The Venetian Ghetto

A Dialectic of Marginalisation and the Recognition of Otherness

“So that no outward division may remain among the citizens of this city, we order that those gates which in the past enclosed the Ghetto be demolished.”[1] These words, spoken shortly before 19 Messidor, Year II (7 July 1793), presaged the end of the first and oldest Jewish ghetto in the world. Beyond the gates, the Venetian government had abdicated on 12 May of the same year in the face of the Napoleonic armies. The French occupation of the city of the Doges likewise signalled the end of the Jews’ isolation on the island of Cannaregio, an isolation that had begun in 1516 under the authority of Zaccaria Dolphin. This sentence would mark the gradual end of the Venetian Jews’ way of life, as it formed part of Bonapartist emancipation policy.

Our own age has largely debased the term “ghetto” by applying it to the most diverse situations. We use it for any district in which a minority is concentrated. The modern meaning, or at the very least the connotations of the word, are now negative, referring both to difficulties of integration and to an image of dilapidated urban areas. We owe this perception in large part to Hitlerian policy, which found in the creation of ghettos a means of controlling Jews before deporting them. The largest of these modern ghettos, established in 1939 and numbering more than 380,000 people, was that of Warsaw. It will remain for ever in collective memory as the site of twenty-seven days of a fatal uprising by its inhabitants, the disproportion of forces depriving them of any real hope of victory. One recalls the grimly famous words of one of the fighters: “We do not want to save our lives. No one will leave here alive. We want to save human dignity. Arie Wilner.”

These modern Jewish ghettos, the product of the Nazi regime’s antisemitic policy, have profoundly shaped our collective memory. Yet the institution of the ghetto is far older. Its connection with Nazi policy lies in a perverse appropriation of the Venetian institution. Indeed, one should never forget that Jews had already been emancipated, to varying degrees, in almost all European countries when the Nazis reactivated an institution that had been dead for two centuries. The subject must therefore be approached with all due historical caution, failing which the risk of anachronistic interpretation is certain.

In Western Europe we now live in a place and at a time that are almost unique in the history of humanity. To pass a value judgement on a period stretching from the early Middle Ages to the emancipation of Jewish communities by the standards of our own criteria of tolerance would therefore be a serious error. The political and confessional standards of tolerance of Western democracies now seem so natural to us that we sometimes forget their normative character. They were the outcome of a long process, at once theological and philosophical, which, in our country, took concrete form for Protestants in the Edict of Tolerance of 1787, and then in 1791 with the recognition of Jewish citizenship, a prelude to emancipation. It took a further one hundred and fifteen years before the 1905 law on secularism was promulgated, a law that remains both one of the founding pillars of our Republic and an almost worldwide exception. From this perspective, France played a key role both in the emancipation of minorities and in the creation of its political structures of integration. As the topic this evening does not call for an exposition on emancipation and its consequences, I shall close this preliminary parenthesis.

The origins of the term “ghetto” disappear into the depths of the very history of its distant creation in Venice. Numerous, not entirely satisfactory etymological hypotheses have been proposed. Much has been written about the origin of the word ghetto, which, according to the Venetians, would derive from geto, a Venetian term for the place where the slag from nearby foundries was discarded. Others suggest that the term might also come from an old word in Talmudic Hebrew, ghet, meaning “separation”, or from the Syriac nghetto, meaning “congregation”. Since the ghetto was located on the site of a former foundry, the Venetian hypothesis appears the most probable.[2]

The presence of Jews in Venice and its region is very ancient and long predates the creation of the first Jewish ghetto in the world. A census carried out in 1152[3] records the presence of 1,300 Jews settled in Venice. Another, equally debatable element concerning the antiquity of Jewish presence in the city relates to the very name of the Venetian island associated with the ghetto, “Giudecca”, a name given to the island of Spinalunga. The name “Giudecca” is said to be a deformation of “guidecche”, that is, the name commonly given to Mediterranean quarters exclusively inhabited by Jews.

The Venetian ghetto cannot be separated from the history of the city. The obscurities and confused origins surrounding both the etymology of the term and the date of arrival of the first Jews in the city nonetheless testify to its antiquity. If we broaden our enquiry to Jewish presence in Europe, we may state that Jews reached our countries after the destruction of the Temple by Titus in 70 CE. Thus Jewish presence, although unevenly distributed across Europe, is attested at least from the first century of our era. Contrary to a widely held but erroneous belief that Jews arrived in France in the Middle Ages, the settlement of the first Jews in Gaul took place between the first and third centuries CE. They came from Rome by land, reaching Lyons, the north of France and Brittany, before moving down towards Marseilles. Jewish presence in Western Europe is therefore as ancient as the establishment of Christianity.

