– Introduction – H  ere are two essays about what it means to be a foreigner. The first is set in Venice at the dawn of the sixteenth century, as the city became the seat of a global trading empire; many of the stran- gers necessary to run that empire were unwanted in the city itself: Germans, Greeks, Turks, and Jews – Jews were the least wanted. What was it like to carve out a life in a hostile place? I asked myself this question when I first visited the Jewish ghetto of Venice in the 1960s. The silent, empty islands which compose the ghetto were still haunted by the expulsions and mass murders of the Second World War, their houses crumbling, their synagogues defaced. But long before, at the height of the Renaissance, Jews exiled from Spain had managed to make a home here. The ways they did so show something, I think, about how other exiles and migrants, forced to live in isolation, can create a community for themselves. he second essay is about foreigners, and foreignness, closer in time to us. The essay revolves around the life of Alexander Herzen, the great nineteenth-century Russian reformer who spent much of his life in exile in Britain, or in drifting from city to city on the Continent. Isaiah Berlin recounted to me vii