THE WORD "GHETTO"

“It has been decided to pack all of them off to the Geto Nuovo”: wrote Marin Sanudo in his Diary. The word appears with variety of spellings in old documents: ghèto, getto, ghetto, geto, but always, from 1516, to indicate an area were Jews were confined. That “tract of land called the getto or ghetto – explains Giuseppe Tassini, in his famous Curiosità Veneziane – was the site of the public foundries, where they cast (gettavano) the cannon” and thus “the area is called el getto because it contained more than a dozen furnaces for bronze-casting”, wrote Sabellico.

The word ‘Ghetto’, then, derives originally from the name of the island where the old brass or bronze foundries (iactus ramis) stood. Many other more or less fanciful theories have been advanced: that it comes rather from the Jewish get, divorce act, also used in some old documents (e.g.1519) to mean ‘separation’ more generally, from the German gehegt, ‘enclosed’; from the Old French gueat, ‘guard’; from getto, ‘jetty’, onto which Jewish refugees from Spain are supposed to have disgorged in the port of Genoa in 1492, from the Italiano borghetto; more wildly still, from the Old English gatwon, ‘road’; not forgetting that the word geto was also used for gettito-tributo, a tax to be paid.

However all that may be, this was more than just a residential quarter apart from the rest of the city – a giudecca as such areas spontaneously inhabited by Jews were known in some Venetian territories overseas (and similarly in other countries: Juderia in Spain; in France Juiverie; in Germany Judengasse; in England Jewry) – but a measure imposed by the state, a compulsory seclusion, which none the less did provide the Jews with a degree of safety and stability.