Nadene Goldfoot
Jews have lived in Rome for over 2,000 years, longer than in any other European city. They originally went there from Alexandria, Egypt, drawn by the lively commercial intercourse between those two cities. From here they got to the Rhineland, Germany, and became the Ashkenazim; Jews that went in this direction and combined Hebrew with German to created a new language, Yiddish.
The first record of Jews in Rome is in 161 BCE., when Jason b. Eleazar and Eupolemus b. Johanan are said to have gone there as envoys from Judah Maccabee.
Image of Joshua from the 3rd-century wall paintings at the synagogue of Dura-Europos. The Dura-Europos synagogue was an ancient synagogue uncovered at Dura-Europos, Syria, in 1932. The synagogue contains a forecourt and house of assembly with painted walls depicting people and animals, and a Torah shrine in the western wall facing Jerusalem.
The history of the Jews in the Roman Empire (Latin: Iudaeorum Romanum) traces the interaction of Jews and Romans during the period of the Roman Empire (27 BCE – CE 476). A Jewish diaspora had migrated to Rome and to the territories of Roman Europe from the land of Israel, Anatolia, Babylon and Alexandria in response to economic hardship and incessant warfare over the land of Israel between the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires from the 4th to the 1st centuries BCE. In Rome, Jewish communities thrived economically. Jews became a significant part of the Roman Empire's population in the first century CE, with some estimates as high as 7 million people., the population of Jewish Israel today.In the year 139 BCE, the pretor Hispanus issued a decree expelling all Jews who were not Roman citizens, so Jews had been there way before that. Praetor, also prætor and pretor, was the title granted by the government of Ancient Rome to a man acting in one of two official capacities: the commander of an army, and as an elected magistratus, assigned to discharge various duties... Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Hispanus was the son of Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Hispallus. He was one of the decemviri stlitibus judicandis and military tribune before 150 BCE, and became quaestor around that date. He then became aedile, probably in 141 BCE. He was a praetor in 139 BCE. As praetor, he expelled the astrologers (Chaldaeans and Jews) from the city of Rome.( Jews should not have been included; astrology was a tabooed occupation in the Jewish religion, but upon investigation, they had been) Chaldea was a country that existed between the late 10th or early 9th and mid-6th centuries BCE, after which the country and its people were absorbed and assimilated into Babylonia. Semitic-speaking, it was located in the marshy land of the far southeastern corner of Mesopotamia and briefly came to rule Babylon. Although the Jews of both Palestine and the Diaspora had steadily moved into the orbit of the Roman world in the course of the second century BCE, Rome did not develop a substantial body of laws regarding the Jews until the second half of the first century BCE. Only then, in the fifty-odd years from Caesar to Augustus, did Roman magistrates pass a number of decrees aimed at protecting the free exercise of Jewish religion. They decreed that Jews might gather freely in thiasoi, observe the Sabbath and the Jewish festivals, send money to the Temple in Jerusalem, and enjoy autonomy in their communal affairs. Jews were also absolved from compulsory enrollment in the Roman military.
Rome's involvement in the Eastern Mediterranean dated from 63 BCE, following the end of the Third Mithridatic War, when Rome made Syria a province. It was at this date, in 63 BCE, that the Romans occupied Jerusalem.
The former Israelite king Hyrcanus II d: 33 BCE-eldest son of Alexander Yannai and Salome Alexandra, was confirmed as ethnarch of the Jews by Julius Caesar in 48 BCE.
The Roman Jews are said to have been conspicuous in the mourning for Julius Caesar in 44 BCE.
In 37 BCE, the Herodian Kingdom was established as a Roman client kingdom. Herod I, the Great (73 BCE-4 BCE) king of Judea, son of Antipater the Idumean (Edom) also Mt. Seir, mountainous land, and the Nabatean, Arabs who occupied Edom in the 6th century, Cypros, his wife. While a governor, appointed by his father, he showed an appetite for executing dissidents.
In 6 CE parts became a province of the Roman Empire, named Iudaea/Judaea Province.
