User:AveryScott6/History of the Jews in Venice

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The Jewish community of Venice, which is the capital of the Veneto region of Italy, has been well-established since the medieval period, and its complex and often contradictory history is a unique example of Jewish existence in European society.

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Early History

As early as the tenth century, it is likely that Jewish merchants and moneylenders were visiting and working in Venice; documents from 945 and 992 forbid Venetian sea captains from employing Jews on their vessels. Around the middle of the thirteenth century, Jews were still forbidden from residing permanently in Venice and were subject to special taxation, but they played a significant role in the city's business and trade.

The first formal and definitive record of Jews playing an active and influential role in the city of Venice dates to 1314, when a Jew appealed to the Doge of Venice on behalf of the Jews living in Venetian Crete. However, it was not until the last twenty years of the fourteenth century that Jews were permitted to settle in Venice, specifically as moneylenders; economic stress in the city had created a considerable need for moneylending, and Jewish practitioners of this occupation were offered their own area of the city as a residence in which to dwell while filling this need. In 1386, the Jews of Venice were granted a cemetery for their use. By 1388, though, tensions had arisen, largely tied to the Venetian government's dissatisfaction with the business practices of many Jewish moneylenders, and in 1394, the Venetian Senate passed legislation insisting that all Jewish moneylenders leave the city of Venice once their ten-year moneylending charter expired in 1396. Additionally, no Jew could remain in Venice for a period of more than fifteen days, and they would be required to wear a visible identifier during their presence. Many Jews found ways to circumvent these legal obstacles, and the Venetian government did not enforce the law to its strictest extent; the government was especially lenient towards Jewish doctors. In regard to sexual relations, though, the law was stricter--by 1424, sexual relations between Jews and Christians was highly forbidden, illustrating the Venetian government's concern with eliminating social contact between Jews and Christians. Perhaps most restrictive was a 1408 declaration prohibiting Jews from practicing their religion even behind closed doors and stating that more than ten people could not practice Jewish religious traditions together. The enforcement of these prohibitions, along with others limiting the freedom of Venetian Jews, would only increase in severity over the next twenty years.

In 1464, though, Venetian Jews experienced a small respite in the form of a rollback of the 1408 declaration, which had been reiterated in 1426. In 1492, two Jews known only as Mandolino and Anselmo (Mendel and Anschel, respectively) appealed to the Venetian government on behalf of Jews visiting the city who were harassed for failing to prominently wear the marker required of Jews; in response, the government ruled that visiting Jews were not to be mistreated.

The year 1497 marked the commencement of a new chapter in the history of Jewish history in Venice, one characterized by the presence of the Marranos. Initially, a ban was placed on Marranos conducting trade in Venice and remaining in the city for more than two months. The existence of Marranos in Venice would be a source of concern for the government for roughly the following century.

In 1510, the War of the League of Cambrai necessitated a relaxation of anti-Jewish legislation in Venice, as moneylending was again in demand due to the precarious economic situation and the increased revenue that could be procured via taxing Jews in Venice was highly desirable.

Venetian Ghetto
The first record of a real community of Jews living in Venice and the terra ferma can be dated to 1492, though it is not clear how formal or organized this community actually was at the time of its origin. Beginning in 1516, the Republic obliged the Jews to live in an area of the city where the foundries, known in Venetian as geto, had been situated in ancient times and to manage the city's pawnshops at rates established by La Serenissima. When Germans arrived on the scene, their guttural pronunciation changed the Venetian term from getto into ghetto. The forcible segregation of Jews was likely seen as a kind of expulsion or cleansing of the sinfulness that had brought God's judgement on Venice in the form of military failures in the ongoing War of the League of Cambrai. In the context of this segregation, it is likely that there was pushback from leaders within the Jewish community of Venice, but whatever arguments they may have made, they were no match for the prevailing political and religious fervor.

The first ghetto was the ghetto nuovo. This community was originally populated by Jews from German and Italian communities, many of whom were escaping anti-Semitism and persecution. By 1541, the neighboring community--the ghetto vecchio--would come to be populated by Levantine Sephardic Jews as well as Spanish and Portuguese Jews who arrived towards the beginning of the 16th century and came to be known as the wealthiest and most influential Venetian Jews; many of these Spanish and Portuguese Jews were Marranos. As the initial settlement grew in size, the ghetto's rigid physical boundaries forced Jews to expand upwards, causing the buildings around the ghetto campo to be among the tallest structures in Venice. There were few, if any, accommodations for Jewish merchants traveling to Venice, and it was required that all Jews reside in the ghetto even if their stay was temporary. Under the permission and discretion of government officials, Jewish merchants living in Venice were temporarily allowed to move into the ghetto vecchio under the guise that they would not move to Venice permanently or bring their families.

