The liberation of Italy’s Jews only began with the coming of Napoleon. During the French Revolution, for the first time, Jews had been given equal rights as citizens. Napoleon rolled out this “radical policy” all over the Continent, banning ghettos, lifting all restrictions, and putting Judaism on an equal footing with the Christian religions. He even had the pope disavow all his worldly power.
But these freedoms came and went with Napoleon. As soon as Pius VII was reinstated, he locked up the city’s Jews in the ghetto and resumed the Inquisition. However, time was not on the side of the church state as liberal, social, and democratic movements gained ground in the 1800s. The medieval system of ghettos, restrictions, and slavery were in dissolution all over Europe. In the revolutions of 1848, many European Jews regained their rights. Even in the Italian states the anti-Semitic restrictions were being removed and the ghetto rule ended. The church state resisted the development until the bitter end. Liberation came in 1870, when Italian troops marched into Rome and dissolved the church state. The ghetto in Rome was actually the last of its kind in Europe, before the Nazis reinstituted the ghetto system and reimposed medieval restrictions on the Jewish population.
In the late 1800s the walls surrounding the ghetto were demolished along with most of the run-down area nearby. Nonetheless a literary treasure trove was rescued out of the demolished ghetto, where it had somehow survived hundreds of years of the Inquisition’s confiscations and book pyres.
A priceless collection of Jewish writings, manuscripts, and books was assembled from the synagogues, schools, and homes in the ghetto, which laid the foundations for the Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica.11 This unique library testified to the tragic history of the Jews in Rome. Not only were the Italian Jews the cultural heirs of the oldest Jewish community in Europe, in their isolation they had also developed a dialect of their own, which came close to being a language in its own right: Giudeo-Romanesco, or Ladino, with roots from the medieval era.12
A full catalog of the Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica was never made, with the exception of a lesser compilation of its more valuable texts, which was made by the Jewish researcher Isaiah Sonne in 1934. But before the outbreak of the Second World War, the library contained some seven thousand volumes, including both manuscripts and books that could not be found anywhere else. There were incunabula and books from Italian printers of the 1500s, including a rare edition of the Talmud in twenty-one volumes by Soncino, the printer who had been banned by the papacy.13 There were books from other famous Jewish printers such as Bomberg and Bragadin, as well as medieval manuscripts by the Jewish poet, rabbi, and medical doctor Moses Rieti, who had been the personal physician of Pope Pius II in the 1400s. And alongside manuscripts on medicine and astronomy from the 1300s, there were books brought by Sephardic Jews from Spain, including a Portuguese incunabulum from 1494.
The library was the literary remnant of two thousand years of Jewish presence in Rome, an inheritance that not only told the history of the Jews in the city, but also the beginnings of Christianity. As Robert Katz describes in his book Black Sabbath, “Among the known material were the only copies of books and manuscripts dating from before the birth of Christ, from the time of the Caesars, the emperors, and the early popes. There were engravings from the Middle Ages, books from the earliest printers, and papers and documents handed down through the ages.”14
• • •
Dario Tedeschi cups his hand behind his ear and gives me a questioning look. I try again, slowly articulating every syllable. He shakes his head resignedly. He wears a starched white shirt, the arms of which are rolled up to his elbows. Through the windows, one can make out Rome’s university buildings. We are in his legal chambers—a large, bright, and sparsely furnished office. I am unsure whether Tedeschi, nearing his eighties, is unable to hear what I am saying or simply does not understand my English. Maybe a bit of both. In the end he just hands me a pen. It turns into a curious interview, in which I write down my questions on a slip of paper that he scrutinizes for several minutes before he attempts to answer them.
“In the Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica there were incredibly important, rare books. We are assuming that this was the most important Jewish library in Italy, maybe even the whole world,” says Tedeschi, placing a book on the table with the title Rapporto Sull’Attività della Commissione per il Recupero del Patrimonio Bibliografico della Comunità Ebraica di Roma, Razziato Nel 1943—the results of the investigations conducted by the Italian government on the subject of stolen Jewish property. Italy, like many other European nations at the end of the 1990s, set up a public committee to investigate the plundering of Italian Jewish property during the Second World War. Tedeschi, a member of this committee, was one of those urging that particular attention should be given to the disappearance of the Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica. “I have a personal interest in this; I am a Roman Jew myself. My father’s parents both died in the Holocaust. But this library is not only of interest to the Jewish congregation in Rome, but for the whole of Italy,” says Tedeschi.
