SESSION 7
Financing Consumption: The Jews of Venice Primary Source Readings “'Ebrei Tedeschi': The Germanic and Italian Jews.” and “Levantine Jews and the Ghetto Vecchio, 1541.” In Venice a Documentary History 1450-1630, edited by David Chambers and Brian Pullan, 338-344. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
Secondary Source Readings Calabi, Donatalla. “The City of the Jews.” In The Jews of Early Modern Venice, edited by Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid, 31-52. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Ravid, Benjamin. “The Venetian Government and the Jews.” In The Jews of Early Modern Venice, edited by Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid, 3-30. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Curatola, Giovanni. “Venice’s Textile and Carpet Trade: The Role of Jewish Merchants.” In Venice and the Islamic World 828-1797, edited by Stefano Carboni, 204-211. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2007.
Further Readings The origins of the Jewish community in Venice is much contested, especially whether or not they ever lived on the island of the Giudecca. For a discussion of this consult: Ravid, Benjamin. “The Jewish Mercantile Settlement of Twelfth and Thirteenth Century Venice: Reality of Conjecture?” AJS Review 2 (1977): 201-225. 775
Arbel, Benjamin. “Jews in International Trade: The Emergence of theLevantines and Ponentines.” In The Jews of Early Modern Venice, edited by Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid, 73-96. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Ravid, Benjamin. “The Legal Status of Jews in Venice to 1509.” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 54 (1987): 169-202. Finlay, Robert. “The Foundations of the Ghetto: Venice, the Jews and the War of the League of Cambrai.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 126.2 (1982). Botticini, Maristella. “A Tale of 'Benevolent' Governments: Private Credit Markets, Public Finance, and the Role of Jewish Lenders in Medieval and Renaissance Italy.” The Journal of Economic History 60.1 (2000): 164-189. Berek, Peter. “The Jew as Renaissance Man.” Renaissance Quarterly 51.5 (1998): 128-162. Katz, Dana. The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Calimani, Riccardo. The Ghetto of Venice: A History. M. Evans and Co., 1987. Translated by Katherine Silberblatt Wolfthal. Ravid, Benjamin. “From Geographical Reality to Historiographical Symbol: The Odyssey of the Word Ghetto.” In Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, edited by David Ruderman, 373-85. New York 1992. Sennett, Richard. “Fear of Touching: The Jewish Ghetto in Renaissance Venice.” In Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, edited by R. Sennett. Norton, 1996. Bland, Kalman. The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual. Princeton University Press, 2001 (especially Chapter 7: “The Power and Regulation of Images in Late Medieval Jewish Society.”)
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READING 1
Jewish Communities in Venice The ‘Geto at San Hieronimo’, 1516 From a Senate decree of 29 March 1516 (Ravid 1987b, pp. 248-50). Several laws of the Senate and Great Council have prescribed that Jews shall not be permitted to stay in Venice save for a total of fifteen days in any one year. Other godly and necessary ordinances have been issued for the purpose of frustrating the treachery of the Jews, and since these measures are well known to everyone it is pointless to recall them. However, given the urgent needs of the present times, the said Jews have been permitted to come and live in Venice, and the main purpose of this concession was to preserve the property of Christians which was in their hands. But no godfearing subject of our state would have wished them, after their arrival, to disperse throughout the city, sharing houses with Christians and going wherever they choose by day and night, perpetrating all those misdemeanours and detestable and abominable acts which are generally known and shameful to describe, with grave offence to the Majesty of God and uncommon notoriety on the part of this well-ordered Republic. Since it is most necessary to take appropriate and effective action, Be it determined that, to prevent such grave disorders and unseemly occurrences, the following measures shall be adopted, i.e. that all the Jews who are at present living in different parishes within our city, and all others who may come here, until the law is changed as the times may demand and as shall be deemed expedient, shall be obliged to go at once to dwell together in the houses in the court within the Geto at San Hieronimo, where there is plenty of room for them to live. That they may obey this order, and not evade it, arrangements shall be made for the immediate evacuation of all these houses, and the Jews must pay a rent which will be higher by one third than that received at present by the landlords of the aforesaid houses. The Jews may not keep an inn in any part of the city, save in the 777
Geto. That the landlords may the more readily grant them the houses, be it resolved that they are not to pay tenths on the increment of one third added to the rents for such time as the Jews are occupying these houses. To prevent the Jews from going about all night, provoking the greatest discontent and the deepest displeasure on the part of Jesus Christ, be it determined that, on the side towards the old Geto, where there is a little bridge, and likewise on the other side of the bridge, two doors shall be made, one for each of these two places. These doors must be opened in the morning at the sound of the marangona, and in the evening they shall be shut at the twenty- fourth hour [sunset] by four Christian guards, who shall be appointed for this purpose and paid by the Jews, at whatever rate shall seem appropriate to the Collegio. Furthermore, two high walls shall be built to close off the other two sides, which rise above the canals, and all the quays attached to the said houses shall be walled in. These guards shall be obliged to live in the place, day and night, alone and without their families, in order to keep a close watch on it, with such orders as may be issued by the Collegio. Furthermore, the Collegio must assign two boats to patrol around the place by day and by night, and they too shall be paid for by the money of the Jews. All orders, however, shall be balloted by the Collegio, and those that obtain more than half the votes shall have as much force and permanence as if this Council had determined upon them. If by chance any Jew is found by officials or public servants outside the Geto after the hours specified above, they shall be bound to arrest him at once for his disobedience.
Money-Lending and the Second-Hand Trade, 1624 From the condotta or agreement with the Germanic Jews (Ebrei Tedeschi) authorized by the Senate on 16 November 1624 (Ravid 1978, pp. 106-23). 2. For the greater convenience of the poor, the Jews shall be bound to provide them with loans of 3 ducats or less on each pawn ticket, upon interest of 1 bagattino per lira per month10 and no more. The three bankers who are at 778
present serving the poor must until the end of December next continue to do so on the same terms as they have had in the past from the corporation [Universita] of the Jews, so that within that time this corporation can either make a further agreement with the same banks or else provide three others equipped to meet this need. These must, by the end of October next, or by such earlier time as they can be ready, begin to serve and lend to the poor in the manner described above, and as laid down in the last contract [condotta]. The leases of the premises on which the banks store their pledges shall be continued, and the bankers shall share between them the rents which are due to the landlords of these properties. Let it be clear that the Jews are not obliged to lend upon gold, silver, pearls, jewels, tapestries and silken cloths, with the exception of bracelets, silver plates, gold rings, and other rings set with false stones or no stones at all, on which they must provide loans, and they may not refuse, excuse themselves or delay making these loans on any account in dealing with any person whatsoever, on pain of a fine of 20 ducats for every time they fail. This fine must be exacted from them in full by the Sopraconsoli, and one half of it shall go to the accuser, who shall be kept secret, and the other half to the magistracy which enforces this decree. The Jews are not to issue more than one ticket upon any one pledge. . . . 12. The Jews may engage in the second-hand trade, but they may not sell new materials of any kind, either by piece or by length, nor may they make or cause others to make clothing or other goods of new cloth or other new material. Should they break this rule and the report be proved, they shall forfeit the material and pay 50 ducats for each offence, of which sum one half shall go to the accuser, who shall be kept secret, and the other half to the office of the Sopraconsoli, which shall be charged with the enforcement of this law. They may not work as furriers, nor may they keep, sell or work upon any kind of new hides, but only keep things which pertain to the second-hand trade. They may, however, engage in the manufacture of veils and coifs. Let it be clear that coats and sleeves and other articles of chain mail are not to be regarded as second hand goods, upon pain of forfeiting these articles and paying a fine of 50 ducats for every infraction of this rule. In accordance with the agreement reached between the Jews and the Craft of the Tailors of Venice before the Savii of the Collegio in the last contract, 779
no Jew may work as a tailor for himself or for others, nor may he cut or stitch even in the Ghetto on pain of a fine of 50 ducats for each occasion on which he is found working, and of forfeiture of the material. This penalty shall apply both to the Jew who does the cutting and to anyone who gives him sewing or other work to do. No Jew may import to this city any new clothing of any kind, on pain of a fine of 100 ducats and forfeiture of any material discovered. He may not give tailor’s work, either in the Ghetto or outside it, to anyone who is not a qualified master of the Craft of the Tailors, whether male or female, on pain of a fine of 50 ducats for each offence, the same sum to be paid by any unqualified person who accepts work.
Notes 1. Since there were 12 bagattini to the soldo and 20 soldi to the lira, the rate of interest was equivalent to 5 per cent per annum. It had remained at this level since the condoua of 1573.
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READING 2
Donatella Calabi The “City of Jews” The Settlement Structure In his late-seventeenth-century etching of Venice, Giovanni Merlo offers one of the few premodern Venetian panoramas in which the Jewish ghetto is both perfectly identifiable and indicated by name. Merlo’s rendition is certainly rather sketchy, but it still gives a good impression of the typology of the Ghetto Nuovo, the area in which the Jews first settled in the city and which in time they adapted to their needs. Merlo drew this space as a central square ringed by a homogeneous portico —not exactly as it existed, for the buildings were never so uniform, but in any case he conveyed a correct sense of how construction in this part of the ghetto was divided between the various levels of human habitation above and the numerous shops and communal meeting places in the covered and open areas below. This is not a literally correct depiction of how the Jews, starting in 1516, converted the buildings and spaces that were rented to them as they gradually adapted the place in which they were required to live to their own exigencies. The documentary evidence does not support any such formal unity, but it does correctly portray the allocation of the space formed by the integration around the central square (campo) of the shops, stalls, storerooms, and festive and even sacred activities (although initially these were banned). This organizing principle of settlement —the ring of buildings rising high around an almost circular, relatively homogeneous space with three wells — appears to have become identified very early as a sort of model for collective Jewish identity, and it was cited elsewhere (in Padua in 1603, in Modena in 1638) as the desirable format to use in constituting a ghetto.1 Basic outline aside, the ghetto of Merlo’s day had changed a good deal from the original settlement of the early 1500s. For one thing, the ghetto fabric was much 781
denser than it had been in the preceding century: the 199 Jewish dwelling units that had been assessed for taxation in 1582 had by 1661 grown to a total of 618 units, as a consequence of a remarkable increase in both new buildings and oneroom accommodations, and thanks to the expansion of the original Ghetto Nuovo to include first the Ghetto Vecchio and then the Ghetto Nuovissimo. Initial construction work must have been carried out using the cheapest materials and the poorest-quality finishings possible, since later on restorations became an almost daily necessity. An example comes from a 1608 agreement, between the Christian proprietor Camilla Minotto and some Jews, to have new houses built at the edge of the ghetto in a peripheral area adjoining the rio del Cannaregio. According to the agreement, the new buildings, to be built by the inhabitants of the ghetto for their families and heirs, were to replace some old houses of the Minotto family that had been declared “collapsing” (ruinose) by the state. As it happened, the project was successfully opposed by the parish priest of the nearby church of Saint Geremia, who asserted that the new buildings would have protruded beyond the permitted boundaries of the ghetto, but it is still symptomatic of the state of decay of the area, as well as of the inherent dynamic of both investment in the area and interactions between Christian landlords and Jewish tenants.2 By 1632 even the wooden drawbridges connecting the ghettos to the outside were declared unsafe, and carpenters were asked to tender bids for their total reconstruction.3 Once installed in the ghetto, the Jews increased the number of entries and quays that opened all around the outer perimeter of the enclosure, with or without the permission of the Council of Ten. These made many of the ghetto’s public and private spaces accessible by boat or from the surrounding alleys, as can be seen in the seventeenth-century etchings.4 The buildings of the Ghetto Nuovo, facing out onto the campo and backing onto the surrounding canal, were in good part “rebuilt” by their tenants, who increased the number of floors and the available habitable area without, however, modifying the basic shape of the campo. A great number of them also obtained permits from the Piovego (what one might call Venice’s Zoning Board) to construct rooftop terraces. Known as altane and overlooking the canals or the campo, these platforms came in every possible dimension, ranging from less than one square meter to as large as twelve square 782
meters.5 On the outer, canal side, tenants also opened up a good many windows and balconies low down by the water. Since these gave ample opportunity for Jews to violate the enclosure that was an essential premise of the ghetto, some thought was given to having them closed off with iron bars, but eventually this idea was discarded for health reasons. This sort of “artful craft” with which the Jews set out to modify the space allocated to them often provoked notable inconveniences and disorder, but ultimately it allowed them to perform with greater dignity the economic activities for which they had been invited to settle in Venice. The settlement structure of the ghetto was also more complex than Merlo’s concise image suggests. To begin with, after 1541 there were two ghettos — the Ghetto Nuovo and the Ghetto Vecchio — contiguous but separated by a bridge and, above all, by their distinct usages, customs, and services. This diversity is reflected in good measure in how the buildings of each ghetto relate to their respective communal space. The Ghetto Vecchio, conceded to Jewish merchants twenty-five years after the Ghetto Nuovo as an enlargement of the first enclosure, was not a self-enclosed space in the manner of its predecessor but was rather organized along an avenue that functioned to carry one toward the outside world that is, toward the water and pedestrian byways of the Cannaregio canal. This was, moreover, an area completely different from the Ghetto Nuovo in terms of its density of construction. Initially neglected and relatively well provided with open spaces - gardens, little public squares, courtyards, light shafts around buildings — the Ghetto Vecchio was gradually filled in, in a way that underscored the contrasts between the monumentality of its synagogues and the narrowness of its side streets.6 The ways m which the residents tried to solve their problems of space were likewise not always the same in the Ghetto Nuovo as in the Ghetto Vecchio. In the Ghetto Nuovo the preferred method was to build higher and to subdivide apartments, since the built-up area around the campo had fairly set dimensions, thus making it more difficult to modify. By contrast, in the Ghetto Vecchio the urban texture was less fixed and thus allowed for the transformation of exterior as well as interior space. Growth here was made possible by subdividing and remodeling interiors to create additional floors, each with lower ceilings, and by 783
invading neighboring buildings. It was particularly common, however, to expand by sacrificing the available empty, external spaces, taking over the less defined thoroughfares or courtyards that had previously been overlooked, or by constructing overhangs to occupy the open air. The tendency of Jews in these years to carry out all manner of internal subdivisions and exterior attachments without bothering to ask permission of the primary owners is amply attested to by the protests of the latter, who requested that the state at least grant them rent hikes in buildings that had been significantly enlarged or otherwise modified. This was a highly dynamic housing situation, in which the Jewish community asserted on various occasions to the Giudici del Proprio, to the Quarantia Civile, or to the Senate that the agreements reached with Jewish tenants were different from those made with other renters in the city, because leases in the ghetto provided that tenants were responsible for the upkeep of the houses-which meant assuming responsibility for rebuilding walls or roofs that threatened to collapse as well as paying the rent even when the space was unoccupied. It was for this very reason that the Jews sought to have such properties included under the judicial rubric of casacà o inviamento, meaning that they could be given as dowries, willed, or sold by the tenants themselves. To modify this system now, they lamented in grieving and dramatic petitions, would cause the “extermination of poor widows and children.”7 By the 1630s every square meter of terrain that had once been still open was finally filled in. Caiman Belgrado, for example, built and rented out seven houses in the garden and orchard of the property he had “acquired” in 1578 from Camilla Minotto. The grandchildren of Daniel Rodriga, famed for his proposal to set up the scala (port) of Spalato in the 1580s, were still living in another house of Minotto’s that Daniel had rented thirty years earlier. When they set about enlarging it in 1604, they were called onto the carpet and ordered to stick to the lease agreement, or istrumento, that their grandfather had originally signed. Daniel Rodriga’s heirs were evidently stopped in time, but with the Jew Jacob Saracin, the officials of the Cattaver arrived too late, for he had already burrowed a hole through the attic wall of his house, to the detriment of the neighbors; the best they could do was to order him to close it off immediately— “by tomorrow,” 784
they said. The madonna Bella Todesca may have done something similar, for the Cattaver demanded that she “voluntarily” vacate the house she was occupying; moreover, it was expected that she would need up to a year and a half to return it to the same state in which she had found it, before giving it back to its primary leaser, the doctor Taula.8 These everyday arguments, little stories of the interplay between ordinary needs and the invasion of the rights of others, generally ended up sanctioned by the state. This is demonstrated by the many “regular” sales registered by the Inquisitori degli Ebrei of “improvements” carried out in local houses and shops, or by other acts that underscore the judicial separation between land and building. For example, the building next to the bridge of the Agudi, built on Minotto land, turned out in 1613 to have actually been rebuilt by its residents: increased to three floors, all walled in, it now had a narrow covered courtyard, a communal staircase, a well, a cellar, and a room for firewood storage. By 1648 the area near the oven, with access from a sottoportico that led to the garden, had become a large dwelling, as the tenant there was recorded as having acquired, in more hebreorum (“in the Jewish custom,” i.e., with the possibility to “hold, enjoy, possess, exploit, rent out, evict, barter, give up, sell, entail, alienate, make and dispose of as he wishes and likes, up to the public thoroughfares”), its four shops on the mezzanine level, a storeroom on the next floor, and four rooms with a porch, kitchen, and pantry on the floor above; there was even the customary altana situated over the little courtyard. Just a few years later, over by the gate of San Girolamo, Moisè Coen Spilimbergo willed to his daughter the house he himself had built, together with the right to enjoy it or rent it out and to pass it on to her heirs; he imposed on her only his predecessors’ existing obligation to pay twenty-four ducats a year for the land.’ The result of such practices was a warren of small - sometimes very small - apartments mixed with larger ones in a maze of passageways and access corridors that were occasionally held separately and themselves rented out autonomously. It all made for an incredibly fragmented and diverse fabric of habitation, even inside a single property unit with boundaries not clearly defined and with sporadic protrusions, entrances,’ stairs, passageways, and facilities held in common with neighboring units. 785
This splintering and densifying of the ghetto’s human population was not a continuous process. Tax returns of 16Ó1, in which some dwellings were declared “empty,” make it clear that even thirty years after the plague had struck e city m 1630-31, its effects were still reverberating in die ghetto.10 During the catastrophe itself a distraught Leon Modena noted that the epidemic which “has by now spread everywhere,” had provoked a great panic in the various congregations, causing many, especially the Sephardim, to flee the city for the Levant or for Verona, as “above me, on every side, on the right and on the left, people are sickening and dying.” Modena’s account of the tragedy is especially precise and well documented. He notes; that during the plague’s second year, between March and June 1631, the scourge erupted even worse than before throughout the city, but not m the two ghettos, where in fact no one sickened or died. The Gentiles were stunned by such a miracle, he wrote, believing that God had wanted “to distinguish between [the Christian] zone and that of Israel. But by summer the plague had come back to both ghettos, and until the epidemic finally waned for good in November 1631, the Jews began dying again - as eloquently attested by their commemorative stone in the Jewish cemetery on the Lido, which carries the simple inscription “1631 Hebrei” - even if the Jewish death rate never reached the levels recorded in the rest of the city.11 For Venetian Jews, as international traders, the crisis was economic as well as demographic. For around a year Jewish merchants were forbidden to buy or sell, or to pledge themselves to agreements of exchange. Moreover, the government of Venice still demanded that they pay the usual tax of 120,000 ducats, even though it had impounded 750 large bales of Jewish merchandise, goods of enormous value suspected of carrying the infection, and sent them all to the lazaret; while sequestered, these goods were subsequently either destroyed or somehow lost. The years between 1667 and 1720 were a time of especially rapid exchange of housing between tenants in the ghetto, although tire rate varied between areas.12 Particularly m the Ghetto Vecchio, during the intense time of transforming dwellings and facilities linked to the rebuilding of the two synagogues there, this rapid change reached a dizzying pace. The dealings involved dwelling that were sublet or held for the use of the lessor. Occasionally they concerned only sections, 786
presumably very tiny, of an apartment; in some cases the same unit might be transferred as many as three times over the course of just fifteen years.13 The Jews who were engaged in these transactions might be the lessors of an acquired dwelling and simultaneously have the rights over its use, for which they also paid rent to the Christian owner. Such “acquisitions” might represent an inheritance, a leasehold, a dowry assigned through the Giudici del Proprio, or part of a marriage contract of the Christian owners themselves. Thanks to a patrimony’s often extreme fragmentation and diversity, these properties might guarantee an income from the rent that could range from seven to fifteen or up to as high as a hundred ducats annually for houses situated in the Ghetto Nuovo.14 It was a real estate patrimony that continually passed from hand to hand: “a house above the bridge,” “a house under the roof,” “a dwelling attached to a shop,” “a small place on the ground floor,” “a single room with two windows,” or even “a little room cut in half with boards, in which there is a balcony.” But along with these spaces evidently “clipped out” of the interior of a building there were also a good number of finer dwellings, of die sort that consisted of a portico, two bedrooms, an entryway (in which the tenant pursued his craft), a kitchen with a balcony, and another room; such apartments could reach dimensions typical of those found elsewhere in the city, even if organized on two floors, one on top of the other. With the passing of the plague, Venice’s Jewish population soon began increasing again, but it was the foundation of the Ghetto Nuovissimo, an expansion zone intended to attract another wave of Jewish migration to the city, that allowed the community to reattain its former levels of between twenty-five hundred and three thousand individuals.15 For at least thirty years there had been strong pressure to invade the space adjacent to the Ghetto Nuovo, in particular the houses of the Malipiero family or those belonging to Giacomo de Ludovici, which lay beyond the boundary canal and could be absorbed into the ghetto without too much effort.16 This was also an attractive option for the Venetian state, which was well aware that any expansion of space designated for Jews would not only alleviate any existing overcrowding but also encourage more Jews to move to Venice — either way increasing the city’s tax revenues. 787
It was not until 1633, however, that practical steps were taken to acquire these buildings, with the Senate ordering the Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia, or Board of Trade, to examine the possible sites, draw up a survey, deal with property owners, decide on the form and arrangement of twenty new houses, and, finally, build a bridge to connect the area with the Ghetto Nuovo so that the twenty expected families could be “locked up and incorporated” within the existing enclosure.17 To this end, Marco da Brolo was told that he had to give up a passageway inside his buildings on the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo, leading to where the bridge would be; in exchange, he received five hundred ducats. Those responsible for the tunnel had to guarantee the upkeep of da Brolo’s buildings, according to the specifications of inspectors, with the expenses for planning and building to be met by the Jews. The passageway, a tunnel three meters tall, roofed over with ornate beams to support the dwellings overhead, was to be somewhat less than three meters wide at the end toward the Ghetto Nuovo and four meters wide at the end attached to the bridge. This was the only bridge and tunnel built to connect the two ghettos, in part because of the expense such construction caused by sacrificing existing shops — in this case one that looked out onto the campo and another facing the canal, along with some butchers’ stalls that also had to be moved.18 Once the planned “cloistering” had been accomplished and the state’s master of works (pioto al sale) had approved the finished construction, the Mercanzia authorized the heads of the Levantine and Ponentine communities to encourage the arrival of people “of good reputation” by offering them “large and roomy” houses. Clearly the state’s (at least professed) intention had thus been not to lighten the high density of dwelling space in the existing ghettos by offering this space to local Jews but rather to set up accommodations that would attract other, foreign Jews to Venice, with attendant gains for both the public tax rolls and private investment. To drive this point home, the government absolutely forbade anyone to move from the original ghettos to the Ghetto Nuovissimo, for at least the first three years.19 But once again the rhythms of life and population flows in the ghettos were faster and more insistent than anyone had expected or than physical structures could control. Even before the bridge was built, there were reports that the houses and the campiello (small square) of the Ghetto Nuovissimo that faced 788
