500 Years of Jewish Life in Venice

David Laskin

---

A journey into one of the world’s oldest Jewish ghettos, where this year a long, rich history is commemorated.

The Ponte delle Guglie. To the right of the bridge is the passage to the Jewish ghetto. Credit Andrea Wyner for The New York Times

Though you can still see the recesses in the walls where the hinges of the portals once hung, the Venice ghetto has not been a prison since Napoleon seized the city and tore down the gates in 1797. Today, no barrier or signpost marks where Venice ends and its ghetto begins. Cross a canal on an arched bridge, duck through a sottoportego (an alley tunneling through a building), disappear down a vent in the urban fabric — you come and go just like everywhere else in the maze of this island city.

But linger long enough in the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo, the generous, frayed, tree-flecked plaza that anchors this corner of Cannaregio (the quiet northwest quadrant of the city) and you’ll feel the wall of the past closing in. Half a millennium of history does not transpire without stamping the soul of a place.

Established by decree of Doge Leonardo Loredan on March 29, 1516, the Venice ghetto was one of the first places where people were forcibly segregated and surveilled because of religious difference. The term itself originated here; the area had been used as a foundry (“geto” in Venice dialect) and over time the neighborhood’s polyglot residents corrupted the word to ghetto.

I traveled to La Serenissima in December to see how the city was gearing up for the anniversary of the establishment of the ghetto. A major exhibition called “Venice, the Jews and Europe: 1516 to 2016” (on view from June 19 to Nov. 13) was being planned for the Ducal Palace, and during the last week of July, Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” will be staged (in English) for the first time in the confines where its most hallucinatory scenes take place. Venice being Venice, there will also be glittering parties, celebrity-filled fund-raisers and fancy dress galas, starting with the invitation-only performance of Mahler’s First Symphony at La Fenice opera house on March 29.

But in the course of my visit, what I became most curious about was the mood of the current Jewish community of 450 people. Venice is such an impossibly beautiful fantasy, it seems astonishing that ordinary people, Jews among them, actually live there. How, I wondered, did deep-rooted Jewish families feel about their past — and future — in this ancient, vulnerable city?

Inside the Scuola Grande Spagnola, or Great Spanish Synagogue,
possibly the work of Baldassare Longhena. Credit Andrea
Wyner for The New York Times
My first answer came inside the humble, rectangular sanctuary of the circa-1532 Scuola Canton, one of five synagogues still standing in the ghetto. The synagogues are open to the public only as part of guided tours offered by the Jewish Museum of Venice, and that morning just three of us (two other Americans and I) had signed up for the 10:30 tour in English. We were standing with our guide, Silvia Crepaldi, admiring the golden spiraling tree-trunk columns that support the arch over the bimah (podium), when the subject of rising sea levels came up.

“The city will be empty before it sinks,” Ms. Crepaldi said ruefully. “Venice is shrinking before our eyes.”

The urban exodus of both Jews and gentiles has been going on for some time, though the pace has accelerated in recent years.

When the ghetto was at its height in the 17th century, 5,000 Jews from Italy, Germany, France, Spain and the Ottoman Empire carved out tiny, distinct fiefs, each maintaining its own synagogue, all of them crammed into an acre and a quarter of alleys and courtyards. Confinement was a burden, but it also provided an opportunity for cultural exchange unparalleled in the diaspora. As Jan Morris, a Venice devotee and one-time resident, writes in “The World of Venice,” the city was a “treasure-box” full of “ivory, spices, scents, apes, ebony, indigo, slaves, great galleons, Jews, mosaics, shining domes, rubies, and all the gorgeous commodities of Arabia, China and the Indies.”

Jewish merchants and bankers were vital to the flow of these commodities, but as Venice declined, the Jewish presence dwindled. By the outbreak of the Second World War, Jewish Venice had shrunk to 1,200 residents. Today, with the city’s total population hovering around 58,000 (down from 150,000 before the war), there are about 450 Venetian Jews left, only a handful of them residing in the ghetto.

“So now the ghetto is just a shell?” I wondered aloud as Ms. Crepaldi led us across the campo, over a bridge, down a street of intriguing-looking shops, and into a tighter, grimmer square (the Campiello delle Scuole or “little square of the synagogues”), flanked by the two Sephardic scuole.

The scene approaching Silvia Crepaldi’s flat. Credit Andrea Wyner for The New York Times

Read more: 500 Years of Jewish Life in Venice

---

 

---