Harvard University Press Blog

A Lesson in German Military History with Peter Wilson

In his landmark book Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples since 1500, acclaimed historian Peter H. Wilson offers a masterful reappraisal of German militarism and warfighting over the last five centuries, leading to the rise of Prussia and the world wars. Below, Wilson answers our questions about this complex history, breaking down key moments and challenging preconceptions about a specifically “German way of war.”

 Why did you feel it important to include the histories of Austria and Switzerland in the story of German military history?

Modern Germany is a very recent creation. The Federal Republic’s current frontiers date from 1990 with the reunification of the two Germanies created by the Cold War. Germany’s size and location in Europe had shifted significantly several times before, while its political structure underwent profound transformations. War was central to all these processes, but it makes little sense to frame German military history in isolation from that of Austria and Switzerland to which it was intimately connected for centuries. All three countries have their own martial traditions and stories, but these are often entwined and have shared much in common, so the book uses “German” more as a shorthand to encompass the large section of Central Europe to which these states belonged.

That’s also why the book starts around 1500, when the countries which are now the German, Austrian, and Swiss republics were part of the Holy Roman Empire. Although the medieval Empire was not short on conflict, wars were usually short and intermittent. The later fifteenth century saw the creation of new mechanisms for mobilizing armies for more sustained and coordinated struggles, in response to broader changes in European warfare. Importantly for German history, this was not achieved by forging a single, national state, but instead through collective, multilateral structures within a decentralized polity.

What do you see as key transformations in German military history?

German military development has broadly followed European trends, but with some important distinctive characteristics. The first key transformation was the creation of a mobilization structure around 1500 which shared the burdens across the numerous principalities and cities composing the Holy Roman Empire. While Switzerland opted out, it nonetheless adopted its own version of this decentralized system which proved surprisingly durable.

The second transformation was the emergence of permanent, professional forces during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These assumed a structure which remained broadly the same into the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815). Those conflicts saw the adoption of new forms of conscription, which became more comprehensive around the mid-nineteenth century and transformed military service into a rite of passage for a significant proportion of young men.

New forms of command and control also emerged in the nineteenth century, notably the General Staff which was widely copied around the world following the unexpected German victory over France in 1870-1. The newly united German Empire now joined Austria as a significant naval power, ranked second only to Britain by 1914 (with Austria-Hungary as seventh largest). Air forces were added during the First World War, but despite producing innovative and iconic aircraft, Germany never succeeded in wielding airpower as effectively as its enemies in either that conflict or WWII.

Defeat in 1945 was indeed a major rupture, but there were several important continuities across the mid-twentieth century, especially in the Communist-controlled East Germany which remained more highly militarized than the West. Germany’s relative disregard for its allies in both world wars also contrasts with its previous and subsequent behavior, and its integration within NATO and the EU echoes the earlier tradition of burden-sharing and multilateral collective security.

What was the role of Prussia in German military history?

Prussia has a central place in German military history, not least because its experience has shaped how that wider story has been perceived and interpreted. Many of the key symbols of German militarism, like the Iron Cross and the Pickelhaube spiked helmet, originated in Prussia. However, it was Austria that was the primary military power until its defeat by Prussia in 1866. Austria consistently had a larger army and was the only German state capable of launching a major war independent of allies.

Prussia’s rise was far from certain, and it only narrowly escaped disaster on several occasions, notably in 1806 when it was decisively defeated by France. Even in 1866, most bets were on an Austrian victory. It is also important not to forget the “Third Germany” of lesser states like Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg, whose armies had often been larger, and sometimes more creative than Prussia’s prior to about 1700, and which remained separate organizations until 1919.

To what extent can we still talk of a “German” way of war?

The presence of these smaller armies alongside the Austrian and Prussian forces already indicates that it is difficult to talk of a single German way of war. Germany’s military history has always contained several threads. What people usually mean by the idea of a German way of war is primarily a product of both world wars, particularly the Second. It is the belief that, surrounded by more numerous and collectively richer enemies, the country had to fight swift, decisive wars of annihilation because it could not afford a protracted war of attrition.

Some German generals had indeed reached that conclusion by the 1850s and interpreted their earlier history, notably the reign of Prussia’s Frederick the Great (1740-86), to justify this belief. This conviction became more entrenched following the victory over France in 1870-1 which nearly unraveled as French partisans and volunteers continued to resist after their country’s regular army had been largely destroyed. Germany entered both world wars convinced it had to win quickly, and the spectacular victories in the opening years of WWII suggested that its armed forces could really achieve this. However, the Germans are hardly unique in desiring a quick victory, while their conduct of both world wars demonstrates the difficulties of doing this. The two post-war Germanies were subsumed within the rival Cold War alliances and had to adopt the doctrines of their American and Soviet sponsors. Reunited Germany’s membership of NATO and the EU continues to constrain any distinct way of war, and Germany’s recent experience in Afghanistan revealed that its forces lack a war-fighting doctrine as opposed to a peacekeeping one.

 Most readers when they think of German military history likely bring up the German forces of WWII. How do you position WWII in the longer history of the German military? 

The Second World War was a titanic struggle, involving unprecedented levels of mobilization and destruction. Around 20 million Germans and Austrians served in the Wehrmacht or other militarized organizations, while by 1945, 60 percent of Germany’s urban space had been destroyed. This cataclysmic event features prominently in the chapters dealing with the twentieth century, but it is also important to place it within the longer story and not to write the rest of German military history as somehow leading inevitably towards Hitler and the Holocaust.

What does this history tell us about the relationship between the German military and the German state today?