out onto the canal were being rented out to local Jews. This sort of partial seepage between the various ghettos is also confirmed by existing figures on the population densities in adjoining areas.20 According to the tax census, by 1661 the number of dwellings in the Ghetto Nuovissimo had already increased from twenty to twenty-seven; by 1740 the number had grown still more, to over fifty. It appears that the houses acquired various facilities bit by bit: in 1661, nineteen of them had their own well, while three had an altana, or a balcony. The census also indicates the presence of twenty storerooms (magazzini), not always linked to a specific residence but in any case distinct from attic storage space. By the 1760s a confraternity had been established in the area, with rooms set aside for a school and for storing firefighting equipment, keeping buckets and tubs, and accommodating a carpenter’s shop. The variety of the rentals to be found in this little group of buildings — three houses went for charity, “for the love of God,” while others brought in a healthy one hundred ducats a year — together with the diversity of their dimensions and character, provides a good indication of the extent to which they were assimilated into the urban periphery of which they made a part.21 Although the three ghettos were intended for different ethnic groups of Jewish settlers, there was always a certain amount of mixing between them. A glimpse of this comes up in the trial of a Jew named Israel Tedesco, accused in 1699 of having demolished a building in the Ghetto Nuovissimo and erecting two new houses in its place, thereby enlarging the boundaries of the enclosure without permission. A priest of the neighboring parish of San Marcuola who was called to testify observed not only that he often met members of the Jewish community on his way to visit his parishioners but that in the houses illegally built by Israel Tedesco there were to be found both Christians and Jews of many different ethnic origins all living on the various floors — tenants who, moreover, all seemed to have been making constant, if slight, modifications to their dwellings: painting the walls, opening up or closing off windows, adding new iron grilles, and so forth.22
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Services Facilities By the end of the seventeenth century all three ghettos had a predominantly residential character, but each had its own facilities, depending for the most part on the various special prerogatives that had been won by local inhabitants.23 Characteristic of the entire area was its high population density. In just its first twenty years the population of the Ghetto Nuovo increased by 2 5 percent; by 1 589, when the Senate was debating the charter of the Ponentine Jews, the area counted about sixteen hundred inhabitants. Over the next generation or so population in the ghettos grew much more rapidly than that elsewhere in the city, reaching 2,414 individuals in 1642, despite the loss of 454 residents during the plague of 1630-31. By 1654, now consisting of all three ghettos, the area’s population had nearly doubled again, to as many as 4,870 individuals, according to some estimates. This represented around 3 percent of all the inhabitants of Venice, living crammed together in a density two to four times higher than the rest of the city.24 By the mid-sixteenth century this overcrowding was already becoming critical, as indicated by the frequency with which residents were interfering with and abusing each other and by an often unacceptable level of bad hygiene. It was said that ‘eight or ten and sometimes many more people, staying in only a single narrow place and with great stink,” would occupy the minute lodgings into which the buildings situated around the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo had bit by bit been subdivided. Ever more frequently Jewish tenants, driven by their own quest for income, would rent to fellow Jews these “little spaces” (loghetti) that were completely lacking in such necessities as fireplace or toilet, creating a serious situation in terms of overcrowding and disease. If anything, complaints about “discomfort” and “suffering” were even more common in the Ghetto Vecchio, where the documentation collected by the health inspectors reveals absolutely unheard-of levels of misery. It was ironic that these Jewish merchants, who were so necessary to the Venetian economy and by now so connected to the city, had to live in such tiny dwellings, in very tall buildings that were without separate storerooms for their merchandise and that possessed neither the space nor the minimum services necessary for their families. 790
Since they were so overcrowded, it was all the more vital to keep the ghettos clean, and a number of proposals and debates dealt with this problem. There was, for example, tire plan for garbage collection put forth by a certain Iseppo Paohni, an expert from Belluno who proposed digging a garbage pit in an open spot within the ghetto, perhaps along one side of the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo, and installing four caissons or a number of openings into which the Jews could dump tire enormous quantity of garbage they created. This rudimentary system of urban hygiene, proposed by Paolini in 1609, came just at the time when the Cattaveri were trying to figure out a way to entice the Tedeschi Jews back to this area, which had been assigned to them but which they had left, covertly invading the houses of others. As a technician, Paolini certainly understood what the politicians must have also been well aware of: that in such an era of epidemics and contagion, a single district that was so overcrowded could pose a serious danger to the city as a whole.25 Despite its often rather desperate state, by the 1630s, having reached its greatest size, the Venetian ghetto was clearly no longer just a refugee shelter for a minority group, as it had been in the first decades of the 1500s. Rather, it had evolved into an urban environment in which daily life was a rich tapestry woven from points of primary exchange and places of work. There was a bakery for bread and Passover matzo in each of the two original ghettos; there were also numerous shops for greens and fruit, for wine, meat, cheese, pasta. New food shops were continually being opened, like the one we find in 1617 obtaining a license for the sale of oil and other traditional foods. Some vendors sold oil of different sorts that were appropriate for the Germans and for the Levantines; others offered tobacco or wax candles. There were also the shops and stalls of a variety of artisans who provided services, including a barber, hairdresser, clothes mender, tailor, and wood carver, as well as a bookseller, who perhaps had an attached printing house and a workshop for binding. There was a nurse who looked after the local Jewish children, a vendor of alchemical supplies, and an inn for foreign Jews. Scattered among these were also sundry storerooms holding lumber, majolica, and coffins for the dead.26
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The retail marketing system of the ghettos was enriched by this very fragmentation, and we can detect how tightly linked consumers became with their particular suppliers of primary goods and services, if only to keep distances between home and shop down to a minimum. In the Ghetto Vecchio the local butchers, greengrocers, fruit sellers, and wine dealers had nothing to do with their opposite numbers in the Ghetto Nuovo, not only discouraging Christian outsiders from shopping there but even preferring that the Tedeschi Jews from across the canal keep their distance. Some shops — like the one located in the Querini houses — were supposedly allowed to sell their bread, wine, fruit, and vegetables senza pregiudizi (i.e., without interference on the part of Jewish neighbors of different ethnic background), but because there were so many conflicts and disturbances taking place between the two ghettos, the owners complained that “it was not even safe to stay at home.”27 The upkeep of the ghetto area was for the most part taken care of by the Jewish community, which already had in place such infrastructural activities as street lighting and cleaning, a ferry service, a system for periodically dredging the canals, and wells for water.28 For those “unfortunate ones” who did not have any source of water in their houses, a certain number of water carriers were licensed to sell water taken from private wells either inside or outside the ghetto. This system apparently functioned smoothly enough until it was decided that the habit of haggling over the price of each bucket was making the water carriers too competitive with the Jewish community, which derived its own earnings from the use of the ghettos’ four public wells. Eventually the confraternity of the Talmud Torah, which had the concession over the four wells, managed to have severe restrictions imposed on water carriers’ use of private wells, but such action only encouraged people to equip their houses and little courtyards with their own wells. 29 Beyond this, the proper administration of internal matters fell to the government of the Jewish community (Università degli Ebrei), which was properly charged with taking care of taxation, the collection of contributions, the equitable distribution of debts, and keeping an eye out for corruption. The simple administration of internal justice presupposed that the community would also 792
provide supplementary organization for local public life. As a consequence, the community also came to be responsible for the more customary sorts of urban services, such as the night watch; lighting the public streets and squares and the synagogues; providing water; regulating the condition of the animals used for ritual slaughter; and getting the streets swept by a “ghetto cleaner,� a scopa-ghetti, whom the community appointed and paid for the job.30 Over time the numbers and types of activities that Jews were authorized to carry out beyond the ghettos, in the city as a whole, were expanded. The traditional service that they continued to provide to Venice took the form of their loan banks located in the Ghetto Nuovo, and the clerk assigned to the work went to the banks early in the morning and stayed until the evening to watch over the interests of the Christian borrowers. Meanwhile, Jewish commerce m used goods and their renting of furniture, carpets, and decorations for special occasions became steadily more necessary for those Venetian magistracies that were involved in putting on festivities and celebrations. This increasing importance can be traced over the course of the seventeenth century in Senate edicts concerning the decorations for Fat Thursday, the festivities for important state guests, and the outfitting of the ornate ducal barge, the Bucintoro, for all of which the Jews were required to provide decorations under the provisions of their charter. As the Jewish shops and warehouses dedicated to these activities steadily grew in number, even outside the confines of the ghettos, the state took an increasing interest in how they were managed, insisting on holding inspections °f the ghetto shops and attics where Christians might be employed by Jewish artisans to work on fur, cloth, or carpets. Feeling their growing importance in Venetian society, these Jewish dealers in secondhand goods, or strazzaruoli,, repeatedly attempted to establish themselves as a guild, a process that would have allowed them, like other guildsmen, to determine the quality and nature of the products m which they dealt.31 For the most part, the loan banks and such activities as dealing in secondhand goods were considered particularly Jewish. Not to be found in other parts of the city, commerce of this sort ended up functionally characterizing the area of the ghettos, even if, in matters such as festival decorations, it in fact spread well
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beyond the confines of the Jewish district to create an entire web of interdependent points.
Schooling and Religious Culture As the commercial and residential worlds of the ghetto grew, so too was there a flourishing of schools, confraternities, and synagogues, along with various hospices set up for both Levantine and Tedeschi Jews. Education in the ghettos was established on all levels. Teachers like the rabbi Leon Modena might go, dressed in the robes of a tutor, to the houses of wealthier Jews to instruct their children. Other times, teachers might collect twenty or so youths together in an apartment in the Ghetto Vecchio, where they would explain the Bible and the sacred texts to them.32 For poorer students, whether boys or girls, the community might also make available rooms in which teachers could give lessons. By the seventeenth century, moreover, a host of communitarian and charitable associations had been established in connection with the synagogues, for the purpose of reading the sacred book, for prayers, or for study and comment on the Torah. These soon became reference points for civil as much as religious life, redoubts for defining ethnic identity and behavior.33 Local Jews adopted the Venetian term scola (now scuola) to refer to both their main synagogues and to those smaller houses of worship that had been founded by individuals. In Christian Venice this term — especially when applied to the city’s six Scuole Grandi, but also in reference to some of the Scuole Piccole, or “little schools” —indicated religious-based charitable institutions designed to carry out programs of education, self-help, control, and protection of certain categories of citizens. In all such senses the Jewish scuole, although more specifically houses of worship, were remarkably similar to the city’s Christian scuole. Like them, they were founded on a set of regulations that had to be periodically reviewed and updated. They were administered by representatives who were elected from the community of members and were given a broad range of both fiscal and moral authority: providing mutual aid through clothing the poor, treating the sick, burying the dead, ransoming captives, securing the release of prisoners, and arranging marriages for girls. They were also expected to assist absent co794
religionists among the Tedeschi and the Ponentines as well as ensure maritime trade. Carrying out all these duties on behalf of their scuole, along with the administrative responsibilities for distributing offices or secondary duties and preparing feasts, ceremonies, and spectacles, these men clearly had a significant role in organizing the social life of the ghetto. The Jewish scuole were able to do all this because, like their Christian analogues, they possessed real property, in the form of houses, warehouses, and shops that generated the rental income that gave them the capital they needed. Other properties were equally important, for providing the scuole space in the crowded environment of the ghettos so that they could carry out the many primary services they were expected to provide — educating children, creating a home for poor Tedeschi Jews or a hostel for visiting Levantines, running a hospice for unmarried girls, a hospital, or an oratorio. They were also able to place a certain amount of necessary meeting space at the disposal of their members-the heads of the community, women, the scribes of die loan banks, and so forth.34 Considering both the many different ethnic backgrounds of the Jews who were packed in there and the multiple uses to which such space could be put, it is hardly surprising to find that even in such a restricted area as the ghetto, there were a great many places of worship. Leon Modena explained that “of these Synagogues, or Scuole, there are one, two, six or more in the City, according to the number of Jews living in this place, as one can well understand, and according to the diversity of the Levantine, Tedeschi, and Italian ‘nations,’ because in their religious services they are more than in any other thing different among each other, and everyone wants to conduct them in his own way.” This said* however, there was clearly not complete separation between the many houses of worship, given that even Modena himself, who usually preached to the approval of worshippers in the Scuola Grande Tedesca, was also known to give sermons in the Levantine and Italian synagogues.35 This was an extremely dynamic time in the history of sacred space in the ghettos: studies, preaching, and theological debates all went hand in hand with problems and decisions concerning construction. During the seventeenth century the 795
particularly important building and reconstruction projects that were undertaken to reorder such space in both the Ghetto Vecchio and the Ghetto Nuovo would seem to have been connected to growing efforts at delineating sharper sectarian distinctions. Earliest to establish distinct congregations were the Jews of the Ashkenazic rite, who founded the first synagogue in the city, the Scuola Grande Tedesca, in 1528-29, followed by the Scuola Canton in 1532 and the Scuola Italiana by 1575, at the latest. Near them, around the southeast corner of the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo, there were added sometime after 1638 various rooms intended for teaching, for the confraternity Talmud Torah, and for storing coffins. Meanwhile, along the campo's perimeter were also established at least three “little synagogues”: the Scuola Coanim (first mentioned in 1587), the Scuola Luzzatto (presumably also of sixteenth-century origin), and the Scuola Meshullamim (dating from no later than 1635). These were all built in a similar manner, out of small connected rooms with an intermediate hall (portego), with their entrances on a private staircase shared with neighboring dwellings. Their odd dimensions - the Scuola Luzzatto also lacked the customary lighting—were probably indicative of an origin as private, family temples. While a certain architectural reticence had characterized the facades of the first sixteenth-century synagogues, by the 1600s their internal structures and decorations had certainly been much reworked. In 1609, for example, the Scuola Italiana underwent some major renovations that included restructuring its brickwork, raising the roof, installing a women’s gallery, and opening up a skylight in the ceiling. Between 1657 and 1658, through the acquisition of some adjoining space, the Scuola Canton was also transformed, with the elimination of a staircase, the addition of a “place for the women,” and the general embellishment of the interior, through enlarging and giving the midrash a more regular and geometrical shape, according “to the taste of our brotherhood.” The small Scuola Luzzatto likewise underwent continuous restoration throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century, much of it done by the same builder-architects who were responsible for carrying out work in the Ghetto Nuovissimo. Also founded in the late sixteenth century were the two synagogues of the Ghetto Vecchio, facing each other on opposite sides of the small Campiello del Ghetto 796
Vecchio: the Scuola Ponentina, or Spanish Synagogue, and the Scuola Levantina, of the Levantine community. Initially built on the foundations of Ca’ Minotto, the Synagogue of the Ponentine Nation was enlarged after about 1612, with the acquisition of some available land, the closing of one of die two local wells, and the demolition of some nearby structures. Then the restructuring program underwent a long pause, probably while funds were collected and permissions acquired, and the main part of the work was not finished until around 1657, and many of the finishing touches would not be added until even later in the century. The exterior, with its balanced facade of windows and walls, has only the portal, with its sober dignity, to allude to the formal, almost self- celebratory design of the interior spaces. Opposite the Scuola Ponentina had been, from the beginning of the Ghetto Vecchio, a hospice for traveling Levantine merchants; certainly by 1582 these merchants had also initiated their own synagogue there. Like its neighbor, the Scuola Levantina would have had the midrash on the ground floor, the hall of worship on the floor above, and the women’s gallery above that. By the 1660s these facilities were not only becoming too cramped but were also in danger of collapsing, as indicated by the considerable amount of restoration work that was going on in the area. Finally, in 1680, it was decided to demolish the synagogue altogether, right down to its foundations, and build a new and bigger structure. Work began by 1683 and was probably completed by 1712.36 The resulting structure introduced significant innovations in the Venetian architectural tradition for synagogues. For the first time in the Venetian ghettos — as would soon be the case with the two great synagogues in Amsterdam — a synagogue was designed as an autonomous structure, possessing two facades, one on the campiello and one on the adjoining alley. These facades were given decorative unity through horizontal rows of matched slabs of Istrian marble and vertical columns of large windows - rectangular on the ground floor, arched on the level of worship, and oval on the third floor. The sense this gives of a strange “Venetianness” in design, as Ennio Concina has put it, makes it highly likely that the Levantine merchants had hired for the job someone who was aware of the architectural realities of the city and who knew how to employ design themes 797
present in other Venetian structures. The result was a particularly important example of the confluence between the artistic culture of Venice and that of the Jews, an interesting indication of the extent to which the baroque city and its ghetto had sealed their relationship.37 The lively cultural and religious world of the ghettos, with its tradition of teaching and of publishing sermons, prayers, ethical writings, dedicatory poetry, and commentaries on Hebrew texts, provoked both great interest among and intellectual exchanges with some cultivated Venetian nobles. Those scholars and patricians who were more open to a variegated and cosmopolitan culture like that of the ghetto and those in Christian religious circles who were interested in studying the origins of Christianity were especially attracted to the works of Leon Modena, Menasseh ben Israel, and Simone Luzzatto, author of the renowned Discorso circa il stato de gl’hebrei. Even Enrico Barbaro, a man notoriously careful with his money, was nevertheless willing to give twenty-five scudi to Modena as a token of his appreciation for the books the rabbi had dedicated to him.38
The Ghetto in the Foreign Gaze Crowded and uncomfortable though they were, the three ghettos of Venice were also filled with life. Especially on religious holidays these narrow spaces were filled with activity, and on every side one could find dice games, shows, or a popular rabbi whose public oration everyone wanted to hear. Shops of printers, booksellers, and jewelers, employing both Christian and Jewish workers and often housed in sublet rooms or attics, brought into the ghettos a virtual mob of casual laborers from both faiths — porters, street cleaners, water carriers, attendants of stalls and pitches, wandering vendors, and lackeys of the magistrates, all given the occasion and the pretext to crowd together, elbow to elbow.39 Such cultural and social vivacity helped draw foreigners visiting Venice into the ghetto. Jean-Baptiste Duval, secretary to the French ambassador, went off to the ghetto shortly after his arrival in Venice in 1607 to watch a religious ceremony. He went back a few months later to see a festival, and then another time to witness a circumcision, which he accurately described in his diary. William Bedell, the 798
chaplain of the English ambassador to Venice, a Protestant of Puritan inclinations and friend of Paolo Sarpi, who later became provost of Trinity College Dublin, mentioned in his letters both the sermons he heard on the Holy Scriptures and the conversations he had in 1608 with Venetian Jews on theological matters. Henry Wotton, the ambassador Bedell served, was no less interested in Jewish matters. James Harrington, considered one of die most important English political thinkers of the mid-seventeenth century, was well acquainted with Simone Luzzatto’s references to the government of Venice in his Discorso. Harrington’s contacts with Luzzatto may have been direct ones, in the form of personal meetings during one of the Englishman’s visits to Venice in the late 1630s, or they may have been of a more indirect nature, perhaps through the influence Luzzatto had on the writings of Menassah ben Israel. Whatever the precise nature of such contacts, it is clear that the intellectual activities of the Venetian ghetto could have extraordinary influence on such young foreign visitors, whether they came for motives of work, as part of their self-education during the Grand Tour, or gained the knowledge secondhand, by exposure to the writings of others.40 In 1611 it was another English visitor, Thomas Coryat, who conveyed his impressions of the ghetto. Although Coryat probably exaggerated in estimating the number of residents in the area, he in any case immediately understood that in it existed a community of great diversity in terms of origins and customs. He noted that those born in western countries used a red head-covering while the easterners, from Jerusalem, Alexandria, or Constantinople, wore the turban, as did the Turks. He was above all struck by the importance of the seven major synagogues as community meeting places for men, women, and children. He noted the synagogues’ organization of internal space, strongly illuminated by the enormous quantity of candles that remained lit throughout the ceremonies. He commented both on the varied activities of those who read the sacred texts and the irreverence of those in the congregation, who entered without taking off their hats, kneeling, or making any other act of submission to God. He was struck by the separation during services of men and women, with the women, often extremely beautiful and as richly bejeweled as any English countess, being seated in a gallery expressly reserved for them. His impression of the readings done 799
during the religious services was that they were “sober, distinct, and ordered,” but he also complained that the reading was too loud, as was the recitation of the psalms, which he thought sounded like a noisy and incomprehensible “bleating” of animals. Coryat also gave his readers some secondhand information about the customs of these people who had aroused his curiosity and who he realized were not a marginal presence in Venice. The Jews, he said, did not use images; they were so respectful of their Sabbath that on that day they did not buy or sell or do any other tiling of a secular or profane nature. Coryat was not able to observe a circumcision, but he reported that it was as much a custom relating to health as to religion, carried out on eight-day-old infants “with a stone knife.” Perhaps the most fascinating part of Coryat’s long account, however, was an experience reflective of how two different cultures could clash, in the sort of encounter that the ghetto apparently both permitted and facilitated. Having walked about in die Campo del Ghetto Nuovo for a while, intent on taking in the sights, Coryat happened to meet there a cultured rabbi (perhaps it was Leon Modena?), a man as knowledgeable in Latin as Coryat himself, with whom he fell into a learned discussion on the divinity of Christ. But their pleasant stroll and animated theological discussion soon went sour and degenerated into a virtual brawl when forty or fifty outraged Jews, coming from every direction, violently and loudly accused Coryat of daring to criticize their religion. It was only thanks to the fact that Henry Wotton himself happened to be passing in a gondola under the adjoining bridge of the Ormesini, just at the moment when Coryat was trying to inch away from the encircling and threatening crowd, that he managed to save himself in extremis. Coryat retold what had happened to him with a mixture of astonishment and irritation, depicting in lively tones his fascination with this alien culture, his interest in the life of this particular district, and his attraction to the opportunity for a learned debate in which passersby might happen to join. In fact, in his narrative he clearly describes the role —protective on the one hand, threatening on the other —that space can take in an island closed off all around by water, as well as the importance that the limited options for entry and exit can assume for those who are inside.41
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In 1629 it was the duke of Orleans who asked to be taken through the ghetto, resulting in a ducal stroll accompanied by a glittering entourage. Just a few decades later the French consul seems to have been especially struck by the ghetto’s sumptuous wedding feasts. He described with particular admiration the wedding of a daughter of the wealthy Levi dal Banco, which featured a great turnout of guests, including even some foreign ambassadors; alongside the luxuriously dressed Jewish guests, he wrote, Venetian noblewomen also took part, in masque so that they would not be too easily recognized.42 Alexandre Toussaint Limojon de Saint Didier, secretary and confidential adviser of Louis XIV’s ambassador to Venice, also wrote of the Venetian ghetto, asserting what had by the later seventeenth century become a universal truism: that there was no other place in Italy where the Jews were treated as well as they were in Venice. In his description of 1680, published after he had accompanied the count di Avaux on a diplomatic mission to the city, Saint Didier noted on the one hand, that land in the ghetto was so precious as to produce an extraordinary density of building but, on the other, that the proverbial tolerance of the Venetians was such that every noble household counted some Jews among its beloved and absolutely trusted friends. The aristocrats, well aware of the need for discretion, had become protectors of the Jews and at the same time served them for a variety of ends. Not “tolerated,” then, but “associates” in the richest mercantile dealings in the Levant, the Venetian Jews seemed to be able to attract to the city great amounts of money, beyond what they contributed with their regular and extraordinary taxes to the state coffers. To foreigners’ eyes, the Jews stood out from the mass of Venetian Christians only because diey wore the most elegant hats anyone had ever seen, made of the most beautiful scarlet fabric and lined with shining black taffeta.43 It happened rather rarely, then, that foreigners would leave Venice without visiting the ghetto. Their accounts of their visits there are often quite lively, filled with curiosity about the richness of the local celebrations, the religious ceremonies, festivals, theatrical and musical presentations, and funerals that all fed the fascination aroused by such a peculiar “cloister.”
