SHYLOCK, OF COURSE, WAS not the Merchant of Venice. The Merchant was the hero, Antonio. Shylock was only a moneylender. But popular belief declines to make the distinction and persists in thinking that Shylock was the merchant, i.e., that Venetian merchants were all Shylocks. This reflects the reputation borne by the Venetians in the outside world. They had a name for sharp dealing, for ‘sticking together,’ artful diplomacy, business ‘push,’ and godless secularism—traits familiarly ascribed to the Jews. Anti-Semitism is often traced to a medieval hatred of capitalism. To the medieval mind, the Jew was the capitalist par excellence. But this could also be said of the Venetian, whose palace was his emporium and his warehouse. Certainly the hatred excited by Venice during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, the wave of revulsion that swept over Europe, culminating in the League of Cambrai of 1508, had an irrational, supercharged quality that was like modern anti-Semitism.
The Venetians were more feared than they deserved to be. Boundless ambition was attributed to them; they were accused of seeking world-domination, which seems to have been far from their thoughts. Even Machiavelli was taken in by this myth, and the language of the pact of Cambrai, signed by most of the great powers of the Christian world, anticipates the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a case of mass hysteria being manipulated by a political adventurer, who, in this instance, was the Emperor Maximilian. Early in 1509, abetted by the pope, this German prince issued a manifesto, in which he cited the Venetians as ‘conspiring the ruin of everyone,’ and he called on all peoples to partake in a just vengeance, to put out ‘like a common fire, the insatiable cupidity of the Venetians and their thirst for domination.’ It was Maximilian himself, as a matter of fact, ‘the last of the knights,’ as he was styled, who was plotting a universal kingdom, and who, shortly afterwards, had the notion of making himself Pope. But Christendom agreed with him that Venice was the real enemy. He was joined by the King of France, the Kong of Spain, the King of Hungary, the Duke of Milan, and the Duke of Savoy. The Pope, Julius II (friend of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Bramante), laid Venice under an interdict and proclaimed the war against her to be a holy crusade, in which all measures were justified. The results were not as conclusive as might have been expected; the allies fell out among themselves, and Venice was only partly dismembered. Nevertheless, this holy war against her was a moral shock from which Venice did not recover. Her decline as a power dates from the Cambrai period. To be disliked on such a scale and with so little provocation is unsettling to a nation which is, above all, rational in its approach to politics.
There were those who saw it coming. In 1423, the old doge, Tommaso Mocenigo, called the chief magistrates to his deathbed to warn them against territorial expansion and the suspicions it would be bound to arouse. He argued in terms of the balance-sheet: six million ducats a year in exports, with an annual return of two million; three thousand ships of two hundred tons, manned by seventeen thousand sailors; three hundred shipping firms with a payroll of eight thousand hands; forty-five galleys with eleven thousand sailors, three thousand shipwrights and three thousand caulkers; three thousand silk weavers, sixteen thousand fustian weavers ... This investment could only be safeguarded by a peaceful policy. The other way lay universal odium, war abroad, bankruptcy at home. If ‘the young procurator,’ Francesco Foscari (48 years old), were elected doge, ‘the man who has ten thousand ducats will have a thousand; the man who has two houses will have one; you will spend your silver and gold, reputation and honour. Instead of being master in your city, you will be at the mercy of your troops, your military men and captains.’
The young procurator was elected, and the old doge’s prophecy came true. Foscari’s terra ferma adventures greatly increased Venice’s holdings on the peninsula, but they left her much poorer and, as Mocenigo had said, dependent on her military men, soldiers of fortune, like General Carmagnola, who, having been paid for his prowess, preferred taking the baths at Lucca to fighting for the Republic. Yet even under ‘the young procurator,’ Venetian foreign policy lacked élan and firmness. It shuffled about, undecided, the merchants of the Senate being always of two minds as to whether these land wars would really be good for business in the long run, as the war party claimed. At the slightest reverse, querulous voices began demanding peace. In all the confused wars of Francesco Foscari, the only military action that was done with resolution and dispatch was the arrest of General Carmagnola—once it was agreed upon. He was apprehended in the Doge’s Palace and politely shown the way to prison, before he or anyone outside was aware of the Republic’s suspicions of him. Under torture, he confessed. He was tried for treason and decapitated. And it was all done so swiftly and succinctly that it is even possible that the unfortunate mercenary was innocent. The rest of Europe gaped; that was not the way condottieri were treated. But such summary decisions, on the domestic scene, were what the Venetians were good at.