The Second World War continues to cast a long shadow over Germany and shapes how its military history is interpreted, as well as how the country views the use of armed force today. The general assumption has been that Germany rejected its military past and became a “civilian power,” relying on diplomacy and economic leverage to exert international influence. Just as the earlier period was not wholly militaristic, military preparations continued to shape the post-war era into the 1990s. Germany’s economic power means that even spending only a small proportion of national wealth on defense is still a lot of money and can buy a lot of fancy kit. What Germany can do with such weaponry remains to be seen.

Order your copy of Iron and Blood »

Inside the Perfumed World of Bohemian Paris with Theresa Levitt

In her new book Elixir: A Parisian Perfume House and the Quest for the Secret of Life, Theresa Levitt tells the story of two scientific outcasts whose work rewrote the boundary between life and nonlife—and in so doing, takes us on a sensory journey through nineteenth-century Paris. Here, we asked Levitt a few questions about some of the unexpected things she discovered while writing this fascinating history.

 What first brought you to writing a book about the history and chemistry of perfume?

I had been interested for a while in the question of whether there is anything “special” about life. People often think that once you get the development of modern chemistry, everyone accepts that living and non-living things are made up of the same matter, and there is no difference between them. But I was seeing plenty of people in the nineteenth century who remained convinced there was a fundamental distinction (and who ultimately turned out to be right!). Two of my favorites were a grouchy, reclusive physicist named Jean-Baptiste Biot and a down-trodden, oft-ignored chemist named Auguste Laurent. One day, I noticed that both of them mentioned working with a certain perfumer, Edouard Laugier. I decided to try pulling on that thread to see who he was, and it revealed a whole world where aroma and essential oils were at the center of one of the liveliest scientific debates of the time.

I think when people hear the word “perfume,” they sometimes think of an esoteric, even frivolous, luxury product. But it was really part of one of humankind’s oldest endeavors: to capture and preserve the ephemeral qualities of plants. And its pursuit helped revise our understanding of life itself.

Could you describe what it was like to work in a Parisian distillery in the 18th/19th century?

Distilling was one of the most skilled and delicate operations of the time. For centuries, it had been part of the alchemists’ practice, with recipes written in secret code involving sometimes over a hundred ingredients. By the eighteenth century, it was taught in the apothecaries’ guild. Distillers and perfumers emerged as more specialized offshoots of the apothecaries, but their practices were largely the same. They would have a variety of different stills and alembics in the back room, suited to different purposes. In some they might try to capture the volatile essential oils of a plant directly. In others, they might pass brandy through again and again, adding different botanicals each time, or pausing for stages of maceration or infusion. Everything had to be exactly right—the timing, the sequence, the materials—for the product to turn out.

The distinction between natural and synthetic chemicals continues to be a scientific mystery. How can that be?

It does seem wild that there are big, fundamental questions that science is still trying to figure out. But this is one of them. Organic molecules can come in both right-handed and left-handed varieties, and when chemists make them in a lab, both kinds appear in equal numbers. Chemically speaking, they are identical to one another. But right-handed molecules can’t interact the same way with left-handed molecules. Since our bodies are made up of these asymmetric molecules, this has a huge impact on how food is digested, medicines affect the body, and even how things smell. It was quite a detective story to figure this out, especially coming at a time when chemists thought it was naïve to talk about atoms as physical objects that had a particular spatial arrangement.

This book is not just about perfume—it also tackles revolution, the vibrant culture of bohemian Paris, shifting trends in health and hygiene, scientific breakthroughs, and more. How did all these aspects of your research and writing come together?

The bigger story here is the invention of the modern world. It’s an intensely exciting time period, seeing the end of a social structure that had been in place for centuries and the foundations of an entirely new one. Science and technology were at the center of all this change, kicked off by the magic trick of being able to turn fossil fuels into usable energy. There was hope that this technological bounty could bring about a new era of liberty and equality, and that things that had been hoarded by the elites would be available to everyone. In particular demand were the resources for health and hygiene, which included perfume in this period. And perfume does have a front-seat to all these changes. It’s among the first products to be artificially synthesized from petroleum products—another exploitation of fossil fuels that profoundly shaped the modern world.

Elixir features a wide cast of characters, including Marie Antoinette, Napoleon, and Louis Pasteur. What surprising things did you uncover about some of these figures?

Well, they all relied on the restorative powers of perfume! There are letters from Pasteur’s father telling him to put drops of cologne in his hair to keep from getting headaches while he studied. And Napoleon went through nearly a bottle a day, crediting it with giving him superhuman energy. He would empty a bottle of cologne in the bath, and then spend hours there, reading letters and conducting business. Marie Antoinette, meanwhile, was so concerned with being surrounded by fine scents, that she used perfume not only on herself, but also on the sheep and cows she kept at her Petit Trianon retreat.

When we think about the Palace of Versailles and its opulence, we usually aren’t thinking about how it smelled as part of that. What was the role of perfume in the royal residence?

The scents of Versailles were as central to its function as its mirrors and gold paneling. Nearly everything in the palace was perfumed—the people, the wigs, the fabrics, the air itself—and every interaction was informed by the competing aromas. Much of this had to do with status, of course. Members of court could spend a good portion of their budget on signature perfumes. But I’m convinced there was a deeper impulse as well. I was shocked by just how much effort went into supplying the court with perfume. There was an entire industry devoted to growing fragrant plants in the south of France, concentrating them into small vials, and sending them to Versailles. This was motivated not just by vanity, but by an impulse to life itself. Medical theories of the time held that bad smells brought disease and promoted decay, while good ones were associated with growth and vitality. For the residents of Versailles, these little bottles thus held their best bet for preserving their life and youth.

