Early Jewish History in Italy

After the First Jewish War (66 to 70 A.D.) and the Holocaust in our time, the third greatest disaster in Jewish history was the 1492 Spanish expulsion which, though not commonly thought of, included Sicily under Spanish domination, where they were expelled after 1500 years of continuous history. A filthy aspect of this decree was an earlier law prohibiting sale of Jewish property without royal license, thus freezing their possessions which they in three months had to sell for almost nothing. All their remaining property was then sequestered. Thereafter an emigration tax was passed which made them pay for the loss of revenue due to their expulsion. And the final straw was a further decree that any person baptized should be freed of these edicts and treated as any other Christian. More than half of the Jews converted; it is a miracle that the others refused.

It should be mentioned, as almost a singular exception in the history of Jewish persecution, that the Sicilian Privy Council, including the justices of the High Court and the main financial authorities, pleaded with Spain to withdraw these decrees, mainly for the economic damage they would wreak but, almost unbelievably, also on humanitarian grounds. As an example, 40 percent of the population of Syracuse, the second largest city after Palermo, was Jewish; and the total Jewish population of Sicily had grown to 100,000 persons, probably the most important Jewish center in the world after Spain. [5]

The Privy Council plea was ignored by Spain. Though delayed two times, it was finally enforced in January 1493. It may also be mentioned, again almost uniquely, many Christians in Palermo, who themselves had suffered under Moslem rule for two centuries, expressed sorrow and sympathized with those expelled.

Today at last count there are less than 100 Jews in Sicily compared to the 37,000 to 40,000 Jews who would not convert and were driven out. They fled to the nearby mainland, mainly to Calabria, from which they would be expelled again in a short time; to Rome; and to the far more tolerant Islamic lands of North Africa and the Turkish Empire. Nothing remains of this great culture except a few street names and a building considered a former synagogue at Trapani. The reason is less deliberate destruction but rather, unlike the backwater towns of Puglia, Sicily has flourished of recent years and the old buildings all destroyed except religious Catholic ones. It may be added that this is likewise true for Moslem structures; of the some 1,000 mosques formerly dotting Palermo according to Islamic records only one remains. [6]

In Annie Sacerdoti's Guide to Jewish Italy the author devotes only four pages to Sicily and three to Puglia out of almost two hundred pages. [7] The Baedeker's Italy has no reference to Jewish culture and even those few pages devoted to catacombs list only those Christian and pagan. Yet the region of Puglia surpasses every other area in Europe except possibly Spain as a place to see original Jewish buildings and artifacts from the medieval period. I have visited Toledo, Sevilla, Cordoba, and Girona in Spain; Lyons, Narbonne, and Avignon in France; and Prague in Czechoslovakia. Nowhere is there a complete quarter intact from medieval Jewry as there is in Trani; nowhere outside of museums are there Jewish tombstones from before the tenth century as in Trani and Venosa; nowhere other than in Rome are there Jewish catacombs as in Venosa. And in cities like Oria and Taranto there still exist significant traces of former Jewish medieval Giudecche.