Ghetto of Venice

On 29 March 1516 the Senate of the Republic of Venice ordered all the city's Jews to live on the small island of the Ghetto Nuovo in the Cannaregio district, the site of an old copper foundry; getto in the Venetian dialect means a casting. Its two gates were locked at night and guarded by Christian watchmen, whose wages the Jews had to pay, and boats patrolled the canals around it. The area grew with the Ghetto Vecchio in 1541 and the Ghetto Nuovissimo in 1633. Its houses rose up to seven storeys, and by the 17th century some 5,000 Jews from Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and the Levant lived there, with five synagogues (scole) for their communities. Rabbi Leon of Modena preached there, and Venice became a great centre of Hebrew printing.

The name of this Venetian quarter became the word for Jewish quarters everywhere: Pope Paul IV ordered a ghetto in Rome in 1555, and the Nazis used the word for the quarters where they imprisoned Jews before murdering them. The gates of the Venice ghetto were torn down when Napoleon's army entered the city in 1797.