VENICE AND THE JEWS

It was a marshy island where waste from the nearby municipal copper foundry (called Gheto Vecio, the Old Gheto) was thrown, and where a new artillery foundry had operated for a short time before all cannon-making activities were definitively moved to the Arsenal (at the extreme Northeast of Venice, in the district of Castello) in the 1430s.

Gheto or Ghetto originally meant ‘metal foundry’, and was simply the name of an abandoned industrial area of Venice, sold in 1434 by the Venetian government to private owners, which later had to rent their modest buildings to the Jews for almost three centuries. In 1541 the government decided that the wandering “Levantine” Jewish merchants arriving in Venice from the Ottoman Empire should receive better treatment than the German and Italian Jews already residing in the New Gheto.

The government established their residences into the nearby Old Ghetto, which was separated from the rest of the city by tall walls, with a single entrance and exit along the Cannaregio Canal that was connected to the New Ghetto via bridge.

At this point the word gheto was strictly associated with the Jews of Venice and the quarter they were obliged to live in.  During the day however, they could exit, while the Christians were permitted to visit.

In 1555 Pope Paul IV issued the infamous bull “Cum Nimis Absurdum” obliging Roman Jews to reside in one single section of the city; the word ghetto was set for migration.

Seven years later the mandatory Jewish quarter in Rome was already called the Ghetto. After the example set by the Papal States, other governments in Italy decided to create their own Jewish Ghetto, and at this point “ghetto” was already used in legislation and official documents.

As for Venice, the Ghetto was enlarged a third time after the 1630-1631 plague and was now obviously called the Gheto Novissimo (the “newest ghetto”). It was the only ghetto without synagogues or shops, used exclusively residentially.

Different origins have been conjectured for the word ghetto, but the Venetian/Italian origin is widely proved by extensive documents.