The Venetian Ghetto was the area of Venice in which Jews were forced to live by the government of the Venetian Republic. The English word ghetto is derived from the Jewish ghetto in Venice. The Venetian Ghetto was instituted on 29 March 1516 by decree of Doge Leonardo Loredan and the Venetian Senate. It was not the first time that Jews in Venice were compelled to live in a segregated area of the city. In 1555, Venice had 160,208 inhabitants, including 923 Jews, who were mainly merchants. In 1797 the French Army of Italy, commanded by the 28-year-old General Napoleon Bonaparte, occupied Venice, forced the Venetian Republic to dissolve itself on 12 May 1797, and ended the ghetto's separation from the city on 11 July the same year. In the 19th century, the ghetto was renamed the Contrada dell'unione. Etymology The origins of the name ghetto (ghèto in the Venetian language) are disputed. Among the theories are: ghetto comes from "giotto" or "geto", meaning "foundry", since the first Jewish quarter was near a foundry that once made cannons; ghetto, from Italian getto, which is the act of, or the resulting object from, pouring molted metal into a mold, as old state foundries existed in this city quarter ghetto formerly meant "street" (like German Gasse, Swedish gata, and Gothic gatwo) ghetto comes from borghetto, diminutive of borgo, meaning "little town" ghetto is related to the Hebrew word get, meaning a divorce document. The Oxford University Press etymologist Anatoly Liberman 2009 reviewed many theories and concluded that all were speculative. Donatella Calabi, faculty member of IUAV University Venice, Architecture, Construction and Conservation, argued in the documentary Venice and the Ghetto (2017, Klaus T. Steindl) that ghetto comes from the Italian word gettare [dʒet·ˈta:·re] which means "throw away", because the area was before then a waste dump for foundries. The first Jewish arrivals were German and they pronounced the word [ˈɡɛto] - the spelling followed ("h" after "g" changes [dʒ] to [ˈɡ]). The same opinion was published in her book Venezia e il ghetto. Cinquecento anni del "recinto deli ebrei". Marcella Ansaldi, director of the Jewish Museum of Venice, endorses this theory in a history video. The author of Ghetto: The History of a Word, Daniel B. Schwartz, endorses the theories that the term ghetto did not emerge as a result of Jewish resident segregation, but rather, that the word is a relic