The Ghetto
System

Why this Chapter exists

An institution that named itself.

The word “ghetto” is often linked first with the Holocaust (Warsaw, Łódź, Vilna, Kraków). The original was the early-modern European ghetto, born in Venice in 1516 and dismantled three centuries later by the laws of emancipation, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century acts that made Jews full citizens. The shared word hides a line between an enclosure built for long-term segregation and the Nazi-era ghettos that led to mass murder.

Two ghettos, one word

The distinction the term hides.

Read the Chapter on the Nazi ghettos →

Venice · March 29, 1516

The first ghetto.

The institution has an exact birthday. During the War of the League of Cambrai (1508–1516), fighting on the mainland had driven Jewish refugees into Venice, and the city’s Jewish community grew. On March 29, 1516, after long debate, the Venetian Senate ordered all the city’s Jews into a single enclosed area. The site was an old copper foundry on the northwest edge of Venice, in the sestiere of Cannaregio. In the Venetian dialect a foundry was a geto, from gettare, “to cast” metal. The quarter took the foundry’s name, and from this one decree the word entered the languages of Europe.

The original quarter, the Geto Nuovo, was a small island ringed by canals. Gates were built at its two access points and locked at night, with Christian guards, paid by the Jewish community, patrolling the perimeter. Residents could leave during set daylight hours to do business in the city, and were required to wear a yellow hat or badge when they did, a marker carried over from earlier Venetian rules on Jewish dress.

As the community grew across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the quarter grew with it. The Geto Vecchio (“Old Ghetto”) was added in 1541 for Jewish merchants from the eastern Mediterranean (Levantine) lands of the Ottoman Empire, the Muslim empire ruled from today’s Turkey. The Geto Nuovissimo (“Newest Ghetto”) followed in 1633, for merchant families of Spanish and Portuguese Jewish descent, descendants of conversos, Jews forced to convert to Christianity in Spain and Portugal. By the 1600s as many as 5,000 people lived on roughly four acres, one of the most crowded districts anywhere in early-modern Europe. Buildings were subdivided again and again and pushed upward. Some reached seven and eight stories in a city where most stood at two or three. The Venetian Ghetto ran for 281 years, until Napoleon’s army took Venice in May 1797.

Rome · July 14, 1555

The papal model.

The second great ghetto was Rome’s, created by the bull (a formal papal decree) Cum Nimis Absurdum, issued by Pope Paul IV on July 14, 1555, barely two months into his reign. Its opening words, Cum nimis absurdum (“since it is utterly absurd”), gave it its name. The same opening sentence stated the theology behind the law: the Jews, it said, had been condemned by their own guilt to perpetual servitude. Jews had lived in Rome continuously since the second century BCE, and theirs is often called the oldest Jewish community in Europe. The bull confined them to a single enclosed strip along the Tiber, near the Portico of Octavia. It was a low-lying district, prone to flooding and counted among the least desirable in Rome.

The bull followed an attack on Jewish books. In August 1553 a papal decree condemned the Talmud as blasphemous. On September 9, 1553, the Jewish New Year, Hebrew books seized from Jewish homes were burned on a pyre in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori. The order was carried out across the Papal States and in Ferrara, Mantua, Florence, and Venice, where one contemporary account counted more than 1,000 complete copies of the Talmud burned.

Rome’s terms were harsher than Venice’s. Beyond the enclosure, later popes added a compulsory Catholic sermon that Roman Jews were made to attend. Jews were shut out of most trades, could not own property outside the ghetto, were made to wear distinguishing dress, and lived under a stack of further regulations enforced by the papal authorities. The Roman Ghetto was among the most populous in Europe, and it lasted 315 years. It ended when papal Rome fell on September 20, 1870, to the army of the Risorgimento, the movement that unified Italy into a single kingdom.

Cum Nimis Absurdum became the template for the ghettos that followed across the Papal States, the belt of central Italy the pope ruled as a civil sovereign: Ancona, Bologna, Ferrara, Avignon, and others. Later popes kept or tightened it. Pius V’s 1569 bull Hebraeorum Gens expelled Jews from most of the Papal States outside Rome and Ancona. Sixtus V eased some rules, and Clement VIII reimposed them. The rhythm of expansion, restriction, and brief relief ran on through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The system across Italy

From a model to a standard form.

