Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 2015
ISSN: 1016-3476
Christian Construction of the other
Vol. 24, No. 2: 37–52
37
CHRISTIAN CONSTRUCTION OF THE OTHER:
THE ROLE OF JEWS IN THE EARLY MODERN CARNIVAL OF ROME
ÅSA BOHOLM
University of Gothenburg
In Rome, for many centuries, it was mandatory for the city’s Jews to take part in gross and
degrading carnival spectacles. Making use of various historical records of such celebrations, this
article explores the cultural construction of Jewish character within carnival against the background
of religious ideas about Christian identity and alterity. In contrast to Christians, whose constitutions
were believed to include a spiritual essence, or ‘soul’, Jews were construed to lack spirituality
entirely. Learned churchmen have argued that Jews were unable to perceive the ‘truth’ of the
doctrines of the Christian religion. Allowing themselves to be controlled by their bodies, unlike
good Christians, they were viewed as being akin to beasts in human guise. But the Jew, according
to this culturally determined view, not only furnished a caricature of what, according to Christian
values, were vices, but also represented a real threat to the Christian community.
Introduction
In rural Southern Italy and in Sicily, traditional processions of masked figures, celebrating the
death and resurrection of Christ, are still enacted in some villages. These processions include
not only statues of Christ and the Virgin, but also people dressed up as demons and devils.
In some of these Easter parades carried out on Good Friday, a procession depicting the Via
Dolorosa is put on, in which Christ is represented by a penitent bearing a cross on his
shoulder. Local peasants, masquerading as ‘Jews’, accompany in this procession in a disorderly
and exhilarated fashion; they sing, jump, perform various balancing tricks, and scurry around.
The carnival-like conduct and attitude of these ‘Jews’, taken to be the ‘killers of Christ’,
express their disrespect of the solemn and sad occasion. Instead of mourning Christ, as do the
Christians, they are expressing joy and happiness at Christ’s approaching death (Buttitta 1978:
26–27). Records from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance provide evidence that in Italy
Jews often took part in rituals to celebrate the principal feast days of the Christian calendar.
In Rome, Jews were used as mounts during mock tournaments on St John’s Day, and stones
were thrown at the houses of the Jewish quarter on Good Friday (Roth 1946: 236). Fourteenth
century records from the Iberian Peninsula systematically describe attacks during Holy Week
on Jewish urban communities (Nirenberg 1996: 203–209). In Italian cities, burlesque plays
enacted on ox-drawn carriages, often to ridicule Jewish life and customs, were a popular form
of carnival entertainment (Roth 1946: 286).
It is to be noted that the Christian calendar is organized in such a way that Easter will
always fall before the Jewish Passover. The Jewish celebration of Purim is a seasonal feast
Copyright © 2015 Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta.
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before Passover which commemorates the saving of the Jews during the Babylonian captivity.
Purim includes masquerades, much food and drink, and spectacles outdoors, and often coincided
with the Christian Easter. The conspicuous carnival-like ingredients of Purim, and the occasional
unhappy co-incidence with Good Friday, might have been understood by Christians as an act
of deliberate blasphemy on the part of the Jews. Hence, even as Christians were mourning
their dead Saviour, whom the Jews had killed, the Jews on their part were celebrating a
‘carnival’. According to the historian Cecil Roth, such overlaps of the Christian and Jewish
ritual calendars presumably led Christians early to infer (wrongly) that both communities
were commemorating the same event, namely the death of Christ. However, while the Christian
community mourn their dead saviour, the Jewish community seem to triumph their success
in killing Christ. This Christian perspective, drawing on an imperfect knowledge of Jewish
customs, paved the way for the attribution of all sorts of immoral and evil qualities collectively
on the Jews (Roth 1933).
Christian hostility within the educated elite as well as among commoners towards Jews,
construed as enemies of Christ and Christians, has expressed itself in various ways through
the centuries. Modern anti-Semitism, which led to the atrocities of the Holocaust, is not an
isolated phenomenon in the course of European history. In the Middle Ages, the religious
frenzy that accompanied the inception of the Crusades gave rise to much suffering by Jews.
Many crusaders took the Jews to be enemies of Christ. Enforced baptism, murder, and the
destruction of Jewish communities followed in the footsteps of the crusaders as they marched
through Europe on their way to the Holy Land. European history is full of examples of Jews
having been made the scapegoats for various misfortunes; popular attitudes and folk-lore
make this plain (see Dundes [ed.] 1991). The great plague of 1347–1350 was blamed on the
Jews, who were believed to have allied themselves with the Devil to destroy Christians. It is
documented that Jews were accused of various hideous crimes, and that this sometimes led
to uprisings or pogroms; such incidents have increasingly been attracting the attention of
historians. When occasionally a mutilated corpse, especially that of a child or a young person,
was found in a community without any clear explanation, suspicion often fell on the local
Jewish community (Chazan 1997).
Hostile attitudes towards Jews and Judaism were already being expressed during the
formative days of the Early Church. In their references to the Jewish people and their religion,
individual churchmen have through the centuries made their own interpretations, emphasizing
slightly different themes. The Christian attitude towards Jews and Judaism has been riddled
with ambiguity, because while they were regarded as having committed the terrible crime of
killing Christ, for which they had to suffer, they were at the same time allocated a central role
in the Christian tradition. As the historian Kenneth Stowe remarks:
The Jews were a balance to Christian belief in the scholastic Christian world order. Their refusal to
accept Christ as the Messiah led to their punishment, while Christians were rewarded with salvation,
a lesson that required constant repetition (Stowe 1995: li).
