by Jan Morris
In the seventeenth century the ladies of the Ghetto were described as ‘gorgeous in their apparel, jewels, chains of gold and rings adorned with precious stones … having marvellous long trains like Princesses that are borne up by waiting women serving for the same purpose’. Henry VIII consulted a learned Venetian Jew when he was planning his divorce suit against Katherine of Aragon. Some of the rabbis of Venice were celebrated throughout Europe, and it became a fashionable practice for visitors to attend a sermon in a Ghetto synagogue. Napoleon abolished the Ghetto in 1797: and when, in 1848, the Venetians rebelled against their Austrian masters, their leader was half-Jewish, and Jewish brain-power gave the revolutionary Republic its astonishing financial stability.
People have often observed an affinity between Venetians and Jews – a common aptitude for money-making, a similar sense of wry humour, a shared feeling of national exclusion. One Edwardian visitor wrote of the ‘Hebrew bearing’ of the priests of St Mark’s. Somebody else has mentioned the conviction with which Venetian painters depicted Old Testament patriarchs. Today it is very difficult to tell who is a Jew in Venice. Lord Fisher, who had British Israelite sympathies, used to say that the faces of the Lost Tribes were obviously different from those of the other Jews, ‘otherwise they wouldn’t be lost’: but often the male Venetian face, grave and meditative, has a striking Jewish cast to it, redolent of Venice’s Eastern commerce, and the infusions of Oriental culture (and blood, too) that have enriched the city down the centuries.
There are still about 800 Jews in Venice. Some still live in the three sections of the Ghetto, Vecchio, Nuovo, Nuovissimo – Old, New and Newest: the story goes that when Napoleon’s soldiers threw open the gates, the inmates were so debilitated that they had not the strength to move, and have stayed there ever since. Many more live in other parts of the city. They are mostly middle-class citizens and professional men – only a few are very rich – and they retain a strong sense of community. The tall teeming houses of the Ghetto are still poor, and the canal behind them, upon which the guards used to float watchfully about in scows, is usually thick with slime and refuse: but there is a comfortable Jewish old people’s home, and a well-endowed meeting hall, and an interesting little museum. The Jewish cemetery on the Lido island, once Byron’s riding-ground and a playing field for ribald adolescents, is now handsomely maintained. Of the five Ghetto synagogues – one originally for Levantine Jews, one for Spaniards, one for Italians and two for Germans – two are still used for services (another is part of the museum, and the rest are high and inaccessible in tenement blocks).
If you visit one on the day of the Passover, you may see how trim, bright and gregarious the Venetian Jews are today. The Rabbi stands hunched and scholarly on his high dais. The usher wears his tall top-hat at a rakish angle. A few well-dressed women peer down from the oval gallery, high in the ceiling of the synagogue. On the men’s side of the floor the congregation sits placid or devout: on the women’s side there is a flurry of bright dresses and floral hats, a bustle of starched children, a cheerful buzz of gossip and a veil of perfume (Ca’ d’Oro, perhaps, named for a palace on the Grand Canal, or Evenings in Venice, with a blue gondola and a pair of lovers on the package). All seems vigorous and uninhibited, and it is moving to remember, as the porter at the door ushers you politely into the sunshine, that you are standing in the middle of the very first of all the sad Ghettos of the world.
On the walls outside, though, two inscriptions are worth reading before you leave the place. One is a sixteenth-century notice declaring the intention of the Republican magistrates to repress the sin of blasphemy, as committed both by Jews proper and by converted Jews. ‘They have therefore ordered this proclamation to be carved in stone in the most frequented part of the Ghetto, and threaten with the cord, stocks, whip, galleys or prisons all who are guilty of blasphemy. Their Excellencies offer to receive secret denunciations and to reward informers by a sum of a hundred ducats to be taken from the property of the offender under conviction.’
The other inscription is a modern one. It records the fact that of the 8,000 Italian Jews who lost their lives in the Second World War, 200 were Venetians. From the first plaque the Jews, presumably at the fall of the Republic, have roughly removed the image of the Lion of St Mark, symbol of their servitude: but the second plaque they put up themselves.
