Everyone loves Venice, though few know it as well as David Landau, the art historian and philanthropist who has a second home there.
He’s leading an urgently needed 8,000,000 euro fund-raising effort to help conserve three of the five surviving synagogues in the ghetto. (If we’re pedantic about names, it’s actually “ghéto”, Venice’s original naval foundry area). The interiors in need of attention are the Great German, Canton and Italian synagogues, all forming part of the Jewish Museum of Venice. The remaining two, the Spanish and Levantine synagogues, remain in use by the 450 strong community as well as the city’s visitors.
There had been a love-hate relationship between the Republic and its Jewish arrivals ever since the 13th century. The city vacillated between welcoming their talents as essential to its dominant mercantile position in the Mediterranean, while simultaneously mocking them as alien to its Christian ethos, a stance familiar to us from Shakespeare’s Shylock of 1596/7. The city, worried about foreign numbers and influence, duly decreed their move to Europe’s first ghetto in 1516, lasting until 1797 when its gates were to be trashed forever by the young General Napoleon Bonaparte.

Great German Synagogue, women-s gallery

The ladies' gallery of the Great German Synagogue in the Venice ghetto

Having escaped persecution elsewhere, Jews could readily see on which side their bread was buttered. Notwithstanding occasional, but never implemented, threats of expulsion, they accepted the bans on acquiring property, the night-time closures of the ghetto bridges, the need to hide their synagogues behind nondescript frontages in upper storey residential conversions, and the imposition of their distinctive red or yellow hats, as the unavoidable costs of daytime freedom to thrive where they wished as merchants, money lenders, physicians, scholars and musicians. In Venice, if the price was right, you had a deal.
Though Vasco da Gama had ended the Republic’s premier position on the old trade route to India with his epic voyage round the Cape of 1497/9, the 16th century nevertheless ushered in a Venetian Jewish golden age, exemplified by the construction of those five synagogues. Refugees from the Spanish and Portuguese expulsions of 1492 and 1497, led by the eminent sage Isaac Abrabanel, came in their hundreds, as did the erstwhile secret Jews, the conversos. The Republic, protective both of their potential and its independence, ensured they were kept safe from the Inquisition. Jews from the Ottoman empire followed in the 1540s, as did more Sephardim from Amsterdam, Livorno and Ferrara, and Ashkenazim from Germany, Austria and Bohemia. The place became a veritable medley of tongues and traditions.

Canton Synagogue, relief medallion

The Canton Synagogue in the Venice Ghetto

By the end of the century the community was some 5,000 strong, many in partnerships with Christians, punching well above its commercial and cultural weight in a city of some 160,000 people. The high reputation of rabbi-physicians Jacob Mantino and Elijah Halfon prompted Henry VIII to seek their advice in 1530 about his divorce from Catherine of Aragon (though he wasn’t, alas, happy with what he was told). 1544 saw the arrival of that remarkable philanthropist Doña Gracia Nasi. Solomon Ashkenazi’s welcome by the Doge as Ottoman ambassador in 1577 was marked by the kind of pomp and circumstance you wouldn’t get anywhere but in Venice. And in 1592 a great crowd of all persuasions was transfixed by the oratory of the 21-year-old Leone de Modena in the Scuola Grande Tedesca, the Great German synagogue.
The community’s dynamism also attracted its inevitable share of mavericks and adventurers. Solomon Molcho arrived in messianic fervour from Portugal in 1530, plotting a Jewish army with David Reubeni, ambassador of a purported Jewish kingdom of Khaybar in Arabia descended, so he claimed, from the ten lost tribes of Israel. Having unwisely proposed a Christian-Jewish alliance against the Ottoman Turks successively to the pope, the Holy Roman emperor and the king of Portugal, both men sadly suffered the Inquisition’s death at the stake for their chutzpah.
Venice had, on a happier note, become the centre of the Jewish world’s book production with the arrival in 1511 from Antwerp of the Christian printer David Bomberg, who knew a commercial opportunity when he saw one. The first to add chapter and verse numbers in the Hebrew Bible, he was to produce no less than 200 unrivalled editions of Judaica of every kind. Unsurprisingly, a copy of his unprecedented first printed edition of the Babylonian Talmud of 1523, with the now familiar arrangement of central text flanked each side by the Rashi and Tosafot commentaries, sold at Sothebys in 2015 for $9.3 million. Hebrew books produced by Bomberg’s successors Antonio Giustiniani and Alvise Bragadini remain sought after by scholars and bibliophiles alike.

Great German Synagogue, ark

The Ark at the Great German Synagogue

When commissioning the décor of its synagogues, it was both gratitude for blessings received and pride in its Jewish and secular culture that impelled Venetian Jewry to insist on the very best Baroque and Rococo artistry and craftsmanship available. The Grande Tedesca, for example, built by merchants from Germany in 1529, shows a talented architect’s hand in its rich gilded decorations and prominent oval balustrade to the women’s gallery, creating an illusion of symmetry for the trapezoidal plan.
Provençal Jews shamelessly copied the Tedesca’s elegant Torah ark when opening their Scuola Canton three years later, and were the first to introduce the imaginative Venetian “bipolar” layout, with congregants facing each other across the central space while ark and bimah dominate the room from niches at opposite ends.
Not to be outdone, the 17th century remodelling of the Scuola Levantina, begun by Ottoman Jews in 1538, features two stunning carved semi-circular stairs to the cantilevered Bimah with its “Solomonic” spiral columns, while the Spagnola of 1584, the largest in the ghetto, displays the skills of no less a designer than La Serenissima’s premier Baroque architect Baldassare Longhena. Che bello! Such standards couldn’t be beaten.
Venetian Jewry has left us an unparalleled heritage in both books and buildings. The books we still have are thankfully safe, notwithstanding countless wanderings and burnings, but if we fail to devote the necessary, indeed urgent, love and care for those incomparable synagogue interiors, who will?

Eli Abt writes on the Jewish arts. Support for Venice’s synagogue conservation projects can be found at savevenice.org.