The Roman Ghetto

What Jews behind their ghetto walls were doing was nothing less than recasting in a state of physical distress, the spiritual meaning of their situation. Jewish spirituality evolved on its own terms, of course, but in times of crisis, as now, dynamic interventions between the two communities were decisive. If the Christian world had cut them off, the Jews would turn their separation into a religious value. Christianity ceases to be mentioned now in Jewish texts. If, after the various expulsions and corrallings, they were once again a people in exile, they would define exile itself as holy, a kind of metaphysical truth of the human condition. If Jews seemed once again to have been abandoned by God, they reenvisioned creation as the work of God's self-abandonment. If Jews were forbidden even the remotest suggestion of sexual liaison with Christians, they would turn intra- Jewish matrimony into a dynastic principle of social cohesion, even across national boundaries, as families from various ghettos arranged marriages. If Jews were forbidden to leave the ghetto at night, then night would become not only the time for study and prayer, but an image of God's own darkness. (Jews in the ghetto, in the 17th century, drank newly imported coffee as a way of staying awake.)

This mysticism, Stow writes, "allowed Jews to transcend the physical limits of the ghetto. It permitted them to fantasize that things were the opposite of what they seemed to be in reality. Closure was really an opening. By being restricted to the ghetto, therefore, the Jews were being propelled mystically toward their rendezvous with the liberation of the messianic moment. Mystical speculation made them immune to the threats of the outside world.

The prophet of the new Jewish mysticism, "the central figure of the new Kabbalah," in Gershom Scholem's phrase, was Isaac Luria (1534-1572). He was a contemporary of the ghetto-creating inquisitor pope, Paul IV, but Luria, "the Holy Lion," had a ferocity that expressed itself differently. He lived in Palestine, in Safed, a city that still draws mystical seekers. "Rising from the haze of fog of Upper Galilee's deepest ravines and valleys, Safed has no biblical pedigree, no deep roots in the scriptural or prophetic history of Israel.," Neil Asher Silberman writes, "Yet after 1492, with the horror and uncertainty of the Spanish Expulsion and the increasing flow of Jewish immigrants toward the Ottoman Empire, Safed was one of the several towns in the Holy Land that received a significant number of refugees." Silberman cites a "massive influx of sages back into the Land of Israel."

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