The Venetian Ghetto

On 29 March 1516 the Senate of Venice decreed that all the city's Jews must move to a small island in the parish of San Girolamo, the site of a former copper foundry—in Venetian, geto. The gates were locked at sunset and opened at dawn; Christian watchmen patrolled the surrounding canals in boats, and the Jews were required to pay their wages. By day one could leave, provided men wore a yellow, later red, hat.

This was not the first restriction or the first Jewish quarter; what was new was the structure itself—a legalised, permanent, walled space where a community was both tolerated and locked in. Venice needed Jewish moneylenders, physicians and Levantine traders but did not wish to see them. The model spread: in 1555 Pope Paul IV's bull Cum nimis absurdum created the Roman ghetto, which lasted until 1870.

The island filled quickly, and since there was no room to spread, houses rose to seven or eight storeys with ceilings barely a man's height. Three 'nations' lived there—German, Levantine and Iberian—each building its own synagogue; five survive. Venetian presses printed the Talmud and the Shulchan Aruch for the whole Jewish world. Napoleon's troops tore down the gates in 1797.