Cum nimis absurdum and the Roman ghetto

Paul IV — Cardinal Gian Pietro Carafa, the same man who had run the Talmud case — was elected on 23 May 1555. Seven weeks later, on 14 July, the bull Cum nimis absurdum appeared: fifteen provisions, in force throughout the Papal States.

Jews to live in one quarter with a single entrance and exit; one synagogue to a city, the rest demolished; real property to be sold to Christians; a yellow sign to be worn — a hat for men, a veil for women, "not to be concealed by any means"; no Christian servants or wet-nurses; no work on Sundays and feast-days; no eating or fraternising with Christians; ledgers kept with Christians in Latin or Italian, not Hebrew; trade restricted to second-hand dealing, grain and staples forbidden; Jewish physicians not to treat Christians; Jews not to be addressed as *signore*; pawn accounts closed monthly and pledges not sold before eighteen months; all previous papal exemptions revoked.

At Rome the Jews were moved inside the enclosure by 26 July 1555 — by the Julian calendar 8 Av, the eve of the Ninth of Av. The wall was built by Giovanni Sallustio Peruzzi at a cost of three hundred Roman scudi, charged to the community itself. The site was some three hectares between the Ponte Fabricio, the Portico d'Ottavia and the Tiber — the most flood-prone ground in the city. Gates: two at first, then three, five under Sixtus V, eight by the nineteenth century; opened at dawn, shut an hour or two after sunset. Population: about two thousand in 1555, about four thousand in the mid-seventeenth century (the plague of 1656 took eight hundred of them), about four thousand seven hundred by 1870 — in a quarter built for a fraction of that. Compulsory conversionary sermons were instituted in 1577.

The five Roman congregations — Italian, Nova, Sicilian, Castilian and Catalan — were packed into one building on the Piazza delle Cinque Scole precisely because the bull allowed one synagogue.

Four corrections. The date is 14 July (*pridie Idus Iulii*); the "12 July" of the Jewish Encyclopedia is a miscount of the ides. Paul IV did not invent the ghetto — Venice did, in 1516; he extended the Venetian device. The word "ghetto" does not occur in the bull, which says "one quarter"; the Roman enclosure was the *serraglio*. And "the Jews were reduced to rag-picking" is inexact: the bull left the rag trade and regulated pawnbroking and took away the grain trade, landholding and the treatment of Christian patients — a precise impoverishment, not a ban on labour.

It ended on 20 September 1870, when Italian troops entered Rome through the Porta Pia. There were interruptions — 1798, 1809–14 and 1848 — but each time everything was restored.