Long before the Roma arrived in the West, there was another people who had already suffered under the sign of alterity in Christian Europe. During the centuries between the fall of Rome and early modernity, jewish people lived surrounded by an aura of ambiguity intolerable to Christian culture: while it was undeniable that Jesus was Jewish and the Old Testament was rooted in Jewish religion, the Jewish people were widely regarded as the killers of Christ but, curiously enough, not the romans who became his inheritors. The Jews were not entirely new for Christians, they were strangely familiar and yet radically alien and dangerous. Thus, they ended up becoming the very incarnation of the uncanny (unheimlich), alien to the house (heim, domus) that Christian culture had built during centuries of religious domination
After centuries of living both inside and outside of the dominant culture—often perceived as a source of spiritual “contamination” for the ordinary Christian, and even for converts of their own brethren—by the end of the fourteenth century european Jews had already been expelled from England (1290), France (1306 and 1394) and Spain (1492), and massacred in the German territories. In this circumstances many were forced to live scattered in different locations to avoid being singled out. Displaced by the persecutions taking place north of the Alps, many Jewish families emigrated to Venice where they settled down even though they were not granted legal status and were not allowed to lend money. This city was particularly harsh on them and in 1516 the senate
passed legislation requiring all Jews residing throughout the city, as well as any who were to come in the future, to reside together on the island of Cannaregio, which was already known as the Ghetto Nuovo (the New Ghetto) because of its association with the municipal copper foundry previously located across the canal in the Ghetto Vecchio (the Old Ghetto). (il guetto or getto is derived from gettare, which means “the pouring or casting of metal.”)1
The Guetto Nuovo was closed by a gate overlooking a small pedestrian bridge guarded by Christian guards who closed the doors at sunset and only opened them at dawn, when the Marangona, the largest bell in St. Mark’s Basilica, rang. Similarly, the areas of the island facing the Grand Canal were sealed with walls to prevent anyone from entering or leaving. The Jews were effectively isolated from the rest of the city, a circumstance that “created a completely Jewish space within a much larger Christian polity.”2
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