In the early days, under a Byzantine influence, they were fond of blinding their doges, over a brazier of live coals. Four doges met this punishment in the eighth and ninth centuries. Later, a refinement was introduced; the erring doge was seized by his people, who shaved his beard and compelled him to retire to a monastery or else banished him to Constantinople. This happened on three occasions. Other doges fled secretly to monasteries to avoid being murdered by their subjects; one of these, Pietro Orseolo I, lived twenty-nine years of pious life after his escape and was eventually canonized. By 1172, out of fifty doges, nineteen had been slain, banished, mutilated or deposed. The convent of San Zaccaria, not far from San Marco, proved to be a fatal spot for several wearers of the ducal bonnet, which, as a matter of fact, was a present from the nuns to one of the doges. Pietro Tradonico was slain as he was leaving vespers there in 864. Tribuno Memmo was forcibly retired there in 992. After Tradonico’s murder, a new and safer (as it was hoped) entrance was made to the convent, on the other side, from SS. Filippo and Giacomo. But events did not prove it to be so. The doge Vitale Michiel II was struck down in 1172, just outside the gate, as he was hurrying to sanctuary.
The young procurator himself, when he reached old age, was deposed in summary fashion for sympathizing with his son, whom the Venetians had condemned unjustly. After his deposition, he sent a touching message to an old noble who was his friend, a message that evokes the banished kings of Shakespeare. ‘My dear good friend,’ he said to Memmo’s son, Jacopo, ‘tell him [your father] to come and see me. We will go and amuse ourselves in a boat, rowing to the monasteries.’
The Venetians were not sentimental; they were efficient. The past did not count for them until it had been gilded in ritual. They threw their greatest captain, Vettor Pisani, into jail because of a single naval defeat that was, in fact, their own fault. When Sansovino’s ceiling in the Old Library fell, they clapped him at once into jail, unmindful of the beauties he had contributed to Venetian architecture. The famous mysteries of Venetian history, the plot of Marino Falier, the Spanish conspiracy, are mysterious because the Republic acted so promptly that nobody knew what had happened, and the public was left to guess. In 1618, in May, two bodies appeared on the Piazzetta one morning, hanging by one leg between gibbets. Sir Henry Wotton, the English poet and ambassador to the Republic from James I, wrote to Buckingham of seeing the two bodies hanging between ‘the two fatal pillars’ in St Mark’s place. A day or so later, a third body appeared. They hung there—silent warnings—all through the festivities following the doge’s election and through the Wedding of the Adriatic on Ascension Day. Who they were or what they had done, nobody was told; rumour declared that a conspiracy had been suppressed. A Spanish conspiracy, some said; more likely a French conspiracy, others decided. The bodies were three Frenchmen. This is all that is known for certain about the famous Spanish Conspiracy, the subject of Otway’s Venice Preserved.
In the absence of facts, poetry and rumour surround Venetian events. Marino Falier, a member of the highest aristocracy, described by Petrarch as a man noted for his wisdom, who was elected doge without having sought the office, suddenly after eight months of power, in the seventy-seventh year of his life, conspired to overthrow the Republic and make himself prince with the help of the arsenal workers and other disaffected plebeians and middle-class persons, including a man named Calendario, the architect of the Doge’s Palace. Falier confessed to the crime, but his motives remain unknown, as blank as the black space in the Hall of the Great Council where his portrait once hung in the long row of doges. According to one legend, a young noble had insulted his wife; the old man, hot-tempered, took offence and turned against his own class. Popular opinion ascribed the whole affair to a fog or mist that sprang up, inexplicably, in the harbour as he was arriving in the Bucintoro to take office, so that he ran aground at San Giorgio in Alega. ‘Sinistro pede palatium ingressus,’ Petrarch wrote. Thanks to the fog, he entered the palace on the left foot, so to speak, passing between the two columns on the Molo where executions were held instead of going the usual way, over the Bridge of Straw. In any case, eight months later he was beheaded; his body was placed in a common barge from the traghetto—the sort of barge used in the Great Plague (1348) of the same period, with boatmen crying out, ‘Any dead bodies?’ and carting them off like garbage to the outlying cemeteries. Falier, symbolically pestilential, was allowed four torches, a single priest and an acolyte to see him to the family vault in SS. Giovanni and Paolo. Byron made a play of him.
