The fall of the Italian ghettos — and the pogroms that rolled it back

Napoleon issued no general decree abolishing the ghettos. The gates fell locally and on different days, as French armies arrived and French-sponsored republics were set up, and it was usually the local municipalities, the local Jacobins and the Jews themselves who opened them.

On 2 February 1797 Mantua surrendered and the gates were opened. Ancona was occupied in February. On 28 April the French entered Padua and destroyed the ghetto gates; on 28 August the ghetto street was officially renamed *Via Libera*. On 12 May the Republic of Venice fell, and on 11 July the new provisional municipality ceremonially burned the gates of the Ghetto Nuovo and planted a tree of liberty in the campo, with Jews sitting on the municipal council. On 15 February 1798 the Roman Republic was proclaimed, and on 20 February the Roman ghetto was legally dissolved: a tree of liberty on the Piazza delle Cinque Scole and the badges laid aside.

What is almost never told began eighteen months later. When in 1799 the Austro-Russian armies and the *sanfedista* insurgents rolled the French back, the emancipated Jews were the visible sign of the Jacobin order. There were pogroms and sackings at Siena — on 28 June 1799 Jews were murdered and burned in the Piazza del Campo — and at Ferrara, Lugo, Senigallia, Pesaro, Ancona, Florence and Livorno. The ghettos were locked again. Italian emancipation proved reversible from the first, and was reversed within eighteen months.

In the Napoleonic decade Italian delegates sat in the Paris Assembly of Notables and the Grand Sanhedrin of 1806–07 — above all R. Abraham de Cologna of Mantua and Isaac Samuel Avigdor of Nice. But Napoleonic equality was conditional too: the *décret infâme* of 17 March 1808 imposed for ten years restrictions on Jewish commerce, debt and residence across most of the empire, and in the Italian departments from 1809.

Pius VII returned to Rome on 24 May 1814, and the ghetto, the badge, the residence and occupation limits and the compulsory sermons were restored. After that emancipation came state by state: Piedmont-Sardinia on 29 March 1848, Tuscany in the same year, Modena and Parma in 1859–60 with annexation. At Rome the walls were pulled down on Pius IX's order on 17 April 1848 and the restrictions reimposed in 1850. The end came on 20 September 1870: Italian troops entered through the Porta Pia, the temporal power of the popes ended, and with it the last ghetto in western Europe.