On the death of Herod in 4 BCE, 8,000 native Roman Jews are reported to have escorted the Jewish delegates from Judea who came to request the senate to abolish the Herodian monarchy. Evidently the Senate turned a deaf ear. Herod of Chalcis died in 48 CE, son of Aristobulus, grandson of Herod, brother of Agrippa I, appointed king of Chaleis (Syria) by the MAD Caligula in 41 CE, and received pretorian rank. His 1st wife was Marianme, granddaughter of Herod, and their son, Aristobulus, was appointed by Nero to reign in Lesser Armenia. Herod later married his niece, Berenice. He deposed and appointed a succession of high priests. He was succeeded by his nephew Agrippa II.
At the same time, another narrative commencing in Bethlehem was born in about 4 BCE, Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary and Joseph, who would be the founder of Christianity and died in 29 CE or 30CE or 33CE according to various reports. According to the canonical gospels, Jesus was arrested and tried by the Sanhedrin (71 scholars like a supreme court and as legislature led by the Nasi, Hillel-the Elder of 1st century BCE who had originated the Golden Rule of what you do not like, don't do to others, who answered a scoffer to condense the whole of Torah in one sentence and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself; or a descendant of him and would have met in the Temple chamber called the Hall of Hewn Stone, entered only by the priests/ Cohen's court and the Israelite's court) Thousands of Jews were being condemned by the Romans and placed on crosses during this period and Jesus was but one of them.
and then sentenced by Pontius Pilate, a Roman Procurator- the governor of Judea under the Roman emperors, at this time residing in Herod's palace, to be scourged, and finally crucified by the Romans. One of the earliest—and most scathing—accounts of Pilate comes from the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria. Writing around 50 CE., he castigated the prefect for his “briberies, insults, robberies, outrages and wanton injuries, executions without trial, constantly repeated, ceaseless and supremely grievous cruelty.”
According to the traditional account of his life, Pilate was a Roman equestrian (knight) of the Samnite clan of the Pontii (hence his name Pontius). He was appointed prefect of Judaea through the intervention of Sejanus, a favourite of the Roman emperor Tiberius. (That his title was prefect is confirmed by an inscription from Caesarea in ancient Palestine.) He was not a Jew as Christian literature has made him out to be from medieval times.
Protected by Sejanus, Pilate incurred the enmity of Jews in Roman-occupied Palestine by insulting their religious sensibilities, as when he hung worship images of the emperor throughout Jerusalem and had coins bearing pagan religious symbols minted. After Sejanus’s fall (31 CE), (John 19:12) tells tales that the previous writers did not, and he accuses Jews of being terrible people. This is the cause of much anti-Semitism in the world. Lucius Aelius Seianus, commonly known as Sejanus, was a Roman soldier, friend and confidant of the Roman Emperor Tiberius. An equestrian by birth, Sejanus rose to power as prefect of the Roman imperial bodyguard, known as the Praetorian Guard, of which he was commander from AD 14 until his death in AD 31.
Two synagogues were seemingly founded by " Jewish freedmen" who had been slaves of Augustus (d. 14 c.e.) and Agrippa (d. 12 b.c.e.) respectively and bore their names.
There was also from an early date a Samaritan synagogue (Northern Israel mixed population) in Rome which continued to exist for centuries.
Although the position of the Roman Jews must have been adversely affected by the great Roman-Jewish wars in Judea in 66-73 and 132-135, the prisoners of war brought back as slaves ultimately gave a great impetus to the Jewish population.
A delegation of scholars from Eretz Israel in 95-96, led by the patriarch Gamaliel II, found as its religious head the enthusiastic but unlearned Theudas.
From the second half of the first century c.e. the Roman Jewish community seems to have been firmly established. The total number of Jews in Rome has been estimated as high as 40,000, but was probably nearer 10,000. Besides the beggars and peddlers, there were physicians, actors, and poets, but the majority of the members of the community were shopkeepers and craftsmen (tailors, tentmakers, butchers, limeburners).
With the adoption of Christianity by the Roman emperors the position of the Jews changed immediately for the worse. While Judaism remained officially a tolerated religion as before, its actual status deteriorated, and every pressure was brought on the Jews to adopt the now-dominant faith. Even Constantine reluctantly converted, though never really letting go of Olympus and his gods. In 387-388, a Christian mob, after systematically destroying heathen temples, turned its attention to the synagogues and burned one of them to the ground.
The anti-Jewish legislation of the 4th Lateran Council (1215) inspired by Pope Innocent III does not seem to have been strictly enforced in the Papal capital. There is some evidence that copies of the Talmud were burned here after its condemnation in Paris in 1245. The wearing of the Jewish badge was imposed in 1257 and the city statutes of 1360 ordered male Jews to wear a red tabard, and the women a red petticoat.
