Venice is an improbable place. A lagoon dotted with small, silty islands strung together to create a city. Not just any old city. A city that for centuries was one of the wealthiest and most powerful states in Europe. An empire without an emperor; a republic in an age of kingdoms and duchies and principalities. A seagoing state of merchant adventurers who built one of the most beautiful cities in the world; so beautiful that 14 million people visit it each year. An island city-state so pleasing to the eye, so exquisite its architecture, so enchanting its waterscape, that in the glory years of the Republic it styled itself La Serenissima, the Most Serene.
A financially astute trading centre governed by a patrician regime, Venice treated its Jews better than almost anywhere else in Europe. That’s not saying much. The Venetians were dreadful, frightful, horrific to their Jews. But even so, if you were a Jew in times gone by and you had to live in Europe, you couldn’t choose better than La Serenissima. For all its faults.
This is a book about the Venice Ghetto. The word ghetto is used today to describe an area whose residents share the same economic status, ethnicity or background. The impoverished quarters of major cities where refugees and immigrants crowd together are called ghettos. So are districts where those of a similar origin or faith choose to live. Even those who dwell in mansions within gated communities may think of themselves as living in a ghetto of sorts. But none of these places is anything like the Venice Ghetto, the very first ghetto in the world. Prison is a more appropriate word for the area in which the Jews of Venice were forced to live. Or, if we are feeling generous, open prison, since the barred gates were opened during daylight hours and the ghetto inhabitants could come and go freely. Provided they returned by nightfall.
There was nothing particularly unusual about confining the Jews in Venice into one part of the city; most cities had quarters where those of the same nationality lived. Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Dalmatians, Albanians and Germans all dwelt in their own districts of Venice. German merchants were obliged to live in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, where they were free to come and go as they pleased, though the Turks in the Fondaco dei Turchi did have constraints placed upon their movements. But Turkey was often a hostile power and the Turkish merchants tended to stay in Venice only for short periods, conducting their business, doing who knows what else and leaving again. One can understand why the Venetians might have been wary of them. The Jews though, barricaded at night in their prison ghetto, were not a hostile community. Far from it, they were only allowed to be in the city because they were useful to the Venetians. The Jews did what the Venetians were prohibited by religion from doing. They lent money, typically as pawnbrokers, and helped the city’s many poor to put food on the table.
Moneylending was one of very few trades that Jews were allowed to practise in Christian Europe. It was also the stick with which they were beaten. The myth of the avaricious Jewish moneylender, the conspiracy theory of the world-dominating Jewish banker, only exists because Christians were forbidden to lend to each other on interest. Jews were forbidden too, under the same biblical stricture. But by the twelfth century, rabbis were coming round to the view that Jews should be allowed to charge interest. They had little choice. They couldn’t earn a proper living. They were forbidden from joining the guilds, the trade associations to which all merchants and craftsmen had to belong, and they were excluded from all the professions, with the occasional exception of medicine.
The first Jewish moneylenders opened shop in Venetian territory at the end of the thirteenth century. The Venetians licensed them to lend to the poor, charged them fees for the privilege of doing so, and regulated the rate of interest they could levy. They resented and distrusted the Jews, accusing them of deicide, telling them that they had been rejected and cursed by God for their failure to recognize the divinity of Christ; it was these sins which justified their status as serfs. This attitude towards the Jews was no different from any in Europe. But unlike in other countries the Venetians never expelled the Jews, nor confiscated their belongings. They didn’t slaughter Jewish men, rape women, or forcibly baptize children. That wasn’t the Venetian way. Rather, they took money from them through taxation. That was how the Venetians did things. That’s why Venice was the best place in Europe for Jews to live.
It was for reasons of economic utility that the Venetians first permitted Jewish moneylenders to settle in the city. It was for similar reasons that they later permitted Jewish merchants to reside in the ghetto. A decline in the Venetian economy during the sixteenth century had forced the government to review their trade policies. Jewish merchants based in Turkey handled much of the trade to and from the empire; the Venetians valued their contribution to the economy, but the merchants themselves were discouraged by the petty restrictions and bureaucracy the Republic imposed upon foreign traders. Trading with Venice was so difficult that when they arrived with their cargoes they could not even find a place in the city to stay. Realizing that it was in their own interest to make life easier for the Jewish merchants, the Venetian government expanded the ghetto and set aside lodgings for them to rent when in town.
The merchants soon brought their families and in time their temporary lodgings became permanent. In their robes and turbans they brought colour to the ghetto and their liquidity provided a certain amount of financial relief. But like the moneylenders the merchants were few in number, there were never enough of them to drag the ordinary, barely employed residents of the ghetto out of their poverty.
