venice and its minorities 475
the pawnshops, initially privately run profit-making businesses,
became much less lucrative as the government increasingly utilized the
Jews as providers of inexpensive credit for the Venetian poor rather than
as contributors to the treasury. consequently, during the course of the
16th century, it gradually lowered the interest rates from 15 per cent to 12
to ten and finally to five per cent in 1573 and required the Jews to lend
sums of up to three ducats if given an adequate pledge. at the same time,
in response to repeated Jewish complaints that the lower interest rates
were eliminating their profits, the government lowered their annual pay-
ments to the treasury until finally those payments were completely elimi-
nated when the interest rate was reduced to five percent. thus the nature
of Jewish pawnbroking changed from a private profit-making enterprise
to the equivalent of a Monte di Pietà subsidized by the Jewish community
that, in order to enable the Jews to continue to reside in Venice, had to
assume responsibility for the operation of three pawnshops and to grant
the Jews who operated them a subsidy by augmenting the economically
unviable five per cent interest rate on all sums lent out.67
the Venetian-ottoman war of 1537–40 led to the diversion of much of
the maritime trade of Venice to ancona, so when in 1541 Levantine Jewish
merchants came to the government complaining that they did not have
space to dwell in the ghetto because of its narrowness and requested that
they be provided with adequate room, the government responded favor-
ably. observing that the greater part of the merchandise coming from
Upper and Lower romania was handled by those merchants, in the con-
text of a larger plan designed to make trading in Venice more attractive to
foreign merchants, it assigned them 20 dwellings in the Ghetto Vecchio,
which was ordered walled up with a gate at each end, one opening up to
the pavement along the canal of cannaregio and the other to the wooden
footbridge leading to the Ghetto nuovo.68
Meanwhile, at the end of the 15th century a major demographic change
commenced. as a result of the expulsion of the Jews from spain in 1492
and the continual emigration of new christians who had been converted
by force in Portugal in 1497 and their descendents, a far-flung kinship net-
work of Jews and new christians gradually came into being throughout
the Mediterranean world, especially in its eastern coastal port cities, such
as istanbul and salonika. simultaneously, the eastern Mediterranean, the
67 ravid, “on sufferance,” pp. 25–43.
68 see chambers and Pullan, eds., Venice: A Documentary History, p. 344.