The architect, Calendario, was strangled for his part in the conspiracy and strung up between the two red columns on the Doge’s Palace loggia, on the side facing the Piazzetta. They are supposed to have turned red from the blood that ran down them, on this and other occasions. And here, by the way, is another case of twinning. There are two sets of ‘fatal pillars,’ the big granite ones on the Molo and the smaller, red ones of the Doge’s Palace loggia. Both were used for public executions and for the display of corpses, and it is hard to tell, in any given account, which ones are meant. Wotton wrote Buckingham that the more general practice was for the executioner to drown his victims quietly in the Canal degli Orfani, ‘one of their deepest channels.’ This Orphans’ Canal,’ curiously enough, is not shown to tourists today, which is surprising, since Venice cultivates the ricordi of her blackest acts, such as the ‘column of infamy’ put up to Bajamonte Tiepolo, another aristocratic conspirator, on the site of his house in the Campo Sant’ Agostino. In the eighteenth century, the column was taken by a rich patrician as an ornament for his villa near Padua, but a little plaque in the pavement commemorates the spot. Bajamonte, young, handsome, and rich, was the most attractive of all Venice’s rebels. A gay little jingle in Venetian dialect tells the story of ‘the great cavalier’ who crossed the Rialto Bridge and came marching up the Merceria with his standards flying, only to find that the people’s temper had turned against him:
‘Del mille trecento e diese
A mezzo el mese delle cericse
Bagiamonte passo el ponte
E per esso fo fatto el consegio di diese.’
‘In one thousand three hundred and ten
In the middle of the month of cherries
Bajamonte crossed the Bridge
And for that they made the Council of Ten.’
His standard-bearer, with a flag inscribed, ‘Liberty,’ was killed by a brick thrown by a woman of the people from her balcony—a disconcerting omen for a popular uprising. Just past the Clock Tower, the sottoportico del Cappello Nero has a relief known as ‘The Old Woman with the Brick.’ Below, on the street, a little white stone purports to indicate the precise spot where the brick fell.
The ricordi or souvenirs of today are yesterday’s reminders or warnings. And this, again, is suggestive of a politics of old men, a counting-house politics that constantly reminds its citizens, as if in a series of mottoes, that honesty is the best policy. Those bodies hanging on the Molo (or from the Doge’s Palace), that column of infamy, that vacant space on the wall where a doge has been erased—these are not barbaric shows of vengeance but daily reminders, such as might be hung over the desks of clerks in a big old-fashioned office. Venetian history (as opposed to Venetian pageantry) is singularly lacking in colour. A doge is deposed, after many years of service to the state, in the same dry style that an employee is given his dismissal. ‘You had better quit,’ the Ten warn old Foscari. ‘I won’t quit; you’ll have to fire me,’ replies the failing doge. The individual is expected to set the firm’s interest first, and the individual scarcely figures in the firm’s records, unless a black mark has been set against his name. Horatio Brown comments on the scarcity of biographical material on Venice’s great men; it is hard, he indicates, to write the history of a state in which nothing personal is known about its soldiers and statesmen. The Republic took every safeguard against popular intrusions, on the one hand, and against manifestations of individuality in the aristocracy, on the other. Its leaders are all subordinates, and its sole heroine, the poor Queen of Cyprus, Caterina Cornaro, meekly handing her Crown over to the Republic, achieved her place in history by an act of renunciation. Wotton says they chose on purpose doges who were not likely to live long, and he describes a candidate counterfeiting feebleness in the hope of getting elected.
