Daniel B. Schwartz - Ghetto: The History of a Word

ON MARCH 29, 1516, the Venetian Republic ordered that the Jews of Venice be restricted to a small island on the northern edge of the city. Christian inhabitants of this area were compelled to vacate their homes; all outward-facing doors, windows, and quays on the island were to be bricked over; and gates were to be erected in two places, to be locked at sunset. The new Venetian enclave was hardly the first example in history of the Jewish street or Jewish quarter, which dated to the origins of the Jewish Diaspora in antiquity. Nor was it the first instance in which the Jews of a European town or city were compelled to live in an enclosed area separately from Christians, although segregation of this kind, especially in Italy, certainly grew more common in its wake. Yet the establishment of an enforced and exclusive residential space for the Jews of Venice was a historical beginning in at least one crucial respect. It marked the start of a fateful link between the idea of segregation and a particular word: ghetto.

While there are many theories concerning the etymology of ghetto, the most widely held traces it to the fact that the Venetian island was already known as the Ghetto Nuovo (or New Ghetto) before issuance of the 1516 edict that required Jews to relocate there. Ghetto is generally thought to derive from the Venetian verb gettare, meaning to throw or to cast, which would evoke the copper foundry that had once occupied the area that was to become an all-Jewish district. From these origins, the word ghetto has journeyed a great distance. What started as the name for one specific place where Jews were forced to live became, over the sixteenth century, the principal term for mandatory and exclusive urban Jewish quarters throughout Italy. Later, in the nineteenth century, as Jews throughout the West were emancipated and ghettos in their original form were dismantled, the word ghetto transcended its Italian roots and was fashioned into a general metaphor for traditional and premodern Judaism, even as it also came to designate new Jewish spacesfrom the voluntary immigrant neighborhoods of turn-of-the-century London, New York, and Chicago to the hypersegregated holding pens of Nazi-occupied Europethat were as dissimilar from the pre-emancipation ghettos as they were from each other. Later still, the word ghetto broke free of its Jewish origins entirely, emerging in the course of the last seventy years or so as a term more commonly associated with African Americans than with Jews. A noun with a long history of being used as an adjective (from the ghetto Jew to thats so ghetto); a term that, depending on how it is used and who is using it, can suggest both danger and security, weakness and toughness, social pathology and communal solidarity, a prison and a fortress; a descriptive sociological concept that is hardly value free; and a keyword of both the Jewish and African American imaginariesthe ghetto, historically, has been all of the above. In its very ubiquity and elusiveness, it exemplifies Nietzsches claim in On the Genealogy of Morals that only that which has no history is definable.

Yet the word ghetto does have a history, one of shifting and cascading meanings in both Jewish contexts and beyond. Beginning with an exploration of the prehistory of both the word and the concept, this book chronicles the evolution of the term in early modern Italy through its nineteenth-century transformations, its crossing of the Atlantic, and return to Europe before crossing the Atlantic again with the blackening of the ghetto in postwar America. The historical odyssey of this particular term affords new ways of thinking about how we approach the problem of defining the ghetto and discovering its significance in the Jewish experience.

What is a ghetto? The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1989) provides two definitions:

1. The quarter of a city, chiefly in Italy, to which Jews were restricted.

2. transf. and fig. A quarter in a city, esp. a thickly populated slum area, inhabited by a minority group or groups, usually as a result of economic or social pressures; an area, etc., occupied by an isolated group; an isolated or segregated group, community, or area.

To the dictionarys descriptive definition of how the term is used in practice can be added numerous prescriptive definitions by those making arguments about how the term should be used. The historian Benjamin Ravid, a specialist on the Jews of early modern Venice, claims that the term ghetto should be reserved for areas that are legally compulsory, completely segregated, and enclosed.

All definitions of ghetto tend to draw on some combination of the following attributes: compulsion, homogeneity, spatial segregation, immobility, and socioeconomic deprivation. Yet they do not always incorporate every feature, nor do they agree over how these traits should be ranked in importance or understood. If force is a necessary element, must it be de jure, or can it also include de facto structural and societal impediments to integration? How uniform in its composition does a neighborhood have to be to qualify, and must this sameness be racial or religious, or can it also be based on class or sexual orientation or some other criterion of identity? Is social and economic disadvantage a sine qua non? Can one choose to live in a ghetto?

Definitions are important. It is essential that a site of mandatory segregation like the Venetian or Roman Ghetto be distinguished from the more common social and spatial form of the voluntary Jewish quarter. Historians of the Holocaust must be clear on how the ghetto differed from the labor camp, despite resemblances in some cases. Social scientists who use the ghetto as an analytical concept must be transparent on what, in their view, the term includes and what it excludes. Yet there are certain keywords that are not so easily confined within definitions. In the first of many ironies, ghetto, notwithstanding its linkage with confinement, is one of them. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, the word ghetto, in its more than five hundred years, has accumulated multiple layers of meaning. It contains within it recollections of iconic places, diverse histories and images, and ambivalent associations. As the historian Michael Meng writes, The word ghetto provokes emotions and memories that far outstrip the putatively neutral facts that one may wish to claim the term represents. Efforts to suppress the folk notions of the ghetto in the name of analytical rigor and clarity may be necessary for the construction of certain field- and discipline-appropriate typologies. But the idea that one can provide a satisfying answer to the question, What is a ghetto? by simply deleting the resonances that deviate from what is held to be the correct use of the word is misguided.