This is Writer's Voice, and I'm Francesca Riannon.


Today, two stories of what in the modern world we've come to call apartheid, the practice of segregating a subjugated population and imposing oppressive laws on it.


First, we talk with UK historian Harry Friedman about his captivating history of the first Jewish ghetto, that of Venice, Italy.


It's called Shylock's Venice.


Then we revisit my conversation with novelist Rebecca Sachs about her powerful novel, City of a Thousand Gates.


Its depiction of Israeli apartheid against the citizens of the occupied West Bank resonates with the apartheid against Jews in Venice during medieval and Renaissance times.


That's all coming up on today's Writer's Voice.


In-depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.


Thanks for joining us this hour.


On this station and at writersvoice.net, I'm Francesca Riannon.


Harry Friedman, welcome to Writer's Voice.


Millions flock to Venice each year, often unaware of an important part of the past that shapes the city.


Central to this history is the Jewish ghetto, the birthplace of the term ghetto itself.


In his book Shylock's Venice, Harry Friedman masterfully recounts the evolution of Venice's ghetto from its creation in 1516 to its ending under Napoleon in 1797.


The ghetto was not just a place of confinement, it was also a vibrant epicenter of cultural and intellectual flourishing.


Despite its physical barriers, the Venice ghetto walls became permeable to the exchange of ideas as Jews and Christians mingled and advanced together into modernity.


The tale of Venice's Jews is incomplete without addressing Shakespeare's notorious character, Shylock.


Harry Friedman reveals how Shakespeare's portrayal of Shylock was influenced by Elizabethan antisemitism, but also transcended it to reflect on the common humanity that Venice's ghetto exemplified as a meeting place of peoples of diverse faiths.


Harry Friedman is the author of popular works of Jewish culture and history, including works about the Kabbalah, the Talmud, and the history of Britain's Jews.


Francesca, thank you very much for inviting me.


I'm delighted to be talking to you this evening.


This is such an interesting book, Shylock's Venice.


Venice was the first ghetto for Jews in the world.


And before we talk any further about Venice, which I will, I will ask you about Venice and what it was like, but first describe to us what the Venice ghetto was like and what it was like to live there.


So the Venice ghetto is founded, established in 1516.


The reason they established it was because for centuries prior to that, Jews were not allowed into Venice, but at the same time, the only trades they could practice was money lending and pawnbroking, and so people would try to borrow money, you know, small amounts of money to tie them over for a few days.


They would have to travel across the lagoon from the city of Venice to the mainland to find a pawnbroker.


The Jews came into the city when there was a war, they fled into the city, and the Venetians realized how much more convenient it would be to keep them there.


But at the same time, they didn't want Jews in the city, the church particularly was not very pleased about the fact that Jews were in the city, and so the compromise was to keep them in the city, but to confine them to a single area.


And they put them in the area we now know as the Venice Ghetto, which is right on the northern edge of the city, so quite a long way away from the central market, the Rialto, the markets where things were happening.


The area they chose was a former copper foundry.


In those days it was a square of four houses with a field in between, a field about the size I suppose of a football pitch, something like that, not a huge field, but it was really four houses surrounding a field, and it was very, very muddy and unsanitary, there was no paving, the field was muddy, this is Venice, we're talking about Venice, so it's wet ground anyway and there's no drainage, there's no sewerage and nothing like that, so it was really squalid, and because the Jews were confined in this area they couldn't spread out laterally, when more people moved in they couldn't build war houses outside the ghetto, they could only build up, and so what happened was that you ended up with these very, very tall narrow buildings with as many rooms crammed into them as possible, so low ceilings, fragile walls to minimise the load on the ground, and it really was quite an unpleasant place to live.


On the other hand, it was a place that saw an incredible renaissance of Jewish thought and thinking.


You talk about a Jewish enlightenment.


What made the ghetto special in a positive sense?


What were some of the circumstances that allowed this enlightenment to flourish?


