Inside Venice’s Jewish ghetto

Commercial break

0:00A burst pipe, a dead water heater, the AC calling it quits. Who do you call? HomeServe is an easy way to handle unexpected home repairs. With plans covering stuff, basic homeowners insurance usually won't. Instead of scrambling for a contractor, you make one call to get the repair process started. Join the millions of customers who trust HomeServe right now. Go to homeserve.com slash podcast for 50% less your first year. That's homeserve.com slash podcast. Savings compared to renewal price void in floor.

0:30CBS Thursday. Elsbeth, we need your help. Carrie Preston returns as Elsbeth. Your bloody fingerprints on the doorknob. That doesn't seem very safe. In a can't miss new season. It's my job to make sure that the police do everything right. I'm innocent. If you say so. Guest starring Nicholas Braun, Jemima Kirk, OG Ananobi, and Nicole Scherzinger. I don't watch television. Well, you should. Someone's great. Elsbeth, new season Thursday. Part of CBS Premiere Week and streaming on Paramount+. Back to school, practices, and games.

1:03Fall fills up fast for families. That's why, at Cracker Barrel, comfort comes easy. Stop in for our crispy home-style chicken deals starting at just $9.99. Hand-breaded chicken prepared the way the family likes it, no matter how they build it. You can start with a classic sandwich or plate for $9.99, then make it saucy or load it up. It's home-style, your style. With so many choices, comfort comes easy. Welcome home to Cracker Barrel. Stone Fire Naan is inspired by ancient traditions, baked on stone at blazing high heat.

1:36But it's perfect for your new traditions, too. I love putting out Stone Fire Naan with dips for board game night. Or with cinnamon and sugar for my book club gals. We enjoy Stone Fire Naan. Before the ritual summoning of the nameless ones. We invoke the nameless ones. They shall not be named. And we, uh, do Stone Fire pizza parties for the kids. I'm really scared right now. Stone Fire. From our tradition to yours.

Origins of the Venetian ghetto

1:59Together we naan. In the early 16th century, Venice confined its Jewish population to a restricted quarter on an island in the city. This became known as the first ghetto, a word that would come to define centuries of Jewish segregation and persecution. But why did Venice create it? And what was life like inside its walls? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Emily Griffith speaks to historian Alexander

2:32Lee, who is a finalist for the 2026 Kundal History Prize about the origins of the Venetian ghetto, the tensions behind its creation, and the vibrant Jewish community that developed within it. It's a real pleasure to have you on today to talk all about your new book, The First Ghetto, Venice and the Jews. What was happening in Venice in the early 16th century that led to the creation of this first Jewish ghetto? Why then? It's a very good question, Emily. Why the first ghetto and why the first ghetto in Venice?

3:03Well, the first thing to say is that it certainly wasn't the first time a Jewish population was confined to a particular quarter of a city. Such things had been going on for literally centuries by the time the Venetians thought of it in their own city. In fact, they'd even imposed confinement on Jewish populations in other Venetian subject cities around the Mediterranean long before that. Nevertheless, the ghetto in Venice does represent a turning point in the history of the concept, partly because it was conceptually a lot clearer than any other previous form of Jewish settlement.

3:37Secondly, it had a very clear name that was untethered to anything like a street or square, by which Jewish quarters elsewhere had previously been known. And thirdly, because Venice was such an emblematic city at the time. Now, the idea of the ghetto, the idea of confining Jews to a particular island in Venice, arose out of a paradox at the heart of Venice's relations with the Jews. On the one hand, Venice was exceedingly welcoming of the Jewish presence. Venice needed, like most Italian cities at the time, access to credit.

4:09Since the Fourth Lateran Council in the 13th century, it had been forbidden for Christians to lend each other money at interest, a practice named as usury. Jews supplied a useful alternative, that it was permissible for them to lend at least small sums at reasonable rates of interest to Christians without either side incurring any sin. So, that was an attraction. On the other hand, Venice was marred by a tremendous sense of suspicion of the Jewish presence. The city conceived of itself, from a very early date, as a distinctively Christian entity.

4:44Having people of any other faith, particularly Jews, resident in the city at a given time, was a danger. Indeed, it was described, or Jews were described, using language borrowed from medicine as a disease, who could quite easily infect Christian neighbours with their non-Christian ideas, tempt people away from the faith. So, the ghetto was, in a sense, a way of resolving this apparently irresolvable tension between need and fear of love and hate, literally, if you like.

5:16And in many ways, you can see it as a solution of last resort. Many other alternatives had been explored beforehand, including confining Jews to another city or making sure that Jews could only visit Venice from a nearby city across the other side of the lagoon, Mestre, or other areas of confinement in the city. And it never worked. This was a solution of last resort.

