Murray Baumgarten University of California, Santa Cruz Home Publications Presentations Courses Family Album Working Papers for Students
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Murray Baumgarten University of California, Santa Cruz Home Publications Presentations Courses Family Album Working Papers For Students Outsiders and Insiders: Venice, the Jews, and Italian Culture Murray Baumgarten, April 7, 2008 Jewish Difference, Venetian Policy Jewish Difference, Venetian Policy Jewish difference, for the Venetians, did not lead them to expel the Jews, as the English had in 1290, the French in 1319, and the Spanish in 1492. The liberal solution the Venetians adopted in 1516 was to restrict the Jews to the Ghetto, where they might live in order to do money-lending – today we’d call it pawn-broking – which was essential to the economic and social wellbeing of the Venetian polity. The onetime Senator and semi-official chronicler of Venice, Marino Sanuto makes the point forcefully in several places in his diaries, outlining the perspective which informed the decision to keep the Jews by sequestering them in the newly devised Ghetto. “Had I, Marino Sanuto, been a member of the Senate as I was last year, I would have spoken, though not to speak for the Jews, because I could describe many sharp practices of theirs in connexion with their loans. I would have . prov[ed] that Jews are even more necessary to a city than bakers are (dimostrando è necessarii più hebrei e pistori in una terra), and especially to this one, for the sake of the general welfare.†No trifling comparison this, for a city that by the 13th century had learned how to store grain so that the guild of bakers could feed the city folk and even have enough left over between harvests to sell to other communities that did not have such a reserve. Sanuto goes on to expand and defend his decision: “I would have referred to the laws, and to what our ancestors have always done, and to the opinion of the Doctors of Alessandro of Imola, Pietro of Ancarano, Baldus and others, who advise us that Jews be kept to lend upon interest.†In this fascinating entry, Sanuto also suggests that mercantile acumen and the collateral stuff of pawn- broking, as well as providing for the needs of the Jews living in the Ghetto, made it one of the best shopping districts in the city. “It is true that I would not have wished them to keep shops dealing in second-hand goods, so as not to deprive Christians of a living, even though if they kept them goods could be sold very profitably (ancora che a tenirli sia gran beneficio di le robe si vol vender). Our countrymen have never wanted Jews to keep shops to trade in this city, but to buy and sell and go away again.†And then he clinches his point about the importance of the Jews to Venice: “But there should be none of this humbug in our State about expelling the Jews when there is no Monte di Pietà .†The contemporary Venetian architect and urban historian, Donatella Calabi expands on what emerges inadvertently from Sanuto. She notes that “Despite its often rather desperate state, by the 1630s, having reached its greatest size, the Venetian ghetto was clearly no longer just a refugee shelter for a minority group, as it had been in the first decades of the 1500s. Rather, it had evolved into an urban environment in which daily life was a rich tapestry woven from points of primary exchange and places of work.†The urban record indicates that “There was a bakery for bread and Passover matzo in each of the two original ghettos; there were also numerous shops for greens and fruit, for wine, meat, cheese, pasta.†Not that the wealth of the Jews rivaled that of the great Venetian families – but the Ghetto had become a thriving commercial center, enriched now by the mercantile trade with the Ottoman Empire of the new group of Jews, the Levantines, who had been settled in the Ghetto Vecchio for that purpose in 1541. Calabi continues: â €œNew food shops were continually being opened, like the one we find in 1627 obtaining a license for the sale of oil and other traditional foods.†There were specialty shops: “Some vendors sold oil of different sorts that were appropriate for the Germans and for the Levantines, others offered tobacco or wax candles. There were also the shops and stalls of a variety of artisans who provided services, including a barber, hairdresser, clothes mender, tailor, and wood carver, as well as a bookseller, who perhaps had an attached printing house and a workshop for binding. There was a nurse who looked after the local Jewish children, a vendor of alchemical supplies, and an inn for foreign Jews. Scattered among these were also sundry storerooms holding lumber, majolica, and coffins for the dead.