This ambiguity in the cultural construction of Jews and Judaism allowed for a wide range of
actions and attitudes towards them. Jews might be greatly feared and cruelly persecuted1 but they
might also be treated with a certain amount of respect and benevolence; in periods they lived side
by side with Christians, even interacting with them, and in some communities receiving protection
and social and economic autonomy in exchange or tributes (Jaffe-Berg 2013).
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Christian Construction of the other
39
The aim of this article is to address, from a standpoint of anthropological theory on
cultural symbolism, a body of fairly well accepted historical knowledge on the role of Jews
in the carnival as it was celebrated in the early modern city of Rome. The data accounted for
in this article derive mainly from Italian, German, and English historical literature, reasonably
reliable as to the facts they record. Among such works we find two late nineteenth century
students of the history of the city of Rome: Ferdinand Gregorovius and Vittorio Clementi. In
addition, historians of Jewish history in Latin Mediterranean culture of a more recent date
such as Hermann Vogelstein and Cecil Roth provide data relevant for the study. Original
sources have also been considered, namely a late 15th early 16th century diary of a papal
master of ceremony, Johannes Burcadus, which contains quite extensive descriptions of carnival;
and travel literature by Michele de Montaigne (1533–1592), John Evelyn (1620–1706) and
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, (1749–1832) who provide accounts of their experiences during
carnival.
Descriptions from these various sources at different junctures in time, provide ethnography
of the celebration of carnival in Rome and its historical development. From this ethnography
a pattern of core activities constitutive of the carnival can be reconstructed. The accounts
provided by the various sources used in this study are fairly consistent as to what were the
basic elements of the ritual celebrations. Although this way of using existing historical
knowledge to formulate interpretations of and hypothesis about social and cultural structures
might be considered somewhat unorthodox from a disciplinary perspective of history, it
constitutes a key element of historical anthropology. Such work (Boholm 1993a, 1993b, 1998;
Geertz 1980; Sahlins 1995, 2009) can inspire interdisciplinary debate and give raise to new
research ideas and perspectives on social and cultural institutions and processes in past societies.
By re-thinking established bodies of historical knowledge in the light of insights from
interpretative and structural anthropology, customs and mentalities of the past can be understood
and explained in novel ways. The reconstruction of the finer details of specific events or the
critical assessment of how historical scholars have used and interpreted their sources demands
considerable amount of new archival research, which goes beyond the aim of this paper.
Some observations on the Carnival in the Latin Mediterranean Tradition
The celebration of carnival and its various manifestations has attracted a good deal of scholarly
attention. A striking feature about carnival is that its social content stands out in radical
contrast to everyday life during the rest of the year. In Rome during the baroque era while
carnival lasted, the world looked different; people looked, acted and indeed were different as
was the entire city space (Fagiolo & Carandini 1978). One view of this overwhelming amount
of contrast from a sociological perspective regards carnival as an institutional opportunity for
social protest in which the members of society are allowed to challenge and question authority
and social institutions at large. Such ‘rituals of rebellion’, it has been argued renew and
strengthen the social system rather than disrupt it (Gluckman 1963). According to this
interpretation, despite the chaotic, violent and aggressive elements characteristic of a ritualized
state of liminality, carnival constitutes a vital source of social cohesion (Turner 1969).
A common presumption regarding the symbolic dimension of carnival is that it conveys
a negative message about the world by constructing an inversion of established society.
Consequently, what it conveys of the world is only indirect—in terms of what the world is
‘not’. The semiotics of carnival symbolically negates a conventional and established
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classificatory order (Ivanov 1984). In the view of Mikhail Bakhtin (1968) carnival acknowledges
an unofficial way of life and an informal society. It moots an egalitarian order and ridicules
authority, questions official hierarchical society, and makes fun of formal and pompous rituals,
both those of the Church and those conducted by political rulers to enhance their splendour
and image of eternal power. By propounding other values and qualities, carnival brings into
existence a contrary world order with its own rules and qualities of life. This world is
collective, grotesque and comic, with its focus on the physical—flesh and body, birth and
death—as non-spiritual realities pertaining to the human condition (see Muir, 1997). Sometimes,
as in France in 1580, carnival even ended up in outright uprisings of common people against
nobility and clergy (Le Roy Ladurie 1979).
A closer examination of the ethnography describing how carnival was actually celebrated,
for example in the several regions of Italy, indicates that these feasts are symbolically complex,
needing to be analysed in conjunction with the social and cultural context of the society in
which they emerged (for an example, see Boholm 1993a). In certain carnival traditions, such
as that of medieval and renaissance Venice, neither messages lampooning the ruling order nor
forms of critical commentary on specific institutions—whether the Church or state—seem to
have been particularly salient (Boholm 1993a, 1993b; Giurgea 1987; Muir 1981).
A dimension that has not received full attention in studies of carnival is its ritual role in
the Christian calendar and particularly its relation to Easter. Carnival is by no means a freestanding or isolated festival. Celebrating carnival was a way for the Christian to make his
carnal existence manifest, of temporarily enjoying it prior to strictly controlling and defeating
it during Lent and Easter (Boholm 1993a). The ‘death of the carnival king’, was still performed
in many places in rural Italy up to the early twentieth century. During this ritual an effigy of
a man was destroyed after having been carried around the village in procession, illustrating
this theme of dismissal of the carnal body as a preparation for Lent and Easter (Toschi 1955).
Carnival celebrates the mortal human body portrayed as a vital physical body, filled with
energy and a source of satisfaction and pleasure. The contrast with the human body exhibited
during Lent, barefoot, forehead smeared with ashes, costumed in a white, black, grey or
brown habit and bearing emblems of death and mourning, and which undergoes various
regimes of penitence and self-inflicted mortification, is striking (Boholm 1993a: 131).
