Five hidden gems at the Venice Ghetto
Today, no barrier or signpost marks where Venice ends and its ghetto begins, but linger long enough in the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo and you will feel the wall of the closing in. Established by decree of Doge Leonardo Lorendan on March 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. At that time in history, Venice was a capital of the Mediterranean world but it was also the capital of Jewish life in Europe, the epitome of the Diaspora’s potential. The most enduring evidence of the cosmopolitan universe that used to exist here are the five synagogues that today lie hidden behind the nondescript facades of dilapidated apartment buildings where a few families actually still live: small jewel boxes that quietly preserve an enchanting global artistry. Each synagogue was design to correspond to a different nation of Jewish immigrants and part of the pleasure of visiting them is noticing their unique styles. The oldest, the Scuola Grande Tedesca (Great German Synagogue) built in the 1520s for German Jews who imported Ashkenazi tradition to the Mediterranean world, is most ornate, although you’d never know it from the outside. The synagogues were initially tolerated on the condition that their exteriors bear no resemblance to Jewish houses of worship, so the sense of being enveloped in opulence is all the more striking when you enter. The Scuola Canton, built a few years later, possibly for émigrés from southern France, showcases a Torah ark laced with gilded carvings and wood panels illustrating the Book of Exodus. The beauty of the Renaissance Scuola Italiana is restrained by contrast, with natural light streaming in from five large windows illuminating the ancient mahogany. Across a small pedestrian bridge are the two Sephardic synagogues, the Scuola Levantina and the Scuola Spagnola. In terms of architectural conventions, these two seem to break all the rules: they were lovingly restored in the 17th c. By non-Jewish artisans – perhaps by Baldassarre Longhena, the master of the Venetian Baroque.
When the ghetto was at its height, just in the 17th c., 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. Jan Morris, a Venice devotee and one-time resident wrote in his 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 WWII, 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, that today belongs to the city of Venice – it does not belong to the Jews. The ghetto has become part of the panorama of Venice.