Order your copy of Elixir »

The War in Ukraine: Updated Reading List

It is inconceivable to think that a year has passed since Russia first launched its devastating invasion of Ukraine. The following books shed light on the ongoing conflict and provide a better understanding of Ukrainian history as well as the complicated, intertwined pasts of both countries as the war continues. Recent titles published by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute also highlight the voices of Ukrainian writers through timely and harrowing narratives.

  The Torture Camp on Paradise Street
Stanislav Aseyev

Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev details his experience as a prisoner for nearly three years at a modern-day concentration camp overseen by the Federal Security Bureau of the Russian Federation in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk. This compelling memoir offers critical insight into the operations of Russian forces in the occupied territories of Ukraine.

 The Moscow Factor: U.S. Policy toward Sovereign Ukraine and the Kremlin
Eugene M. Fishel

Eugene Fishel asks whether, how, and under what circumstances the United States has considered Ukraine’s sovereignty in its relations with Moscow. The Moscow Factor brings together for the first time documentary evidence and declassified materials, retrospective articles by former policymakers, and memoirs by erstwhile senior officials.

 The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad
Volodymyr Rafeyenko

In The Length of Days, featuring a wild cast of characters, Volodymyr Rafeyenko combines poetry and wicked humor with elements of magical realism. The novel is set in 2014, mostly in the composite Donbas city of Z—an uncanny foretelling of what this letter has come to symbolize since February 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

 

In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas
Stanislav Aseyev

In this collection of dispatches, Aseyev attempts to understand the reasons behind the success of Russian propaganda among the residents of the industrial region of Donbas. For the first time, an inside account shows the toll on real human lives and civic freedoms that citizens continue to suffer in Russia’s hybrid war on its territory.

 

Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love
Volodymyr Rafeyenko

Mondegreen tells the story of a refugee from Ukraine’s Donbas region who has escaped to Kyiv at the onset of the Ukrainian-Russian war. Written in beautiful, experimental style, the novel shows how people—and cities—are capable of radical transformation and how this, in turn, affects their interpersonal relations and cultural identification.

 

The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv
William Jay Risch

Months before crowds in Moscow dismantled monuments to Lenin, residents of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv toppled theirs. William Jay Risch argues that Soviet politics of empire created this anti-Soviet city, and that opposition from the periphery as much as from the imperial center was instrumental in unraveling the Soviet Union.

 

Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament: A History
Yuri Kostenko

Based on original and previously unavailable documents, Yuri Kostenko’s account of the negotiations surrounding the Budapest Memorandum agreement between Ukraine, Russia, and the US reveals for the first time the internal debates of the Ukrainian government, as well as the pressure exerted upon it by its international partners.

 

Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule
Karel C. Berkhoff

Karel C. Berkhoff describes how a blend of German nationalism, anti-Semitism, and racist notions about the Slavs produced a reign of terror and genocide in the Third Reich’s largest colony. He also shows how a pervasive Soviet mentality worked against solidarity, explaining why the vast majority of the population did not resist the Germans.

 

Russia: The Story of War
Gregory Carleton

Outsiders view Russia as an aggressor, but Russians see themselves as surrounded by enemies, defensively fighting off invader after invader, or called upon by history to be the savior of Europe, or Christianity, or civilization itself, often at immense cost. As Gregory Carleton shows, war is the unifying thread of Russia’s national epic.

 The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present
Serhii Plokhy

The Frontline collects essays in a companion volume to Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe and Chernobyl. The essays present further analysis of key events in Ukrainian history, including Ukraine’s relations with Russia and the West, the Holodomor and World War II, the impact of Chernobyl, and Ukraine’s contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The War in Ukraine

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has people wondering how we got to this point. For those looking for a better understanding of the complicated, intertwined pasts of these two countries, and to learn more about Ukrainian history, these books provide answers and shed light on the current conflict. The first two titles are being published next month by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and could not be more timely.

In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas
Stanislav Aseyev

In this collection of dispatches, Stanislav Aseyev attempts to understand the reasons behind the success of Russian propaganda among the residents of the industrial region of Donbas. For the first time, an inside account shows the toll on real human lives and civic freedoms that citizens continue to suffer in Russia’s hybrid war on its territory.

Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love
Volodymyr Rafeyenko

Mondegreen tells the story of a refugee from Ukraine’s Donbas region who has escaped to Kyiv at the onset of the Ukrainian-Russian war. Written in beautiful, experimental style, the novel shows how people—and cities—are capable of radical transformation and how this, in turn, affects their interpersonal relations and cultural identification.

The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present
Serhii Plokhy

The Frontline collects essays in a companion volume to Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe and Chernobyl. The essays present further analysis of key events in Ukrainian history, including Ukraine’s relations with Russia and the West, the Holodomor and World War II, the impact of Chernobyl, and Ukraine’s contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament: A History
Yuri Kostenko

Based on original and previously unavailable documents, Yuri Kostenko’s account of the negotiations surrounding the Budapest Memorandum agreement between Ukraine, Russia, and the US reveals for the first time the internal debates of the Ukrainian government, as well as the pressure exerted upon it by its international partners.

Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule
Karel C. Berkhoff

Berkhoff describes how a blend of German nationalism, anti-Semitism, and racist notions about the Slavs produced a reign of terror and genocide in the Third Reich’s largest colony. He also shows how a pervasive Soviet mentality worked against solidarity, explaining why the vast majority of the population did not resist the Germans.

