Authenticity and Place

Abstract

I am sitting in the Spanish synagogue in Venice, during the morning service on the Jewish holiday of Simchas Torah. I sit on a plain wooden bench—it is dark wood, beautiful and soft in its age—with my back against the southern wall, as I listen to several members of the congregation read from the Torah scroll. The bimah, the pulpit, is on the western wall, across the room from the ark, and all the pews run east to west, so that one sits facing the center aisle between the bimah and the ark. These two focal points are perfectly balanced, and although the bimah is raised above the  oor and  anked by two marble columns in the Corinthian style, it seems accessible, open, and inviting. The golden ark opposite is framed in a marble arch, and above the arch is a painted starry sky in blue and gold. Except for my bench in the last row against the wall, all the pews have little wooden desks, so that one can appreciate the fact that the synagogue is called in Italian a scola—a school, a schule. Across the center aisle is a trellised screen about Ž ve feet high, shielding the eyes of the men from the women who sit on the north side of the synagogue. Somewhere on that side of the synagogue is my wife. I look at my watch and hope that she is not bored. She knows much less about Jewish rituals than I, and a strange service in a foreign country might initially be intriguing, but after a while it may become tiresome. She cannot even pass the time by skimming through the prayerbook, for it is written in Hebrew and Italian. I, however, am not the least bit bored—I am enchanted by the entire spectacle. And I am quite pleased with myself for having managed to get into the synagogue, a process that involved some minor league con artistry. I had been to Venice several times over the last six years, and had always made a point of visiting the Ghetto section of the city with its Ž ve extant synagogues. The word ghetto means foundry in Italian, and it is likely that the origin of the term as applied to an isolated and restricted living community