The Games on Monte Testaccio
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Jewish community in Rome was concentrated
on the West Bank of the Tiber, in Trastevere, and to the east in the ward San Angelo; these
Jewish quarters dated back to the 10th or 11th century (Stowe 1995: xxxii). At this time Jews
were awarded Roman citizenship, and they could hold property in the city. The Jews in Rome
supported themselves mainly through money lending (although the rates of interest were
under strict papal regulation), as merchants in foodstuffs, and by means of commerce in, and
repair of, used cloth and clothing. Some were learned men and philosophers who had not only
studied Christian and Jewish texts, but were also well versed in Arabic treatises regarding
‘matter’, such as medicine, chemistry and natural science. From the late 13th century, there are
even records of Jews occasionally acting as physicians at the papal court, and several popes
had personal Jewish doctors (Synan 1967; Vogelstein 1941: 179–180).
In the 14th century carnival games in Rome were not (as later) held in the centre of the
city, but at its periphery, south of the Aventine at Monte Testaccio near the Porta S. Paolo.2
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Christian Construction of the other
41
Besides the inaugurations of popes and emperors, and the religious ceremonies celebrated by
the Pope during the course of the liturgical year, these games were, in the medieval period,
the only communally organized secular spectacles taking place in Rome (Gregorovius 1926,
vol II: 565–567). The historian Cecil Roth (1946: 140–141) mentions (without giving any
specific historical evidence) that, on Monte Testaccio before Lent, it had once been customary
to arrange mock jousts between soldiers, in which Jews were used as mounts. In 1312, the
Jewish community was relieved of this humiliating custom but was instead required to make
an annual payment to finance carnival games. The tax, known as the ‘Tribute of Agone and
Testaccio’, was the earliest levy specifically imposed on Rome’s Jewish community; Jewish
communities in other major Italian cities also had to contribute to this church tax to finance
the carnival games in Rome (Roth 1946: 140–141). So the cost of the carnival games was
borne by the Jewish community. This was officially argued by the city of Rome to be the price
for Jews being allowed to observe their own religious ceremonies (Clementi 1899, vol I: 49).
By the use of various historical sources, (Clementi 1899: I; Gregorovius 1929: II; Fiorani,
et al. 1970) the following account can be conjectured as to what occurred during carnival in
Rome in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. We can admittedly not get a complete picture
of exactly what took place at any particular time nor can we know anything about how the
events were actually perceived by actors or spectators. A first prerequisite for the celebration
of carnival was that each of Rome’s thirteen city wards (rioni) provide one bull and several
bullfighters (giocatori). On Giovedi Grasso, (the Thursday before Shrove Tuesday), which was
then counted as the first day of carnival, each bull, decorated with coloured ribbons and
accompanied by the giocatori, was paraded through the streets of its rione. This attracted big
crowds, and noble women who watched from balconies threw down gifts of sweets, wine and
food to the bullfighters. The next day all the bulls, together with their giocatori, who had also
brought for display their gifts from women of their own rione received the previous day,
assembled in Circus Agonale (the ruins of the Stadium of Domitian), where the senators of
Rome and many other citizens joined.
On the following Saturday, the bulls were displayed again, but now on the Capitol, for
the caporioni, the ‘heads of ward’. The bullfighters on their horses, dressed in black velvet,
presented themselves to the caporioni showing respect and subordination. After this ceremonial
expression of respect by the rioni towards the municipal authorities, a bullfight was staged
on the Capitol; fierce dogs were encouraged to attack the bulls, and this spectacle continued
until the evening. On the next day, Sunday, all the bells of the city besides that of the
Campanile on the Capitol rang to announce the beginning of the games, which concluded
carnival. Members of the city guilds and officials in festive costumes gathered for a procession
led by finely dressed young men, who belonged to the most noble families of Rome. The
procession further included state officials, trumpeters, sword-bearers from the senatorial guard,
the senatorial scribes, drum-majors from each city ward, the heads of wards, their priors, and
the city prefect who was followed by a young boy with a bundle of rods or fasces, an emblem
of authority. Then came the Roman senators, knights, musicians, and the bulls from the city
wards accompanied by the bull-fighters, horse-drawn triumphal wagons, one from each ward,
loaded with pigs, and a troop of guards, together with the city executioner complete with the
tools of his trade. Ironically, it was the Jewish community, for which of course pork is
unclean, that was forced to supply these pigs for the celebration. Representatives of the
Jewish community, who had to appear in traditional dress, were also in the procession, but
first they had to pay ceremonial respect to the city authorities, and to deliver their annual
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carnival tax, together with the palii—the pieces of precious colourful cloth—to be awarded
as prizes for the carnival races. However, instead of being thanked for their contribution to
the festival, the spokesman of the Jews was given a humiliating kick by the city curator
(Vogelstein 1941: 231–233, 282–283).
The theatre historian Fabrizio Cruciani notes that the carnival games of Agone and Testaccio
as celebrated in the mid fifteenth century, during the reign of Pope Pius II was basically a lay
event (1983: 78–89). Clergy and other religious elements were conspicuously absent from the
procession, although if the pope was present in Rome, he would ride from his quarters at the
Lateran palace to watch the games. The procession led south from the Capitol to Monte
Testaccio; it moved from abitato to disabitato—from the densely populated city centre to the
vast uninhabited wasteland surrounding it. The disabitato, which lay inside the great Aurelian
wall, consisted of vineyards, a few farms and monasteries, neglected ruins, fields, and wild
plants, shrubs and trees. It was the realm of wild animals, hermits and other non-social
elements (Brentano 1990). When reaching Monte Testaccio, banners carried at the front of the
procession were planted at the top of the hill. The pigs and bulls were released to be driven
down to the bullfighters who, together with a crowd of spectators, awaited them in the field
below. The animals were all killed, and people in the crowd tried to seize pieces of meat from
the carcasses. In his comprehensive work on the Roman carnival, Filippo Clementi (1899, vol.
