The word ghetto begins with a wall in Venice in 1516, but the wall begins with an accusation. This dossier follows one contested charge, that the Jews bore collective guilt for the death of Jesus, from the single Gospel verse that carries it, through the canon law that hardened it into the doctrine of perpetual servitude, to the gated quarters it built across four centuries, and finally to the twentieth-century rupture that borrowed the word for something else entirely. At every stop it marks what the record confirms and where it stays silent.
How a contested theological charge became the legal engine of the ghetto, from Venice 1516 to Rome 1555 to the emancipations of the nineteenth century.