The enclosing of the Venice ghetto marks the appearance of a new form of locus terribilis different from the confinement scenarios known until then, such as the quarantine stations or lazzarettos (another Venetian invention) and the leper colonies that abounded near the Mediterranean ports. But more importantly, while the lazzaretto and the leprosarium were designed to contain biological agents, the ghetto was intended to contain an alleged agent of “spiritual” contamination (7.6); that is, they were designed to contain alterity.

On the other hand, unlike the somewhat voluntary ban of the Roma (7.2), which finds its topographical expression in the encampment, the Jews of Venice were confined against their will in a geographical space perfectly suited to this purpose, an island. They could enter and leave the Ghetto Nuovo once a day and continued to interact with the rest of the city’s population, but their options and consequently their sources of income had been severely limited. The Venice ghetto offers a closed but permeable place, where one is and isn’t simultaneously. Like the door in Kafka’s Before the Law (0.9), the gate of the Venice Ghetto opens to a place of exception; a non-place in which one only exists for oneself and one’s own, but not for the rest of the population.