In Southern Italy and Sicily, la Giudecca identified any urban district (or a portion of a village) where Jewish communities dwelled and had their shrines and business.Unlike ghettos, in some Southern Italian hamlets and cities the Hebraic families and their members concentrated without constraint and they could freely circulate and even contribute with Christian neighbours to the success or commercial, cultural and artistic progresses of a region.A very few Sicilian Giudeccas were unhealthy and declined, the greater part numbered lots of craftsmen, doctors and dealers.

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Etymology

Judeca and Giudecca are the corrupt or jargonized medieval versions of the latin female adjective Judaica , namely Judaical or Judean. The Jewess or The Jewry are other plausible meanings.

Jewish neighbourhoods in southern Italy

Italian Region Southern Italian Cities, small towns, villages with their Hebrew Districts
Sicily

In the Arab Balarm[1] these two areas were called Harat-Al-Yahud (The Jewish Ward)[1].

Visible traces: the Ruins of an old Synagogue [2].

On 15 August 1474 Modica's Christian townspeople put into effect a fierce and brutal havoc against the Jewish dwellers of Cartellone, the so-called "Strage dell'Assunta".This episode has been one of the most horrible antisemitic massacre to the detriment of the Sicilian Israelites. During the evening of Assumption's Day, with a single collective raptus - fomented by fanatic Catholic preachers - a bloodthirsty populace slaughtered about 360 innocents causing a total and destructive devastation. The purging call to arms was: "Hurrah for Mary! Death to the Jews!" (Viva Maria! Morte ai Judey!)[4]
Calabria
Campania
  • Naples: Monterone and San Marcellino, Patrizzano, Giudecca Vecchia di Forcella, Giudecca Grande di Portanova, Giudechella del Porto.
  • Sorrento
  • Amalfi
  • Salerno: Giudecca
Basilicata
  • Melfi
Apulia
Sardinia
  • Cagliari: Giudaria di Castello
  • Oristano
  • Alghero

Some names' senses

  • Meschita derives from Arab Masjid meaning Mosque.[2]
  • Cafarone, corruption of Cafarnao or the local Hebrew dialectization of "Qaphar Aharon", namely "The Hamlet of Aaron" (maybe a Jewish religious leader, a rich or prominent Jewish personage from Catanzaro or the simple respectful eponym to remember Moses' brother).
  • Rabato is the Sicilian arabicized translation of Rabāṭ (literally a Stronghold or a Fortalice).The ancient fortified zone of Erice was mainly populated by Jews.
  • Cartellone should not correspond with its literal Italian meaning notwithstanding a local recountment keeps asserting that a "big placard" was placed in the quarter's main entrance to make easily manifest to Christians the Hebrew presence in it. Nowadays, visible traces of such "large signboards" or "showy signposts", if any, are completely vanished or removed.In another folksy story the houses' doors and their outer facings were adorned with little tablets reproducing the Mosaic Laws or a few precepts of Torah.That might be the simple result of Christian misinterpretation of Mezuzah's rite where little scrolls are kept in the doorposts instead.The most suitable explication is rather strictly relatable to a typical Modica's artisanal mastery.Cartellone is the male augmentative of medieval Latin word "cartallus, cartella" that qualified a "woven hamper" or more precisely, in this case, a "big woven hamper" (to identify an entire specific category of workingmen and workingwomen).Aforetime, in that area, the production of wiskets was chiefly monopolized by Jewish basket-makers and today many wrights of Cartellone still exercise this kind of patient traditional handwork.A last surmise would be a likely dialectal mangling of an Hebrew toponym called "Qiryath Alon" or "Qiryath Aloni"(The Village of the Oak or The Village of Alon).

Notes and references

  1. ^ Balarm was the Arab name of Palermo.
  2. ^ In the Saracenic Sicily the Synagogue or the Temple were called Mosque , since a Beit Tefila could often phagocyte and take place in an abandoned Muslim cultic building.The words Meskita, Moschetta, Muschitta, Moschella are the Siculo-Arab variants for Little Mosque. After 1492, Moschetta, Muschitta and Moschella were widely adopted as surnames by several Southern Italian Neophytes.Nowadays, they are three very common last names highly diffused in all the meridional regions of Italy.

Sicilia Judaica, N.Bucaria.Flaccovio Editore (1996)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Giudecca"

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