Early Jewish presence in Venice

5:36But really, to understand how this kind of paradox played out, you do have to set the foundation of the ghetto in the context of a longer time frame. Unlike many other Italian cities, which had had a Jewish presence since late antiquity, Venice's experience with Jews reached back only a comparatively short time. Although we have evidence of Jews being on Venetian ships as early as the 10th century, the earliest documented Jew to be present in Venice only crops up in about 1314.

6:07And to begin with, many of those who had come to Venice were refugees who had been expelled from or forced to flee from Germany in the mid-14th century as a result of pogroms that had erupted in the wake of the Black Death. They probably didn't remain in Venice for a particularly long time at any given moment. There probably weren't very large numbers of them, but they were nevertheless present. Even at this early stage, we see a hesitancy about how to handle Jews. In the early 14th century, we know that this kind of activity is going on,

6:39but it's only really permitted for Jews to lend money at interest in the city from about 1382. Now, I should add that at this point, Jews aren't named. In that particular charter that's granted, it doesn't name any particular religious group. The first charter allowing people to lend money in Venice only says, you know, anybody can do it. But we know from recent research that all but one of the people who signed up for it were Jews. However, very soon afterwards, Venice starts to get uneasy about this and it says, well, look, it's not really appropriate that you stay in the city.

7:12So what we're going to do is we're going to push you out to the nearby city of Mestri, which is just across the lagoon. You can see Venice from Mestri. And you can only come to the city to lend money for 15 days at a time. Then you have to go. And when you're here, you have to wear a yellow badge, a yellow circle on your outer clothing, etc. And there's a back and forth. So ways around that are quickly found. Many Jewish moneylenders come over to the city for 15 days, then go back to Mestri and then come straight back to Venice. So effectively, they're permanent residents. And Venice does its absolute best to try and make this, to prevent this kind of thing from happening.

7:47But by the early 15th century, it's very, very clear that it's just not kind of working. So in a very Venetian way, the government of Venice fudges the issue. It says effectively, we don't really like Jews staying in the city for any length of time. We know there's cheating going on, but we're not going to do anything about it. We're just going to turn a blind eye and hope that this problem just sort of sorts itself out. There were lots of attempts to constrain Jewish activities and to limit the impact of Jewish life on Venetian communities.

8:18So, for example, in the early 15th century, there's a lot of legislation which prevents Jews from having sexual relations with Christians. That's a massive worry throughout the history of the ghetto. There's legislation which prevents Jews from giving music lessons. They might think, why is that an issue? Well, there's a fear that if somebody is giving music lessons to a child, they might corrupt them while they're playing music, etc., etc. But essentially, you've got this sort of uneasy scenario where Venice knows Jews are present in the city, but they don't want to allow them to live there permanently.

8:50They just allow this fudge to go on.

War and the foundation of the ghetto

8:52So what changes? What is it that happens that means that this horrible, unfortunate compromise breaks down? And the answer is simple. It's war. From 1494 onwards, the whole of Italy is consumed by a series of exceedingly brutal conflicts, catalyzed by the invasion of the French king, Charles VIII, who wants to, in 1494, capture the kingdom of Naples. And this leads to six decades of near-constant war. Well, Machiavelli blames Venice for the whole thing, inaccurately.

9:23But Venice is bound up in this in a very real way. Unfortunately, early in the conflict, it does very, very badly. And it is defeated very viciously at a battle called the Battle of Agnadello in 1509. This is such a catastrophic defeat that, as Machiavelli said, in one single afternoon, Venice lost what it had taken its people 800 years to acquire to that point. So why is this significant for Jews? And why does it lead to the creation of the ghetto?

9:55Well, quite simply because a little bit early, in 1509, as things were getting a little bit hairy on the mainland, where Venice had a lot of land, Venice had reissued a charter, an agreement, with the Jewish bankers of Mestre. And it had said, look, you have to stay living in Mestre, and you can only come to Venice, you know, lending money every so often. But if war comes to your doorstep, you can bring your family and all your property to Venice. So when in 1509, the Battle of Agnadello unleashes holy hell on the Venetian Empire, a lot of Jews take advantage of this to take refuge in Venice.

10:33And they stay there for a long time. Now, not all those who go to Venice at this time have signed up to this charter. They're not all technically allowed to be in the city. But when you've got, you know, military catastrophe, and you really need to understand how severe this was, this is worse than the kind of Britain in the Blitz type scenario. You know, we're waiting for invasion. You know, there are certain moments after the Battle of Agnadello when guns can be heard of the invading armies from across the lagoon. So there's a real sense that any moment now there's going to be an invasion.

