1516: where the word begins

On 29 March 1516, by decree of Doge Leonardo Loredan, the Jews of Venice were ordered to live on a small island in Cannaregio that had once held a copper foundry. In Venetian the foundry was the getà – and the name stuck to the place, and then to every enclosure like it, everywhere.

The Venice ghetto was among the first places where people were forcibly segregated and surveilled because of religious difference. Gates were locked at sunset and guarded by Christian watchmen whom the community itself was made to pay for.

And yet the paradox of Venice is real. While Jews were being expelled outright from much of Europe, Venice offered something close to safety: the right to live, trade and worship openly, under conditions, but without the threat of expulsion. By the 16th century the ghetto had become a crossroads of peoples and cultures and an international centre of Hebrew printing.

The city that printed Judaism

This is Venice’s most underrated Jewish contribution. In 1516 the Christian printer Daniel Bomberg opened a Hebrew press in the city and produced the first complete printed edition of the Babylonian Talmud. His layout – the text in the centre, Rashi on the inner margin, the Tosafot on the outer – is still the layout of every printed Talmud today, and his pagination is still the standard by which pages are cited worldwide.

Venice also gave the world the first printed editions of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah and of Joseph Karo’s Shulchan Aruch, the code of Jewish law still in use. For roughly a century, the books that shaped Jewish practice everywhere were being set in type on this island.

The five synagogues

Space inside the ghetto was fixed, so Venice built upward: the tallest buildings in the historic city are here, some rising to seven or eight cramped storeys. The synagogues – the Scole – were tucked into the top floors, invisible from the street and identifiable only by a row of five windows.

Five were built, one for each community that arrived: the Scola Grande Tedesca (1528), the Scola Canton, the Scola Italiana, and in the Ghetto Vecchio the two Sephardi synagogues, the Scola Levantina and the Scola Spagnola, the latter attributed to Longhena. Each follows the rite of the community that built it, and each is startling inside after the plainness of the exterior.

In Campo di Ghetto Nuovo stand the bronze reliefs of the Holocaust memorial by Arbit Blatas, and the memorial to the 246 Venetian Jews deported in 1943 and 1944. Eight returned.

After the gates

Napoleon’s troops tore down the ghetto gates in 1797, ending 281 years of segregation. Venetian Jews went on to play a significant part in the fight for Italian unification. That opening was closed again by the Racial Laws of 1938, the German occupation and the deportations.

Today, in a historic city of around 50,000 residents, roughly 450 Venetian Jews remain, only a handful of them living in the ghetto itself. But the quarter is alive: there is a yeshiva, a rest home, a kosher bakery and restaurant, and around each holiday the narrow calli leading into Campo di Ghetto Nuovo fill with the smell of pastries made to recipes a century old.

Planning your visit

The synagogues can only be seen on a guided visit departing from the Jewish Museum in Campo di Ghetto Nuovo, and the tour rotates between three of the five depending on the day and season. Everything closes on Saturdays and Jewish holidays. Allow two to three hours.

Venice also works as a long day trip from Rome or Florence by high-speed train, though the ghetto rewards an unhurried morning.

If you are planning a kosher trip to Venice, ask me how to:

• Find the right accommodation – hotel, apartment or B&B, including kosher options in the Ghetto itself
• Arrange Shabbat in Venice
• Eat kosher
• Visit the Jewish Museum and the synagogues with a guide
• Explore Venice and the lagoon beyond the Jewish quarter