In 2016, the Venetian ghetto was in the limelight. Media coverage and an exhibition at the Doge's Palace commemorated the five hundredth anniversary of the establishment of Venice's enclosed Jewish neighborhood—the first Jewish ghetto in the Italian peninsula and, as the trajectory of the word “ghetto” indicates, an influential template for the spatial confinement of religious and ethnic minorities. The spotlight was also on in a literal sense: in cooperation with Ca’ Foscari University, the Compagnia de’ Colombari, an international theater ensemble, performed Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice in the heart of the so-called Ghetto Nuovo. For one week in July, the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo, the quarter's central square, became an open-air stage in which the historical high-rise tenements served as the backdrop for the play that is arguably the most famous literary treatment of Venetian Jewish history.
These same buildings also play a central role in Dana Katz's new book. Her study focuses on the interplay between the architectural fabric and the theater of everyday life in a period when the Venetian ghetto was not yet a tourist attraction, but rather a space of lived segregation. As the book's title indicates, Katz is particularly interested in the ways in which the ghetto shaped the visual imagination of both the Serenissima and its Jewish community (one of the largest in early modern western Europe).
Chapter 1 embeds the case of the Venetian ghetto in the history of Jewish confinement. The ghetti of Florence and Rome, which date to the second half of the sixteenth century, were informed by the Venetian precedent (though the Judengasse in Frankfurt am Main preceded Venice's ghetto by about half a century). But there were also differences: while most early modern Italian ghetti were located in or near the center of town, the Venetian ghetto was situated at the urban periphery and enclosed not only by walls, but also by water. Chapter 2 explores this uniquely Venetian “topography of enclosure,” while showing that, despite the two layers of segregation, active surveillance remained a central concern for the Venetian authorities. Katz rightly points out that neither the architecture of enclosure nor the practices of surveillance were unique to Jewish ghetti: precedents and parallels can be found in urban enclaves such as monasteries and convents. And as in these Christian analogues, enclosure was never, in reality, absolute. Chapter 3 elaborates on the theme of transgression, highlighting the role of “windows as sites of visual disturbance” (67). Drawing on a rich body of sources that record Christian complaints about Jewish gazes from windows, Katz notes that “the documentary language in contemporary Venice … gives sensory primacy to sight, although sight's sister sense, particularly hearing (or touch), also induced anxieties around the ghetto's architectural openings” (75). Chapter 4, “Walls as Boundaries of the Night,” develops the observation about touch, exploring how nighttime increased the fear of “cutaneous contact between Christians and Jews” (86). Nocturnal darkness, that great leveler of premodern times, brought to the fore deep-rooted collective anxieties about contagion and pollution that were often associated with Jewish bodies.
But despite the physical walls and the barriers of stereotypes, the Venetian ghetto cannot simply be reduced to a chapter in what Salo Baron famously criticized as the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” As Katz points out, the ghetto's “enclosing walls and gates attracted a growing Jewish population” (13). Leon Modena, the ghetto's most famous preacher in the seventeenth century, is a case in point: his frequent complaints about the ghetto's crammed living conditions notwithstanding, Modena spoke in his autobiography of his “great longing and love for Venice” (quote, p. 13). Indeed, historians such as Robert Bonfil and Stefanie B. Siegmund have shown how, in early modern Italy, ghettoization was sometimes a driving force behind new developments in Jewish self-governance, cultural production, and religious practice.
This “internal” perspective is different from the vantage point that Katz chooses for her study, which is more concerned with the external perception of ghetto life. Katz rightly emphasizes that smell and touch played an important part in this perception. Perhaps more could have been said about the sonic dimension and its role in the construction of a distinctively Jewish space. Ultimately—and in line with its title—the volume foregrounds the visual dimension of the ghetto's perception. Katz argues that the establishment of the Jewish quarter helped “to make the Jews objects of the Venetian gaze” (1). Yet the confinement of the Jewish community also set in motion a seemingly paradoxical development: “Pushed to the periphery to minimize their visual presence, Jews erected towering tenements that made that marginal community highly visible” (2). According to Katz, this architectural “verticality” set the ghetto apart from the rest of the urban fabric. It also aggravated the class differences within the Jewish community, privileging wealthy Jewish families who lived on the top floors (which provided access to rooftops and balconies), while poorer coreligionists dwelled in the lower stories and had to put up with restricted views and limited access to light. As Katz notes, this residential hierarchy ran counter to the architectural conventions in Venetian society, where patricians preferred to live on the first or second floors: “The spatial conditions of the Jews’ locality,” she argues, “produced a new form of urbanity in which high-density living produced high-rise architecture” (41).
Katz is certainly right that multistory construction became a characteristic feature of the Venetian ghetto—but one might find her descriptive language exaggerated at times (for instance, when she speaks of the “dizzying elevation” of buildings “soaring with acute perpendicularity” and “yielding extraordinary city sights,” p. 76). Be that as it may, given the centrality that Katz accords to this “new vision of urbanity” (44), more elaboration on the social and legal history of ghetto urbanism would have been welcome: after all, the vertical expansion of the ghetto did not happen overnight in 1516; it was the result of a gradual, decades-long process, and the Venetian archives abound with documents recording the lengthy negotiations and struggles that accompanied this development. And what of the place of the ghetto in the larger context of late medieval and Renaissance urbanism? Katz's emphasis on verticality brings to mind the “fine towers” that had long characterized the urban landscape of many northern Italian cities. True, these towering structures were functionally different from the high-rise ghetto tenements, but they were certainly no less controversial. Indeed, they often raised similar problems with respect to the “geography of the gaze,” to use Renzo Dubbini's definition.
While Katz's slim volume cannot explore all of these different directions, it offers new perspectives on the history of Venice and its ghetto. There is still surprisingly little literature at the intersection of Jewish history and the history of urbanism. This volume offers a valuable point of departure for further inquiry.
