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Palermo Cathedral embraced the best of all architectural styles of medieval Sicily: Romanesque, Arab, Norman and Byzantine. Its square had been a site

Photo by Alex Shaland

where Jews were accused of being heretics during the Inquisition.

Irene Shaland with
Bianca Del Bello
Special to the Jewish News

R

abbi Barbara Aiello, the first
female and non-Orthodox rabbi to
head the first modern Liberal syn-
agogue in Italy, told me about the Anousim
or "the forced ones" of the south of Italy,
people who are rediscovering their Jewish
roots and traditions many centuries after
their ancestors were forcefully converted to
Christianity. For many, as Aiello said, this
new knowledge leads to a new identity:
formal conversion to Judaism.

A Little History
Contrary to popular opinion, Sicily's Jewish
culture was not imported from Spain but
came from Judea in antiquity as part of
the diaspora. Some sources date the arrival
of the first Jewish settlers in Sicily to the
destruction of Jerusalem's Second Temple
in 70 C.E., when Titus brought more than
30,000 Jewish slaves to Rome, some of
whom were later sent to the island of Sicily.
Academics generally agree that the
Jewish presence in Italy began long before
that. A sizable Jewish community was

34 September 17 • 2015

likely established in the southeastern part
of Sicily in Siracusa during the Hellenistic
Greek period. Encyclopedia Judaica quotes
the record of the first-known European
Jewish poet, Caecilius of Calacte, moving
to Rome from Sicily in 50 C.E., 20 years
prior to Titus' slaves. These records prove
that the Sicilian Jewish community is the
oldest in Europe.
The Phoenicians, Semitic people, were
the first to colonize Sicily in 800 B.C.E.
They established a city-port they called
Zis, now known as Palermo. They spoke
a language similar to Hebrew and devel-
oped the first alphabet that was written
like Hebrew. The Greeks came 100 years
later, and 500 years later, the Romans.
The Vandals came 500 years after the
Romans, then the Arabs, the Normans, the
Schwabians, the French and the Spanish.
The last wave of invaders came after the
unification of Italy in 1861. These were the
"northern-Italians:' as the locals call them.
When the Arabs conquered Sicily in 831,
they required Sicilian Jews to pay special
taxes and wear a distinctive badge. But
Jews were considered the "People of the
Book" and respected. At that time, there
were flourishing Jewish communities in

Siracusa, Messina, Taormina, Mazara and
other cities. The Jews of Palermo conduct-
ed lucrative trade between Sicily, North
Africa and Egypt and prospered under
Muslim rule.
The Normans arrived in 1070 C.E., and
though the Jews still had to pay heavy
taxes and wear a badge, they were recog-
nized as citizens, and allowed to hold pub-
lic office and buy land. Travelers described
the beauty of the Palermian synagogues
and the wealth of the Jews.
Benjamin of Tudela, himself a Jew, esti-
mated that the 11th-century Palermian
community numbered at least 1,500
families or close to 6,000 to 8,000 people.
In addition to being noted merchants, the
Jews of Palermo were physicians, mon-
eylenders, translators and precious metal
workers, and had a virtual monopoly on
the silk and dyeing industry.
My dear Palermian friend and a tour
guide par excellence, Bianca Del Bello,
explained that though Sicily geographically
and administratively is indeed part of Italy,
the Sicilians, culturally and linguistically,
are not Italians.
"We are the people of the most con-
quered island in the world, where one

wave of invaders just changed another
and so we created and inhabited our own
universe, where the past — Phoenician,
Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Jewish, Arabic,
Norman, French, Spanish — was never
rejected but accepted and embraced"

La Giudecca - Jewish Quarter
Unlike the European ghettos that were
locked in from the outside, Sicilian Jews
lived in La Giudecca, an open quarter that
offered free passage and was freely chosen
by the Jews to be near their fellow co-
religionists. The Jewish quarter most likely
extended as far west as Salita dell Ospedale
in the albergheria quarter.
In 2003, Professor Niccolo Bucaria
announced his controversial discovery
of a 10th-century Miqweh or mikvah, a
ritual Jewish bath, under the 15th-century
Palazzo Marchesi. The Jesuits built their
Church of Santa Maria del Gesu or Casa
Professa on the site of the Palazzo. This
discovery provoked numerous arguments
on whether the structure of what was long
believed to be a water reservoir pointed
to the location of a second synagogue.
Recently, the city of Palermo installed
brown-and-white street signs that show

