Venice was the first place in Europe to lock its Jews behind gates, and one of the most important places any Sephardi family passed through. Both statements are true, and holding them together is the key to understanding the city.
The Venetian Republic wanted Jewish merchants and did not want Jewish neighbours. It resolved that contradiction in 1516 by confining them to the geto, the site of a former foundry, which gave the world the word ghetto. The gates were locked at dusk and opened at dawn, and the arrangement lasted until Napoleon tore them down in 1797.
Within those walls the Republic nevertheless granted Jewish merchants trading privileges no other Italian state matched in the sixteenth century, renewed them every ten years for two hundred years, and defended them against the Pope.
Four communities, not one
Venice held several Jewish communities, worshipping separately, with different rites, different origins and different legal standing.
Ponentine, meaning western: Spanish and Portuguese Jews, many of them former New Christians. The Scola Spagnola is theirs.
Levantine: Sephardim from the Ottoman lands, chiefly Salonika, Constantinople and Corfu, who were Ottoman subjects and traded east. The Scola Levantina is theirs.
Italiani: Italian Jews of the older Roman rite.
Tedeschi and Canton: Ashkenazim from the German lands, the earliest permitted group, and the poorest.
The distinction between Ponentine and Levantine is not a detail. It was the whole basis of Venetian policy, and it determined who could stay and on what terms. A Levantine had never been baptised and was therefore, to the Church, unobjectionable. A Ponentine was very likely a baptised Christian who had returned to Judaism, which was apostasy. Venice spent the sixteenth century finding ways not to notice.
What Venice means for Sephardi research
Two things, and they pull in different directions.
Venice was a transit point more than a destination. Families arrived from Iberia, from Ferrara, from Ancona and from the Ottoman lands, stayed a generation or two, and moved on to Amsterdam, Hamburg, London or Livorno.
If your family is recorded in Amsterdam as having come from Venice, the generation before that is very often in Ferrara or Ancona rather than in Venice itself. This is the most useful single thing to know about the city.
Venice was also the route by which Eastern Sephardim reached the West. The Levantine congregation connected Salonika, Constantinople and Corfu to Italy, and from Italy to the Atlantic communities. Families that appear in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Western Sephardi records with Ottoman origins have frequently come through Venice.
The records, though, are harder to use than Livorno’s. There is no published edition of the Venetian ketubot, no complete transcription of the community’s registers, and the burial registers have serious gaps. Venice is a rich archive that has not been made accessible.
Where they came from
In waves, and each wave arrived under a different legal regime.
Ashkenazim came first, from the German lands, tolerated as pawnbrokers from 1366 because the Church forbade Christians to lend at interest. They were the reason the ghetto was created in 1516 and they remained the largest group.
Levantine Sephardim followed. In 1514 the Senate granted fiscal privileges to Levantine merchants importing from Morea and Romania, two years before the ghetto, and a full generation before Portuguese Jews were admitted at all. The Ghetto Vecchio was opened for them in 1541.
Ponentine, or Portuguese, Jews came late and by a specific route. Venice banished Spanish Jews from its territories in 1497, aligning itself with Spanish policy, and in 1550 passed draconian measures against anyone trading with a Marrano.
The turn came in 1573, when Venice granted a safe conduct to Spanish and Portuguese Jews, explicitly promising they would not be punished for having previously lived as Christians. The Pope complained. Venice replied, in effect, that the Papacy itself had welcomed Portuguese Jews to Ancona between 1532 and 1555, and that since Popes do not err, the precedent held.
The decisive charter came in 1589. Daniel Rodriga, a Portuguese Jew, proposed it; the Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia approved it and added the words Levantini e Ponentini explicitly; the Senate extended its term from ten years to twenty-five. Portuguese Jews could now settle openly as merchants with their families. The charter was renewed in 1598, 1608, 1624 and repeatedly thereafter, each renewal justified on the grounds that these merchants increased trade and customs revenue.
The largest single reinforcement came from Ferrara. When Ferrara passed to the Papal States in 1597, its Portuguese community left, and much of it came to Venice. This matters more than the numbers suggest: the internal rules by which the Venetian Portuguese community governed itself were substantially taken from Ferrara’s existing statutes. The Venetian nation was, institutionally, Ferrara’s daughter. See our page on Italy for Ancona and Ferrara.
How they made a living
Trade with the Levant, and the specialisms that followed from it.
The Republic’s whole rationale for admitting Sephardi merchants was that they had correspondents, languages and credit in the Ottoman world. Venetian Jewish houses moved textiles, spices, grain, sugar and currants between the Adriatic and the eastern Mediterranean.
Daniel Rodriga’s other achievement was persuading the Senate to establish a free transit port at Split, opening an overland route through the Balkans as an alternative to the Ancona and Dubrovnik axis that Venice’s rivals controlled.
