I read in Simon Schama's "The Story of the Jews" that the word "ghetto" derives from a Venetian word for "foundry" because the first Jewish quarter established in Venice in 1516 was built over an old foundry district.
Was this first ghetto in Venice actually built over a foundry district? What would a foundry be like in 1516 anyway? Would a foundry from that time period pollute the air, soil, or water, or create hazardous byproducts? Could this have possibly impacted the health of the future Jewish residents? Was the first ghetto an industrial wasteland? Would the people of Venice and the Jews in the ghetto know about things like pollution from industrial processes?
The industrial hazards wouldn't have mattered much, relative to the social and bacteriologic hazards.
We do have plenty of evidence of pre-modern industrial pollution -- Roman metallurgy leaves a record through lead deposition in Greenland ice cores.
Most of the hazards of a foundry would have been in the smoke from fires-- since it was no longer being used as a foundry, that would no longer have been a problem.
Generally, until you get to the industrial revolution, artisanal production was fairly low volume and so was industrial pollution. For a Jew in Renaissance Venice, environmental hazards would been a rounding error compared with plague and social hazards.
[Weiner 1970] observes
[Considering the] plague which struck Venice between 1575 and 1577. The number of Jews in the Venetian population declined from a little over ten thousand to a little over one thousand.
In percentage terms, this was a decline from over five to under one per cent of the population. The possibility exists that some of this decline reflects emigration from Venice or deaths which occurred after the plague years. The probability is, however, that the major portion of decline reflects deaths caused by the plague.
The medieval history of Jews in Venice remains murky. There are sources which mention massacre and expropriation, there are also reasons to be skeptical of them. Plague and some other diseases were the natural killers, humans a potential social killer for the Jews of Venice. Someone might well have been poisoned by lead or mercury, but in the context of the mortality and morbidity at that place and time, it would have been a negligible effect compared with other causes of disease and death. Metals can be found in the bones of ancient and medieval skeletons, and those directly exposed to industrial processes could suffer health effects-- but long term exposure to contaminated environments doesn't appear to contribute much to overall health.
See:
WEINER, GORDON M. “The Demographic Effects of the Venetian Plagues of 1575-77 and 1630-31.” Genus, vol. 26, no. 1/2, 1970, pp. 41–57.
Ravid, Benjamin. “The Jewish Mercantile Settlement of Twelfth and Thirteenth Century Venice: Reality or Conjecture?” AJS Review, vol. 2, 1977, pp. 201–225.
McConnell, J. R.; Wilson, A. I.; Stohl, A.; Arienzo, M. M.; Chellman, N. J.; Eckhardt, S.; Thompson, E. M.; Pollard, A. M.; Steffensen, J. P. Lead Pollution Recorded in Greenland Ice Indicates European Emissions Tracked Plagues, Wars, and Imperial Expansion during Antiquity. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2018, 115 (22), 5726– 5731, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1721818115
López-Costas O, Kylander M, Mattielli N, et al. Human bones tell the story of atmospheric mercury and lead exposure at the edge of Roman World. Sci Total Environ. 2020;710:136319. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.136319