Nadene Goldfoot
Since Rome occupied Judah over 100 years before the turn of the century and then burned down the Temple and destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE (AD), they also took those alive after a starvation period caused by the Romans, the Jews to be slaves along with the new Christians.
Jews were first settled in Rome by the 2nd century BCE and then in other southern ports along the trade route. Jews were known to live in 40 places before the end of the classical period. Catacombs give evidence of this.
The Justinian Code, compiled by scholars for the Emperor Justinian, 527-565 A.D., excluded Jews from all public places, prohibited Jews from giving evidence in lawsuits in which Christians took part, and forbade the reading of the Bible in Hebrew. Only Greek or Latin were allowed.
Emperor Justinian (527-565) created elaborate anti-Jewish laws in his Code, issued a decree in 553 which interfered with the conduct of the synagogue services. Heraclius in 614 issued an edict ordering the conversion of the Jews.
Then in 640, 721, 873, Jews living in the Byzantine Empire/ Byzantium (Eastern Roman Empire with capital in Constantinople) were forcibly converted to Christianity. This also included their domain as including Palestine.
Judaism was formally forbidden by successive emperors--Leo in 723, Basil I in 873-874, Romanus Lucapenus in 932-936, etc. On each occasion, Jews would pick up where they left off and there were Jewish communities alive by 1179 when Benjamin of Tudela reported on them, though he found that Constantinople treated Jews with contempt. In 1453, the Turks conquered the Byzantine Empire.
One surprise is that the popes protected Jews against the worst excesses and their fundamental rights were maintained for a short period. Why? In 1428, the small Jewish community in Florence lent funds to Pope Martin V in exchange for his protection for the local Jews. The Jewish community in Florence was formally founded in 1437. It happened that the Jews' position deteriorated with the Christianization of the Roman Empire grew. Anti-Semitism grew by leaps and bounds.
By 1492, Jews were forced into exile from Spain, and then Portugal by orders from Italy's popes, and so it continued. By 1497, Jews from Sicily and Sardinia were expulsed. By 1541, Jews from the Kingdom of Naples were expulsed.
Certain sections in the Southern part of Italy became home to Jews such as Livorno, Florence in Tuscany and Venice, where the Ghetto became extremely confining to Jews as a prison. It was in the Dark Ages that this southern end held the Jewish life and growth. Talmudic scholarship came from here and spread out into northern Europe. But mostly, the southern Italian communities were engaged in wholesale trade, from which they eventually were later eliminated by the Venetians who learned from them, and in handicrafts like dyeing and silk-weaving.
The surname I'm most interested in is on my tree, Kalonymos. Kalonymos or Kalonymus (Hebrew: קָלוֹנִימוּס Qālōnīmūs) is a prominent Jewish family who lived in Italy, mostly in Lucca of Tuscany and in Rome, which, after the settlement at Mainz and Speyer (Germany) 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. This is how Ashkenazi Jews came about, from Italy to Germany.
From the 15th century, the friars in Italy began to press for the effective segregation of the Jews, and in 1555, Pope Paul IV ordered that Jews in the Papal States should be forced to live in separate quarters. The friars, especially the Franciscans and Dominicans, in their writing and preaching about Jews and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were anti Jewish. This was immediately carried into effect in Rome and became the rule throughout Italy in the course of the next generation. The name "ghetto" (already accepted in Venice) was now universally applied. The institution became common in Germany, Prague and in some Polish cities.
Sicily had a large proletarian (social class of Roman citizens who owned little or no property) community of manual laborers.
In 1517 Ghettos (Jewish Quarter) set up by law, were developed in Venice to hold Jews. This was actually initiated and used from 1179's Latrine Councils and 1215 which forbade Jews and Christians to live together in close contact. The ghetto became a town within a town, having some autonomy and still maintained their own spiritual and intellectual life. But it was salubrious (unhealthy), overcrowded as it couldn't expand, and subject to frequent fires. In the Daniel Silva books, the main person, Gabriel Allon's wife was an Italian Jew whose family still lived in the ghetto in Venice.
Sept. 23, 1938 - Rome, Italy - BENITO MUSSOLINI (1883-1945) trotting with men of the Italian Brigade
One of the first actions that the Italian government took against Italian Jews began in 1938 with the enactment of Racial Laws of segregation by the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. These laws stripped away many basic human rights of the Italian Jewish citizens, with Jewish children not being allowed to go to school and Jews forbidden from marrying outside their cultural heritage. The Holocaust in Italy was the persecution, deportation, and murder of Jews between 1943 and 1945 in the Italian Social Republic, the part of the Kingdom of Italy occupied by Nazi Germany after the Italian surrender on September 8, 1943, during World War II.
Resource;
https://goldfoot_genealogy.blogspot.com/2022/04/tracking-down-kalonymos-descendants.html
No comments:
Post a Comment