THE ROMAN JEWISH COMMUNITY: A STUDY IN HISTORICAL CAUSATION.

This article presents information on a study of Jewish population in Rome. The study presented in this article, which follows two partial reports, is sociological in concept but anthropological and historical in method. In its original form, it used the intellectual tools of sociology and drew sociological conclusions, but relied on documentary evidence and on free interviews with individual informants, rather than on predetermined questionnaires and statistical surveys. It is informed that the Jewish community of Rome is generally supposed to be the oldest one extant on the European continent, probably dating from 130 B.C.E. As it stands, it consists in effect of two communities-- one a tightly organized social nucleus surrounded by a loosely organized fringe group of entirely different character. Beginning with the establishment of the Italian monarchy in 1871, Rome, as the capital of a major modern nation, attracted large numbers of people from other parts of the country, including a number of Jews. On the other hand, the original Jewish population of Rome remained largely centred in the district with which it was historically identified, a small area not more than ten square city blocks on the left bank of the Tiber between the base of the Capitoline hill and the river. This area, with its population, forms a distinct enclave whose existence, social separateness, and special quality are recognized by its members and by many of their Christian neighbors, although denied with some vehemence by most other Roman Jews.