Fancy soldiers’ outfits, impressive roads and architecture, brutality abroad (and, indeed, at home against real and imagined political threats), and gory spectacles are the centerpieces of Roman culture.
Ongoing brutality: Five hundred years later in Rome’s Coliseum, an amphitheater built in part by 20,000+ Jewish captives from Jerusalem in 70 CE. Some say well over 50,000 Jewish captives—both male and female—were sent to Rome and Alexandria (Egypt) combined.
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Note that Rome has an ongoing Jewish community from c. 165 BCE (Maccabeean times in Judea) through the present day. The community traces its origins to a delegation sent by Judah Maccabee to Rome to attempt to enlist Rome’s assistance against the Greeks. The Romans decline the invitation, but according to Italian Jewish lore, the delegation liked what it saw in Rome, and networking leads to the establishment of this uninterrupted 2200–year–old Jewish community. Its centerpiece, the Great Synagogue of Rome (completed 1904), is an artistic masterpiece.
The unique Italian Jewish nusach (prayer service detail) is continuous for these same 2200 years.
The exquisite contemporary film “The Garden of the Finzi–Continis” chronicles the life of a wealthy northern–Italian Jewish family and the racial laws enacted under Mussolini (in the 1930s–1940s) that separated the Jews from society at large.
Moving to the present day, the tight–knit and heavily traditional Roman Jewish community—a mile down the road from the Vatican—asserts that it has just a 1 percent intermarriage rate.
But regardless, each day after Mincha (afternoon prayer service) in the Great Synagogue, the names of every Italian Jew who ever died on that day are read aloud by the Chazzan (cantor), and a special Yahrzeit room (Yahrzeit is the annual anniversary marking the passing of an individual), contiguous to the main chapel and fully outfitted with ornate Yahrzeit candle–lamps, which commemorates each Yahrzeit individually.
The only permanent pews in the Great Synagogue are the six center–front pews reserved for the “Returning Internees” of Auschwitz and their descendants. [Of approximately 2,000 Italian Jews who were deported (a mile away from Pope Pius) to Auschwitz, 16 survived – 10 men and 1 woman.