The Venetian state was a closed concern. After 1287, nobody could hold office who was not inscribed in the Golden Book—the ancient rolls of the nobility, which were finally burned, in Napoleon’s time, at the foot of the Tree of Liberty. The machinery for electing a doge in its perfected form was like an elaborate burglar-alarm system; nobody unauthorized could get in, and it responded to the slightest jar in the atmosphere. Out of the Great Council (consisting at first of 480, then of 600, and finally of 1200 nobles), 9 were picked by lot to elect 40 electors, who had to be chosen by a majority of at least seven. The 40 drew lots to see which 12 would elect 25 more by a majority of at least seven. These 25 then drew lots to see which 9 would elect 45 by a majority of at least seven. Finally, these 45 drew lots to choose 11, who would vote for 41 electors, who would elect the doge by a majority of at least 25.
According to Wotton, the method of choosing the doge was supposed to have been invented by a Benedictine, and ‘the whole mysterious frame therein doth much savour of the cloister.’ The doge lived a cloistered existence in the exquisite prison of the ducal palace. He had to swear a ducal oath on taking office, and this oath, which kept getting longer and longer and longer, was simply a list of things he promised not to do. He could not own property outside the Republic. Neither he nor his sons could marry a foreigner without the Great Council’s permission. He was forbidden to display his coat-of-arms. No member of his family was allowed to hold a political post. He was hedged about by the Forty, by the Signory of six ducal councillors, by the Senate, by the sixteen Grand Sages, by the Ten, and (after Cambrai) by the Three Inquisitors, who served for one year only and had the whole charge of public safety and private morals within their control. After the doge’s death, a wax figure, his simulacrum, was laid out in the chamber of Piovego, on the first floor of the ducal palace, and a scrutiny was made of all his acts in office. This symbolic dummy, clad in the ducal robes and wearing the bonnet, was not very different from the living man, who was carried about in a chair in processions like a holy image or relic.
The doge was not the only prisoner of the system. It was a trap in which every noble Venetian was caught on attaining his majority. At the age of twenty-five, a young aristocrat was introduced into the maze of duties and ceremonies—at once decorative and confining like the eighteenth-century maze of the Pisani on the grounds of their villa at Stra. A member of the Great Council (i.e., any member of the nobility) was forbidden to associate with foreigners. Wotton, one morning, found Antonio Foscarini, the former ambassador to England, hanging by one leg from a gibbet in the Square; his association with Lady Arundel, an Englishwoman, had lent credence to an accusation of treason, though in fact he was only in love with her. The three Capi of the Ten—the most powerful members of the bureaucracy before the Inquisitors superseded them—were required to live strictly apart from the rest of the community, staying at home and associating with no one during their term of office, which was limited to one month. Dress was prescribed for the nobility, though some of its members were very impoverished; beggars dressed in silk—the compulsory material for nobles—were a common sight in Venice. The Inquisitors themselves were subject to a fear peculiar to their function: the fear of reprisals for acts they had committed during their year of power. Wotton tells of a Leonardo Mocenigo, who was appointed Captain of the Sea and who refused the post because he regarded the appointment as a trap set for him by the enemies he had made when he was Inquisitor of State. But escape was not open to such a man; he could not be permitted to vanish into private life. He was punished by the Ten for refusing.
