ABSTRACT
In 1527, the Jewish community of Rome consisted of 373 families, or 1772 individuals, comprising 3.6 per cent of the total Roman population of fifty thousand inhabitants. During the eighteenth century, the number of Jews increased from 3000 to between 5000 and 7000, while the population of Rome as a whole grew from 50,000 to 150,000. The Jews resided at the rione, or city district of Sant’Angelo, a Jewish ghetto forcibly created in 1555, where the gates were closed at night. The Christian Church’s fear of contagion led to the Jews being separated from the Catholic community and placed on the outskirts of the city, near the River Tiber, in an area that flooded frequently. As Michel Foucault has shown, using the examples of the insane and the poor, the practice of physical separation and confinement spread throughout the seventeenth century. 1 The contagion of Judaism was resisted in the same way as that of the plague epidemics, by sealing off the city and closing the gates. 2 There was a very real fear of contagion through proximity. The cardinal Carlo Borromeo directly called on people to avoid contact. The proximity of their living quarters did, however, lead to daily contact between the Jewish and Christian populations of Rome, as did the fact that during the day, the Jews left the ghetto and Christians entered the ghetto.
