What Was Forbidden

Venice Ghetto, 1672. A brother is killed. A truth buried. When faith, freedom and obedience collide, one woman risks everything to remain true to herself and to the brother she loved.
When Yehudit’s beloved brother Mordechai is found murdered, her search to know what happened upends her world. In life, Mordechai—disaffected merchant, outspoken skeptic—secretly defied expectations his family, religion, and the Ghetto community placed on one of their own, and limits imposed by gentile Venice. As Yehudit exposes conflicts that shaped Mordechai’s final weeks, she increasingly must challenge restrictions and controls on her life as a woman. Yehudit’s determination to find and speak the truth set her on a collision course with her family and the entrenched Ghetto power structure.
Inspired by a true event memorialized in the Venice Ghetto, WHAT WAS FORBIDDEN is set within the backdrop of two historical movements each of which ignited hopes of freedom but in diametrically opposite ways.