I: 48) mentions that there is evidence that sometimes an old Jew, who had been locked up
naked in a barrel, was thrown down Monte Testaccio along with the pigs and bulls. It even
happened that he died as a result of this harsh treatment (see also Jaffe-Berg 2013: 408, fn. 3).
This must indeed have been a brutal and riotous affair; bulls and pigs and humans in a
disorderly and confusing hunt, which ended in humans killing the animals. The amount of
blood, the cries and death agonies must have been truly awe inspiring during what was in
effect a ritual conquest-cum-consumption of carnality put into effect at the climax of the
carnival season. The carnal element (the bulls from the rioni, and the pigs provided by the
Jews) is physically removed from the inhabited part of the city to be violently struck down.
In the procession to Monte Testaccio, and in the ceremonies on the Capitol and in Circus
Agonale, the city of Rome was represented as a hierarchically-structured polity, consisting of
various office-holders and civic functionaries bound together by obligations of loyalty,
submission and authority. On its arrival at Monte Testaccio however, the community was
envisaged as an unstructured, violent horde, united in a single common purpose, that of
brutally killing and consuming carnal existence, as symbolized by these animals.
After the field had been cleared of the remainders of this grotesque and violent spectacle,
sword games and races took place. The races, including horses and draught animals, set off from
the foot of the hill and the winning post was the remains of an ancient column below the Aventine.
The winner of each race was awarded a precious piece of cloth (palio). After these races between
animals, there followed a race between Jews, who were made to participate in accordance with
the city statutes, as a tribute to the Pope. The games, which brought carnival to an end, concluded
with a banquet in honour of the giocatori who had participated in the games.
The Reformed Carnival and the Foot-Races of the Jews
A Venetian cardinal of San Marco, Pietro Bembo, was elected Pope in 1464, taking the name
of Paul II. He reformed the legislation of the city of Rome, took action against vendetta
warfare between noble factions and he also began to renovate antique monuments and remains,
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Christian Construction of the other
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even those lacking any particular practical purposes (Weiss 1969: 104, 168). Among the
restored buildings was the Basilica of San Marco, one of the oldest churches in Rome. As a
cardinal he had built the Palazzo Venezia, on the west side of the Piazza San Marco. After
becoming Pope, Paul II moved into this palace in 1466, and in this year he also reorganized
the celebration of carnival.
For one thing, Paul II brought the customary races, held below Monte Testaccio, into the
city centre. The races were now to start from Porta del Popolo, follow the Via Lata, and end
on the Piazza Venezia, where from his new palace he would have a good view of the course
and the winning post. In 1466, the carnival commenced on Monday the 9th of February, with
a foot race of Jews; on the following day, young boys below the age of fifteen ran and the
next day there was a race of adult men. On Giovedi Grasso, the pope held a banquet in the
garden of the Palazzo Venezia. The public were entertained at tables spread with delicious
food and, from a window, the pope threw money to the crowd. On Saturday, there were
bullfights on the Capitol, and on Sunday there were the traditional games on Monte Testaccio
(Gregorovius 1926, vol. II: 708–709). On the Tuesday of the following week, there were races
on the Via Lata, firstly between donkeys, then between horses, this being the race between
riderless Berber horses draped with white cloth, which were brought to a halt by a huge white
sheet stretched across the street. The surrounding buildings were decorated with leaves, while
garlands, ribbons and flowers hung down between the benches and aisles especially erected
for the spectators. Paul II introduced the further innovation of inaugurating carnival with a
masquerade. On a cortège of allegorical floats, ancient mythological motifs and characters
were displayed. Figures such asDiana, Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, fauns and bacchants were
drawn along the Via Lata and paraded before the loggia of Palazzo Venezia. Similar carnival
proceedings including races of Jews, young men, old men, donkeys, bulls and horses, were
reported also for the following year (Ademollo 1883: 60–61).
During the reign of Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503), who had taken up residence in the
Vatican, the races during carnival ended instead on St Peter’s square. The calendar in a diary
kept at this time by the German papal master of ceremonies, Johannes Burcardus, reports that
the carnival in 1499 began with races of Jews, followed in subsequent days by races first of
young boys and then of old men. The route in each case was the same, starting from Castel
St Angelo heading to the Vatican and to the winning post at St Peter’s square. This source also
mentions that bulls were captured and allotted to the city quarters and, after having been
displayed at a ceremony on the Capitol on the last Sunday of carnival, taken to Monte
Testaccio for ‘the steer and pig festival’. This festival, the source also comments, ‘was celebrated
. . . as usual, however, without riots or aggression’ (Thuasne [ed.] 1884, vol. II: 508). Below
Monte Testaccio further races of privately owned Berber horses were held, notice being made
of the names of the owners of the winners and the prizes they won. On the last two days of
carnival, on Monday and Tuesday, races of donkeys and bulls were held along the same route
as the humans had run earlier (Thuasne [ed.] 1884, vol. II: 508). Towards the end of the
sixteenth century the traditional carnival races were however moved away from the Vatican
area and back to the Via Lata. Michel de Montaigne, who witnessed the carnival on his visit
to Rome in 1581, has provided an additional piece of information on the races of humans. He
notes that they all—young children, old men and Jews—ran naked (Montaigne 1928, vol. 7:
223–224). One historian on the Jews of Rome, Hermann Vogelstein, adds that before the race
it was customary to give the Jewish participants a great deal of food, a special diet being
served for them for several days beforehand, until they could hardly move from overeating.
