Volume 30, Number 13 · August 18, 1983
The Triumph of the Italian Jews
By Bernard Knox
Prisoners of Hope: The Silver Age of the Italian Jews, 1924-1974
by H. Stuart Hughes
Harvard University Press, 188 pp., $15.00
GETO—the word stood out in large black capitals against the small print of a poster on the wall of the Gesuati Church when I was in Venice recently; it turned out to be the name of a film which was to be shown, once only, in the Camera di Commercio on May 11.[1] More familiar in its nondialect form 'ghetto,' the word prompts images of fifteenth-century Frankfurt or twentieth-century Warsaw, but it was Venice that provided a name for the urban prisons in which the Jews were confined for many centuries. Since Venice is a city of small islands connected by bridges, nothing was easier than to post sentries on the bridges and isolate one of the islands in the northern sector of the city, an industrial site where there had been a foundry—it was done in 1516.
Review, 5674 words
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