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JEWISH HERITAGE EUROPE
An Online Resource Centre
VATICAN CITY
Vatican Library
Vatican Museums
The Vatican Library has an extensive and important collection of Hebraica and Judaica. While most of this material has been available to scholars for years – the first important catalogue was compiled in 1675-93 – it has become more visible since the 1980s.
In 1987 the Union of American Hebrew Congregations published a well-illustrated catalogue of the collection with essays by Vatican librarian Leonard Boyle and historian of Jewish art Joseph Guttmann. An exhibition of that year further increased interest in the origins of this material, especially those of the so-called Palatine Collection, which consists of manuscripts confiscated by Elector Rupert II in 1391 from German Jews. In 1622, when Catholic forces sacked Heidelberg, these books and many others came as booty to Rome.
Since the 1980s, there has been a movement to pressure the Vatican to cede many of its Hebrew manuscripts to ‘the Jewish people’, especially where those manuscripts came into Christian hands through the repression of Jewish communities. For more on this see Greenfield 1996, Jacobs and Guidi 1905, and (for a less dispassionate view) the Manfred and Anne Lehmann Foundation website.
The library also possesses various Jewish objects, including a glass vessel with a representation of the Temple of Jerusalem, thought to have been taken from a Jewish catacomb under the Via Labicana. It has been widely reproduced since it was first published in 1882. The collection also includes ancient oil lamps decorated with menorot.
The library is not open to the general public, but is available to qualified researchers by prior appointment.
Opening hours:
Monday to Friday
09:00 - 17:00
Address
Telephone
Fax
Email
Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana
00120 Città del Vaticano
+39 06 6987 9403
+39 06 6988 4795
vaticanlibrary@librs6k.vatlib.it
A catalogue of Jewish-related collections is online at:
www.slu.edu/libraries/vfl/cllctns/HebrewMssResearchBibliography.pdf
Until the renegotiation of the Vatican Concordat of 1984, control of all catacombs – Christian and Jewish – remained with the Vatican’s Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana. The two extant Jewish catacombs of Rome (Vigna Randanini and Villa Torlonia) are now controlled jointly by the Jewish community of Rome and the Soprintendenza of monuments for Rome. However the Vatican remains in charge of the large collection of Jewish inscriptions and other objects found in these and other catacombs during excavations of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Vatican Museum has the largest collection of these. Here, nearly 200 gravestones are on display, bearing inscriptions in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The Galleria del Museo Gregoriano Profano also has an exhibition of about 140 Jewish epitaphs and funerary artefacts, primarily from the Monteverde catacomb, one of six Jewish catacombs that were known of in Rome in the 19th century.
These tombstones are an enormously important source of information about the Jewish community of Italy during the Roman period. Most are flat marble slabs, originally used to close the rock-carved burial slots which lined the catacomb tunnels. The slabs were inscribed with funerary epitaphs, including the names of the deceased. To these were sometimes added symbols – most often alluding to the Temple in Jerusalem, and perhaps to ideas of life after death. The most common representation is of the Temple menorah (plundered by the Romans and carved on the Arch of Titus in the Forum).
The museum also houses column capitals decorated with incised menorot found at the site traditionally identified as the xenodochium (pilgrims’ rest house) of Portus, a former port of ancient Rome, located east of modern Fiumicino.
As part of its Collection of Modern Religious Art the Vatican Museums have paintings by Jewish artists, such as Marc Chagall, Ben Shahn, Leonard Baskin, Jack Levine and Abraham Ratner.
Vatican Museums opening hours:
April - October:
November - March:
Monday - Saturday 08:45 - 16:45
Monday - Saturday 08:45 - 13:45
The museums are also open on the last Sunday of each month.
Address
Telephone
Fax
Viale del Vaticano
00120 Città del Vaticano
+39 06 6988 4947
+39 06 6988 1573
Baumgarten, Paul Maria. ‘The Vatican Palace as a Scientific Institute’,
The Catholic Encyclopedia, New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912, 15.
www.newadvent.org/cathen/15286a.htm (accessed December 2007)
Greenfield, Jeanette.
The Return of Cultural Treasures, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, chapter 9, 236 ff.
Gruber, Ruth Ellen. ‘Credit Maccabees for planting Rome's Jewish roots and the Romans for memorializing the
menorah’, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 7 December, 2001.
www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0/module/displaystory/story_id/17347/edition_id/343/format/html/displaystory.html (accessed January 2008)
‘Hebrew Manuscripts in the Vatican Collections: a research bibliography for Vatican Library manuscripts’,
www.slu.edu/libraries/vfl/cllctns/HebrewMssResearchBibliography.pdf (accessed December 2007)
Hiat, Philip, ed. A Visual Testimony: Judaica from the Vatican Library, Miami: Center for the Fine Arts; New York, Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1987.
Jacobs, Joseph and Guidi, Ignatio. ‘Vatican Library’, Jewish Encyclopedia, New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1905, 12, 42-403.
www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=26&letter=V (accessed December 2007)
Manfred and Anne Lehmann Foundation website:
www.manfredlehmann.com/sieg115.html (accessed December 2007)
Rutgers, Leonard. The Jews in Late Ancient Rome: Evidence of cultural interaction in the Roman diaspora, Leiden: Brill, 1995.
Stickley, Alphons M. The Vatican Manuscript Collection against the Background of the History of the Vatican Library (The Rudolph and Sara Wyner Memorial Lecture, 24 April 1989), Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991.
(Updated 20 December 2007)
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