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While they ran as best that they could, the Roman public threw mud and stones at them, and
tried to whip these Jewish runners with canes (Vogelstein 1941: 232).
In 1604, there were races of Jews, old men and hunchbacks. The participation of the Jews was
mandatory, whereas the others were free to enter or to stay out. In 1632, there were horse races,
races for Jews, small children, young men and old men. People with physical deformities still at
this time also ran races during carnival, a race of naked hunchbacks being reported in 1633
(Ademollo 1883: 64). The English traveller John Evelyn journeyed to Italy in 1644–1645 and
during carnival visited Rome. In his diary, he makes the following entry on 28th February 1645:
We were taken up the next morning in seing the impertinences of the Carnoval when all the world are
as mad at Rome, as at other places, but the most remarkable was the three races of Barbarie horses,
that run in the strada of del Corso without riders, onely having spurrs so placed on their backs, and
hanging downe by their sides, as with their motion to stimulate them; then of mares: then of asses, of
bufalos, of naked men (-old men, young and boys:) and aboundance of idle and ridiculous passtime:
One thing yet is remarkable, their acting comedies upon a stage placed on a cart, or plastrum where
the scene or tiring place is made of bowghs, in pastoral and rural manner, this they drove from street
to street with a yoake or two of oxen, after the antient guise; The streets swarming with whores,
buffoones and all manner of rabble (de Beer 1955: vol. 2, 381–382).
However, on 28th January 1668, Pope Clement IX abolished the races of Jews and instead they
had to pay 300 scudi as a further contribution to the festival. When the Jews were exempted,
other races between human participants also ceased to be part of the celebration of carnival.
All that survived of the carnival races was the races of Berber horses for which the carnival
of Rome continued to be famous. A detailed and vivid description of the carnival in the late
18th century is provided by Johan Wolfgang von Goethe (1958, [orig. 1789]) in his diary from
an Italian journey. The downfall of the Roman carnival began with the revolution in 1849 when
Giuseppe Mazzini proclaimed the independent Roman republic. When Pius IX (1846–1878)
returned to power, he suspended carnival for a time, as a punishment for the Romans for their
uprising. In 1875 and 1876, the carnival was celebrated once again, but without horse races.
The Jews as Living Memories of the Passion of Christ
Jews and Judaism have for many centuries of European history been a prime concern for
Christianity. The origin of Christianity’s negative attitudes towards Jews and Judaism is to be
found in the stories in the Gospels, especially that of St John, which focuses on the relationship
between Jesus and the Jewish community. The Apostle relates that the Jews fiercely rejected
the teachings of Jesus, and underlines their hostility resulting in his trial and death. The Jews
did not believe in the religious message of Christ nor in the miracles he did perform. He was
regarded as a false prophet, or even possessed by an evil demon, so that the Jews persecuted
him, threw stones at him and demanded his execution. St John, the author of the Book of
Revelation (assumed to have been the Evangelist himself of the same name), also reveals an
emphatically negative attitude towards the Jews, who are collectively referred to as ‘a synagogue
of Satan’ (Rev. 2:9; 3:9). This characterization of the Jews as demonic allies of Satan was
echoed in the late 4th century by ‘the master of anti-Jewish invective’ John Chrysostom,
presbyter at Antioch, whose ideas wielded great influence during the rise of Christian antiSemitic attitudes during the High Middle Ages (Cohen 1994: 20).
Why did the Jews not believe in Christ; why did they not recognise his divine nature and
mission? The answer pondered by St Paul (Romans 11: 7–8) to this crucial question was that
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Christian Construction of the other
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God had ‘blinded’ most Jews to the meaning of their own scriptures, and even to their God’s
presence among them (Langmuir 1990: 286). This was also the view of St Augustine of Hippo
(d. 423), who argued that although the Jews had caused Christ’s death, they were not to be
morally blamed. Since according to St Paul, the Jews had been ‘blinded’ by God and were
therefore unable to recognise Christ’s divinity, they could not be held responsible for deicide.
The Jews, due to their impaired senses, were unable to see the Truth. They had killed Christ
because they truly believed that he was an ordinary human who laid claim to godhead for
himself—hence that he was a ‘false prophet’. According to St Augustine, their fault was not
that they had killed Christ, but that in retrospect they did not recognize their own blindness
and seek remedy for it.3 The Church asserted that:
. . . Judaism was superseded, that Jews could not understand the spiritual meaning of their own
scriptures, that they had killed Christ, that though they were being divinely punished for it, their
continued existence served to demonstrate the truth of Christianity, that they should therefore not be
killed but be protected in a degraded condition, and that their remnant at the end of days would be
saved. (Langmuir 1992: 81).
This interpretation made the Jews living memorials of the truth of Christianity and it was thus
wholly in the interests of Christianity that Jewish identity should be protected and preserved.
The Jews were understood as an integral component of the collective memory of Christians.
A central idea was that Jews had a clearly defined role in Christian society; without a nation
of their own, they existed to serve Christians (Bonfil 1994). According to St Augustine, Jews
were to be made useful to Christians, and their continued existence in the Christian community
was therefore ensured through protection by the civil authorities.
