Last Venice Update

The day before yesterday we spent the day in the ghetto- the Ghetto Nuovo, which is the original ghetto and the origin of the use of “ghetto” as a quarter for minorities. We visited three of the five synagogues, and then we took the vaporetto to the Lido, a barrier island in the Adriatic, where we visited the old Jewish graveyard. Venice has been home to a lot of Jews, including Italian Jews, who settled in Italy after the diaspora, Sephardim who settled after 1391 and 1492, the Ashkenazi from Eastern and Northern Europe, and Levantine Jews from Turkey and Greece.

While I'm on the subject, a quick word on “ghetto”: originally it was geto, but the Ashkenazi Jews who were put thee were unable to say the soft g, so it became a hard g. Geto is actually a reference to the iron foundry, where cannons were made, around which the ghetto was built. The New Ghetto is actually the oldest, but it is the New Ghetto because it was built around the new foundry. By the time the Newest Ghetto was made, the term meant “Jewish quarter”. There was once a community of about 5000 Jews in Venice, all crammed into the ghettos New, Old, and Newest, so there were a lot of gravestones in the cemetery to examine. Many of the Sephardic stones are easily recognizable, as the Sephardim indicated their former hidalgo status on their gravestones, since they could no longer display the symbols above their doors.

After the cemetery, I went to the beach and walked. Then we all had dinner back in the ghetto and celebrated a classmate's birthday with cake.