Venice and the Jews

Food may be the most ephemeral of the material arts, but sometimes it conserves the oldest layers of memory. Many of us recognize this through the dishes we learned (or failed to learn) from our immigrant ancestors, but the cuisine of today’s Jewish community in Venice, Italy, provides another striking (and delicious) example of food as a living connection to the past.

Dishes that are still prepared there today can be traced back not only to the era of the ghetto of Venice (1516-1797), but to their origins among the different Jewish ethnic groups that settled in the ghetto nearly five centuries ago. Remarkably, members of these distinct Jewish cultures, living in extremely crowded conditions, preserved their identities in their cuisine.

Try to imagine 16th or 17th century Venice--not as the scene of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” but as a lively, dynamic melting pot of distinctly different European and Mediterranean cultures, including Jews from other areas of Italy (including Sicily and Calabria), Spain, Portugal, Germany and the Ottoman Empire.

Shylock, the engaging but ultimately humiliated Jewish villain of Shakespeare’s play, was not based on any real Venetian Jew and actually gives us a misleading notion of what Jewish life in Venice was like then. For that we have to look to the archives, to the ghetto’s architecture (still very much intact), and even to the cuisine of today’s descendants of the ghetto Jews.

In the small area of the Cannaregio district of Venice where the word “ghetto” gained its modern meaning, you might-if you could go back to the 16th century--hear an old form of Yiddish spoken by Ashkenazic Jews from Germany. (The Yiddish term yohrzeit , for instance, referring to the anniversary of someone’s death, still echoes today in the Jewish-Venetian equivalent, orsai .)

You would definitely hear Portuguese and Spanish spoken by the wealthy mercantile elite, the Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal, who continued to arrive in Venice after sojourns in places like Constantinople. And you might hear a variety of Italian Jewish dialects spoken by the Italian Jews, originally from Rome and other points south, joining with Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish and Portuguese to form Giudeo-Veneziano, the Jewish-Venetian dialect that survived into the 20th century.

Today you can still visit the magnificent baroque synagogues they built as monuments to their distinct ethnic minhagim (liturgies) and identities. There are the two functioning Sephardic synagogues (the Scuola Levantina and the Scuola Spagnola). The two Ashkenazic synagogues (Scuola Todesca and Scuola Canton) and the Italian Synagogue (Scuola Italiano) have been restored and serve as museums.

Even the names of Venetian Jews who fell in World War I, etched in the outer stone wall of the Scuola Levantina, bespeak the diverse origins of Venetian Jewry: names like Polacco (from Poland), Sarfatti (from France), Calimani (“Good Name” in Greek, from the Hebrew “Shemtov”), Ottolenghi (from Ettlingen, in Germany), Navarro (a Spanish name), Todesco (literally “German”) and so on.

This diversity was most intimately reflected in the kitchens of the ghetto. And you can still visit those kitchens via the tastes and smells of today’s Jewish Venetian cuisine--a direct link to the past of this important center of Renaissance Italian Jewry.

The Jewish ghetto in Venice was formed in 1516 during a war that pitted most of the powers of Europe against Venice. Jews were among those refugees from Venetian-controlled territory in northern Italy who escaped to Venice in front of the armies that swept up to the edge of the lagoon that had always protected the city. (And did this time too.)

Until that moment it seems that Jews had not been allowed to live permanently within the city of Venice itself. But their loan-banking services were especially needed in time of war and in the aftermath as well--so there were compelling practical reasons for the Venetian authorities to forego their prejudice and allow the Jews who were already there to remain.

At the same time, the authorities saw Jews as a threat to Christianity, a “leaven of disbelief.” The solution was to allow them to stay but to sequester them in one part of the city--an area called the “ ghetto ,” meaning foundry, because it had been an iron foundry at one time.

Over the course of perhaps a hundred years, during which time this separated area expanded to include two adjoining neighborhoods, the term ghetto evolved to gain its modern, international meaning. Jews were free to leave the area during the day, wearing a Jewish badge to identify themselves, but they had to return, to be locked within the ghetto gates each day at sunset. Nevertheless, Christians and Jews interacted a great deal--which is clear from the fact that Christian Jewish relations had to be regulated, with penalties for too much (especially too intimate) interaction.