†It is not my intention to minimize the shaming of the Jews that their ghettoization produced. The badge they were required to wear upon leaving the ghetto also was demanded of prostitutes. They were walled up; it was believed that their very gaze could pollute the host, so windows were boarded up, and the water doors to the ghetto sealed. They had to pay the guards who watched them and, patrolling the island, forced them to observe their nightly curfew. But Calabi’s characterization of the rich urban fabric of their neighborhood is also part of the context for the meanings of difference that defined the experience of the Jews of Venice and the Ghetto. David Myers has recently phrased the issue by asking how the “typical Venetian Jew in 1520†might â €œhave made sense of the multiple social and cultural layers of his existence?†Though “he was now confined at night behind the locked gates of the ghetto,†they did not, however, “prevent him from crossing over to Gentile society during the day and engaging in regular economic, social and cultural exchange.†This meant that he had to internalize the values of the ruling culture in addition to his own — to experience difference and sameness from within and without. He had to be nimble enough to shift rapidly between the role of insider and outsider. This involved a psychic as well as sociological adjustment. We might say that this typical Venetian Jew lived the Ghetto solution, which mediated between, in the historian Roberto Bonfil’s phrase, “the chimera of unconditioned acceptance and the nightmare of expulsion.â € Visible Community The ironies of space, time, and history from March 29, 1516, when the Ghetto was established, also meant that the Jews were transformed from itinerants into a settled, established, and visible community. The desire of Marino Sanuto and “our countrymen†never to have Jews keep “shops to trade in the city, but to buy and sell and go away again†was not to be fulfilled. For the Jews had been granted refuge by this city, itself devised as a sanctuary from marauding armies that could not cross the lagoon. The Ghetto thus highlighted their difference, and in some sense, also simultaneously dissolved the difference Sanuto and others wanted to insist on maintaining. Rather than becoming marginalized the Ghetto became a microcosm of La Serenissima. As Shaul Bassi notes, “Contained within the narrow limits of an island, surrounded by water, a safe haven for refugees, multiethnic and multilingual, the Ghetto turns out to be a perfect microcosm of Venice, epitomizing the potentialities and contradictions of the city as a whole.†A city without an agricultural base, dependent for its existence on the exchanges of commerce, Venice had to offer access to all traders. It could control them through restriction and surveillance, limiting access through the terms of charters, but it could not banish them. Thus Bassi notes that “Venice is a place where identity has always been dynamic and negotiated across different cultural boundaries, with foreigners quickly making themselves at home.†(Bassi 470) As the Jews engaged in regular interchange with the Venetians, they also articulated their own communal institutions, in which the wealthier Levantines, engaged in trade with the Ottoman Empire, took the lead. Much of this is reflected in the dialect they developed. Bassi tells us that the “newborn community . developed a Judeo-Venetian jargon, characteristically made of the local language enriched with Hebrew terms. Jews referred to the Ghetto by the term ‘hasser,’ derived from the Hebrew hatzer,חצר ,courtyard, which suggests an intimate and a familiar space.†(472) Quoting from the Venetian Jewish lexicon compiled by Umberto Fortis and Paolo Zolli – La parlata giudeo-veneziana (Assisi: Carucci 1979), Bassi notes that “the entry ‘Ghetto’ does not feature in this lexicon.†(479) Note also that the Roman Jews in their ghetto, which was established on the Venetian model in 1555, used the word, but derived it from the Hebrew word for marital divorce, the get. These linguistic usages are further evidence of their status as insiders. Though they lived on the sufferance of their rulers, and with each expiration of the condotta – the charter – granting them the privilege of residence in the Ghetto had to provide increasing tribute levied exponentially, it is important to acknowledge that they yet made of this place of exile, shame, and insult, their own diasporic urban home. Jewish Difference and Venetian Jewish Irony Thinking about difference here reminds us of the power of the point of view of the observer. For the Jews, however, this is doubled. There are two perspectives constantly present in their consciousness.