In the early stages of their settlement, coexistence between Jews and gentiles, or with idolaters, was not always conflictual. Exclusion from gentile society was progressive. The use of the term “antisemitism” is anachronistic in the specific case of societies of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, since antisemitism is a modern notion linked to the emancipation of Jews within the polity. The Middle Ages manifested anti-Judaism, a theological stance that bears only a distant relation to the attitudes of our own societies towards the Jewish people. It is nonetheless possible to analyse retrospectively the Judeo-Alexandrian conflict (38–41), the theatre of the first known pogrom in history, as the first manifestation of antisemitism, given that Alexandria housed the largest Jewish community of the diaspora in a cosmopolitan context. Jews in Ptolemaic Egypt enjoyed a form of civic status and were, in that respect, akin to the Hellenes, that is, the ruling class of the period.[4]

In the Roman Empire, citizenship was granted to Jews as early as 212 CE. As a protected minority, they were not, strictly speaking, persecuted; the papacy of the time sought to convert them without difficulty, provided they “recognised their error”. This doctrinal point is of great importance, and we shall have occasion to return to it in detail later.

During the period of the Carolingian emperors, a similar attitude prevailed before taking a critical turn in the ninth century at the time of the Great Schism and the First Crusade. The West confronted the “Orientalisms”, namely the Byzantine and Muslim civilisations. The Jew then became, and in some cases remains even today, the internal enemy (alongside, let us not forget, other categories of human beings deemed “foreign” in an ethnic, ideological, social, or moral sense). Anti-Judaism was born and would be the forerunner of its secular form, antisemitism, whose modern and acute form is anti-Zionism. The Jewish minority would thus be designated as “the” responsible party[5] for society’s ills in various guises: as a deicidal people, as a cosmopolitan and stateless people, as agents of high finance, or as traitors from within.

We shall first examine the nature of relations between Jews and gentiles before providing a rapid overview of the creation of the ghetto. Anti-Judaism was a theological position, in that it combated Judaism as a religion, advancing several arguments, the most salient being that Jews, having failed to recognise the messiahship of Jesus of Nazareth, lived in error. Christianity having become the state religion of the Roman Empire, it therefore seemed necessary to convert, or to bring to conversion, the Jews living in Christian lands. The attitude of the time was indeed one of confrontation essentially religious in nature. Nevertheless, Christianity had not only never rejected the Sinai revelation, but had incorporated it into the canon of its own sacred writings under the still current name of the Septuagint, a word-for-word translation of the Tanakh[6] produced by Hellenised Jews. The Bible used to this day by Orthodox Christians in the Greek sphere remains the Septuagint. The relations between these two religions were thus highly complex, given that they proceeded in part from a shared revelation, completed, according to Christianity, by a new law. That new law did not deny the old but fulfilled it.

From the point of view of Judaism, the Messiah has not come, which ultimately amounted to denying the existence of the new covenant. For its part, ancient Judaism did not develop an abundant literature concerning Jesus. The Talmud (the codification of the Oral Law) does not speak of him by name; and when Jesus is mentioned, it is only the man Jesus to whom the Talmud refers. Moreover, the Trinitarian reference, central to Christianity, is inadmissible in the eyes of Judaism, since it breaks, in its view, the indivisible monad constituted by the eternal being in monotheism.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to reduce the controversy between Jews and Christians solely to the themes of messiahship and the Trinity, and still more wrong to think that Judaism would be anterior to Christianity.[7]