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The Cemetery of San Nicolò and the Canale degli Ebrei A final aspect of the experience of living in the Jewish ghetto of Venice was that of dying there. The right of burial for minority groups in the city required a use of urban space that the Venetian government neither wished to nor could limit in any way. This was demonstrated in 1386 —during a brief period in which Jewish moneylenders were allowed to settle in the city—when the Piovego granted the Jew Solomon, on behalf of the Jews in the city, a plot of seventy by thirty passi veneziani (roughly twenty-one by nine meters) right next to die Benedictine monastery on the island of the Lido. Two years later the Jews received permission to surround this land with a fence to protect the tombs from the desecration that so often befell Jewish cemeteries. Then in 1578, with the growth of the community following the Jews’ permanent settlement in the city, more adjacent land was rented from the Benedictines.44 The resulting cemetery was located on the shore, at the mouth of the port of San Nicolò, flanked by its castles and the wells at which departing ships would load fresh water for their journeys abroad. For these reasons the government maintained a particular interest in the area, reserving the right to use it for public ceremonies or for receiving very important visitors. For all Venetians, the size and morphology of the lagoon assumed significance in the organization of funeral rites. Transportation of the dead and their relatives to die place of burial was more difficult and more costly here than in other cities. For Jews, such problems were increased by the greater distance of their cemetery from their homes, requiring them to organize their funeral rites in a lengthy passage by boat from the ghetto in Cannaregio, across the back of the district of Castello, cutting before the church of San Pietro, and then out to the Lido. To keep costs down and avoid what was considered by many to be superfluous display, funeral corteges from the ghetto were generally limited to just two boats, barges, or gondolas; even such a small entourage still tended to attract die insults of little boys on the bridge of the island of San Pietro, under which the processions had to pass on their way to the Lido. 802
In 1668, workmen paid by the Jewish community carried out the excavation of the Canal of the Jews (Canale degli Ebrei), which the Venetian Senate had authorized in order to allow Jewish funeral corteges to pass from the ghetto to San Nicolò on the Lido without having to take that difficult route under the bridge of San Pietro. Twenty years later the canal was further enlarged and deepened, with the result that this short stretch of water soon assumed an important role in the lagoon’s network of waterways, not only serving the Jews as an alternative funerary route but also facilitating the passage of all Venetians from the lagoon northward toward the open sea. But given that the morphology of the lagoon was never definitively fixed, in the course of the next few decades tidal flows made the Canal of the Jews “extremely deep.” A series of measurements by the leading Venetian water experts between 1725 and 1739 blamed this deepening not only for the silting up of neighboring canals but also for a shift in the direction of the canal itself and in the location of the opening to the sea. Some suggested refilling the canal in order to return to the former situation, while others argued either that the course of events was by now irreversible or that it would be more risky to commence something new whose effect could not be predicted.45 In the end, despite these problems, the Canal of the Jews was left as it had become: an attempt to further ensure the separation and the safety of the Jews that ended by inevitably involving the Christian world in a variety of unexpected ways. One might say that in this way the canal was symbolic and representative of die particular interrelationship that had come to exist between the Jewish community and the city of Venice, at least from the perspective of urban topography: an effective symbol of the spatial isolation that was periodically sought by both sides but was never completely achieved (or even achievable).
Notes 1. Andrea Balletti, Gli ebrei e gli estensi (Bologna, 1969), 175; Stefano Zaggia, “Il ghetto di Padova” (degree thesis, Dipartimento di Storia dell’Architettura, IUAV, 1990). 2. Benjamin Ravid, “The Minotto family and an Unapproved Construction Project in the Ghetto Vecchio of Venice, i6o8-I6o9,” in Daniel Carpi Jubilee Volume, ed. Minna Rozen, Anita Shapira, and Dina Porat (Tel Aviv, 1996), 91-108. 3. Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Ufficiali al Cattaver (hereafter ASV, UC), bu. 242, 6 November 1632. 4. Carla Boccato, “Processi ad ebrei nell’archivio degli Ufficiali al Cattaver a Vene- zia,” La rassegna 'mensile dì Israelii (1975): 164-80. 5. ASV, Giudici del Piovego (hereafter ASV GP), bu. 24, 20 October 1644. 803
6. Bernardino Zendrini, Memorie storiche dello stato antico e moderno delle Lagime di Venezia (Venice, 1807), tome 1, voi. 8, 1037. 7. Ennio Concina, “Parva Jerusalem,” in La città degli ebrei: Il ghetto di Venezia: Architettura e urbanistica, ed. Ennio Concina, Ugo Camerino, and Donatella Calabi (Venice 1991), 41-47. 8. Brian Pullan, Gli ebrei in Europa e l’inquisizione a Venezia, 1550-1670 (Rome, 1985), 248. 9. ASVj Inquisitori agli Ebrei (hereafter ASV, IE), bu. 19, 13 August 1613 and 3 April 1648; bu. 20, 29 June 1660. 10. ASV, Dieci Savi alle Decime (hereafter ASV, DSD), bu. 425 and 426, for 1661. 11. The Autobiography of a Seven te en th- Cen tury Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena’s Life of Judah, trans, and ed. Mark R. Cohen (Princeton, 1988), 134-39. 12. ASV, DSD, Traslati ghetto, regs. 1285-92 (for years 1667-91) and regs. 1293- 1303 (for years 1692-1720). 13. Ibid., reg. 1290, 30 December 1682 (CommissariaMalipiero); reg. 1291, 30 May 1688 (Cannaregio 861, terminazione di stìm,a 3 September 1663) and 15 January 1685 (Cannaregio 867, terminazione di stima 8 March 1662). 14. Ibid., reg. 1285, 3° J uty 1669 (Cond. Francesco Malipiero q. Antonio). 15. Daniele Beltrami, Storia della popolazione di Venezia dalla fine del secolo XVI alla caduta della repubblica (Padua, 1954), 30-32; Alan Charles Harris, “La demografia del ghetto 111 Italia,” L? rassegia -mensile di Israel (1967): 15-16; and Simone Luzzatto, Discorso circa il stato de glhebrei et in panìcolar dimoranti neWinclita città di Venetia (Venice, 1638), ióir. 16. ASV, IE, bu. 19, 3 June 1604. 17. ASV, Senato terra (hereafter ASV, ST), reg. 109, 3 March 1633; Benjamin Ravid, The Establishment of the Ghetto Nuovissimo of Venice,” in Jews in Italy: Studies Dedicated to the Memory of Umberto Cassuto, ed. H. Beinart (Jerusalem, 1988), 35-54. 18. ASV, Procuratori di San Marco de ultra, bu. 57, 22 September, 6 October, and 10 November 1633. 19. ASV, ST, reg. 109, 3 March 1633. 20. ASV, IE, bu. 19, 3 June, 27 June, and 7 August 1604; Beltrami, Storia della popolazionie di Venezia, 30. 21. ASV, DSD, bu. 426,1661, p. 1126. 22. Archivio Patriarchale di San Marco, Processo dell’Ecc.mo Ma.to de Cattaveri à favor del R.do Capitolo di S. Marcitola contro gl’Hebrei, 17 August 1699; ASV, ST, 21 January 1702 (m.v. 1701) reg. 243, c. 68ir. 23. ASV, Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia (Diversorum), bu. 348, 1722, nos. 83 and 7. 24. Aldo Contento, “Il censimento della popolazione di Venezia/’ Nuovo archivio veneto, 1899-1900; Gino Luzzatto, “Sulla condizione degli ebrei veneziani nel secolo XVIII0,” La rassegna mensile di Israel 16 (1950): 161-72; Harris, “La demografia del ghetto,” 15-16; Pullan, Gli ebrei in Europa, 245; Luigi Arnaldo Schiavi, “Gli ebrei in Venezia e nelle sue colonie,” Nuova antologia, 3d series, 47 (1893): 491-92. 25. ASV, Segreta,, Materie miste e notabili, bu. 131 : drawing by Iseppo Paolini. Paolini had earlier proven his skills by drafting a comprehensive project to avoid the damages caused to the topography of the lagoon by detritus and by the process of landfill. 26. ASV, DSD, bu. 426, 1661; Condizioni aggiunte 1589, bu. 181, n. 3416, reg. 18 March 1598; ASV, Procuratori di San Marco de ultra, bu. 55, file 4, 10 February 1574 (m.v. 1573), affitanza di Marcantonio Friuli (for the oven); ASV, Notarile Atti, A. Calzavara, bu. 2970, 29 February 1656 (m.v. 1655). 27. ASV, UC, bu. 245, 19 September 1617; bu. 242, 1 May 1632; Dal Libro grande; Cinque Savi alle Mercanzie, 2d series, bu. 62, 13 February 1617 (m.v. 1616); [Diversorum], bu. 348, 27 June 1663 (for wine, fruit, meat, and bread in the Ghetto Vecchio); 14 April 1679 (for the sale of wine to Christians); ASV, Notarile Atti, Calzavara, bu. 2955, 4 January 1651 (m.v. 1650); bu. 2972, 9 August 1656 (for a fruit stand in the Ghetto Nuovo); bu. 2956, 23 May 1651; bu. 2658, 23 November 1651 (for that of the Ghetto Vecchio); bu. 2959, 19 March 1652 (for another fruit stand, presumably outside both ghettos, situated “on the bridge at the fondamenta”); bu. 2969,18 August 1655; bu. 2970, 7 November 1655. Also Pullan, Gli ebrei in Europa, 663. 28. ASV, Notarile Atti, A. Calzavara, bu. 2961, 2 January 1653 (m.v. 1652). 29. ASVJE, 17 September 1638; ASV, DSD, bu. 221,1661, c. 813. 30. Giacomo Carletto, IIghetto veneziano nel ’700 attraverso i catastici (Rome, 1981), 48-5Ó; Umberto Fortis, Il ghetto in laguna (Venice, 1967), 80. 31. ASV, ST, reg. 61, 31 January 1597 (m.v. 1596), fols. 165V-172V. 32. Autobiography ofa Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi, 97.
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33. Adolfo Ottolenghi, Per ilIV centenario della Scuola Canton: Notizie storiche sui templi veneziani di rito tedesco e su alcuni templi privati con cenni della vita ebraica nei secoli XVI-XIX (Venice, 1932), 7; Adolfo Pacifici, “I regolamenti della Scuola Italiana a Venezia nel secolo XVII0,” in La rassegna mensile di Israel 5 (1930): 392-400. Also ASM DSD, bu. 2 2 l, 1661, cc. 814, 1030; ASV, Notarile Atti: A. Calzavara, 15 February 1652 (m.v. 1651), bu. 2958, c. 784L 8May 1654, 2 965*cc* 2 January 1663 (m.v. 1662), bu. 2989, c. 837^ and Prefettura dell’Adriatico, 1808, bu. 136, fase. Ebrei, nos. 1-4. 34. ASV, Scuole piccole e suffragi, 27 Aprii 1713, bu. 730, cc. 3-64; ASV, IE, 22 November 1678, bu. 32, cc. 105-6; 3 June 1704, bu. 38, cc. 64-80. 35. Autobiography of' a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi, 106, 131. 36. Fortis, IIghetto in laguna, 46-47; ASV, DSD, Redecima 1661, bu. 221, cond. 833; bu. 825, cond. 1712; Catastico 1661, bu. 425, no. 319; Catastico 1712, bu. 433, no. 328; Catastico 1749, bu. 440, no. 354; Terminazioni di sopraluogo e stima, reg. 876, no. 4 (12 May 1741), with reference to the previous estimates of 19 September 1668 and 2 3 March 1724, bu. 440, nos. 44-45. 37. Concina, “Parva Jerusalem,” 93-155. 38. Benjamin Ravid, Economics and Toleration in Seventeenth Centmy Venice: The Background and Context of the Discorso of Sim-one Luzzatto (Jerusalem, 1978), 20 n. 14. 39. This is n. 165 in La città degli ebrei 40. Gaetano Cozzi, “Società veneziana e società ebraica,” in Gli ebrei e Venezia, ed. Gaetano Cozzi (Milan, 1987), 348-49 and nn. 50 and 51; Abraham Melamed, “English Travellers and Venetian Jewish Scholars: The Case of Simone Luzzatto and James Harrington,” in Gli ebrei e Venezia, 507-27. 41. Thomas Coryat, Coryafs Crudities, 2 vols. (London, 1611; reprinted London, 1776), 1:296-304; Jewish section reprinted in Benjamin Ravid, “Christian Travelers in the Ghetto of Venice: Some Preliminary Observations,” in Between Histoiy and Literature: Studies in Honor ofI saac Barzilay, ed. S. Nash (Benei Brak, 1997), 111-50. 42. Jean Georgelin, Venise au siècle des lumTeres (Paris, 1978), 676. 43. Alexandre Toussaint Limojon de Saint Didier, La Ville et la republique de Venise (Paris, 1680), 30-32,172; Jewish section reprinted in Ravid, “Christian Travelers,” 131-32. 44. Paolo Candio, “L’antico cimitero ebraico del Lido nei contratti tra la communità ebraica ed il monastero benedettino di S. Nicolò,” Ateneo veneto 178 (1991): 109-39; Charles Malagola, Le Lido de Venise à traverse Bhistoire (Venice, 1909). 45. Georgelin, Venise au siede des lumieres, 945 n. 66; Pullan, Gli ebrei in Europa, 249.
