I’m sure I sound like a heartless, racist cad saying this, but it seems to me like the Jewish community is over-emphasizing its history of persecution. Yes, yes, the Nazis, the Spanish Inquisition, the Pharaoh. They have some legitimate reasons to paint themselves as a people fraught with woe. I don’t grudge them those claims.
My problem starts with the smaller incidents. The Ghetto synagogue holds tours through a ghetto that by now looks like the rest of Rome and has tour guides talk about how strapped the Roman Jews were back in the day. And even in old pictures of before the ghetto was renovated to more human standards, it looks to me like any early-Industrial Revolution society (have you seen modern-day Manila?). The streets are no more narrow, and honestly more lighted, than those among English tenement complexes. And for all the cities (London included) that drove their impoverished communities into underground labyrinthines, that when fires or plagues sprang up in those shitholes sealed the few exits to save the above-ground affluent community at the expense of thousands of workers’ lives…does the Roman Jewish community think that because of their ghetto experience they should be recognized specially among the many horrors that humanity has every committed against itself? How many times can you pull the same discrimination card before it loses its potency?
The ghetto tour is only one example. I suppose most actually come from the movie shown after the tour. I find it a little difficult to make my heart bleed when I look at the unimpressive plaque of names of Jewish soldiers who died in WWI. The millions of men that died in that pointless war and the movie asks me to pour sympathy on this specific group of a few hundred? Even in the Holocaust itself, Roman Jews experienced a much abbreviated version of what Polish Jews endured—the tour guide admitted so, herself. Again, the generous serving of sensationalism shlopped on us in the movie tends to push me in the other direction. What’s more, the official Jewish Ghetto had already been disbanded by then so I’m not sure why those facts made up such a big part of a Jewish Ghetto Tour. For all the centuries that Jews legitimately endured harsh discrimination can you come up with no other examples than the ones I already know? The two conclusions I can come to are that (1) the Jewish community is overcapitalizing on the Holocaust or (2) they don’t have other stories to tell. Neither are particularly nice ideas but if the image given to me today is what the biggest synagogue in Rome wants me to take away, then that has to be my analysis.
Now, to entirely switch gears, my favorite picture of the day was an actual, already-printed picture. The one of the old Ghetto nudged right up on the Tiber. The buildings all look a bit slanted and ill-built like real slum-dwellings, with small windows and no space between structures. There is no human touch to the scene, not even clothes drying out of a window. The buildings also tower high above the river in an ominous way that contrasts city living and the freedom of nature. In the foreground is a mudflat exposed out of the water, indicating the muck present in the river itself. This picture is the closest I came to really pity the Ghetto dwellers. I still maintain that it looks like any other non-aristocratic neighborhood across Europe depicted between the Middle Ages and the 1700’s, but there was a certain drama to that picture that was missing from the rest of the tour.
And as for questions raised today, I honestly don’t feel like we delved deep enough to prompt any good ones. If we heard about specific people in the slums (more than just ‘she was forced to buy and sell used clothes’) then something would certainly come up. As it stands the only thing I can really question is how oppressed Jews were able to exponentially increase their property values to those seen today…or did that happen only because they were finally evicted and their Ghetto razed?
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