Long before Casanova, the terror struck by the Inquisitors reached a pitch of melodrama. Yet they were not as effective as their legend. Their decrees, especially in the field of private morals and of dress, were openly disregarded, and the foreign embassies were havens of thugs and ruffians who defied any control. In this atmosphere of private violence, the Inquisitors sometimes appeared positively benign, like Platonic Guardians. And unlike the modern police state, to which it is often compared, Venice feared power and surrounded it with checks and deterrents. Its real desire was for business as usual. Its foreign policy, even in its expansionist phase, always had a protectionist aim: the safeguarding of markets. Narrow, short-sighted men, narrow, blinkered policies—its enemies flattered the Republic when they imputed a thirst for dominion to it. Wherever the Republic conquered territory, it tended to revert to the habits it had formed in the near East in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Old Dandolo refused the crown after the capture of Constantinople. He was content, as his forbears had been, to let others rule. He stipulated his ‘quarter and a half-quarter’ of the Roman Empire as his forbears had stipulated a Venetian ‘quarter,’ with baths and ovens, for the Venetian merchants. A modified self-rule was offered by Venice to her subject-lands; Venice could not tax herself with the heavy apparatus of Empire. The result of this moderate policy was that she regained many of the Italian lands she had lost during the wars of the League of Cambrai. Treviso, Verona, Padua, Vicenza—they came back to her, voluntarily, after a real taste of the oppressor’s boot.
Venice was never feudal, and it never acquired feudal habits of mind. Because of its impregnable situation. moated by lagoons, it did not require walls or fortified castles or brawling bands of men-at-arms. Its noblemen bore no titles, only the designation, ‘N. H.,’ for nobleman. The present-day counts are creations of the Austrians. It had a citizen army in its days of valour and was the last of the Italian states to begin hiring mercenary captains. The citizen, in his domestic aspect, tranquil in the enjoyment of his goods, was in fact a Venetian ideal. Reasonable, peaceful, avid only for consumption, unsuperstitious, it was a country, said Wotton, ‘in general not much inclined to presagement but rather every man busy about himself.’ The purpose of the intricate state machinery was to create, precisely, a machine for government, in which the wills and passions of men would have no part; the Venetian government was an invention in the field of political science, a patented device, not unlike the signora’s goldfish bowl, in which all the components are supposed to cancel each other out, achieving a perfect equipoise. If the machine became a Frankenstein’s monster, that was a paradoxical result of the original intention. The attempt to evolve a perfect product of any kind tends, by some law of limit, to conjure up its contrary: the demand for perfect love, for example, elicits perfect hate.
The Venetians, as I have said, were hated in much the same fashion as the Jews, for being outside the compact. They were hated and envied and they knew it. They were a people apart; like the Jews, the children of an Exodus. Their remarkable survival gave them a certain sense of chosenness. They regarded themselves as the true heirs of Rome, and this was right to a degree. The Venetian Republic was the only state to emerge intact from the ruins of the Roman Empire. They were governed originally, on the islets, by tribunes. Their patrician democracy corresponded to that of the Roman Republic; their military men and admirals, summoned from private life to lead in a time of peril, had a good deal of Cincinnatus about them. The fear of kingship (which amounted almost to phobia) was Roman; so, on the other hand, was their sexual vice and their delicate voluptuous luxury, which makes one think, often, of Pompeii. Their practicality, too, and their money-greed recall the Roman capitalists, Crassus the Triumvir of the late Republic.
The legacy of Rome is evident, but Roman grossness is lacking, the grossness of the Empire and its swollen, mad, deified Emperors. The Venetians seem to have had the later Rome always before their eyes, as a terrible object-lesson. That was why they circumscribed their doges and kept down their military captains; they feared a Caesar for ten obsessive centuries. ‘Morte ai tiranni,’ the old woman is supposed to have screeched as she threw her brick at Bajamonte. It is as heirs, chiefly, of the antique Republic that the Venetians present themselves, a chosen strain, perpetuated, in a city that is like the Heavenly Jerusalem: ‘Flash the streets with jasper, Shine the gates with gold, Flows the gladdening river, Shedding joys untold.’