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READING 3
Benjamin Ravid The Venetian Government and the Jews Before the Establishment of the Ghetto In the past it was taken for granted that Jews had been present in Venice and active in the commerce of the city as early as the twelfth century. Three pieces of evidence were adduced to support this assertion: a census of 1152 purportedly indicating that thirteen hundred Jews then dwelled in the city; legislation of the Venetian Great Council of 1290 supposedly requiring Jews to pay a 5 percent import and export tax on their merchandise; and finally, the belief that the Venetian island of Spinalunga was called Giudecca (in Venetian dialect, Zuecca or Zudecca) sometime before 1254 because of the presence of Jews there (indeed, it was even claimed that all Jews coming to Venice had been required to live there).1 More recently, however, it has been demonstrated that none of these claims is valid. The purported census of 1152 turns out to have been from 1552 or more probably 1555; the customs legislation of 1290 dealt with Jewish commercial activity not in Venice but at Venetian-held Negroponte (today, Euboea), an island off the eastern coast of Greece; and although elsewhere the word Giudecca was used to refer to Jewish quarters, there is no extant evidence to support the assertion that Jews ever lived on the Giudecca and that it was therefore named after them.2 The first Jew documented in Venice itself was an inhabitant of Venetian Crete who in 1314 petitioned the doge on behalf of the Jews of Crete.3 Since Jews lived throughout the Stato da Mar, as Venice’s eastern overseas possessions were known, 4 very likely Jews from there had already been in Venice previously.5 In any case, even if future research turns up a few additional Jews in early-fourteenth-century Venice, clearly they amounted only to a mere handful, and their presence did not elicit any government provisions.6 806
As definitely established by Reinhold Mueller, only in the later fourteenth century did the Venetian government authorize Jews to reside in Venice, as part of a change in its attitude toward small-scale moneylending.7 Borrowing money on pledges at fixed rates of interest had been illegal in Venice since 1254, and anyone wishing to do so legally had to go across the lagoon to Mestre, which was annexed by Venice in 1338-39. The general disruption caused by the Black Death in 1348-49 and the economic difficulties resulting from Venice’s Third Genoese War (1350-55) led the Venetian government, understandably, to reconsider its policy. After hearing in 1366 from the Venetian podesta in Mestre that some moneylenders there were charging 25 percent a year and engaging in “many dishonest and illegal practices,� and that others were prepared to lend at 20 percent a year, the Great Council authorized negotiations to work out a charter with the latter for five years. It was until recently assumed that the council was thereby inviting Jews to engage in moneylending in Venice, but as Mueller pointed out, it actually dealt only with moneylending in Mestre and not in Venice; furthermore, the authorization referred to moneylenders in general, without any reference to their religion.8 The Fourth Genoese War, the War of Chioggia (1378-81), required Venice to raise very heavy forced loans as well as impose new direct and indirect taxes, causing a great shortage of money and illegal moneylending at exorbitantly high rates. Consequently, in February 1382 the Venetian government decided to allow any person, Venetian or foreigner, to lend at a maximum rate of 10 percent a year on pledges and 12 percent on notes in Venice itself. Although this legislation did not refer specifically to Jews, Mueller ascertained on the basis of surviving notarial records that all who accepted this invitation appear to have been Jews, with the exception of one Christian who was the associate of three Jews.9 Three and a half years later the economic situation was slowly improving, but money remained scarce, so it seemed desirable to retain the Jews. After some negotiations the Senate approved a new charter in November 1385 specifically affirming that since, for the good of the city, those Jews then in Venice should stay and others should come, the legislation of 1382 would remain unchanged. After its expiration in 1387, however, new provisions were to go into effect, requiring 807
that for the following ten years and thereafter until revoked, the Jews could either pay four thousand ducats a year and lend at a maximum rate of 10 percent on pledges and 12 percent on notes, or not pay the annual tax and lend only at the lower rates of 8 percent and 10 percent respectively.10 The Venetian government, which had hoped that the Jews would pay the annual tax and lend at higher rates, was soon in sharp disagreement with the Jews, who chose not to pay the tax and therefore lent at the lower rates. The Jews also preferred to lend larger sums on notes at 10 percent and were unwilling to lend smaller amounts on pledges at 8 percent because the costs of handling pledges lowered their profits. Consequently, in 1388 the Senate compelled them to grant all loan requests for sums under thirty ducats.11 In 1394, however, alleging Jewish economic malpractices but more probably because the acute need for credit had passed, the government decreed that the Jews should depart when the charter expired in 1397- Thereafter, no Jew could stay in Venice for longer than fifteen days at a time, and following the general policy of the Fourth Lateran Council that Jews and Moslems were to be distinguishable from Christians in order to prevent inadvertent sexual relationships, all Jews coming to the city were to wear a yellow circle on their outer clothing.12 The Jews evidently managed to evade the new residential restrictions, coming to Venice and then after fifteen days leaving for Mestre and immediately returning for another fifteen, because the Senate decided in r402 that once the fifteen days had elapsed, Jews could not return for four months.13 Yet clearly the Venetian government not only did not wish to exclude Jews from the city altogether but was also very concerned that because of the legislation of 1394 and 1402 Jewish merchants, whose presence it greatly desired, were no longer coming to the city but rather going to Ancona, Venice’s major commercial rival on the Italian Adriatic coast. The Senate accordingly decided in 1408 that Jewish merchants from elsewhere in the Adriatic were exempt from these laws and could continue to come freely to Venice and send goods to the city. The legal framework for the presence of Jews in fifteenth-century Venice was thus established. Determined not to permit Jewish moneylending in the city, the government was not as resolute about eliminating the Jewish presence completely, 808
both reassuring Jewish merchants that they were welcome and also tolerating Jewish doctors. Recent research has identified numerous individual Jews who came to fifteenth-century Venice from Venice’s Italian mainland holdings of the Terraferma and the Stato da Mar, from elsewhere on the Italian peninsula, from the eastern Adriatic, and from the Germanic lands; their ranks included doctors, merchants, literati, and pilgrims traveling to and from the Holy Land.14 Some who, unlike the doctors, were without authorization even stayed on in the city, as legislation seeking to control them clearly attests. Yet although the Venetian government tolerated the presence of individual Jews in Venice, it initially did not permit the open practice of Judaism. Legislation of r4o8 and ^26 claiming that Jews were establishing synagogues and holding services in quarters rented from Christians, with great offense to the Christian faith, condemned both such Jewish tenants and their Christian landlords to a year in jail and a fine of one thousand lire, while all other Jews attending the service were given six months in jail and a fine of three hundred lire.15 The Ducal College improved this situation somewhat in ^64, at the request of the Jews. Pointing out that Pope Pius II (1458-64) had allowed Jews to practice their religion and threatened with excommunication anyone who barred them from doing so, the college provided that although Jews could still not establish synagogues or designate places for prayer in Venice itself, they could thenceforth freely honor and praise God with psalms and prayers according to their laws in their rented houses, as long as not more than ten persons participated (ten being the minimum quorum prescribed by Jewish law for the recitation of certain prayers and the public reading of the Pentateuch).16 The government was also still concerned about sexual contact between Jews and Christians, forbidding sexual relations between Jewish men and Christian women in 1424 and setting the penalty according to the status of the Christian woman. For relations with a prostitute, the Jew would pay five hundred lire and receive six months in jail; for relations with any other Christian woman, the punishment would be five hundred lire and a whole year in jail. This doubling of the jail sentence and the fact that conversion to Christianity could commute the punishment seem to indicate that financial considerations were secondary to socio809
religious ones.17 In 1443 the Senate also proceeded more severely against Christian men having sexual relations with Jewish women, closing the loophole in earlier legislation that, while requiring male Jews to wear a sign that could be recognized by Christians, had said nothing about Jewish women. To ensure that they should also be recognizable, so that Christian men would not have relations with them and produce a Jewish child, the Senate ordered all Jewish women also to wear the sign, and if wives broke the law their husbands were to pay the same fines as were imposed on men.18 Although Jews were still permitted to practice medicine as before, the Senate sought to limit contact between Jews and Christians in other ways. Claiming that some Jews were teaching instrument playing and singing to Christian youths in music schools, the Senate directed in 1443 that, for the honor of God, no Jew was to operate a school of games, crafts, doctrine, singing, instrument playing, or anything else, subject to a fine of five hundred ducats and six months in jail. Finally, to further deter sexual relations between Jewish men and Christian women, the punishment for this offense was increased from five hundred lire to five hundred ducats, and the jail sentence from one year to two.19 Offering such an inhospitable reception, Venice did not attract a significant number of the Jews exiled from Spain in 1492, although a few apparently found a haven there, even if only temporarily.20 Meanwhile, the old problem of badge evasion was continuing, according to Senate legislation of 1496, which alleged that some Jews were improperly claiming the right to wear their yellow badge concealed and, not being recognizable as Jews, were thus able to remain in the city as they wished, supposedly committing many outrages. The Senate therefore ordered that instead of the yellow circle Jews were to wear a yellow hat, or baretta, as was the practice elsewhere. Moreover, after their permitted fifteen days in Venice had expired, they had to stay away for a whole year, rather than for only four months.21 In the following year the Venetian government first dealt with the new problem of the Marranos, a problem that would long concern the Western Catholic world. Initially a derogatory word in Spanish meaning pig, and today increasingly replaced by the term Crypto-Jew, Marrano primarily designated those Iberian 810
Jews who had converted to Christianity—therefore known as New Christians, or Conversos — but who afterward regretted their conversion and secretly judaized in varying degrees. In 1497 the Senate noted that many of the “Marrano heretics” who were being persecuted in Catholic Spain had come to Venice, and it ordered them to depart within two months, during which time they were not to engage in trade or any other business, or else face confiscation of all their goods. Any Venetian caught doing business with a Crypto-Jew was also to lose all his property. 22
The Settlement of the Jews in Venice and the Establishment of the Ghetto Nuovo Official authorization for Jews to reside continuously in the city of Venice and the emergence of the Jewish community that would play an important role in early modern Jewish history were developments not initially planned by the Venetian government. Fifteenth-century restrictions on Jewish residence in Venice were not applied to Jews in either the Stato da Mar or the Venetian territories on the Italian Terraferma, where they had long been allowed to reside, in Mestre, Padua, Verona, and Brescia. Indeed, the charter issued in 1503 to three Jewish moneylenders in Mestre contained a clause permitting them to come to Venice in case of war, both for their own safety and to safeguard the pledges of Christians that they held.23 When, in 1509, the armies of the League of Cambrai overran the Venetian Terraferma, Jewish moneylenders residing in the occupied area were consequently among the many refugees who fled to Venice. Soon afterward the Venetian government recovered that territory and ordered all the refugees to return home, but then quickly realized that allowing the Jews to stay would be doubly beneficial. Not only could they be required to pay the hard-pressed treasury annual taxes that represented a small but still significant percentage of the total budget,24 but also it was convenient to have them as moneylenders in the city, for the sake of the urban poor, whose numbers had been swelled by the war. Consequently, in 1513 the Council of Ten contracted with the Jewish banker Anselmo del Banco (Asher Meshullam) from Mestre that he and his associates could engage in moneylending in Venice for five years, in return for an annual 811
payment of sixty-five hundred ducats. Two years later, in return for a three-year loan of five thousand ducats, the Jews obtained permission to sell secondhand goods (strazzaria: literally rags, but by extension secondhand clothing and other used items, especially household goods and furnishings) for three years in nine stores; in 1516 they were permitted to open a tenth, in return for a gift of one hundred ducats and a loan of four hundred. The goods they offered were sought by a large part of the population, particularly foreign diplomats and visitors to the city, and even the government itself for decorations on state occasions. Jewish moneylending was clearly very important, indeed indispensable. In theory, Christians followed the Jewish interpretation of the biblical laws of Exodus 23:24, Leviticus 25:35-38, and Deuteronomy 23:20-21, which forbade moneylending at interest to a brother, as referring not literally to a brother but rather, more extensively, to all co-religionists.2 s Therefore, Jewish moneylending at interest to the Christian poor not only helped to alleviate the socioeconomic problems of an increasingly urbanized economy but also rendered it unnecessary for Christians to violate this religious tradition.26 Despite the government’s policy of allowing Jews to reside in Venice, many Venetians, especially clerics, objected to their presence all over the city. The clergy preached against them and demanded their expulsion, especially at Easter time, when anti-Jewish sentiment tended to intensify. A less drastic proposal to relegate the Jews to the island of Giudecca in 1515 failed. In the following year, however, the Senate decided, despite the objections of the Jews, to segregate them, as a compromise between their new freedom to reside all over the city and their previous state of official exclusion. The Senate’s legislation, of 29 March 1516, began by recalling that various earlier laws had forbidden Jews to reside in the city for longer than fifteen days a year, but out of necessity the Jews had been permitted to come to live in Venice, primarily so that Christian pledges that were in their hands could be preserved. Nevertheless, the legislation continued, no God-fearing Venetian wished that they should live spread out all over the city, in the same houses as Christians, going where they pleased day and night, doing, “as was known to all and shameful to relate, many detestable and abominable things to the gravest offense of God and 812
against the honor of the well-established Venetian republic.� Therefore, all Jews then living throughout the city as well as all future arrivals were ordered to go immediately to live together in the courtyard of the houses in the Ghetto Nuovo (the New Ghetto). So that this could be done without delay, those houses were to be evacuated at once, and the Jews, who had been forbidden to own real estate in the Venetian state for nearly a century, were to move in as renters. As an incentive for landlords to comply with the ruling, the Jews were to pay one-third more than the current rents, with the additional amount being tax-exempt. To prevent the Jews from going around all night, gates were to be erected at both entrances to the ghetto, to be opened at sunrise and closed at sunset by four Christian guards who were to live there alone, without their families, and be paid by the Jews. The two sides of the ghetto overlooking small canals were to be sealed off by high walls, and all quays bricked up, to eliminate direct access with those routes of communication and transportation. Finally, two boats, financed by the Jews, were to go around the area day and night to enforce the regulations. The legislation also declared that it was shameful that all over the city Jews had synagogues in which they chanted their prayers aloud and where Christian men and women came and went; thenceforth under no pretext whatsoever could Jews establish synagogues anywhere in the city, not even in the ghetto, but only in Mestre, as before the War of the League of Cambrai.27 Thus the ghetto of Venice came into being. The history of the area before it was assigned to the Jews, and accordingly the much-debated etymology of the word ghetto, has been definitively reconstructed by Ennio Concina.28 Earlier, the site adjacent to the island of the Ghetto Nuovo, referred to in the legislation of 1516 as the Ghetto Vecchio, had served as Venice’s municipal copper foundry, which for security reasons had been surrounded by walls and a robust fence along the canal to the north, with entry only from the fondamenta (quay) of Cannaregio. It was mainly used in the production of copper bars and bronze for artillery. In the meantime, the adjacent island, partially reclaimed in the fourteenth century from water and swamp, had been rented to fishermen. Later it was joined to the foundry by a wooden bridge over what became known as the Rio di Ghetto Nuovo or Rio degli Agudi, to make it possible to dump the foundry waste there. 813
Accordingly it came to be referred to as “the terrain of the ghetto” (il terren del geto). During the first two decades of the fifteenth century its ground was consolidated and a wooden hut constructed on it for one of the master cannon casters. Subsequently, however, the foundry proved unable to meet the increased demand for artillery needed for Venice’s conquest of the Terraferma, so its activities were moved to the state Arsenal, and in 1434 the government auctioned off it and the adjacent island as one unit, probably hoping that the future owner would continue to operate it. Instead the property was purchased by a noble named Marco Ruzini, who demolished some of the foundry buildings and built himself a residence there. By 1502, when the area was acquired by Zuan Antonio Muazzo, it was neglected, yielding barely 150 ducats a year in rents. Two years later the area, with thirty or so wooden houses mostly inhabited by weavers and other petty artisans, was given as a dowry valued at twenty-seven hundred golden ducats to Lunardo Minotto when he married Zuan’s daughter Elena Muazzo.29 The island on which the foundry waste had been dumped had meanwhile become a grassy meadow where young nobles practiced with their crossbows and set traps for birds. In order to receive income from this land, Ruzini rented it out to cloth workers, who stretched out their textiles there to dry —a fairly common use of land in the western outskirts of Venice, which were appropriate for manufacturing activity that was “dirty” or required large open spaces. Such areas were also suited for entrepreneurs to invest in real estate and build inexpensive housing, and accordingly the brothers Constantine and Bartholemeo da Brolo, of a merchant family originally from Verona, purchased the island in 1455 and developed it intensively. They built twenty-five rental houses around the perimeter of the island, which, instead of terren delgeto, now became known as the Ghetto Nuovo, by analogical extension of the name of the adjacent area. This created a large central courtyard, which was left open, probably with the intention of building a church, and in which the brothers also dug three wells; on the wellheads they put the da Brolo family crest, which was later erroneously interpreted as Jewish iconography, specifically the Lion of Judah.30 They also added a bridge at the other end of the courtyard, crossing the canal of San Girolamo and thereby linking the Ghetto Nuovo to the Fondamenta degli Ormesini. Ownership of the 814
island was later divided among several members of the da Brolo family, some of whom may have sold their holdings before the Jews were confined there in 1516. Although the Jews attempted to ward off their segregation, the Venetian government was adamant and willing to make only a few minor concessions, such as extending the closing of the gates by one hour in the summer and two in the winter, allowing Jewish doctors to leave the ghetto after hours to treat Christian patients, and eliminating the nocturnal boat patrol. The phenomenon of ghettoization was double-edged, however, for although it severely restricted the physical freedom of the Jews, it did acknowledge their legal right to reside in the city. Yet this right was not assured but only based on the charter of 1513. When the charter expired in 1518, extensive discussions took place in the Senate over whether Jews should be allowed to continue lending money in Venice or should be sent back to Mestre or even expelled from the Venetian state altogether and replaced by a charitable pawnshop known as a monte di pieta, as had been done elsewhere in Italy.31 Finally the Senate agreed, by a relatively close vote, to renew the charter of the Jews for four years, authorizing them, in return for an annual payment of ten thousand ducats, to lend money at r 5 percent on pledges and to sell strazzaria in the ghetto but not new goods at either wholesale or retail. Lending on notes, which was still permitted at 20 percent on the Terraferma, was no longer allowed in Venice itself. Jewish moneylenders were thenceforth actually pawnbrokers, not bankers, but since the Italian name for their establishments was bancbi dipegni (banks of pawns), which became shortened to bancbi, their owners and managers were often understandably referred to as banchieri (bankers) rather than prestatori or feneratori (moneylenders). Although the charter was renewed in 1523, the Senate also voted to establish a monte di pietĂ , which could have made the Jews dispensable. The following year, however, the Council of Ten intervened, ordering those who had been promoting the monte statutes to drop the project quietly on pain of death and never speak of it again or reveal that they had been so admonished by the Ten. The council moreover insisted that no one was even to propose establishing a monte without its unanimous approval, citing only certain unspecified “most important causes and 815
well-considered reasons,” which to this day unfortunately remain a matter of conjecture.32 The charter was reconfirmed in 1525, but when, in 1526, the government proposed imposing a significant tax on them, the (Jews gave notice that they intended to exercise their option to cease moneylending. This led a member of the Ducal College who had earlier been hostile to the Jews to propose a draconic expulsion, to be implemented as soon as their renunciation went into effect. Another member of the college argued, however, that since the charter had not yet expired and many things could happen in the interim, the Senate should table the expulsion motion so that later on it could take whatever action might then seem appropriate, especially since the Jews had already indicated their intention to leave. After two inconclusive ballots, the Senate voted to expel the Jews, by the narrow margin of 105 in favor, 95 opposed, and 3 abstentions. But the Jews did not really want to leave, and the government perceived the need for their credit at a time of poor harvest and high food prices, so in 1528 the Council of Ten accepted a proposal by the Jews and issued a new charter permitting them to lend money and sell strazzaria for the next five years. Two subsequent charters, containing slight changes, were approved by the council, in 1533 for five years and in 1537 for ten.33 In 1548 the Senate took up the question of a new charter. Five separate proposals were made, four of which accepted the status quo, differing only slightly regarding annual payments and maximum rates of interest. The fifth, however, denounced usury as a practice condemned by all divine and human laws and the means whereby the Jews “consumed and devoured the populace and the poor of this city, committing various rapacious and evil deeds.” It proposed, “for the glory of God,” that all mention of usury be removed and that the rest of the charter be valid for only one year, during which time it could be seen what would happen and what action seemed most appropriate. Although this motion received the second highest total number of votes, it was defeated in the runoff by a relatively close vote of 96-62, with 16 senators abstaining.
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The resulting charter of 1548 became the basis for all subsequent charters of the Jewish moneylenders for the following 175 years, with additions and modifications for the most part designed to eliminate alleged abuses in moneylending and to impose new responsibilities and restrictions on the Jews. The reason underlying this constant renewal of the privileges of the Jews in the face of not inconsiderable resistance was clearly expressed in Senate legislation of 1553, which asserted that “this Council has permitted the Jews to dwell in our dominions for the sole purpose of preventing Christians from lending on usury in violation of both the divine and the civil laws.�34 In 1558 the charter was renewed without major difficulty, but the Senate refused to authorize a new charter in 1565, ruling instead that the Jews would have to leave at the end of the two-year grace period provided for in the previous charter. The following year, however, the new charter was passed once again, in light of the realization that the Christian poor of the city had nowhere else to turn for relief. This time the provision promising automatic renewal every five years unless either side wished otherwise was changed to provide that should no new charter be issued, then the Jews would have a two-year grace period during which they could not engage in moneylending, and at its expiration they would have to leave the city.35 After a steady deterioration in the relationship between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, war broke out in 1570. Following a bitter struggle, in the summer of 1571 Venice lost Cyprus, which it had possessed since 1489, but a few months later the combined Venetian-Spanish forces defeated the Turks at the naval battle of Lepanto. Nationalistic and religious sentiments were thus running very high in the Senate when the Ducal College sought to renew the expiring charter of 1566. One senator proposed rejecting the charter and expelling all Jews from the city at the end of their two-year grace period, whereupon another made a compromise motion to defer the issue for a month to determine what would be best for the poor of the city. Clearly reflecting the crusading spirit of Lepanto, 108 senators voted for expulsion, as opposed to only 21 to recharter and 16 to wait for a month. 36
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Apparently most Jews did not leave, and shortly after the two-year grace period expired the Avvogadori di Commun (state attorney) claimed in the Senate that legally, the legislation expelling the Jews should not have been introduced at all, presumably since the Council of Ten’s decree of 1524 had meant that no motion expelling the Jews could be proposed until a monte di pieta had first been authorized by the Ten. Even so, many senators apparently did not wish to see the Jews stay, for only on the third ballot was the Avvogadori’s motion approved, presumably as a result of extensive lobbying, opening the way for rechartering the Jews the following month.37 Clearly the attitude of the Venetian government toward the Jews was highly ambivalent. While the majority of the senators ultimately placed utilitarian socioeconomic considerations foremost in their decision making, thereby making the residence of the Jews in the city continuous from 1513 on, there still was a constant undercurrent of hostility that could express itself at every charter renewal. The renewal of the charter in 1580 and 1586 was thus by no means routine, and in 1591 lengthy discussions took place on the terms of renewal. Once introduced in the Senate, however, the charter passed handily on the first ballot, and subsequent renewals proceeded much more smoothly. Over the years clauses were added to successive charters to further regulate, usually more stringently, the status and responsibilities of the Jews. In keeping with the hostile Counter Reformation spirit of the papal bull Cum Nimis Absurdum of 1555, a clause was added to the charter of 1558 prohibiting Jews from keeping Christians in their houses as servants or in any other capacity, subject to a fine of a hundred ducats and three years in the galleys for the Jew and two years’ banishment for the Christian.38 The charter of 1597 required the Jews to furnish certain rooms used by the government on state occasions, as well as the doge’s ceremonial vessel, the Bucintoro, with items from their strazzaria stores; that of 1607 forbade Jews to live in any of the ville of the state or to engage in the grain trade on the Terraferma. Noting that unauthorized quays and doors were being opened around the ghetto, presumably to facilitate the viewing of strazzaria and the moving of larger items such as tapestries, the charter of 1607 also ordered that
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all those not specifically permitted by the Senate or Council of Ten were to be closed.39 Most important, the Venetian government also began to change its attitude toward Jewish moneylending, increasingly viewing Jewish moneylenders as a source of cheap credit for the urban poor rather than of revenue for the treasury. It accordingly lowered the interest rates and reduced the annual payments made by the Jews, until finally, in 1573, it eliminated the payments altogether but required the Jews to make loans of up to three ducats each at 5 percent to any borrower with a suitable pledge, under penalty of a three-ducat fine. In 1591 the number of Jewish pawnshops was fixed at three, and because the Jews of Venice claimed that they could not support the expenses on their own, the Jewish communities of the Terraferma were required to contribute. The nature of Jewish moneylending was thus completely changed, from a voluntary profit- making activity conducted by a few wealthy individuals to a compulsory responsibility imposed on the Jewish community, which was required to place huge sums, raised by communal taxation, at the disposal of the pawnshops.