Russia: The Story of War
Gregory Carleton

Outsiders view Russia as an aggressor, but Russians see themselves as surrounded by enemies, defensively fighting off invader after invader, or called upon by history to be the savior of Europe, or Christianity, or civilization itself, often at immense cost. As Gregory Carleton shows, war is the unifying thread of Russia’s national epic.

The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv
William Jay Risch

Months before crowds in Moscow dismantled monuments to Lenin, residents of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv toppled theirs. Risch argues that Soviet politics of empire created this anti-Soviet city, and that opposition from the periphery as much as from the imperial center was instrumental in unraveling the Soviet Union.

The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

Our third excerpt to celebrate Black History Month comes from Vincent Brown’s award-winning Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, which Cornel West calls “brilliant” and “groundbreaking.” This gripping account of the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, an uprising that laid bare the interconnectedness of Europe, Africa, and America, shook the foundations of empire, and reshaped ideas of race and popular belonging.

Only the plotters truly knew if their plans had called for a general uprising from the beginning. The colonists were guessing based on evidence garnered from torture, and historians have little more to go on than their speculations. Were the events in St. Mary’s, Kingston, St. Thomas in the East, and Westmoreland part of a general insurrection?

Something important is at stake in the answer to this question. Historians sometimes view slave-conspiracy trials as evidence of panic, projections by slaveholders upon hapless victims. Another perspective casts the slaves’ actions as mostly reactive responses to immediate circumstances and opportunities, rather than as the outcome of careful organizing. By contrast, the first named historian to interpret Tacky’s revolt, Edward Long, agreed with his fellow colonists that the rebellion had been carefully planned:

“These circumstances show the great extent of the conspiracy, the strict correspondence which had been carried on by the Coromantins in every quarter of the island, and their almost incredible secrecy in the forming of their plan of insurrection; for it appeared in evidence, that the first eruption in St. Mary’s, was a matter pre-concerted, and known to all the chief men in the different districts; and the secret was probably confided to some hundreds, for several months before the blow was struck.”

For Long, Tacky was the “chief man” at the head of the conspiracy. But Long’s account is an unreliable guide. Most importantly, he offers an erroneous chronology of events. Wanting to show an island-wide conspiracy, he depicted the events in St. Mary’s Parish as simultaneous with later events in Westmoreland, extending the timeline for the St. Mary’s uprising and making it appear to last well beyond the Westmoreland insurrection. At least one detail of the account makes this misrepresentation seem willful. Long states that it was Admiral Charles Holmes who dispatched the naval vessels to the north side of the island, despite the fact that Holmes did not arrive at Jamaica until May 13, weeks after Tacky was killed and the rebels had dispersed. Long surely knew this, but distorting the sequence of events in this way had the effect of making the whole affair seem that it was indeed Tacky’s revolt.

This theory gave the insurrection an identifiable scapegoat, whom Long could blame and belittle all at once. Acknowledging Tacky as a “young man of good stature, and well made,” he called him “handsome, but rather of an effeminate than manly cast.” Mocking and demonizing black sexuality was an important part of establishing racial hierarchy, and Long hastened to add that Tacky “had flattered himself with the hope of obtaining (among other fruits of victory) the lieutenant governor’s lady for his concubine”—that lady being Edward Long’s eldest sister. In Long’s estimation, Tacky’s elevation stemmed not from his leadership abilities or military experience but from his supposed resemblance to “some favourite leader of their nation in Africa.” Most likely, Tacky had himself been a leader in Africa, but for Long this was merely a sign of Coromantees’ credulity. He compared Tacky’s followers to some Africans who had once encountered the bronze statue of a gladiator erected on a local plantation, which “the Coromantins no sooner beheld, than they were almost ready to fall down, and adore it.” With Tacky at the head of uprising, Long had devised an intelligible narrative of the violence that conveniently discounted the strategic implications he most feared. According to him, the uprising resulted from a concerted effort, but it was doomed by Africans’ intrinsic faults. Yet, as he knew, from the attack on Fort Haldane to Tacky’s death in the rocky valley upriver from Downes’s Cove, “Tacky’s Revolt” lasted only a week.

What explains Long’s desire to subsume the entire rebellion within a chronology that elevates the primacy of the events in St. Mary’s? Other sources, too, conspired to highlight the importance of the earliest clashes. The April 14 “Letter from a Gentleman at St. Mary’s” was the first and only coherently plotted account; the ones that followed display the irregularity and confusion of the colonists’ predicament. Dread governed their experience. By May, they were growing wild with fright as they ginned up the docket of African savagery. It is difficult to tell which stories came from captured rebels and which sprang from slaveholders’ imaginations, especially when the specter of cannibalism appeared in print. Colonists read that the rebels at Ballard’s Valley “cut off the Overseer’s Head, put his Blood in a Calabash, mixed gunpowder with it, and [ate] their Plantains dipp’d in it, as they did by every white Man they killed: In short, their savage Barbarity can scarcely be paralleled.” If there had indeed been a blood sacrifice at Ballard’s Valley, this report made it seem as if the rebels were taking some holy communion, with bananas instead of bread. The story made the sacrament all the more heinous by comparing the Coromantees to Catholics—Protestant Britain’s foremost global adversaries—and contributed to the sense that the colony was besieged from within and without by enemies at once familiar and strange. With each successive discovery of new unrest, the slaveholders grew more fearful and bewildered. Suddenly the uprising seemed to be happening everywhere at once. The shocking reminder that power did not guarantee security drove colonists wild with fear.

