Life
Can we save these Venetian treasures?
Donations are needed to renovate the shuls of the ghetto reports Eli Abt
July 7, 2022 09:03
Donations are needed to renovate the shuls of the ghetto reports Eli Abt
July 7, 2022 09:03
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.
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.
The Canton Synagogue in the Venice Ghetto
