Venice

Venetian tradition holds that in 828 two merchants removed the body of Mark the Evangelist from Alexandria and got it past the customs inspection by packing pork around it, which no Muslim official would search. A legend developed afterwards that an angel had once told Mark his rest would be in the lagoon, which conveniently made the theft a homecoming.

The consequences were constitutional. The basilica built for the relic stands beside the doge's palace and was, until 1807, the private chapel of the doge rather than the cathedral of the city; the patriarch sat elsewhere. That arrangement kept the republic's central religious institution under the government's control rather than the church's, which is one reason Venice could take an independent line with Rome, most spectacularly during the interdict of 1606, when the city ordered its clergy to keep celebrating and expelled those who obeyed the pope.

The building itself is a Byzantine church in the west, domed and encrusted with gold ground mosaics, and much of what covers it was taken from Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204, including the four bronze horses. The Pala d'Oro behind the altar is a screen of enamels and jewels assembled over four centuries. The whole is a statement that Venice was heir to the eastern empire and answerable to nobody, and the winged lion of Mark became the emblem of every territory it ruled.

In 1516 the Venetian senate resolved that the city's Jews should live in one place, the site of a disused foundry, with gates locked at night and guarded at the community's own expense. The Venetian word for foundry, geto, became the name of the quarter and then, through Venice's prominence, the word in every European language for a compulsory Jewish district. Because the site could not spread outward the buildings went up instead, six and seven storeys with low ceilings, and five synagogues were fitted into upper floors of ordinary looking houses, serving German, Italian, Levantine, Spanish and Portuguese rites within a few hundred metres of each other. Napoleon's troops took the gates down in 1797.

Venetian printing did something the confinement did not undo. In the early sixteenth century the Flemish printer Daniel Bomberg, a Christian working with Jewish editors, produced in Venice the first complete Rabbinic Bible, with the text surrounded by Targum and commentaries, and the first complete printed Talmud. He fixed the layout, the placing of Rashi and the Tosafot around the text, and the folio numbering, and every edition since has followed it, so that a page reference given anywhere in the world today points to the same page of a book made in this city.

The same century saw the Talmud burned in Italy on papal order and subjected to censorship. The Venetian Jewish community was deported in 1943 and 1944, and a memorial in the campo names those taken.