October 5, 2004

Synagogues Without Jews:
The Guide to Jewish Italy by Annie Sacerdoti

It was the saddest day of the year, Tisha B'Av, in the pitch darkness of the Scola Levantina in Venice. I was sitting on the floor with twenty other mourners holding a thin wick candle and the book of Lamentations as the tiny pools of flickering light plunged the beautiful 16th century synagogue into a tableau of awesome mystery. Mourning the loss of the Second Temple, the centuries of massacres, depredations and the Holocaust was all too real here in the Venetian ghetto.

Italian Jews are inextricably bound up in two interlocking narratives; a Diaspora of intermittent oppressions, book burnings and murders contrasts vividly with the lyric melody of beauty, culture and Mediterranean sensibility. It is hard to know how to reconcile these terrible contradictions and yet for Italian Jews it seems to come naturally.

The Italian Jews have a proud two thousand year history. Josephus Flavius, apologist and historian of the Jewish people, spent half his life in pagan Rome, home to as many as twelve synagogues and at least one Talmudic academy. The Renaissance saw Obadiah of Bertinoro (Rav) pen his authoritative commentary on the Mishnah as the Abarbanel along with the Sforno transformed biblical commentary in the humanist spirit. Salamone de' Rossi in Mantua radicalized Jewish music in the 16th century combining liturgy and polyphonic choral music while in the 17th century Moses Hayyim Luzzatto's Derech haShem explained Judaism with Enlightenment rationality and kabalistic sensitivity. The expatriate artist Modigliani and Holocaust author Primo Levi illuminated the 20th century.

Annie Sacerdoti's “The Guide to Jewish Italy” with 200 brilliant color photographs by Alberto Jona Falco presents synagogue after synagogue in a stunning procession of architectural delights echoing five hundred years of Jewish Italian architectural tradition. While the majority of the Jews have long since moved away from their ancestral communities the sanctuaries stand as silent witnesses to this rich history.

Jews were in Italy when the Second Temple still stood and Rome ruled the Mediterranean. More arrived as prisoners after the devastating destruction of the Temple and soon there were close to 50,000 Jews in first century Italy, almost half in Rome alone. Judaism was effectively tolerated until Christian repression created fifteen hundred years of uncertainty. Sacerdoti presents this familiar pattern: “ For years the Jews had a relatively trouble-free life thanks to the tolerant policies of local princes...however in 1638 (or 1518, 1555, 1593), under pressure from the Church they were forced to live in the ghetto and a difficult crowded life in slums and poverty began...until in 1797 the French pulled down the gates of the ghetto...which were replaced during the restoration of the monarchy and finally abolished in 1859...”

Italian Jewish life today is concentrated in Rome and Milan with 10,000 and 6,000 Jews respectively. Turin, Venice, Bologna and Florence have considerably smaller active communities that are slowly declining. Only Rome has a stable population. In spite of the effective abandonment of many smaller congregations the regional and national governments along with the Jewish community has preserved an awesome collection of architectural gems.

The Piedmont region boasts the most concentrated array of synagogues in Italy, home to thirteen interiors of breathtaking beauty. These intimate sanctuaries reflect the diminutive scale of ghetto environment. Casale Montferrato has a baroque grandeur of gold and white Cararra marble with stately arches that frame the second story women's gallery discreetly hidden by golden lacquered screens. In use since 1599 it was last restored in 1968. This gilt chamber was a sacred vessel for prayer, a shimmering sanctuary from the humiliations of the ghetto. In town after town the pattern is repeated, some less ornate, some more baroque, all express a quiet elegance and self-assured piety    

The neighboring city of Mantua was a paragon of Renaissance Jewish life. The Norsa Torrazza synagogue was first built in 1513 and later rebuilt from its original plans in 1902. The clean white walls ornately decorated with stucco contrast with the pink and white stone paving reflecting a sophisticated and refined Humanism of the Mantuan Jews (close to 3,000 in 1600). The Counter-Reformation resulted in riots, murder, ghettoization and finally banishment in 1630. Even after they returned the community never regained its former glory and today there are only a few dozen Jews left in Mantua.

Sacerdoti's guide to forty-five Italian communities does not flinch from reminding us of the oppressions Jews were forced to bear over the centuries, from the mandatory wearing of the Jewish badge to the Papal bull of 1553 that ordered the public burning of the Talmud, faithfully carried out in Rome, Bologna, Florence, Venice, Ancona, Ferrara, Ravenna and Mantua. Attacking the intellectual heart of the Jews, the Church suppressed and censored many works and saw to it that the Talmud was never printed in Italy again.   

And yet they stayed and once emancipation came in the mid-19th century many communities optimistically built large Neoclassical and Moorish synagogues like the stately edifice in Florence and its equally grand cousin in Modena. In almost all cases an ironic decline of the communities ensued. Modernity in the form of assimilation and ignorance shrank the Jewish population to only 45,000 in Mussolini's Italy of 1938. The worst Fascist persecutions occurred in 1943-45 when close to 7,750 Jews lost their lives in deportations to concentrations camps. Conversions and emigration decimated the population further leaving approximately 29,000 to rebuild their lives after the war.

Venice is a contemporary glory with five 16th century ghetto synagogues. Two, the Levantina and the Spangnola, alternate winter and summer for the modest Venetian community. Nonetheless their ranks are swelled by a constant stream of tourists and youth groups to this literal island of Judaism in the magical city of Venice.

The largest Venetian synagogue, built by Spanish and Marrano refugees, has a quiet elegance of red drapery set against white stucco decorated walls and somber wooden pews. It is said that marble was forbidden for Jews to use and therefore elaborate wooden carvings predominate the interior and the ceiling allegedly designed by the famous Venetian Baroque architect Baldassarre Longhena. In August the Friday night service was packed, men and women divided by a broad central aisle reflecting the unique Venetian floor plan placing the bima and the aron on opposite ends of the sanctuary.

Later on Shabbos afternoon a much smaller congregation retired to the Community Center for the third meal of Shabbos. There a handful of visitors and local Venetians chatted in Italian, Hebrew and English over homemade Italian Jewish cakes as Rabbi Roberto Della Rocca presided. He expressed a sanguine determination to persevere in the face of the community's decline. His relations with the local Chabad; their separate minyans, restaurant and outreach efforts, were cordial but distant. The Venetians were here for the long run, patient inheritors of 500 years of Jewish presence in the city that coined the very concept of the Ghetto.

As Shabbos drew to a close I realized that the contemporary reality of the Italian Jews expressed a fundamental acceptance of the nature of the Diaspora. Sent into exile as punishment their travails were clearly God's will. In the good years, and there were many of them, it was incumbent upon the Italian Jews to praise God with a plethora of glorious sanctuaries. Years later it was equally important to preserve those places even when the Jews themselves had moved on.

This is a very special time for the Jews of Italy. It is finally safe to be a Jew here; many Jewish treasures have been preserved and are waiting to be discovered. The riches of this singularly patient Italian Diaspora console us in exile even as they exhort us to believe in its imminent end.  

Richard McBee

October 5, 2004

The Guide to Jewish Italy

By Annie Sacerdoti; with photographs by Alberto Jona Falco

Rizzoli International Publications, October 2004