DANIEL SCHWARTZ: We sometimes think that we have minimized the scope of disagreement when we boil a debate down to semantics. But I think the reality is, so many of our most pressing cultural arguments manifest as battles over words—over what they mean, how they are used, and who gets to define them. So I became kind of interested in that whole issue of what the ghetto means, and the variety of meanings, and the sheer range of its permutations. This term that was almost code for Jews and Jewishness—how did it migrate to become a term that now is associated with Black segregated areas, or more generally, if controversially, with kind of blackness itself?
I’m Daniel Schwartz. I am an associate professor of history and the director of Judaic Studies at George Washington University. And I’m the author of Ghetto: The History of a Word.
It starts in Venice. This is not necessarily where the concept of a legally mandatory, exclusive Jewish quarter originated. There were, in effect, ghettos before the ghetto, but Venice is where the concept gets its name. We know that the island to which Jews are restricted by the Venetian Senate in 1516 was already known as the ghetto nuovo, or the “new ghetto.” Now the question is how that island got that name, and most believe it’s a result of the fact that probably over a hundred years prior there had been a copper foundry on the site. So perhaps this Venetian verb, also an Italian verb, gettare, which would mean “to throw” or “to cast.” It was only by osmosis, the kind of association of this island, Il ghetto, with this nascent idea of a legally compulsory, segregated, enclosed Jewish neighborhood, that allowed then this term to become a name for that phenomenon.
The idea of the ghetto as not just a physical fact but a state of mind is something that really begins in the nineteenth century, and it happens as different writers outside of Italy begin to appropriate this term to describe these kind of traditional Jewish areas that are densely Jewish and deeply religious as ghettos, even if these areas weren’t necessarily legally segregated. But the very fact that they were seen as isolated, that they were seen as living this kind of old world Jewish life, led them to be named ghettos. So you see the term ghetto now taking on much more of an association with tradition as opposed to maternity.
Chapter three traces how the term came to be applied to these Jewish immigrant enclaves that were emerging in Western European, and ultimately American, cities as a result of the mass emigration of Jews out of Eastern Europe. And what was significant is that these were areas that were legally voluntary. Nobody, you know, arrived at Ellis Island and was told, You must go live in the Lower East Side. There may have been various social, linguistic, economic pressures that caused people to cluster, but it was not legally mandated. So the use of this term now to describe what is really in many ways just a Jewish neighborhood as opposed to a compulsory Jewish neighborhood, that is a kind of key semantic shift here.
Chapter four looks at the revival of the ghetto as an obligatory institution under the Nazis. What’s interesting here is that, you know, on the one hand there’s this idea you’re creating the ghetto, you’re returning Jews, in a sense, to the Middle Ages. That is in some ways perhaps the perception. But in reality these ghettos were far worse than anything the early modern founders of the ghetto had envisioned. They were designed to marginalize, exploit, starve, control, and ultimately kill Jews.
And then chapter five traces what I think is the last significant migration of the term—the transfer the term from Jews to African Americans—and the way in which it really kind of moves into overdrive in the postwar era, in particular in the 60s during the urban race riots and in the 70s as well. But it also looks at kind of Jewish responses, and African American responses, and some of the controversy just over this transfer of the term: looking at often how Jews resisted it, although sometimes how they endorsed it and even contributed to it; and it also looks at, you know, the mixed reaction on the part of African Americans. So again, pointing to the fact that, you know, the history of the ghetto is also part of a history of controversy over the very term itself.
I think it’s important to underscore that the early modern ghetto—the ghetto of Venice, for example—it was not a prison in our kind of typical perception of incarceration today. It was a place in which Jews were required to live. They were also required to be back there by curfew. So there is some degree of confinement here. But during the day, the ghetto was open. Jews could leave the ghetto so long as they were wearing the special hat that identified themselves as Jews; they could go to the Rialto; they could go visit Gentile acquaintances. Jews were able to travel between ghettos in Italy. And Christians also came into the ghetto. Generally, Jews protested when a city was deliberating the creation of a ghetto. They sought to preempt that mainly because they wanted to avoid being relegated to some outlying slum of the city. They also obviously objected to living in what typically became, quite quickly, overcrowded conditions. But they rarely protested the idea of the ghetto as unjust in the way that, you know, with the spread of enlightenment in the eighteenth century and nineteenth century, they would later come to see the ghetto as anomalous and as anachronistic as unjust. But you really see that in the early modern period. And there are even cases where we see Jews kind of touting the merits of their segregation by helping the community avoid attrition by easing the observance of certain principles of Jewish law.
In the African American case, I mean, it’s interesting. The term mainly has a kind of negative cast to it, and in the book I give examples of African American intellectuals who sought to resist the application of the ghetto label to Black neighborhoods, because they saw it as something that was defamatory, they thought of it as something that was a kind of pathologizing of Black communities and they wanted to defend the neighborhood-like qualities of these areas, to vouch for them as sites of community and solidarity. But within hip hop, the ghetto in many ways figures ambivalently, and for the most part it’s a bleak dangerous site, a place that you’re kind of desperate to get out of. But, you know, there are also rap songs that kind of celebrate the ghetto as kind of home, as something authentic; it’s, you know, real, as opposed to people selling out and kind of leaving the ghetto and becoming integrated into white society.
One of the new kind of ideas that enters into the kind of overall complex of associations with the ghetto, with these immigrant ghettos like Lower East Side or Chicago’s Near West Side, is that these sites are essentially our way stations, where immigrants enter, are able to kind of begin to Americanize, but within an area that feels somewhat familiar. But then ultimately this idea that you’re going to graduate from the ghetto, whether the immigrants themselves, or at least their children will move out of these spaces. So they’re seen as kind of way stations into America, even if the reality is that Jews who moved out of these areas typically moved to areas of second settlement that were themselves densely Jewish.
That’s a major difference from the African American ghetto, which doesn’t prove to be a kind of pitstop and a migration journey in the same way. I mean there were some who thought, and argued that, the Black ghetto should be seen as analogous to the immigrant ghetto, that eventually it too would prove to be a transitional site. But that was increasingly shown to be untrue. The color line, it was something that prevented Blacks from getting out in the same way. And you know, the various state policies—restrictive covenants, which also affected Jews, but not as much as African Americans; redlining, which also affected Jews, but not nearly as much as African Americans, especially in the postwar era—they basically prevented Blacks from taking advantage of the same opportunities for mobility afforded Jews. So, yeah, I mean, I think that is one of these crucial differences in terms of the evolution of the term and the concept.
We should kind of resist imposing a singular definition on the ghetto and try to explore how this word, how this concept, has evolved over time, to kind of allow people to reflect on its usage in the present day with greater historical awareness and discernment.
