Why Venice Built the World's First Ghetto
Sixteenth-century Venice had a problem it could not solve by preference alone: it wanted its Jewish population gone, and it could not do without them. The compromise, as Alexander Lee's Aeon essay describes it, was the world's first ghetto — a place Jews were permitted to be, on terms the city set rather than ones they chose. The sequence is the interesting part. Expulsion was blocked by economic dependence; dependence was then managed by segregation. The ghetto was an administrative answer to a contradiction, not a neighbourhood that simply formed around a community. That makes the word 'compromise' do heavy lifting. A compromise usually implies two sides giving something up; here the alternative on the table was expulsion, which makes the ghetto the less brutal option rather than a fair bargain.
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Calling it a compromise frames a forced arrangement as a negotiation. The alternative was expulsion, so the ghetto was the lesser harm, not a deal struck between equals.
But the framing points at something real: the arrangement existed because Venice needed its Jewish residents, and that dependence is precisely what made expulsion impossible.