So we're talking now about a period at the end of the Renaissance, the great reawakening of art and culture, particularly in Italy, and whereas in Florence the Renaissance was very much about art and music, in Venice it was much more about words and ideas and philosophies.


And so what you had in the Venice ghetto was really two influences.


One was the fact that Venice anyway, not just the ghetto, Venice anyway, had a number of scholars, scholars of mysticism, of Christian and Jewish Kabbalah philosophers in the city.


The fact you've got a number of people, a large number of people, confined into a very small space and really, you know, creative, intelligent people meant that the ghetto was a venue where ideas circulated rapidly and caught on, and at the same time Venice is the only place in Europe at that stage which has a license to print Hebrew books.


The printer who obtained a license, Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer, but he got a license to print Hebrew books.


And because we're at the dawn of printing, dozens of scholars, people who had written manuscripts of Hebrew books, poetry or philosophy or religion or whatever, would come to Venice to get their books printed in Bomberg's print shop.


And so therefore Venice becomes not just a place where people are talking to each other about high ideas, but also a place where scholars are arriving to get their books printed.


And the combination of those two things means that you ended up with a number of really interesting and intelligent people who are basically who raised the intellectual level of the ghetto.


And we will get back to some of those people as we talk a little bit more.


You call this Shylock's Venice.


Say a little bit about Shylock and his image.


How did he come about?


What does he represent?


How does he represent what is same or different about attitudes towards Jews at that time?


Okay.


So Shylock.


First of all, the main thing about Shylock, of course, is that he is Shakespeare's invention.


And so therefore when we talk about Shylock, what we're really talking about is Shakespeare's image, Shakespeare's understanding of Jews and how Jews lived in Venice in those days.


And to understand that, we have to first of all appreciate that Shakespeare lives at a time where officially Jews are banned from England.


There are Jews, but they tend to be Jews who converted to Christianity.


They were forced to convert in Spain and Portugal at the end of the 15th century.


There are a number of those people living in England, but Shakespeare knows no Jews as such.


And therefore, he has this rather romanticized or perhaps villainized view of Jews depending on how you look at the character of Shylock.


And he's using Shylock in a number of different ways, really.


And this is one of the great mysteries of the immersion to Venice is, is Shylock a villain?


Is Shylock a sympathetic character?


What does Shakespeare really think of Shylock?


And we have these two very contradictory views.


You have the idea of the man who wants the pound of fresh, the usurer who demands strict justice.


And you have the man who makes this impassioned speech about, if you prick me, do I not bleed?


If you tickle me, do I not laugh?


So, you know, how do we understand Shylock?


Shakespeare places Shylock in a house in Venice, which doesn't seem to be a house in the ghetto.


He's too opulent, he's too wealthy, the Jews in the ghetto were just not like that.


So that either means that Shakespeare had no concept of the ghetto, or possibly that he knew about the ghetto but was placing Shylock at a different historical period, which is also difficult because of other allusions into play.


So if we come back to the idea that Shakespeare has no concept of the ghetto, we then have to ask why the English ambassador to Venice is a man called Henry Wotton.


And Henry Wotton has friends in Shakespeare's company in England.


And Henry Wotton corresponds with, or learns with, a Venetian rabbi called Leon de Medena.


And Leon de Medena corresponds with people in England who know about Shakespeare's company, who know about Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.


So the idea that Shakespeare is ignorant of the ghetto is quite strange.


So we end up really with no answers, just a lot of questions.


What is Shakespeare trying to do?


And what I'm trying to argue in the book, and it's not my argument, it's an argument which came together from a very renowned scholar called Dame Frances Yates, who died 15, 20 years ago, is that Shylock is a metaphor.


Shylock is a metaphor for the occult ideas circulating in those days, based on Kabbalah, based on various other occult traits, which is that Shylock represents the attribute, if you like, of justice, whereas Antonio, the man who owes him money, represents the attribute of love.


And Porter, who is the judge who tries to resolve the dilemma, represents the attribute of mercy, which harmonizes between love and justice.


So this is all very complicated, and I don't think we should go into too much detail.