The Levantine Jewish Merchants and the Establishment of the Ghetto Vecchio The commercial preeminence of Venice declined over the course of the sixteenth century, owing to a number of factors that were far beyond the ability of the Venetians to reverse. The Portuguese discovery of the direct sea route to the Indies around the Cape of Good Hope eventually meant that fewer goods from Asia and Africa reached Venice via the eastern Mediterranean ports, and with ever more goods imported from the New World, a general shift in trade occurred from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. Moreover, the French, English, and Dutch built fleets that increasingly competed with the Venetians for the reduced quantity of merchandise still coming to the Ottoman ports of the eastern Mediterranean, taking advantage of Venice’s weak points: the long trip up the Adriatic, piracy, and a lack of adequate Venetian shipping. Venice’s series of wars with the Ottoman Empire (1463-79, 1499-1503, and 1537-40) also meant disruptions in commerce,
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the loss of ships, and diversion of trade elsewhere, especially to Ancona, Venice’s longstanding Adriatic rival. Both as a consequence of these developments and because of the attractiveness of the alternative of investing in land on the Venetian Terraferma, Venetian merchants increasingly tended to withdraw from maritime trade. Meanwhile a major demographic change was also taking place in the Jewish world. As a result of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and the continual emigration of New Christians who had been converted by force in Portugal in 1497, a far- flung kinship network of Jews and New Christians came into being throughout the Mediterranean port cities and along the Atlantic seaboard. Since the eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans, and North Africa were simultaneously being consolidated into the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman subjects, especially Jews who had often come originally from Spain or Portugal, came to play an increasingly significant role in Mediterranean commerce.40 After the war of 15 3 7-40 with the Ottoman Empire had greatly weakened its commerce, the Venetian government realized that it had to counter the competition of Ancona and make Venice more attractive to foreign merchants. Accordingly, the government eliminated customs duties on certain imports and gave the Jewish merchants who predominated in the import trade from the Ottoman Balkans a sufficient space to stay in the city, in the original foundry area now known as the Ghetto Vecchio. To enclose it, the space was ordered walled up, with two gates, one opening onto the fondamenta along the canal of Cannaregio and the other onto a wooden footbridge leading to the Ghetto Nuovo.41 Originally Jewish merchants were permitted to reside in the Ghetto Vecchio only by themselves, without their families, and to engage in wholesale maritime trade for only four months, but at their request this was soon extended to two years, a period equal to the customs exemptions. That two-year exemption proved successful and was extended in 1543, 1545, and 1547, without any reference to the Jewish merchants. In view of many alleged but unspecified bad results of their two-year stay, however, in 1549 it was ordered that in the future they remain in the city for only one year. In practice this restriction was disregarded, and some merchants actually resided in the city with their families for lengthy periods. 820
It is not known how many Levantine Jewish merchants came to Venice, or how many of them really were true Levantines and how many were actually of Iberian origin—Jews (or the descendants of Jews) who had left the Iberian peninsula for the Levant, or lapsed New Christians from Spain or Portugal who had resumed the practice of Judaism upon arriving in Ottoman lands. Moreover, the establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal in 1536 increasingly induced many judaizing New Christians there to leave, and the existence of a Jewish community in Venice and the growing presence of Levantine Jewish merchants there after 1541 made it more attractive for them, whether merchants or not, to come to the city. Once there, some reverted to Judaism and either stayed or went on elsewhere, especially to the Ottoman Empire, whence some subsequently returned to Venice as Ottoman subjects. Always zealously Catholic and concerned with the religious faith of its inhabitants, the Venetian government nevertheless did not generally concern itself with those New Christians who upon arriving in Venice went directly to the ghetto and there reverted to Judaism and thenceforth lived unambiguously as Jews. Although this policy amounted to a rejection of the generally accepted Catholic policy that even the baptism of infidels by force was still valid, since baptism was an indelible sacrament, it did reflect the accepted practice in many places on the Italian peninsula. Indeed, earlier in the century even popes had granted Iberian New Christian merchants the privilege of reverting to Judaism with impunity in the papal seaport of Ancona in order to enhance its commerce. This lenient papal policy changed abruptly in 1556, however, when the Counter Reformation pope Paul IV embarked on a new and harsher approach to the Jews and, reversing the lax policy of his predecessors, had around twenty-five former New Christians burned at the stake in Ancona.42 Officially the Venetian government did not tolerate New Christians who lived outside the ghetto and passed themselves off as Christians while still secretly judaizing and maintaining contacts with ghetto Jews (who were sometimes their relatives), both because the conduct of these Marranos was an affront to Christianity and because it was feared that they might lead more simple Christians astray. Nevertheless, only once in the sixteenth century, apparently under the 821
pressure of Emperor Charles V, did the Venetian government take action against judaizing New Christians as a group. Recollecting that the Marranos had been expelled from the Venetian state in 1497 and all contact between them and Venetians forbidden under grave sanctions, Senate legislation of 1550 noted that their numbers had so increased both in the city and throughout the Venetian state that it was necessary to take action. Accordingly, the Senate again required all Marranos to leave the republic within two months, subject to confiscation of all their goods and two years in the galleys, while any Venetian who had any contact with them thereafter would incur the same penalties. This legislation greatly disturbed the Christian merchants in Venice, who complained that, not knowing who was a Marrano, they might unwittingly violate the law. The Senate thereupon ruled that such Christians would not be punished for doing business with Marranos, whether within or outside Venetian territory, since it had intended not to prohibit trade with Marranos living in other countries but only to prevent them from settling in Venice and the Venetian state. Thus, economic considerations led to the rescinding of the original harsh provisions against Christians dealing with Marranos.43 Indeed, despite this legislation, the pressures applied by the papal nuncio, and the revival of the Venetian Inquisition in 1547 — primarily to deal with Protestant heretics, however— Venice continued to serve judaizing New Christians as a major center not only of transit but also of actual settlement, since, whether they were covertly judaizing outside the ghetto or had overtly reverted to Judaism inside it, the Venetian government did not actively seek them out.44
Daniel Rodriga and the Charters of the Levantine and Ponentine Jewish Merchants The Ottoman war of 1570-73 had the usual negative effects on Venetian commerce, and in 1573 the Venetian government moved away from tacitly acquiescing to the presence of former Iberian New Christians who had returned to Judaism and began actively trying to attract them to Venice. The doge and the Council of Ten approved a safe-conduct enabling Spanish, Portuguese, and other Jews living under Christian rule to dwell in Venice for the following two years. Its 822
key feature was the provision that as long as they stayed “without scandal” as Jews in the place assigned to them and wore a yellow head-covering, they could not be investigated, accused, punished, or in any way molested for the crimes of apostasy or “hypocrisy” or for having previously lived as Christians. Although this safeconduct never received the approval of the Senate — probably because of the opposition of the papal nuncio — in practice the Venetian government continued not to bother Iberian New Christians who settled in the ghetto as Jews.45 The cause of these merchants was soon taken up by Daniel Rodriga, himself a Jew of Portuguese New Christian origin, who had probably been behind the safeconduct of 1573.46 For over thirty years Rodriga submitted numerous proposals and projects to the Venetian government, intended primarily to restore Venice’s declining maritime commerce and diminishing customs revenue while simultaneously benefiting Jewish merchants and, above all, obtaining privileges in Venice for them. Keenly aware of the far-flung merchant kinship networks of the Jewish-New Christian Iberian diaspora in the ports of the Mediterranean, Rodriga claimed that these merchants would, if given suitable guarantees of security, bring their merchandise to Venice, increasing its customs revenue and enabling it to maintain its entrepot function. In referring to these merchants, Rodriga avoided such explicit and potentially provocative terms as Spanish or Portuguese Jew, New Christian, or Marrano; to minimize the fact that these individuals had been baptized at birth and were reverting to Judaism, he instead termed them Ponentine, or western, Jews — a neutral geographical circumlocution, indeed euphemism, that the Venetian government found acceptable. At the same time, Rodriga sought to change the status of the Levantine Jewish merchants in Venice, from that of visiting Ottoman subjects entitled to reside in Venice by virtue of treaties with the Ottoman Empire to that of Venetian subjects dwelling in Venice on the basis of a specific charter. To make his plan more attractive, he urged the Venetian government to establish a free-transit scala (port) on Venetian land at Spalato (modem Split, in Croatia), on the Adriatic-Dalmatian coast north of Ragusa (modem Dubrovnik), in order to divert trade between Italy and the Balkans away from the Ragusa-Ancona route and to Venice. Rodriga 823
promised that if the Jewish merchants were granted the privileges he sought, they would then play a major role in developing that new trade between Venice and Spalato. Inviting Jewish merchants to the city constituted the least breach of its longstanding protectionist policy and, accordingly, the least objectionable way to alleviate the decline in Venetian maritime commerce.47 Rodriga’s charter proposal for “Levantine, Spanish and other Jewish merchants living in Venice with their families,” after some changes — including the less explicit formulation of “Levantine and Ponentine Jewish merchants” — was therefore overwhelmingly approved by the Senate, which simultaneously took measures to implement the establishment of the scala of Spalato. This charter set forth the general principle that for the coming ten years Levantine and Ponentine Jewish merchants would have a safe-conduct to come with their families to live in Venice. They could import and export without restriction on the wholesale level and practice Judaism freely with the assurance that they would not be disturbed by any magistracy for religious reasons. Like all Jews already in the city, they were also required to reside in the ghetto and to wear a special yellow head-covering. Since the charters of the Jewish moneylenders, previously the only group of Jews with official permission to reside in Venice, had dealt extensively with their moneylending and strazzaria activities while also setting forth the special provisions imposed on them as Jews, Rodriga’s charter needed to consider only commercial and administrative matters that specifically concerned the merchant newcomers. Thus, the rights, responsibilities, and restrictions pertaining to the Jews already in the city were automatically extended to these merchants, who in general commercial matters were subject to the same regulations governing merchants in the city. The only important exception was that the merchants were exempted from supporting the pawnshops, though that was not to last for long. This charter was of special significance in two respects. First, while the Levantine Jews had been permitted to trade between Venice and the Levant because they were Ottoman subjects, it was completely unprecedented to grant this right to 824
other non-Venetians — such as the Ponentine Jews —on any terms, let alone those of equality with Venetian subjects, without the obligatory wait of twenty-five years that had been required since at least the fourteenth century. This concession clearly testified to Venice’s perception of the importance of these merchants, as did the subsequently unsuccessful attempts by Christian merchants from elsewhere in Europe to secure the same privilege. Second, these Ponentine Jews, although formerly New Christians, were allowed — actually, even required —to revert to Judaism with impunity upon arriving in Venice. Such an explicit authorization, over thirty years after the start of the Counter Reformation’s hostile policies toward Jews and judaizers, was completely unacceptable to the papacy, which understandably challenged it. In response, Fra Paolo Sarpi, Venice’s chief ideologist, shrewdly identified Venetian raison d’etat with the greater good of Christian Europe, claiming that permission for New Christians to settle freely in Venice as Jews was for the general benefit of Christendom, for otherwise they might migrate with their assets to the Ottoman Empire and strengthen Christianity’s longstanding enemy. Furthermore, he asserted that granting such a safe-conduct was legitimate and could not be condemned, since previous popes had allowed Marranos to live in Ancona with greater privileges than those granted by Venice.48 In 1598, as the ten-year charter of 1589 approached its expiration, Rodriga proposed a new one to the Venetian government that was very similar. Containing only minor changes that experience had indicated were desirable, it easily passed in the Senate by the vote of 94-6-16. Its preamble clearly indicated the attitude of the government: “At this time, even greater are the reasons which on other occasions induced this Council to permit the residence of Levantine and Ponentine Jewish merchants in this city and their trade in the places of our state, principally for mercantile trade which is so important for the public service.”49 Those words were not mere rhetoric. Venice was facing not only a long-range general decline in its Mediterranean trade but also the specific competition of both Ancona and Livorno (Leghorn), the grand duchy of Tuscany’s free port on the west coast of Italy.50 Unwilling to allow non-Venetians — other than reciprocally Ottoman subjects — to trade with the Levant, the republic had to 825
continue its attempts to attract Jewish merchants, and subsequent charters were regularly renewed with only minor changes throughout the seventeenth century.51 The Venetian government was indeed so satisfied with the Jewish merchants that in 1630, when they informed it that additional merchants would come to Venice if assured of adequate living space, the Senate responded favorably. In March 1633 it ordered that an area containing twenty dwellings located across from the Ghetto Nuovo, in a direction almost opposite from the Ghetto Vecchio, be enclosed and joined to the Ghetto Nuovo by a bridge. This area was not designated by any name in the Senate legislation of 1633, but it almost immediately became known as the Ghetto Nuovissimo, or Newest Ghetto.52 Since the term ghetto came to refer to the compulsory, segregated, and enclosed Jewish quarters that had been established in Italy, in accordance with the papal bull Cum Nimis Ahsurdum of 1555, it is understandable that this third Jewish quarter in Venice was also referred to as a ghetto; and since the Ghetto Vecchio and the Ghetto Nuovo already existed there, it is understandable that it became known as the Ghetto Nuovissimo. Unlike the two earlier ghettos, however, the Ghetto Nuovissimo had never been associated with a foundry but rather was so named precisely because it constituted a compulsory, segregated, and enclosed Jewish quarter. The term ghetto had thus come full circle in the city where it had originated: initially meaning a foundry in Venice, it had acquired a generic sense in other cities to designate a walled-in Jewish quarter, and it finally acquired that generic usage in Venice as well.53
The Ghetto and the Jewish Community Meanwhile, the Jewish moneylenders continued to reside in Venice on the basis of their own five-year charters alongside the Levantine and Ponentine Jewish merchants, although not always in harmony. In order to distinguish between the Jewish moneylenders and the Jewish merchants, the Venetian government referred to the former as Tedeschi (i.e., German) Jews because many of them were of Germanic origin, even though their families might have lived in Italy or the Venetian Terraferma for generations. Also included under this rubric, primarily because they too were moneylenders, were Jews of Italian origin, known as Italiani Jews, who retained their own religious traditions and rituals. Over the years the 826
financial condition of the Tedeschi Jews deteriorated because of the economically inviable low interest rate they were required to charge in their pawnshops and the competition from Christian strazzaria dealers. To meet the expenses of their pawnshops, it was necessary that they be subsidized not only by the Jewish communities of the Terraferma but also by the Levantine and Ponentine merchants, leading to some sharp contentions between the groups and greatly exacerbating existing ethnic tensions.54 To ease their financial plight, the Tedeschi Jews sought permission to lend larger sums to better-off borrowers at higher interest rates, to charge a very slight, “almost imperceptible,” transaction fee on each pawn, and above all to engage in the Levant trade —which they were apparently already doing illegally—along with the Levantine and Ponentine Jews. Only this last request, which in no way affected the poor, was granted in 1634, as the Venetian government acknowledged that such permission could only benefit its declining maritime commerce and customs revenue.55 The legal status and economic activities of the two categories of Jews thus gradually became more interrelated and similar, even though the system of separate charters continued. As the commercial activities and fiscal responsibilities of the Jewish groups intertwined, so too their residential status increasingly commingled. When the ghetto was established in 1516 there had not been enough dwellings, compelling some Jews to leave the city, while those who remained soon had to subdivide their apartments and add new stories onto their buildings in a continuous process of alteration and modification.56 When the Jewish enclosure was expanded in 1541 by the inclusion of twenty dwellings in the Ghetto Vecchio, only Jewish merchants without their families were supposed to live there, but after Christian landlords there complained in 1560 that those merchants did not wish to rent some new buildings that had been specially built for them, the government allowed Tedeschi Jews to move in. Thereafter no clear distinction existed as to which group of Jews resided in which ghetto. When a shortage of housing occurred in one or other of the ghettos, Jews would move as they saw fit or were able to find quarters. For its part, the Venetian government enforced the regulations regarding residence in the ghetto and the requirement to remain there after the closing of its gates. 827
Only Jewish doctors treating Christian patients and Jewish merchants who had to attend to their business enjoyed routine permission to be outside the ghetto after hours, but they were required to submit a written report of their activities to the guards. Sometimes, however, individual Jews —such as representatives of the Jewish community who had to negotiate charter renewals with the government, singers and dancers who performed in the homes of Christians at carnival time, and others who had special skills and needs — were granted the privilege, often only until a specified hour of the night. Only extremely rarely was permission granted to a few individuals, usually doctors, to reside outside the ghetto.57 The enforcement of the wearing of the special Jewish head-covering also became a significant part of the socioreligious policy of segregating the Jews. While officially the color of the head-covering was supposed to be yellow, both administrative documents issued by the Venetian government and travel accounts of foreign visitors indicate that from the late sixteenth century on, many Jews wore red head-coverings, although those of Levantine origin continued to wear yellow ones. Unfortunately no contemporary explanation has yet been found for this change from yellow to red, and it can only be conjectured that it originated with the Jews themselves because they did not like the color yellow, perhaps because the Venetian government also attempted to make prostitutes and pimps recognizable by marking them in yellow. The law finally came into line with practice in 1738, when the government ordered all Jews in the Venetian state to wear a red headcovering, except for the Levantines, who were to continue to wear yellow.58 The requirements to remain in the ghetto at night and to wear the special distinguishing head-covering were often reiterated together in government legislation and administrative rulings, a particular reflection of the constant concern that Christian women might have sexual relations with unidentified Jews at night. Interestingly, if taken at face value, these worries would seem to indicate that as a rule Jews in Venice could not be distinguished either by their dress or by their speech, even though it is known that a special Judeo-Venetian dialect existed. 59 If indeed Jews were otherwise indistinguishable, then it would appear that the special head-covering was really needed to mark the Jews as such, as well as to
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enforce the Venetian penchant for order and propriety, rather than merely constituting a form of humiliation.60 Over time the ghetto came to house not only the Jews but also all the facilities required to meet their other needs, such as synagogues, stores for foods specially prepared in accordance with Jewish law —such as bread, meat, wine, oil, and fruit —and additional facilities, including an inn for foreign Jews. Only the cemetery, established in 1386 on the Lido, was of necessity located outside the ghetto.61 The ghetto was also the site of the houses of study and meeting places of the various organizations of the Jewish community, including a wide range of confraternities devoted to traditional Jewish concerns such as caring for the sick, assisting the needy, dowering poor brides, and burying the dead. Reflecting the geographical location of Venice, the ghetto was also a center for the organization of relief for the poor of the Land of Israel and for ransoming Jewish captives, often seized by pirates who were well aware of the importance Jewish communities placed upon freeing their captured co-religionists. In short, Venice came to be what has felicitously been called “la citta degli ebrei” — the City of the Jews.62 The population of this “city” in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries apparently ranged from somewhat under two thousand persons to at least three thousand, or very roughly between 1 percent and at least 2.5 percent of the total population of Venice. Some sources, probably inaccurate, asserted a much higher figure, which in any case substantially declined by the ghetto’s end in 1797, to a low of only 1,626.63 In order to enable these Jews to live in Venice and carry out the economic functions expected of them, the Venetian government had to grant them the right to practice Judaism freely. Accordingly, the terms of the charters of the Tedeschi Jews from 1528 on specified that they could live in Venice according to their rites and customs, while the charter of 1548 specifically permitted them to have synagogues, a provision that was also reiterated in all subsequent charters. Charters of the Levantine and Ponentine merchants, from the first issued in 1589, provided in slightly greater detail that they too could observe their rites, precepts, and ceremonies. The significance of this permission to have synagogues becomes apparent when compared with the experiences of other non-Catholic groups in the city.64 Only 829
in 1657 were the Protestant merchants from Germanic lands who were residing in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi allowed to hold private services there. The Moslem Turks — generally perceived to be a real political threat, as well as religiously undesirable, and viewed with more antipathy than the Jews —were never allowed to have a mosque in Venice. Indeed, until 1573 even the Greek Orthodox in Venice were not allowed to build a church there because the Venetian government suspected their religious loyalty to Catholicism and the papacy, and their clerics were permitted to lead services only in one designated chapel. Still, although the Jews were granted complete freedom of religious observance within the enclosure of the ghetto, otherwise their status was far more restricted than that of other non-Catholics and non-Venetians residing in Venice, even though most of them had been born in the city. Reflecting the increasing ethnic diversity of the Jews of Venice, at least eight synagogues were established in the ghetto.65 Three of the major ones were located in the Ghetto Nuovo (the Scuola Grande Tedesca66 and the Scuola Canton,67 both of the Ashkenazic rite, and the Scuola Italiana68) as well as at least three smaller synagogues (the Scuola Coanim or Sacerdote, the Scuola Luzzatto, and the Scuola Meshullamim). Situated in the Ghetto Vecchio were the Scuola Levantina and the Scuola Ponentina or Spagnola, officially Kahal Kadosh Talmud Torah. The latter would exert significant influence elsewhere, for in 1663 the Jews of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in London drew on its usages in framing their own bylaws, which served in turn as a model for the Spanish and Portuguese synagogues of colonial New York, Philadelphia, and Montreal.69 These synagogues of Venice clearly exerted a special fascination not only on foreign visitors but also, to the great concern of the patriarch of Venice, on some Venetian Christians. Particularly on Simhat Torah, they would require the ghetto gates to be especially opened for them as they flocked in great numbers to the synagogues, inducing the cantor to recite the prayer for the Venetian government in a voice louder than usual.70 The fact that sermons were delivered in Italian clearly enhanced visitors’ understanding of what was transpiring, but if they were published afterward, it was virtually always in Hebrew, possibly in a considerably embellished version.71 830
The rabbis of Venice who served in these synagogues constituted overall a distinguished cadre who provided leadership for their day, and a few were outstanding figures of more than local significance. The best known and most significant was undoubtedly the prolific Leon Modena (1571-1648), whose numerous works include a remarkably frank Hebrew autobiography. This sheds much light on his own life as well as on the everyday lives, practices, and values of the Jews in early modem Venice, including their extensive relationships with Christian neighbors on all levels, from intellectual exchanges to joint participation in alchemy experiments and gambling.72 Modena himself interacted with Christian literati in Venice and elsewhere and authored an Italian compendium of Jewish law, the Historia de’ riti hebraici, written for the English ambassador to Venice, Henry Wotton, as a presentation copy for King James I. Also of special prominence was Modena’s contemporary, Simha Simone Luzzatto (ca. 1583-1663). Highly respected by both Jewish and Christian contemporaries for his learning and eloquence, Luzzatto is today remembered primarily for his Discorso circa il stato de gl’hebrei et in particolar dimoranti nell’inclita città di Venetia (Discourse on the State of the Jews, Particularly Those Dwelling in the Illustrious City of Venice) (Venice, 163 8).73 In it Luzzatto displayed a keen understanding of the contemporary economic and commercial situation, combined with a thorough acquaintance with classical Greco-Roman literature, an awareness of contemporary trends in philosophical and political thought, and a cognizance of new scientific discoveries in mathematics and astronomy. The Discorso is of major significance in that it constituted the first systematic exposition of the role of the Jews in international trade and presented the theoretical background for the practical commercial raison d'etat that determined their treatment by the Venetian government; later it was to influence both Menasseh ben Israel and John Toland profoundly.74 In light of these considerable intellectual resources, sixteenth-century Venice, with its available capital, technical knowledge, and convenient location, understandably emerged as a major center of printing in Hebrew, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), and Yiddish (Judeo-German), playing a fundamental role in the early history of Hebrew printing and publishing.75 One of the outstanding publishers of Hebrew 831
books in Renaissance Italy, and indeed of all time, was Daniel Bomberg, a Christian originally from Antwerp, who with the help of numerous editors, typesetters, and proofreaders, mostly either Jews or converts from Judaism, printed around two hundred Hebrew books. Of prime significance for Jewish religious life and culture is his complete edition —the first—of the Babylonian Talmud (1520-23), with the commentary of Rashi and the Tosaphot, whose format and pagination have been followed in virtually all subsequent editions up to the present. Also especially noteworthy are his edition of the Rabbinic Bible (Hebrew, Mikra'ot gedolot) (1517-18) with the Aramaic translation and standard commentaries—which also became the standard model for most later editions — and such major works as the Palestinian Talmud and the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides. Subsequent Hebrew printers of importance included Marc’Antonio Giustiniani, whose activity overlapped with the last years of Bomberg, and Alvise Bragadini. Their competition over rival editions of Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah led eventually in 1553 to a papal decree condemning the Talmud and ordering it burned. Consequently, on 21 October 1553 the Venetian government burned Hebrew books in the Piazza San Marco, to the great loss of the Jewish community and the Christian printers alike. The following year the pope, responding to the pleas of the Jews, permitted Hebrew books to be printed after being censored, while in 1559 Venice’s Esecutori contro la Bestemmia ruled that Hebrew books, with the exception of the Talmud and its commentaries, could be published after expurgation. Consequently, in the early 1560s Hebrew printers in Venice resumed their activities, printing books of Jewish authors from both Venice and throughout the Jewish world who sought out the city’s publishing resources and its capacity to export books all over Europe and the Mediterranean world. Thus, in 1555 the definitive code of Jewish law, the Shulhan arukh of Joseph Karo, was printed for the first time in Venice. Also significant were the Jewish doctors of Venice, attracted there by the presence of the nearby medical school of Padua.76 At the University of Padua, Jews could obtain a master’s degree in medicine — basically a professional degree—but generally not did aspire to the higher degree of doctor in arts and medicine, which 832
was granted by the Sacred College of Philosophers and Physicians in a Catholic religious ceremony; only a very few Jews ever obtained this degree, on the basis of a special papal privilege. Non-Catholics could, however, also be granted the degree outside the walls of the university by individuals known as Counts Palatine, who had received their authority from the Holy Roman Emperor. In this private ceremony conducted before a notary and witnesses, both Jewish and Protestant medical students received their doctorates until 1615, when the Venetian government established the Venetian College (Collegium Venetorum), which granted doctorates to students who would not or could not receive their degrees from the Sacred College.77 The attendance of Jewish students at the medical school of Padua was especially significant, since it was generally regarded as the best medical school in Europe, with the humanities integrated into the scientific curriculum. As such, Padua provided one of the richest opportunities for Jews to familiarize themselves intellectually and socially with some of the best of European civilization. From the sixteenth century until well into the eighteenth, Jewish students came there from all over central and eastern Europe and returned to serve in their communities and elsewhere. The experience not only provided socialization among Jews from varied backgrounds but also required them to interact with Christians from all over Europe. After the Renaissance discovery of the surviving medical texts of classical antiquity, Jewish doctors no longer enjoyed a special advantage as a result of their access to many of those texts through Arabic intermediaries. Still, they were generally appreciated by the Venetian government, which continued to exempt some from the ghetto curfew and wearing the yellow baretta. Especially noteworthy was the outstanding Jewish doctor David de’ Pomis (1525-93), who left Rome as a result of Cum Nimis Absurdum, eventually settling for the rest of his life in Venice, where he published, among other works, his De Medico Hebraeo Enaratio Apologica, which refuted charges often brought against Jews and Jewish doctors.78 Of course, the most famous Jew associated with the city of Venice is the fictional Shylock, who came to life only in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (London, 833
1597). Familiar to millions who have never read the play, he has become one of the most widely known and controversial stereotypes of the Jew.79 It must always be borne in mind, however, that Shylock was not based on a historical figure and that the play and its characters cannot be used to reconstruct the history of the Jews of Venice.80 Although the play does correctly confirm the essential role played by Jewish moneylending, the Jews of Venice were in fact absolutely forbidden to make large-scale commercial loans of the type it describes. It should also be noted that nowhere in the play does Shakespeare mention either the institution of the ghetto or the requirement that Jews wear a special headcovering. Finally, no Venetian court would have upheld Shylock’s “pound of flesh” penalty clause but rather would have either severely punished lender and borrower alike or deemed them both insane and treated them accordingly. Even though Shakespeare’s treatment of the character of Shylock must be looked at critically in the light of modem antisemitism, in the context of such contemporary portrayals of the Jew in European literature as Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta or Jewish characters in the widely performed Easter passion plays of the day, Shylock represented a relatively less hostile portrayal of the Jew, one that was unprecedented prior to the Enlightenment.