Alongside the merchants was the older pawnbroking economy, largely Ashkenazi, which the Republic required as a public service and taxed accordingly. And below both, a substantial poor population supported by the congregations’ charities.
Venice was also a printing centre, and Hebrew printing there, Bomberg’s Talmud above all, supplied the Jewish world.
Where they went
Outward, in every direction, and this is the defining fact about Venetian Sephardi families.
To Amsterdam and Hamburg from the late sixteenth century onward, as the Atlantic trade displaced the Mediterranean. Many of the founding families of the Amsterdam Portuguese community came through Venice.
To Livorno. The Livornina of 1591 and 1593 offered everything Venice offered and more: no ghetto, the right to own property, the right to employ Christian servants, and freedom to practise any trade. Our records of men balloted into the Livorno community name at least eighteen who came from Venice, among them Treves, Ancona, Racah, De Paz, Uziel, Paesan, Pincherle, Vivante, Alpron, Diaz, Abendana, Gentili, Pesah, Namias and Serusi.
Some moved for opportunity. At least one branch of the Baruch Carvalho family moved to avoid paying the Venetian community’s taxes, and was excommunicated for it.
To Trieste, from the eighteenth century. When the Habsburgs made Trieste a free port it drew directly on the Venetian world: of the Jews recorded in the Trieste censuses of 1735 and 1765 whose birthplace is given, the largest outside groups come from Gorizia, Venice, Padua and Ferrara.
To London, often by way of Livorno or Amsterdam rather than directly.
If you lose a Venetian family, look at Amsterdam, Livorno, Hamburg, Trieste and Split, and look backwards at Ferrara, Ancona and Salonika.
The five synagogues
Five survive in the ghetto, and they map the community’s divisions precisely.
- Scola Grande Tedesca, 1528, of the German rite, the oldest
- Scola Canton, 1531, also Ashkenazi
- Scola Levantina, 1541, of the Levantine Sephardim, in the Ghetto Vecchio
- Scola Italiana, 1575, of the Italian rite
- Scola Spagnola, from around 1580, the Ponentine congregation, and the largest of the five
The Levantina and the Spagnola are the two that concern Sephardi researchers, and the distinction between their memberships was legal as well as liturgical.
Elsewhere in the Veneto there were Jewish populations at Padua, important out of all proportion to its size because its university admitted Jews to study medicine when almost nowhere else in Europe did, and at Verona, Rovigo and the smaller towns.
Cemeteries
The Jewish cemetery of San Nicolò on the Lido, in use from 1386, is one of the oldest surviving Jewish burial grounds in Europe. It fell into neglect and part of the ground was lost, but a substantial number of stones survive, many of them Sephardi and inscribed in Hebrew, Spanish and Portuguese.
Riccardo Pacifici transcribed the inscriptions in Le iscrizioni dell’antico cimitero ebraico a Venezia (1938). Aldo Luzzatto and Carla Boccato have both published on the ground since. Pacifici’s transcriptions have been indexed by Mathilde Tagger, which makes them searchable by surname.
A newer cemetery adjoins the old one and remains in use.
Records
Venice’s records are extensive and awkward. The awkwardness is worth stating plainly, because it is the reason so little Venetian Sephardi genealogy has been published.
Community records
The archive of the Jewish community holds registers of births from 1706, marriages from 1815, and burials from 1601, the last with significant gaps.
Carla Boccato has established what those gaps are. The community’s own burial registers cover 1601 to 1839 with breaks. The records of the Provveditori alla Sanità, the magistracy that issued burial licences, cover 1631 to 1765, also with breaks. Combining the two still leaves nothing at all for March 1656 to April 1671, and for March 1794 to July 1795.
Nineteenth and early twentieth-century material is held by the Renato Maestro Library.
State and civic records
The Archivio di Stato di Venezia holds the records of the Republic. The relevant series are the notarial archives, which are enormous, indexed, and hold wills, dowry contracts and commercial deeds, together with the Provveditori alla Sanità. There is a general index to the archive.
Notarial records matter more here than in most places. As in Amsterdam, a prenuptial agreement drawn before a notary could take precedence over the ketubah in a dispute, and such agreements often name people the ketubah does not.
The city archive holds cadastral records for 1786 and 1802, and population registers: the Austrian register of 1805, the Napoleonic register of 1811, and the Austrian registers of 1850 to 1857. Its archival series are listed online.
The census of 1797 survives complete, family by family, and is printed in Cristina Treves, L’oblio e il ricordo.
Published lists
Benjamin Ravid, Studies on the Jews of Venice, prints a list of Jewish merchants approved by the Venetian authorities across the seventeenth century, overwhelmingly with Sephardi and Portuguese surnames.