Confined to their compound, taxed to the hilt, barred from nearly every field of employment, forbidden to own property, obliged to wear a distinguishing yellow badge or cap, we might conclude that life for the Jews of Venice was miserable. As indeed it was. And yet, something remarkable happened in the Venice Ghetto.
For centuries the university at the nearby town of Padua had been the scholarly heart of the Republic. As one of the only institutions in Europe that would admit Jewish students, its medical school had long been a magnet for the ambitious. Padua had a yeshiva too, a school for rabbinic training. There had never been a lack of opportunity for the bright and scholarly among the Jews of Venice. But the establishment of the ghetto broadened the intellectual horizon for those who were not naturally attracted to formal education. Quite unexpectedly, almost as soon as it was established, the ghetto became the centre of a Jewish cultural renaissance.
We may never fully understand why it happened. Certainly the zeitgeist had much to do with it. These were the closing years of the Italian Renaissance, and even in their ghetto the Jews could not help but be touched by cultural upheavals in the outside world. The fact that Venice was Europe’s preeminent centre of printing also helped; scholars flocked from far and wide to have their works immortalized in print. And the concentration in such a small space of so many minds, all raised in a Jewish culture that emphasized education, must have made a contribution too.
Whatever the reasons, the Venice Ghetto was arguably the place where the Jewish enlightenment began, where for the first time Jews, ironically enough, stepped out of what has been called their ‘ghetto mentality’ and began to engage with the world around them.
The Jewish enlightenment is traditionally said to have begun in Germany in the eighteenth century. That, it is claimed, is when Jews first started to study secular subjects, engage with contemporary culture, and integrate with the world around them. But such things were already happening in the Venice Ghetto two centuries earlier. Not, it is true, for everybody; many residents of the ghetto were too downtrodden to give much thought to anything other than scraping a few coins together or how to protect their children from plague and hunger. But a few, not many, wrote books on science, philosophy and medicine. Some composed music or wrote poetry, delved into antique writings, or printed new editions of ancient manuscripts. Ghetto intellectuals conversed with Italian scholars and corresponded with European humanists. There was even a renowned artist, Moses dal Castellazzo; an occupation that in those days was the least Jewish of all cultural activities. If Florence was the home of the Italian Renaissance, Venice saw the flowering of its Jewish counterpart.
The ghetto occupies a distinctive place in the history of European antisemitism. The Venetians had been the first to effectively imprison their Jews, but as the years passed they grew noticeably more tolerant, more willing to engage with them culturally and in commerce. They still despised Jews of course, they weren’t that enlightened; they continued to treat them as outsiders, cursing them as deicides, fearing the supernatural powers they irrationally credited them with. But over the two centuries of the ghetto’s existence the anti-Jewish polemics grew fewer and the calls to expel them from the city died down. The hand of the Venetian State weighed less heavily: always anxious to exact as much money from the ghetto as it could, in its latter years the Republic became more open to negotiation and compromise. Maybe the change was brought about by the zeitgeist; by a world that was opening up, where communications were improving and attitudes towards foreign cultures and nations were generally becoming more tolerant. Maybe it was because the ghetto contained people of note, intellectuals and merchants who commanded a degree of respect, who made tangible contributions to the prosperity and cultural well-being of Venice. Although it never became as tolerant towards its Jews as Amsterdam, whose story was very different, in its latter years the Venetian Republic displayed noticeably little hostility to its Jews. It stands out as an example of a city that not only came to terms with the fact that Venetians had to live with an indigenous Jewish population but, recognizing their economic utility, encouraged other Jews to join them. Provided, of course, that the newcomers too were also economically useful.
In the following pages we will read about life in the Venice Ghetto during the three centuries when Jews were confined there. We will meet its outstanding characters, the torchbearers of the Jewish renaissance. Leon Modena, who preached Judaism to princes and bishops, corresponded with Christian Talmudists, and brought music to the ghetto. Simone Luzzatto, whose manifesto on religious tolerance was read in Amsterdam and London, and Leone Ebreo the philosopher of love. We will hear how the poet Sara Copia Sulam was exploited by the Venetian guests she invited to her ghetto salon and read about Elia Levita, the author of courtly romances who lived for ten years in the home of a Cardinal, learning from him and teaching him. We will cross paths with Elijah Halfon, adviser to Henry VIII and Anselmo del Banco whose name tells us his profession, along with a sprinkling of mystics, alchemists, odd bods and false messiahs. Oh, and of course, Shylock, the most famous Venetian Jew of all.