| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Kenneth Stow. Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 2001. Pp. x, 246. Cloth $45.00, paper $22.50.

When Pope Paul IV closed the Roman Ghetto in 1555, the Roman Jews had to cope with a totally new predicament. They had been living at Rome since Caesar's days in close and quite harmonious relations with their non-Jewish neighbors. Their position within the Christian environment began to deteriorate in the later Middle Ages, when they were no longer seen as Romans with minor cultural differences but more and more only as Jews. In the fifteenth century, the idea of converting them to Christianity became the central theme of Christian-Jewish relations, and it was the belief that Jewish mass conversion could be fostered by compulsion that urged Paul IV to found the Roman Ghetto. In the long run, the ghetto situation had surprisingly little impact on the religious and cultural identity of the Roman Jews. Very few became Christians, and in 1870 they left their compulsory segregation with an almost unshaken cultural heredity. They were still Jews, and they were still Romans. Kenneth Stow finds the secret of this astonishing cultural survival in two unverbalized strategies: conservative acculturation and arbitration. His sources are about 6,000 acts of the so-called notai ebrei, Jewish notaries who worked in the ghetto on the same footing Christian notaries did outside the ghetto. This material, preserved today in the Capitoline Archives at Rome, spans from about 1536 to about 1640, when the notai ebrei were finally suppressed. Stow has published two volumes with summaries of the first 2,000 acts (The Jews in Rome [1995–1997]). . . .

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