No doubt, they did not compare themselves with that other chosen people whom they permitted to live in their midst, but a subtle relationship existed, nonetheless. The Venetian Jew enjoyed a favoured status in the medieval period. He was allowed to set up loan banks, ‘for the relief of the Venetian poor,’ to trade with the East, to practise medicine, and to sell old clothes—concessions that do not seem very great today but which reflected a high degree of tolerance on the part of the Republic. Resident Jews were obliged to wear the yellow hat (later a red hat), but exceptional Jews were often exempted from the rule. Most remarkable of all, the authorities would not permit the Jews to be persecuted. During the wave of anti-Semitic feeling that ran through Italy in 1475, the doge ordered protection for the Jews and prohibited inflammatory sermons. This was only one of many edicts restraining the enthusiasm of the friars who came to Venice, preaching death to the Jews. There were two bad episodes. Some Jews from near Treviso were burned to death by the Republic for the alleged ritual murder of a child in 1480, and the whole community was expelled from Vicenza, on the same suspicion, in 1485. But these, at any rate, were official acts. What the Republic refused to concede its citizens was the right to do arbitrary violence to Jewish persons and property—a right that appeared virtually innate to the rest of the Christian world. That, on the contrary, a Jew had rights, was the essence of Venetian law, whose spirit is summed up, correctly, by Shakespeare’s merchant, Antonio.
‘The duke cannot deny the course of law;
For the commodity that strangers have
With us in Venice if it be denied,
Will much impeach the justice of this state;
Since that the trade and profit of this city
Consisteth of all nations.’
‘The trade and profit of this city’—here the Venetian cash-register rings, for if the Republic tolerated the Jews, it did so for a price. No Jew, including a native, could stay in Venice without a permit, which cost a considerable sum of money, and which had to be renewed every five, seven, or ten years for an additional fee. From time to time, the Republic would contemplate the expulsion of the Jews but it would change its mind, expediently, after negotiations with the chief Jews of the city during which a bargain would be struck, a rather one-sided bargain, for the Jews had no recourse, generally, but to pay the price set by the Republic for its continued toleration. The notion that a Jew had rights did not imply any doctrine of equality; the Jews had specific rights, the rights he paid to enjoy.
The Venetians were tolerant, but the Ghetto was a Venetian invention, a typical piece of Venetian machinery, designed to ‘contain’ the Jews while profiting from them, just as the doge was ‘contained.’ The word comes from the Venetian word, foundry, and the New Ghetto, into which the Jews were directed, the day after Pentecost, 1516, was the New Foundry, where cannons had formerly been cast. The idea was devised to meet the problem of the Jewish refugees who were fleeing into the city from the mainland towns during the wars of the League of Cambrai. Venetian geography made segregation easy. The area of the New Foundry was an island, on which the Jews were shut up every day at nightfall. The three gates were closed and locked; Christian guards, paid by the Jews, were posted, at first in boats on the canal. The house windows facing outwards were blocked up, by decree, so that the Ghetto turned a blind face to the city. In the morning, when the Marangona rang, the gates were unlocked. The New Ghetto was made for German and Italian Jews; later, the Old Foundry or Old Ghetto was added, for the Levantines. When crowding became a problem, tall houses resembling skyscrapers were built, which still can be seen in the main square of the Ghetto Nuovo—a strange, picturesque sight, as if a modern slum were expressed in an ancient idiom, like a prophecy.
The Venetians, needless to say, were alert to the picturesque aspect. The Ghetto became a tourist haunt almost as soon as it was devised. Thomas Coryat, an Englishman who walked from Somerset to Venice, described his peregrinations through the Ghetto in 1608. The Jews of that time were prosperous and handsome, the women, he said, ‘as beautiful as I ever saw, ... so gorgeous in their apparel, jewels, chains of gold, and rings adorned with precious stones, that some of our English countesses do scarce exceed them, having marvailous long trains like Princesses that are borne up by waiting women serving for the same purpose.’ He got into a theological dispute with a rabbi and was worsted by him. In 1629, the Duke of Orleans, brother of the King of France, visited the Ghetto in state, with his tram, and listened to a sermon in the Spanish synagogue. In 1635, this synagogue was restored and enlarged by Longhena.
