In The Ghetto

Following a couple of hours train journey from Florence, a 30 minute or so trip down the Grand Canal on the Vaporetto No. 2 and about another half hour walk over three bridges and the paved streets in between, we finally hung a left and found our Venetian hotel. After we dragged our luggage through the front door and checked in, we were handed a map of Venice and given a quick orientation to the city by our hotel clerk opening up the map and drawing lines, scribbling words and circling the sights that he thought we might want to take in while we were in the city.

I'm sure this is not an uncommon exercise; I'd be willing to bet the staff at our hotel and pretty much every other hotel in the city does the same thing for each new guest. Indeed, I'm sure this happens in most all vacation spots in Europe. There must be tons of maps with the Rialto Bridge, Piazza San Marco and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection handed to tourists every single day in Venice. And I'm sure it helps a ton of people immeasurably.

I think the guys at our front desk did a pretty good job hitting the high points, but they missed one spot in the Cannaregio sestieri in the northwest corner of the city that there was no way I was going to miss: the Venetian ghetto. Yep, you read that right. A can't miss spot for me in an historic city in Italy was the ghetto. Read on. It will make more sense. I promise.

If you had asked me a year ago what the word "ghetto" meant to me, I would likely have described an impoverished, crime-ridden area of some United States city in the 1960s or 1970s where the poverty cycle kept generation after generation of families all but imprisoned by an economic system which they could not escape or conquer. I'd have seen images of people of African or Latin descent in housing projects which are dangerous to the point of deadly for most all of the people who are forced to live there. Most importantly, the association of that word would have been strictly American.

Today, it is not. Today, it's all about Venice. In fact, if it wasn't for Venice, we probably wouldn't have ghettos at all. Don't get me wrong, we'd still have dirt poor areas of cities and countries where the people with money herd all the people who are different from them. We just might not call it a ghetto. I learned that from Venice, while also being reminded again of how hateful and cruel the people running things can be towards those who are not them. I think it's important we continue to talk about this issue and so the ghetto gets a post all to itself.

Long long before white settlers in what is now North America were driving native populations from the lands they had hunted or farmed for generations and a couple of centuries before wealthy mostly southern white plantation owners started buying humans from slave traders to tend their fields in exchange for inhumane treatment and the possibility of no freedom ever, people in power all over the rest of the world were engaged in discrimination and persecution of ethnic, religious and racial groups that were different from them. It has been going on since the beginning of time and it's still going on today all over the world. Yes, even here in the land of the free and home of the brave.

During the early days of the Roman Empire, just after the B.C./A.D. turnover, one of the most persecuted peoples in what is now Italy were those folks identifying themselves as Christians. This new religion, whose followers strangely worshipped only one god, rejected things like sacrifice as a means of pleasing the gods and insisted on burying, rather than cremating, their dead scared the Romans. So they made sure to pass laws forbidding the practice of Christianity. Sometimes they did more than just pass laws; they killed the people for their faith. The first five to six hundred years of the Empire were tough centuries to be a Christian in Europe.

But then something fortunate happened: the emperor Constantine decided to convert to Christianity and directed the rest of the Empire to do likewise. While I'm sure things didn't change overnight, the Christians were now running the show so to speak. And now that they were no longer being officially picked on for their religious practices, and apparently forgetting how much they disliked being discriminated against, they started looking about for a group of people to persecute; to take their former place if you will. They picked the Jews.

The story of discrimination against Jewish people in Europe varies from country to country from century to century but there's one thing for certain: it happened a lot and it happened everywhere. And don't think it isn't happening today since World War II. It is. The story of Venice's persecution of Jews is told today each day week and year by the Museo Ebraico (or Jewish Museum) which is located right in the heart of the Venetian ghetto, the spot the guy at our hotel front desk didn't circle when we checked in. In our first full day in the city, we started out early to discover this history for ourselves.

The walk from our hotel to the ghetto was a good 30 to 40 minutes, depending on the pace of our walk and how often we got lost. I came to Venice armed with large scale printouts of maps from Google Maps with every street identified. Add to those maps my free front desk map and I figured I was set. Yeah, not so much. I don't think I even got maybe one or two islands away from our hotel before I was a little lost. But the sun was shining and I didn't get turned around too badly so I was able to make my way generally north and west until I found a street in person that appeared on my maps. From there it was pretty easy. We'd allowed some float in our schedule and rolled in to the center of the ghetto about when we planned to.

