Tracing the Hebrew Book Collection of the Venice Ghetto

This paper, based on my PhD thesis, traces the history of the ancient Hebrew book collection of the Jewish Community of Venice that is now part of the “Renato Maestro” Library and Archive.

It traces the movements and the composition of this collection starting from its various collocations in the last two centuries. This study was based on different archival and documentary sources, as well as brief articles, reports, letters, oral witnesses and, of course, footprints.

The archival sources include an 18^th-century book-list, a 19^th (?)-century inventory, a book-list of the Spanish Synagogue (19^th-20^th-century), and a 19^th-century cards catalogue.

The documentary witnesses, that are of different nature, helped to fill the gaps in the library history, and to determine when, approximately, some books disappeared.

The second part of the paper is dedicated to the footprints that were found in the copies (ex libris, signatures, inscriptions, stamps, and censor’s notes). It highlights the outstanding figures of the Venice Ghetto as well as the members of those families whose names recurred most frequently in the books. The footprints helped tracing the family trees that, in turn, served as a basis to identify family book collections.

All these data enable us to follow the copies journey across the time and the space, and prove the former existence of broader and richer collections that were dispersed, while only a few copies remained, or arrived to the library sometimes by chance.