That error long prevailed both in popular imagery and among certain Christian exegetes. In fact, although we may affirm that the two religions both proceed from a common foundation, the Tanakh, it remains true that Rabbinic Judaism, that is, the Judaism we still know today, is contemporary with primitive Christianity. From this perspective, one may say that Christianity and Judaism constitute two different forms of the religion that preceded them, namely Yahwism. The Talmud, which constitutes the collection of the Oral Law of Judaism, was not fully codified until the sixth century CE, whereas Christianity had already been the state religion of the Roman Empire for three hundred years. Furthermore, Rabbinic Judaism and Jewish philosophy have drawn abundantly from sources other than the Tanakh. The profound Jewish fascination with Greek philosophy, whether Platonic or Aristotelian, influenced that religion just as much as Christianity drew from Hellenism. In the Middle Ages, Moses Maimonides, the historic herald of reconciliation between Aristotelian philosophy and Judaism, affirmed that Christianity is closer to Judaism than Islam. He went so far as to state that it is permissible (without engaging in proselytism) for a Jew to teach the Torah to a Christian but not to a Muslim, on the grounds of Christianity’s recognition of the Old Testament. Once again, the heart of the discord lies in the interpretation of the Torah; this time, from the Jewish point of view, it is Christianity that errs in interpretation. In a remark of rare tolerance for his time, he would say that “there is nothing in their scriptures that differs from ours.”[8]

In the light of these remarks, it goes without saying that the relations and “disputations” that delighted theologians revolved around problems of recognition at once insoluble and ambiguous. To complete this point, one can only recommend to anyone wishing to understand the precise nature of the relationship between Jews and gentiles the Disputation of Barcelona, which opposed Rabbi Nahmanides to the apostate, newly converted Christian Paul of Christiani.[9]

Another point placed Jews in a position likely to complicate their relations with Christians. Beyond the theological aspects that might divide them, the central issue was that of lending money. According to theology, lending money at interest between Christians was forbidden; it was therefore possible to turn to Jews. The most extraordinary aspect of this position, which would mark a decisive turning point in Jewish history, is that it takes its source from a verse in Deuteronomy, and thus from the Tanakh: “You shall not lend at interest to your brother, interest on money or interest on food, interest on anything that is lent at interest”; and then, “You may charge interest to a foreigner, but to your brother you shall not charge interest, that the Lord your God may bless you in all that you undertake in the land you are entering to possess.”

It should also be added that these verses were criticised in their interpretative register both by the rabbis and by the Church. Nevertheless, the role that Jews would come to play in moneylending was established, and it would constitute one of the principal points of tension between the two religions and communities.

The plague, the war against Verona, and the war against Genoa had weakened Venice in the fourteenth century. In 1356, the situation was such that the Great Council drew up a bill intended to authorise the establishment of pawnbrokers in Venice. The objective was to obtain ready money for merchants in order to relieve the misery of the population. This law also offered a certain advantage: as the loans came from Jews, popular hostility tended to be directed towards them rather than towards the governing power. The decree of 1356 authorised them to operate banks on the grounds that gentiles were forbidden to lend money to one another. This precarious status was short-lived, for they were prohibited again as early as 1396. A new politico-religious problem soon emerged. Around the middle of the fifteenth century, Dominicans and Franciscans divided over the role of the monti di pietà authorised by the papacy. In other words, Jewish and Christian banks were to engage in fierce competition. The status of Jews in Venice in the fifteenth century had improved. People asked whether it was opportune for Jews to live alongside Christians. Beyond their contribution to Venetian finance, certain theologians saw in such coexistence a chance that they might convert to Christianity. The answer was therefore positive. The only restriction was the wearing of a yellow distinguishing sign, a restriction that was, moreover, more or less observed. Relations between the two communities improved to such an extent that laws were drafted at the time forbidding sexual relations between Jewish men and Christian women.

It would take too long, within the scope of such a lecture, to describe in detail three hundred years of the history of Venetian Judaism; we shall therefore confine ourselves to the salient facts surrounding the creation of the ghetto. Another capital point in Jewish history relevant to the creation of the ghetto was the expulsion of the Jews from Spain by the Catholic Monarchs. That expulsion created a double problem: an immediate one, namely the massive arrival of Jews in search of lands more lenient towards them, among which Venice was to be found; and a second problem which the Christian West would soon face, namely the emergence of Marranism, the outward conversion of Jews to Christianity.

In the years around 1513, Jews lived in every quarter of Venice and had been authorised to practise many trades. The Venetian Senate, in search of funds, authorised, in exchange for 5,000 ducats obtained from the Jews, the opening of nine shops selling second-hand clothing at the Rialto. Until then, two opposing tendencies had existed in Venice: the nobility, which treated the Jews pragmatically, and Catholic preachers, who pleaded for a separation between the two communities. This minor event, the opening of nine shops, had the effect of confirming in everyone’s mind the free movement and settlement of Jews throughout the city. The effect was such that, on 29 March 1516, the following decree was promulgated:

“Jews shall all dwell together in the cluster of houses situated in the Ghetto, near San Girolamo; and, so that they may not circulate all night, we decree that on the side of the old Ghetto where there is a small bridge, and likewise on the other side of the bridge, two gates shall be installed; these shall be opened at dawn and closed at midnight by four guards engaged for this purpose and paid by the Jews themselves at the price that our college shall deem appropriate.”

