Books / The Venice Ghetto was a landmark in the history of Jewish persecution |
The word ‘ghetto’ is said to derive from the Venetian dialect term for ‘foundry’: ghèto. In the early 16th century, on the orders of the Doge, Jews were herded en masse from the centre of Venice to the Ghetto Nuovo, or New Foundry district, where metal workers had long cast cannon for the Venetian fleet. The Ghetto – the first of its kind on the Italian peninsula and anywhere in the world – became a model for segregated Jewish quarters throughout Europe. It was soon blighted by poverty, malnutrition and disease. The Ghetto Nuovo was a landmark in the history of Jewish persecution.
In this fascinating history of the New Foundry and its inhabitants, Alexander Lee conjures the Adriatic seaport in all its strange glory. Beyond the scenery of gondolas and tulip-shaped chimneys was a hidden, gated world of sorrow and derision. The Holy Inquisition, which operated in Venice with papal blessing from the 1560s onwards, gleefully indicted the Jews as slayers of Christ and Christian children. Worse, the ‘infidel Israelite’ was a moneylender. The charge of usury had the usual anti-Judaic connotation in Inquisition-era Venice, yet, as Lee points out, the city was reliant on the Ghetto merchants for its glittering prosperity. At best, Jews were grudgingly tolerated.
My night at the........