Ghetto

The Venice Ghetto

The Jewish community in Venice dates to AD 1382, when the Venetian government authorized Jews to live in the city; the first residents were money lenders and businessmen. The enclosure of the Jews came after an outbreak of syphilis—a disease introduced from the New World that had no certain name, diagnosis, or treatment; it was said to be linked to the arrival of the Marrani Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. By act of the Venetian senate on March 29, 1516, some 700 Jewish households were required to move into the Ghetto Nuovo, an island in the cannaregio sestieri on the northwest edge of the city, with entry controlled by two gates that were locked at sundown (the term refers to the original use of the island as a foundry and is from the Italian verb gettare, which means “to pour”).

The Jewish ghetto would eventually include the Ghetto Nuovo, Ghetto Vecchio (1541), and Ghetto Nuovissimo (1633). Jews emerged from the world of the ghetto each morning to work or to shop, their clothing marked with a yellow circle (for men) or yellow scarf (for women) and spent the workday among gentiles, returning to the ghetto each evening before sundown. Within the ghetto, Jews were free to wear jewelry and other clothing prohibited on the streets of Venice following the Decree of 1512, and, in 1589, a charter of Jewish rights guaranteed the right to practice their religion. There eventually would be five synagogues for the separate groups of French, German, Italian, Levantine, and Spanish Jews.

Although the Ghetto was intended to isolate the Jews from the Venetian world outside its gates, physical segregation provided the community with some measure of protection. When groups of angry Catholics tried to attack the ghetto in 1534 during Lent, the bridges were drawn up and windows closed, and those inside were safe from the outside threat. Bernard Dov Cooperman notes that residents saw the ghetto as a biblical “camp of the Hebrews” rather than as a jail, a holy place en route to the Promised Land. The establishment of a ghetto in Verona was an occasion of celebration.

Segregation from the outside world would also turn the community inward, leading to the development of a religious culture different from other Jewish communities. By the end of the sixteenth century, fear of assimilation and intermarriage led rabbinic courts to forbid dancing between Jewish women and Christian men.

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