Introduction. The Relationship Between Jews and Christians. Toward a Rede nition of the Ghettos.

The five hundredth anniversary of the Venice ghetto (1516) offers an opportunity to resume the discussion of the Italian ghettos in the light of a new historiographical chapter. In recent years, several studies have opened up new issues and perspectives on these themes. The word “ghetto,” often used inappropriately and applied to various contemporary realities – the Nazi ghettos, the American black ghettos, immigrant ghettos – offers a point of reflection about its potential usage which could produce misinformation and error by invoking a biased historical projection. It is necessary to refuse the sociological and ahistorical use of the word “ghetto” as a global metaphor, charged with an intrinsically negative meaning in time and space, thus erasing the specificity of what a ghetto is. Moreover, the chronology of the ghettos is subject to revision and must be inserted into the broader political, social, economic and cultural processes of this long era, demonstrating how ghet- toization, from its origins, has been a multifaceted process that is impossible to summarize by dates, much less by definitions and paradigmatic models. What determined the success of the “ghetto system” in central and northern Italy for more than three centuries was more the passage of the 1555’s ponti- fical support than the Venetian model of 1516 (followed in 1546 by a second ghetto at Ragusa, as we shall see). It is also important to note that through seventeenth century and into part of the eighteenth, new ghettos were created with distinct characteristics and varied geopolitical and institutional situa- tions. Notwithstanding some local variations in both internal and external standardization and enforcement, the organization of the claustri was based on a series of generally shared procedures: opening doors only during dayti- me hours, discriminatory signs for the Jews, the prohibition of medical prac- tice on Christian patients and of having Christian servants, and restrictions on economic activity—if not already reduced to simple moneylending.