The Jew of the Roman Ghetto
IT is a pity that so little is known to us about the life of the Jewish masses in Italy. The fame of the Nathans and Luzzattis has led us to believe that in Italy Jews form the class of society from which mayors and statesmen are recruited. But in Italy the majority of Jews still live in social and economic conditions not far advanced above those of their ancestors in centuries past. Italy is the only country in Europe outside those in the Eastern part where the so-called ghettoes are populated by native Jews. Their political emancipation has not raised them from the bottom of the social structure over the heads of their Gentile neighbors. Nowhere is the average Jew so much like the non-Jew in appearance, language, manners, and vocation than the inhabitant of the Roman Ghetto on the bank of the Tiber. He is engaged there in the petty trades of selling his olives, peaches, and figs, and hires out as a journeyman in and outside his country. He hawks with "cartiloni" and "ricordi di Roma" in front of the café terraces, and his street waifs accost the foreigners for a "soldi." Even at the door of his old-clothes shop you can hardly recognize in him the Jew. It is this, more than the paucity of the number of Jews in Italy, that explains the absence of anti-Jewish feeling there. For the name Sacerdote by which Italian Cohens call themselves does not suggest affluence, and the cognomen Levi does not necessarily designate one's business.
In his religious life the Jew of the Roman Ghetto resembles the Lithuanian rather than the Western European. His religious activity, to be sure, is restricted to the prayer services of the Temple, but his Temple is more like a Beth Midrash than a symphony hall and lyceum. Living within a Catholic environment, his religion has been preserved as something positive, tangible, and powerful; and if it is no longer an inspiring influence within him, it exists at least as a reality outside of him. The religious institutions and instrumentalities are looked upon by him as something hallowed and consecrate. The synagogue is spoken of as the "sacro tempio" and the rabbi, referred to by the Hebrew words "Morenu Harav," is looked up to in matters religious as if he were the incumbent of the throne of Moses. The place of worship is opened three times a day for the traditional number of the daily public prayers, and young men as well as old, unwashed and in their working garments, repair there directly from their work to hear the "sacra messa," as the services are sometimes termed by them. Most of the younger Jews are unable to read the Hebrew prayers, some read without understanding them; but they all know a few selected prayers by heart which they recite aloud with many interesting gesticulations and genuflections, while in the pulpit the Chasan reads the services from a prayer-book printed in Livorno, chanting them in a monotonous sing-song not unlike what one often hears in the chapels of St. Peter.
Societies of Jewish Youth in Italy
RACIAL consciousness is strong among these Jews of the Roman Ghetto. They are to themselves, in common parlance, "Ibrim" or "Yahudim," which they utter not without pride, and the Gentile is looked down upon as a mere "goi," while the passing priest is pointed out as a "komer." If you ever happen to be in Rome, I should advise you take one afternoon off, and ordering a "café noro" at some café house on the Piazza Venezia, sit down quietly at a table on the terrace and try to look Jewish. You will soon be assailed by a number of postal-card venders coming one after another, until one importunate youth, discovering your identity, will of a sudden change his attitude, and, his obsequiousness gone, will enter with you into an intimate conversation. He will tell you his name, his pedigree, and of the "tempio," and of the street where many Jews live. He will no longer entreat you to buy his goods; and if you do so, he will mumble out his "grazie" rather perfunctorily. For are not all Israel of the same descent?—and if they are not all princes, at least none of them is better than a postal-card vender in Rome.
It is therefore not surprising that among the native Italian Jews there should arise on the part of the young educated elements a desire to convert that latent Jewish sentiment into some form of practical and useful activity. A society of Jewish youth in Italy has already existed for about three years during which time two conventions were held. A number of commendable resolutions were passed about the improvement of Jewish education among the Italian Jews and especially the advancement of the study of the Hebrew language among them. Zionism was warmly endorsed, though the society as a whole did not commit itself officially to the cause. Like the A. J. J. of Paris, the Italian organization also purports to act as intermediaries between the Italian government and the native Jewish population of Tripoli. In Rome there is a local organization of Jewish students, devoted to the study of Hebrew literature, and is rather of cosmopolitan complexion, being composed of Italian, Greek, German, and Russian Jews. The moving spirit of that circle was a brilliant Russian Jew, who had graduated in law from the University of Rome.
Conclusion: The Growing National Spirit Among Jewish Students
A CLOSE observation of European Jewish students, both as individuals and as groups, leads one to the realization of a growing consciousness among them of national unity, and of an increasing belief on their part of the imperishability of the Jews as a race. That morbid feeling of national decay and the imminent disappearance of the race, which had preyed upon the minds of Jewish men in the past generation, and which is reflected in the literature of that time, has been everywhere displaced by one of confidence and hope. Desertion from Judaism, to be sure, may sporadically make its appearance here and there as a convenient escape from material disadvantages; indifference towards it may likewise in some quarters still survive as a relic of the past,—but these are rather unusual and isolated phenomena, emphasizing all the more the universal fidelity and attachment to all things Jewish.
The enthusiasm for Judaism, everywhere in a process of growth, manifests itself in its early stages in study and self-cultivation; it assumes a more concrete form, in its later stages, of some communal or social activity; and if that development keeps on uninterruptedly it finally consummates in Zionism. This development, it must be admitted, is not a spontaneous and self-directive movement. In no small measure, it is everywhere stimulated by the growing tendency on the part of non-Jews in almost every country to appraise the Jew according to his racial origin, an appraisal which results in a feeling not necessarily hostile, but in most cases neutral and sometimes even favoring the racial and cultural peculiarity, indestructible and impermiscible, of the Jewish element. It is this external stimulus, rather than any internal impulse, that is responsible for the unfolding of the national spirit among Jewish students and the assertion of their selfhood.
None the less, their self-assertion has nowhere reached the extreme of spiritual alienation from their environment. There is nothing more remarkable in the character of Jewish youth of the present day, even among those who were born and raised in East European ghettos, than the spiritual and intellectual snugness in which they find themselves, in what should have been expected to remain to them a foreign environment. The residual estrangement of the Jewish soul from everything that is non-Jewish, which our forefathers in the past had figuratively designated with what Jewish mysticism called the "Captivity of the Shekinah," has totally disappeared. The individual Jew of to-day, while sharing in the sublimated consciousness of the race as a whole, does not in any conscious or subliminal way feel himself to be personally identified with it; whence the hesitation on the part of the majority of Jewish students to participate actively in Zionism even though they would all admit it to be the logical sequel of Jewish history.