Over the next several weeks, lasting into July, they discovered several more conspiracies. In the commercial capital, colonial officials deepened their investigation into the circumstances surrounding the war-token mahogany sword. They learned that Kingston’s Coromantees had rallied around a woman named Cubah, whom they elevated “to the rank of royalty” and dubbed the “Queen of Kingston.” Like other Africans, she claimed territory for herself and her followers in the knowledge that the boundaries of her dominion were drawn more by peoples’ loyalties than by land surveyors. At meetings “she had sat in state under a canopy, with a sort of robe on her shoulders, and a crown upon her head,” adopting the “paraphernalia of power” she might have known on the Gold Coast. Upon this intelligence, the government seized Cubah and ordered her to be transported from the island. In the Vale of Louidas in St. John’s Parish, Coromantees belonging to the speaker of the House of Assembly, Charles Price, “had agreed to rise, ravage the estates, and murder the white men there.” Three people familiar with the plan betrayed the rebels, and the “ringleaders were taken up, and upon conviction, executed; others, who turned evidence, were transported off the island thus the whole of this bloody scheme was providentially frustrated.” More plots were afoot in the parishes of St. Dorothy’s, Hanover, and Clarendon, where Edward Long owned his estate. Throughout this time Henry Moore kept martial law in effect, and the military remained on the march all over the island.

Fear transported the slaveholders into a delirious fever dream from which they would not soon recover. Possibly the experience of frightened alarm during the uprising sent some of them into a fugue state, in which linear temporality had lost some of its purchase. They had lost the plot. The narrative they pieced together at the start of the rebellion represented the most linear description they could manage, until Long sat down a decade later in London to reconstruct the sequence. Partly for this reason, and partly because of events that occurred later in the 1760s, the St. Mary’s revolt established an enduring narrative pattern, providing an intelligible origin and knowable characters, with the colonists’ actions bending a discernible story arc from beginning to end.

The slaveholders were paranoid, and their slaves really were out to get them. Sometimes, these two facts could exist independently; the events of 1760 knotted them together. The causes of the insurrection were probably more broadly distributed and far more contingent than Long and the other slaveholders knew. Even so, whether or not these revolts were the result of a single grand design, they were not disconnected from each other nor merely opportunistic. The rebels coalesced around affiliations of language, regional identification, and military verve. If each uprising had its own inspiration, each also took careful account of local conditions, potential connections, and broader opportunities. In St. Mary’s, the path of the insurgency strongly suggests a defined objective: control or destruction of the commercial zone along the rivers. Yet if what happened in St. Mary’s parish could be called Tacky’s Revolt, it was only one conflict within a larger war, an unfolding uprising itself encompassed by wars within wars.

In the cascading series of events initiated by the rebels in St. Mary’s, we see how African militancy derived from the entanglements of empire, trade, and war across the Atlantic. Tacky’s Revolt was smaller and less significant than Long and subsequent historians have supposed only because the slave war it advanced was larger and more consequential. “A more dangerous or troublesome Affair I was never engaged in, in all my life,” wrote Zachary Bayly about the St. Mary’s insurrection. And still the Coromantee War was closer to its beginning than its end.

Finding Solidarity in Others’ Struggles

As we celebrate Passover, after a year marked by protests for racial equality and social justice, Amelia M. Glaser, author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine, reminds us of the Yiddish poets during the interwar years who drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalized peoples and embraced a global community of the oppressed.

Last Spring, George Floyd gasped, “I can’t breathe,” seconds before his murder under the knee of a police officer. His plea became a metaphor for the violence of racism in America, and the months of reckoning that have followed have revealed a painful rift in America over the country’s commitment to equality. This year, many Americans have asked how it’s possible to express solidarity with, and fight for, the human rights of all groups, including those that may not be our own. In a year marked both by a deepening divide over social justice and the fear and loss due to the global pandemic, the celebration of Passover, a holiday commemorating exodus from slavery, offers an opportunity to think about how one group’s experience of injustice can help to understand another group’s pain.

I expect that this year, perhaps more than usual, many will be asking at their seder tables how Jews can translate the collective experience of trauma to speak out against racist violence in the United States. This was a burning question for the Yiddish poets who are the subject of my book, Songs in Dark Times, who found themselves between a privileged majority and threatened minority. In 1931, for example, Malka Lee, an immigrant from Galicia to New York, wrote about a Black man on a subway who described a lynching in the American south.

Now I hear his young cry on the wind

“My brother’s body’s swinging from a pine.”

He raises his fist and waves it, wild,

He sees the murderer’s portrait in every white...

The Yiddish poets I write about were not religious Jews. Nevertheless, the poetry they wrote in the interwar period is a wellspring of thought on the struggle among Jews to fight for other groups’ freedom. My book is the story of Yiddish leftist internationalist poets who, in the 1920s and ’30s, described the struggles of non-Jewish groups, including Chinese workers, Black Americans, Spanish republicans, Palestinian Arabs, and Ukrainian peasants. These writers attempted to translate the pain of others by using passwords from Jewish religious texts and collective memory. They were, in essence, changing what “we” meant—altering it from “we Jews” to “we workers of the world.” These poets were rejecting the very idea of a religious or ethnic community of Jews. But they were also drawing from a rich tradition of Jewish text and practice to make sense of a polarized world.

The Yiddish internationalist poets were drawing from a history of Jewish struggle to convince their readers to empathize with others’ struggles. For example, in keeping with the Jewish tradition of the yahrzeit (commemoration of the anniversary of a death), H. Leivick marked the occasion of a year after the execution of the Italian-born anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in his poem “A Sacco-Vanzetti Year.” Leivick identifies the perpetrator of the crime against the two anarchists as “The same evil from accuser to accuser.” In the Yiddish original, Leivik’s “accuser” is a “kateyger,” the talmudic term for prosecutor which had come to mean, in Yiddish, “prosecuting angel.” Leivick, with this Jewish password, links the injustice against the Italian anarchists to the many historical injustices against Jews.