11:03People come pouring across, and the Venetian authorities just can't physically sort out who's got the right to be in Venice and who hasn't. So for several years, it just sort of muddles along until this becomes progressively more and more of a problem because under stress, the need, you know, food runs short, cash runs short. But more and more people, particularly at the poor end of the scale, and to say the people who had previously relied most on Jewish credit, borrowed more and more and more and started to resent this to a greater extent.

11:35Clearly, the Venetian government has boxed itself into a corner. It can't push out the Jewish bankers who had come already, and nor can it particularly distinguish between those who have the right and those who don't have the right to be there. But nor can it allow the situation to go on. So how can it deal with this situation? There were lots of ideas. There's one idea to confine them to the island of Murano, and that doesn't really go anywhere. There were lots of boring technical problems with that. So eventually, somebody comes up with the bright idea of using an area known as the Guetta del Rame in the northwest of the city in an area called Canareggio.

12:14It was an island surrounded on all four sides by water, and it had been used as a dumping ground for the communal areas. It was a copper foundry in the past that had since then had a few buildings put up on it, and it was a pretty run-down place. And this seems to be an ideal option. It's because of the kind of high-rise, low-quality building that had been constructed there. It already looked like a fortress. So it was thought that if you could find the entire Jewish population there, it would be fairly easy to isolate them within the city, to create a city within the city, essentially, that would be cut off.

12:49All outward-facing windows and balconies were blocked up. Access was by only a couple of bridges in front of the doors of which heavy iron gates could be placed and closed at night. And the canals around it could be patrolled by boats manned by Christian guards paid for by the Jewish population to ensure that after the curfew was enforced, no Jews could escape. Many historians have argued this moment, the 29th of March 1516, arises as a result of a sudden additional crisis.

13:25But in reality, you can see in the evidence that actually it's the result of years and years of efforts, failed efforts, to find a solution to a problem of Venice's own creation, a problem that didn't have a neat solution. Was it intended to be a long-term measure? Not at all. It was intended from the very beginning to be a temporary issue. There was no idea of it being there for nearly 300 more years. It was just intended to be a response to an immediate problem in a very Venetian way.

13:56The Venetian government at this time likes to fudge things as much as it possibly can. And if it can kick a thorny problem down the road, it will.

Daily interactions inside the walls

14:03Is that how it just continued then, this just pushing the problem away? Well, yes and no. After the immediate military crisis disappears or gets a little bit better a few years later, there is a move to kick Jews out of Venice. However, it doesn't end up resulting in anything practical for the simple reason that Venice realised very quickly that it simply could not do without a Jewish presence. Now, I should clarify something that I have been, in Venetian style, fudging up until now.

14:37So far, I've been speaking about Jews as money lenders. But in reality, even at this early phase, the Jewish community contained people who pursued a whole range of different professions. Doctors, jewel cutters, second-hand clothes dealers. That was an exceedingly important source of income for the community. But it was really as money lenders that they were most important. And again, to be absolutely clear, they're lending money predominantly in small sums. I mean, not gigantic sums. There are workarounds for that that can be served by Christians. But for small sums.

15:09We've talked about these high walls without windows looking outwards. How porous were these walls? Were communities able to mix? How did they interact? Well, from the very beginning, the ghettos' walls were far more porous than they were intended to be. When it was founded, there was an idea that it would be a hermetically sealed environment. But, you know, within a few months, it was a pattern that was unfeasible. For example, let's take the case of Jewish doctors.

15:41If you are a Jewish doctor and you have to attend to a patient outside the ghetto at night, what are you going to do? Well, of course, you've got to have an exception. And there are lots of other reasons why you might need to be out of the ghetto. Similarly, there are lots of reasons why Christians might need to be in the ghetto as well to do business of one complexion or another. How are you going to see people about various business dealings? How are you going to buy second-hand goods? How are you going to discuss the terms of your loan? You know, there's loads and loads of reasons. It never quite works.

16:14And the Venetian government is forever issuing edicts and decrees saying, you know, we must put a stop to it. We really must put a stop to it. But it never quite works. What did interactions look like on a day-to-day basis? Were there positive interactions? You've hinted that there's an edge of hostility here. There's extreme hostility. To give you an indication of just how intense the hostility is, let's take a step back before the foundation, the ghetto, to 1475. In 1475, in a town called Trent, which is just a little bit north, northwest of Venice,

16:45there was a very significant case whereby a young Christian boy called Simon was found murdered. And his death was blamed on the Jewish community, who, it was alleged, had killed him for ritual purposes. And this unleashed a wave of anti-Semitic persecution, including acts of violence in Venice itself. There are steps taken in Venice to prevent this getting out of hand.