After Venice and Rome, the ghetto became the default way Italian cities managed their Jewish communities. Among the major foundations:

• Florence and Siena (1571). Both established under Cosimo I de’ Medici, by an order of 1570 carried out in 1571. The Florentine ghetto ran for 277 years, until 1848.
• Ferrara (1624). Created under direct papal authority after the city passed to the Papal States in 1598.
• Modena (1638). Established by Duke Francesco I d’Este.
• Padua (1601–1603). Two enclosures created under Venetian rule.
• Mantua (1612). Established by Duke Vincenzo I Gonzaga, and notable for the architectural ambition of its synagogue interiors.
• Verona (1599) and Turin (1679). Under Venetian authority and the House of Savoy, respectively.
• Ancona (1555). Founded by the same papal authority as Rome.

By the mid-1600s, nearly every Italian city with a sizable Jewish community had one. The form was settled. The clearest exception, Livorno, where the Medici grand dukes used the 1591 Livornina charter to grant the Jewish community wide freedom of residence and attract Sephardic merchants, came from competing economic interests, not from any principled objection to the institution.

The system beyond Italy

Frankfurt, Prague, and the German lands.

Outside Italy, the enclosure took deepest root in the German lands and the Habsburg territories of central Europe.

• Frankfurt am Main (1462). The Judengasse (“Jews’ Lane”) predated Venice by more than fifty years, though Venice and its name are conventionally treated as the start of the modern institution. It was a single narrow street, gated and locked at night and on Christian holidays. It lasted nearly 350 years. In 1614 a mob led by Vincent Fettmilch stormed the lane and plundered the houses, and every Jew was driven out of the city. The emperor outlawed the rebels, their leaders were put to death in 1616, and the Jews were brought back to the Judengasse, a return the community marked every year as “Purim Winz,” the Purim of Vincent. French bombardment damaged the Judengasse in 1796, and the city’s Napoleonic-era government formally ended it in 1811, when the community purchased full civic rights with a payment that replaced its special taxes. It was the birthplace of the Rothschild banking family.
• Prague. The Jewish Quarter, Josefov, developed over many centuries, with its most restrictive enclosure in the seventeenth and eighteenth. It preserved an unusually deep material record of early-modern European Jewish life, including the Old-New Synagogue (built c. 1270, the oldest synagogue in continuous use in Europe) and the Old Jewish Cemetery. In November 1744, as the Prussian army withdrew from the city, Prussian soldiers, Austrian irregular troops called Pandurs, and some people of Prague looted the Jewish Quarter, and Jews were killed. Weeks later the empress Maria Theresa, accusing the Jews of Bohemia of collaborating with the Prussians, ordered every Jew out of Prague by the end of January 1745, and they were allowed back only in 1748, after promising to pay high taxes.
• Trieste, Gorizia, and the smaller Habsburg cities. Restricted quarters existed in most Habsburg cities, and were eased under the Habsburg emperor Joseph II’s 1782 Patent of Toleration, which opened the long Habsburg unwinding.
• The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Jewish life here, by the eighteenth century the demographic center of world Jewry, ran through a very different architecture: the kahal of communal self-rule and the shtetl, the small Jewish-majority market town. These were not ghettos in the sense this Chapter uses. The Commonwealth has its own Chapter, Unit 2 · Ch. 07 · The Jews of Poland and Lithuania.

Life inside the gates

The reality.

The ghetto was a closed world that ran, internally, as a working community. The law set its outer edges, and the Jewish community organized the life within them. The shared features, across the Italian and German cases:

• Self-government. Each ghetto was run by a council of Jewish leaders, the Università degli Ebrei in Italy, the Judengemeinde in the German lands. It collected taxes, ran the rabbinic court (beit din), kept the synagogue and cemetery, ran the schools, and spoke for the community to the civic authority.
• Many synagogues. The Venetian Ghetto held five, each for a distinct liturgical tradition living inside the same walls. They were the Scuola Grande Tedesca (German rite, 1528), the Scuola Canton (Ashkenazi, 1532), the Scuola Italiana (Italian rite, 1575), the Scuola Levantina (Sephardic), and the Scuola Spagnola (Spanish, c. 1580). All five survive.
• Work. Residents did business in the city by day. Italian ghettos carried real trade: moneylending, textiles, secondhand goods, jewelry, and a growing engagement with the commercial economy from the 1600s on. In the Italian cities moneylending was a licensed obligation. Communes chartered Jewish pawn banks, at capped interest rates, to provide credit for the urban poor, as a condition of the community’s residence. Cities developed specialties: Rome in textiles, Venice in moneylending and Levantine trade, Mantua in luxury goods.
• Schools and learning. Each major ghetto ran its own schooling, from children’s religious instruction to advanced study and, in a few cases, formal rabbinical academies. Venice, Mantua, and Rome were each serious centers of Jewish learning in the period.
• Overcrowding. A fixed perimeter and a growing population produced severe crowding. Apartments were subdivided, and upper floors were stacked until the buildings could bear no more. Historians rank the seventeenth-century Venetian Ghetto among the densest pre-industrial districts in Europe.
• Health. Crowding, poor drainage in low-lying sites (the Roman Ghetto by the Tiber especially), and thin sanitation drove disease rates above those of the surrounding cities. The plague years of 1630 and 1656 struck ghetto populations disproportionately.

