Hidden secrets

IN 1516, when the Venetian authorities ordered the city’s Jews into an area near a foundry, they gave them just 48 hours to move. They also forced them to pay their new landlords 30% more rent than the outgoing Christian tenants. A Venetian word meaning “foundry” may have given rise to the term “ghetto”, which over the years has taken on wholly negative connotations. The 500th anniversary of that fateful event scarcely invites celebration. Yet it has inspired in Venice itself several intriguing, and controversial, initiatives of which the highlight is an exhibition opening at the Doge’s Palace on June 19th.

Some visitors will find the show surprising, even shocking. The curator, Donatella Calabi, argues that viewing the Venetian ghetto through the prism of the Nazi-imposed ghettos of the Shoah is misleading. Her exhibition shows how the ghetto was created at a time of crisis in the old Venetian republic, or La Serenissima, when its governors became wary, not just of Jews but of all deemed to be outsiders. In confining them, they were doing what they also did to non-native merchants including Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Persians and, ironically, Germans. The Turks particularly, says Ms Calabi, were subject to rules “stricter perhaps than those imposed on the Jews”. Quarantining foreigners was done partly for their own safety (murderous clashes between merchant communities were not uncommon) and was “the same as the discrimination exercised at the time in all the great commercial cities: London, Seville and Antwerp”.