Ghebberty

The ghetto is to many minds a symbol of everything that was evil: the Jews were imprisoned here. They were free to leave the island by day, but had to be back on it by nightfall. At night, the bridges to and from it were guarded by Christian guards (though the Jewish community was free to choose them). Population density was very high: the buildings of the old ghetto have the most floors of all in Venice.

Which makes it puzzling why Jews should be moving back here. There is a kind of sentimentality for the ghetto, and the shtetl, a sense that Jews could only be properly speaking Jews when separated from the general population, by walls, bridges, outfit. I was watching a small Hassid boy on the waterbus today; it was hot and he felt uncomfortable in his black, heavy clothes. He also seemed to feel geeky and estranged – perhaps even apologetic – children generally want to be like other children, specialness and difference are not something they treasure.

I was thinking to myself: what kind of a god would want this horrid outfit on this child? Can it possibly be true that god – any god – wants it? And I reflected that the obverse of state persecution of minorities – of the majority’s insistence that they assimilate – is the permission expressly granted by the state to the leaders of the said minorities to oppress their own members, to require them to wear strange clothes and engage in strange religious practices. It is a point well made by the life stories of several high profile Portuguese Jews in Holland in the sixteen hundreds, Spinoza among them; and the novels of several Galician Jews of the 19th century – like Joseph Roth – whose central point was the attempt to escape the shtetl: not the state which confined them there, but the community of the holy men, family, neighbors and priests.

I managed my escape. From a different ghetto, but, of course, in some ways, all ghettos are the same.