The title of this magnificent history of the Jews of Venice is a touch misleading. It is true that the Venetian Ghetto, officially established on March 29th, 1516, was Europe’s first designated urban quarter, “obligatory, separate and enclosed”, in which people of the Jewish faith were sequestered. However, as Alexander Lee himself points out, “In many ways, there was nothing particularly new about the Venetian Ghetto“.
Since medieval times, a number of Europe’s major cities had corralled their Jewish populations into specific, gated areas, for fear of “infection” and “contamination” of Christian beliefs and practices. But at the beginning of the 16th century, the Venetian Republic was acutely aware of how heavily its economy depended on Jewish bankers. It had once been immensely rich but was, by then, in decline after decades of warfare. It was also threatened by the rise of the Spanish and British empires in the west and the powerful Ottoman Empire in the east.
“The Ghetto,” Lee writes, “was simply the easiest way of allowing Jewish loans to keep flowing, while keeping the spiritual ‘risks’ to a minimum.”
Christian Europe had been in an economic bind of its own making since at least 1179, when the Third Lateran Council forbade money-lending for profit. Of course, canny merchants found ways around the ban – and few were as canny as the merchants of Venice. In the 12th century, the city’s money-lenders were charging interest rates of up to 20 per cent. Nice work and no sweat.
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The First Ghetto is a catalogue of catastrophes, recoveries and more catastrophes. Wars ebbed and flowed like the tides in the Venetian lagoon and the city’s Jews were successively inundated, rescued and dried off, then promptly sunk again. Some of them were among the wealthiest Venetians, but many were the poorest of the poor. Like their co-religionists throughout Europe, they all, even the wealthy, lived on a knife-edge – often literally so. They could be, and were, blamed for anything, from the accidental death of a child to outbreaks of plague. Why this should be is one of the most egregious examples of human foolishness; anti-Semitism is as absurd as would be, say, the persecution of red-haired or left-handed people.
Venice was a major maritime power from the Middle Ages until the 15th century. Its holdings on terraferma stretched from the Veneto along the eastern coast of the Adriatic and onwards to Crete, which Venetian troops first occupied in 1205, after the Fourth Crusade. At that time also, the city-state acquired territory and plunder in what remained of the eastern Roman Empire – Byzantium – and became one of the great trading posts between the Mediterranean countries and Asia.
The Jews of northern Europe had always looked to Venice as a haven of – relative – religious tolerance and many had migrated south to settle there. At the beginning of the 16th century, France was at war with the Holy Roman Empire; the Venetians, to their great cost, backed Francis I against the Emperor Maximilian. The ambitions of the latter, as Lee points out, “posed a clear threat to the Republic’s possessions on terraferma”. In these perilous times, Venice’s Jews once again became scapegoats. What was to be done with them?
A city councillor, Zaccaria Dolfin, came up with what he saw as a simple solution. Claiming that, as Lee writes, “the Jews’ presence in the city was the source of all Venice’s afflictions”, Dolfin nonetheless acknowledged that the city could not afford to expel them, therefore he recommended they be brought together and isolated on the ghetto nuovo, a small island within the larger island of Cannaregio, the northernmost area of the city. Thus was founded the Venetian Ghetto.
It was an insalubrious spot, to say the least, “cramped, unsanitary, and marred by privation”, its residents “subject not just to innumerable petty restrictions, but to an ineradicable, if often variable, hostility”.
Alexander Lee, a fellow of the University of Warwick, follows the history of this beleaguered sanctuary, if that is the word, with judicious forbearance. In his introduction to the book he traces his fascination with the ghetto to a winter afternoon when he first visited the place and glimpsed, through a ground-floor window, a group of black-clad men joined together in song. He realised it was Friday and they were celebrating the Sabbath. “Without knowing why, I burst into tears.”
In the pages that follow he adduces many a cause for weeping, up to and including Benito Mussolini’s deportation of the Jews of Italy to the Nazi death camps. However, the testimony is not entirely bleak. “The longer I have studied this most remarkable place,” Lee writes, “the more deeply I have dug into its records and remains, the more clearly I have come to see its essential truth: that its greatest monument is its endurance; its greatest blessing, its memory; and its greatest hope, its people.”
Fine words, indeed, but even at their finest, words do not negate the ashpit.
John Banville’s Christine Falls is this year’s One Dublin One Book choice