Jews dwelling inside the ghetto were subject to a variety of oppressive restrictions. They could only leave the ghetto during the day, were limited to working in a small handful of professions such as pawning, moneylending, the textile industry, and the printing of Hebrew books, and the economic odds were stacked agains them via intentional lowering of interest rates. Considerable efforts were also taken to ensure that the ghetto was visually isolated from the rest of Venice. These efforts included closing gates to the community at night and even using more opaque windows in ghetto buildings that faced outward, minimizing visual access to the Jewish inhabitants of the community. Despite these restrictions, though, the legal segregation of Jews and Christians was difficult to implement, as business practices regularly brought members of the two communities into contact. Contact between Jews and Christians occurred in other manners as well. An example is a project undertaken in the early seventeenth century by Camilla Ragazzoni Minotto, an influential Venetian aristocrat who proposed a building project for Jews outside the boundaries of the ghetto and in close proximity to the residences of Christians. The project was shut down mid-construction by angry Christian petitioners who protested the impropriety of such close contact between Christians and Jews as well as the fact that the building's position along a canal would make Jewish life publicly visible.

Despite this oppressive legal and social environment, though, Jews established houses of worship inside the ghetto. These synagogues were known as scole; the word scole (σχολή) can be compared with the Yiddish shul, the German Schule, the Italian scuola, or the English school. Noted examples of such synagogues, such as the Scola Grande Tedesca and the Scola Canton, are still in existence today.

By the seventeenth century, the Venetian ghetto had reached what is often considered to be its golden age--not only did the community's intellectual culture thrive, Jews dwelling in the ghetto had gained substantial influence over Venice's foreign maritime trade. The plague dampened this growth and claimed the lives of 450 ghetto residents, but the Jewish community of Venice rebounded, becoming a major center for the advancement of Kabbalistic thought by the early eighteenth century.

The situation of the Venetian Jews, however, deteriorated shortly thereafter, with anti-Jewish sentiments and resulting legal crackdowns increasing. Many Jews, including prominent families, departed Venice in favor of other port cities, and in 1737, the Jewish community declared bankruptcy.

Post-Republic Era
In 1797, Napoleon overthrew the Venetian Republic and decreed the end of the Jewish segregation and the equalization of the Jews to other citizens. Upon Napoleon's initial arrival, many Jews volunteered for Napoleon's army. When Venice became a part of the Hapsburg Empire in 1798, some of the legal restrictions on Jewish life in Venice were reinstated, but the formal enforcement of the ghetto was never to return. When Italy was unified in 1866, Venetian Jews finally achieved fully equal status.

Rise of Fascism and the Holocaust
In the wake of the First World War, many Venetian Jews left the city as tensions grew. Their fears were proven accurate when restrictions affecting Jews were reintroduced in the 1930s as Italy allied with Germany in the decade preceding the Second World War. In 1938, the Jewish population of Venice was 2,189 ; by the time Nazi forces occupied Venice in 1943, around 1,200 Jews were still living in Venice. On September 17, 1943, an unidentified agent requested that Dr. Giuseppe Jona, the president of the Jewish Community of Venice, hand over records listing the Jewish citizens of Venice. After requesting a day's time to collect the records, Dr. Jona destroyed them and committed suicide.

Sources differ on the exact number of Jews who were captured in Venice during the Holocaust, but between November 9, 1943, and August 17th, 1944, anywhere from 205 to 212 Jews were forcibly relocated to extermination camps, especially Auschwitz. Of the 200-odd Venetian Jews who were deported, fifteen returned.

The bulk of this relocation occurred, as was the case in much of Italy, in December of 1943. Raids that resulted in arrests of Venetian Jews were sometimes carried out in coordination with Italian fascist forces. The most significant such raid occurred in early December 1943 and resulted in ninety-three Jews being taken into custody. By the spring of 1944, the SS was conducting active raids of its own in Venice, especially in hospitals and nursing homes. Many of these raids were guided by information from Graziadio Mauro Grini, an Italian Jew from Trieste who functioned as a Nazi informer across many Italian cities. Grini claimed to work only for the protection of his own family, but contemporaries have alleged that he was generously compensated financially.

Some Venetians, though, worked actively to thwart the SS and Italian fascists by protecting Jews. In medical settings, doctors were known to simulate or generate or fabricate serious illnesses or medical conditions in order to hide Jews in intensive medical care or isolation. While this method did not always effectively prevent deportation, it did successfully shelter some.

Today
The former ghetto is now a lively and popular district of the city where the religious and administrative institutions of the Jewish Community and its five synagogues persist. Only a small percentage of the city's Jewish population resides in the former ghetto. A museum, bookstore, publishing house, and yeshiva are some of the area's most active Jewish establishments, and these and other landmarks in and around the ghetto are well-known historical tourist sites.

The Renato Maestro Library opened in 1981 in the former Venetian Ghetto with the purpose of serving as a repository and resource for written and archival information on Jewish culture and history, especially in Venice. The library's catalogue includes roughly 10,000 titles in Italian, English, French, German and Hebrew; included in this collection are 2,500 Hebrew volumes spanning from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The library also houses an extensive collection of archival documents and periodicals. In 1991, the library relocated to a new building near the Venice Jewish Museum.