The Eighteenth Century As eighteenth-century Venice declined economically, in a relative if not an absolute sense, the financial condition of the Jewish community as a corporate entity declined with it, even though, as Gino Luzzatto noted, an impoverished community did not mean that all of its individual members were impoverished.81 This deterioration worried the Venetian government, above all because the Jewish community had to be solvent in order to operate the pawnshops, and the state was still unwilling to establish a monte di pieta, although that possibility was raised on several occasions during the eighteenth century. After the five-year charter of the Tedeschi moneylenders expired in 1720 and the ten- year charter of the Levantine and Ponentine Jews expired in 1721, neither was renewed. Instead, for over fifteen years the Venetian government discussed at great length how to restore the impoverished Jewish community of Venice. In 1721 it granted the Tedeschi Jews the permission they had long sought to raise the interest rate on pawns from 5 834
percent to 5.5 percent, as well as to charge a transaction fee for each receipt issued. In 1722 the government took the major step of creating the magistracy of the Inquisitorato sopra l’Universita degli Ebrei for the purpose of restoring and maintaining the financial solvency of the community. For the rest of the century the Inquisitorato, together with the Senate and other magistracies, constantly worked out detailed regulations in attempts to promote the smooth functioning of the banks, the repayment of the various substantial debts of the Jewish community, and the general restoration of the community to its former state, eventually closely supervising — today one would say micromanaging — all aspects of its everyday financial affairs. Along the way, in 1738, the dual-charter system of the Jews ended, with one unified charter being issued for all Jews residing in the Yenetian state. In a sense such a charter was long overdue, since the charters of the Tedeschi Jews, which antedated those of the Levantine and Ponentine Jewish merchants, contained general provisions that were also applied to the merchants, while the once distinct economic functions of the two groups had merged over the years. Significantly, for the first time that charter specified the hours of the opening and closing of the ghetto gates, which were again fixed at sunrise and sunset, as in 1516. This provision was repeated in the charter of 1750, while that of 1760 extended the hours of closing to the fourth hour of the night from 1 October to 1 April and the second hour of the night from 1 April to the end of September.82 After numerous lengthy and divided conferences of Venetian magistracies convened by the Senate, an extensive new charter consisting of ninety-six clauses was issued in 1777.83 Among other things, it specified that the Jews of the Venetian state could never claim or enjoy any right of sudditananza (the privileges reserved only for Venetian subjects) and consequently could never anywhere be regarded as such. The next charter, of 1788, ameliorated the general situation slightly by extending the closing time of the ghetto gates to the middle of the night all year round.84 That charter was slightly over a year away from its expiration when, in May 1797, with the army of Napoleon Bonaparte standing poised across the lagoons, the Venetian government dissolved itself in favor of a municipal council. That council 835
ordered the ghetto gates torn down, and the special restricted status of the Jews of Venice came to an end.85 Yet while the institution that gave birth to the word ghetto no longer existed, the word lived on, in a process that has not yet been traced, coming to be used in a looser sense to refer to any area densely populated by Jews, even in places where they had freedom of residence and lived in the same areas and houses as Christians. Later still it gained increasing currency and became the general designation for areas densely inhabited by members of any minority group, whether by compulsion or by choice.86 Thus, ghetto entered the general, everyday vocabulary, much like other words first associated with the historical experience of the Jews, such as diaspora, pogrom, and holocaust.87
Conclusion Largely because of the negative connotations of the word ghetto, the nature of Jewish life in early modem Venice — and elsewhere — has often been misunderstood. Clearly the establishment of ghettos did not lead to the breaking off of Jewish contacts with the outside world on any level, often to the consternation of church and state alike. Quite apart from the question as to whether the ghetto succeeded in fulfilling the expectations of those in the outside world who desired its establishment, from the perspective of the Jews the alleged impact of the ghetto upon their cultural and intellectual life requires substantial revision. Certainly the autobiography of Leon Modena and the writings of Simone Luzzatto, for example, give a clear indication of a keen knowledge of the outside world and most extensive contact with it. To a considerable extent integrated into their environment despite its generally anti-Jewish orientation, the Jews of Venice shared much of the general outlook and many of the interests of their Christian neighbors, although they completely retained their own religious identity, with all that it entailed.88 Early modern Venice was a dynamic center of Jewish creativity, and it produced a cultural life closer to the more open, pre-1492 Spanish (Sephardic) Jewish paradigm than to the more restrictive type characteristic of northern Germanic-Polish (Ashkenazic) Jewry, which is often
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mistakenly considered to constitute the Jewish norm instead of only one cultural tradition among the many that evolved over time. In general, the genres and modes of Jewish self-expression and creativity were determined not so much by whether a community was forcibly ghettoized as by whether the surrounding environment constituted an attractive stimulus to Jewish thought and a desirable supplement to traditional Jewish genres of intellectual activity. This was certainly the case in a location as cosmopolitan as Venice, where the afterglow of the Renaissance continued to shine. Yet given the numerous restrictions imposed on Jews in Venice, it may well be asked how any Jew could find anything positive in residing in the ghetto or desire to do so. Nevertheless, as the Tedeschi Jewish moneylenders and the Levantine and Ponentine Jewish merchants sought the renewal of their charters, they expressed their profound desire to continue to live and eventually to die under the benign rule of the Venetian government. Even allowing for exaggerated rhetoric, it is obvious that the Jews wanted keenly to reside in Venice, notwithstanding all the restrictions. Indeed, several significant Renaissance and early modem figures, both Jewish and non-Jewish, saw the righteous laws and sense of justice widely associated with the “myth of Venice” as incarnated in the republic’s treatment of the Jews. This was most articulately and extensively invoked in the Discorso of Simone Luzzatto, who affirmed that “above all, holding the Jews firm and annexed to the city and its state is the exemplary justice administered in their defense against any group of persons that offends them, whether in person or in goods, with the exact observance of all that is contained in their charters and the privileges promised to them.”89 Venice’s real concern for due process in its treatment of the Jews was confirmed by the elaborate procedure of petitions, reports, discussions, and votes, even on such issues as the forced baptism of Jewish minors.90 Luzzatto recognized that “there is no doubt that among all the states and places in the world, the Jewish people is pleased by the very gentle government of the Most Serene Republic, because its government is stable and not variable on account of the changeability of the thoughts of one sole ruler and the instigation of counselors.”91 On their part, whenever the Jews felt that the terms of their charter or provisions of other legislation were not being 837
appropriately observed, they would seek redress, either when petitioning for renewal of their charters or in special ad hoc petitions submitted as the need arose; sometimes their wishes were granted. Everything went through the appropriate councils and magistracies in accordance with the regular procedures. Indeed, on occasion those responsible for formulating the government’s Jewish policy could not agree on what to recommend, so magistracies issued both majority and minority reports, while councils were faced with more than one proposal on which to vote. Clearly, however, anti-Jewish sentiment did exist in Venice in all circles. While its extent remains to be ascertained, as elsewhere on the Italian peninsula it apparently did not reach the collective level of overt hostility and physical violence encountered in the Germanic lands and in eastern Europe. Inquisitional trials, the frank autobiography of Leon Modena, and numerous other sources reveal constant peaceful interaction between Jews and Christians on all levels, despite the legal restrictions and religious condemnation. Accordingly, one cannot dismiss out of hand Luzzatto’s assertion that in Venice “the common people are more peaceful and docile toward the Jewish nation than in other parts of the world”;92 had this remark been too greatly at variance with the perceptions of the Venetian patriciate for whom the Discorso was written, Luzzatto would probably not have made it. Despite the general perception in Renaissance and early modern Europe that Venice was an attractive place for Jews to reside, the Jews themselves often perceived their fate as hanging in the balance each time the Senate decreed an expulsion, failed to renew a charter, or, as happened much more frequently, failed to renew it on the first ballot. This insecurity was always hanging over a community that resided in Venice on sufferance and not by right, and although the Venetian government did not act arbitrarily within the framework of the numerous restrictions affecting everyday life, it must never be forgotten that the Jews of Venice were always considered by all to constitute the Other who inhabited their own separate space and whose status was not, and could never be, the same as that of the other native inhabitants of the city.93
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Notes 1. For the most elaborate presentation of this view, still sometimes encountered, especially in popular works and guidebooks, see Cecil Roth, Venice (Philadelphia, 1930; reprinted 1975 as The Jewish Community of Venice), 9 -12. Also Encyclopaedia Judaica, 16 vols. (Jerusalem, 1970), s.v. “Venice.” 2. See, most extensively, Benjamin Ravid, “The Jewish Mercantile Settlement of Twelfth and Thirteenth Century Venice: Reality or Conjecture?” Association for Jewish Studies Review 2 (1977): 201-26. Also Reinhold Mueller, “Les Preteurs juifs de Venise au moyen age,” Annales ESC 30 (1975): 1277-130 2; David Jacoby, “Les Juifs a Venise du XTVe au milieu du XVTe siecle,” in Venezia centro di mediazione tra oriente e occidente, ed. Hans-Georg Beck, Manoussos Manoussacas, and Agostino Pertusi, 2 vols. (Florence, 1977)i 1:16 3-216 , photoreproduced in David Jacoby, Recherches sur la Mediterranee orien- tale (London, 1979), art. 6; and Eliyahu Ashtor, “ Gli inizi della comunita ebraica a Venezia,” La rassegna mensile di Israel 44 (1978): 683-703, photoreproduced in Eliyahu Ashtor, The Jews and the Mediterranean Economy, Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries (London, 1983), art. 4, and reprinted in Umberto Fortis, ed., Venezia ebraica (Rome, 1979), 17-39. 3. See Jacoby, “ Les Juifs a Venise,” 165, suggesting that he may have gone to Venice on business and his coreligionists decided to avail themselves of his trip for their own purposes. 4. See David Jacoby, “Venice and Venetian Jews in the Eastern Mediterranean,” in Gli ebrei e Venezia, ed. Gaetano Cozzi (Milan, 1987), 37-39. 5. On Isaiah di Trani, who, some scholars have claimed, lived in Venice in the thirteenth century, see Benjamin Ravid, “The Legal Status of thejews ofVenice to 1509,” Proceedings of the American AcademyforJewish Research 54(1987): 17 1-7 2 n. 2. 6. See Jacoby, “Les Juifs a Venise,” 16 6,182-83, 20 1-2, 203. Also Ashtor, “Gli inizi,” 687. 7. See Mueller, “Les Preteurs juifs,” 1278-82, summarized in Ravid, “Legal Status,” 1 7I_ 74- Also Reinhold Mueller, “The Jewish Moneylenders of Late Trecento Venice: A Revisitation,” Mediterranean Historical Review 10 (1995): 202—17. 8. See Mueller, “Les Preteurs juifs,” 1280. 9. The legislation was to be valid for five years and then remain in effect until revoked. See ibid., 1280-83; Jacoby, “Les Juifs a Venise,” 166, 188-90; and Ravid, “Legal Status,” 173-74. 10. See Mueller, “Les Preteurs juifs,” 1284-85; Ravid, “Legal Status,” 174-76; and Mueller, “Jewish Moneylenders,” 204-10. 11. See Mueller, “Les Preteurs juifs,” 1285-86, and Ravid, “Legal Status,” 177-78. 12. See Ravid, “Legal Status,” 180-81. On the special Jewish distinguishing badge, see Benjamin Ravid, “From Yellow to Red: On the Distinguishing Head-Covering of the Jews of Venice,” Jewish History 6 (1992): 179-210. 13. See Ravid, “Legal Status,” 181-82. 14. For further details, see Jacoby, “Les Juifs a Venise”; Ashtor, “ Gli inizi”; and David Jacoby, “New Evidence on Jewish Bankers in Venice and the Venetian Terraferma (c. 1450-1550),” in The Mediterranean and thejews: Banking, Finance, and International Trade, XVI—XVIII Centuries, ed. Ariel Toaff and Simon Schwarzfuchs (Ramat Gan, 1989), 151-78 . 15. See Ravid, “Legal Status,” 185. 16. Ibid., 189. 17. Ibid., 185-86. 18. Ibid., 187. 19. Ibid., 186. Guido Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crimes and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York, 1985), 87-88, associates this legislation with measures adopted against homosexuality. 20. For a revision of the assumption that the Italian peninsula served as a haven for large numbers of Spanish exiles in 1492, see Cecil Roth, “The Spanish Exiles of 1492 in Italy,” in Homenaje aMillas-Vallicrosa (Barcelona, 1956), 2:293-302; Henry Kamen, “The Mediterranean and the Expulsion of Spanish Jews in 1492,” Past and Present 119 (1988): 30-55; and Robert Ronbl,Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, trans. Anthony Oldcorn (Berkeley, 1994), 59-61. On the Sephardim in Venice, see Benjamin Ravid, “Les sefarades a Venise,” in Les Juifs d’Espagne: Histoire d'une diaspora, 1492—1992, ed. Henri Mechoulan (Paris, 1992), 283-94, 32 1-32 (subsequently translated into Spanish); Renata Segre, “Sephardic Settlements in Sixteenth Century Italy: A Historical and Geographical Survey,” Mediterranean Historical Review 6 (1991—92): 112 -3 7 ; Robert Bonfil, “The History of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews in Italy,” in Moreshet Sepharad [The Sephardi Legacy], ed. Haim Beinart, 2 vols. (Jerusalem, 1992), 2:217-39; and Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini, “Ebrei sefarditi, marrani e 839
nuovi cristiani a Venezia nel Cinquecento,” in E andammo dove il vento cispinse: La cacciata degli ebreidalla Spagna, ed. Guido N . Zazzu (Genoa, 1992), 115 -37. 21. See Ravid, “Legal Status,” 192-93. The sole exception were the bankers of Mestre, who had to be constantly in Venice, at the magistracy of the Sopraconsoli. 22. Ibid., 193-94. Also Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 5 13-14 , and Segre, “ Sephardic Settlements,” 120 -21. 1 23. On the charter of 1503, see Reinhold Mueller, “ Charitable Institutions, thejew- ish Community, and Venetian Society,” Studi veneziani 14 (1972): 62-74. 24. For a caution against overestimating Jewish contributions to state treasuries in Renaissance Italy, with specific reference to the situation in Venice, see Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 37-44. 25. See Pullan, Rich and Poor, 4 31-75 , and Benjamin Ravid, “Moneylending in Seventeenth Century Jewish Vernacular Apologetica,” in Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Isadore Twersky and Bernard Septimus (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 257-83. 26. On the Jewish moneylenders of Venice, see, in addition to the essay of Brian Pullan in this volume, Pullan, Rich and Poor, 476-578; Mueller, “Charitable Institutions”; Benjamin Ravid, “The Socioeconomic Background of the Expulsion and Readmission of the Venetian Jews, 15 7 1-15 7 3 ,” in Essays in Modem Jewish History: A Tribute to Ben Halpem, ed. Frances Malino and Phyllis Cohen Albert (Rutherford, N.J., 1982), 27-45; and Brian Pullan, “Jewish Moneylending in Venice: From Private Enterprise to Public Service,” in Gli ebrei e Venezia, 671-86. 27. On the establishment of the ghetto ofVenice, see Robert Finlay, “The Foundation of the Ghetto: Venice, the Jews, and the War of Cambrai,” Proceedings ofthe American Philosophical Society 126 (1982): 149-52; Benjamin Ravid, “The Religious, Economic, and Social Background and Context of the Establishment of the Ghetti ofVenice,” in Gli ebrei e Venezia, 211-59 ; Ennio Concina, “Parva Jerusalem,” in La cittd degli ebrei: II ghetto di Venezia: Architettura e urbanistica, ed. Ennio Concina, Ugo Camerino, and Donatella Calabi (Venice, 1991), 11-15 5 ; and Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, “Venice between Jerusalem, Byzantium, and Divine Retribution: The Origins of the Ghetto,” Mediterranean Historical Review 6 (1991): 163-79. Also Benjamin Ravid, “New Light on the Ghetti of Venice,” in Shlomo Simonsohn Jubilee Volume: Studies on the History of thejews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance Period, ed. Daniel Carpi etal. (Tel Aviv, 1993), 149-76, and Benjamin Ravid, “Curfew Time in the Ghetto of Venice,” in Medieval and Renaissance Venice, ed. Ellen E. Kittell and Thomas F. Madden (Urbana, 1999), 237-75. 28. The following account is based on the pioneering account of Concina, “Parva Jerusalem,” 12-24, sections of which are available in English in Ennio Concina, “The Origins of the Venetian Ghetto: The Houses, the People, the Laws, 13 90-1540,” in Het ghetto van Venetie [The Ghetto in Venice: Ponentini, Levantini, and Tedeschi, 15 16 - 1797], ed. Julie-Marthe Cohen (Gravenhage, 1990), 28-45, an^ Ennio Concina, “Owners, Houses, Functions: New Research on the Origins of the Venetian Ghetto,” Mediterranean Historical Review 6 (1991): 180-89. 29. On the Minotto family, see Benjamin Ravid, “The Minotto Family and an Unapproved Construction Project in the Ghetto Vecchio of Venice, 1608-1609,” in Daniel Carpi Jubilee Volume, ed. Minna Rozen, Anita Shapira, and Dina Porat (Tel Aviv, 1996), 91-10 8, with a family tree on 106. 30. See Concina, “Parva Jerusalem,” 23, and Concina, “Origins of the Venetian Ghetto,” 31. 31. See the summary of the discussions recorded in the Diarii of Marino Sanuto in Benjamin Ravid, “ On Sufferance and Not by Right: The Status of the Jewish Community of Early-Modern Venice,” in Leone Modena and His World, ed. David Malkiel (Jerusalem, 2001). Excerpts are available in English translation in Pullan, Rich and Poor, 488-98, and Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 39-43. 32. See Pullan, Rich and Poor, 499-504. 33. Ibid., 488-540; Ravid, “Socioeconomic Background,” 2 7-51. 34. See Pullan, Rich and Poor, 521. 35. Ibid., 527-31; Ravid, “Socioeconomic Background,” 36-40. 36. See Ravid, “Socioeconomic Background,” 42-45. 37. Ibid., 47-48. 38. See Benjamin Ravid, “Cum Nimis Absurdum, the Venetian Republic, and the Patriarch of Venice” (forthcoming). 39. See Ravid, “Curfew Time in the Ghetto of Venice,” 253-57.
