jewish community of Rome is the oldest continuously inhabited Jewish community in Europe, with documented presence in the city from the second century BCE. Its survival through two thousand years, including more than three centuries inside the Roman ghetto and the Holocaust deportation of October 1943, makes it one of the strangest of the European Jewish stories. By 1938 the community numbered around 12,000. After the deportation of 16 October 1943 and the subsequent arrests and killings until the liberation of Rome in June 1944, around 1,800 Roman Jews had been murdered. Around 10,000 survived. The community continues, in the same neighbourhood, in 2026.

Two thousand years

The Jewish community of Rome predates Christianity. Jewish ambassadors from the Hasmonean kingdom were active in the city in the second century BCE; the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE and the subsequent Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-135 CE brought Jewish prisoners to Rome in numbers, and the community has never been interrupted since. The Arch of Titus on the Via Sacra still depicts the menorah taken from the Temple of Jerusalem; the community has refused to walk under the arch for nearly two thousand years.

The community survived the long medieval period of Christian rule, the Counter-Reformation, the establishment of the ghetto by Pope Paul IV in 1555 in the Via del Portico d’Ottavia, and the three centuries during which the ghetto was the only legal place of residence for Roman Jews. The ghetto was abolished in 1870 with the unification of Italy and the end of the Papal States; the community celebrated, but most of its members continued to live in the same neighbourhood, where the Great Synagogue was completed in 1904 in a distinctive Assyrian-Babylonian style chosen to be visibly different from any Christian church.

1938 to 1943: the racial laws and the Italian retreat

The Italian racial laws of 1938, modelled on the Nuremberg Laws and pressed on Mussolini by his German alliance, were a shock to a community that had been formally emancipated for nearly seventy years and that had been broadly comfortable under fascism in its first decade. Jews were excluded from public service, from the universities, from the schools, from the professions. Around 6,000 Italian Jews emigrated between 1938 and 1940, most to Palestine, the United States or Latin America. The remaining community lost its institutional standing in Italian public life.

The Italian state, however, did not deport its own Jews. From 1940 to 1943 Italian Jews were subjected to dispossession and discrimination but were not handed over to the Germans, even after Italy entered the war on Germany’s side in June 1940. Italian-occupied territories in southern France, in Croatia and in Greece were, paradoxically, places where Jews from elsewhere in occupied Europe took refuge from German deportation; the Italian army administration repeatedly refused German requests to hand them over.

The Italian armistice with the Allies on 8 September 1943 ended this anomalous protection. The Germans occupied northern and central Italy within hours. Rome fell to the German army on 10 September. The new German occupying administration began the systematic round-up of Italian Jews on 16 October 1943.

The deportation of 16 October 1943

The round-up in Rome began at dawn on Saturday 16 October 1943. Around 365 SS troops under the command of Theodor Dannecker, an Eichmann subordinate, surrounded the former ghetto and the surrounding neighbourhoods. Some 1,259 Jews were arrested in the course of the day. Approximately 250 were released over the following two days as non-Jews or as members of mixed marriages; 1,022 were held. They were taken to the Tiburtina station and put on a sealed train on 18 October. The train arrived at Auschwitz on 23 October. Of the 1,022 deported, 16 survived the war.

The round-up had been preceded, ten days earlier, by an extortion. The German military commander in Rome, Herbert Kappler, had demanded fifty kilograms of gold from the Jewish community on threat of mass deportation; the community, with the help of non-Jewish Romans including Pope Pius XII (whose role here remains debated), had assembled the gold in two days. The handover took place on 28 September. The deportation came regardless. The gold extortion is one of the documented episodes of the Holocaust in Italy and is preserved in the Italian state archives.

Further deportations from Rome continued through the autumn and winter. Around 730 more Roman Jews were arrested in smaller operations and individual betrayals between October 1943 and the liberation of Rome on 4 June 1944. Of these, 64 returned. The total Roman Jewish death toll was 1,800. The community lost roughly 17 per cent of its members, the lowest deportation rate of any major European Jewish community subjected to a German operation, partly because of the speed of the Allied advance and partly because of the willingness of non-Jewish Romans, including many institutions of the Catholic Church, to hide Jews in their convents, monasteries and homes.

Afterwards

The community of Rome survived in greater numbers than any other major continental community subjected to German deportation. The Great Synagogue on the Lungotevere de’ Cenci is still in use; the building survived the war undamaged. The community in 2026 numbers around 13,000, larger than the pre-war community, and is the largest in Italy. The neighbourhood around the former ghetto, with its kosher restaurants and its plaque-marked buildings, remains the centre of Roman Jewish life.

The deportation is remembered every year on 16 October in a public commemoration that begins in the Piazza delle Cinque Scole. The Pope has been a regular participant since 1986, when John Paul II became the first reigning pope to visit a synagogue in modern times. The visit was to the Great Synagogue of Rome.

See also

Sources

  • Robert Katz, Black Sabbath: A Journey through a Crime against Humanity, Macmillan, 1969
  • Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue and Survival, Basic Books, 1987
  • Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy, Yale University Press, 2000
  • Michael Tagliacozzo, La comunità ebraica di Roma sotto l’occupazione nazista, La Rassegna Mensile di Israel, 1963
  • Giacomo Debenedetti, 16 ottobre 1943, Il Saggiatore, 1959 (one of the earliest published accounts of the deportation, written by an eyewitness)
  • Renzo De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, Einaudi, 1961 (revised editions through 1993)
  • Liliana Picciotto, Il Libro della Memoria: Gli ebrei deportati dall’Italia 1943-1945, Mursia, 1991 (the definitive register of Italian Jewish deportees)
  • Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, Milan, https://www.cdec.it
  • Museo Ebraico di Roma, https://www.museoebraico.roma.it