Esther Shumiatsher, who wrote poignantly in the late 1920s about the human suffering she observed on her world travels with her spouse, the playwright Peretz Hirschbein, wrote:

The whole world has become my comrade,—

From the Yangtze’s valleys

And the thirst of India’s hot plains.

The Soviet poet Khane Levin, who is best known for her verse about motherhood and the Revolution, weaves Biblical motifs into her poems about building a new Soviet society. In her 1928 “Crimean motifs,” Levin describes a young Jewish man named “Anaki,” a name conjuring the Biblical giants known as Anakim. Anaki, a strapping youth, must overcome the influence of his two fathers—one a Jewish peddler who “sang on the wagon” and the other the tsar who “didn’t learn to work.”

Even among these Yiddish-speaking secularists, Jewish prayer did not entirely disappear. The poet Aaron Kurtz left his Hassidic family as a teenager to join the circus and later made his way to the US where he joined the Communist Party. And yet Kurtz, writing about the Spanish Civil War in 1938, describes a Jewish volunteer for the International Brigades reciting the Kol Nidre prayer on the eve of Yom Kippur together with his comrades in arms, Pedro of Madrid and Johannes of Hamburg.

With World War II, Jewish internationalism changed. Yiddish poets in the Soviet Union, the United States, and elsewhere turned inward, mourning the genocide that had taken place in Europe. The internationalist excitement of the interwar period had faded. Those Yiddish poets who had fought the rise in fascism by binding themselves to the Soviet cause were now forced to confront Stalin’s atrocities. The radical internationalism that had become de rigueur in the 1920s and ’30s gave way to new forms of Yiddish poetry as the Jewish world mourned the horrific murder of the majority of the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust. Many of the poets who had once focused on the struggles of others now turned, in their writing, to face this indescribable loss.

And yet some writers still found ways of simultaneously mourning Jewish loss and the losses of other minorities. Two decades after World War II, following the murder of four young Black girls in a church in the Civil Rights era, Aaron Kurtz turned to the traditional Mourner’s Kaddish as a way of honoring the victims of American race violence:

I am not a Kaddish-sayer. But today mamas

The world over bitterly

Wept and mourned the four little black girls—

I responded to the rabbi’s Kaddish:

Omeyn!

Today, a year into a global pandemic, we celebrate Passover, at a time of personal and communal struggles for freedom and justice. Some may find hope in the utopian Yiddish writers who believed that a fairer world was at hand.

The Story behind Dante’s Bones

Last year, Italy decreed March 25 as National Dante Day. This year marks the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. To honor these occasions, Guy Raffa explains how he came to write Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy, on what some might consider to be a morbid topic.

Dante’s Bones is the most personal book I have written. In it, I tell the story of the poet's adventurous physical afterlife—how his bones have been stolen, hidden, contested, discovered, examined, and, above all, venerated—and I unravel the meaning of these events at pivotal moments in Italian history from the late Middle Ages to the present. The book’s exploration of Dante’s graveyard history reflects an obsession I have had with cemeteries and tombs—how we mourn and honor the dead—literally for as long as I can remember. I trace this fascination to my earliest memory: watching President John F. Kennedy's funeral procession with my parents on our black and white television set in 1963, when I was three years old.

Now, just past my sixty-first birthday, my memory of the slain president’s funeral feels more like the memory of a memory. I've seen those iconic images many times since that first, live experience, but one moment brings an aching pang of recognition whenever I see it on a screen or in my mind: John F. Kennedy Jr., on his third birthday, saluting his father’s flag-draped casket after it has been carried outside St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, DC, and begins its slow journey to Arlington National Cemetery. Forever fixed in my memory is one three-year-old boy watching another three-year-old boy say goodbye to his father.

Forty years later, in 2003, my own father died. Dante was on my mind as I addressed family and friends at his burial in Long Island National Cemetery (Pinelawn), not far from Smithtown Pines, the town where I lived as a child. The pine trees of my young life and my father’s final resting place (my brother is also buried there) joined in my imagination with the famous pine forest—the pineta—outside Ravenna, where Dante died and was buried in 1321. The poet modeled the Terrestrial Paradise atop the Mountain of Purgatory, the most human-centered afterworld of the Divine Comedy, on this pine forest. My attachment to Dante’s Purgatory, the poetic site of loving care between purifying souls and living human beings, has grown stronger as I’ve grown older. Dante’s imagining of communion between the living and the dead is a big part of why I love reading, teaching, and writing about his Divine Comedy. This posthumous communion is also central to the adventurous afterlife of the poet’s mortal remains that my book recounts.

Personal and professional interests in Dante’s bones coincided when I learned that traces of the poet’s physical afterlife—a small packet of “Dante dust” and impressions taken of his skull—had been discovered in the National Central Library of Florence. On July 16, 1999, three days before the discovery, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and her sister, Lauren Bassette, died when the plane he was piloting crashed into the ocean en route to Martha’s Vineyard. I had always felt an odd sense of connection to this famous Kennedy son, whom I only knew through media coverage. Similar to how he was known as “John-John” to his family, my parents had affectionately called me “Guy-Guy” to distinguish me from my father, whose birth name (Gaetano) had been Americanized as “Guy,” my given name. Reclassification of efforts to find the crash victims from “search and rescue” to “search and recovery” appeared in newspapers on July 19, 1999, the same day as the discovery of the missing Dante relics. The sad news of JFK Jr.’s death inevitably reawakened my memory of him saluting his father’s casket, while news of the “Dante dust” and cranial impressions piqued my curiosity about the fate of the poet’s physical remains. The seeds of Dante’s Bones had been planted.