The ghetto was born. By enclosing the Jews on a tiny island in the Cannaregio quarter, Venice created the archetype of an urban concentration assigned to a minority. Every evening, Jews had to return to the Ghetto; the bridges giving access to the rest of the city were raised, and the islet was guarded by the Jews themselves.

An anti-Jewish policy was in full swing in the sixteenth century; Jews fleeing the armies of the League of Cambrai left Treviso, Verona and Padua. Venice faced an unprecedented wave of immigration. It took little for the Dominicans to demand the definitive expulsion of Venetian Jews. The Serenissima thus authorised Jews to reside permanently in Venice under several restrictive conditions. They were permitted to practise only the trades of second-hand clothiers, pawnbrokers and physicians, and were required to live in a specific district of the city that was assigned and closed.

Thus, from 1516, Venice gave rise to two modern characteristics of Jewish life in the diaspora: the community understood beyond its purely cultic aspect, and the ghetto.

Ashkenazi Jews were the first to occupy this part of the city, and were joined by Sephardic merchants in 1541. In 1589, Spanish Jews were compelled to reside in the Ghetto, which at its height reached 5,000 inhabitants, to the point that it became necessary to build houses of seven or eight storeys, which are still among the tallest buildings in the city.

It should nevertheless be specified that the allocation of specific quarters, although not walled and guarded, was not a regime reserved solely for Jews. German merchants had already had, since 1314, a closed quarter, and there was even discussion of creating a quarter for prostitutes.

The Dualism of the Ghetto

Once again, it is not for us to judge history, but to draw lessons from it. The urban model of the ghetto had a profound effect on Jewish life. The ghetto became, beyond being merely a place of residence, a site of study and of reinforcement of tradition. The sociologist Yankel Fijalkow aptly observes:

“In Western Europe the rulers of the Middle Ages used the Jews to secure revenues, collecting a tax on their community so that it could be passed on in prices. The ‘ghetto’ system entails physical separation and a special status supposedly intended to protect them from antisemitic outbursts. Surrounded by walls, the ghetto is closed at night, on Sundays and on Christian feast days. It is often overcrowded because the authorities refuse to extend its boundaries. But, despite its defects, the ghetto may also be considered ‘voluntary’. It allows the community to strengthen its internal ties and to preserve tradition. It is organised around the family and the synagogue, with autonomous communal, social and legal institutions. It enjoys a certain extraterritoriality.”[10]

The tribunals of the Inquisition were less severe in Venice than in the Iberian Peninsula. Marranos, “new Christians”, often lived with a blurred and ill-defined identity. Converted to Christianity for several generations, they defined themselves as Christians in countries that enacted anti-Jewish measures, but were able to declare themselves Jews in Venice. In that case, they were required to join the ghetto.

Nothing is more mistaken than to suppose that all Marranos possessed an exhaustive and secret knowledge of Judaism. For most of these new Christians, their knowledge of Judaism was rudimentary. Certain rites, often distorted, had remained from their Jewish ancestors; they did not know Hebrew. The only documentation accessible concerning their ancestors’ religion passed through Christian works, and many among them entered Holy Orders in order to learn Hebrew.

The Talmud, without which it is impossible to practise Judaism, had been burned in Spain. The return to the Jewish community was not achieved without difficulty, even if one can count among Marrano destinies some brilliant commentators on Judaism. Yet the Marranos, because of their difficulty in defining themselves, also cast a critical eye both on Christian customs and on Jewish customs. Living on the boundary between two cultures, the Marranos were in large measure the first translators of Hebrew works into vernacular languages. Professor Cecil Roth, editor of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, did not hesitate to write in his History of the Marranos: “it is not rash to see in them the first modern Jews.”

In the course of the fifteenth century, Venice became the centre of the book industry. A figure of fifteen thousand titles published in this cosmopolitan city is often advanced. Venice became one of the intellectual centres of Europe. There is no need to emphasise the Jews’ relationship with the book. From this fortunate conjunction there arose in Venice an abundant Hebrew literature. These works were initially published by Daniel Bomberg, who was Christian despite the sound of his surname and given name. Despite the prohibition imposed in 1548 on Jewish printing, many books left the presses with rabbinical approval so that the works would not be offensive either to Judaism or to Christianity. The Ghetto became the crucible of an intense Jewish intellectual life, which won recognition even among gentiles. Kabbalah developed there greatly, and a certain permeability appeared between the two communities.

