Ghetto

The History of a Word

Daniel B. Schwartz

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780674243354
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea

Just as European Jews were being emancipated and ghettos in their original form—compulsory, enclosed spaces designed to segregate—were being dismantled, use of the word ghetto surged in Europe and spread around the globe. Tracing the curious path of this loaded word from its first use in sixteenth-century Venice to the present turns out to be more than an adventure in linguistics. Few words are as ideologically charged as ghetto. Its early uses centered on two cities: Venice, where it referred to the segregation of the Jews in 1516, and Rome, where the ghetto survived until the fall of the Papal States in 1870, long after it had ceased to exist elsewhere. Ghetto: The History of a Word offers a fascinating account of the changing nuances of this slippery term, from its coinage to the present day. It details how the ghetto emerged as an ambivalent metaphor for "premodern" Judaism in the nineteenth century and how it was later revived to refer to everything from densely populated Jewish immigrant enclaves in modern cities to the hypersegregated holding pens of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. We see how this ever-evolving word traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, settled into New York's Lower East Side and Chicago's Near West Side, then came to be more closely associated with African Americans than with Jews.Chronicling this sinuous transatlantic odyssey, Daniel B. Schwartz reveals how the history of ghettos is tied up with the struggle and argument over the meaning of a word. Paradoxically, the term ghetto came to loom larger in discourse about Jews when Jews were no longer required to live in legal ghettos. At a time when the Jewish associations have been largely eclipsed, Ghetto retrieves the history of a disturbingly resilient word.

1

THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE GHETTO

WHAT’S IN A NAME? It is not surprising that a history of the word ghetto would begin with one of the most well-known questions in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. For Juliet, the answer is perfectly obvious: nothing. It should not matter that her sweetheart Romeo is a Montague and she a Capulet, feuding families in the strife-riven city of medieval Verona. “’Tis but thy name that is my enemy,” Juliet assures Romeo. He could cease to be a Montague, he could cease even to be Romeo, and he would remain her beloved. “O! Be some other name: What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”¹

Juliet’s answer is difficult to square not only with the ultimate fate of the star-crossed lovers in Shakespeare’s classic play but also with the controversies that frequently attend the application to someone or something of a highly charged label. True, it is common to hear the accusation “it’s just semantics” directed at a person who seems to invest too much significance in words, yet our most pressing cultural arguments often hinge on whether a particular descriptive term is appropriate or misplaced. Indeed, the phrase “one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter,” however clichéd, suggests the very opposite of Juliet’s answer to her own question. Names matter. The action being described may be the same, but how it is termed can make all the difference.

The genealogy of the ghetto would seem, similarly, to contradict Juliet. For any attempt to write a history of the ghetto will repeatedly bump up against the problem, What is a ghetto? How should the term be used and defined? The meaning of ghetto has been stretched and contracted, appropriated for new groups and contexts, reclaimed by its original “owners,” and accepted and rejected. The answer to the “What’s in a name?” question becomes, with respect to the word ghetto, “quite a lot.”

Through the eve of emancipation in the late eighteenth century, however, the word ghetto had a more limited bandwidth of meaning and usage. Its origins lay in geographic happenstance, the sheer coincidence that Venice decided to create an all-Jewish mandatory quarter on an island, at the northern edge of the city, already known as the Ghetto (or Geto) Nuovo—and even later attempts to imbue this arbitrary term with motivation and purpose did not significantly expand its signifying power and reach. For centuries, there is no evidence of debate over the definition of ghetto. A ghetto was a compulsory Jewish quarter of an Italian town or city. True to its association with spatial confinement and enclosure, the word ghetto itself was more restricted in its semantic range in this early period than it would later become.

---

Venice is often held up as the site of the world’s first ghetto. In the words of Shaul Bassi, a Venetian Jewish scholar and writer and one of the driving forces behind Venice’s year-long series of exhibitions and conferences held to commemorate the ghetto’s five hundredth anniversary in 2016, “the concept of the ghetto was born here in Venice.… And that is why we must never forget the place.”² Few today dispute the derivation of the term ghetto from the Venetian geto, or foundry, or that the word’s association with segregated Jewish space began in the wake of the 1516 edict confining Jews to an island in the northern part of the lagoon city that was already known as the Ghetto Nuovo. The word ghetto was almost certainly born in Venice. The origins of the idea itself—the signified as opposed to signifier—are somewhat murkier. On the one hand, it is fair to say that there was no familiar, ready-to-wear concept of a mandatory and homogeneous Jewish enclosure that was available to the Venetians in 1516 and that they simply outfitted with the name “ghetto.” On the other, the idea of such an enclosure was already a part (albeit a minor one) of Christian Europe’s toolkit for dealing with its “Jewish Question.” In fact, there were European ghettos that preceded the Ghetto of Venice. As the preeminent historian of Jewish Venice, Benjamin Ravid, has written, “to apply the term ‘ghetto’ to a Jewish area prior to 1516 is anachronistic, while to state that the first ghetto was established in Venice in 1516 is something of a misrepresentation. It would be more precise to say that [the] compulsory, segregated and enclosed Jewish quarter received the name ‘ghetto’ as a result of developments in Venice in 1516.”³

