I just returned from a trip to Sicily, which has an amazing history and amazing ruins, having been conquered by a series of seafaring nations, starting with bronze-age travelers through the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Moors, Normans, Spanish and finally the Bourbons. An island in the center of the Mediterranean, Sicily only became part of a unified Italy in 1860, after Garibaldi’s volunteer army succeeded in annexing it. On our tour, we saw gorgeous mosaics adorning a late-period Roman villa, a famous Greek amphitheater and quarry in Syracuse, magnificent Greek temples, and most interesting (to me at least), a Jewish mikveh or ritual bath dating back to the 6th century AD. The mikveh, which was fed by underground springs, had been built under Byzantine rule, when the orthodox Christian emperors in Constantinople extended their empire west to Sicily and the Greek isles. According to our guide, Jews lived comfortably in Syracuse or rather Ortigia (a small island that comprised the historic center of Syracuse) and even built a small synagogue in the Jewish quarter. They continued to flourish under a host of succeeding conquerors until the Spanish conquered Sicily. In 1493, a year after Ferdinand and Isabella instituted the Inquisition, Jews were forced to leave Sicily en masse unless they converted to Catholicism.
Most of the Jews who lived in Syracuse either converted (and continued to face harassment from the Church) or fled to more hospitable venues like Constantinople, Tunisia or Morocco. But not before the Jewish community hid the mikveh (probably by sealing it off). The mikveh wasn’t discovered until the 19th century when the owner of the house above it decided to do some renovations. While Jews were allowed to return to Sicily in the 18th century, under the Bourbon King Charles III, those who took up his offer never really felt comfortable living there and most left again for friendlier environs, according to this history of Sicilian Jews. Even today, there are very few Jews living in Sicily, and when I visited the Jewish quarter in Palermo, I was discomfited to see rude caricatures of religious Jews (including a nude woman) painted on the walls, very close to where city authorities are renovating a church that sits on top of an ancient Jewish synagogue in Palermo’s Jewish ghetto. The idea is to restore the building as a center for Jewish worship. If the caricatures I saw on my recent trip are any indication, it will be an uphill battle to make Sicily’s capital more hospitable to Jewish life. I have no doubt that the war between Israel and Hamas and subsequent devastation of Gaza has only heightened the historic antisemitism that exists in places like Sicily and Spain. And yet I’d like to think that ruins like a 1,450-year-old mikveh serve to remind us that the past need not be prologue.
