While the pope no longer holds secular and religious authority over the city of Rome, and no longer forces its Jews to listen to a sermon about why they should accept Christianity on Shabbat afternoons, relations between Roman Jews and the Vatican remain important. And fortunately, they have been good for the past half-century or more. Rossella Tercatin describes one Jewish family’s particular connection to the pontiff, and the damage done by Pope Francis’s recent anti-Israel turn:

Monday, March 3, was marked in Bruno Limentani’s calendar as a very important day. The sixty-three-year-old Roman Jewish businessman was supposed to meet with Pope Francis to choose a porcelain dining set from Limentani’s company’s collection for the pontiff’s personal apartment. [But] the pope is hospitalized following a respiratory crisis; the appointment was canceled.

Named after its founder Leone Limentani, the company started providing glasses and china to the Vatican over 150 years ago. As the seventh generation of his family in the business, Limentani has personally gifted a 24-piece porcelain set to both John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Limentani’s father David developed a personal relationship with the pope, to the point that John Paul II asked him to gauge discreetly the opinion of Rome’s chief rabbi, Elio Toaff, on the idea of a visit to the synagogue. The visit then happened in 1986.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.