Federica Ruspio, La nazione portoghese, lists Portuguese Jews active in trade in Venice from 1567 onward, compiled from notarial registers.
Arton, Il patto di Abramo, gives hundreds of circumcisions in Venice from 1776 to 1872.
For the wider Veneto, Giovanni and Silvia Tomasi’s Ebrei nel Veneto orientale lists hundreds of individuals from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Alberto Castaldini’s La segregazione apparente covers Verona, including Navarra, Nunes, Fonseca, Henriques and Meldola.
The Padua medical graduates are separately documented: hundreds of Jews took degrees there between 1670 and 1870, including Alpron, Fonseca, Benveniste, Calvo, Capriles, Cardoso and Pereira, with the thesis, the supervising professor and family details recorded.
Records elsewhere
Amsterdam City Archive, inventory 334, for families who moved on. The marriage banns record place of origin.
Archivio di Stato di Ferrara and the Ferrara community material, for the generation before Venice.
Archivio storico della Comunità Ebraica di Livorno, for the families who went south.
The Trieste censuses of 1735, 1765 and 1775, printed in Carlo Gatti’s Gli ebrei di Trieste nel Settecento.
Sephardic World lectures on Venice and Italy
- The Venetian Jews: Sephardim, Germans and Levantines in the ghettos — Nardo Bonomi Braverman
- Sephardic Migrations in Sixteenth-Century Italy — Luca Ascoli
- The Jews of Italy: their history, genealogy and surnames — Luca Ascoli
- The Portuguese Conversos of Ancona, 1556 — Martina Mampieri
What has and hasn’t been researched
The history is well served; the genealogy is not.
Venice has an enormous scholarly literature — Ravid, Ruspio, Boccato, Luzzatto and many others — and the ghetto is among the most studied Jewish sites in Europe. What does not exist is the genealogical equivalent of what Nedjar’s team did for Livorno: no complete transcription of the marriage registers, no reconstruction of the community family by family, no published index of the ketubot.
There is no authoritative English-language guide to the Jewish-related archives of Venice. In Italian, the journal Materia giudaica is the place to start, and the Italian Family History site has a Venice page in English.
The relationship between Ferrara and Venice deserves proper genealogical treatment. It is well established historically that the Ferrara Portuguese nation seeded the Venetian one in 1597, but no one appears to have traced the individual families across that move.
The same is true in the other direction, towards Livorno, Trieste and Amsterdam. Venice sits at the centre of the Western Sephardi world and almost none of the connections running through it have been worked.
Further reading
Benjamin Ravid, Studies on the Jews of Venice, 1382–1797.
Federica Ruspio, La nazione portoghese: ebrei ponentini e nuovi cristiani a Venezia.
Riccardo Pacifici, Le iscrizioni dell’antico cimitero ebraico a Venezia (1938).
Aldo Luzzatto, La comunità ebraica di Venezia e il suo antico cimitero.
Carla Boccato, on the ancient cemetery of San Nicolò and on the burial registers.
Cristina Treves, L’oblio e il ricordo, including the complete Venice census of 1797.
Giovanni and Silvia Tomasi, Ebrei nel Veneto orientale.
Alberto Castaldini, La segregazione apparente, on Verona.
Arton, Il patto di Abramo, on circumcisions 1776 to 1872.
Carlo Gatti, Gli ebrei di Trieste nel Settecento.
Alexander Beider, A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Italy, France and Portuguese Communities (Avotaynu).
Organisations and repositories
Comunità Ebraica di Venezia, Cannaregio 2899, in the ghetto.
Archivio della Comunità Ebraica di Venezia, and the Biblioteca Renato Maestro.
Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Campo dei Frari, San Polo 3002.
Archivio Storico del Comune di Venezia.
Museo Ebraico di Venezia, Campo del Ghetto Nuovo.
Archivio di Stato di Trieste, for the Adriatic connection.
Help us find records
We are looking for:
- Any transcription or index of the Venetian ketubot, of either the Spanish or the Levantine congregation
- Marriage records for the Ponentine community before 1815
- Anything filling the burial gaps of March 1656 to April 1671 and March 1794 to July 1795
- Membership lists of the Scola Spagnola and Scola Levantina, of any date
- Any list tracing families from Ferrara to Venice after 1597
- Photographs or a modern survey of the San Nicolò cemetery on the Lido
- Notarial prenuptial agreements naming Jewish couples, and any index to them
- The 1805, 1811 and 1850 to 1857 population registers in transcribed form
If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected].
Research services
Venetian research means a large and well-catalogued state archive, a community archive with real gaps, records in Italian, Hebrew, Portuguese and Spanish, and a population that was constantly arriving from and departing to somewhere else. Following a family into or out of Venice usually means working in at least two other archives. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.
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