History of the Jews in Venice

by Cecil Roth

The heyday of the Jewish community of Venice is both comparatively late and short, comprising the greater parts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, during this time, Venice attracted some of the most vivid personalities in the whole range of Jewish history. It also became for a while an important place of meeting between Jews of the east and west and a significant center of Hebrew printing. At the same time, within the ghetto walls -- the word "ghetto" itself being of Venetian origin -- there developed a social life of extraordinary warmth and interest, which it is possible to reconstruct in unusual detail. In this work, Cecil Roth focuses on the day-to-day life of the Jews and their institutions. He tells of the role Jews played in Venetian life generally, but for the most part describes their organizational and institutional life and portrays many fascinating people -- merchants and scholars -- who were associated with the ghetto. It is in this respect -- as a social history of a Jewish community sharing much in common with other Jewish communities -- that History of the Jews in Venice is a work of great importance for the student of Jewish history, as well as for the casual reader who will find in its pages many absorbing narratives of Jewish-Italian life, brought to light by the historical researches that went into making this book.

Genres: History

380 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1976

About the author

Cecil Roth (5 March 1899 – 21 June 1970),[1] was a British Jewish historian.

A prolific writer, Roth published more than 600 books and articles, which have been translated into many languages, including histories of the Jews in England (1941) and Italy (1946), A History of the Marranos (3d ed. 1966), The Jews in the Renaissance (1959), Jewish Art (1961), and The Dead Sea Scrolls (1965).

He was educated at Merton College, Oxford (Ph.D., 1924)[1] and later returned to Oxford as Reader in Post-Biblical Jewish Studies from 1939 to 1964.[2] Thereafter he was visiting professor at Bar-Ilan University, Israel (1964–1965), and at the City University of New York (1966–1969).

Roth was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1925 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1941.[1] He died, aged 71, on 21 June 1970 in Jerusalem.[2]

Reviews

[Eli Mandel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roth writes quite thoroughly, focusing narrowly on Venice, for the most part, but devoting one chapter to "The Communities of the Terra Ferma" and another to "The Communities of Stato del Mar", which I appreciated for the wider lens of context they gave me.

In this day when we talk about popular politics and why people favor policies that run counter to their own best interest, we can learn something from history, when Christians harassed the Jew from profession to profession, from city to city, taxed them out of existence all to their own detriment. And yet they kept doing it, undoing it when the consequences inevitably hurt themselves, but then did it again 10 years later, or fifty, or 100 when the lessons from their last round of protectionism were forgotten.