But the basic point is that Shakespeare, I think, is using Shylock allegorically, rather than trying to describe the life of a Jew in Venice.


So, Shylock, the rich moneylender who did not live in the ghetto, was not actually typical of Jewish moneylenders?


So, absolutely not.


I mean, the image, if you like, the historical image of Jewish moneylenders is wealthy bankers who are lending money to dukes and barons and kings to finance their wars or to finance their territorial expansion.


There were a handful of those throughout history, but the vast majority of Jewish moneylenders are pawnbrokers, and they really are lending a few coins in exchange for rags so that poor people can get through the week until their debts get paid, and this is one of the problems with the presentation of Jews in history.


The word moneylender brings to our minds a wealthy person, and that's certainly how Sherlock is portrayed by Shakespeare, but the vast majority of Jewish so-called moneylenders were actually pawnbrokers, and they were as impoverished, really, as the people that they were lending money to.


They were impoverished because the Venetians set very high interest rates, they had to lend at high rates, the Venetians took a huge amount of tax from them out of their profits, the Jews anyway had to pay a tax, they had a charter which was renewed every five years under which they had to pay a tax for the privilege of living in the ghetto, so poverty was rife, there are no rich Jews in the ghetto, and Shiloh certainly is not a rich ghetto Jew.


And so talk about the role of these Jewish pawnbrokers, basically, of the Jews themselves in Venice, moneylending of this kind was virtually the only profession open to them, what role do they play in the larger governance of Venice and the social, kind of keeping the social peace in Venice?


Okay, so first of all, just to clarify, Jews are, not just in Italy, but across Europe, Jews are excluded from the trades and the guilds, the guilds were the bodies which controlled the various trades, printing or whatever, and in order to carry out a trade, you had to be a member of a guild, and Jews were not allowed to join the guilds, they were not allowed to own land, they were not allowed to practice any profession with the exception of medicine.


So the Jews in the ghetto were either moneylenders or pawnbrokers, I should say, or they were support people, if you like, bakers and butchers and people like that who are supplying the needs of the community in the ghetto, or they were doctors, and it's only really the doctors who have any significant impact on the life of Venice outside the ghetto, because the doctors, there is a tradition in the Jewish social world of studying medicine.


Many of the leading doctors in Venice were Jews, and many of the leading aristocracy of Venice had Jewish doctors, were patients of Jewish doctors.


So the doctors have some sort of influence, but they're not involved in governance.


Venice is an autocracy, it's run by a small number of very wealthy families.


Even the ordinary people of Venice have very little say in the way things are run there, the Jews certainly don't.


The Jews have their self-governing within the community, but they have no governance impact outside of their community.


And yet you point out that Venice was a republic, and in that way it was quite different from the rest of Europe.


Talk about that contrast and what it meant in terms of the governance of that republic itself, the Council of Ten.


When we talk about Venice as a republic, we're not talking about a place like the United States, where you have a president and a democracy and a congress and elected representatives.


We're talking about a place which has a senate comprised of about 2,000 people, it varies from time to time, about 2,000 people who are the wealthy aristocrats within the city.


And they elect or choose, choose is probably a better word than elect, they choose various committees and they have a sort of a hierarchy.


The Doge or the Doge, which is the Italian word for Duke, is at the top of the hierarchy, although he's really a figurehead, he doesn't have much power.


And then there are various committees beneath him.


And the Council of Ten is the equivalent, I suppose, of the cabinet in a modern democracy.


They're the executive body, they're the body who make the day-to-day decisions, but ultimately they're answerable to the Senate and to the Doge.


So we can't really look at Venice through modern eyes, we can only look at it as a republic inasmuch as it doesn't have a king.


The Doge is somebody who was appointed by the Senate and he has that job usually for life unless he's been deposed, but he's not a king, there is no hereditary right of his family to rule after him.


And so now, you say in this book, Harry Friedman and Sherlock's Venice, that the fact that the ghetto was a separate, geologically-defined Jewish space radically reshaped the way Jews thought about themselves and their relationship with their Christian neighbors.


