A shiva for Julius Caesar and Rome’s other Jewish surprises

When in Rome do as the Romans do. Walk. Yesterday we walked 18,344 steps. Each. We did an exhibition of Flowers. Art from the renaissance to AI in the Chiostro Del Bramante art gallery in the morning and a guided tour of the Forum and the Colosseum in the afternoon. Today we did the Jewish Quarter. You can do all of that in Rome if you can take the cramp from your astonished calves – because the archaic artefacts, excavations and BCE remains are right there in the street, visible through every railing, as you meander between roundabouts.

It is all sensational… and humbling. There is too much to take in in four days.

The flowers were curated by Franziska Stöhr with Roger Diederen to create havoc with your senses and to drown you in a floral cornucopia. The first room was floor-to-ceiling arches curtained in billowing voile, painted with massive flowers, leaves and tendrils in glorious pastel shades. The paintings flow on to the floor. It was impossible not to lie back and wait for Puck, if you take my meaning. You walked down corridors of hanging braids of papery autumn leaves. Video took you via illustrative wildflowers to beneath the soil, and three Israelis from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem created a film showing how they made bees work on wax casings of Roman busts, each one individually formed to a humming soundtrack assailing all your senses.

Each room had a vessel at the door with a particular perfume to be inhaled. It was heady stuff. There was a forest bed of tiny, delicate black metal cut-outs which morphed into vibrant colour as you walked past it and, best of all, at just the right time, a vast velvet pouffe on which to lie back as upside-down blooms opened and closed above your head. LSD was not required.

Our boutique hotel was the Velabra, right by the now trendy Jewish Quarter and it couldn’t have suited us better. Our room had a kitchen so the matzahs came out and the macaroons were housed. There we met our wonderfully exotic guide, Sara. With her lovely, cat-like face and black hair, she looked more Spanish than Jewish, but thereby lay a story. She was bursting with enthusiasm for her craft and to tell our story. What a story. My ignorance knew no bounds.

As Shakespeare knew, merchant Jews had lived fairly freely in Italy since BCE. They were not allowed into any profession save money lending, which was officially banned but practised everywhere. Lord knows, we financed wars that enslaved us. Our treatment depended entirely on the whims of kind, clever or crazed popes and leaders. No change there, then.

When Pope Paul IV confined the Jews to the ghetto in 1555, he allowed them only one synagogue. To avoid broiges  – or broigae perhaps – they split it into five shuls to accommodate all strands.

The fabled Arch of Titus displays a menorah clearly on its frieze after the fatal destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Who knew that 95,000 Jewish slaves were brought back to Rome in chains? In typical two-Jews, three-opinions fashion, the merchant Jews raced to the slave market to buy and release them, while the dissenters complained to the authorities that this was not the kind of Jew who should be allowed to inhabit the Eternal City. The spoils included a solid gold menorah, which allegedly ended up – via the Barbarians – secreted in the Vatican. Some of the slaves became gladiators, with a special helmet embossed with the date palm of Israel. Imagine how well that went down in the Forum. “My son, the Gladiator.”

I was surprised to learn just how philosemitic Julius Caesar was. It was he who decreed that the Jewish workers should have a day off for Shabbos.

We stood in the place where Mark Antony allegedly made his speech to the populace and because I taught it to my grandkids, I was able to haltingly speak it. Sara told us that after Caesar’s body was removed, Jews from all over Rome came and sat on the floor, for seven days, with their food and wine. They were sitting shiva for a great benefactor.

The Colosseum, funded by spoils from the Temple and built by many Jewish slaves, has a scale which photographs cannot capture. You need drones. The hierarchy is imprinted on every stone. The Emperor’s royal box shifted from one side to the other to avoid the sun irritating their eyes. There was actually a sliding roof over the whole 189 metres, with a base area of 24,000 square metres. It was slid, of course, by slaves. “Bread and circuses” was the whim of this emperor, every kind of animal lived below in cruel conditions to facilitate ferocity in the ring and, occasionally, the whole base was filled with water to re-enact naval battles. There was sand to collect the blood and a chute to dispense the bodies.

The story is that Nero wanted to see the seven hills of Rome as he dined, so a sort of massive Lazy Susan was built beneath his dining room, endlessly heaved round and round by slaves. Forerunner to the old Post Office Tower I guess. What did the Romans ever do for us, eh?

We had booked Shabbos dinner at the kosher restaurant BaGhetto in the shade of the former gates of the ghetto. But they texted us on the day to say they were closed for Shabbat. We’d paid ahead so we had lunch instead and were frankly glad of the closure. Desultory service and clod-like kosher food that sat on my chest like an anvil.

Next door at another kosher restaurant BellaCarne we had the beautiful “Artichokes fried in the Jewish way”, chicken and Roman chicory (spinach) with garlic. Afterwards a dessert of such Moorishness we could have been in Morocco. It had cocoa powder, pistachio, raisins, egg and maybe matzo-meal and honey and it was hot and heavenly.

Our guide, Sara Terracina, has spent her life “giving back”. As she revealed in our last minutes together in the old ghetto area, because her parents were unable to conceive, she was adopted at one month old from Colombia. She was converted, and her son, Gideon, attends the Jewish school in the old quarter. She loves her work and, oh joy, so did we.

Onwards now to the liner, Queen Mary, from which I shall report… waiting hours to board with other septuagenarians.