Rome is home to the oldest community of Jews outside the middle-east. There were Jews in the city as early as the second century BCE. They tended to first settle in Trastevere and by the second century CE, it is thought there were about 40,000 Jews, with more than a dozen synagogues. In ancient Rome the Jews were tolerated more than Christians, possibly because they made no attempt to convert people. Around the beginning of the 13th century they started to settle on the east side of the river.
For centuries, the Jews and the papacy coexisted fairly amicably; the Jews serving the popes as doctors and bankers. However, in the 13th century things began to change. The Jews were first made to wear a yellow ‘O’ on their clothing for the purposes of identification. In 1555, the situation deteriorated dramatically when Pope Paul IV (r. 1555-59) had all of the city's Jews enclosed in a walled and gated ghetto, with a curfew on entry and exit. |