17:18And there are also steps taken to prevent it getting out of hand in cities belonging to Venice on the mainland. But it never quite goes away. There are many, many acts of extreme violence which are perpetrated against Jews down the years. Indeed, if we look further ahead, down to the early 17th century, one of the ghetto's leading intellectuals and rabbis, a guy called Leon Modernus, he's his son killed by Christians in a stupid dispute. Similarly, if we look ahead to the late 17th century,

17:51you find that a canal has to be dug or excavated to allow Jewish funeral boats to get to the cemetery, from the ghetto to the cemetery on the Lido, without passing under a bridge by the Church of San Pietro. And this was necessary because boys would stand on that bridge and hurl abuse and stones and things at Jewish funeral cortges. So when we're talking about hostility, sometimes it's fairly low-grade stuff, but it's occasionally very violent stuff. There are, nonetheless, exceedingly positive forms of interaction.

18:25There's a lot of cultural interaction. To give one very good case in point, we could look at printing. Venice in the Renaissance is one of Europe's foremost centres of printing. And it very quickly becomes the European leader in Hebrew printing. The most important figure in this is a guy called Daniel Bomberg. Now, Daniel Bomberg's a Christian. He comes from Antwerp. However, very soon after he appears in Venice in the early 16th century,

18:56he realises that there is a market for Hebrew books. Now, that doesn't mean just Hebrew books for a Jewish market. It also means Hebrew books for a Christian humanist market. Humanists, that's to say people who are interested in the recovery and emulation of the ancient classics, had a profound interest in Hebrew. Many leading humanists today were very keen on learning Hebrew and wanted Hebrew texts. So, Bomberg sets himself up in business, draws on the help of a Jewish convert to Christianity called Felipe de Prato,

19:27and begins churning out books properly in Hebrew. The most remarkable example of which is the rabbinical Bible, the Mikraot Gedarat. And this is a remarkable work of printing and typography, a landmark both in the history of the Jewish community and in the broader history of the Jewish diaspora. But it's just one of many works of Jewish devotional texts and liturgical texts that he produces down the years. And after he eventually dies, his place is taken up by other printing houses run by Christians,

20:00tailoring to a Jewish market and to a Christian market of humanists who are interested in Hebrew as well. And we can see, even at the level of personal interaction, there's a great deal of very human exchange.

20:15This is an advertisement from Surfshark. From the Trojan horse to undercover wartime agents, history teaches us that threats can emerge from unlikely sources. And now, with our lives increasingly playing out online, those dangers are virtual, but no less real. That's where Surfshark comes in. It's an all-in-one cybersecurity suite that protects every aspect of your online life. Its VPN ensures your data is encrypted, making your online activity much harder to track. Vital in a world in which every link you click

20:47and every site you visit leaves a trail. And its email scam checker uses AI to spot fake messages and scams before you even open them. Secure your entire digital life with Surfshark. It's completely risk-free with their 30-day money-back guarantee. Go to surfshark.com forward slash history extra or use the code history extra at checkout to get four extra months added to your plan. Again, that's surfshark.com forward slash history extra code history extra. A burst pipe.

21:19A dead water heater. The AC calling it quits. Who do you call? HomeServe is an easy way to handle unexpected home repairs. With plans covering stuff, basic homeowners insurance usually won't. Instead of scrambling for a contractor, you make one call to get the repair process started. Join the millions of customers who trust HomeServe right now. Go to homeserve.com slash podcast for 50% less your first year. That's homeserve.com slash podcast. Savings compared to renewal price void in Florida. CBS Thursday.

21:50Elsbeth, we need your help. Carrie Preston returns as Elsbeth. Your bloody fingerprints on the doorknob. That doesn't seem very safe. And a can't-miss new season. It's my job to make sure that the police do everything right. I'm innocent. If you say so. Guest-starring Nicholas Braun, Jemima Kirk, O.G. Ananobi, and Nicole Scherzinger. I don't watch television. Well, you should.

A microcosm of the Jewish world

22:11Someone's great. One of the things that really fascinated me in your book is how you describe the ghetto as this microcosm of the Jewish world. Could you tell us what you mean by that? From the very beginning, the ghetto in Venice was people populated by Jews from elsewhere. Many Jews in the first part of the ghetto, because the ghetto had three components over the years, many of the inhabitants of the ghetto Nuovo,

22:43the first part, had come either from the Italian mainland or, in many cases, from Germany. As I suggested they were German refugees of persecution after the Black Death. But they were just the first of many groups that made it to Venice after fleeing somewhere else. The most important of these groups came from the Iberian land, Spain and Portugal. After the Reconquista was completed in 1492, the King and Queen of Spain, Fernanda de Isabella, issued a decree forcing Jews either to leave the peninsula or to convert to Christianity.