What was made there

The cultural record of the ghetto period.

Confinement did not extinguish Jewish intellectual and cultural work, and in some periods it concentrated it. The work made inside the gates belongs to the record of the institution as much as the restrictions do.

• The Venetian Hebrew press. In the 1500s, Venice was the greatest center of Hebrew printing in the world, and the presses stood just outside the ghetto, in Christian hands, because Jews could not hold printing licenses. The Bomberg press (Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer working with Jewish editors from 1516) produced the first complete printed Talmud and the first Rabbinic Bible, in the page layout shown in the Object Spotlight below.
• Sara Copia Sullam (Venice, c. 1592–1641). A Jewish woman of the ghetto who kept a literary and philosophical salon, corresponded with Christian intellectuals, and published a 1621 defense of her convictions against a Christian polemicist. Her surviving letters and writings are a rare record of the intellectual life of an early-modern Jewish woman.
• Leon of Modena (Venice, 1571–1648). Rabbi, scholar, translator. His autobiography, The Life of Judah, is among the great early-modern Hebrew prose works and one of the most-cited windows onto daily life in the Venetian Ghetto.
• Mantuan Hebrew theater. From the late sixteenth century the Jewish community of Mantua built a Hebrew and Italian theatrical tradition, above all through Leone de’ Sommi (1525–1590), sometimes called the first Jewish playwright of the European tradition.
• Synagogue art and silver. The interiors of the Italian ghetto synagogues (Venice’s Scuola Spagnola, Padua’s Scuola Italiana, the Asti synagogue in Piedmont, the Mantua synagogues, and the Conegliano synagogue, now rebuilt in Jerusalem) are among the finest in early-modern Europe. The period’s decorative silver (Torah crowns and finials, Hanukkah lamps) survives in collections including the Israel Museum and the Jewish Museum, New York.
• The Rothschilds at Frankfurt. The Frankfurt Judengasse was where Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812) and his sons built one of the foundational banking houses of modern European finance, from a small house on the street known as the House at the Green Shield.

The long dismantling

The end of the institution.

The ghetto came apart across a long process running from the 1780s into the 1870s, pushed by three forces in succession.

The Habsburg Patent of Toleration (1782). Joseph II’s Toleranzpatent for the Jews, issued January 2, 1782, began the formal unwinding of Habsburg ghetto restrictions. It granted Jews incremental rights, to attend public schools and universities and to enter trades long closed to them. It also imposed obligations of its own: German-language schooling and, from 1788, military conscription. It did not abolish the institution outright, but it set the legal machinery by which it would be wound down.

The French Revolution and Napoleon (1789–1815). The Revolutionary settlement of 1790–91 made French Jews full citizens, the first European state to do so, and the Napoleonic conquests carried the model across Western Europe. Napoleon himself pulled part of it back with an 1808 decree restricting Jewish lending and residence in France’s eastern regions for a decade. Days after the French-installed city government decreed the Venetian Ghetto abolished, its gates were torn down and burned on July 11, 1797. The Roman gates came down during the short-lived Roman Republic of 1798–99, only to be restored when the papacy returned. The Frankfurt Judengasse was taken apart between 1796 and 1811. Much of this was reversed after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, but the legal template for emancipation had been set.

Emancipation across the nineteenth century. Full legal emancipation took most of the century. The Habsburg lands emancipated Jews in 1867, the North German Confederation in 1869, and the unified German Empire in 1871. The Italian states moved across the 1848 revolutions and the unification that followed, Piedmont and Tuscany in 1848, the rest as it joined the Kingdom of Italy. The last ghetto dismantled in the formal sense was Rome’s, which ended with the fall of papal Rome on September 20, 1870. The walls themselves had already come down in 1848, and the old district was cleared and rebuilt in the decades that followed.

