The ghetto גטו

On 29 March 1516 the Venetian Senate decreed that all the Jews of the city move into the enclosed court by San Girolamo, on the site of the old foundry — in Venetian *getto*, "casting." Two bridges, gates opened at dawn with the stroke of the *marangona* bell and locked at night, guards and patrol boats — all of it paid for by those locked in. From there the word travelled across Europe.

Closed Jewish streets had existed before; Frankfurt's Judengasse, from 1462, is older than the Venetian one. What was new was an island wholly cut off by water, fixed in law as the only permitted place of residence, and the name that stuck to it.

Paul IV, by the bull Cum nimis absurdum of 14 July 1555, extended the Venetian arrangement to the whole of the Papal States. Then it ran through Italy: Bologna 1556, Florence and Siena 1571, Verona 1600, Padua 1602, Mantua 1610–12, Ferrara 1624–27, Modena 1638, Turin 1679, Casale 1724, Correggio 1779 — the last ghetto ever established in Italy.

Two corrections are worth holding on to. The word "ghetto" does not appear in the bull: it says "one quarter," and the Roman enclosure was officially the *serraglio*. And the ghetto was not a flat prohibition on work: the bull left the rag trade and, regulated, pawnbroking, and took away the grain trade, landholding and the treatment of Christian patients — not a ban on labour but a precise impoverishment.

It ended in 1796–98, when French armies and local municipalities opened the gates town by town; in 1799 all of it was restored. The Roman ghetto outlived every other and was abolished on 20 September 1870, when Italian troops entered Rome through the Porta Pia.