23:16Now, many Jews did flee, but a great many more did take the opportunity to convert. And, although some did so wholeheartedly, a larger number maintained a Christian outer life, as it were, and continued to practice Judaism inwardly, at home, privately, secretly. However, after the establishment of the Spanish and then Portuguese inquisitions, persecution of these so-called new Christians, or Maranas,

23:46became more intense. And many were forced to flee, in the hope of being able to practice Judaism more openly elsewhere. Now, here was a problem. Obviously, a great number of them wanted to come to Italy, and some did come directly to Italy. But the problem was that if they did come to Italy and resumed life as Jews openly, they would be at risk of being accused of apostasy. That's to say, renouncing their Christian baptism, the Christian baptism they were forced to accept. So, many of them chose to come

24:17via the Ottoman Empire. They would go from the Iberian Peninsula to the Ottoman Empire, based in mostly what is now Turkey, but also extending both into Balkans and down towards Egypt, where they would throw off their Christian garb and resume their Jewish identity. Then, from the Ottoman Empire, go to Venice as Jews, but as Jews who were notionally subjects of the Ottoman sultan. So, no problem. So, by the time we get to the mid-16th century,

24:49you've already got Jews from many parts of Europe, you have Germany and Spain who have come via the Ottoman Empire living there all together. I should add that by that point, you do have also some new Christians living as notionally Christians in public, but Jews in private in Venice as well, which itself is a massive problem for Venice at the time. Later on, we have other communities as well. In the later centuries, there's a massive wave of persecution in what is now Ukraine,

25:19leading to many refugees coming from there. Indeed, funds were specially set up to provide for people who were coming from there or who, along the way, had been sold into slavery and needed to be ransomed out of slavery. So, really, Venice is home to Jewish refugees from all around Europe. So, essentially, anybody who has had to flee as a Jew because of their faith in Europe has at least some connection with Venice itself. But there are several other reasons

25:50why we can talk to it as Mike Crossham as well, precisely because many Jews, particularly from about 1541 onwards, when the second part of the ghetto, the Ghetto Vecchio, is established, we have a lot more formerly Iberian merchants present in the city. They have great trading connections with Jews elsewhere in Europe. On their travels, they have established links with places from Beirut, Alexandria, etc., and maintain those links. Slightly later,

26:21there are ties with Amsterdam. Books written by Jews in Venice are circulated very widely throughout Europe. For example, one particularly influential book, Discorso, written by a guy called Simone Rizzato, is, you know, read by leading rabbis and Christians in Britain after the Civil War and contributes significantly to the readmission of Jews to England. So, both at the level of residence

26:51and at the level of broader cultural and economic contacts, the ghetto is, in a real sense, a microcosm of the world. Did the mix of cultural linguistic differences create tension within the ghetto or did it enrich cultural communal life? Well, both. Because there were so many different communities, some of whom were, you know, Ashkenazi, some of whom were Sephardim, there was a need for a variety

27:22of different synagogues, for example. So, the ghetto by the mid-17th century boasts eight synagogues, five major, three minor, catering to different liturgical traditions, Sephardim and Ashkenazi, and also different linguistic national groups as well. There is necessarily a high level of contact between these communities, although each ghetto is set up with a particular community in mind. There's a lot of mixing, a great deal of mixing. It isn't always harmonious.

27:54There is a great deal of bickering that goes on. And, you know, we do have plenty of testimony of fights breaking out between different communities at one time or another. Could you tell us more about what daily life may have looked like within the ghetto? Well, to a certain extent, it depends slightly when we're talking about. If we take, say, what you might call the ghetto's golden age in the early 17th century, just before the plague of the 1630s,

28:25it is at its most vibrant. It's very populous. There's several thousand people living there at the time. It's not luxurious by any stretch of the imagination. Accommodation is limited by necessity. So apartments are very small. They're often subdivided many, many times. They're very cramped. They are not in any sense is ideal. In order to gain more space, families very frequently undertake unauthorized DIY projects

28:58to enlarge the available space. You know, they try to extend balconies out as far as they can. And they try to extend in whatever direction is possible, rarely with much effect on the quality of life, I should say. There is not a very large amount of fresh water available. There are only a few wells in the ghetto itself. In the Ghetto Nuova, there are only three wells, which for a large population is not large. There are problems with waste disposal.