Many Jewish communities went on living in the old ghetto districts for generations, out of economic necessity, communal closeness, or choice. What ended was the ghetto as an institution the law enforced.

Sites that survive

Where the record stands.

Much of the early-modern ghetto system survives in stone and is open to scholars, teachers, and students. The major sites:

• Venice, the Venetian Ghetto. The Campo del Ghetto Nuovo in Cannaregio. All five synagogue interiors are preserved and shown by guided tour through the Jewish Museum of Venice (Museo Ebraico di Venezia).
• Rome, the Roman Ghetto. The historic district along the Tiber near the Portico of Octavia. The Great Synagogue of Rome (Tempio Maggiore), built 1901–1904 just outside the old boundary, houses the Jewish Museum of Rome.
• Prague, Josefov. Most of the old quarter was demolished around 1900, but its synagogues and old cemetery survive. The Jewish Museum in Prague administers the Old Jewish Cemetery (begun 1439), the Pinkas Synagogue (now a Holocaust memorial), and the Klausen, Spanish, and Maisel synagogues. The Old-New Synagogue (c. 1270) is kept by the city’s Jewish Community.
• Frankfurt, the Judengasse. Most of the street was lost to nineteenth-century redevelopment and the Second World War. The Museum Judengasse, opened in 1992 over preserved foundation ruins, presents the record.
• Padua and Mantua. Padua preserves the Scuola Italiana and the Scuola Ashkenazita, shown through the Padua Jewish Museum. Mantua preserves the Norsa Torrazzo Synagogue (1751), kept by the Jewish Museum of Mantua.

Object Spotlight

The Bomberg page, Venice.

Look at the page before worrying about the words. The page holds three layers at once. A dense block sits in the middle, and two narrower columns of smaller type wrap around it on the left and right edges, with a few more lines tucked along the bottom. It looks less like a page to read straight through than like a conversation crowded onto paper, a main voice in the center, others talking back in the margins.

The book is the Talmud, the vast record of centuries of rabbinic discussion and law, the central text of Jewish study. The big central block is the ancient core text. The columns around it are commentaries written centuries later: closest to the spine, the explanations of Rashi, the eleventh-century French scholar, and on the outer edge, the arguments of his successors, the Tosafists. The Soncino press first tried this arrangement in print in the 1480s. It was standardized by Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer working in Venice with Jewish editors, who produced the first complete printed edition of the Talmud between 1520 and 1523.

Bomberg printed it in Venice in the 1520s, in the same city and the same decade as the world’s first ghetto, the locked and gated quarter the Jews of Venice were confined to in 1516. Jews were being walled into a corner of the city at night, and in that same place and time one of the most important books in the history of printing was produced.

The layout was new in its effect. By fixing the text and its commentaries into one stable, repeatable page, Bomberg gave every later reader the same map. A teacher in Vilna and a teacher in Baghdad could say “look at the top of the page” and mean the identical spot. Before print, every handwritten copy was a little different. After Bomberg, the page itself became shared ground.

The layout held. Nearly every printed Talmud since 1523 has followed the Bomberg layout, down to where each commentary sits and which word starts each page. Surviving copies of the original edition are now among the treasures of the great research libraries. The format a Venetian shop fixed beside the ghetto gates outlived the gates by centuries.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History, early-modern Europe. The ghetto is a standard feature of early-modern European urban life.
• World History, the medieval world. The Lateran councils and the canonical regulation of Jewish life set the legal ground the ghetto would later grow from.
• World History, revolution and emancipation. The dismantling of the ghetto is part of the standard story of European emancipation.
• International Classroom Relevance. Because the ghetto shaped cities from Venice and Rome to Frankfurt and Prague, and lent its name to later institutions, this Chapter supports world history, urban history, and the study of religious minorities internationally.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: NY Global History 9.9 (Transformation of Western Europe and Russia, including 9.9b, the discrimination against and persecution of Jews), 9.6 (Social and Cultural Growth and Conflict), and 10.2 (Enlightenment, Revolution, and Nationalism, the era of emancipation).
• Common Core RH.9–10.7 & RH.11–12.7. Integrating text and visual sources. The institution is attested through papal bulls, Senate decrees, surviving buildings, Hebrew literary sources, contemporary Christian polemics, and printed objects like the Bomberg Talmud, an unusually rich set for source-integration work.
• C3 Framework, D2.His.2 & D2.His.14. Continuity, change, and causation. The 354-year span from Venice 1516 to Rome 1870 offers a long case study for these questions.