What Was Forbidden

What Was Forbidden

by Jonathan Bockian

Released October 20, 2025

Venice, 1672. When Yehudit's beloved brother Mordechai is found murdered in the Ghetto's central campo, her search to know what happened upends her life as a dutiful, widowed mother. Before his death, Mordechai, disaffected merchant, outspoken skeptic, rebelled against pressure to conform to the expectations that his family and the Ghetto community place on one of their own, and to the limits imposed by gentile Venice. As Yehudit exposes conflicts that shaped Mordechai's final weeks, she increasingly confronts the boundaries of her own independence. Yehudit's tenacity and determination to find and speak the truth set her on a collision course with her family and the entrenched power structure of the Ghetto.

What Was Forbidden is inspired by an inscription in the Venice Ghetto commemorating the death of Mordechai Baldosa, who it says was "slaughtered like a lamb." The plot is set against the true backdrop of two historical movements-one political, the other religious-whose echoes reverberate to this day, each of which ignited hope of freedom from oppression and bigotry, but in diametrically opposite ways. The novel's braided narrative alternates between Mordechai's slide toward peril in the weeks before his death and Yehudit's journey afterward, to tell a richly layered story about conscience, the clash between belief and reason, and what one woman may be forced to give up to remain true to herself-and to the brother she loved.

Jonathan Bockian grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended modern orthodox yeshivahs through high school and then went on to New York University and Harvard Law School. He and his wife live in Watertown, Massachusetts.