‘The Merchant’ in Venice
Recognizing the complexity inherent in marking the 500th anniversary of the Venice ghetto, organizers created some history of their own by staging the first production of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” on the city’s landmark palazzo and holding a mock trial involving U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “You don’t celebrate the creation of the ghetto, but it’s not like marking the anniversary of Treblinka or Auschwitz,” said Stephen Greenblatt, John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard, who participated in the mock trial and who taught Shakespeare in the joint Harvard/Ca’ Foscari University of Venice Summer School. Marking the creation of one of the world’s earliest ghettos in 1516, when the ruling Venetian council ordered the Jewish population to move to a small island marked by an iron foundry (gheto in Venetian dialect), has been a complex task for the small community of 500 Jews still living...