City of the Soul by William Murray

Author:William Murray
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307420442
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T10:00:00+00:00

Ten

IN THE EARLY spring of 1949 I was hired as a stringer by the Rome bureau of Time-Life. I had heard about the job from an acquaintance at the bar of the Foreign Press Club, where I used to hang out in the late afternoons. The bureau chief was a man named George Jones, who saw in me talents I didn’t know I possessed. He immediately put me to work on a possible story coming out of a section of Rome I had never even heard of, the ancient ghetto along the banks of the Tiber across from Trastevere. Because I was the only person in the office who spoke Italian, Jones must have thought me uniquely qualified to interview the residents of the quarter, but I have no idea what made him believe I could get a story out of the assignment and get it down on paper. Whatever the reasons, his blind faith in me abruptly launched me on a different path, even though it was several years before I abandoned any hope of a career in opera to become a full-time writer.

I had always known vaguely that Italy had a Jewish population, but had not become really aware of it until the late 1930s, when a number of my mother’s old Roman friends showed up in New York as fugitives from the racial laws imposed on the country by the Fascist regime. Not even my mother had known that they were Jewish, because she had grown up in a society that didn’t distinguish between races. Rome’s Jews had been around practically since the beginning of the republic, and had once flourished as the city acquired its empire and its riches. By the time my mother was born, they had become integrated and accepted into the society.

The first recorded contact came in 161 B.C., when a Jewish leader named Judah the Maccabee asked for Rome’s protection against the Seleucid dynasty in Asia Minor. By 69 B.C., when Pompey the Great conquered Palestine and made it part of Rome’s province of Syria, there were several thousand Jews living in Rome, and their numbers grew with the arrival of slaves and prisoners, most of whom were eventually set free. With added immigration from the Levant and Egypt, the colony swelled until it consisted of between thirty and forty thousand people. When a revolt broke out in Palestine in A.D. 67, however, and took three years to crush, during which many thousands of people died and Jerusalem was sacked, the Romans became less tolerant of the Jews in their midst, and began to regard them with suspicion. The Arch of Titus, erected at the foot of the Palatine in A.D. 81, commemorates the Roman victory over the Jews and depicts the prisoners and booty brought back into the city by the Roman army led by the Emperor Vespasian’s son Titus. And the first restrictive measures against the colony, in the form of a tax, the so-called fisca judaicus, were imposed by Vespasian.

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