Much of what I subsequently learned about Dante’s physical afterlife came to light during the 600th anniversaries of his birth (1865) and death (1921). #Dante2021 and #Dante700 are popular Twitter hashtags recognizing that 2021 is another huge year for Dante Alighieri: the 700th anniversary of the Italian poet’s death in Ravenna, where he is buried. He is thought to have died during the night of September 13-14, 1321. The year-long commemorations began in Italy on September 5, 2020, when Sergio Mattarella, the president of the Italian Republic, and Michele de Pascale, the mayor of Ravenna, presided over the opening of the refurbished chapel or tempietto (“little temple”) holding Dante’s tomb.

Celebrations of the poet’s life, works, and legacy have continued throughout the year not only in Italy but around the world, including a dynamic series of Dante-themed events in the United States—though the reality of life under COVID-19, with conferences, talks, and exhibits held remotely, has essentially erased borders and collapsed distances for the real-time dissemination of knowledge. While all-things-Dante are on the table for this milestone anniversary of his death, the occasion sparks special interest in the poet’s graveyard history, the subject of Dante’s Bones.

During World War II, the casket containing the poet’s remains was removed from the marble tomb and hidden underground to protect his bones from bombing and looting. But the last time the bones were actually taken out of the casket and examined was soon after the commemorations in 1921. It was reported last summer that plans are underway to reexamine Dante’s bones with modern scientific methods before the 700th anniversary of his death in September 2021. As you might imagine, I can’t wait to see what new light is shed on this subject that, for me, is more than just academic.

On the Bicentennial of the Greek Revolution

Greek Independence Day is celebrated on March 25th, observing the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821, which ultimately led to independence for Greece from the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Since independence, particular attention has been paid by the Greek people to the 50th, 100th, and 150th anniversaries of this revolutionary war. With the 200th anniversary approaching, it seems like an apt time to learn more about the legacy of each significant anniversary, and how the celebrations have come to represent different ways of celebrating Greek statehood. Below is an excerpt adapted from the chapter “Anniversaries” by Gonda Van Steen in The Greek Revolution: A Critical Dictionary edited by Paschalis M. Kitromilides and Constantinos Tsoukalas (being published on March 25).

In anticipation of the bicentennial of Greece’s independence, it may prove helpful to study the earlier celebrations, their main themes and agendas, the “imaginary nation” to which they appealed, and some of the images and reports they left behind. We expect to find the years 1871, 1921, and 1971 as the key anniversary dates, but we are immediately struck by an important exception: the grand celebrations of the centenary of 1921 were “postponed” due to political and military circumstances. Besides, the Greeks looked forward with great anticipation to a more wide-ranging series of events that was scheduled for 1930, the centenary of the year in which the Greek state was formed. Thus, past and present, and even the unknown but projected future, affected the making of the anniversaries of Greece as a product of a revolution and as a nation. Also, the various anniversaries offer up a potent reminder that, on each occasion, the nation’s process of becoming was yet to be completed. The year 1871 preceded the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) and the ensuing territorial gains by a few (turbulent) decades. The crisis of 1921–1922 signaled a reduction in the Greek territorial expanse and an even greater blow to Greek political and cultural self-confidence. The year 1971, which fell about halfway through the dictatorship period of 1967–1974, was used by the military regime to affirm “revolution” and “independence,” but by the anti-dictatorship opposition to question the extent to which the long-suffering state had been genuinely sovereign and democratic.

The productive but also troubled realm of Greek historical celebrations and of mass pageants has, for decades now, been central to the formation of Greek identity. For the greater purpose of instilling national sensibilities, the Greek state has put itself on display on the occasion of landmark anniversaries. The performative dimensions of anniversary parades, with their typical sequences of heroic episodes through the canonical ages of Hellenic civilization, had to model proper ideals and modes of conduct for Greece’s young people, especially. Three major events have marked the nation’s celebration history of the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1821. The domestic political culture and ideology of the three major anniversary dates—namely 1871, 1921 / 1930, and 1971—could hardly have been more different. Nonetheless, the execution as well as the objective of these jubilees of the past converged as they resorted to classicizing statues and mass pageantry to mark the Greek state’s public and formal use of history. Surveying these anniversaries has proven to be a fruitful exercise in anticipation of a critical evaluation of the bicentenary of the year 2021.

The Greeks of the three anniversaries of the revolution had not yet reached a consensus about how to present recent Greek history, but many had come to realize that the true interest of the national past lay in how it constituted and conditioned the future. Their monuments and festivals served the national interest and also the goal of political cohesion; they projected the idea of progress along a historical and cultural continuum, and they posited a survival, revival, or even resurrection of a Greek patriotic ethos. The sustained continuity model that linked the past to the present was, undoubtedly, engaged in national mythmaking. Also, this model kept suggesting a paradoxical kind of parthenogenesis of Greek culture, as if Greek culture moved forward in a controlled vacuum, from one military victory to the next, and was only ever driven by male leaders. The last jubilee of 1971, in particular, marked an intense era in Greek politics and culture when truth, authority, Greek history, destiny, and collective identity were the subjects of a public standoff that played out in the old venues. Perhaps for the last time, this jubilee tried to solidify a national master narrative that reasserted the political and socioeconomic status quo. In hindsight, it failed to once more crystallize the national myth. Let us hope that the bicentennial celebrations of 2021 will build on a critical reception of the past jubilees and will prove to be meaningfully different.