Until then almost nothing had been known about the library’s disappearance. Some attempts, all fruitless, had been made after the war to find the library. As late as 2002, after pressure from the Jewish congregation, a special commission was put together to find the Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica, which was considered to have “priceless value for the cultural inheritance of Italy as a whole.”15
Dario Tedeschi, at that time the chairman of the Unione delle Comunità Ebraiche Italiane, was chosen to lead the investigation. The members of the investigating commission, which included historians, archivists, and civil servants, managed after several years of detective work to uncover some new details of the mysterious disappearance of the library.
“We found documents that confirmed that Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg stole the library. But the mystery was obviously that they did not steal one but two libraries, they also took the Biblioteca del Collegio Rabbinico Italiano. Yet why did only one of the libraries come back? This was the question we wanted to answer,” Tedeschi tells me.
The plundering, and the circumstances leading up to it, was yet another tragic chapter in the long history of the Roman Jews. When Mussolini and his National Fascist Party took power in 1922, there were no outward signs of the movement being anti-Semitic in its outlook. Quite the contrary, the regime had the support of many Italian Jews, and some of the highest-ranking leaders within the party were Jews—for instance, the finance minister, Guido Jung.16 But there existed a race-ideological phalanx within the Fascist movement. Not until the late 1930s when the Axis powers were formed through the union between Hitler and Mussolini did the regime begin to show signs of open anti-Semitism. In 1938 the Fascists introduced racial legislation modeled on the Nuremberg Laws, among other things prohibiting Jews from holding positions of public office or entering into matrimony with “non-Jews.”17
When Italy entered into the war in 1940, the persecution was stepped up. Nazi Germany started exerting pressure on Italy to solve “the Jewish question.” It offered to take on the role of executioner—all the Italian Fascists had to do was put the country’s Jews on trains and send them to the north.
Despite widespread anti-Semitism, many groups in the Italian general public, the army, and even the Fascist Party responded with distaste to German racial politics. Pressure from Germany notwithstanding, the Italian military refused to take part in genocide. Thousands of Jews between 1941 and 1943 had taken refuge in Italian-occupied parts of Yugoslavia, Greece, and southeastern France, where for the time being they were safer than on German territory. The Italian regime had also evacuated four thousand Jews to the south of Italy, where they remained in security throughout the war.
It was Benito Mussolini’s fall in July 1943 that sealed the fate of Italy’s Jews. When the Western Allies landed on Sicily in the same month, the Italians’ confidence in their leader
and their appetite for war were both utterly spent. After the country surrendered to the Allies in September, Nazi Germany, which had long had misgivings about Italy, attacked immediately. Mussolini was freed and returned to power, but he was little more than a puppet for the occupiers.18 The invasion would dramatically change the situation for the 43,000 Jews who had ended up under the jurisdiction of the German occupiers.
At the end of September 1943, Herbert Kappler, the recently appointed head of the secret police in Rome, called in the city’s Jewish leaders. He assured them that the twelve thousand Jews living in Rome would avoid deportation if they assembled a ransom of fifty kilos of gold within six hours. Thousands of people streamed into the synagogue to leave their earrings, wedding rings, necklaces, and other items of gold. The required gold was handed in at the SS headquarters on Via Tasso before the expiration of the deadline. But in fact the extortion was fraudulent, as the deportation order had already been sent in secret.19
The day after the ransom was paid, some twenty SS men raided the synagogue on Lungotevere de’ Cenci and went through its property, confiscating its archive among other things, which included a register of the names and addresses of the city’s Jews. A few days later the synagogue was visited by two men from the ERR, who had come to inspect the Biblioteca del Collegio Rabbinico Italiano and the Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica.20 The ERR had set up a special group for its Italian operation, known as Sonderkommando Italien. One of the visitors to the synagogue was Johannes Pohl from the Hebraic Department at the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage in Frankfurt, the very same Pohl who, the year before, had assessed the libraries Ets Haim and Rosenthaliana in Amsterdam.21 A few days later yet more ERR staff arrived to start evaluating the collection.
