The Pope's Jews

On a peaceful Sunday afternoon in September, 1943, ss Major Herbert Kappler invited two leaders of Rome's Jewish community to discuss with him a small matter of 50 kilograms of gold. Supply it in 36 hours, he said, or 200 Jews would be deported to Nazi Germany. They succeeded, but only after desperately collecting wedding rings, gold coins, spoons, and lire with which to purchase black market gold at exorbitant prices. As word spread of the Jews dilemma, innumerable Catholic Romans made the pilgrimage to the ancient Temple of the Tiber to offer what they could. The Jews appealed to the Vatican and were promised up to 15 kilograms if they could not get gold elsewhere. The ransom was paid and the Jews began to breathe easily again - until a rainy Sabbath in October, when German trucks sealed off the Jewish quarter and storm troopers collected 1127 Jews and sent them to their doom. To the Jews of Rome it was an ancient story, one with melancholy parallels to episodes stretching back to the centuries before Christ when the Jews began to settle in a trading community on the banks of the Tiber. This is the almost forgotten story of a small community which lived through all the great tragic dramas of European history from the rise and fall of the Roman Empire to the decline and death of the Fascist dictators. The author has done much original research to reconstruct a history which in its human scope is almost a parable of European civilization. Here is a tale of poverty and pestilence, of human fortitude seasoned at times with Jewish wit and Christian charity. It is a vast dramatic panorama of floods and catastrophes, riots and murder, theological intrigue and political expediency and through it all the growth of a community of destiny.

Text: English, Italian (translation)