Because they disbelieved yet preserved the Scriptures they could not understand, they were
testimony that the Christians had not invented Christ. The presence of Jews dispelled doubts about
Christianity. . . . ‘The Jew is the slave of the Christian’ (Augustine, The City of God. 2.277–279;
18.49) (quoted in Langmuir 1990: 294)
In accordance with these ideas the papal bull Sicut Judeis, from the time of Pope Calixtus II
(1119–1124), sought to provide Jews with a certain amount of protection by the Church, by means
of regulating the ways in which Christians should treat those Jews that lived in Christian communities.
Elements in this official policy stem from St Augustine’s doctrine of Jewish ‘innocence and
servitude’, and may be traced back to decrees issued by the early Church during the sixth century.
Although the Jews, according to the bull, ‘prefer to persist in their own obstinacy rather than
acknowledge the words of the prophets and the eternal secrets of their own scriptures’, they should
nevertheless be treated with a certain amount of respect due to ‘the clemency which Christian piety
imposes’ (Grayzel 1962: 243–280). They were granted the privilege of living according to their
own laws and customs, and at liberty to practice their own religion.
Impending Stigmatization: A Theme of Jewish Carnality
It was indeed problematic however that not only had the Jews killed Christ, but that they also
persisted in stubborn disbelief, unable to recognize the Christian miracles which they had
themselves witnessed. Theological debate in the High Middle Ages found it less and less
plausible that Christ could have been encountered without being recognized as a God. It was
simply no longer possible to accept ignorance through ‘blindness’ as a sufficient explanation
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for such a degree of hostility to Christ among Jews that they had wanted him killed. St Thomas
Aquinas (d. 1274) thought that the Jews were not simply ignorant, but should be viewed as
intrinsically malevolent; they had seen the ‘signs of His Godhead’ but out of ‘hatred and
envy’, had turned against Christ (Langmuir 1990: 288). This idea of the Jews as deliberate
unbelievers, who had indeed seen the truth but had refused to accept it, gained in currency
during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Dominican and Franciscan friars were
especially influential in promoting this view, which emphasized that the Jews’ anti-Christian
malevolence had been intentional (Cohen 1983). Since the Jews were increasingly seen as
deliberate unbelievers, hence enemies of the Christ-God, it was also believed that their hostility
was not confined to a single historic moment, but was generalized to an enduring state of
animosity towards Christians (Roth 1938).
Jews were increasingly associated with what was demonic and anti-Christian. They
began to be accused of all kinds of perverse crimes: that they re-enacted the crucifixion by
committing ritual murders of children at Easter; that they, in the practice of their own religion
or for medical purposes, committed blood sacrifices using the blood of Christians (Dundes
[ed.] 1991); that they desecrated Christian sacraments, especially by treating the consecrated
Host, believed to be an incarnation of Christ’s body, cruelly and disrespectfully (Browe 1938;
Langmuir 1996; Rubin 1992), and that they intentionally harmed Christians by poisoning their
wells or introduced outbreaks of plague. Their nature was conceived of as being similar to
witches, heretics or lepers, all seen as dangerously evil enemies of Christ (Cohn 1970).
The scholarly debate, which increasingly emphasized the human faculty of reason,
approached the problem of Jewish ‘ignorance’ from a new angle. A popular literary genre was
to stage an imaginary ‘Disputation’ between a learned Jew and a Christian scholar. The
Christian, with the help of scholarly arguments, tries to convince the Jew of the logically
reasoned truth of the cornerstones of Christian belief: Virgin Birth, The Doctrine of the
Trinity, or Christ’s Divine Nature (Abulafia 1995; Roth 1938). But however ‘good’ the
arguments were, the Jew could not be persuaded to denounce Judaism and to convert to
Christianity. One explanation for the Jew, exposed as he was to a massive dose of reasoned
evidence for the truth of the Christian faith, not converting but persisting in his old Judaic
faith, was that Jews, as a people, could not see reason, since their senses were blocked by the
sensuous ‘appetites of the body’. In a cosmology such as that of contemporary Christianity,
which separated spirit from flesh, mind from body, and where this duality was associated with
contrasts between good and evil, altruism and avarice, salvation and damnation, divinity and
the demonic, it was only logical that people were categorised accordingly, so that ‘carnal
Jews’ were contrasted with ‘rational, spiritual Christians’ (Abulafia 1995: 121). In this sense,
being portrayed as governed entirely by their bodily senses, eager to fulfil irrational ‘appetites’
of their bodies, Jews were taken to be more akin to animals than humans, lacking the faculty
understood to separates man from beasts, namely reason (Abulafia 1995: 129, 131–132). The
ideas of Jewish ‘carnality’ and ‘bestiality’ were not new but had been quite common among
Christian eleventh century scholars. For example, Peter the Venerable of Cluny (c. 1092–
1156) wrote of Jews as pigs or beasts referring to their ‘irrational’ failure to accept the
Christian faith. (Dahan 1990; Fabre-Vassas, 1997; Iogna-Prat 1998; Tolan 1993).
One activity deemed to be essential to Jewish character was money lending. Jews were
regarded as ‘royal serfs’, owing their loyalty directly to the Sovereign, be he king, pope or
emperor, on whose protection their existence as a community also depended. Since they could
not take an oath of fealty to a feudal lord, they were barred from holding landed estate. In
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Christian Construction of the other
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the city, they were not allowed to join artisan guilds. There were Jewish communities in most
important European cities, who supported themselves as merchants, engaging in trade and
money lending. The flowering economy and the expansion of trade during the eleventh and
twelfth centuries made money lending a lucrative business. But, however necessary they
might have been for the economy, the occupations of merchant, moneylender and the like
were not fully accepted by the Christian Church (Bonfil 1994; Cohen 1994).
