Flesh and Stone by Richard Sennett

Author:Richard Sennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393346503
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Plan of the Venetian Ghettos: (1) Italian temple, (2) Cantonese temple, (3) German temple, (4) Levantine temple, (5) Spanish or Pnentina temple.

Entrance to the Ghetto Nuovo in Venice. Copyright Graziano Arici. All rights reserved.

The proposal to make use of the Ghetto Nuovo came from Zacaria Dolfin in 1515. His plan for the segregation of the Jews was to

Send all of them to live in the Ghetto Nuovo which is like a castle, and to make drawbridges and close it with a wall; they should have only one gate, which would enclose them there and they would stay there, and two boats of the Council of Ten would go and stay there at night, at their expense, for their greater security.31

This proposal contains one key difference from the conception of segregation built into the Fondaco dei Tedeschi: in the Jewish Ghetto there was to be no internal surveillance. External surveillance would take place from the boats, circling the Ghetto throughout the night. Imprisoned inside, the Jews were to be left to themselves, an abandoned people.

Dolfin’s proposal was put into practice beginning in 1516. Jews were moved into the Ghetto Nuovo from all sections of the city, but particularly from the Giudecca, where Jews had congregated since 1090. Not all Jews, however. When the Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, a group came to live in a little colony in Venice near a burial ground for executed criminals. There they remained, as did Levantine Jews in other parts of the city, who passed in and out of Venice from the Adriatic coast and the Middle East. Moreover, an important part of the story of the Ghetto is that many Venetian Jews, when faced with the prospect of living in the Ghetto, left the city instead.

About seven hundred Jews, mostly Ashkenazim, were first sent into the Ghetto in 1516. The original annexation in the Ghetto was twenty houses only. These were owned by Christians, since Jews in Venice, as elsewhere, were denied the right to own land or buildings; they could only rent from year to year. As more houses were renovated, rents sky-rocketed; Brian Pullan says that rent on “the narrow houses in the Ghetto was three times as high as it would have been on similar cramped accommodation in the Christian city.”32 The buildings were gradually added to, reaching six or seven stories in height, listing to the sides since their weight was not well supported by piles in the substrate.

The drawbridges opened in the morning and some Jews fanned out into the city, mostly around the area of the Rialto where they circulated with the ordinary crowd. Christians came into the Ghetto to borrow money or to sell food and do business. At dusk, all the Jews were obliged to be back in the Ghetto, the Christians to be out; the drawbridges were raised. Moreover, the windows fronting the exterior were shut every evening and all balconies removed from them, so that the buildings facing the canals outside became like the sheer walls of a castle.

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