Afterword: The Ghetto After the Plague

The Venice Ghetto was founded in 1516 by the Venetian government as a segregated area of the city in which Jews were compelled to live. The world's first ghetto and the origin of the English word, the term simultaneously works to mark specific places and their histories, and as a global symbol that evokes themes of identity, exile, marginalization, and segregation. To capture these multiple meanings, the editors of this volume conceptualize the ghetto as a "memory space that travels" through both time and space. This interdisciplinary collection engages with questions about the history, conditions, and lived experience of the Venice Ghetto, including its legacy as a compulsory, segregated, and enclosed space. Contributors also consider the ghetto's influence on the figure of the Renaissance moneylender, the material culture of the ghetto archive, the urban form of North Africa's mellah and hara, and the ghetto's impact on the writings of Primo Levi and Marjorie Agosìn. In November 2019 and in March 2020 Venice went through two moments of crisis. A flooding of unprecedented magnitude and duration and the ongoing Coronavirus outbreak have turned one of the most visited cities in the world in a ghost town. This afterword reflects on the role that the Ghetto has performed historically in times of crisis and on how its present and future condition, sadly not much improved since the high hopes connected with the 2016 quincentennial, may still have important lessons for the future of Venice as a whole, following Salvatore Settis' definition of Venice: "a thinking machine that allows us to ponder the very idea of the city, citizenship practices, urban life as sediments of history, as the experience of the here and now, as well as a project for a possible future". In particular, the challenge of climate change and the connected sea-level rise will be addressed, in connection with Amitav Ghosh's representation of the Ghetto as a crossroad of global migration in his recent novel Gun Island.