At the other end of the city, beyond the Piazza of St Mark, stood the Greek quarter of Venice, once thriving, rich and assured. Only a century ago the Greek colony lent a familiar splash of colour to the city, and had its own meeting-places and restaurants, and even its own café in the Piazza. Venice once paid hazy allegiance to the Byzantine Emperors, and though the Venetians later quarrelled violently with Constantinople, and engineered the temporary downfall of the Greek Empire, nevertheless the Serenissima was always close to the world of the Greeks, and deeply influenced by its ways. The Greeks, grocers and money-lenders to the Levant, were money-lenders here too, and flourished in many a minor business in the days before visas and import licences. For several centuries they fluctuated in religious loyalty between Rome and Constantinople, one bishop playing a double game with such conspicuous ineptitude that he was simultaneously excommunicated both by the Pope and by the Oecumenical Patriarch. The Government did not often press the issue, for it welcomed the presence of the prosperous Greek merchants, and until 1781 the Greek Church in Venice maintained a precarious communion with Rome, only becoming frankly schismatic when Napoleon proclaimed liberty of conscience throughout conquered Venetia.
In the heyday of the colony there were 10,000 Greeks in Venice. They established a school, the Phlangineion, which became one of the great centres of Greek culture abroad, when the Turks overran the homeland. Longhena designed a building for it, which still stands, and Sansovino built the adjacent church of San Giorgio dei Greci. Many of the most brilliant Venetian courtesans were Greeks. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Greek wines were drunk at all the best Venetian tables. Many Greeks of great wealth came to Venice after the fall of Constantinople, and Venetians sometimes owned, when the political winds were blowing right, villas and gardens in the Morea.
Even now you are never far from Greece in Venice. Not only are there the Byzantine treasures of the city, and the Greek overtones to its history and culture: almost any summer day you may see a sleek white Greek steamer, a breath of the Aegean, sailing in with the morning tide, or embarking its befurred and portly passengers for an archaeological cruise. There is a Greek Consul in Venice, and a Greek institute of Byzantine studies: and sometimes in the season one of the prodigious Greek magnates will land at St Mark’s from the tender of his yacht, with his dazzling mistress or his complacent wife, his immaculate captain and his sleek secretaries, bringing to these severe porticoes a full-blown vision of the merchant-venturers.
The colony itself survives, though it has dwindled to about fifty members. You can see it almost in its entirety, supplemented by a few resident Russians, at a feast-day service in San Giorgio dei Greci, now unashamedly Orthodox. The ceremonials there are beautifully calm and mysterious, set against a background of dim shimmering ikons and golden crosses. Much of the service, in the Greek way, is conducted at an inner altar, invisible to the congregation: but in the body of the church the people observe their own devotions with an impressive lack of self-consciousness, walking up the nave all alone with elaborate crossings and genuflections, to kneel before a crucifix; entering the sanctum, apparently unannounced, to receive the personal blessing of the priest; singing the canticles in a style by no means flippant or irreverent, but oddly detached. When the priest emerges from the curtains of the altar, black-hatted and heavily bearded, and passes gravely down the nave with his censer, all those Greeks bow gracefully at his passing, allowing the incense to flow around their heads, as the Arabs use it to sweeten their beards.
There are still Armenians in Venice, too. They have a famous monastery on one of the islands of the lagoon, and they have a church, Santa
Croce degli Armeni, tucked away in the Alley of the Armenians, near San Giuliano. The Armenians formed the oldest of the foreign communities in Venice. They were firmly established at the beginning of the twelfth century, and their position was consolidated when a Doge who had made a fortune in their country left part of it to establish an Armenian headquarters in Venice. The Armenians were merchants, shopkeepers, financiers, money-lenders, pawnbrokers (they paid depositors partly in money, but partly in watered white wine, just as the coloured labourers of the Cape used to be paid in tots). It is said that the plague first came into Venice with Armenian immigrants, but they were never harried or victimized: in Venice, as a sixteenth-century Englishman observed, it signified nothing ‘if a man be a Turk, a Jew, a Gospeller, a Papist or a believer in the Devil; nor does anyone challenge you, whether you are married or not, and whether you eat flesh and fish in your own home’.
