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Three Centuries of Enforcement

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Three Centuries of Enforcement

What distinguishes this instrument from most of its neighbours is that it was enforced, and kept being enforced, for three hundred years. The Roman Ghetto was built on low ground by the Tiber and flooded regularly. Its population grew without room to expand, so buildings rose storey on storey along streets that stayed narrow. Successive popes tightened or eased the terms, and the compulsory sermon, at which a portion of the community was required to attend Christian preaching, ran into the nineteenth century.

The relaxations came and went with regimes rather than with reigns. French occupation opened the gates in 1798 and the restoration closed them. Pius IX ordered the walls demolished in 1848, and after the revolution of that year the enclosure was restored. The end came from outside the church entirely: Italian troops entered Rome on 20 September 1870, papal temporal rule ended, and the ghetto was abolished by the new state. The quarter was largely demolished and rebuilt in the 1880s.

The bull was never repealed as such. It was left behind when the jurisdiction that carried it ceased to exist, which is the ordinary way a spent instrument dies. The Second Vatican Council's declaration Nostra Aetate in 1965, which rejected the charge of collective Jewish guilt that the bull's opening sentence assumes, is the point at which the reasoning was formally abandoned as well.

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