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.