You would never know that behind the entirely nondescript facade of the city’s old
Jewish quarter are five exquisite synagogues, each with its own particular style.
In the context of Jewish history, the word ‘‘ghetto’’ carries with it an unmistakable fatalism. But long before the Holocaust, the term had a different set of connotations. The Jewish quarters of the great European capitals — Paris’s Marais, Frankfurt’s Judengasse, Amsterdam’s Jodenbuurt — were testaments to the diversity and richness of Jewish life. Often sites of mandated segregation ridden with poverty and plague, they also fostered cultural exchange and intellectual vitality. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Venice, which established one of Europe’s first Jewish ghettos in 1516 in the Cannaregio district, on a small island where the city's cannons had previously been cast: the foundry, or ‘‘geto.’’
Today a quiet, crumbling corner of a sinking city, the Venetian ghetto was once a microcosm of Venice itself, a tapestry woven of many nations, pasts, traditions and languages. Venice was a capital of the Mediterranean world, but it was also a capital of Jewish life in Europe, the epitome of the Diaspora’s potential. The most enduring evidence of the cosmopolitan universe that used to exist here are the five synagogues that today lie hidden behind the nondescript facades of dilapidated apartment buildings where a few families actually still live: small jewel boxes that quietly preserve an enchanting global artistry.
On a Friday afternoon this fall, I walked along the bar-lined main canal that cuts through the now trendy Cannaregio, past tourists eating outside and locals crowded around coffee counters, before turning into a dark alley, the Calle Ghetto Vecchio, next to a small kosher restaurant. On a sleepy square at the passage’s end, the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo, boys were kicking a soccer ball while elderly women perused a storefront display of winter accouterments for pets. The Museo Ebraico, a small, modest museum from the 1950s, organized in a series of strange little rooms, tells the story of the area. It is to be refurbished next year by the Venetian Heritage Council to mark the ghetto’s 500th anniversary, along with the three 16th-century synagogues hidden on the upper floors of the crumbling buildings on the same piazza.
Each synagogue was designed to correspond to a different nation of Jewish immigrants, and part of the pleasure of visiting them is noticing their unique styles. The oldest, the Scuola Grande Tedesca, built in the 1520s for German Jews who imported Ashkenazi traditions to the Mediterranean world, is most ornate, although you’d never know it from the outside. The synagogues were initially tolerated on the condition that their exteriors bear no resemblance to Jewish houses of worship, so the sense of being enveloped in opulence is all the more striking when you enter. The Scuola Canton, built a few years later, possibly for émigrés from southern France, showcases a Torah ark laced with gilded carvings and wood panels illustrating the book of Exodus. The beauty of the Renaissance Scuola Italiana is restrained, by contrast, with natural light streaming in from five large windows, illuminating the ancient mahogany.
Across a small pedestrian bridge are the two Sephardic synagogues, the Scuola Levantina and the Scuola Spagnola. In terms of architectural conventions, these two seem to break all the rules; they were lovingly restored in the 17th century by non-Jewish artisans — perhaps even by Baldassare Longhena, the master of Venetian Baroque. That evening, I returned to the Spanish synagogue for a service packed with locals and visitors. Bathed in the gentle glow of giant Flemish candelabra, the space was resplendent, filled with chanting and with history, in all its darkness and light. A fantasy of black-and-white marble and rich red satin, it is as much a piece of Venetian cultural patrimony as it is a masterpiece of Jewish architecture. For a moment in time, there was little difference.
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