Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [36]
In part, it did so by demonizing the very people whose own religious injunctions against usury provided the bedrock of the church's arguments against it: the Jews, a presence of deep historical record in Rome that forcibly reminded a hostile hierarchy that the church's own original sin lay in its dependence for moral precepts on a people it regarded as damned to all eternity. It is ironic that Pope John Paul II, soon to be imitated by the parish priest of Monti in a genuinely moving ceremony of recognition for a local church's role in the forced conversion of Roman Jews, sought the forgiveness of the Jewish people, whom he called "our elder brothers"; the Israelite condemnation for usury was expressed as a rejection of ensnaring one's "brothers" in debt."
In Monti the Jewish presence is a weak echo of the Ghetto's nearby presence and of a past when Monti was the place where newly converted Jews, from 1634 on, were forcibly isolated in a convent-like structure-now a seat of one of Rome's secular universities-adjoining the parish church and a few paces from the Church of San Salvatore, formerly the seat of the parish priest. Here, in rigid isolation for a ritualistic forty days, they were indoctrinated in their new faith. In the parish church, too, lies buried a rabbi who not only converted but also served his Vatican masters by trying to bring his erstwhile followers into the Christian flock with him, his tomb marked by a Hebrew inscription that, like the bilingual text from Isaiah over the doorway of the Church of St. Gregory at the entrance to the Ghetto, marks the ongoing attempts by the Vatican to incorporate the Jews while marking even those who converted as forever tainted by their collective past. 12
Recognition of the historical relationship between the two religions, and even the shared doctrine of original sin, was not to come until the twentieth century, when the Jews who died at the hands of the Nazi occupiers were eventually commemorated in a simple but deeply moving memorial as "Roman citizens of Jewish religion"-claimed, that is, not as indwelling outsiders nor yet as citizens of the nation-state, but as an integral segment of the city's very soul.13 Two black-shirted neofascists assured me, individually and on separate occasions, that the Roman Jews were truly the last genuine Romans.14 Some Monti Jews certainly owed their survival during the Nazi occupation to the willingness of nuns-and even, in one case, an active Fascist-to hide them at considerable risk to their own lives. Such incidents are often held to demonstrate that anti-Semitism is foreign to the Italian way, despite the fact that others including one entire Monti family were betrayed to the Nazis by local informers; and that Mussolini's racial laws were entirely the result of pressure from Hitler and the Nazis.15 While such self-exoneration has come in for some long-overdue rethinking, 16 the Jewish presence-despite hostile mutterings among right-wingers who blame the Jews for letting Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs buy out their properties in the nearby Esquilino district-is now largely viewed with equanimity and affection. The Monti parish priest was clearly serious about recognizing the importance of reconnecting the church with its Jewish roots, and his enthusiasm for this subject was manifest in his unflinching lecture, preceded by a formal ritual of prayer and followed by a historical exegesis of the role of the Church of San Salvatore in the forcible isolation of Jewish converts, on the wrong that the church had committed against the Jewish people-although, as he insisted, this wrong sprang from a sincere if misguided desire to