Q&A with Sharon Strocchia, author of Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy

As part of Women’s History Month, we spoke with Sharon T. Strocchia about her new book, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, which uncovers the crucial role women played in the great transformations of medical science and health care that accompanied the Italian Renaissance.

Your research demonstrates that women in Renaissance Italy played a major role in providing health care. Why have historians failed to recognize their centrality until so recently?

I would highlight two reasons why Renaissance women healers have been hiding in plain sight for so long. First, the historiography of Italian Renaissance medicine has been dominated by developments in academic medicine—anatomy, dissection, humanistic debates. Although this body of scholarship has been invaluable for understanding transformations in medical thinking, it has been less concerned with the lived experience of illness on the streets or the activities of frontline healers in households and hospitals. As a result, studies of women’s entanglements with household medicine, care practices, and the culture of experimentation on the Italian peninsula have not flourished to the same degree as elsewhere. Second, many of the care practices performed by Renaissance women have either been naturalized as “women’s work” or coded as charitable activities. The first interpretation makes women’s labor and know-how less visible, while the second often empties it of medical meaning. In addition, a persistent focus on practitioners’ official titles and occupational identities, along with the greater value assigned to cure over care, have led scholars to both undercount and undervalue the healthcare services women provided to household and community. In order to capture a more accurate, dynamic picture of medical provisioning in the early modern period, we need to redefine what “counts” as medical work.  

What was one of the most surprising discoveries you made while conducting archival research for this book?

I was amazed by the extent to which sixteenth-century Italian urban women kept abreast of market trends and new technologies for making remedies and wellness products. Religious women living in convents, for instance, kept their finger on the pulse of commercial life, in part because selling medicinal remedies represented such a vital revenue stream for their communities. Thanks to their wide-ranging information networks, they could respond nimbly to shifts in the medical marketplace, such as the globalization of new medicaments and changing consumer preferences. They also stayed connected to the knowledge circulating in local health markets by exchanging treasured recipes with friends and family and by experimenting directly with various health-giving products.

You focus on the various spaces where women practiced medicine—the household, the pox hospital, and the convent. Can you give an example of how nun apothecaries worked “at the nexus of religion, magic, and medicine”? How did they understand their work to be both sacred and scientific?

Take the case of the Tuscan nun Orsola Fontebuoni, who was active in the 1620s. This recognized charismatic seamlessly melded her spiritual gifts with naturalistic healing skills. An accomplished pharmacist, Orsola was conversant with old standbys from medieval Mediterranean pharmacopeia as well as newer additions to the European medicine chest imported from the Americas. She helped expand the convent’s pharmacy business while also attracting powerful patrons, thanks to her visions and ecstasies. Even while she was experimenting with new remedies in her workshop, she trafficked in healing relics, circulating them within local female networks that included members of the Medici court. Among her most intimate clients was the Tuscan grand duchess Maria Maddalena of Austria, to whom she provided magico-religious remedies like amulets, informed medical advice gleaned from long years of experience, and priceless consolation in the form of healing eloquence. For Orsola, these healing activities comprised an integrated whole that simultaneously tapped the powers of the natural and sacred worlds.

Your book moves between the micro and the macro in terms of historical scope, zeroing in on the lives of individual women and health practitioners to analyze the broader systems of their time. Who do you find to be one of the most fascinating figures in the book, and what do you think readers would want to know about her?

One of the most intriguing figures I encountered was the Florentine nun Giovanna Ginori. She came from a renowned local family that had deep investments in civic politics and social welfare initiatives. Giovanna entered the convent around age twelve and took vows four years later in 1517. Many of her female relatives were known for their charitable work, such as founding shelters for at-risk girls. So there was a shared family interest in helping the helpless, which probably accounts for Giovanna’s placement in the convent pharmacy at an early age. She apprenticed there for six years with an older, skilled mentor, from whom she learned her craft—how to identify and process medicinal herbs, how to prepare efficacious remedies, how to experiment with new techniques and materials. In the thirty-seven years that she ran the convent pharmacy, Giovanna also read widely in the medical literature of her day and experimented with new medical remedies in her workshop. Often working around the clock as a back-up nurse in the convent infirmary, she became a renowned pharmacist and healer. At the same time, she had a keen business sense that led her to develop innovative products, expand the pharmacy’s client base, and build its reputation. We still have several signed sales receipts written in her own hand. Gifted with skilled hands and an inquiring mind, Giovanna Ginori is proof positive that women have enjoyed a long history in medicine, science, and technology.   

We tend to focus on how far medicine has come since the 1500s, but what are some of the enduring effects or lessons of Renaissance medicine? How might we turn to the Renaissance to think about developing a culture of care and consolation?

I think there are a couple of things we can learn from these forgotten healers and their world. One is that the task of healing is complex. Renaissance medicine took a holistic view of health that wove together physical, mental, and spiritual or emotional elements. By contrast, modern biomedicine tends to divide the body into many constituent parts and to divorce human health from the broad ecosystems in which it is embedded. Renaissance notions of health and healing remind us that we’re deeply interconnected, both as individuals and as a species. I would also say that, while Renaissance medicine lacked the hallmarks associated with modern biomedicine, it was much richer in community-based resources. The importance of cultivating personal relationships with our healthcare providers as well as the crucial role played by support networks in sustaining health and well-being are lessons we’re learning over and over again.

The History of a Word

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.