It’s said that during the Jewish holiday of Purim, celebrated much like Carnival (and occurring at almost the same time of year), Christians took advantage of the wearing of masks to visit the ghetto’s synagogues without fear of being recognized and suffering reprisals from the Christian authorities. Jews, likewise, could take part in Carnival festivity wearing masks.

One should not think that Venetian Jewish life was not without many tense moments--Jews stayed shut in the ghetto during Easter for their own safety, for instance--but constant personal interaction made Jews Venetians in much of their culture and worldview.

As strange as it seems today, the ghetto was created with a segregation of its own. Ashkenazi and Italian Jews lived in one ghetto (the Ghetto Nuovo), and the Sephardic Jews lived in two adjoining ghettos (the Ghetto Vecchio and in the 1600s the additional Ghetto Nuovissimo).

Even though Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, German and Italian Jews eventually “intermarried,” they didn’t relinquish their favorite dishes, and today the Venetian Jewish menu still reflects its diverse origins. The ghetto is gone, and that is a blessing; but the cuisine that may have sometimes relieved the strain of ghetto life endures, and that is a blessing too. And one we all can partake of.

The dish with the mysterious name, frizinsal , for instance, is thought to be of Ashkenazic (German Jewish) origins. The name is mysterious to Venetian Jews because it has no meaning in Italian or Venetian and sounds vaguely Germanic to the Venetian ear. And Venetian Jews also say it must be “from the North” because of its combination of sweet and salty flavors in a dish with meat, a taste that seems un-Italian to them.

Giuliana Ascoli Vitali-Norsa, author of the standard Italian Jewish cookbook “La Cucina Nella Tradizione Ebraica” (Giuntina Editore, 1998), calls frizinsal “a little macabre” because items in the dish like goose salami and raisins represent the decapitated heads of humans. The dish is served once a year on a particular Sabbath (Shabbat be-Shallach, usually at the beginning of February) when the portion of the Bible in which Pharoah’s pursuing charioteers are drowned in the Reed Sea is read in the synagogue. The dish is the gustatory and visual representation of the triumph-a story in taste and image (thus the bits of goose salami and raisins as the Egyptians’ heads). Naturally, it’s a favorite for children since it allows for the kind of license with food that’s usually discouraged.

Bollo, a holiday sweet bread studded with dried fruit, is another dish with a slightly tangled past. The first time I tasted it, I was walking out of the Scuola Spagnola at the end of the fast of Yom Kippur. I (and everyone else bursting through the doorway) was handed a slice.

Any food would certainly have been welcome at the end of the long fast, but this very light cake was a sweet and gentle way to end it. I found that bollo was ubiquitous at meals for the following week or more-as dessert at the break-the-fast meal, as a food to eat to fulfill the precept of eating in the sukkah (the temporary shelter built for the holiday of Sukkot) during the ensuing days, and as an element placed on the “Table of the Angel,” an aesthetic, ritual table setting laid out by many Venetian Jewish families during this fall holiday period.

Bollo came to Venice with Portuguese immigrants hundreds of years earlier, but it was only on a visit to Portugal several years after this first encounter in Venice, that I realized that “ bollo “ wasn’t just a Portuguese word that had made it to Venice, but a Portuguese word for all kinds of delicious cakes, some very like the one I had eaten in Venice.

One of the archetypal Venetian Jewish dishes is a saffron-stained Sabbath rice, or as it is sometimes called, risi gialli di Sabato. Edda Servi Machlin, author of the excellent and evocative cookbook and memoir, “The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews” (Giro Press, $35) writes, “Saffron, the dried stigma of the saffron crocus, used in Italy in some dishes, is said to have been brought there from Asia Minor by the Jews for their Sabbath rice.” This suggests the recipe is of eastern Mediterranean origin.

The dish is found in different versions among Jews elsewhere in Italy, but in Venice it’s like a risotto (similar to risotto Milanese). An elderly Venetian Jew, Emiliano Aboaff, told me in 1978 that this was the Sabbath dish of his youth and that he remembered when alms were distributed to the Jewish poor of Venice on Fridays so they could buy their rice and saffron for a good Sabbath meal.

Sabbath Rice is a far cry from chicken soup, challah and tzimmes , the East European Friday night dinner of my American youth. It speaks for another strand in the multiple origins of the Jews of Venice, a direct link to history that can still be seen--and even tasted--today.

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Siporin is a professor in the folklore program at Utah State University.