The Ghetto

Why it matters

The Venetian Ghetto is the area of Cannaregio where the government of the Republic forced the city's Jews to live from 1516 until 1797. The English word ghetto comes from it. For nearly three centuries the Jews of Venice, merchants, doctors, printers and scholars from Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and the Levant, lived here behind gates that were locked at night, and they built one of the great Jewish communities of Europe inside its walls.

It is still a center of Jewish life. The community of Venice numbers around 450 people, only a few of whom live in the Ghetto itself, but many come here for services in the two synagogues still used for worship, and for the museum, the library, the kosher bakery and restaurants and the yeshiva. For a visitor, it is one of the most moving places in the city and one of the least like the rest of it.

The decree of 1516

Jews had long been allowed to visit Venice only for a limited time each year. After the Republic's defeat by the League of Cambrai in 1509, many settled permanently in parishes such as San Cassiano and San Polo. On 29 March 1516 the Senate decreed that all Jews living in the city must move at once into the houses round the court of the Geto at San Girolamo, the Ghetto Nuovo, a small island in Cannaregio.

The decree said openly that the Senate did not want Jews living among Christians. The quarter was locked at night, its gates opened in the morning at the ringing of the Marangona, the great bell of the Campanile of San Marco, and closed again in the evening, with guards paid for by the residents themselves. Windows and quays facing outward were bricked up. Jews could not own property and paid rents a third higher than Christians had.

The Ghetto was enlarged twice as the population grew: the Ghetto Vecchio was added in 1541 for Levantine Jews, and the Ghetto Novissimo in 1633. Because the quarter could not spread, it grew upward, which is why its buildings rise up to eight stories, taller than anywhere else in Venice. On 11 July 1797, after Napoleon's army ended the Republic, the gates were opened and the separation came to an end.

Where the word came from

The name is older than the enclosure. The site had been used by the city's foundries, and one widely supported explanation connects ghetto with the Venetian geto or the Italian gettare, the casting or throwing away of metal where slag was dumped; the first Jewish arrivals, from Germany, are said to have pronounced it with a hard g. That is also why the older enclosure is the Ghetto Nuovo and the later one the Ghetto Vecchio: the names came from the new and old foundries, not from the order in which Jews were sent to live there. Etymologists still disagree.

Life inside the walls

The Ghetto was crowded and cosmopolitan. Its people spoke Venetian, Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Spanish, French and Yiddish, and kept their separate synagogues rather than merging into one Venetian Jewish community. Its scholars and writers were known across Europe: the rabbi Leon of Modena, and his pupil Sara Copia Sullam, a poet who held her own literary salon and debated by letter. Meir Magino, a celebrated glassmaker, came from the Ghetto too, and Venice was a center of Hebrew printing, where the first printed Talmud came from the press of Daniel Bomberg.

What you see

Cross into the Ghetto Nuovo by one of its bridges and you come into a wide, quiet campo, unusually large for Venice, with wellheads, trees and tall, plain houses on every side. The synagogues are hard to spot from outside; nothing on the campo announces them.

There are five historic synagogues, called scole, and four of them were divided by origin: the Scola Grande Tedesca for the Germans, the Scola Italiana, the Scola Spagnola for the Spanish and Portuguese, and the Scola Levantina for Jews from the eastern Mediterranean. The fifth, the Scola Canton, may have begun as a private synagogue.

In the campo are the Holocaust memorials. In September 1943 the Nazi occupation began a hunt for the Jews of Venice; the community's president, Giuseppe Jona, killed himself rather than hand over its list of members, and between November 1943 and August 1944 at least two hundred and five Venetian Jews were deported, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Bronze reliefs by the artist Arbit Blatas and a memorial tablet with the victims' names stand near the building of the old Jewish rest home, from which twenty-one people were taken; stumbling stones in the pavement mark them.

How to visit

The Jewish Museum of Venice, in the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo, is the way into the synagogues, which can be seen only on the guided tours it runs; three of the five are now used only for these visits. Check the museum's site for tour times, and remember that the synagogues and the museum observe the Sabbath and the Jewish holidays.

Allow an hour and a half for the museum and a synagogue tour, longer to walk the Ghetto Vecchio and the Fondamenta di Cannaregio. The Ghetto is a residential quarter and a place of worship, so keep your voice down and dress as you would for a synagogue.

From the station it is a short walk along the Rio Terà Lista di Spagna and over the Ponte delle Guglie; the nearest water-bus landings are Guglie and San Marcuola. Continue east through Cannaregio to the Ca' d'Oro and the Rialto.