This event discusses the Jewish home in Venice during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a multi-religious and multi-ethnic web-work of individuals, communities, and objects in motion. Although the ghetto was a space of physical separation, oppression, and housing scarcity, unlike many domestic spaces of that era, the Jewish homes in Venice connected outward to the broader Mediterranean world. Uncovering the unexplored nexus of early modern Italian and Jewish culture, the Mediterranean and the Global Renaissance, the paper argues that the Jewish home was equally shaped by both routes and roots because of the specific histories of the individuals and diverse communities that lived there. The Jewish home was both a receptacle of complex histories of interaction, displacement, and transculturation, and a space in which premodern Jewish identities were shaped by crossing social, cultural, religious, and ethnic boundaries.
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This event is part of the series "The Life of Venice and its People" celebrating the tenth-year anniversary of the Italian and Mediterranean Colloquium, organized by the Department of Italian at Columbia University in collaboration with Casa Muraro in Venice, and co-sponsored by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Division of Humanities, and the European Institute at Columbia University.
