Few words are as ideologically charged as ghetto. Daniel B. Schwartz offers a fascinating account of the changing nuances of this slippery term, from its coinage to the present day, in Ghetto: The History of a Word. We asked him for a quick run-down of the word’s origin, what it described, and its modern meaning.
In the U.S., we associate the term “ghetto” with African American communities in inner cities. Could you explain how it originated in a very different setting?
In 1516, the Venetian Senate restricted all Jews living in Venice to a small island in the northern part of the lagoon city that was already known as the Ghetto Nuovo (or New Ghetto). It is generally believed that the island got its name from a copper foundry that had formerly been located there. “Ghetto” is thought to derive from the Italian verb gettare, meaning to throw or to cast, which would evoke the casting of metal for the production of ammunition at the foundry. By osmosis, the proper name Ghetto came to be associated with the Jews who now lived there, and more specifically with the phenomenon of the compulsory, segregated, and enclosed Jewish quarter. When residential segregation of Jews spread to other Italian towns and cities from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the all-Jewish and only-Jewish areas formed came to be called ghettos. There were mandatory and exclusive Jewish neighborhoods in Europe before 1516—in Frankfurt am Main, for example, where Jews were forcibly concentrated in a particular street in 1462—but Venice is where the name “ghetto” for such neighborhoods originated.
What was life like in European ghettos at their peak? How isolated were Jewish residents?
Life in the European ghettos at their peak was in many ways paradoxical. On one hand, the ghettos had many of the drawbacks of segregated areas: because the boundaries of the ghetto typically were not extended sufficiently to accommodate the growth of population, they were often appallingly overcrowded. Ghettos featured some of the tallest buildings in the city, with seven to as many as nine floors needed to house all the people; when these tenement-like apartments were built in narrow alleys, they frequently obscured the flow of light. A saying that originated in eighteenth-century Italian, fare un ghetto, “to make a ghetto,” may have betrayed traditional stereotypes about Jewish noisiness, but it stands to reason that ghettos were clamorous, cacophonous places where sounds were intensified. On the other hand, the ghetto was also seen as a kind of haven, a walled city in miniature where Jews enjoyed a measure of protection from the outside world and, significantly, were spared the much worse fate of expulsion. It must be emphasized that the original ghettos of early modern Europe were not prisons. Though there were curfews that required Jews to be back in the ghettos by a certain hour, when the gates would be shut and locked, Jews (so long as they were wearing some distinguishing garment, typically in the case of the Italian ghettos a colored hat) were free to leave the ghetto by day to conduct business or visit gentile acquaintances. The boundaries of the ghetto were porous; there were always, at least during the permitted hours, Christians entering and Jews leaving. They were not only physically, but culturally permeable: behind the walls of the ghetto, Jews absorbed everything from the language to the folkways of the surrounding society, even if they tended also to “Judaize” them. Despite the fact Jews were forced to live apart in their own quarters, they were much less isolated than the connotations of the word “ghetto” would lead one to expect.
How did the ghettos come to an end?
Many of the ghettos of Italy and Central Europe were razed to the ground by French armies during the Napoleonic Wars, as part of their campaign to export the French revolution and its emancipation of the Jews to all the areas they conquered. In some cases, most notably in Rome, Napoleon’s defeat and the restoration of the old regime resulted in a re-ghettoization of Jews. The plight of Roman Jewry, which had been steadily impoverished and worn down as a result of papal pressure over the centuries, was a focus of a great deal of attention on the part of both Jews and non-Jews in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, by which point the fact this community was still ghettoized was seen as anomalous. Rome’s ghetto was finally dismantled in 1870, after the popes were stripped of all temporal power and the project of Italian unification was completed. It was the last of the old European ghettos to fall. Most of the European ghettos were leveled as part of urban renewal projects, so that there are only a handful that one can visit today that even somewhat resemble what they once looked like. In Venice, most of the buildings (including the synagogues) and the layout of the ghetto were preserved, so that it offers the best opportunity to see the ghetto as it was.