A few Armenians still live in the Alley of the Armenians, and any Sunday morning you will find seven or eight people, mostly women, attending Mass in the church (the Armenian Church, the oldest Established church in the world, is nowadays split between Catholics and Orthodox: the Armenians in Venice are in communion with Rome). It is a strange little building. Its campanile, now silent, is so surrounded by tall buildings and chimneys that you can hardly see it: its façade is unobtrusively hidden away in a row of houses, and only the cross on the door shows that it is a church at all. Inside it is shabby but brightly decorated, and the floor of the vestibule is covered with memorial slabs, extolling the virtues of eminent Venetian Armenians – ‘He lived as a Lion’, says one, ‘Died as a Swan, and will Rise as a Phoenix.’ The congregations are usually poorly dressed: and though the priest has splendid vestments, and conducts the services with lordly grace, his solemn young acolyte will probably be wearing blue jeans and a pullover. A sense of ancient continuity informs the proceedings, for the church of Santa Croce stands on the very same site that was given to the Armenian community by that indulgent Doge, eight centuries ago.
The Germans, whose links with Venice are old and profitable, also have their church in the city: the chapel of the Lutherans, which has, since 1813, occupied a comfortable first-floor room near the church of Santi Apostoli. Its congregations are small but extremely well dressed; its lighting is discreetly subdued; and on the door a notice says: ‘The service is conducted in German: do not disturb.’
For a taste of Venetian Englishry, go on a summer morning to the Anglican Church of St George, which is a converted warehouse near the Accademia bridge. Its pews are usually full, and the familiar melodies of Ancient and Modern stream away, turgid but enthusiastic, across the Grand Canal. The drone of the visiting padre blends easily with the hot buzz of the Venetian summer, and when the service ends you will see his surplice fluttering in the doorway, among the neat hats and tweedy suits, the white gloves and prayer-books, the scrubbed children and the pink-cheeked, tight-curled, lavender-scented, pearl-necklaced, regimentally brooched ladies that so admirably represent, year in, year out, east and west, the perennial spirit of England abroad.
The English have always been familiar to the Venetians (and there are astonishing parallels between the histories of the two peoples). There was a regular service of fifteenth-century galleys between Venice and Southampton; each rower was a business man himself, and took a little private merchandise under his seat, to peddle in the Hampshire lanes on his own account. Venetian ships also put in at Rye, Sandwich, Deal, and the other south coast ports of England, now almost as dead as the Serenissima herself. The private Church of England chapel maintained by Sir Henry Wotton, the English Ambassador, was one of the causes of Venice’s worst quarrels with the Holy See. Petrarch, describing a Venetian festival in the fourteenth century, says that among the honoured guests were some English noblemen, ‘comrades and kinsmen of their King’, who had come to Venice with their ships on a navigational exercise. English captains and soldiers often fought in the Venetian cause, and the English, in return, sometimes hired Venetian ships and sailors.
In the nineteenth century, when Venice was in the doldrums, it was the complacent English who founded her romantic cult: Browning among the splendours of the Ca’Rezzonico (as it says in a plaque on the wall: ‘Open my heart and you will see, Graven inside of it, Italy’); Byron swimming home along the Grand Canal after a soirée, with a servant carrying his clothes in the gondola behind; Shelley watching the sun go down behind the Euganean Hills; Cobden fêted at a banquet on Giudecca, with an ear of corn in every guest’s button-hole; Ruskin, for fifty years the arbiter of taste on Venice, and still the author of the most splendid descriptions of the city in the English language. In Victorian times the English community even had its own herd of seventeen cows, kept in a Venetian garden in imperial disregard of the rules, and providing every subscribing member with a fresh pint daily.
The Americans, too, were soon well known in Venice. W. D. Howells wrote a charming book about the place a century ago, before he turned to novel-writing: he was United States consul in the city, an agreeable sinecure granted him as a reward for writing an effective campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln. Another consul, Donald Mitchell, wrote a once-popular book called Reveries of a Bachelor, under the pseudonym of ‘Ik Marvel’. Henry James wrote hauntingly about the city, and lived for a time in a house on the Grand Canal. Rich Americans, following the English fashion, took to buying or renting old palaces for the season, and one generous lady, when she died, left a house to each of her gondoliers. In the days when Americanism was synonymous with all that was free, generous, and sensible, the prestige of the United States was very high in Venice. The sculptor Canova was honorary President of the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, and when a team of gondoliers took their craft to the Chicago World Fair, so I am told, they came home to Venice as heroes, and lived comfortably on the experience for the rest of their lives.