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40. See Benjamin Ravid, “An Introduction to the Economic History of the Iberian Diaspora in the Mediterranean,” Judaism 41 (1992): 268-85. 41. On the establishment of the Ghetto Vecchio, see Ravid, “Religious, Economic, and Social Background,” 222-28. 42. See Benjamin Ravid, “A Tale of Three Cities and Their Raison d’Etat: Ancona, Venice, Livorno, and the Compedtion for Jewish Merchants in the Sixteenth Century,” Mediterranean Historical Review 6 (1991-92): 143-45, an^ Benjamin Ravid, “Venice, Rome, and the Reversion of Conversos to Judaism: A Study in Ragione di Stato,” in L'identita dissimulata: Giudaizzanti iberici nelPEuropa cristiana dell’etd modema, ed. Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini (Florence, 2000), 151-93. 43. The documents have been published in David Kaufmann, “ Die Vertreibung der Marranen aus Venedig im Jahre 1550,” Jewish Quarterly Remew, old series, 13 (1900): 526-29. 44. On Crypto-Jews and the Inquisition in Venice, see, in addition to the essay of Pier Notes to Pages 17-22 253 Cesare Ioly Zorattini in this volume, Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini, ed., Processi del S. Uffizio di Venezia contro ebrei e giudaizzanti, 14V0IS. (Florence, 1980-99); Brian Pullan, Thejews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice (Oxford, 1983); and Ravid, Venice, Rome, and the Reversion of Conversos to Judaism.” 45. See Ravid, “Tale of Three Cities,” 147; Pullan, Jews of Europe, 189; and Ioly Zorattini, Processi, 97-8. 46. For recent literature on Rodriga, see Benjamin Ravid, “An Autobiographical Memorandum by Daniel Rodriga, Inventor of the Scala of Spalato,” in The Mediterranean and thejews, 18 9-213; Benjamin Ravid, “Daniel Rodriga and the First Decade of the Jewish Merchants of Venice,” in Exile and Diaspora: Studies in the History of the Jewish People Presented to Professor Haim Beinart [Latin-alphabet volume] (Jerusalem, 1991), 203—23; Maren Frejdenberg, “Venetian Jews and the Ottoman Authorities in the Sixteenth Century,” Etudes balkaniques 3 (1994)- 5^*~66; and Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini, “L’Inventario dei beni di Daniel Rodriga a Venezia,” in Memorfui dierum antiquorum: Studi in memoria di Luigi de Biasio, ed. Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini and Attilio M. Caproni (Udine, 1995), 135-43. 47. Quite probably the government was acting under the influence of the group known as thegiovani. See Gaetano Cozzi, “ Societa veneziana, societa ebraica,” in Gliebrei e Venezia, 336-44, and Benjamin Ravid, “The First Charter of the Jewish Merchants of Venice, 1589,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 1 (1976): 197-222. 48. Sarpi specifically cited a safe-conduct of Pope Julius III in i 552- ^ee R^^d, “Venice, Rome, and the Reversion of Conversos to Judaism.” 49. See Ravid, “ Daniel Rodriga and the First Decade,” 227. 50. See Ravid, “Tale ofThree Cities,” 155-58. 51. On the charter of 16 11, see Benjamin Ravid, “The Third Charter of the Jewish Merchants of Venice, 1611,” Jewish Political Studies Review 6 (1994): 83-134, and on subsequent charters, Benjamin Ravid, “An Introduction to the Charters of the Jewish Merchants of Venice,” in The Mediterranean and thejews II: Society and Culture in Early Modem Times, ed. Elliott Horowitz and Moises Orfali (Ramat Gan, forthcoming). 52. See Benjamin Ravid, “The Establishment of the Ghetto Nuovissimo of Venice,” \njews in Italy: Studies Dedicated to the Memory of Umberto Cassuto, ed. Haim Beinart (Jerusalem, 1988), 35-54, and Donatella Calabi, “II ghetto e la citta, in La cittd degli ebrei, 224-26. 53. See Benjamin Ravid, “From Geographical Reality to Historiographical Symbol: The Odyssey of the Word Ghetto,” in Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, ed. David Ruderman (New York, 1992), 373-85, and Bonfil, Jewish Life innRenaissance Italy, 68-77. 54. See Ravid, “Daniel Rodriga and the First Decade,” 206-9, 2 I3_ I4> 22r> an^ Ravid, “Third Charter,” passim. On the hostility between the Tedeschi and the Levantine and Ponentinejews, see ibid., 86, 122-23 n. 9. 55. See Ravid, “Introduction to the Charters of the Jewish Merchants of Venice.” 56. See Concina, “Parva Jerusalem,” 40-45. 57. See Ravid, “Curfew Time in the Ghetto ofVenice,” 24 1-51. 58. See Ravid, “From Yellow to Red,” 179 -210 , and Benjamin Ravid, “Christian Travelers in the Ghetto ofVenice,” in Between History and Literature: Studies in Honor of Isaac Barzilay, ed. Stanley Nash (Ramat Gan, 1997), 111-50. 59. See Umberto Fortis and Paolo Zolli, La parlatagiudeo-veneziana (Rome, 1979). 60. On this issue, which requires further investigation, see Ravid, “Curfew Time in the Ghetto of Venice,” 248-49. 841
61. On the establishment of the cemetery, see Ravid, “Legal Status,” 176 -77, 179. For recent literature, see Carla Boccato, The Ancient Jewish Cemetery of San Nicolo on the Lido in Venice, trans. Lillian Hertzberg (Venice, 1981). Also the color photographs in Roberta Curiel and Bernard D. Cooperman, The Venetian Ghetto (New York, 1990), 148-55. 62. As in the title of the book by Concina, Camarino, and Calabi. On the Jewish community, see, in addition to the essays of Donatella Calabi, David Malkiel, and Elliott Horowitz in this volume, David Malkiel, A Separate Republic: The Mechanics and Dynamics of Jewish Self-Government, 1607-1624 (Jerusalem, 1991); Daniel Carpi, “Ordinances of the Community ofYfenice, 159 1—1607,” in Exile and Diaspora, 447,465—66, reprinted in Daniel Carpi, Between Renaissance and Ghetto (Tel Aviv, 1989), 173, 201; Daniel Carpi, “Le ‘Convenzioni’ degli anni 1624 e 1645 ^a le ^ ‘nazioni’ della comunita di Venezia,” in Shlomo Simonsohn Jubilee Volume, 25-70; and Benjamin Ravid, “ ‘A Republic Separate from All Other Government’: Jewish Autonomy in Venice in the Seventeenth Century and the Translation of the Libro Grande” [Hebrew, with documents in Italian], in Hagut u-mdaseh [Thought and Action: Essays in Memory of Simon Rawidowicz], ed. Alfred A. Greenbaum and Alfred L. Ivry (Tel Aviv, 1983), 53-76. Also the Hebrew articles of Daniel Carpi, “On the ‘Redemption of Captives’ in Venice in the Early Seventeenth Century,” “The Activity of the ‘Great German Synagogue’ of Venice on Behalf of the Poor of Eretz Yisrael (1642-1784),” and “The Activity of the ‘Italian Synagogue’ of Venice on Behalf of the Jewish Communities of Eretz Israel (1576 -1733),” all republished in Carpi, Between Renaissance and Ghetto, 209-81. 63. Lack of space precludes a more detailed presentation of this complex issue here. For some figures, see Benjamin Ravid, Economics and Toleration in Seventeenth Century Venice: The Background and Context of the Discorso of Simone Luzzatto (Jerusalem, 1978), 75- 77; Sergio Della Pergola, “Aspetti e problemi della demografia degli ebrei nelFepoca preindustriale,” in Gli ebrei e Venezia, 201-9; and Gino Luzzatto, “Un anagrafe degli ebrei di Venezia del settembre 1797,” in Scritti in memoria di Sally Mayer (Jerusalem, 1956), 194-98. 64. For an expanded version of this paragraph, see Benjamin Ravid, “ Between the Myth of Venice and the Lachrymose Conception of Jewish History: The Historical Experience of the Jews of Venice,” in Memory and Identity: The Jews of Italy, ed. Bernard D. Cooperman and Barbara Garvin (forthcoming). 65. On the synagogues in the ghetto of Venice in general, see David Cassuto, Ricerche suUe cinque sinagoghe (scuole) di Venezia (Jerusalem, 1978); Concina, “Parva Jerusalem,” 92—155; Ugo Camarino, “Rilievi delle sinagoghe,” in La citta degli ebrei, 159-99; and the color illustrations in Umberto Fords, The Ghetto on the Lagoon (Venice, 1988), and Curiel and Cooperman, Venetian Ghetto. 66. See also David Cassuto, “The Scuola Grande Tedesca in the Venice Ghetto,” Journal of Jewish Art 3-4 (1977): 40-57. 67. See also Adolfo Ottolenghi, Per il IVcentenario della Scuola Canton: Notizie storiche sui templi veneziani di rito tedesco e su alcuni templiprivati con cenni della vita ebraica nei secoli X V I-X IX (Venice, 1932), and Renata Segre, “La Scuola Canton e la nazione tedesca a Venezia nella prima meta del Seicento,” in Daniel Carpi Jubilee Volume, 69-90. 68. See also Adolfo Pacifici, “I regolamenti della Scuola Italiana a Venezia nel secolo XVII0,” La rassegna mensile di Israel 5 (1930): 392-400. 69. Available in English translation in El Libro de los Acurdos, Being the Records and Accompts of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue of London from 1663 to 1681 (Oxford, 19 31), 3, and in the original Spanish in Miriam Bodian, “The Escamot of the Spanish- Portuguese Jewish Community of London, 1664,” Michael 9 (1985): 16. 70. See Ravid, “Christian Travelers in the Ghetto of Venice,” 115 -17 , and Ravid, “ Between the Myth of Venice and the Lachrymose Conception ofjewish History.” 71. See Ravid, “Christian Travelers in the Ghetto of Venice,” esp. 116 -17 and 137 n. 23. 72. See Leon Modena, Chayye’ Yehuda [The Autobiography of a Venetian Rabbi], ed. Daniel Carpi (Tel Aviv, 1985). An English translation by Mark R. Cohen has been published under the title The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena's Life of Judah (Princeton, 1988). 73. The work was written in Italian for non-Jewish readers in order to avert a possible expulsion of the Jews as a result of a major case of bribery of Venetian judges through Jewish intermediaries. See Gaetano Cozzi, Giustizia ‘contaminata : Vicende giudiziane di nobili ed ebrei nella Venezia del Seicento (Venice, 1996). 74. On Luzzatto, see Paul F. Grendler, ed. in chief, Encyclopedia of the Renaissance (New York, 1999), s.v. “Luzzatto, Simone (Simha) ” On the Discorso specifically, see Ravid, Economics and Toleration, and Benjamin 842
Ravid, “Contra Judaeos in Seventeenth- Century Italy: Two Responses to the Discorso of Simone Luzzatto by Melchiore Palon- trotti and Giulio Morosini,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 7-8 (1982-83): 30 1-51. On Luzzatto’s other major work, his virtually unstudied Socrate, overo Dell'humano sapere esercitio seriogiocoso (Venice, 1651), see David Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modem Europe (New Haven, 1995), 1 53— an(^ Ariel Viterbo, Socrate nel ghetto: Lo scetticismo mascherato di Simone Luzzatto,” Studi veneziani 38 (1999): 79-128. 75. For recent studies of Hebrew printing, see Paul Grendler, “The Destruction of Hebrew Books in Venice, 1568,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 45 (1978): 103-30, photoreproduced in Paul Grendler, Culture and Censorship in Late Renaissance Italy and France (London, 1981), art. 12; Benjamin Ravid, The Prohibition against Jewish Printing and Publishing in Venice and the Difficulties of Leon Modena, in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 135-53; Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini, “Censura e controllo della stampa ebraica a Venezia nel Cinquecento,” in Manoscritti, frammenti e libri ebraici neWItalia dei secoli X V -X V I, ed. Giuliano Tamani and Angelo Vivian (Rome, 1991), 115 -2 7 ; and Umberto Fortis, Editoria ebraico a Venezia (Venice, 1991). On Ladino, see Ioly Zorattini, “Ebrei sefarditi,” 133-34 , and on Yiddish, Chone Shmeruk, “Yiddish Imprints in Italy” [Hebrew], Italia 3 (1982): 112 -75 . 76. See, in addition to the essay of David Ruderman in this volume, N. Elena Vanzan-Marchini, “Medici ebrei a Venezia nel Cinquecento,” in Venezia ebraica, ed. Umberto Fortis (Rome, 1979), 55-84; Achille Olivieri, “II medico ebreo nella Venezia del Quattrocento e Cinquecento,” in Gli ebrei e Venezia, 449—68; and Daniel Carpi, “Jewish Graduates of the University of Padua during the Sixteenth Century” [Hebrew], in Carpi, Between Renaissance and Ghetto, 96—130. 77. For a list of Jews who received degrees from the Collegium Venetorum, see Abdelkader Modena and Edgardo Morpurgo, Medici e chirurghi ebrei dottorati e licenziati nell’Universitd di Padova dal 1617 al 1816 (Bologna, 1967). 78. In his own days in the bull of Gregory XIII. See Harry Freidenwald, The Jews and Medicine, 3 vols. (Baltimore, 1944), 1:3 1-5 3 , and Vanzan-Marchini, “Medici ebrei,” 61, 79-80. 79. Shylock and the play with which he is associated constitute a controversy that engages every generation, which tends to evaluate them in the light of its own experience. See John Gross, Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy (New York, 1992); James S. Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York, 1996); and Martin Yaffe, Shylock and the Jewish Question (Baltimore, 1997). 80. For a historically aware and sympathetic “sequel” to The Merchant of Venice, see Ludwig Lewisohn, The Last Days of Shylock (New York, 1931). 81. See Gino Luzzatto, “Sulla condizione economica degli ebrei veneziani nel secolo XVIII,” La rassegnamensiledi Israel 16 (1950): 16 1-72. Also Luzzatto, “Un anagrafe degli ebrei di Venezia”; Marino Berengo, La societd veneta alia fine del Settecento (Florence, 1956), 31-34 ; Gino Luzzatto, “Armatori ebrei a Venezia negli ultimi 250 anni della repubblica,” La rassegna mensile di Israel 28 (1962): 160-68; Salvatore Ciriacono, Olio ed ebrei nella repubblica veneta del Settecento (Venice, 1975); Giovanni Tabacco, Andrea Tron e la crisi dell'aristocrazia senatoria a Venezia (Udine, 1980); Giacomo Carletto, II ghetto veneziano nel Settecento attraverso icatastici (Rome, 1981); and Calabi, “II ghetto e la citta,” 276-84. 82. See Ravid, “CurfewTime in the Ghetto of Venice,” 241-42. 83. Archivio di Stato di Venezia (hereafter ASV), Senato, terra, filza 2660, 27 September 1777, printed as Capitoli della ricondotta degli ebrei di Venezia e dello stato veneziano (Venice, 1777). 84. ASV, Senato, rettori, reg. 165, 53V-56V, 5 June 1788, clause 71, 85. On the abolition of the ghetto and the emancipation of thejews of Venice, see Raccolta di decreti, processi, verbali e discorsi concementi li cittadini ebrei di Venezia dopo la loro felice rigenerazione (Venice, 1797), and Adolfo Ottolenghi, “II governo democratico di Venezia e l’abolizione del ghetto,” La rassegna mensile di Israel 2 (1930): 88-104. 86. See Ravid, “From Historical Reality to Historiographical Symbol,” 381-84. 87. It is interesting to note that Venice also contributed other words to the everyday vocabulary, including arsenal, irroglio, casino, gazette, gondola, lagoon, lazaret, lido, and sequin. 88. See Robert Bonfil, “The Historian’s Perception of the Jews in the Renaissance: Towards a Reappraisal,” Revue des etudesjuives 134 (1984): 59-82, and Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, esp. 10 1-212. 89. See Simone Luzzatto, Discorso circa il stato de gl'hebrei et in particolar dimoranti nelPinclita citta di Venetia (Venice, 1638), I5v-i6r; see also 2ir-v, 35r-v, ^6v-^jr, 91V- 92r. 843
90. See Benjamin Ravid, “The Forced Baptism of Jewish Minors in Early Modern Venice,” Italia (forthcoming). 91. See Luzzatto, Discorso, I5v-i6r. 92. Ibid., 32r-34r. 93. See Ravid, “On Sufferance and Not by Right.”
