“Clamber not you up to the casements”: On ghetto views and viewing

On 29 March 1516 the Venetian Senate ordered all Jews residing in the city to move behind the walls of the ghetto. The mandate stipulated that Jews would be watched by Christian guards twenty-four hours a day and restricted by a nighttime curfew. In such a surveilled space, Venice’s ghetto windows played an integral role in the complex and interactive networks constituting the city and its constituency. The singular status of ghetto architecture—especially the injunctions regarding its fenestration—provides an opportunity to explore the processes of ghettoization that partitioned a population and monitored the activities of Jews and Christians alike. Windows produced spatial occasions for looking and being looked at that reinforced social difference and created profound cultural fissures. This article studies the windows of the Venetian ghetto and the city’s ongoing claims to obstruct them in the early modern period. To study the window is to study the demarcation between public good and private plurality, between the citizen and the subordinated Other.