29:30It is, however, very, very busy. There is a great deal of music being performed, particularly in the synagogues. There are plays that are put on very frequently, some of which are attended by Christians and visiting dignitaries. On occasions, rabbis also preach to congregations, which even include visiting nobles from abroad. One English visitor recalled going to visit a synagogue and never having seen

30:00so much rich clothing and fine jewellery in evidence. There are shops which cater to different communities, sometimes all communities. There is one that also caters to Christians as well. There's every type of economic activity you can think of. There are schools. By that point, there is also a form of Jewish self-government as well. It is quite sophisticated. It has its own rules and regulations. It has forms of elections, etc.

30:32It's responsible for gathering the heavy taxes that are owed to the Venetian government and for renegotiating the charters which allow Jews to go on living in the city. It's not just that people are allowed to live there tacitly. It has to be negotiated and renegotiated for defined periods of time. So life is very rich, very busy, never easy, often turbulent. There is a surprisingly high degree of autonomy although people

31:03within the ghetto are notionally bound by the laws of Venice. The Jewish communities do go to great effort to resolve disputes themselves and to avoid involving the Venetian court, a fact which itself is a source of immense controversy at a certain moment. So it is described as the city of the Jews, a city within a city. Very much not ideal though. As time moved on, how did attitudes towards the purpose of and life within

31:33the ghetto change?

Shifting attitudes and the fall of the ghetto

31:35There are several moments of transformation really. One important point of inflection concerns Venice's relationship with the church. In 1547, an inquisition was set up in Venice and this was from the beginning extremely concerned with the issue of new Christians, that's to say. Jews who in Iberia had been forced to convert to Christianity but who were on many occasions suspected of Judaising, that is say, reverting to Judaism.

32:05So the Venetian inquisition set up with the complicity of the Venetian state seeks to prosecute any Jews that it thinks have previously been baptised. baptised. And when it's set up, Venice is reasonably happy with this. However, very soon Venice realises that this is slightly problematic because by the mid-16th century, Venice not only needs credit, it also needs merchants. Having once been a very dynamic and vibrant

32:36mercantile empire, by that point, Venice is seeing its commercial empire of commercial dominance wane dramatically, partially because of the discovery of new trade routes around the Capes, partially because of competition from other Italian cities and states. So it really needs merchants and it really is very keen to have merchants from the Iberian Peninsula. So it definitely doesn't want to prosecute

33:06people who it needs. Venice, as I said earlier, is always happy to fudge an issue if it proves advantageous, but it can't for a long time quite manage its relationship with the church. However, a breaking point comes in 1606 when as a result of tension over the prosecution of two very naughty priests under an issue over land, Venice is placed under interdict and then kind of separates itself slightly from or asserts more independence from the church

33:37insofar as matters such as this are concerned. and Venice is after 1606, 1607 very much happier to let issues like this slide, very much happier to let Jews come to the city even if there's a suspicion they may have been Christians before. It just, it excises a don't ask, don't tell policy basically. So that allows it for a time to become a lot more welcoming. However, very soon after that, only a few decades after that,

34:08we see a great cooling in attitudes towards Jews and as the 17th century wears on, as Venice's commercial dependence on Jews grows, as its own economic affairs decline, you see a degree of, as I said, of real coolness coming in. The ghetto endures in one form or another until 1797 when as a result of the French invasion under Napoleon, it is finally opened, the gates are burned

34:38and the ghetto is formally abolished. This notionally grants Jews a great many more rights. It grants them pretty much the same rights as any other citizen. So you would think that that would lead to a great deal of improvement. But after that, it's a seesaw-like situation. Venice changes hands several times. It goes from being French to being Austrian. When the Austrians come in, a much more conservative approach takes hold, Jewish civil rights are restricted. In 1848, when revolutions come along,

35:10there is another attempt to open up civil rights for Jews again. It's short-lived and things progress very slowly. By the late 19th century, you do have many more Jewish figures playing a very much more prominent role in the first in Venice and then in what became the Kingdom of Italy. However, it's important to do a distinction between Jews who by this stage were allowed to live outside the ghetto and the Jews within the ghetto. Although the ghetto didn't formally exist as a separate

35:41legal entity by the mid to late 19th century, it did exist in an unofficial form. The majority of poorer Jews still lived there and conditions there were getting worse by the day. Indeed, by the late 19th century, many of the buildings were so decrepit that the only way of dealing with them was to have some of them knocked down. So relations between Venice and the Jews and the Kingdom of Italy and the Jews does change

36:12gradually over time depending on external circumstances. Better for some, worse for others. There is no general case. It is one of constant evolution.