An eyewitness, the Jewish journalist and literary critic Giacomo Debenedetti, later described what took place during these days:
A German officer examined the collection as if it were fine embroidery; he caressed the papyrus and incunabula, turned the pages of the manuscripts and the rare editions. The gradations of his care and attention to the volumes stood in direct proportion to their value. These works were to a very great extent written in obscure alphabets. But when he opened their pages, his eyes fixed on them and widened and shone like a reader who is familiar with a subject and knows how to find a desired passage or a couple of revealing lines. In his elegant hands these ancient books spoke as if being submitted to a bloodless torture.22
The secretary of the synagogue, Rosina Sorani, was another witness. After going through the two collections, the same officer who had earlier caressed the incunabula told Sorani that the libraries were going to be confiscated and taken away within the next few days. He also threatened her, as she testified in her diary, saying that “everything had to stay exactly as they left it, and if not—I would pay with my life.”23
The congregation, in a desperate attempt to save the library, pleaded with the Italian Fascists. But it was useless. In the new Fascist regime, which wore a German overcoat, the party’s anti-Semitic wing had been moved into leading positions.
In the morning of October 13, 1943, two large German railroad cars, which had been placed on the city’s tram lines, were moved to the synagogue by the Tiber. Putting their lives in danger, Rosina Sorani and her coworkers quickly hid some of the most valuable items. Religious artifacts of gold and silver were hidden inside a wall, while several particularly valuable manuscripts were smuggled across to the nearby library, Biblioteca Vallicelliana. Early the following morning, ERR staff arrived with a gang of laborers. It took a whole day to fill the two freight cars—which disappeared after that. A few months later, in December 1943, they came back to pick up what had been left, especially the greater part of the Biblioteca del Collegio Rabbinico Italiano.
A book from 1745 at the Centro Bibliografico in Rome, with annotations from several generations of a family of Sephardic Jews in Pisa.
Fortunately, the Germans did not find the hidden objects, but Rome’s Jews had no time to rejoice at this or mourn the loss of their library. On the orders of SS-Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, other railroad cars had already arrived. Just two days after the first load of books had been removed from the synagogue, early in the morning of the Sabbath on October 16, Kappler’s men raided hundreds of Jewish homes in Rome. Over a thousand people were taken prisoner, mostly women and children. They were taken to the military college, Collegio Militare, only a few blocks from the Vatican and St. Peter’s Basilica, and held there over the weekend. A pregnant woman was forced to give birth outside the school, in the courtyard, when the guards refused to take her to a hospital. On Monday, the prisoners were loaded onto a freight train and taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only a handful would survive.24
Pope Pius XII chose not to intervene or make any official protest against the persecution. The pope’s role in the occupation is still a controversial issue, but most likely he did not dare risk his relations with the Axis powers, as this might have upset the Vatican’s neutrality.25
However, the Nazis met with more resistance from other parts of Italian society. Rome’s police refused to take part in the search for Jews, and large numbers of ordinary Roman citizens opened their homes to the fugitives. Many Jews also found sanctuary in monasteries, churches, and other Catholic institutions, thanks to the individual contributions of priests and nuns. In spite of rewards being offered to those who revealed where Jews were being hidden, Kappler’s forces were only able to seize another eight hundred Jews. Thousands managed to stay in hiding in Rome until the city was liberated in June 1944.
In March 1947, the Biblioteca del Collegio Rabbinico came back the same way as it had been removed, by train from Germany. And until the return of the mouse-nibbled Jewish Bible in 2005, it had been assumed that the whole library had been returned in 1947. This assumption was something that Dario Tedeschi and his commission had to reevaluate during the process of their work. “It came as a total surprise to us,” Tedeschi tells me, “but it was proof that not everything had come back after the war. What we know is that Biblioteca del Collegio Rabbinico was taken to Frankfurt, and that was where it was found after the war. But somewhere on the way from Rome to Germany, the Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica went somewhere else.”
