Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [37]
The Jews were often hated in earlier days, as they had been elsewhere in Europe, because of their reputation as extortionate moneylenders-a role into which the Christain faith propelled them, and not only because the authorities forbade them to own rural land. St. Thomas Aquinas and other medieval church leaders claimed that the Jews could serve as usurers because they were damned anyway; this would not only save Christians from the venal sin of usury, but would protect the desperate from the hardly lesser sin of complicity in the usurers' wickedness, since to ask another Christian for a loan at interest was to place that person's soul at risk of eternal damnation.17
Over the centuries, and especially as it began to countenance money lending on a limited scale by members of its own flock, the papacy increasingly persecuted the Jewish community even while continuing to exploit its financial services, thereby tacitly admitting its indebtedness to a population it regarded as diabolical. Its cynical expropriation of Jewish law at once allowed it to depend on and to repress the Jewish community, a tactic that can partly be traced to the hostility of the Franciscan order in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,18 and served as a template for the continuing cultural ambiguity of the Jewish presence, and the equally persistent moral ambiguity of commerce, in Rome. As Renata Ago points out, "the intermingling and reciprocal influence between the two cultures-that of the theologians and that of the merchants-is strong and continuous."19
In practice, the church tolerated certain forms of usury and deployed some adroit casuistry in its defense.20 By the end of papal rule usury was certainly not a Jewish monopoly; indeed, by that time it had become normal for local priests to engage in limited forms of low-interest money lending, and there are still instances of this in some areas.21 Thus the Vatican eventually approved the lending of money at rates that were fixed by law, and this process accompanied the gradual downgrading and disappearance from public view of the Jewish community, formerly the bankers as well as the scapegoats of a Vatican prepared, even compelled, to tolerate its continuing presence.22 As the fortunes of the Jewish community declined in the two centuries before Unification, the Vatican increased its own financial activity. The arguments in favor of this shift appealed to social relations and practical necessity as well as to the risks that an honest lender always assumed. Debtors sometimes felt enormous gratitude to usurers who, at risk to both their souls and their mortal lives, had saved them from immediate ruin; moreover, the church also recognized that forbidding the restitution of a debt with interest was also a denial of basic forms of reciprocity." Faint indeed was the echo of the medieval church, which had even argued that lenders should not stipulate deadlines for repayment, and that even the expectation of reciprocity represented the morally illicit hope of material gain.24
Such reasoning brought minor usury morally into line with relatively trivial misdeeds like tax evasion and bribery; just as some priests began to lend money as an act of charity hand pawnshops, the famous monti di pieta, were openly permitted to do sod, so corrupt officials often appeared as saviors who facilitated the everyday survival of hard-pressed citizens.
Usury, whether as an avaricious form of opportunism or as a helping hand, did not endear those who practiced it to their debtors, who suffered social stigma as well as a terrible financial burden. Some of the most vicious forms of extortion appear in Rome, and usury has come to be regarded, in the secret spaces of the city's sense of cultural intimacy, as a peculiarly Roman problem, the church as one of the institutions that perpetuate its presence. The Vatican's involvement in banking led to major embarrassments, among which the collapse of the Milan-based Banco Ambrosiano in 1982 was the most dramatic.25 Such scandals fueled the cynicism of the Italian public