Webs of Life: Domestic Jewish Worlds in Early Modern Venice - Federica Francesconi

This lecture explores domestic life in the Venetian ghetto as both a site of physical segregation, housing scarcity, and oppression, and a space of cultural negotiation and transformation. Drawing on unpublished archival sources, surviving material culture, and the built environment, it traces how Venetian Jews actively shaped their living spaces through engagement with objects, furnishings, and architectural features. From the central portego (the central space in Venetian houses) to repurposed Islamic carpets and gilt leather panels, the home emerged as a site of transculturation where Jewish, Islamic, and Renaissance aesthetics intersected. These material choices reveal not only practical adaptation but also enduring ties to memory, mobility, and diasporic identity. By examining the interplay of people, objects, and spaces, the lecture foregrounds the Jewish home in the ghetto as a dynamic meshwork—extending both vertically and horizontally, and connecting domestic life to the broader urban fabric, natural surroundings, and the wider Mediterranean world.

Federica Francesconi is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Judaic Studies Program at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her research and publications focus on the social, religious, and cultural dimensions of early modern Jewish life in Italy, with particular attention to the politics and dynamics of the ghetto. She has held fellowships in Europe, Israel, and the United States. Her recent book, Invisible Enlighteners: The Jewish Merchants of Modena, from the Renaissance to the Emancipation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), won the 2022 Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize from the American Historical Association and was the finalist for the 2021 National Jewish Book Awards’ JDC-Herbert Katzki Award for Writing Based on Archival Material. She is currently working on a new monograph, The Jewish Home in Early Modern Venice: Cosmopolitan Intimacy, Global Networks, and Diasporic Material Culture, which examines the Jewish home in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice as a multi-religious and multi-ethnic nexus of individuals, communities, and objects in motion. This project has been supported by the Gladys Krieble Delmas, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence.

Tuesday, October 28, 2025 • 314 Royce Hall • 2 PM
Webs of Life: Domestic Jewish Worlds in Early Modern Venice

Federica Francesconi (University at Albany)
Moderator: Stefania Tutino (UCLA)
Viterbi Program in Mediterranean Jewish Studies