Somehow, through all this history, were the ancestors of the Kalonymus family, Jews of Rome. Kalonymos or Kalonymus (Hebrew: קָלוֹנִימוּס Qālōnīmūs) is a prominent Jewish family who lived in Italy, which, after the settlement at Mainz and Speyer of several of its members, took during many generations a leading part in the development of Jewish learning in Germany. The family is according to many considered the foundation of Hachmei Provence and the Ashkenazi Hasidim. They are an important family to many Jews because we find we are related by DNA testing to them.
The name should technically be spelled "Kalonymos," as Kalonymus ben Kalonymus and Immanuel the Roman both rhyme it with words ending in "-mos". The name, which occurs in Greece, Italy, and Provence, is of Greek origin; Kalonymos (Ancient Greek: Kαλώνυμος) means "good name" and Wolf pointed that it is a translation of the Hebrew "Shem-Tov"; Zunz, that it represented the Latin "Cleonymus".
Traces of the family in Italy may be found as early as the second half of the eighth century. As to the date of the settlement of its members in Germany, the opinions of modern scholars are divided, owing to the conflicting statements of the Jewish sources.
Kalonymus Kalman Shapira was born in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, Poland to his father, the Imrei Elimelech of Grodzhisk. Named after his maternal great-grandfather, the renowned Maor VaShemesh, he was a scion of a distinguished family, which included Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk, the Chozeh of Lublin and the Maggid of Kozhnitz.
Kalonymos Ben Kalonymos, called Maestro Calo (1286-after 1328), was a French Hebrew author and translator. He lived in various French centers and in Rome. Kalonymos translated many philosophical and scientific works from Arabic into Hebrew and Latin for King Robert of Naples. His original works include a moral work in rhymed prose, and a satiric parody of a talmudic tractate. Quite often, I've seen Jewish scholarship copied and then claimed by Arabic writers.
Rapoport, Leopold Zunz, and many others place the settlement in 876, believing the King Charles, mentioned in the sources as having induced the Kalonymides to emigrate to Germany, to have been Charles the Bald, who was in Italy in that year; Luzzatto and others think that it took place under Charlemagne, in approximately 800 CE, alleging that the desire to attract scholars to the empire was more in keeping with the character of that monarch; still others assign it to the reign of Otto II, Holy Roman Emperor (973-983), whose life, according to the historian Thietmar von Merseburg, was saved in a battle with the Saracens by a Jew named Kalonymus. The following table, compiled from the accounts of Eleazar of Worms and Solomon Luria, gives the Italian and German heads of the family, which produced for nearly 5 centuries the most notable scholars of Germany and northern France, such as Samuel he-Hasid and his son Judah he-Hasid. Although all of them are mentioned as having been important scholars, the nature of the activity of only a few of them is known.
The 1st-known family members were liturgical poets that I found, 8 of them.
Meshulam I was the first Kalonymus on the family tree from 780 CE in italy.
Kalonymus ben Isaac the Elder
German halachist; lived at Speyer in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; father of Samuel he-Hasid, grandfather of Judah he-Hasid, and great-grandfather of Judah ben Kalonymus, My family is related to someone of the Kalonymus family:
Well-known members of the family are:
- Kalonymus ben Kalonymus
- David Kalonymus ben Jacob
- Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus
- Kalonymus ben Todros
- Eleazar ben Judah ben Kalonymus
- Judah ben Kalonymus
Resource:
https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2021/11/philos-hellenization-after-attempts-to.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Roman_Empire
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Roman_Empire
https://dbs.anumuseum.org.il/skn/en/c6/e139424/Place/Rome?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=jews%20of%20rome&utm_campaign=g&device=c&gclid=CjwKCAiAm7OMBhAQEiwArvGi3KBIPUPv8EasNDrPe0A5GjxQVHC9gQ1Mg4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalonymos_family
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalonymus_Kalman_Shapira
https://www.livescience.com/65283-crucifixion-history.html
https://www.livescience.com/38014-physical-evidence-jesus-debated.html
https://porridgemagazine.com/2016/08/21/the-relationship-of-astrology-with-roman-state-religion-and-practices-kathryn-shaw/
No comments:
Post a Comment