January 23: The “Race of the Jews”

The palio degli ebrei, or “race of the Jews” — a ritual of humiliation and abuse that took place along the Corso, or main street, of Rome during the February Carnival — was abolished on this date in 1668 by Pope Clement IX Rospigliosi, who substituted an annual tax of 300 scudi (silver coins) levied on the Jews. According to the Medici Archives, “at one point, Christian ‘jockeys’ in the race rode Jews instead of horses. Another festive ‘game’ . . . was to roll a Jew in a nailed barrel down the Testaccio Hill. . . . By the 1580s, the Jews are known to have run the race naked; later, they evidently began to assume elaborate costumes, thereby reversing the originally humiliating intention of the event.” By the time of Pope Clement’s decree, some 9,000 Jews lived in the eight-acre Roman ghetto; they were required to wear yellow cloths, scarves or veils outside the ghetto’s doors and were subjected to “compulsory preaches” aimed at their conversion.

“I stretched my hands all day to an unbelieving people that keeps following a road which is not good, pursuing its own ideas, to a people who, right in front of me, continuously provokes my wrath.” —Engraved in Hebrew and Latin on St. Gregory’s Church, where compulsory preaches were held.