The Airbnb my wife, daughter and I rented just off Campo SS. Giovanni e Paolo — the heart of Castello, a still quasi-authentic quarter of working families, schools, neighborhood bars and the municipal hospital — is perhaps half a mile as the crow flies from the flat of Donatella Calabi, a professor of urban history who curated the exhibition “Venice, the Jews and Europe: 1516 to 2016.” But even though Ms. Calabi had emailed me a map with arrows pointing the way, it still required several forays across the nearby Campo Santa Maria Formosa before I hit on just the right “calle” (street in the Venetian dialect).

No matter; it just gave me more angles from which to admire this perfect urban plaza with an austere whitewashed church rising in the center and a perimeter of magnificently crumbling palaces now occupied by restaurants, hotels, banks and the delightful 16th-century house-museum of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia.

As we sat by the windows of her top-floor apartment watching the dome of San Marco go gray against the December dusk, Ms. Calabi spoke with animation of the coming exhibition at the Ducal Palace. “The ghetto provided an incredible occasion for cultural exchange” she said, “and the exhibit will focus on that exchange within the ghetto itself, between the ghetto and the city, and with the rest of Europe.” Artworks including Carpaccio’s “Predica di Santo Stefano” (St. Stephen’s sermon) on loan from the Louvre, virtual reconstructions of the ghetto in various periods, and sacred books will conjure up the rich complexity of this exchange.

Ms. Calabi became more somber when the conversation turned to the present. “Renaissance scholar Francesco Sansovino wrote that for the Jews, Venice was ‘quasi una vera terra di promissione’ — practically a true promised land,” she said. “But today Jewish Venice is a small community within a small city. The 500th anniversary is an occasion not to celebrate — you don’t have a festival for a ghetto — but to commemorate. An unbroken stretch of 500 years of history will not happen again soon.”

I heard similar sentiments voiced later in the week at a packed meeting of an informal discussion group that gathers at intervals to consider issues pertinent to Venetian Jewry. The members had assembled that night in a pretty little house on a canal in Cannaregio near the Gesuiti Church, a Baroque pile that presides over a quarter once inhabited by artisans and artists (Titian and Tintoretto among them). My Italian, though not quite up to the rapid flow of ideas, was good enough to register the passion and erudition that these 30 or so men and women brought to a discussion of their deeply rooted community.

Amos Luzzatto, an esteemed Venetian-Jewish intellectual and the past president of the Jewish Community of Venice, was present, and we chatted for a few minutes about the small Jewish cemetery on the Lido, the “beit midrash” (study room) named for his family that is still in use in the ghetto, and the book by his renowned ancestor Rabbi Simchah Luzzatto that I had spotted in the Jewish Museum.