Nowadays the Venetian summer blazes with affluent visitors, but only a minority of foreign plutocrats prefers a rented palace to an air-conditioned hotel suite. In the winter there are very few foreign residents at all, apart from students at the University and at various language schools – probably less than a hundred, most of them from English-speaking countries. Gondoliers will sometimes tell you, to make you feel at home, that the palace you are passing is owned by an English lady (very beautiful) or an American diplomat (very wealthy); but they are generally years out of date with their information, and picked it up in childhood from the reminiscences of retired predecessors.
10
Melancholia
In Venice the past and the present are curiously interwoven, as in the minds of very old ladies, who are apt to ask if that dullard Mr Baldwin is still Prime Minister, and sometimes complain petulantly about the ill-treatment of cab-horses. The Venetians have never quite recovered from their loss of glory, and have perhaps never quite accepted it, so that somewhere in the backs of their minds their city is still the Serenissima, the Bride of the Adriatic, the Eye of Italy, Lord of a Quarter and a Half-Quarter of the Roman Empire – dignities which seem to have varied in gender, but never in magnificence. This combination of resignation and persistence gives the people their quality of melancholy, a lagoon-like sadness, unruffled and dry. Melancholia contributes strongly to the Venetian atmosphere, whether it is expressed in overgrown gardens or nostalgic verse: and a Venetian once even wrote a play about ‘the fundamental melancholy of sexual passions’.
A century ago, when the Republic was still alive in the world’s mind, the spectacle of Venice subdued was a good deal more poignant than it is now, and Englishmen, in particular, took a chill pleasure in examining the ruins of the Serenissima from the pinnacle of British success. ‘In the history of mankind’, observed one Victorian writer, ‘three peoples have been pre-eminently great and powerful – the Romans in ancient times, the Venetians in the Middle Ages, the English in modern days.’
Men are we [said Wordsworth magnanimously], and must grieve when even the Shade
Of that which once was great is passed away.
The Victorian celebrants of Venice loved to draw sententious conclusions from her humiliation, and saw in the downfall of the Republic either a vindication of their own political system, or an awful portent of things to come.
Today it is too old a story. The world has forgotten the mighty fleets of Venice, her formidable commanders and her pitiless inquisitions. The dungeons of the Doge’s Palace have lost their horror, to the generation of Auschwitz and Hiroshima; and even power itself seems too frail and fickle a commodity to waste our lyrics on. The Venetians may still half-mourn their vanished empire, but to the foreigner the sadness of Venice is a much more nebulous abstraction, a wistful sense of wasted purpose and lost nobility, a suspicion of degradation, a whiff of hollow snobbery, the clang of the turnstile and the sing-song banalities of the guides, knit together with crumbling masonries, suffused in winter twilight.
For a time this people constituted the first Power of the western world. Such a tremendous experience in the life of a community can never be expunged, except by physical destruction, and everywhere in Venice there are still reminders of her political prime, like India Offices in Whitehall, or the great Imperial Square of Isfahan.
The Republic sent its ambassadors to the capitals of the earth, and in return the Powers maintained missions of high importance in Venice, with elaborate fleets of diplomatic gondolas, and splendid crested palaces. The ghosts of these establishments have not yet been thoroughly exorcized. The old Austrian Embassy, on the Grand Canal, is still called the Palace of the Ambassadors. The Spanish Embassy is remembered in the Lista di Spagna, near the station (I have been told that any Venetian street called a lista has old diplomatic connotations). The palace of the Papal Legates, near San Francesco della Vigna, has given its name, agreeably corrupted, to the Salizzada delle Gatte – the Paved Alley of the Female Cats. The English Embassy; in Wotton’s time, was in a palace near Santa Maria dei Miracoli. The Russian Embassy was in a house at the junction of Rio San Trovaso and the Grand Canal, around which there still hangs (at least to the imaginative) a faint evocation of sables and sledges. Rousseau was once secretary to the French Ambasssador; Wotton kept an ape in his palace, and collected lutes and Titians; the Venetians just had time, before their downfall, to exchange letters with the infant United States. (One of the earliest American Consulates was opened in the city soon afterwards, and wonderfully authentic have been the names of its various consuls – Sparks, Flagg, Corrigan, Gerrity, Ferdinand L. Sarmento and John Q. Wood.) In the great days of the Republic appointment to an embassy in Venice was one of the most coveted of diplomatic promotions.
