Skip to content
ZAKHORIUM
PTEN

Date

1553CE

1553–1595

In 1553 the Church ordered Talmud burnings; from 1555 Paul IV confined Roman Jews and intensified Hebrew censorship.

Religious historyAntisemitism and persecutionPolitical history41.8900°N 12.4913°E
1400
1450
1500
1550
1600
1650
1700
A Jewish Renaissance: each bar is an event of the period; this one is in coral.

Sourced narrative

Each block is a verifiable statement. The number opens the cited page; amber or coral blocks flag tradition or contested interpretation.

6 statements

01Evidence and context

01

The Church ordered Talmud burnings throughout Italy in 1553.

02

Paul IV's bull Cum nimis absurdum opened a new phase of Catholic pressure.

03

In 1555 roughly four thousand Roman Jews were confined beside the Tiber.

04

The 1595 expurgatory index required changes to 420 Hebrew works.

05

Ghettos spread through Italian cities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

06

Paradoxically, the Italian ghetto era saw relatively little physical anti-Jewish violence.

Context

Ghettos spread through Italian cities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Paradoxically, the Italian ghetto era saw relatively little physical anti-Jewish violence.

§ 01Geography

Where it happened

Gazetteer coordinates (Pleiades for ancient places; Natural Earth and Wikidata for modern ones) over modern physical geography (Natural Earth). Coastlines and the Dead Sea have changed since antiquity.
▮ loading geography

§ 04Network

Connections

    § 05Bibliography

    Further reading

    • Kenneth Stow, Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).

      The Roman ghetto · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 237

    § 06Apparatus

    Sources on this page

    1. 01Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 229inspect
    2. 02Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 229inspect
    3. 03Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 230inspect
    4. 04Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 230inspect
    5. 05Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 230inspect
    6. 06Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 230inspect
    • Documented evidenceAttested by contemporary evidence: texts, inscriptions, coins, papyri or archaeology.
    • Scholarly reconstructionHistorians' inference from indirect evidence.
    • Tradition or narrativeA literary, traditional or religious account; significant in itself, but not independently verified.
    • Contested interpretationScholars explicitly disagree; see the positions in the debate.
    • Illustrative reconstructionA hypothesis or visual scheme to guide reading; not a historical claim.