The legacy of the word ghetto

36:22How careful should we be about perhaps drawing comparisons between the idea of ghetto in the 20th century with the earlier use of the word ghetto? Perhaps the best way of thinking about this is to consider how ghettos moved beyond Venice. One thing that is striking is how quickly the word ghetto migrates. Within 50 years of the foundation of the ghetto in Venice, we find other sites of Jewish segregation being referred to by the same term.

36:54In 1562, a Jewish ghetto is explicitly set up in Rome with that name and then very soon afterwards, another one is founded in Florence and then we find a sequence cropping up in the early 17th century in places like Padua and Manchu and Ferrara. However, even at this early date, the word ghetto is kind of a grab bag for a whole raft of different concepts, although the reason it spreads is because it is a way, a term that describes Jewish segregation

37:24without being tied to any particular geographical description, a street, a square or whatever, as had been the case before 1516. It can also accommodate a variety of different meanings from an early date. In every place where a ghetto is set up in Italy in the early modern period, it entails a slightly different relationship between different sources of power, between the intersection between faith and finance and issues

37:55of that variety. Things get even more complicated the further on we go, really. After the Jewish ghettos in Venice are abolished from 1797 onwards, they spread beyond Italy. They move first to Germany, and as they move, the word ghetto starts to acquire subtly different meanings. In Germany, it doesn't just mean sites of Jewish containment, it also comes to be used to describe Jewish particularism, and

38:26it can indeed be seen as, or used as a way of describing the resistance of a community to the kind of totalizing mission of emerging nation states, or as an affirmation of identity. Then, a few decades after that, we find the word ghetto cropping up in the United States, where the term loses its connection, its explicit connection with Judaism, and starts to be applied to any migrant or vulnerable group on the periphery of

38:57society, and serves as a kind of counterpoint, a spatial and demographic counterpoint to the immense privileges that we see in certain parts of American cities during the Gilded Age. And then, of course, later on in the 20th century, it is re-appropriated by Nazis to describe the ghettos of Warsaw, Lodz, and places like that. In this later stage, sites of confinement are used to prepare people for genocide. Each of these iterations of

39:28ghettos are very different from the last. There is no direct line which leads from Venice to the Holocaust at all, and it would be foolish to assume that there was any direct continuity. Clearly, there is nothing in common between any of these except the word, really. And if we are to write the history of ghetto as a concept, it is a history which is marked by variation. However, despite this qualification, it's still impossible to

39:59conceive of any of these forms of ghetto, except as branches stemming from the same trunk, really. They each trace back ultimately to the decisions of the Venetian government in the dark days of

Sarah Coppia Sulam and cultural life

40:151516. This is a story with so many personalities in it. Could you perhaps share with us just one of these personalities that you really feel shaped the story of the ghetto? Absolutely. I think one person who captures the ghetto in its golden age perfectly is a woman called Sarah Coppia Sulam. Now, Sarah was a fairly well-to-do Jewish woman. She was married to a prominent figure in the Jewish community. She was very learned. She spoke many languages including, you know, obviously Italian and Hebrew, but

40:45as well Latin and several other languages as well. She enjoyed exchanging with literary figures. She enjoyed friendships with artists and poets, and she wrote poetry herself. But she had a very eventful life. In 1618, while recovering from Mishka, she read a work called La Reina Esther by a priest called Anzaldo Cheba, and she loved it. She loved it so much, in fact, that she wrote to Cheba, and the two sparked a very lively and affectionate correspondent,

41:16both in prose and in poetry. They exchanged verses, they exchanged little gifts, they exchanged each other's pictures, and they spoke very lovingly to one another. It was, you know, very chaste. She also gathered about a salon. She regularly held gatherings for poets and artists, etc., at her home, and was, to all intents and purposes, an equivalent of the many notable saloniere of the day. However, she suffered precisely because of her Jewish identity.

