In the Ghetto
How a Traveller Overplayed his Hand and was Saved by a Trusty Knight
We were in Venice last week. We were there because I needed to do some research for the book I am writing about life in the Venice ghetto during the Renaissance. The book should be published in the next year or so.
Venice was not the first town in the world to corral all its Jews into one area, Prague did so 250 years earlier. But it was Venice that gave the world the name ghetto, an evocative word, even if scholars disagree among about its origins and meaning. It was in the Venice ghetto’s narrow cramped streets and dangerously overcrowded tenements that, paradoxically, Jews started to break out of their so-called ‘ghetto mentality’ and engage with the rest of the world. It is often said that the Haskalah, the enlightenment that led to Jews playing a full and active part in the world today, began in the late 18th century in Germany. In fact a strong case can be made for arguing that the Jewish Enlightenment started in the ghetto of Venice in the 16th century. But that is not what this article is mainly about.
The 16th century was a time when the world was opening up. Travel and tourism was starting to become popular, although of course they were limited to those who had plenty of time and much money to spare. Venice was a magnet for those early travellers, just as it is today and the ghetto was one of the places that tourists to the city wanted to see. For its residents, the ghetto was a miserable prison-city into which they were locked each night. For the travellers though it was a cultural experience. There were three distinct groups of Jews in the ghetto, each one having arrived under different circumstances. The original inhabitants had come from Germany and Italy, followed by Jewish merchants from the Levant and finally families originally from Spain and Portugal. The three groups lived separately, spoke different languages and sported different clothes (apart from the yellow headgear they were all obliged to wear, to mark them out as Jews). Travellers visiting the ghetto for the first time were astounded by the variety and mix of people, the cacophony of speech, the assortment of colours, and the variety of traditions. It was as if a cultural museum had been deposited in the heart of Europe.
The Englishman Thomas Coryate was one of these travellers. We know about him because he wrote an account of his first journey, a tour of Europe that he undertook in 1608. He gave it the catchy title of Coryats Crudities; hastily gobbled up in five months’ travels in France, Savoy, Italy, Rhetia commonly called the Grisons country, Helvetia alias Switzerland, some parts of high Germany, and the Netherlands; newly digested in the hungry air of Odcombe. (Odcombe was the Somerset village he had been born in). The book became very popular and sold well. It is often referred to as the first English travel guide.
Coryate’s European adventure gave him a taste for travel. After returning home and publishing his book he set off again, this time for the East, visiting Turkey, Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, Ottoman Palestine, Persia, and India. He travelled on foot, learning the languages of the places he passed through and sending letters home. He became a role model for younger travellers and was, allegedly, responsible for the introduction of the table fork into England and the use of the word umbrella. He died on his travels in India in 1616.
During his tour of Europe Thomas Coryate visited Venice. Like most other travellers he took a stroll in the ghetto, the gates of which were open during daylight hours. As he was walking he fell into conversation with a man he describes as a ‘learned Jewish rabbi that spoke good Latin.” He doesn’t give us the name of the rabbi but it has been convincingly suggested that it may have been Leon da Modena, the most famous of all the ghetto rabbis, a deeply learned man who unquestionably would have been able to hold a conversation in Latin.
Coryate fell into conversation with the rabbi and asked him for his opinion of Jesus and why he didn’t accept him as the Messiah. He received the same answer from the rabbi that he said he had received from a Turk in Lyons, that although he could accept that Jesus was a great prophet he could neither accept his divinity nor acknowledge him as Messiah. The conversation went back and forth with Coryate growing more and more insistent that the rabbi was mistaken and urging him to reconsider his opinions. He seemed to have forgotten that he was in the middle of a Jewish enclave and spoke down to the rabbi as if speaking to an inferior, with the hubris of someone convinced of their position. Ultimately he warned the rabbi that if he did not renounce his Jewish faith and accept Christianity he would be eternally damned. It was only then that he realised that the rabbi “seemed to be somewhat exasperated against me.”
As Coryate and the rabbi were speaking a few passers-by stopped to listen, with the crowd gradually swelling as the debate continued. The attention made Coryate feel a little uncomfortable. He told his readers that “forty or fifty Jews flocked about me, and some of them began very insolently to swagger with me, because I durst reprehend their religion.” Fearing that they might set upon him, Coryate backed away, heading towards the canal that ran along the edge of the ghetto, planning to make a dash for it as soon as he reached the bridge at the compound’s gates. The small crowd followed him; maybe he was jostled once or twice as they moved. Then, by a stroke of good fortune, just as he reached the bridge over the canal a gondola passed by. In it was the English ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton. Coryate wrote that the ambassador “espied me somewhat earnestly bickering with them, and so incontinently sent unto me out of his boat one of his principal gentlemen, Master Belford his secretary, who conveyed me safely from the unchristian miscreants.”
It is a wonderful image. An overconfident Englishman trying to convince a rabbi of the error of his ways and convert him to Christianity in front of an inquisitive, mildly hostile Jewish crowd. Backing away in fear he was immediately saved by an English knight who just happened to be passing in a gondola. Life in the ghetto, one suspects, was rarely so entertaining.
There is something odd about this story. The English ambassador who rescued Coryate, the learned and scholarly Sir Henry Wotton, lived close to the ghetto. He may have just been passing but he was on good terms with Leon da Modena who Coryate had been arguing with. Wotton had once asked Modena to write a treatise explaining Jewish beliefs and practices which he would present it to King James I. Coryate, who worked in James I’s court, and Sir Henry Wotton also knew each other and Wotton was a member of the same intellectual circle in England as John Selden, who is thought to have corresponded with Modena (I wrote about him a few weeks ago). The circle of connections seems extraordinarily tight. It might make us wonder just how coincidental the encounter was between Coryate and Modena. Was it really a chance meeting?
More significantly the connections in the story show that despite the constraints of the ghetto prison and the ponderous nature of communication in the 16th century, the world even then was a small place. Intellectual ties flourished between Jews and Christians, Englishmen and Italians, ghetto dwellers and noblemen. We don’t often hear of cross cultural currents such as these so long ago.
The Venice ghetto was an astonishing place. This was just one of its stories.