The contempt and fear of Jews continued to rise in Italy during the 16th century and in 1555 Pope Paul IV issued a bull declaring that all Jews in Rome “should live solely in one and the same place, or if that is not possible, in two or three or as many as are necessary, which are to be contiguous and separated completely from the dwellings of Christians.”1 This measure, which founded the Ghetto of Rome, must have been especially humiliating since many of the city’s Jewish families had lived there for hundreds of years as citizens with almost full rights (except some that were only granted to Christians) and shared the customs, cuisine and language with the rest of the population. At modernity’s edge, the 16th century—with its ghettos and menageries of animals and humans (6.8 y 6.10)—witnessed an evident upsurge in the opposition between self and other.
The character of exception of the Italian ghetto is evident in its origin and in the results of its operation: “as long as [jews] stuck to their ways and remained different (in faith), they would not be permitted to participate in society at large. The Roman ghetto, thus placed its residents in a kind of ‘social and spatial limbo’.”2 This situation of “limbo” shows that alterity and exception are inextricably linked. It operative component is what Freud called unheimlich.
Now, talking about limbo in this context is more than just a metaphor. Paul IV, by then a fanatic octogenarian, had devised a plan for forcing the Roman Jews to convert to Christianity through financial pressures, especially taxes. His other card was to confine them in a place “from which they could emerge only upon their baptism.”3 The liminal character of the Roman ghetto is literal in theological terms. The limbo to which the Jews were subjected is a threshold with the underworld (6.4, 6.5, 6.11), the place of forced exile in which any soul is confined before renouncing original sin and accepting the Christian faith.
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