Venetian Ghetto

Venetian Ghetto, seven-acre section of the Cannaregio district in Venice, Italy, to which Jews were confined for more than 250 years beginning in 1516. The Venetian Ghetto was the first to be legally established in the world, and the word ghetto, which predated the residential segregation, was connected to the iron foundries that previously operated in the district.

Until the early 16th century, Jews had been relatively tolerated in Venice, compared with the rest of Europe. This changed after an increasing influx of Jews to Venice, expelled from Spain and Portugal. On March 19, 1516, the Venetian government decreed the segregation of Jews, simultaneously including them within the city and excluding them from full rights.

The area chosen was surrounded on all sides by canals and was linked to the rest of the city by only two bridges. Jews were required to wear insignia to differentiate them from Christians and were not permitted to leave the ghetto at night, and the Jewish residents were required to pay the guards that kept them inside. Several different Jewish communities lived side by side within the Ghetto, among them Levantines, German, Italian, and Spanish Jews. In spite of the various restrictions, the Ghetto grew in size and was twice enlarged—in 1541 and in 1633. Some 700 people lived in the Ghetto initially, a number that grew to about 4,000 by 1650, after which the population declined to about some 1,600 by the end of the century.

When Napoleon conquered Venice in 1797, he destroyed the Ghetto’s gates, ending the legal segregation of the Jews. The ghetto’s population continued to decline during the 19th century. Between 1943 and 1945, 289 Jews were deported from Venice. Only seven returned from the Holocaust.

The ghetto is still a center of Jewish life in Venice. It houses five synagogues, the oldest of which, the Scuola Grande Tedesca, dates from 1528. There is also a yeshiva (religious school), as well as the Jewish Museum of Venice, a museum of Jewish culture. The Venetian Ghetto was not the first site of Jewish persecution in Europe, but it was the first time the Jews were legally and officially segregated. Today, the Venetian Ghetto still shows the richness and depth of Jewish life in Venice in the face of centuries of cultural and legal discrimination.