Thus the children of Israel dwelt apart in these narrow quarters, multiplying fast, while the space allotted to them remained the same; herded together, many families in the same house, often in the same room; and breathing the air of what, under the circumstances, rapidly developed into veritable slums. The world beyond gradually outgrew mediaeval conditions of life; the streets became straight, broad and airy; light penetrated into courts which the overhanging upper stories once doomed to perpetual darkness; but the Ghetto knew none of these blessings. Year after year life in the Ghetto grew more squalid, and the inmates more indifferent alike to the demands of contemporary fashion and of common decency. Confinement initiated degradation; the fatal gift of fecundity, cultivated as a religious duty, promoted it, and soon the Roman Ghetto became a by-word for its filth and misery. At one time as many as ten thousand souls swarmed in a space less than a square kilometre. To the curse of over-population was added the yearly overflow of the Tiber, which transformed the narrow, crooked lanes into marshy alleys, filled the basements with pestiferous mud, and turned the whole quarter into a dismal abode of prematurely aged men, of stunted, elderly children, and of repulsive wrecks of womanhood: a place where Poverty and the Plague stalked hand in hand, and where man was engaged in a perpetual struggle with Death.
The seclusion of the Ghetto widened the breach between the two worlds. If the Gentile forbade the Jew to assume the title, or to pursue the callings, of a Christian gentleman, the Jewish communal law forbade him to wear the garb of the Christian gentleman. The diversity in dress was only an external type of the deeper diversity of character that separated the two elements. The ignorance of the Gentile grew more profound, and the prejudice of the Jew more implacable than they had ever been before. The Ghetto was an institution beside which monasticism might appear the ideal of sociability. The young monk on entering the cloisters of his convent carried into them the indelible impressions of family-life and the tender memories of boyhood. The inmate of the Ghetto, so far as the outer world was concerned, was born a monk. Everybody within the walls of the Ghetto was a brother, everybody beyond its gates an enemy. In infancy the outer world was an unknown, non-existing world. Later the child of the Ghetto was accustomed to hear those beyond described as idolaters; monsters whose impurity was to be shunned, whose cruelty to be feared, whose rapacity to be baffled by cunning—the protection and the pest of the weak. These lessons were illustrated by the tales of assault and insult, of which its parents and its relatives were constantly the victims, more especially on Christian holidays. Still later personal experience gave flesh and blood to the hearsay tales of childhood.
But this outward misery was redeemed by the purity and purifying influence of domestic life. The home was the one spot on earth where the hunted Jew felt a man. On crossing the threshold of his house he discarded, along with the garb of shame, all fear and servility. Everywhere else spurned like a dog, under his own roof he was honoured as master and priest. The Sabbath lamp chased the shades and sorrows of servitude out of the Jew’s heart. His pride was fostered and his humanity saved by the religious and social life of the Ghetto. Rendered by familiarity callous to obloquy on the part of the Gentiles, the Jew remained morbidly sensitive to the opinion of his own people. Persecution from without brought closer union within. As often happens in adversity, individual interests were sacrificed to the public good. Reciprocity in spiritual no less than in temporal matters—the power of combination—the principle of social fraternity—always a characteristic of the Jew—grew into a passion unparalleled in history since the early days of Christianity.
Various communal ordinances (takkanoth) enforced this sentiment of mutual loyalty. For example, no Jew was allowed to compete with a brother-Jew in renting a house from a Christian, or to replace a tenant without the latter’s consent. A series of such laws, many of them dating from a much earlier period, were re-enacted by a congress of Italian Rabbis on the very eve of the creation of the Roman Ghetto. Thus the Jews virtually acquired a perpetual lease of their homes; their communal right to the house (jus casaca) being an asset which could be sold, bequeathed, or bestowed as dowry upon a daughter. The Popes were not slow to take cognisance of this ordinance. Clement VIII. legalised the arrangement, so that, whilst the rent was regularly paid, eviction was practically impossible. But one of his successors carried the principle of Jewish reciprocity to its logical conclusion and turned it against the Jews themselves, by making the community as a body responsible for the rent of all the houses in the Ghetto, empty as well as tenanted. The same reciprocity of interests was recognised in matters pertaining to the soul. Each member of the brotherhood was responsible for the sins of the rest, and the confession of the individual was a confession for the whole community.
Israel, cut off from the world, created a world unto itself. Never did Judaism attain a higher degree of religious uniformity, never were the spiritual bonds that bound together the scattered members of the great family drawn closer than in this period of their sorest affliction. Language was gone, country, state; nothing remained to the Jews but religion. It was held that, if the teaching of the Law were allowed to disappear, it would mean the disappearance of the race. Religion was nationalised that the nation might be saved. The rigorous discipline of the Synagogue and the absence of social joy had always encouraged devotion. The Ghetto crystallised it into a code. Joseph Caro’s Shulchan Aruch, or “Table Prepared,” a handbook of law and custom, compiled in the middle of the sixteenth century, fixed the fluid features of Jewish life into the rigid mask which it continued to wear, throughout Europe, till the beginning of the nineteenth century. But deep beneath the ice-surface of ritual—the crust of dead and deadening rules and prohibitions—there ran the living and sustaining current of faith, all the stronger and fiercer for its imprisonment. The outcasts of humanity, in the midst of their degradation—despised, and in many ways despicable—preserved the precious heritage, and their pride therein, unimpaired. Numerous fasts and feasts assisted this preservation. Thus the community fasted on Sabbath afternoons in memory of the death of Moses, or on Sundays in memory of the destruction of the Temple.
On the Day of Atonement they listened with reverence to the touching words in which a noble old Hebrew bard gave utterance to the sorrow of his race:
“Destroyed lies Zion and profaned,
Of splendour and renown bereft,
Her ancient glories wholly waned,
One deathless treasure only left;