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James Joyce’s Visit to Rome’s Jewish Catacombs

March 24 2016

James Joyce’s sojourn in Rome in 1906-7 is the subject of a recent novel by Giuseppe Cafiero. Here, Cafiero recreates Joyce’s sight-seeing trip to an ancient Jewish burial ground:

[Traveling] along the old Appian Way, [one can] experience a place that Joyce hastened to visit, discovered only in 1859; he had been fascinated by it thanks to some reading [he had done] in Trieste. The Vigna Randanini was (as it still is, even though altered externally by restorations) an ancient Jewish necropolis dating to well before the [nearby] Christian catacombs. Joyce was speechless at the sight of those ruins, recalling the succession of rituals that had marked the place [and] imagining the first settlements when, it is said, the area was sacred to the Jews and it was constructed according to [traditional] dictates, with galleries and narrow tunnels making room for tombs carved into the volcanic rock walls.

Visiting that place even now we can imagine a synagogue, where there is water, where there is the division of spaces into two units (one for men, one for women), where we can deduce the presence of apses. Thus there is a large oblong space preceding an antechamber, then a vestibule as a place of access leading to another room containing a well of about six meters.

Read more at TNT Magazine

More about: ancient Judaism, Ancient Rome, History & Ideas, Italian Jewry

 

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic