Shylock's Venice: The Remarkable History of Venice's Jews and the Ghetto
“the story of the ghetto is the story of Jews in the Renaissance, their tenacity and ability to adapt, even thrive, in horrible circumstances. It's a story that has special resonance to the Jewish community today . . .”
Harry Freedman packs a lot into these pages. He not only gives a detailed history of the Jewish community in Venice, he describes Jewish life all over Renaissance Europe. He presents the prejudices and fears of the Christian community along with the vibrant life of the Jews despite their isolation and oppression. More than that, he demonstrates how integral the Jews were to the financial, cultural, and military life of Venice. Their trade expertise and connections, plus the vast sums they paid in taxes, supported Venice at its most expansive time.
Freedman is especially good at showing the intellectual, philosophical richness the Jews shared with their Christian neighbors. He does this with scrupulous detail, through the lives of several impressive scholars living in the Venetian ghetto. Judah Leon was one such writer. His Dialoghi d'amore was written in Tuscan dialect, making it broadly accessible—and a bestseller. The book is ostensibly about love, but becomes a much wider discussion, covering "a range of topics synthesizing Aristotelian and Platonic thought, drawing Aristotle closer to the views of Plato." It was so popular that writers from Cervantes to John Donne to Giordano Bruno all quoted from it.
Other Jewish Venetian writers had a similar impact, weaving Talmudic and Kabbalistic knowledge with classical philosophy and science. As many Jews did, these scholars "became a bridge between Arabic and Latin. Arabic-speaking Jews translated texts into Hebrew for their own purposes. Hebrew scholars in Europe would then eventually translate them into Latin." This was a role played by many in the ghetto for centuries, filling the libraries of their powerful Christian patrons.
Throughout these pages, Freedman weaves the character of Shylock from Shakespeares's The Merchant of Venice, teasing out whether the play humanizes or demonizes Jews. These are interesting asides, but the meat of the book is the real people of the ghetto, their daily lives, and the constant bargaining they had to do with the authorities in order to stay in their homes.
Freedman holds no illusions as to why the Venetians acted as they did, but he also sees clearly that bad as they might be, they were better than almost anywhere else in Europe: "The Venetians were dreadful, frightful, horrific to their Jews. But even so, if you were a Jew in times gone by and you had to live in Europe, you couldn't choose better than La Serenissima. For all its faults."
These faults are carefully described, all the limitations the Venetians put on their Jews, the poverty and squalor they imposed. And yet, despite them, there was a cultural richness behind the gates.
"Physically the ghetto was a miserable place, unsanitary and crowded. But despite, or perhaps because of the hardships, it slowly began to flourish intellectually and creatively. The Venice Ghetto was on its way to becoming the centre of European Jewish civilization during the late Renaissance; the Hebrew equivalent of Florence in terms of its cultural significance. It is often said that the roots of the Jewish enlightenment lay in mid-eighteenth century Berlin. Arguably they lay in Venice 250 years earlier."
The pages that follow prove that assertion, introducing a varied cast of characters, from printers to writers to rabbis to doctors to women, including biblical experts consulted by Henry VIII when he was searching for reasons to divorce his first wife. The whole combines into a vibrant tapestry, showcasing Jews from all over—Spanish, Portuguese, Levantine, Tedeschi (Germanic). Freedman draws on records from the Inquisition, writings by the Jews themselves, government records in the Venice archives. His research is thorough, careful, and illuminating. As he presents it, the story of the ghetto is the story of Jews in the Renaissance, their tenacity and ability to adapt, even thrive, in horrible circumstances. It's a story that has special resonance to the Jewish community today, and one that should be better known to everyone.