Travels in Jewish Europe
Tourism and the ghetto: how authentic is the experience?
Jewish tourism has taken off in Europe. But what's presented to the tourist often falsifies the Jewish experience. How authentic is what we see?
Venice and the Ghetto
I remember the first time I went to the Venice Jewish Ghetto, twenty years ago. There were few tourists there, even at high summer, and I ate my lunch in a social club with some friendly pensioners.
Now, the Jewish Ghetto is big business. But how authentic is the impression that it gives of the Jewish life of Venice?
The Kosher restaurant is run by Lubavitcher Hasidim who came over from America in the 1980s. They represent only one of the ‘nations’ that made up the Ghetto here – the Ashkenazi or ‘German’ Jews. Sephardi Jews exiled from Spain and Portugal, and Levantine Jews who traded with the East, added their own flavours to what was in effect a melting pot of diverse Jewish cultures.
In fact, after Napoleon opened the doors of the ghetto in 1797, many of Venice’s Jews moved either to the mainland, or to more thriving cities elsewhere. There were only 1,200 Jews left living here when the Germans occupied the city in 1943; less than a hundred live in the Ghetto today. And the Lubavitchers appear not to accept the Orthodoxy of the remaining Venetian Jews – an unhappy conflict.
None the less, Venice’s Ghetto is a monument to a great age of Jewish culture; the fine Baroque synagogues, the development of Hebrew printing – Venice was an early focus of the book trade – and the scholarship that went with it. Yet it also opened my eyes to the deprivations of Jewish life in the Ghetto; Jews weren't allowed to be architects, so their synagogues were designed by Christians. They weren't allowed to own property, so they had Christian landlords. And since they weren't allowed to expand beyond the walls of the Ghetto, they built seven stories high, creating a characteristic townscape of tall, narrow houses.
So Venice is half and half; you can see five centuries of Jewish townscape; but not much Jewish life.
Poland: Judaism without Jews?
In Poland, Jewish tourism is well developed. The Krakow Jewish quarter of Kazimierz boasts ‘Schindler’s List tours’, and a number of kosher restaurants have started up. There’s even a centre of Jewish Studies, supported by the Jagellonian university.
I can vouch for the cheesecake. It’s the best I’ve had outside New York. But the kosher restaurants are mainly staffed by Gentiles, and while there is a small Jewish community, it has no rabbi (it does have a cantor) . This is an ersatz Jewish quarter – pretend Jewishness.
And in fact it’s not the Krakow ghetto as seen in Schindler’s list, either. Kazimierz was the traditional Jewish quarter – but the ghetto was established in Podgorze, across the river.
This is the twee side of Jewish tourism in Poland. The more distressing side – in fact I hesitate to call it tourism – is the development of the concentration camps, Auschwitz and Birkenau, to take over half a million tourists a year.
We certainly need to remember what happened to the Jews in Poland. There were three and a half million in 1939; there are almost none now. But I wonder whether we get a skewed picture of the Jewish experience from what we see in Poland and the rest of Central Europe. We see the horror of holocaust, and the melancholy of deserted synagogues. In Central Europe and in much of Italy, Jewish graveyards are the most obvious monuments left.
So we see a lot of Jewish death – and almost nothing of Jewish life.
England: the new refugees
Brick Lane is now best known for its curry restaurants. It’s now a heavily Bengali area. Only the two Beigel bakeries hint at its Jewish past.
This was a major centre of Jewish life in nineteenth century England, as Jews fled persecution in Eastern Europe and ended up in London. Many spoke Yiddish – there was a Yiddish theatre here – and worked in the fashion trade, as tailors, leather workers, furriers or bootmakers.
There was a strong radical tradition here too. Entrepeneurial capitalism thrived side by side with a strong Communist Party that drew many of its members from the Jewish population.
But as the Jewish community here became richer, many moved out to the suburbs. From the 1960s onwards the Jewish population declined, and in 1996 the last and most famous of the kosher restaurants, Bloom’s, closed its doors.
Still, if you want to find what a Jewish area was really like in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, arguably Brick Lane gives you a much better idea than anything in Italy or Poland. Because when the Jews moved out, the Bangladeshis moved in.
So the area is still bustling with entrepreneurial businesses – the textile and fashion trade – just as it used to be. The synagogue is now a mosque, but it’s still the religious centre of a close knit community. (Before it was a synagogue, in fact, it was a Huguenot church – another persecuted minority fleeing to a more tolerant country.)
The life of Brick Lane isn't Jewish life any more. But it really is alive and kicking. And that’s what Jewish life was really like - a more accurate portrayal than any of the tidied-up, ghostly ghettoes.
