Cum Nimis Absurdum

Paul IV was elected in May 1555 and issued Cum Nimis Absurdum on 14 July, less than two months later. The opening words set the argument: it is absurd that Jews, whom their own guilt has consigned to perpetual servitude, should under Christian mercy be permitted to live among Christians as equals. What follows is a list of measures, and their combined effect was to remake Jewish life in Rome inside a single summer.

Jews were to live in one quarter, entered by one gate, closed at night. Each community was to keep one synagogue and demolish the rest; in Rome seven of the eight were pulled down. All Jews were to wear a distinguishing yellow covering in public, men a hat and women a veil. They were forbidden to own real property and required to sell what they held within a fixed period, at prices the buyers set. They were barred from every occupation except dealing in second hand clothing and lending at interest, forbidden to employ Christian servants, forbidden to work on Christian holy days, and forbidden to be addressed by any title of respect.

Rome had held a continuously settled Jewish community since before the Republic ended. The bull did not expel it. It enclosed it, and made poverty a matter of law.

What distinguishes this instrument from most of its neighbours is that it was enforced, and kept being enforced, for three hundred years. The Roman Ghetto was built on low ground by the Tiber and flooded regularly. Its population grew without room to expand, so buildings rose storey on storey along streets that stayed narrow. Successive popes tightened or eased the terms, and the compulsory sermon, at which a portion of the community was required to attend Christian preaching, ran into the nineteenth century.

The relaxations came and went with regimes rather than with reigns. French occupation opened the gates in 1798 and the restoration closed them. Pius IX ordered the walls demolished in 1848, and after the revolution of that year the enclosure was restored. The end came from outside the church entirely: Italian troops entered Rome on 20 September 1870, papal temporal rule ended, and the ghetto was abolished by the new state. The quarter was largely demolished and rebuilt in the 1880s.

The bull was never repealed as such. It was left behind when the jurisdiction that carried it ceased to exist, which is the ordinary way a spent instrument dies. The Second Vatican Council's declaration Nostra Aetate in 1965, which rejected the charge of collective Jewish guilt that the bull's opening sentence assumes, is the point at which the reasoning was formally abandoned as well.