I'd like you to talk about that and also talk about the example of Don Isaac Abar-Banel.


Is this an example of what you were talking about and his relationship with the Council of Ten?


So, Don Isaac Abar-Banel, a rise in Venice before the ghetto was founded.


He's been expelled from Spain, together with all the other Jews, in 1492.


He's a very wealthy man, a very successful man.


He's been a diplomat in the King of Spain's court, he's a doctor, he's a scholar, he writes books of commentary on the Bible.


Very wealthy, very well-respected man.


He's stayed in various places in Italy after being expelled from Spain and he arrives in Venice around 1498, 1499, something like that.


He's not in the ghetto.


He turns up in Venice, offering the Council of Ten a solution to an economic problem they have.


The problem they have is that Venice for centuries has controlled the trade in the Mediterranean, the trade bringing spices and goods from the East, from India and China, across the Arabian Desert to Turkey, where it was loaded onto ships and transported by merchants to Venice and other ports in Europe.


And Venice was the place which dominated that trade.


But a few years earlier, Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese mariner, has sailed around the bottom of Africa and found a sea route to India.


And the sea route to India means that traders no longer needed to bring their goods across the difficult and long journey across the Arabian Desert.


They could load them onto a boat in India and ship them by boat all the way to Portugal.


And that effectively cut Venice out of the trade.


Now, Donato Gababonel, after being expelled from Spain before arriving in Italy, has lived in Portugal.


He's been expelled from there as well.


But he knows how things work in Portugal.


He's a wealthy man.


He knows the Portuguese royal court.


He can pull strings in Portugal.


So he goes to the Senate and he comes up with a proposal to help them to do a deal, if you like, with Portugal to regain some of their trade.


And I've forgotten the rest of your question.


Oh, yeah.


When you say that the fact that the ghetto was a separate geologically defined Jewish space radically reshaped the way Jews thought about themselves and their relationship with their Christian neighbors, what do you mean?


Well, what that means is that up to now, across Europe, Jews have been a shunned and a separate people.


They've lived in Christian communities and villages and towns where there's been a Christian minority.


They've been persecuted.


They've been expelled.


They've been moved around.


All sorts of terrible things have happened to them.


They've never been self-governing, even if it's only self-governing within the confines of the ghetto.


The ghetto gives them a certain amount of self-respect, a certain amount of self-identity, if you like.


We are now a group of people who have the ability to set our own rules, to raise our own taxes from our own people, to tell people how they should dress, how they should behave, to get involved when there are disputes and things like that.


So it gives them a sense of identity, if you like.


At the same time, because the economic model is that the money coming into the ghetto is coming in from Venetian citizens, Christians who are coming into the ghetto to initially just to pawn their goods, but eventually for more than that, because the ghetto becomes an interesting place for people to come in there to watch plays or to listen to music or to converse with scholars, you get a sort of a dialogue establishing itself between the Venetian citizenry and the ghetto population.


And so you have these two different groups of people, each of whom has their own sense of who they are, interacting, and one of the things we find is that the Jews in the ghetto who initially would have spoken Yiddish or Spanish, because they'd come either from northern Europe or from Spain via Turkey, are now talking in Italian.


And the Jews in Venice, for the first time in Jewish history, are writing books in Italian for Italian readers.


And this is what I mean by a renaissance.


The Jews are, and it's counterintuitive, by the very fact that they're confined and separated from everybody else, they're actually able to engage more with everybody else, because they now recognize there is an other out there who they can communicate with and understand, and they can communicate with them with their own language.


So you get people like Simone Luzzatto, or Don Isaac Ababanel's son, Leone Obreo, who are writing philosophy books in Italian, writing books of politics in Italian, not for the Jews of the ghetto, but for the Italians of Venice and elsewhere.


And this is the first time really that Jews have engaged in society outside their own walls.


And there are so many fascinating personalities that you write about in this book, Harry Friedman in Shylock's Venice.


One of them that I was so interested in was Giuda Leon.