The distinguishing sign ceased to be imposed on Jews from the eighteenth century onwards, and Jewish culture began to enjoy considerable esteem among gentiles. One had to wait until 1797 for Jews to enjoy fully the rights of citizens: the arrival of the Napoleonic armies brought with it the principles of emancipation, of which France was the historic inspirer. The Ghetto was, however, definitively abolished in 1866, and today only four Jewish families still live there. The rest of the community is dispersed throughout the city or in Mestre, Venice no longer offering sufficient employment, particularly for the young.

What remains of this historic place? A plaque not far from the railway station indicates in Italian “SINAGOGHE” and in Hebrew “Beth Knesset”. You will find four synagogues there, a museum of Judaism, and a yeshivah of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, where one will not fail to point out to you the only restaurant and the only kosher grocery in the entire city.

Merchants of the temple abound, offering various ritual objects in Murano glass, from mezuzot to a chess set of questionable taste, in which the pieces represent rabbis for the black side and the Catholic clergy for the white.

Yet it would be reductive to see in it only a museum or a vestige of Jewish isolation. If the Ghetto was certainly an intolerable form of isolating a segment of the population, it was also a refuge. A refuge, or rather a compromise by the Serenissima: by keeping the Jews in the Ghetto, it also spared them definitive expulsion from Venice.

If you have the opportunity to visit the site, you will be struck by these mutual influences. The purely baroque style of the Spanish synagogue, for instance, is remarkable. This monument is today a source of pride for Venetians, Jewish and gentile alike. It is one of the most beautiful buildings in Venice. The similarity with the church of Santa Maria della Salute is striking. Baldassare Longhena oversaw the construction of that church and restored the Spanish synagogue. It was not uncommon for Jews to call upon Christian architects to build and restore their religious buildings, which also testified to a certain commerce between Jews and gentiles. More surprising still is to find, in certain Catholic churches, an influence or a deep knowledge of Judaism.

The churches of Santa Maria della Salute and San Pietro di Castello are probably the two most significant examples. La Salute was built by Longhena following the plague of 1630. The vocation of the building was ecumenical, since the plague had struck both Jews and gentiles. The architect drew extensively on Kabbalah, and in particular on the symbolism of the number eleven, representing the Eternal surrounded by the ten sefirot. Some might see nothing more than chance in this, yet the ground plan of La Salute reproduces with great exactness the Key of Solomon. It should be noted that Longhena’s own origins are the subject of debate. Little is known of the life of this architect, and it is not possible to find his baptismal certificate. He was the son of a stonemason named Melchisedek; there is therefore a strong likelihood that he was of Jewish or Marrano origin. Other clues are striking in the paintings and testify to a deep knowledge of the Tanakh. Titian’s Pentecost painting, placed beside representations of David and Goliath and of Abel and Cain, contains an unambiguous reference to the festival of Shavuot.

San Pietro di Castello, a more recent church dedicated to Peter, is also astonishing. You will not fail to be surprised by the presence of a large menorah beside the altar, and above all by the “Chair of Saint Peter”, inspired by Islamic art.

In November 2006, posters for La Fenice theatre were displayed throughout the city to announce La Juive, the opera by Fromental Halévy. Venice, like Girona in Catalonia, seems to be reconnecting with all aspects of its multiculturalism, and to be acknowledging the contributions of Jews to the construction of Western thought and culture beyond the narrow and reductive image of merchants and usurers in which popular imagination too often confined them outside the very walls of the ghettos.

In so far as it belongs to history, this history of the ghetto is ours, whether we are Jewish or not. Behind the word “ghetto” lies a dualism between the exploitation of a minority and its ostracism. That dualism still exists; in that sense it is not false to speak of urban ghettos, even if the gates fell two hundred years ago. Yet William Shakespeare, by placing this famous speech in the mouth of Shylock, a wealthy Venetian moneylender, revealed to gentiles the nature of their relations with Jews:

“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”

Let us hope that Shakespeare’s famous speech will belong for ever to the enlightenment of the past, enabling us to navigate the darkness of the future.

Jean-Marc CAVALIER LACHGAR

April 2007