In 1638 a book entitled Discorso circa il stato de gl'hebrei et in particolar dimoranti nell'inclita città di Venetia (A Discourse on the State of the Jews, Particularly Those Dwelling in the Illustrious City of Venice), written by the prominent Venetian Rabbi, Simone Luzzatto, was published. This Italian work, 184 quarto size pages in length, was addressed to the Venetian patriciate which constituted the governing body of the city. On the basis of information contained in a seventeenth-century Hebrew chronicle first published in 1949, it appears that it had been written in order to avert an expulsion which threatened the Jews of Venice in 1636–37.

It has hitherto been generally accepted that the Jews played an active part in the overseas commerce of Venice during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that they were present in the city not only as transients but also as residents, and that they were even confined to a special area. However, a closer investigation reveals that this view constitutes a highly questionable reconstruction of the course of events, based simultaneously on the clear misunderstanding of certain alleged data, and also on dubious philological arguments supported by unproven conjecture and expanded by undocumented speculation.