The final bridge we crossed before arriving at the ghetto nuovo.

Venice was founded sometime in the 400s when people fleeing the invading Huns and Germanic tribes began hiding out in the many islands in the Venetian Lagoon. A couple of hundred years later, the wealthy merchants in the city formed a system of government made up of elected councils and a doge, or nobleman leader, which would form the basis of ruling the city for 1,100 years, from 697 to 1797. Under the leadership of the doges, the city became wealthy and powerful. Yet until the year 1385, there were no Jews living within the city of Venice.

That is not to say that there were no Jews in Venice before 1385. There were. They just couldn't live there. The Christians in charge of Venice needed certain services that their faith somehow prevented them from performing so for these jobs, specifically money lending and selling of second hand goods, they turned to the Jews. These were two of the only three occupations Jews were allowed to hold. The other was as a doctor. I'm assuming they allowed Jewish doctors not because the bible forbids Christians to be doctors, but because they needed skilled people to keep them alive, and they didn't mind who did it as long as it worked. This is an unresearched off the cuff opinion but it seems right to me.

Then in 1385, three Jewish money lenders received authorization to live in Venice. A year later, there was a Jewish cemetery established within the city limits. It seemed like things were getting a little better, even if Jews were still forced to wear first an "O" on their clothing (up until 1496) then a beret (yellow until 1500; red thereafter) at all times to identify themselves while in the city. I can't really imagine what it would be like to be forced to wear an identification mark under penalty of fine in the city where I call home; maybe I'm kidding myself in writing that things were actually getting better. But there is no doubt there were more rights afforded to Jewish people between 1385 and 1515, even if those rights seem like basic things people everywhere should be entitled to.

Then on March 29, 1516, everything changed. The merchants who ruled Venice had been debating whether or not to permit Jews to remain as residents of the city. They decided not to expel the Jews, but instead resolved to confine them to an undesirable area of the city. They picked an island formerly used as a copper foundry which was abandoned in 1434 when the fire hazard was deemed too great and all operations were moved away from the city. The Italian word for foundry was geto sometimes spelled ghetto. The pronunciation of the word was "jet-o" but many of the Germanic Jews pronounced the word like we say ghetto today, because their natural tendency was to pronounce the word with a hard G sound. Just like that a legacy was born.

The specific resolution passed by the governors of Venice translates roughly as follows: "The Jews must all live together in the Corte de Case that are in the ghetto at San Girolamo; and so they do not move around at night…let two doors be built which are to be opened each morning at the Marangona and to be closed each night at 12 p.m. by four Christian guards…paid by the Jews at a fee deemed fair by our College." The Marangona refers to the bells of San Marco whose ringing marked the start of the working day. Just so that resolution is clear, not only did it confine all Jews in the city to a single island (later known as the ghetto nuovo because it was the site of one of the newer foundries in Venice) but it required that doors be installed which would be locked each night by guards paid for by the people imprisoned there.  That is tough. Not only are you persecuted, but you are paying for the privilege of it.

Eventually the Jewish population in Venice got too big to stay on the one island allocated to them in 1516 and so they expanded to another former foundry location to the south (the ghetto vecchio) but the rules of confinement remained pretty much the same. In fact, while the tide of the kind of imprisonment imposed on them ebbed and flowed a little over the years, they never really enjoyed any substantial sort of freedom until 1797 when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded the city. If you are counting on a guy like Napoleon to increase your freedom, you know you have very little of it to begin with.

A seven story Venetian skyscraper in the ghetto vecchio. You won't find these any other place in Venice.

When we first arrived in the ghetto on a sunny Saturday morning this past April, the place looked so peaceful and picturesque. What we saw were well maintained, centuries old buildings sheltering an irregular shaped square that must have been the center of Jewish life for generations. What we didn't realize of course, but know now, is that the final bridge we walked over to get to the ghetto was one of the bridges closed at night to all traffic and guarded to keep the residents of the ghetto in the spot assigned to them. Pretty chilling.

What we didn't see from the spot where we entered the ghetto nuovo was any sign of a synagogue. To get a glimpse into religious life in the ghetto from 1516 on, we turned to the Museo Ebraico, which was a few paces away from where we entered the square. The Museo tells the story of Judaism in Venice in two ways: through a museum containing artifacts which interpret the history of life in the ghetto and through a one hour or so tour of some of the five ancient synagogues in the ghetto nuovo and the ghetto vecchio. On the way to and through these synagogues, you get a sense of what life must have been like and how the people there created community, learning and wealth in the city they were reluctantly permitted to occupy. The tour is why we came.

