the
profession of medicine is one which the Hebrews have always followed
with deserved success, and it frequently happened in Rome that the
Pope's private physician, who lived in the Vatican and was a personage
of confidence and importance, was a professed Israelite from the
Ghetto, who worshipped in the synagogue on Saturdays and looked with
contempt and disgust upon his pontifical patient as an eater of unclean
food. There was undoubtedly a law compelling a certain number of the
Jews to hear sermons once a week, first in the Trinita dei Pellegrini,
and afterwards in the Church of Sant' Angelo in the Fishmarket, and it
was from time to time rigorously enforced; it was renewed in the present
century under Leo the Twelfth, and only finally abolished, together with
all other oppressive measures, by Pius the Ninth at the beginning of his
reign. But when one considers the frightful persecution suffered by the
race in Spain, it must be conceded that they were relatively well
treated in Rome by the Popes. Their bitterest enemies and oppressors
were the lower classes of the people, who were always ready to attack
and rifle the Ghetto on the slightest pretext, and against whose
outrageous deeds the Jews had no redress.

[Illustration: THEATRE OF MARCELLUS]

It was their treatment by the people, rather than the matter itself,
which made the carnival races, in which they were forced to run after a
hearty meal, together with a great number of Christians, an intolerable
tyranny; and when Clement the Ninth exempted them from it, he did not
abolish the races of Christian boys and old men. The people detested the
Jews, hooted them, hissed them, and maltreated them with and without
provocation. Moses Mendelssohn, the father of the composer, wrote to a
friend from Berlin late in the eighteenth century, complaining bitterly
that in that self-styled city of toleration, the cry of 'Jew' was raised
against him when he ventured into the streets with his little children
by daylight, and that the boys threw stones at them, as they passed, so
that he only went out late in the evening. Things were no better in Rome
under Paul the Fourth, but they were distinctly better in Rome than in
Berlin at the time of Mendelssohn's writing.

Paul the Fourth, the Carafa Pope, and the friend of the Inquisition,
confined the Jews to the Ghetto. There can be no doubt but that the act
was intended as a measure of severity against heretics, and as such Pius
th