Italian Synagogue

About

The Scola Italiana stands on the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo, the public square at the heart of the Venetian ghetto where Jews were required to live from 1516 onwards. It is one of the five historic synagogues of the ghetto, each associated with a particular Jewish community that settled there in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

While the Scola Tedesca, the Scola Canton, and the Scola Levantina were established by Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews from northern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, the Scola Italiana served those Jews whose ancestors had lived in the Italian peninsula since antiquity. They followed the minhag Italiani, the Italian rite, an ancient liturgical tradition distinct from both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic worlds, with its own piyyutim, melodies, and ritual customs.

Founded in 1575, the synagogue's prayer hall is reached by a discreet flight of stairs, hidden from the square outside in the manner forced upon ghetto communities of the time. Within, the wooden bimah and aron kodesh, the carved benches arranged along facing walls, and the women's gallery preserve the distinctive layout of a Venetian-Renaissance scola.

Like the other historic synagogues of Venice, the Scola Italiana is part of the museum and synagogue circuit administered by the Jewish community of Venice. It is no longer in daily use but is opened for guided visits and for special services that recover the Italian rite for new generations.

History

Italian-rite Jews had long lived in the city and along the lagoon before the Republic of Venice established the Ghetto Nuovo in 1516. The Scola Italiana itself was founded in 1575 by members of this community, who built their prayer hall above secular premises in keeping with the strict regulations of the time.

The synagogue was renovated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, retaining its modest exterior and elaborate interior. After the gates of the ghetto were torn down under Napoleon in 1797 and the Jewish community gained civic freedoms, many Italian-rite Jews moved to other parts of Venice. The five scole of the ghetto, including the Italiana, have since been preserved together as one of the most complete witnesses to early modern Jewish life in Europe.

Significance

The Scola Italiana is among the oldest places of Italian-rite Jewish worship in the world, and one of the five historic scole of the Venetian ghetto. For the Jewish community of Venice and for visitors who come to remember the long Jewish presence in Italy, it preserves a liturgical tradition that runs unbroken from the Roman world into modern times.