Not all cities have stood strong. A Milan branch of the kosher restaurant chain Ba’Ghetto heeded the orders from Israel and pulled the artichoke. (“Their rabbi is more rigid,” a waiter at the branch in Rome’s ghetto said with a shrug.) But in the face of a stiff-necked Israeli rabbinate, the city’s Jews reasserted what they say is a basic principle of kosher law: that Jewish communities around the world can decide for themselves whether their fruits and vegetables are cleaned in a way that keeps them kosher.

“There is no pope,” Mr. Pavoncello said.

Some argued that the hard overlapping petals of their preferred mammole, romanesco and cimaroli artichokes seal out insect eggs and other invasive species. One local rabbi, Umberto Piperno, said in an interview that “Jewish Roman women know how to inspect the artichoke, and better than the rabbis.”

But in order to keep the artichokes clean and kosher the world over, Rabbi Piperno hopes to patent an ultrasound flying-bug repellent he is developing; it works, he said, like a veritable “Iron Dome” for artichokes.

Other Romans deferred to the higher authority of the city’s chief rabbi, Riccardo Di Segni, who prepared the Jewish-style artichokes in a “Happy Passover” video message, and once said, “We are the people of the artichoke, not only the people of the Holocaust.”