Motivated by an unsound appetite for acquiring mundane wealth, the merchant was thought
to have alienated himself from the Christian virtues of poverty and disregard of what is
material. Instead of striving to raise himself spiritually, the merchant was seen as governed
by greed for material wealth. Acquiring wealth by means of lending money and of recovering
interest on the loans was regarded as even more deplorable (Cohen 1994: 77–88; Lipton
1995). From a Christian point of view, money lending came to be metonymically associated
with Jewish nature; the Jew with his money bag became an epitome of anti-Christian values.
The sin of avarice was a deadly sin and it was believed that it was precisely the Jew’s
attachment to money that motivated him to kill Jesus (Lipton 1995). The Catholic CounterReformation and its strenuous campaign against all forms of heresy heralded harsh times for
Rome’s Jews. In 1553, a Franciscan monk who had converted to Judaism was burnt at the
stake. The Talmud was condemned, Talmudic texts were burnt, and Jewish homes were
searched for illicit literature (Vogelstein 1941: 263–265). When Pope Paul IV took office in
1555, he immediately confined the Jews of Rome to a ghetto, a walled-in quarter on the east
bank of the Tiber. The Jews were also forced to wear special clothing by way of identification:
for men, a yellow hat, for women a veil of the same colour. That Jews should wear some
distinctive sign of identification, which would prevent ‘accidental’ commingling of Jews and
Christians, especially of a sexual kind, had already been decreed in 1215, during the Fourth
Lateran Council (Cohen 1994: 38–38, 42). A census from 1591 estimated that the population
of the ghetto consisted of 3,500 people, at a time when the total population of Rome was close
to 100,000 (Stowe 1995: xvii). The intention behind these reforms was to establish a clear
separation between the residential quarters of the Jews and those of the city’s Christian
inhabitants who by no means were to mix with their Jewish counterparts.
Jews were now excluded from many occupations and honourable positions; Pope Pius V
(1556–1572) permitted them to remain in Rome but under humiliating conditions. They were
strictly forbidden to live alongside Christians; to rent houses outside the Ghetto; to keep
Christian nurses, maids or other servants; to work on Christian holidays; to associate on
friendly terms with Christians; to be addressed ‘Sir’ by a Christian or, as physicians, to treat
Christian patients. In 1569, they were expelled from the papal state and were permitted to
remain only in Rome’s ghetto and in Ancona, so that they might still carry on trading with
the Levant. All this, it was said, was because God had condemned Jews to eternal slavery by
reason of their guilt in the killing of Christ (Vogelstein 1941: 267–269).
Discussion
The historian Gavin Langmuir has illuminatingly pointed to the ascribed Jewish character as
a culturally construed complex of symbols deriving from the Christian religion (Langmuir
1990). In Christian thought a reflexive role is allocated to the Jews, so that they came to
represent through reification an inverted mirror of Christian virtue (Jaffe-Berg 2013: 391).
The Jews’ disposition towards economic activities as merchants or money lenders was regarded
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as a sign of their dominating carnality, an existence that was understood to be ultimately
mundane, concerned only with temporal egoistic matters such as the hoarding of material
wealth. The races during the carnival in Rome were in certain respects symbolically similar
to money lending. They promoted an egoistic instinct to win, to gain at the expense of a
fellow being, and to be awarded a prize—a material asset. To win, a competitor, in the process
of using all his physical strength, has to lay aside considerations of etiquette and good
manners. When the human body is used primarily as a vehicle of locomotion, it becomes
animal-like. Humans and animals both have bodies governed by simple sensuous drives and
an urge for material assets and bodily satisfaction. Christian virtues such as humility and piety
had no place in the races during carnival. On the contrary, the races displayed the antithesis
of such values, namely a grossly mundane mentality, which the Jews were taken to represent.
It was by means of such stereotypes that the Christian construction of Jewish Otherness
(Bonfil 1994) assumed a central place in the celebration of carnival in Rome. At a certain
juncture each year the carnal mode of human existence was emphatically enacted, with a view
to expelling it, making way for a more spiritual way of life, in closer contact with the divine
presence. Celebrating carnival was a way for the Christian to make his carnal existence
manifest, of temporarily enjoying it prior to controlling or destroying it. It was by means of
such stereotypes that Jewish Otherness assumed a central place in the Roman celebration of
carnival. The Jews had to pay for the celebration of carnival, and also to contribute certain
essentials such as the pigs and the awards to the winners of races and also to participate in
degrading footraces. The formal reason for their forced participation was that it was the price
they had to pay to be allowed to celebrate their own ceremonies.
Within social anthropology it has been argued that there is a universal dilemma of continuity
in human social existence. The question is: how can human beings be the constituent elements
of permanent institutional structures (Bloch 1992)? A solution offered by religion and ritual,
like in Catholic Christianity, is that humans are conceived to be partly soul, partly flesh.
Human beings are both immortal and unchanging and at the same time alive in a moribund
body. In some respects, humans are like animals (mortal, sexual and impregnated by physical
vitality) and in another, they are like spiritual beings (immortal and transcendental). The
answer to the dilemma of continuity by this version of Christianity has been to teach how
immortality can be achieved through a regime of control over the body and its sensuous
appetites and egoistic drives. Festivals in the religious calendar enact an ongoing struggle
between the disparate essences or powers (flesh and soul) that constitute this dual identity
(Binde 1999; Boholm 1993a).
