Notably absent from Alexander Lee’s The First Ghetto: Venice and the Jews is any significant mention of the best known of them all. If William Shakespeare spent time on the Adriatic lagoon, then it isn’t hard to imagine him visiting the Ghetto and meeting a model for Shylock there. The Merchant of Venice’s most arresting character is quite plausible: a state-licensed moneylender of sober habits, devoutly observant, yet always vulnerable, as a Jew, to abuse from his Gentile clientele.

The continuing ambiguity in Venice’s relationship with its Jewish population is a by-product of the essential paradox underlying the city’s existence. Simply put, that dazzling aggregation of palaces and churches rising out of the sea ought not to be there. By the same token, at least according to the most fervent Catholics, neither should the Jews, condemned by the Holy Church as the killers of Christ. The Venetian Republic, after all, made much of its role as a bulwark of Christendom, and the entire official calendar was punctuated throughout each year by the Senate’s solemn processions to various holy shrines, most of whose prized relics were brought from elsewhere in the Mediterranean as loot or merchandise. Lavishly performative acts of faith were manifested by grand gestures in everything from the mosaics of the Basilica di San Marco to the dome of Santa Maria della Salute.

So why, amid all this confessional assertiveness by the Republic, were the Jews such an established element of its civic community? In other Italian states, even in papal Rome itself, a measure of tolerance was extended to them, but nowhere else saw their presence become such a defining factor in