Venetian Ghetto Historical Timeline

Origins

On March 29, 1516, the Doge Leonardo Loredan and the Venetian Senate decreed that the city's Jewish residents must live within a single enclosed area, the Ghetto Nuovo, an island in Cannaregio previously used as a foundry site. Gates sealed the area at night, and residents paid for the guards who enforced the curfew.

Turning points

As Venice's Jewish population grew through the 16th and 17th centuries, the district expanded into the neighboring Ghetto Vecchio and Ghetto Nuovissimo. Distinct communities of Ashkenazi Jews from Central Europe, Italian Jews, and Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal or arriving from the Ottoman Levant each settled within its walls, and each built its own synagogue rather than sharing a single house of worship.

Influential people

The ghetto's restrictions did not prevent it from becoming a real center of Jewish scholarship and culture: it produced rabbis, physicians, and printers whose Hebrew-language books circulated across Europe, at a time when Venice was already one of the continent's major printing centers.

Emancipation and the word itself

The ghetto's legal segregation ended on July 11, 1797, months after Napoleon's army forced the fall of the Venetian Republic; the gates were taken down and burned. The word "ghetto" had by then already begun spreading outward from this one place. Its exact origin is debated, with the likeliest explanation connecting it to the getto, the foundry that occupied the island before 1516, but by the 19th century the term was used across Europe for any segregated urban district.

The twentieth century

Emancipation did not prove permanent. Italy's racial laws of 1938 stripped Jewish citizens of civil rights, and after the German occupation of northern Italy in 1943 the community was targeted directly. Raids in December 1943 and August 1944 deported Venetian Jews to Auschwitz; the figure usually given is around 246 people, of whom fewer than ten returned. The residents of the Casa di Riposo, the ghetto's old people's home on the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo, were taken in one of those raids.

Two bronze memorials by the artist Arbit Blatas, installed on the campo in 1980, mark this: a series of relief panels depicting the deportations, and a panel known as The Last Train, alongside a wall listing the names of those deported.

Present-day significance

Around 450 Jews live in Venice's Jewish community today, though few remain in the ghetto itself as the area has grown expensive. Five historic synagogues, a Jewish museum, and kosher restaurants and bakeries keep the district active as a living community rather than only a historical site.