844
READING 4
Giovanni Curatola Venice’s Textile and Carpet Trade: The Role of Jewish Merchants In addition to spices, the core of East-West trade revolved around textiles. Venice played a double role in this major commerce, as a center of production and a center of exchange. Indeed, even during its periods of greatest island expansion the Republic never developed an infrastructure for providing raw materials that could compare with the infrastructures of its powerful competitors, so it was therefore in the realm of the transformation of raw materials – in particular wool and silk— that Venice managed to acquire a predominant role. Despite a distinctly protectionist policy based on a great many laws and regulations issued down through the centuries in order to guarantee its own citizens’ privileges (application for Venetian citizenship could be made after 20 years of continuous business activity in the city), the Republic was always careful to cultivate the services of those who, in one way or another, were likely to increase its wealth. Such wars the case with silk workshops, whose local development began in 1314 when 32 families from Lucca— members of the Guelph faction— immigrated with their looms to the lagoon.1 These artisans embodied the heritage of a highly important tradition in Italy, one marked by Oriental influences thanks to the stylistic similarity of their textiles with those from the workshops in Palermo. In 1336 a specialized magistracy was instituted to control the production of silk fabrics,2 and by 1380 regulations sought to prevent the emigration of weavers specialized in the production of silk and gold-brocade textiles. Many documents pertaining to textiles have survived in Venice, a city that exported woolen fabrics and imported raw silk and cotton from Flanders. From London and the rest of England it also imported the famous carisee, that is to say kersey fabric, whose zones of production progressively extended to include other countries, to the point where some cloth has even been identified as coming from 845
Romania. Venice probably imported various types of kersey, including those woven with silk wastes. In addition to quantities and prices, these documents supply a good deal of information, such as the repeated exhortation—almost like a litany-—to buy only the finest quality materials. Terminology in the sphere of textiles is particularly complex, as witnessed by the inventory of a Venetian draper’s shop drawn up in the mid-17th century, recently published by Doretta Davanzo Poli.3 It provides an idea of the incredible variety of merchandise offered by Bortolo Cargoni in his shop at the sign Allo Struzzo d'Oro. Oriental textiles were widespread in Venice by that time. When Marco Polo—who can hardly go unmentioned—died in 1324, he bequeathed to his daughter not only zendadi, (or zenale, cendale, cendato, cendà)5 which were bianchi catai, but also others that were yellow, red (with a rose pattern), and black, as well as a piece of chamoca blava a bele ovre,6 some white silk, and à chocholario, drapo de seda a stranii animali, nasizo. The highly interesting term nasizo—similar to nassiccio—derives from the Arabic nasij,7 close to nacco (nachetto), itself derived from nakhkh, that is to say, “mat, rug, carpet.” Doge Francesco Dandolo, meanwhile, on his death in 1339 left magnificent garments, including one described—perhaps for the first time—as made of veluto, vernicio e viride (red and green velvet). There were also mentions of samito, cendato, cansamito, camochchac, and cambloto. The last word occurs in various forms (cammellotto, cambellotto, zambellotto, giamellotto) and refers to a cloth woven of camel hair, angora, or perhaps even a silk-wool blend.8 Ostentatious luxury was discouraged by sumptuary laws,9 notably by a 1334 parte (decree having the force of law) that outlawed “vestes vel varnimenta aliqua de panno ad aurum laborato ad acu, nec de nassiccio" (jackets or other garments of fabrics brocaded with gold, including nassiccio). An exception was allowed, however, for up to two wedding outfits of velvet. In the 15th century, among the fabrics recurring most often in gift exchanges, we might cite various names whose etymology clearly indicates an Oriental origin— scarlato, ormesino, fustaneo, mocagiari, panno, caixea, veluto videlicet zetani, damaschino, mussola. The same is true of baldacchini (or baldechini) made in Baudac (or Bagad, or Baldac— that is to say, Baghdad), which Marco Polo described as “lavori di seta e d'oro in drappi a bestie e uccelli" (cloths of silk and gold 846
patterned with animals and birds).10 Their typology is similar to the motifs of medallions with fighting animals, typical of the workshops in Lucca, which weavers from that city had brought to Venice.11 Italian terminology for clothing is rich in lexical vestiges that recall the Near East, such as giubba (jacket), caffettano (caftan), and tabarro (cloak), just a few of the words attesting to contact with the Orient. Colors also had considerable importance, and among the most frequently cited we find paonazzo (a shade of violet-blue, perhaps inspired by peacock feathers), bcretino (a shade of blue also used in ceramics),12 viride (green), albo (white), nigrum (black), grana (cochineal, the name of a red dye),13 turchino, blavo (blue), morelo (purple), and cremexino (a blood red, highly appreciated along with carminio [crimson]14 and rubeo [ruby]). Evidence of this fashion is easy to detect in artworks, as seen in paintings by the Bellini and Carpaccio, where Islamic influence is particularly noticeable (to mention only the pseudo inscriptions on garments).15 The 15th-century records of the Governatori delle Pubbliche Entrate, or tax department, offer a good insight into the problems that Venetian authorities had to solve when it to came to commercial trade in such large volumes.16 The magistracy charged with monitoring trade was the Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia,17 whose records are of great interest. Also worth mentioning is the fact that its jurisdiction extended to Jewish citizens originally from the Mediterranean basin (Levantines), whereas Jews of German origin came within the purview of the Ufficiali al Cattaver.18 The issue of Jews will be discussed below. Obviously, the Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia had to deal with many questions, some of them concerning merchandise imported from the Orient,19 notably “robbe che vengono condotte in questa città dalla Romania Alta e Bassa dai mercadanti levantini” (merchandise imported from Upper and Lower Romania by Levantine merchants). The magistracy extended for a period of two years the rules and restrictions pertaining to “sede Belgrado, VaIlona, zambellotti, mocaiari, cordovani, montanine, cuori d'ogni sorte desconzi, schiavaine, vallonie, carisee di ponente.”20 Similarly a great number of rulings concern customs duties; indeed, one of the main forms of tax evasion involved simply transporting 847
merchandise through the port of Venice (where it returned after having been temporarily warehoused somewhere else), or having it shipped without paying taxes to the cottimo (of which there were three—Alexandria, Damascus, and London) by registering it in the name of foreigners. The actual sale of such merchandise could give rise to difficulties, and could not be performed directly if one of the merchants was a foreigner: it then required an authorized intermediary (sensale), specialized in certain products.21 We know that merchandise subsequently passed through a lazaretto, where it was quarantined for a period dictated by Venice’s strict health regulations, designed to shield the city from frequent epidemics. A document dated January 23, 1589,22 contains a passage relating to this health issue, involving a request from sanseri (merchants) who sought authorization to enter lazarettos and ships at anchor, accompanied by guards, as had been done in the past (with the obvious intent of getting a jump on the competition). Such permission had been granted to those merchants “che fanno senseria con Turchi, Armeni et altra simel gente” (who trade with Turks, Armenians, and other people of that kind); these merchants had been accompanied by guards who, despite everything, were unable to intervene: “però che parlando il più detti sanseri in turchescho et altre lingue che dalli fanti dell’officio non sono intese, possono facilmente così per questa come per altra causa succeder diversi scandali” (insofar as said sanseri speak above all Turkish and other languages that the guards do not understand, problems may easily arise for that reason, as well as for others). Obviously, this new request was denied and severe penalties were set for violators. One of the most interesting and most surprising aspects of the relations between Venice and the Orient was linked to the importation of carpets, a subject I have addressed elsewhere.23 Not only was the carpet trade important, but it also involved the Jewish community, and not only the one in Venice. Studying the way this trade worked is like opening a window onto Venetian society, particularly from the late 15th century onwards. Carpets are mentioned fairly frequently in archive documents, in a consistent way, particularly in inventories of goods belonging to leading families—and only to those families. Carpets clearly constituted a key feature of their estates. In contrast, descriptive detail is very brief, and when size is mentioned it is given in general terms (“large” or ‘small”); the same is true of 848
function, whether for the floor, to cover a chest, a scagno (stool), or table. Their typology was linked to provenance: caiarino, caierino, cagierino, cagarin (meaning from Cairo, probably from the term used for the Mamluks), or cimishchasa, cimicasa, cimiscasa (from Chemishgezek, a village in central-western Anatolia, according to Michael Rogers),24 or indeed moschetti (for the pseudo-Mamluks from Damascus); or typology might be based on the size of “rosettes” (in which case they might refer to Holbein carpets, with patterns of variable sizes). An admittedly late document, dated June 13, 1763,22 mentions customs duties applicable in Smyrna — expressed in aspri, at an exchange rate of 110 aspri to one leone, or Venetian ducat)— in which, among roughly one hundred categories, we find tappeti con pelo (3 1/2 or 2 1/2 or 6 aspri apiece), followed by tappeti della prima qualità, della seconda, della terza (respectively, 54 aspri each for prime quality, 36 for second best, and 18 for third best). As to the tappeti rigati detti chiliri mentioned in this same document, I think they must refer to kilims. In these inventories, which merit careful examination, we come across a certain number of terms including celone and, more frequently, stratto (or strato), which Niccolò Tommaseo’s famous Italian dictionary defined as “tappeto o panno che si distende in terra, o altrove, in segno d’onoranza ” (carpet or piece of cloth spread on the ground, or elsewhere, as a mark of honor), which explains the custom of using a stratto at Mass (“habbiano alla Messa l’uso d’un stratto”). Camillo Nalin, a popular 19th-century poetaster, described the Festa dei Pugni, celebrated each year in the Dorsoduro district, on the bridge of the same name between Campo San Barnaba and Campo Santa Margherita, as follows: “Se scornenza abonora / da pergola e balconi a metter fora / dove che sta i signori / tapei, damaschi, strati / e rossi e verdi e a fiori / de mille e più segnati.’26 Poetry by such rhymesters includes verses as evocative as they are entertaining: “Tira su la rebalta ogni botega / e con tapei de Spagna e cagiarini / fa bella mostra e onor”;27 and “O quante de custie co i drappi indosso / tiolte dal strazziarol, o dal zudio / se fa più mamaluchi correr drio / che no fa cani el rosegar d’un osso. ”28 Here, then, we have a reference to strazzaria and Jews, who are central to the issue. Much has been written on Venice and the Jews,29 and the Most Serene Republics ambivalent policies towards them are well known. If Jews were confined to the 849
ghetto, and if tolerated rather than protected (and, for that matter, never sure of the future), it was because with their banchi di imprestito they facilitated the circulation of money, a crucial activity in a city dedicated to trade. People preferred to borrow from Jews (who could be exploited in various ways) rather than the charitable pawn establishments known as Montes Pietatis (which would have given the Church—and therefore the pope—some control over sources of credit). Jews had to live and work in the ghetto, and the trades they could practice outside it were limited to pawn- broking, medicine, and strazzaria, that is to say selling secondhand goods.30 The mariegola, or statutes, governing this latter activity —which was important, if limited— expressly mentioned that it could be performed by Jews; the statutes also list carpets among the goods permitted for resale. Describing this trade, Tommaso Garzoni wrote: “Ha commercio sopra tutto con gli Hebrei d ’ogni sorte, tanto del paese, quanto Levantini,31 perché tutti i stracci fanno recapito in ghetto, come le ciauatte à Novara: e tutti i bazari, ò scavezzacolli, ò baratterie si trovano presso à loro, come i giuochi, e le furberie nelle baccane.”32 Shakespeare’s Shylock inevitably comes to mind when reading the following opinion on secondhand dealers who obviously practiced a trade similar, and sometimes identical, to moneylending: “Non hanno i stracciruoli altra cosa di buono in loro, se non che aiutano in un bisogno uno che stia per annegarsi: ma l’aiuto è tanto sinistro, che dall'appendersi ai spini, e à loro c’è poca differenza affatto.”33 Although the object of menacing contempt, the Jewish merchants who indulged in this trade (pretentiously defined as the finest profession in the world”) organized and defended themselves so well that some of them managed to acquire reputations as mercanti di gran negozio entitled to do business with “diversi nobeli e delli principali di questa eccelsa repubblica.”—such merchants included Isaac Luzzatto, Iseppo della Baldosa, Orso della Man, and Isacco dalla Vida. The latter was highly active in the late 16th century as a furniture dealer (notably during festive celebrations, which was moreover an obligation imposed on the Jewish community, mentioned several times in the Condotta, that is to say the collection or laws and duties imposed on Jews by the Venetian Senate).34 He made repeated requests for authorization to open a shop on the quay overlooking the Rio di Cannaregio (near today’s Ponte delle Guglie), hence accessible from both the ghetto and the quay, so that Christians would not be obliged to cross the Jewish quarter to reach his place of business. Moreover, the exercise of this 850
profession gave rise to constant litigation, perhaps epitomized by the admittedly somewhat bold assertion by a used-goods dealer brought to justice-—and convicted— in 1568: “Che noi altri, strazzarioli podemo tegnir ogni sorte de robbe, cha sian stà vendute una volta” (We secondhand dealers can trade in all kinds of merchandise having already been sold one time). This would imply that they had the right to trade in every sphere. Such a claim might justify the 1577 decree specifically prohibiting Jews from buying or selling gold, silver, and jewelry.35 Documents concerning legal proceedings in the mid-16th-century over carpets have recently been published,36 certain aspects of which are distinctly interesting, notably the fact that in Cairo there existed, as Tommaso Garzoni reported, workshops placed under the direct control of Venice, which stipulated that “i tappeti vogliono esser belli di disegno, e haver vaghi colori, e bassi dì pelo” (the carpets must be of handsome design, fine colors, and of shaven wool). Although sources of supply were diverse, Jews exercised control over a luxury item—one of the first to be pawned during straitened times. It is thus natural that Lorenzo Lotto depicted such carpets in his Saint Antonius altarpiece (1542, Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice).37 The well-known story of the purchase of carpets in Venice in 1518 by Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s highly powerful chancellor, who was only able to obtain them after exhausting diplomatic negotiations that lasted several years, attests to the unique role of trade center played by the Republic at that time.38 Despite the loss of many documents on the role of Jews in Venetian trade, certain surviving evidence nevertheless indicates its importance. For example, there is an assertion that Jews in Egypt were dealing in spices on a wholesale basis before the spices reached Alexandria, which obliged the Venetians to open a consulate in Cairo in 1555.39 And yet the Jews did not always act alone. Thus a memorandum dated 1560 described mixed companies trading between Syria and Cyprus, composed of Jews and Christians.40 These companies notably enjoyed the advantage— thanks to varying statuses (Jews being designated as cittadini del sig. Turcho) —of dodging taxes. “They need only do consolazo, and are not obliged to send [merchandise] to Venice, but may do so to Fiume, Ancona, Ferrara, and they pay neither duty nor cottimo, in such manner that they impoverish the Republic 851
and enrich Ancona and Ferrara.” And, “what is more important, they can conduct their business at the fontego.” It is worth mentioning the vast emigration of Jews from the Iberian peninsula after 1492, in relation to the carpets painted by Vittore Carpaccio in his famous St. Ursula cycle now hanging in the Accademia. The years when the artist was painting this series were precisely those when a great number of Jews arrived, and although it is impossible to document the claim, it is nonetheless tempting to assert that the carpets he depicted came not from Anatolia, as was long believed, but from Spain, inspired by Turkish models. In the same cycle—specifically, in the canvas titled The Meeting with the Pope—Carpaccio painted a Jew who is recognizable by his wide-brimmed black hat, worn over a red skullcap. This is just one of many Oriental references by a singular artist whose oeuvre teems with visual allusions to an Orient that was truly at home in Venice. Relations with Persia, on the other hand, were sporadic, and that country never played an important role in the Republic’s commercial dealings, as confirmed in the realm of carpets. Indeed, although Giosafat Barbaro mentioned them during his visit to Tabriz and referred to “Moorish carpets” (1473-78)41 no document attests to their arrival in Venice prior to the early 17th century when, in 1603, Shah Abbas sent one as a gift to the Signoria, accompanied by the recommendation that “each time the Treasury [of Saint Mark’s] is displayed outside, it may be placed on this carpet, to its greater beauty.”42 It was, moreover, on the same occasion that Venice received a silk brocade with decoration inspired by a Christian theme (Madonna and Child), now in the Museo Civico Correr.43 This carpet—also in silk and silver thread—is interesting for its floral motif, whose less than strict symmetry suggests that it was executed from a drawing rather than from a squared-up cartoon. Thus, Persian carpets benefited from an exotic aura compared to the hundreds, indeed thousands, of rugs that arrived from Anatolia and passed through the hands of travelers and merchants, including Jews.
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Notes 1 Bini 1854. 2 Cecchetci 1866. 3 Dawn7-° Poli 2 0 0 1. 4 The inventory lists 50 types of fabrics, whose names are still highly difficult to translate: trnf- faldà, dnipo d'oro richo, sa mis brocado d'oru. richamo latest'n arieti to, lastre d'oro a rie/ito, roseti senza cordon, raso cren tese, raso latado, raso nero, detto cobrado, raso brochado ttetro, rigadiri-nero, saddio ni e rasi brochadi neri, dam aschiti nero, ochieto, e seghadin, catte/'azero nero, raso in opera nero, raso in opera e ochieto, caritelo to e raso in opera nero, schachiglia, schacho seda e stame, raso brochado nero, rase to, bavelin nero, terza/tela dopìa, detta ordenaria, ceti dà alto, renda! rasado sguardo, '/we e colorado, spumiglia, onnesin colorado alto a raso, fabini di parangon, detti color d i crentese, detto bastardo, detto basso, onnesin tabinadi, onnesin tubiti verde, tabin verde basso, ferandine, aniuer coti ariano, detto crentese oro, arnuerin opera acri, detto schiero, camcloto di seda, satiglioni in opera, drogherò seda e lana, detti alla moda, felpa machnduu eendeline. 5 A silk fabric perhaps originating from Sind, similar to taffeta (whose name comes from Persia, more precisely from lair, a village near Yazd. renowned lor its silk industry). 6 finely worked blue silk. 7 Literally, woven fabric, cloth, material. 8 Marin Sanuclo in entioned a great manv exchanges of gifts between O ttom an and Venetian ambassadors. See. lor example, in the appendix of rhis volume, pp. 3~0 ~~2, texts cited in vol. 5, cols. 50 and 993; vol. 15, col. 195; vol. 17. cols. 521 anti 5 45 -5 46 ; anti vol. 4~. col. 135. 9 Bistort 1912. 10 Brunello 1986, p. 111. 11 Gabrieli and Scemato 1079. p. 225. According to Gabrieli, the word baldracca (woman of easy virtue, prostitute) strangely shares the same etymology. 12 See the essav bv Maria Vittoria Lontana in rhis catalogue. 13 Cochineal was highly sought alter, and its purity had to be mo ni to reti, as witnessed bv a document dateti October 17, 1 557: “The cochineals from that city of the Levant in our possession are almost all brought by Jews and, as already mentioned, carry with them various filth, including leaves and bird droppings.'’ Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Cinque Savi, b. 62, f. i65, 1. ’1 bis long text continues by proposing fines of 50 ducats and calling I or strict monitoring bv the customs officers at the doga tut da mar. 14 In this case, the term also has an O riental— more specifically, Persian— etymology, in reference to the small worm (“vermilion ’) used to make another shade of red dye. 15 CuraroIa 2003. 16 Archivio di Stato di Ycne/.ia, Governatori tiellc Pubbliche Lmrate— 166 (38): smuggled silk; 467 (76): duties on white gattoni from Turkey; (81/82): velvet smuggling; (94): mocagiari (fitte fabrics, usually black, with warp of silk and weft of wool); ( 103): velvet; (117): gattoni; ( 1 22): Sill uggled silk (Turkish mcrcbandi.se); (218): silk. Other hies describe lawsuits and disputes with Jews— -a66 (37): ruling on a dispute concerning a measure of grana; 467 (78): Jewish merchants; 469 (183): sale of crimson to Jews. Other documents arc also of interest— 46~ (101): smuggled za[/are {ccisumcs); (147): gold rings brought into Venice; 470 (207): prohibition of maiolica ware from Ravenna; 471 (239): smuggled glass. In 1559 (b. 467, f. 108), a suit was even brought against Domenego Mantoan-— known as “the Red '— for smuggling cheese made in Piacenza! 17 Borgherini Scarabei I in, 1925. 18 1 lie difficult relations between the two magistracies can be clearly detected in Archivio di Stato di Venezia. Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia, b. 62, f i 65. 19 Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Cinque Savi: folders 639-42: Cairo (years 1745-75); folders 555-56: letters from the bailo in Constantinople 1679-97); folders 947—18; Capitular from the cottim o in Damascus 1490-1684); folder 965: Venetian merchants established in Aleppo; folder 958; account hooks of Giacomo Badoer, established in Constantinople, 1436-39 (see Dorini and Bertele, 1956); lolder 966: legal and administrative decisions concerning Armenians, Germans, lurks; (older 968: convoys of com mercial galleys 1586-1698. 20 Archivio di Stato di Venezia, (Cinque Savi, b. 62, f. 165/1, July 16, 1545. 21 Vercelli n 1980. 22 Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Cinque Savi, b. 62, f. 114. 23 Curatola 1986, 1991, 1999, 2004a, 20()4b. 853
24 Rogers 1986, p. 18, n. 19. Giosafat Barbaro passed through this region, bur without mentioning carpets; Lockhart, Mo rozzo della Rocca and Tiepolo 1973, p. 163. 25 Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Cinque Savi, 1, b. 369, 4 c. 26 At dawn people commence / draping windows and balconies / of stately dwellings / with carpets, damasks, and strati ! all red, green, and flowery / and so much more. 27 Hvery shop draws its curtain / with carpets from Spain and item Cairo / thus bedecking itself with honor. 28 “M any of the [ladies] who wear such gar/ are followed by niarnrnahtehi [young people! i who [worry them] like a dog worries a hone.” M y emphasis. Quoted in Livingston 1912, pp. 163- 188. 29 An excellent overview of the question can be found in Atti dei Convegno internazionale di S. (jiorgio mttggiore, Venice (June 5-10, 1983): see also Cozzi 1987. Also worth citing is Arbcl 1995. 30 Pullan 1982. pp. 605- 6. 31 The question of these Levantines has been the subject of much study. They were usually Jews who had fled Spain and Portugal in the late I 5:i: century, and who passed through Venice— where they were known and often had family ties— before heading on to Salonica or Constantinople, thereby becoming subjects of the Ottoman sultan and hence earning a right of safe-conduct. which Venice was more or less obliged to respect. See Rozcn 1993. 32 Garzoni 1 587, discourse CLI1I: “This trade was above all performed by Jews of all kinds, both local people and Levantines, because all the rags wound up in the ghetto, the way old shoes wind up in Novara. And all the business, trade, and barter is done with them like sonic game of chance.” 33 “ The stracciarolioxc good-for-nothings, at best they might come to the aid of a drowning man, but even then with such clumsiness that it would be not unlike grasping thorns.” 34 Curatola 1986. p. 127. 35 Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Archivio alle Arti, Arte dei calegheri, 7. 36 Curatola 20()4a. 37 Zampetti 1969, p. 74. 38 Bearne 1964, pp. 4-15. 39 lame 1978, p. 347. 40 Biblioteca del Museo Correr, M s PD 397, e. 45. 41 Lockhart. Morozzo della Rocca, and Tiepolo 1 973. 42 Gallo 1967, pp. 264-265. 43 Curatola 1993.
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