Our tour took us to three of the five synagogues total in the city: two in the ghetto nuovo and one in the ghetto vecchio. There are a total of three synagogues in the original ghetto and each was built by a different ethnic group. The German Synagogue was founded in 1529 and is the oldest of the three. The French, or Canton, Synagogue was started just two years later. The Italian Synagogue was the last of the three, being built in 1575. We managed to visit both the German and French Synagogues on our tour and each is an exquisite jewel box in its own way. The gold in the German and the gold and red in the French shine despite the lack of light coming through the shuttered windows in the exterior walls. We were not permitted to take photographs in any of the three spaces we visited so you'll have to live with my paltry description or go find what they look like online.

The darkness in these places is deliberate. Shuttering and hiding the synagogues was smart when the entirety of the city you lived in hated you for no good reason other than you practiced religion differently. While we didn't know it when we entered the main square of the ghetto nuovo, we could actually see all three synagogues. We just didn't know what to look for or where to look. 

Because space was so tight on the island assigned to the Jews, there was not enough land  to place the synagogues on the ground because the land was needed for housing and their faith forbids living above a synagogue. Therefore they did the only logical thing they could: they built the synagogues as the top floor of their residential buildings. In the photograph at the top of this post, the German Synagogue occupies the fourth floor of the beige colored building just to the right of the red building on the far left. The French Synagogue is tucked into the recess just to the left of the red building with the green canopy in the center of the picture. And the Italian Synagogue is behind the five arched windows in the beige building to the right of the same green canopied building. The French Synagogue is also shown below.

The French Synagogue is the brown building with horizontal wood boards at the top of this photo.

After touring the two older synagogues, we made our way south to the ghetto vecchio, where the Levantine, Spanish and Portuguese Jews settled from their home countries and brought with them more money than most folks in the ghetto nuovo would ever possess  As a result, the two synagogues in this portion of the ghetto, the Levantine Synagogue (founded in 1541) and the Spanish Synagogue (founded in 1584) are larger and more luxuriously appointed. These people had money and felt it was important to spend it on their houses of worship.

The two synagogues in the ghetto vecchio are the only ones used for worship today. The Jewish community is so small that there is no need for multiple temples to operate so they just use the two largest. The Spanish synagogue is open in the summer and the Levantine in the winter. The tour run by the Museo takes you to whichever one is not in use at the season when you visit. We visited in the early spring and got to see the Levantine. The difference between this space and the two in the ghetto nuovo is striking. The German and French Synagogues look like they stretched every ducat; the spaces are rich but restrained. There is no such restraint in the Levantine; there's obviously been some money spent here. It doesn't even sit above any of the former residences.

On the way to the last two synagogues, we passed a number of what can only be referred to as high rise buildings. While not especially tall, the number of floors packed in to each building is astounding. What might be a four or five story building elsewhere in Venice turns into a seven story building in the ghetto. This construction speaks to the lack of space available to fit an enormous number of people and to the willingness of the Jewish community to take care of its people and make sure everyone was housed, even if it meant a little sacrifice.

Finally and extremely unfortunately, no discussion of Jewish history in Europe is complete without a mention of the Holocaust. The increase in freedom for the Jewish people in Venice as a result of Napoleon Bonaparte's conquest was short lived compared to their centuries of confinement. In the 1940s, Hitler and the Nazis were determined not to segregate the Jews but to exterminate them. Germany's occupation of Venice began in 1943 and deportations to Auschwitz followed in three waves. The last two deportations were the residents of the Jewish elderly home and the hospital which is just sickening. The names of all those deported and sent to death are in a memorial on the north wall of the main square of the ghetto nuovo. It all seems so pointless.

It may strike you as odd that I continue to visit sites which are less than uplifting on vacation. Two years ago, I spent a day at Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany and came across a story similar but ultimately way worse in its inhumanity than I found in the Venetian ghetto. I visit these sites not because they are fun but because I think it's important that we support and maintain the memory of what happened so that maybe, just maybe something quite like this never happens again. I am sure this is not the last unpleasant place I will visit on a vacation in my life. I think it is worth being a little uncomfortable to preserve these kind of memories.