Now, it is not only the ghetto of Rome that reflects the topology of the terrible place, it is the entire city that is involved in an architectural dynamic that highlights the flawed relationship between self and other (0.27). At around the same time that the Jews of Rome had to cram themselves across the Tiber in a strip of walled streets that were originally intended to guard the city from invaders (and were regularly flooded by the waters of the river), the Catholic Church embarked on a plan to present the city as a “New Jerusalem,” which would anticipate the Heavenly Jerusalem, the city of God that represents both the physical reconstruction and the spiritual restoration of the kingdom of God. In short, the Church of Rome was hinting at the establishment of the earthly Paradise no longer in its original location, the historic Jerusalem, but in the center of power of the Christian world.
Spurred on by the Protestant Reformation, the successors of Paul IV devoted themselves to the construction and renovation of ostentatious squares and churches (including the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica) that compared with “the enclosure of the city’s approximately three to four thousand Jews in a tiny, squalid strip along the Tiber made the city’s new constructions that much more spectacular.”1 The squalor and overcrowding of the ghetto, says Duneier, “offered visual proof of the difference between old and new, Jews and Christians, damned and saved,”2 in short, of the fate of alterity in Christian societies.
Ironically, the Catholic Church’s plan to create a New Jerusalem on earth, had already produced a paradise in the original sense of the term, a walled city in which exclusion and exception become the necessary conditions for the existence of the polis. A tower in which, in the words of Peter Gabriel, the more we are protected, the more we are trapped within.
Leave a Reply