For most of the last 500 years, the Jewish residents of Venice were forced to live in a seven-acre area. They could leave to work during the day but were confined there at night.
Today the Venice Ghetto is not crowded. But it remains as a reminder of the inhuman treatment that Europe's Christian majority inflicted on their Jewish bretheren for many centuries.
The Venetian Ghetto has survived a long history of atrocities, from early religious persecutions to the Holocaust. Of the 246 Jews deported from Venice to concentration camps, only eight have survived.
Read and see more at this CNN photo-essay:
Persecution of Jews: The World's First Ghetto
We can not really understand Jewish-Christian relations or hope to improve them unless we understand what our Christian forebears did to the Jewish people.