41:47Her Jewishness, in many senses, made her more vulnerable to abuse from those upon whom she showered her largesse. Relatively early on, one of her regular attendees, a guy called Baldessari Bonifacio, for somewhat obscure reasons, wrote a pamphlet accusing her of denying the immortality of the soul. You might think to yourself, well, so what? Who cares about that? But in the 17th century, this was a big deal. If it were the

42:18case that Sarah had denied the immortality of the soul, she could be tried for heresy, not just by Jewish authorities, but also by Christian authorities as well. So she wrote a hasty manifesto defending herself against that charge. And it was very well written. Her piece was very funny. It really attacked her accuser in a brilliant way. It's very entertaining. It's a good rebuttal. However, her troubles didn't stop there. In fact, it was only the beginning. Not long after, another one of her hangers-on,

42:49someone who she'd helped more than many, in fact, a chap called Paluzzi, who had contracted syphilis and she had sent to a spa or whatever to help, he cooked up a plot with one of her servants to convince her that a foreign prince was chasing after her and wanted to correspond with her and they were going to use this as a tool to persuade her to send valuable gifts to the prince, which of course didn't exist and which they would of course then pocket. When this plot was exposed, Paluzzi then

43:20wrote a very, very angry invective against her in which he accused her of plagiarising her verses. and she was of course furious with it, so poor Sarah has to go to fight back again in print and she writes a very funny book in which Paluzzi is tried on Parnassus by the muses and the gods and all that lot and he's revealed just to be an idiot basically. And of course nobody who had read Sarah's works, either her poems or this controversy can

43:51have possibly believed that her verses were by anybody else and nobody would have doubted anybody in their right mind at least would have doubted that she was a very clever woman. But the fact that she'd had to go through these controversies and fight off these stupid accusations from rather tawdry people to whom she had been kind I think kind of sapped her enthusiasm and after she dealt with this last controversy she sort of turned her back on literary interests and was forced to live in a rather

44:22quieter way. So in a sense she is an example of the vulnerability of Jewish cultural figures who sought to reach beyond the ghetto's walls but at the same time like many other figures in the ghetto's history I think the very fact that she was so creative, so original and so willing to reach out is a testament to its life, its cultural vibrancy as well. For those people who perhaps go to Venice or even just for those people listening at home thinking about this, is there anything in particular that they should remember,

44:53bear in mind, think about, a message that you think they should

Visiting the ghetto today

44:57be left with? If you visit the ghetto today, even for a short time as a visitor, you cannot help but see around you remains of the ghetto's checkered past. You'll see the synagogues that were founded from the 16th century onwards. You'll see at least one surviving bank. You'll see a monument on the wall of the Jewish retirement home in the square of the ghetto in the war for commemorating a guy called Giuseppe Gionna, a doctor and head of the Jewish community during the Second

45:27World War who saved the lives of hundreds of members of the community by committing suicide to prevent the names of the Jewish inhabitants from falling into Nazi hands. So it's impossible to escape the past. However, one thing that will strike you as you walk around the ghetto of Venice is the sense of life. life continues there. It's vibrant. It's growing. The community is growing. It continues to grow day by day. Even though it still

45:59suffers from anti-Semitic attacks on a daily basis. In fact, on an increasing basis over the past three or four years. It continues to go on. Every moment that it continues to live is an expression of defiance, a will to live and a sense of hope. So I think, to be quite honest, that is what I always take from the ghetto when I go there. Even after having studied it for many, many years, I am

46:30always struck both by the memories of past sufferings and the presence of endurance and the sense of hope that one finds there. That's a wonderful message to leave us with. Thank you very much for your time today, Alex. Thank you. That was Alexander Lee, Honorary Fellow at the University of Warwick, speaking to Emily Griffith. Alexander's book, The First Ghetto, Venice and the Jews, is among the finalists for the 2026 Cundall History Prize. A burst pipe, a dead

47:10water heater, the AC calling it quits. Who do you call? HomeServe is an easy way to handle unexpected home repairs with plans covering stuff basic homeowners insurance usually won't. Instead of scrambling for a contractor, you make one call to get the repair process started. Join the millions of customers who trust HomeServe right now. Go to homeserve.com slash podcast for 50% less your first year. That's homeserve.com slash podcast. Savings compared to renewal price void in Florida. CBS Thursday. Elsbeth, we need your help.

47:40Carrie Preston returns as Elsbeth. There are bloody fingerprints on the doorknob. That doesn't seem very safe. And I can't miss new season. It's my job to make sure that the police do everything right. I'm innocent. If you say so. Guest starring Nicholas Braun, Jemima Kirk, O.G. Ananobi, and Nicole Scherzinger. I don't watch television. Well, you should. Someone's great. Elsbeth, new season Thursday, part of CBS premiere week and streaming on Paramount Plus. Back to school, practices and games.

48:10Fall fills up fast for families. That's why at Cracker Barrel, comfort comes easy. Stop in for our crispy home style chicken deals starting at just $9.99. Hand breaded chicken prepared the way the family likes it, no matter how they build it. You can start with a classic sandwich or plate for $9.99, then make it saucy or load it up. It's home style, your style. With so many choices, comfort comes easy. Welcome home to Cracker Barrel.