500 edward muir
by contracts.37 Thus, there was always a tension between the necessary
presence of Jews and the unnecessary christian biases against them. After
the Venetian loss at Agnadello in 1509, the enemy burned Mestre, and
Jews flooded into Venice along with other refugees. The Jews settled into
various neighborhoods, creating an unprecedented presence in the streets
and campi of Venice. Sanudo recorded in 1515 that “it used to be that from
before palm Sunday to after easter they were not to be seen. This year
they were out and about until yesterday [holy Thursday], and this is a
very bad thing. no one says anything to them because, with these wars,
they need them; thus they do what they want.”38 The Senate considered a
proposal to isolate the Jews on the giudecca, which Jewish leaders man-
aged to prevent, but the pressure was so great that by 1516 the Senate
ordered all Jews to live in the ghetto, which was to be walled and guarded
day and night. The neighborhood, which had previously been the location
of a foundry (gettare means “to cast,” hence ghetto), became a fortress
that both protected the Jews from assault and robbery and placed them
under surveillance and curfew.39 The Jews remained in the ghetto, but
the walls were often quite permeable. Jewish physicians served christian
patients, Jewish merchants traded on the rialto and provided vital loans
to the government and the poor, and Jewish intellectuals interacted with
their christian counterparts. There was, however, continuous pressure
on the Jews to convert, and the baptism of a Jew became a moment for
joyous celebration among Venetian christians.40
one of Sanudo’s most noticeable silences was on the subject of the vast
majority of Venetians, the common people—the guildsmen, shopkeepers,
sailors, Arsenal workers, laborers, servants, and minor professionals such
as notaries. except for extraordinary circumstances such as famine, when
starving beggars interfered with access to Mass or carnival banquets, they
37 Brian pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic
State (cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 431–509; r. po-chia hsia, Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual
Murder Trial (new haven, 1992); robert c. Davis and Benjamin c. i. ravid, eds., The Jews
of Early Modern Venice (Baltimore, 2001).
38 Sanuto, I diarii, 20:98. Translation from Sanudo, Cità Excelentissima, pp. 337–38.
39 Benjamin ravid, “on Sufferance and not as of right: The Status of the Jewish com-
munities in early Modern Venice,” in David Malkiel, ed., The Lion Shall Roar: Leon Modena
and his World (Jerusalem, 2003), pp. 17–61; pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice,
p. 487.
40 Sanuto, I diarii, 46:501–02. Brian pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of
Venice 1550–1670 (oxford, 1983), pp. 58–72, 243–312. ella-natalie rothman, “Becoming
Venetian: conversion and Transformation in the Seventeenth-century Mediterranean,”
Mediterranean Historical Review 21 (2006), 39–75.