Shylock’s Venice: The Remarkable History of Venice’s Jews and the Ghetto

By Harry Freedman

Bloomsbury Continuum 2024

As Harry Freedman points out immediately in his new book Shylock’s Venice, “if you were a Jew in times gone by and you had to live in Europe, you couldn’t choose better than La Serenissima.” There’s scarcely half a beat before the tacked-on “for all its faults,” and the declaration is preceded by “The Venetians were dreadful, frightful, horrific to their Jews.” All this is to make 100% crystal clear that Venice’s Jewish ghetto was absolutely horrible. Except for all the ways it wasn’t all that bad. 

Freedman periodically refreshes this warning throughout his book’s 200 pages. Readers are told that Jews of the ghetto were free to wander the city, do business at the ports, correspond with authorities, read widely, import luxuries, and publish internationally, but those same readers are also regularly reminded that these conditions, even at their best, were “little more than tolerable.” Readers curious to know what a little less than tolerable might look like need only turn to Riyadh in the 16th century, or London, or St. Petersburg, or Salamanca, or literally anywhere else in the world.

But once Freedman has thus pro-actively grounded himself against the kind of character-assassination accusations that are thrown around these days online as easily as casual greetings, he’s free to tell not so much the story of the ghetto as the stories of some of its most colorful inhabitants over the roughly four centuries covered by Shylock’s Venice, the artfully-chosen collection of “oddballs, prophets, and false messiahs” that have so clearly and wonderfully captured this author’s affection. 

Readers get these stories in more or less chronological order with some figures taking up only a page or two, such as 17th century Rabbi Azariah Figo, author of a widely-printed collection of sermons, or Isacco Levi, who was accused of witchcraft by the Inquisition before they inexplicably seemed to lose interest (Freedman wonders if perhaps a strategic bribe was offered, ominously noting, “For whatever reason, the file remains open in the Inquisition’s records”). Alongside these fascinating but minor figures are greater sensations, like the celebrated messiah-figure Shabbetai Tzvi, whose preachings and miracles drew enormous crowds before he confused his followers by converting to Islam. 

Occasionally, if too seldom, Freedman indulges himself in a bit of dry humor, as when he talks about a particular option almost always open to the Jews of Venice:

No matter how difficult it was to be a Jew in the sixteenth century, even in Venice, a more tolerant place than most, there was always a means of escape. No matter how unsanitary, overcrowded, filthy and malodorous the living conditions, restrictive the civic regulations, irrelevant or baffling the cultural environment was to ordinary Jews, they could put it all behind them. All they had to do was convert to Christianity and everything would change. 

He’s also very effective, albeit again maddeningly brief, on the one amazing moment of change experienced when Venice capitulated to Bonaparte’s French empire in 1797 and, in accordance with vagrant “revolutionary” ideals, the ghetto gates were pulled down. People cheered, and a French soldier reported seeing rabbis dancing in the crowd. But in mere months the Austrians took over the city, and all cause for celebration ended.

The real end of the ghetto came like the end of Venice itself, gradually, in stages, accompanied by sighs and commemorative plaques. It’s a sprawling story, enormously documented, but maybe Freeman is wise to tell it this way, hurrying from one theme and biographical sketch to the next. The reader is left with the memory of a parade of big personalities and hot debates, a very living feeling. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News