Voices from the Ghetto of Venice

In this volume, a collection of documents captures the complexity of Jewish life in 16th- and 17th-century Venice. Rather than a linear history of the Ghetto, the curator Dario Calimani presents a tapestry of voices, experiences and perspectives that shed light from within on the reality of a multifaceted community, characterised by segregation, cultural vitality, its relationship with the city and a state of constant precariousness.

Through a rich selection of texts and documents, the publication offers an anthological journey that brings to life a plural and deeply dynamic world. The result is a portrait of a place that is at once closed off and permeable, marginalised yet central to the cultural history of the Mediterranean and modern Europe.

Published in both Italian and English, the volume serves as a valuable resource for scholars and readers interested in the history of Venice and Jewish culture.

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Dario Calimani, university professor and president of the Jewish Community of Venice, soberly mindful of his descent from an ancient Jewish family that, from Palestine—where the name was perhaps Shem Tov, although Kelonymus is already attested in the Talmud—migrated to Apulia (Magna Graecia) in the early Middle Ages, where the name Kalonymos appears; then to Lucca and, in the second half of the ninth century, to the Rhineland (Mainz, Speyer, Worms), where the Kalonymos family formed the core of the Chasidei Ashkenaz, a pietistic and ethical movement whose leading figure was Yehudah he-Chasid of Regensburg, author of the Sefer Chasidim. The family counted among its members generations of scholars and rabbis, including Eleazar ben Yehudah ben Kalonymos of Worms. The plague of 1350 and the massacres that followed led the family to migrate to safer regions, including the Veneto and ultimately Venice, where the name was Italianized as Calimani. The family’s rabbinic tradition was later resumed by the rabbis Baruch Calimani, Yehoshua Abraham ben Simcha Calimani, and Simcha (Simon) ben Abraham Calimani, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.