Recent Excavations in Rome Bare Vast Mortuary Chamber

Rome is the wonder-city of the world where past and present walk hand in hand and the visitor sees before his fascinated eyes old historical facts assume again the color and texture of reality and become part of the present day and hour, giving the spectator the thrilled consciousness of the continuity of life.

If that is true at all times then doubly was it so during the last few months when excavations under the Augusteum, once an Imperial palace, now the well known vast concert hall, have uncovered the tremendous mortuary chamber of Caesar Augustus and his entire family. The Jew, too, visiting Rome will walk with awe and reverence through those mighty chambers, for Augustus as well as Julius Caesar have shown great friendliness to, and interest in the Jews of those times. In fact, Augustus’ tolerance was so great that the Jews were permitted in Rome, always hospitable to all strange and foreign divinities and creeds, to follow undisturbed their ancient customs. In gratefulness they named one of the six then existing Jewish communities in Rome after Augustus, and the modern Jew will thankfully pay his tribute to the memory of this great ruler whenever he has occasion to do so.

TRACES REMAIN

Jews in ancient Rome—a topic of the greatest emotional and historical interest, and many traces are yet to be found of these Roman Jews, traces of their lives and even more of their deaths. Every visitor to Rome has wandered through the catacombs of the Via Appia, those subterranean, long buried tombs of early Christians. Down there, where even on the hottest summer day a chill and moldy air whispers of the impermanence of all life and the brittleness of all beauty and passion, linguistically gifted monks explain in eleven different tongues to the visitors that they stand before the resting place of Christian virgins, believers and martyrs.

Hardly any one of these tourists, and there are surely many Jews among them, is aware that there exist also Jewish catacombs not very far away, catacombs on Monte Verde or in the Vigna Randanini for instance, where one encounters the old Jewish symbols so familiar to all of us.

One sees there the menorah, the seven-armed candlestick, the scrolls of the Law, the palm branches and the “esrog-apple,” and many other typically Jewish presentations, and it is really the Jewish character of these symbols which makes us aware that we are in a Jewish catacomb. For the names themselves are mostly Roman, a token that Jewish assimilation was even in ancient times a social and cultural fact.

The visitor to the Lateran Museum who studies in the Sala Giudaica the inscriptions taken from some of the closed catacombs achieves an even clearer picture of the world of the Jewish dead. The names one finds there—Irene, Euphrenor Gaudentia, Isidorus—are Greek as well as Roman, the inscriptions are mostly in the Latin tongue. There are only a few Hebrew inscriptions (but these are of paramount interest to archaeologists) and in those inscriptions one meets with really Jewish names: Rebekah, Judah. etc.

FIRST PLASTER PORTRAIT

The most interesting item in this collection is doubtlessly a marble coffin??slab showing, beautifully sculptured, the half reclining figure of a little boy. A little boy with decidedly Jewish features. In this child, here pictured with his small dog and a tiny bird, evidently the dearest friends of a young life too soon extinct, we possess the first plastic portrait of a Roman Jew, perhaps even the first presentation of an Occidental Jew.

An abyss, in time as well as culturally and artistically, seems to divide the contents of the Sala Guidaica from the last resting places of later Roman Jews. The very old cemeteries in the Via de Cerchi are no longer open to visitors, for there they are now excavating the antique Circus Maximus, and even the great Cimeterio with its white headstones clearly visible from the Palatine has been closed since 1894.

Roman Jews are now buried in the Central Cemetery in a special Jewish section. And in this section one finds, strange to say, all those symbols again with which ancient Rome did honor to its dead. Little lamps burn on these tombs, plastic representation of the bloved dead keep their features constantly before the survivors—a custom which must seem strange indeed to Eastern European Jews who abhor such, to them, heathenish fashions. One bereaved father even went so far as to have the very funeral of his son sculptured in marble, evidently with portraits of all who attended, but such inartistic tastelessness is seldom encountered, and modern Roman Jews will surely never be guilty of something which is both un-Jewish and un-Roman.

GRAVE OF KEATS

But in order to complete our survey of Jewish graves in Rome we must also visit one of the most beautiful and most moving cemeteries in the world, the non-Catholic cemetery near the ancient Pyramid of Cestius. There were buried all those strangers who were not members of the Catholic Church, and every visitor to Rome makes at least one pilgrimage to this hallowed spot. For there sleeps Keats as well as Shelley, and throughout the cultural world this cemetery is known as the resting place of poets, artists, and philosophers. The children of Humboldt, the son of Goethe, Malvida von Meysenburg and a host of others whose names are household words to all interested in literature, have there found the last peace.

Protestants were buried there, even two Chinese, and, of course, also some Jews. It was usually assumed that those Jews were really converted neo – Christians and were for that reason buried there rather than in the Jewish section of the Central Cemetery, but the well known historian, Ermano Loevinson, has particularly pointed out in his interesting book, “Roma Israelitica,” that this cemetery of all nations and all creeds was also open to Jews who, in sleeping in this ideal resting place and in so elect a company seem to have been well-favored even in death.

Most of the Jewish names one finds there do not signify anything to us any longer, but one may well muse on what strange chain of events brought for instance a certain young Ulrich Wendriner from Beuthen to a grave in Rome. On the other hand, one also finds names which were and are well-known in Jewish communal life and members of the family of Hallgarten, for instance, are also buried there—a family which has won distinction through its philanthropic activities.

Thus Jewish life and Jewish death are intimately interwoven into the history of ancient and modern Rome and wandering through the wonder-city and admiring all the monuments of the past, one marvels at the same time at the vitality and the uniqueness of the Jewish race which through so many centuries shared so many different civilizations without ever losing its distinction and its entity. Rome, the history-book of all mankind contains many a fascinating page of typically Jewish interest.