I went there on Yom Kippur and stood in the women’s gallery; below, under the dark, massive, carved ceiling, a few men and boys in American-style hats were intoning the service. The Ghetto today is one of the poorest sections of Venice, in the northern quarter, where a melancholy light embraces San Giobbe, image of patience, on the west, and the deserted Abbey of the Misericordia, image of mercy, on the cast. It no longer draws many tourists or Venetians either; this is the only area where I have seen children beg. But in the eighteenth century, priests and patricians would come to hear a famous rabbi preach; Benedetto Marcello, the Venetian composer, visited it for inspiration for his Psalms. It was one of the great centres of rabbinical culture in Europe, while outside the Ghetto gates, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Christian Venice itself was the seat of Hebrew book-printing. The Venetian Jews, in their red hats, were called on to supply learning, lore, and luxurious appointments for the foreign world. Henry VIII enlisted the opinion of a Venetian rabbi in his divorce suit against Katharine of Aragon. Another Jewish prodigy, the gambling rabbi, Leone da Modena, was recruited by Henry Wotton to write an account of Jewish rites and ceremonies for the pedant-king, James I. The ambassador hired most of his furniture for his palace on the Grand Canal from a Jew named Luzzati, who also supplied him with pictures, halberds, bucklers and arms—the decorative accessories of the period. It was customary for visiting foreigners, renting palazzi, to resort to Jewish second-hand dealers for articles de luxe sold or pawned by the nobility: hangings and plate, Veroneses and Titians, even gondola-trappings.
But for all this the Venetians exacted a veritable pound of flesh. They bled the Jewish community in every conceivable way. Since the law forbade Jews to own land, the Republic forced them to rent the Ghetto in its entirety on a long lease; the day the Jews moved in, rentals were raised one-third. In the course of years, many Jews left Venice for Holland, because of Venetian rapacity; others died of the plague. But the community continued to pay rent on houses that stood unoccupied—that was the contract. They were gouged for taxes, for tribute, for the army, for the navy, for the upkeep of the canals; they were forced to keep open their loan banks and to pay the government for the privilege, long after these had ceased to be profitable. They were not permitted to go out of business, just as the doge was not permitted to refuse his office or to resign it. This relentless policy continued to the point where in 1735, the Inquisitori sopra gli Ebrei had to confess to the Senate that the Jews under their supervision were insolvent, and the community was declared bankrupt, by official state decree. There was no more to be got from them, the Venetians, as realists, conceded, crossing the account off their books with one of those resigned shrugs commonly thought of as Jewish.
When Napoleon opened the gates of the Ghetto in 1797, it was little but a collection of alms-houses, supported by the handful of prosperous Jews left. A Tree of Liberty was erected in the campo, and the priests from the neighbouring churches came in to dance the carmagnole and fraternize with the starveling survivors of Venetian toleration. The Jews were free to move now, but according to Venetian legend they did not have the strength to do so. Hence they are there still.
A sad story, not without its ironical aspects, a typical Jewish joke, in fact, resigned and wry. The Republic was bankrupt too, of course. It had lived like a grasshopper, while the burdened Jew had toiled like the ant—and they had both come out at the same place. The Venetian today has a sardonic character: the result, no doubt, of his fall from glory. He still feels himself to be chosen, however, chosen in a twofold sense, singled out on the one hand for special favours and, on the other, to be mocked by Fate. The Venetians, everyone says, are not like the other Italians. The Venetians are grave and dignified, full of ceremonious courtesy; at the same time, they are ironical and quick with a retort. They have become peaceful and passive—non-violent. There is very little crime in Venice. This pacific temper, this dryness, this ceremony—all shadowed with a certain faraway sadness—these graven traits of character suggest a ‘Jewish’ strain in the Venetian nature. The high-nosed, dark-eyed Venetian dignitaries painted by Titian and Tintoretto have the look of priests of the Temple; the Old Testament prophets in Venetian art are always completely convincing, as are the Biblical scenes of Jacopo Bassano, which are like sudden illuminations of the life of Canaan, where patriarchal chieftains, with their wives and sons and concubines, grazed their well-fed flocks. Set apart, much hated, the Venetian traders shared a strand of the Jewish destiny, which was interwoven with their own in a fabric commonly thought of as ‘eastern.’ The Jews were the last representatives of the Eastern bazaars to remain in Venice; when the Star of David set in the eighteenth-century ghetto, Venice herself was extinguished.