Not at Rome.  The Popes kept a specimen of the accursed race to bring before God at the last judgment.  The Scripture had warned the Jews that they should live miserably till the consummation of time.  The Church, ever mindful of prophecy, undertook to keep them alive and miserable.  She made enclosures for them, as we do in our Jardin des Plantes for rare animals.  At first they were folded in the valley of Egeria, then they were penned in the Trastevere, and finally cribbed in the Ghetto.  In the daytime they were allowed to go about the city, that the people might see what a dirty, degraded being a man is when he does not happen to be a Christian; but when night came they were put under lock and key.  The Ghetto used to close just as the Faithful were on their way to damnation at the theatre.

On the occasion of certain solemnities the Municipal Council of Rome amused the populace with Jew races.

When modern philosophy had somewhat softened Catholic manners, horses were substituted for Jews.  The Senator of the city used annually to administer to them an official kick in the seat of honour:  which token of respect they acknowledged by a payment of 800 scudi.  At every accession of a Pope, they were obliged to range themselves under the Arch of Titus, and to offer the new Pontiff a Bible, in return for which he addressed to them an insulting observation.  They paid a perpetual annuity of 450 scudi to the heirs of a renegade who had abused them.  They paid the salary of a preacher charged to work at their conversion every Saturday, and if they stayed away from the sermon they were fined.  But they paid no taxes in the strict sense of the word, because they were not citizens.  The law regarded them in the light of travellers at an inn.  The license to dwell in Rome was provisional, and for many centuries it was renewed every year.  Not only were they without any political rights, but they were deprived of even the most elementary civil rights.  They could neither possess property, nor engage in manufactures, nor cultivate the soil:  they lived by botching and brokage.  How they lived at all surprises me.  Want, filth, and the infected atmosphere of their dens, had impoverished their blood, made them wan and haggard, and stamped disgrace upon their looks.  Some of them scarcely retained the semblance of humanity.  They might have been taken for brutes; yet they were notoriously intelligent, apt at business, resigned to their lot, good-tempered, kind-hearted, devoted to their families, and irreproachable in their general conduct.

I need not add that the Roman rabble, bettering the instruction of Catholic monks, spurned them, reviled them, and robbed them.  The law forbade Christians to hold converse with them, but to steal anything from them was a work of grace.

The law did not absolutely sanction the murder of a Jew; but the tribunals regarded the murderer of a man in a different light from the murderer of a Jew.  Mark the line of pleading that follows.