Carnival displays the mortal body; in Rome the customary races, as we have seen, feature
humans of various ages often appearing naked—small boys, young men and old men—as well
as humans with physical deformities—hunchbacks and cripples.4 The races make clear that
the human body, although vital and strong in youth, will necessarily decay through the passage
of age. The physical body is far from perfect, it is transient and moribund. The races also
express that all humans, in their state of carnal nakedness, irrespective of age, appearance or
social standing resemble each other in that they share the same egoistic instincts.
The Jews were construed as human in appearance but in certain respects, especially by
their lack of reason, essentially animal-like. Hence, Jewish existence was seen as a living
example of what, according to Christian values, was vice. The Jew, being human but a nonChristian, is symbolically equated with an animal—a form of carnal existence opposed to
Christian spiritual existence. Such dominance of animalistic drives in a human being, seen as
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spiteful and anti-Christian, has to be punished violently and destroyed. There is a tradition
going back to antiquity that views the pig as the ‘most libidinous animal’, being excessively
sensual, sexual and prolific. A pig might be interpreted as a base, more deplorable form of
carnal (animal) existence (Leland 1892). In the festival on Monte Testaccio the Jewish
community, spatially enclaved within the city were forced to procure the pigs for carnival
(animals which the Jews regard as ‘unclean’ much due to their libidinous carnality) while the
bulls (a more noble kind of animal) are pooled from within the city wards (rioni), the community
of Christian Roman citizens. Both pigs and bulls were taken outside the city to be violently
killed and consumed at the concluding climax of carnival. The procession with the pigs, bulls
and Jews moves from the city centre, the Capitol, to Monte Testaccio at the very outskirts of
inhabited urban space where the final defeat and consumption took place. The rioni were
thereby being cleansed of carnal ‘essence’, which was not only removed from them but
defeated and consumed.
When carnival is over, Lent begins. On Ash Wednesday the participants of carnival
emerge as sinners, filled by remorse who seek salvation for their souls for the sins they have
committed. They go to church where they are blessed and smeared with ashes so as to remind
them of their mortality. They start to prepare themselves by means of fasting and penitence
for the Passion of Christ and the Mystery of his Resurrection (Boholm 1993a). The Christian
liturgy for Easter is a ritual enactment of the Easter sacrifice. Christ dies for all humans on
Good Friday, he is mourned, and his resurrection from the dead, the ultimate spiritual defeat
of the carnal/mortal body, is celebrated on Easter Sunday. By celebrating Mass, the faithful
can now consume His body and blood through the Eucharist. In this Easter sacrifice, by
internalising the divine Christ—a structural inversion of the carnival ‘sacrifice’ in which they
internalised their animal carnal essence—humans achieve transcendence and spiritual rebirth.
In early modern Rome the Christians celebrated carnival by way of forcing the Jews to
enact, as well as cover the expenses of, the grossest facets of carnal existence; by this means,
the Jew came to figure as a reification of the Christian alter ego. This alter ego was sacrificed
and consumed in the guise of animal flesh. In this sense the medieval carnival can be understood
as comprising an act of symbolical cannibalism. Consequently, this ultimate and horrific
excess in carnality must take place in the wilderness, outside urban space, in the disabitato
away from the space of civilised society. With time the carnival was reformed to become
more of a city spectacle, a grandiose demonstration of splendour and power, adding features
of state ceremony to the original ritual emphasizing the expulsion of carnal vice.
As has been demonstrated a stereotypic and grotesque imagery of the Jew and of ‘Jewish
nature’ was imposed upon the Jewish community which was then obliged to enact this alien
identity so as to confirm, again and again each year during carnival and Easter, the religious
messages of Christianity. Hence ‘. . . many Christians, when they perceived real Jews, began
to think about Jews as if they existed physically only as a symbol that expressed Christian
faith’ (Langmuir 1990: 294). As an expression of ‘local religion’ (Stewart 1991: 10–12), carnival
and its messages were not directed exclusively to a small elite of literate scholars and churchmen
but engaged the entire population of Rome. Nevertheless, there are certain striking congruencies
between notions regarding Jewish identity, and its role in the Christian cosmology, as promoted
by the rituals during carnival practised in the city of Rome, and in the scholarly doctrinal
tradition, set forth in literary works by churchmen. Both these religious traditions which build
upon the same ontological presuppositions conceive Jewish nature as being intrinsically carnal.
Although Jews appeared human, unlike good Christians they allowed themselves to be controlled
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by their bodies, and in this sense they were viewed as being akin to beasts in human guise.
This means that rather than enacting an inversion of social reality or cultural categories (which
is what the leading theories in the field claim) carnival shows what reality ‘really’ is. The
Roman Carnival brings into the open and makes real a social and religious ontology of stereotypic
assumptions about Jewish character underlying Christian faith.
Acknowledgements
The research on which this article is based has been funded by a grant from the Swedish
Council of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences. I wish to thank Per Binde, Anna
Bohlin, Patrick Crozier and Marcia Grimes for suggestions and advice. I am grateful to the
anonymous reviewers or Journal of Mediterranean Studies for insightful and constructive
suggestions and critical comments.
Notes
1. See Chazan (1997); Dundes ed. (1991); Langmuir (1990, 1992) and Moore (1987).
2. Monte Testaccio (35 m high and 1000 m round) is an ancient rubbish heap made up of broken
amphorae.
3. On this issue of testimonium veritatis see Abulafia (1995); J. Cohen (1983); Langmuir (1990, 1992).
4. In Italy hunchbacks have been traditionally understood as excessively libidinous human beings. The
popular carnival character of Pulcinella, a demonic, hunch-backed, bird-like creature, is a telling
example of the complex and ambiguous association between mortality and vitality (see Boholm
1993a: 98–101).
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