The dismantling of ghettos sounds like a completely good thing. But did it have any unanticipated effects on Jewish communities?
In the wake of the dismantling of ghettos, some began to express a certain nostalgia for what they believed had been lost in the process. They associated the ghetto with an entire gestalt of Jewish traditions, customs, folkways, values, and social types in the midst of disappearing. This outlook conveyed a degree of unease about modernity, which was seen as a homogenizing force that threatened to swallow any residual spaces of old-world Judaism. Later, when Zionists began to polemicize against Jewish liberal integrationists, they occasionally sought to redeem the much-derided figure of the “ghetto Jew” (associated with weakness, servility, and obscurantism) by comparing him favorably to an “assimilated Jew” they deemed rootless, inauthentic, and neurotic.
How and when did the term cross the Atlantic? When did we start to apply it chiefly to African American urban communities?
In the case of America, we can speak of two fundamental migrations of the word “ghetto.” The first was when it crossed the Atlantic and came to be applied to Jewish immigrant enclaves such as New York’s Lower East Side and Chicago’s Near West Side. This began in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, amid the groundswell of East European Jewish immigration to America, though it really gathered momentum in the 1890s. These immigrant enclaves were legally voluntary, even if Jews clustered there in part because of social and economic pressures. This use of the word “ghetto” to designate a voluntary as opposed to mandatory form of Jewish residential concentration represented a major stretching of the term, though this had already begun in Europe, where Jewish immigrant quarters such as London’s East End were also referred to as ghettos. The new application of the word, however, was not without controversy; some protested the use of “ghetto” as a synonym for “Jewish quarter” because of the negative images it conjured, and one American Jewish notable succeeded in persuading the New York Times to cease referring to the LES as the “New York Ghetto.” The second migration was the transfer of the term from Jewish to African American enclaves. Usage of the word “ghetto” to refer to the residential segregation of blacks began in the African American press in the 1910s as part of a protest against new city ordinances in the South and Midwest that forbade blacks from buying or renting a home on a block the majority of whose residents were white (and vice versa). Such zoning laws were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1917. But residential segregation of blacks continued in the form of restrictive covenants, redlining, and the segregation of public housing (among other things)—and usage of the word “ghetto” to refer to black segregation gradually became more mainstream. That said, the term only came to be primarily associated with African Americans rather than Jews in the postwar period and in particular in the 1960s and 1970s, when the focus of the civil rights movement began to shift from Jim Crow in the South to the ghettos of the North.
How do Jewish people today think about the term?
Certainly, there are several misunderstandings that continue to prevail. Many Jews would argue that most Jews lived in ghettos prior to emancipation, despite the fact urban ghettos were generally limited to the Italian peninsula and a few Central European cities (e.g. Frankfurt, Prague) and were not, on balance, to be found in Poland, where most early modern Jews lived. Despite decades of revisionist scholarship that has challenged the notion that the original European ghettos were largely isolated, it is not clear that this has made a significant dent in popular perceptions. The fact that Jewish immigrant enclaves in this country were once referred to as ghettos has mostly been forgotten; it would probably surprise most Jews to see a postcard of the Lower East Side from the early twentieth century with a street scene labeled “The Ghetto.” When Jews think of Jewish ghettos today, it is probably the Warsaw Ghetto that comes first to mind, though the Nazi ghetto was starkly different (and much worse) than the original European ghettos that coined the term. I think Jews regard the fact the word “ghetto” has come to be primarily associated with another people with some ambivalence. On one hand, the term has mostly pejorative connotations, so that many are happy to bid it farewell. On the other hand, some view the application of the term to African American enclaves with skepticism, whether on account of the fact the de jure dimensions of black segregation in this country were typically not as overt and clear-cut as the statutory laws of early modern Jewish segregation or the Nazi segregation of Jews, or because they see the term as somehow “belonging” to Jewish history and resent its appropriation. Whatever the case, I would say that the word “ghetto” remains a keyword for Jews, one that carries a special ideological charge and is capable of evoking images and associations that exceed any dictionary definition of the term.