The difficulty of pinpointing the beginning of the ghetto is compounded by the elusiveness of the term itself. Where we start will, to some degree, follow from how we define the word ghetto. In the early twentieth century, most historians and sociologists tended toward a capacious definition of the ghetto as, at root, a densely populated Jewish quarter; they generally believed that the seeds of the ghetto lay in the traditional inclination of Jews, for religious and cultural reasons or to achieve safety in numbers, to cluster together by choice. On the basis of this definition, the ghetto could be traced to the distant Jewish past, indeed as far back as the Diaspora itself. The German and later American liberal rabbi Joachim Prinz began his 1937 Life in the Ghetto, a series of five historical portraits of Jewish urban life, with a long chapter on the Jews of ancient Alexandria, the largest, most prosperous, and cosmopolitan Jewish community of the Hellenistic Diaspora. Alexandrian Jews, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands, lived predominantly in two of the city’s five sectors, above all in the fourth or Delta district. Prinz conceded, “It was not an actual ghetto, since many of the well-off lived in the inner parts of the city and in the villa quarters of the rich,” but was more of a “foreign colony,” of the sort found in nearly all port cities. Still, “the strange and unusual customs of the Jews”—their dietary restrictions, their avoidance of the temples of the city with all their statues, their worship of an imageless God—“made such a quarter necessary.”⁴ Louis Wirth, the German-born American Jewish sociologist whose 1928 The Ghetto sought to trace the history of the Jewish ghetto to his own day, opened his account later than Prinz, in the European Middle Ages, yet endorsed a similarly loose usage of the term. In a section significantly titled “The Voluntary Ghetto,” he explained, “The segregation of the Jews into separate local areas in the medieval cities did not originate with any formal edict of church or state. The ghetto was not, as sometimes mistakenly … believed, the arbitrary creation of the authorities, designed to deal with an alien people … but rather the unwitting crystallization of needs and practices rooted in the customs and heritages, religious and secular, of the Jews themselves.”⁵ The acclaimed twentieth-century Jewish historian Salo W. Baron’s classic “Ghetto and Emancipation” essay of that same year took a more sanguine view of the ghetto and the Jewish Middle Ages than did his contemporary Wirth, yet likewise underscored the originally elective nature of the ghetto system. “It must not be forgotten,” Baron wrote, “that the Ghetto grew up voluntarily as a result of Jewish self-government, and it was only in a later development that public law interfered and made it a legal compulsion for all Jews to live in a secluded district in which no Christian was allowed to dwell.” At its inception, “the Ghetto was an institution that the Jews had found it to their interest to create themselves.”⁶

While the institution of the “Jewish quarter” still awaits comprehensive treatment, it does seem to be true that de facto Jewish streets and neighborhoods surfaced in virtually every town or city where Jews settled. Very often their presence in a particular district was represented in the place name. Nearly every European language had a set of native terms, often varying by region and dialect, for the “Jewish street” or “Jewish quarter.” To give only a few examples, there was the Latin Vicus Judeorum, Burgus Judeorum, or Judaica; the French Rue des Juifs, Carrière des Juifs, or Juiverie; the German Judengasse, Judenstrasse, or Judenviertel; the English Jewry; the Spanish Juderìa; and the Italian Giudecca or Zudecca. Since Jews tended to be distinguished from the Christian population not only religiously but also economically, as merchants and moneylenders, their geographic concentration was fully in accord with a premodern social order where it was common for members of the same occupational group (shoemakers, bakers, and the like) to live in the same locality. These Jewish quarters tended to be situated near either the main market square or the seat of political power in the city. They were extensively, but not exclusively Jewish; there were Christians who lived within the Jewish sector and Jews who lived on its outskirts. Moreover, the quarters were occasionally, but not always, set apart and surrounded by gates and walls. While these areas typically contained the main Jewish communal institutions—one or several synagogues and houses of study, a ritual bathhouse, a kosher slaughterhouse—it was not unheard of for a church or even diocese to be located either in those quarters or in the immediate vicinity.⁷ In the case of medieval Cologne, the city hall (Bürgerhaus) actually was in the very heart of the Jewish quarter.⁸ By means of the ritual enclosures (or eruvin) they created to permit transporting objects in public space on the Sabbath, Jews themselves projected onto these areas boundaries drawn from halakhah, or Jewish law, rendering them not only sociologically but also spiritually and symbolically Jewish.

