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

Jews following the ancient Italian rite, minhag Italiani, had lived in Venice and along the lagoon well before the Republic of Venice confined the city's Jewish community to the Ghetto Nuovo in 1516. The Scola Italiana was founded in 1575 by members of this community, its prayer hall set discreetly above street-level shops in keeping with the restrictions the Republic placed on the ghetto. The synagogue was renovated across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and after the ghetto gates were removed under Napoleonic rule in 1797, many Italian-rite families moved into other parts of Venice, leaving the Scola Italiana a place of occasional rather than daily worship.

Significance

The Scola Italiana is among the oldest surviving places of Italian-rite Jewish worship anywhere, preserving in its wooden bimah, its aron kodesh, and its women's gallery the distinct layout of a Venetian Renaissance scola. Together with the four other historic synagogues of the ghetto, it is cared for today by the Jewish Community of Venice and opened to visitors through the Jewish Museum of Venice, bearing witness to one of Europe's oldest continuous Jewish presences.

Architecture

Venetian Renaissance ghetto synagogue architecture (minhag Italiani rite)