The First Ghetto: Venice and the Jews, Alexander Lee, Picador, £30

It was a cold January afternoon when Alexander Lee first came to the Venetian Ghetto, and it caused him to burst into tears. Tears smudge the pages of many books of Jewish history. Every year, on seder night, Jews dip bitter herbs in salt water, recalling the tears shed by the Israelites during their bondage in Egypt. The story of the Jewish diaspora or exile begins with the tears of the prophet Jeremiah: ‘Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!’ God himself is a weeper, we learn in the Talmud. There is that topos in Renaissance art of the philosophers Democritus, who laughs at the world, and Heraclitus, who weeps over it. The story of the Jews tends to be told in the Heraclitan mode.

There is a name for this tendency: it is the ‘lachrymose conception of Jewish history’. This was the coinage of the historian Salo Baron, and intended in a pejorative way: Baron spent his career criticising an earlier generation of scholars for painting such a gloomy picture of Jewish history. The French Revolution, Heinrich Graetz had said, was a ‘judgement which in one day atoned for the sins of a thousand years’; the emancipation of the Jews that followed in its wake marked the ‘dawn after their long slavery among the nations of Europe’. Baron’s 1928 essay, ‘Ghetto and Emancipation’, called for a ‘break with the lachrymose theory of pre-Revolutionary woe, and to adopt a view more in accord with historic truth’. The historic truth, in his view, was that emancipation wasn’t all good, and the ghetto wasn’t all bad.

The case of Venetian Jewry offers good ground for Graetz and Baron, Heraclitus and Democritus, to lock horns once again. Stretching from the 14th century to the present, Lee’s history captures the Ghetto itself, as well as what came after it. Venetian Jewry was a microcosm of the global whole. Originally, the community was German or Ashkenazi; later there arose a significant ‘Levantine’ Sephardi presence, often Marranos who had converted to Christianity under pressure and then came back again. There were tensions between the two groups, so intense at times that, according to one shopkeeper, it was ‘not even safe to stay at home’. Later still, in the 18th century, there was an influx of Jewish immigration (also Ashkenazi) from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Venetian Jews largely performed the function, which they performed elsewhere: as merchants, moneylenders, ‘service nomads‘. They swung on a pendulum between hostility and toleration, persecution and acceptance.

Prejudice was present from the start. The Jews who first arrived in Venice were refugees, fleeing antisemitic violence in northern Europe. Once in Italy, their lives and livelihoods remained at risk. In 1384, five Jews were tied to an anchor and thrown into the sea by three sailors; Lee is quick to add that ‘such abuses were nevertheless rare’. Venice sometimes appeared a haven next to the rest of Christendom. When Barcelona was rocked by pogroms, the Venetian community dispatched one of their number, Salamon Sansone di Vinegia, to rescue invaluable Hebrew books. Still, everyday life was stalked by the usual harassment. The blood libel made it from England to Italy, and intermingled with the notion that Jews mocked and desecrated the eucharist. There emerged, Lee tells us, a ‘discreet but potent connection… between sodomy and Judaism’ – a connection that had not been unknown in England, either, where in 1376 the Good Parliament held Jewish merchants responsible for the introduction of such vices into London. Jews could become wealthy, even powerful, but they remained always on the outside. Shakespeare never set foot in the Ghetto, but The Merchant of Venice was, in this respect, along the right lines.

The Jews of Venice were often at the mercy of diplomatic and political circumstances beyond their control. In 1571, riding high after the great victory against the Turks at Lepanto, the Venetian senate voted to banish the Jews from Venice itself and all its Adriatic possessions. But it wasn’t long afterwards that the Ghetto enjoyed its ‘Golden Age’. The main point of contention was, of course, always moneylending: lending money at interest was what Jews were for. The Venetian government tried repeatedly to get around the issue by setting up monti di pietà, small-loans organisations funded on a charitable basis; their attempts throughout the 16th century repeatedly floundered. One of the things that Graetz – and, even more so, Jewish historians of a Zionist persuasion – found so dispiriting about the experience of diaspora was that it subjected the Jews to a constant state of dependence upon the goodwill of non-Jewish authorities. There was such dependence in Venice, as Lee makes clear – but the dependence was mutual. In order to maintain its position as the central node in a commercial nexus, Venice needed its Jews. Marin Sanudo, the Venetian historian and diarist of the early 16th century, thought that Jewish moneylenders were as vital to the city’s fortunes and functioning as bakers; the city could no more do without Jewish money than without bread.

By 1630, Lee asserts, Venice was ‘the best place in the world to be a Jew’. Their position seemed to be improved further, much later, by the French Revolution. It was Napoleon who abolished the Ghetto and called the Jews of Venice, as elsewhere, into modernity. As the revolutionary Raffael Vivante enthused at the time: ‘The vast abyss which separated us from other nations has been completely overcome… you have toppled the terrible doors which held our Nation as if locked up in a prison.’ Later in the 19th century, Italian nationalism seemed to hold similar promise. ‘Jews and Christians – we are all Italians’, went a popular ditty; ‘Christians and Jews – we are all brothers.’ In 1905, a Jewish newspaper, Il Corriere Israelitico, affirmed that ‘Italian Jewry is great and fortunate; our foreign brothers across the Alps look south with envy’.

Old prejudices proved persistent. In 1855, a peasant girl named Giuditta revived the blood libel when she claimed to have been kidnapped and tortured by a group of Jews. It was ultimately revealed that Giuditta had committed a theft in Legnano at precisely the time she claimed she was being tortured in Verona; she was sentenced to six years of hard imprisonment. Still, it was a warning that Jewish emancipation and Italian nationhood would not mean, as Graetz and others might have hoped, the end of antisemitic hatred.

And so it proved. Venetian Jewry declined during the 19th and early 20th centuries; its destruction occurred during the final two years of the Second World War, when northern Italy was under German occupation. The president of Venice’s Jewish community, Giuseppe Jona, chose to commit suicide rather than hand over a list of names to the Nazis. It was not enough: over 200 Venetian Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Lee saw some of their names on memorial plaques at the Ghetto during his first visit. But it was not this – or this alone – that reduced him to tears that January afternoon. It was rather the sound of a ‘gentle song, joyful and defiant’, sung by the Jews who remain today in the Venetian Ghetto as they marked the beginning of the Sabbath. His tears were not only tears of sadness. They were tears which Salo Baron would have well understood, when he remarked, 30 years after the Holocaust, that ‘suffering is part of the destiny of the Jews, but so is repeated joy as well as ultimate redemption’.