Tell us about him and the cultural revolution that he ushered in and his idea of love, which I completely agree with.


So this is Leone Obreo.


This is Diana Isakova Barbanel's son, and he writes a book.


It's a book of philosophy, but the story of the book is he makes it a dialogue between two people.


One is called Philo, which of course is Greek for love, and one is called Sophia, which is wisdom, and it's a dialogue between love and wisdom or love and philosophy.


And what he's trying to do is to show, if you like, that the world revolves around love and that true wisdom is an understanding of love, and this is his philosophy.


So he's platonic.


He's drawing on Plato's ideas, but he's casting them in a very modern way for the 16th century, and he's getting across these ideas that love is the key to the universe, if you like, and that true wisdom is the understanding of love.


That is a philosophy all of us could use so much more in this time.


Absolutely.


Absolutely.


Yeah, we could do with someone like him now.


You mentioned Kabbalah before.


You say that the Kabbalah as a field of study was in a prime place in Venice.


It was really dominant.


Tell us what is Kabbalism and what role did it play in the Venice Ghetto?


So Kabbalah is the Jewish mystical approach, the idea that one can understand how the universe works, the spirituality of the universe works, how God acts on the world.


It's been around for a long time.


It became very popular, not just in Venice, it became very popular particularly in Florence during the Renaissance.


Christian scholars believe that by harnessing the techniques and the tools of the scholars, which are basically meditation techniques and techniques of playing with words and numbers and combining letters to create new words and symbols, by doing this they could communicate with the angels and that would give them a better understanding of the spiritual universe, if you like.


And so they grew up a movement, if you like, called Christian Kabbalah, focused on Florence, but with a lot of practitioners in Venice.


And those Christian practitioners of Kabbalah in Venice were talking to the Jewish practitioners of Kabbalah.


It's the same system with obviously a slightly different approach, but the idea is the same.


And you have a scholarship going on, an exchange of ideas between these two groups of people, which again is part of the wonderful nature of the Venice ghetto, that you have these two different communities talking to each other about things which unite them rather than divide them.


How ultimately did the ghetto in Venice end?


So the ghetto in Venice ends in 1797 when Napoleon, who's rampaging through Europe, conquers Venice and tears down the ghetto gates and tells the Jews they can live freely as free citizens.


Part of Napoleon's philosophy is that everybody has equal rights.


It doesn't last long because his main opponent during the war is against the Austrians, and eventually he has to reach a compromise with the Austrians, which includes him handing Venice over to Austria.


And Austria tells the Jews they can't leave the ghetto, they don't rebuild the gates and the walls that Napoleon has torn down, but the Jews are still confined to the ghetto.


And what happens is that the Jews are now semi-free, as free as Jews are anywhere else in the Austrian Empire, they're living in the ghetto, because that's where they've been told to live, but they can move around freely within the city.


And they stay like that for another, well, until now really, I mean, the Jews no longer live in the ghetto, but because that's where the synagogues were, and because that's where the schools were, the ghetto remains the heart of the Jewish community, even though the few Jews who live in Venice today tend not to live in the ghetto.


And of course, it was destroyed, the people were destroyed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.


There's a very moving story there about a man called Giuseppe Jonah, who was the leader of the Jewish community.


The Nazis came to him and they said they wanted the names of every Jew in the ghetto, and he had three days to give it to them.


And he spent those three days destroying every single document he could find, tearing everything up so there were no records at all, so the Nazis couldn't identify anybody.


And then when he'd done that, he committed suicide.


And he's now regarded in Venice as one of the heroes of the resistance.


But it's a very sad end to the story.


Well, it is just a fascinating book.


Harry Friedman, your book is Shylock's Venice.


It is a wonderful picture into a time at the birth of the modern world, really.


Thank you so much for talking with us here.


Francesca, thank you.


It's been a real pleasure talking to you, and it's been a delight.


Thank you so much indeed.


Shylock's Venice, the remarkable history of Venice's Jews and the ghetto, is out from Bloomsbury Press.