Wirth and Baron were right to argue that a secluded yet basically open and legally voluntary Jewish quarter was the normative form of Jewish settlement in medieval Europe before the mandatory ghetto. They were wrong, however, to imply that the former was a conceptual precursor of the latter and that both were essentially variations on the idea of the ghetto. An accurate picture of the beginnings of the ghetto must distinguish it sharply from the older, more generic concept of the Jewish quarter. For Benjamin Ravid, the term ghetto should be applied solely to Jewish residential areas that—like the Italian Jewish communities beginning in the sixteenth century that were the first to be known as ghettos—were legally mandatory, exclusively Jewish, and physically cordoned off via gates and walls.⁹ A Jewish neighborhood with all three characteristics, even if it was never referred to by the name “ghetto” (e.g., the Frankfurt Judengasse), could be so labeled (albeit anachronistically); conversely, an area that might popularly have been known as a “ghetto” (e.g., the Jewish immigrant enclaves of the early twentieth century), but lacked these characteristics, should not be. The history of the ghetto, according to Ravid, as distinct from the history of the Jewish quarter more broadly, begins with the creation of or at least the call for Jewish communities that were compulsory, segregated, and enclosed.

Even with this stricter definition, a case can be made that the history of the ghetto begins in Second Temple times. In 38 C.E., the Jews of Alexandria were victims of an unprecedented eruption of urban mob violence. The only two sources on these riots, the ancient Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo’s Against Flaccus and Embassy to Gaius, together yield the following account of the role that segregation played in the anti-Jewish violence. After the Roman governor of the city, Flaccus, publicly branded Alexandria’s Jews aliens and foreigners, stripping them of their civil and political rights, the largely Greek populace “drove the Jews entirely out of four quarters, and crammed them all into a very small portion of one.”¹⁰ This “very narrow space” into which “countless myriads of men, and women, and children” were concentrated “like so many herds of sheep and oxen” was presumably the original Jewish section, located on the eastern side of the city.¹¹ According to Philo, the conditions in the quarter were atrocious. Having abandoned their homes and businesses in haste, the Jews suffered impoverishment and even starvation, and the terrible overcrowding (“like a pen”) corrupted the air and made simple breathing difficult. Eventually, Rome intervened to end Flaccus’s reign of terror, and a few years later the rights of the Jews of Alexandria were restored, including, we can assume, their right to live where they chose. Much remains uncertain about this historical episode. Rhetorical exaggeration is part of the DNA of ancient historiography, Philo’s Against Flaccus and Embassy to Gaius being no exception, and it can be difficult to tell where fact ends and embellishment begins. Still, it would appear that what many have called the “first pogrom”¹² also gave rise to the “first known ghetto in the world,”¹³ however short its lifespan proved to be.

But even if we apply the term ghetto to this first-century Alexandrian case, it was clearly not a landmark in the eventual emergence of the ghetto as an institution. The history of the “ghetto before the ghetto” begins later, in medieval Christian Europe, though how much later remains in question. One possibility is to begin with an early written charter from 1084 granting Jews the right to settle in the Rhineland city of Speyer on favorable terms. The local ruler, Bishop Rüdiger Huozmann, asserting that it “would add to the honor of our place by bringing in Jews,” boasted of having “located them [the Jews] outside of the community and habitation of the other citizens” and “surrounded them with a wall,” so that “they might not readily be disturbed by the insolence of the populace.” All this, the bishop claimed, was part of a package of “laws better than the Jewish people has in any city of the German empire.”¹⁴ Some have seen this as the first instance of a ghetto in the sense of a separate and enclosed Jewish residential area outside of which Jews were not permitted to settle.¹⁵ Yet, even were we to assume that Jews were required to live in the walled area provided for in the document and that Christians were prohibited from doing so—and there is no evidence in the text of the charter to support (or disprove) either—it would still be far-fetched to label this enclave a “ghetto,” for the simple reason...