The Republic of Ragusa was a small place with an enormous talent for survival. Wedged on the Dalmatian coast between Venice, which envied it, and the Ottoman Empire, which surrounded it, the city-state stayed independent from 1358 until Napoleon abolished it in 1808 by doing the one thing nobody could afford to do for them: getting along with everyone. It traded with the Christian West and the Muslim East at the same time, in the same week, and made a fortune from being the door between them. A city like that needs people who can move goods, languages and trust across a hostile sea. It found them, as such cities usually do, among the Jews.
On a narrow lane in the old town called Zudioska, the Jewish Street, stands the proof. The Dubrovnik synagogue is held to have been founded in 1352 and gained legal standing in the city in 1408, which makes it the oldest Sephardic synagogue still in use anywhere in the world and the second-oldest synagogue still in use in Europe. That is a remarkable sentence to be able to write about a building on a side street in a town of stone. It has been open, with interruptions, for more than six centuries.
The door between two worlds
The community swelled after 1492, when Spain expelled its Jews and a generation of Sephardim went looking for ports that would have them. Ragusa would. In May 1544 a ship landed carrying nothing but Portuguese Jewish refugees. The republic, ever practical, found these newcomers useful: they had cousins and credit across the Ottoman Balkans, they spoke the right languages, and they understood the long-distance trade in wool, leather, spices and silver on which Ragusan wealth depended. Jewish brokers became the hinges of that commerce, the people who could get a caravan from Sarajevo to the quay and a bill of exchange from the quay to Ancona.
Usefulness, however, was not the same as safety, and Ragusa was a Catholic republic with a wary eye. In 1546 its officials confined the Jews to a designated street, the ghetto on Zudioska, gated at night, its residents taxed for the privilege of living there. It is the oldest tension in diaspora life: a community valued for what it could do and fenced for what it was. The Jews of Ragusa lived inside that contradiction for centuries, and made the most of the half of it that was generous.
A sanctuary and a gated street
The Dubrovnik synagogue, traditionally dated to 1352, was legally recognised by the city in 1408. In 1546 the authorities confined the Jewish community to a designated quarter on Zudioska Street, the ghetto, whose residents paid a special tax and were locked in at night. The synagogue and the street it stands on are the two stones of the same story.
Dubrovnik Synagogue · History of the Jews in DubrovnikThe Jeshurun affair
The contradiction turned dangerous in 1622. A Christian girl was found dead, and a woman who had in fact murdered her deflected the blame with the oldest and cruellest of slanders: that a Jew, a respected merchant named Isaac Jeshurun, had drawn her into killing the child for ritual blood. It was a blood libel, baseless, and it nearly destroyed a man. Jeshurun was tortured and sentenced to twenty years. The community fought for him, and after three years he was freed. The episode left a scar; restrictions hardened and many families left for Venice or the Ottoman lands. But Ragusa's Jews recorded their own deliverance and commemorated it, which is its own kind of answer to a libel: not silence, but a story told back.
Through all of it the city kept its character. Ragusa produced and sheltered figures who could only have flourished at a crossroads. Didacus Pyrrhus, a Portuguese poet who had fled the Inquisition, returned openly to Judaism in Ragusa and lived there for some fifty years. Rabbi Aaron Cohen ran one of the city's leading commercial houses and wrote the account of the Jeshurun affair into the community's memory. These were not marginal men hiding in a backstreet. They were merchants, scholars and poets in one of the cleverest small states in Europe.
A republic that survived four centuries by getting along with everyone needed people who could cross its waters in both directions. It found them on the Jewish Street.
Shelled, repaired, reopened
During the siege of Dubrovnik, shelling damaged the old town; in 1992 an artillery round struck through the roof of the synagogue. After restoration, the synagogue reopened in 1997. It serves today both as a working house of prayer and as a small Jewish museum, one of the oldest such buildings in Europe still in use.
Dubrovnik Synagogue · WikipediaWhat the harbour still keeps
The twentieth century was nearly the end. Under wartime occupation the small community was deported, many by way of the island camp of Rab, and few of the prewar Jews of Dubrovnik survived. Then, half a century later, the wars of Yugoslavia's collapse brought shells onto the old town again, and in 1992 one tore through the synagogue roof. And still the building reopened in 1997, restored, and still it is in use. Perhaps twenty or thirty Jews live in Dubrovnik today, which is enough to keep a synagogue, a museum and a street called by the right name. A republic is remembered by the people who knew how to cross its waters. On Zudioska Street, the line for the Jews is still open in the ledger.
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