The Biblioteca del Collegio Rabbinico was brought to Johannes Pohl’s department for Jewish literature at the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage in Frankfurt. The question is, Why was the library of the Jewish congregation not delivered to the same place? Tedeschi’s commission would spend seven years trying to come up with an answer, and even after extensive investigations in archives, libraries, and collections across several continents, the fate of the library remained enveloped in an impenetrable historical fog.
On the way, parts were found, pieces of what had been lost. Isaiah Sonne’s catalog of the collection from 1934 was found in the National Library in Jerusalem. “I was in contact with a friend who was working at the National Library in Jerusalem. One day he sent a photo of a book he had found in the library. It looked like a journal, a collation of books in Italian. I recognized his handwriting. He sent more, and that was when I understood that it was the register of the books,” says Gisèle Lèvy, who took part in the search for the library. Two manuscripts with stamps from the library were found at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. The school, which had bought the manuscripts in the 1960s, could not account for how it had acquired them. There were also rumors that the library stamp had been seen in other collections, but this could never be confirmed.
In 2009 the commission presented its final report, in which it drew the conclusion that the books taken from the synagogue in October and December 1943 very likely took different routes. While the December train arrived at the Frankfurt institute, the October train with the Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica probably continued to Berlin. But these conclusions remained speculative. The correspondence relating to the ERR’
s Italian operations was destroyed when Berlin was bombed in November 1943. However, if Tedeschi’s commission was correct, it would explain the disappearance of the library. The books sent to Frankfurt and the books sent to Berlin met two entirely different destinies.
[ 10 ]
FRAGMENTS OF A PEOPLE
Thessaloniki
A warm deluge of rain colors the brick a dark red. The ruins of the palace of the Roman emperor Galerius occupy an entire block in the Greek port city of Thessaloniki. Today the Roman ruins have been made into a tasteful outdoor museum. The palace from AD 300 lies ripped open, and I can see into the emperor’s baths and pleasure gardens. In the enormous throne hall, which has a diameter of thirty yards, there are still the remains of a beautiful marble floor. The best-kept part of the palace complex is the almost completely intact rotunda, a circular brick building that, with its nineteen-foot-thick walls, has held out against two millennia of war, weather, and earthquakes.
From the beginning, the building was used as a pagan temple, but it was later converted by Constantine the Great into one of the first churches in the world. A thousand years later, the Ottomans turned the rotunda into a mosque, and the minaret raised in the 1500s is still standing. The rotunda testifies to Thessaloniki’s long history of cultural and religious diversity: a port on the borderlands between Europe and Asia, bearing the hallmarks of its various rulers—Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and Turks. All have put their mark on the city with their monuments and their ruins. Yet there is one culture that has left few traces, although it dominated the city from the 1500s for the next four hundred years.
The signs of this erased culture are not easy to find. They are not marked out with signposts or detailed in the guidebooks. But they are there if you know where to look. A short distance from Galerius’s magnificent palace ruins is a building that does not attract any particular attention. In the corner of a square is a dirty, dejected-looking garage for mopeds, its walls and roof covered in graffiti. Immediately behind the garage is a knee-high wall made of black slate. But in one section, the slate is suddenly interrupted by a block of marble on which, in spite of erosion and the stain of pollution, one can make out patterned foliage in relief. A little farther to the side sits another block of marble, a little piece of what seems to have once been the bottom of a Corinthian column. I find a more telling piece of masonry where the wall reaches the street—an eight-inch-high marble tablet. It is possible to vaguely discern letters carved into the surface of the stone. They are not Latin but Hebrew. The tablet is a piece of a smashed Jewish headstone, a fragment of a community that until quite recently used to exist here. Possibly this stone was shattered on a cold day early in December 1942, not far from here, when five hundred Greek workers armed with mallets, iron-bar levers, and dynamite arrived at the old Jewish cemetery, which lay outside the city’s east wall.1
The Book Thieves Page 19
