GHETTO

GHETTO. From their earliest days in the Diaspora, Jews chose voluntarily to live close together, reflecting a practice commonly adopted by groups dwelling in foreign lands. Their quarters, often referred to as the Jewish quarter or street, initially were almost never compulsory, and they continued to have contacts on all levels with their Christian neighbors. However, the Catholic church looked askance at such relationships, and in 1179 the Third Lateran Council stipulated that Christians should not dwell together with Jews. This vague policy statement had to be translated into legislation by the secular authorities, and only infrequently in the Middle Ages were laws enacted confining Jews to compulsory, segregated, and enclosed quarters. The few such Jewish quarters then established, such as that of Frankfurt, were never called ghettos, since that term originated in Venice and became associated with the Jews only in the sixteenth century.

THE GHETTO OF VENICE

In 1516, as a compromise between allowing Jews to live anywhere they wished in Venice and expelling them, the Venetian government required them to dwell on the island known as the Ghetto Nuovo (the New Ghetto), which was walled up with only two gates that were locked from sunset to sunrise. Then, when in 1541 visiting Ottoman Jewish merchants complained that they did not have enough room in the ghetto, the government ordered twenty dwellings located across a small canal walled up, joined by a footbridge to the Ghetto Nuovo, and assigned to them. This area was already known as the Ghetto Vecchio (the Old Ghetto), thereby strengthening the association between Jews and the word "ghetto."

Clearly, the word "ghetto" is of Venetian rather than of Jewish origin, as sometimes conjectured. The Ghetto Vecchio had been the original site of the municipal copper foundry, called "ghetto" from the Italian verb gettare, 'to pour or to cast', while the island across from it, on which waste products had been dumped, became known as il terreno del ghetto, 'the terrain of the ghetto', and eventually the Ghetto Nuovo.

Although compulsory, segregated, and enclosed Jewish quarters had existed in a few places prior to 1516, since the term "ghetto" had never been applied to them before 1516, the oft-encountered statement that the first ghetto was established in Venice in 1516 is correct in a technical linguistic sense but very misleading in a wider context, while to apply the term "ghetto" to an area prior to 1516 would be anachronistic. The most precise formulation is that the compulsory segregated and enclosed Jewish quarter received the designation "ghetto" as a result of developments in Venice in 1516.

THE SPREAD OF THE GHETTO

The word "ghetto" did not long remain confined to the city of Venice. In 1555, Pope Paul IV issued his restrictive bull, Cum Nimis Absurdum. Its first paragraph provided that the Jews of the Papal States were to live together on a single street, or should it not suffice, then on as many adjacent ones as necessary, with only one entrance and exit. Accordingly, the Jews of Rome were moved into a new compulsory, segregated, enclosed quarter, which apparently was first called a ghetto seven years later. Influenced by the papal example, local Italian authorities established special compulsory quarters for the Jews in most places in which they were allowed to reside. Following the Venetian nomenclature, these new residential areas were called "ghetto" in the legislation that established them.

In later years, the Venetian origin of the word "ghetto" in connection with the foundry came to be forgotten, as it was used exclusively in its secondary meaning as referring to compulsory, segregated, and enclosed Jewish quarters and then in a looser sense to refer to any area densely populated by Jews, even if they had freedom of residence and lived in the same districts as Christians.

Although the segregated, compulsory, and enclosed ghettos were abolished under the influence of the ideals of the French Revolution and European liberalism (as in Venice, 1797; Frankfurt, 1811; and Rome, where the gates and walls were removed in 1848 although the Jews were basically confined to that area until the city became a part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1870), the word "ghetto" lived on as the general designation for areas densely inhabited by members of minority groups, almost always for socioeconomic reasons rather than for legal ones, as had been the case with the initial Jewish ghetto.

AMBIGUOUS USAGE OF THE WORD "GHETTO"

It must be noted that the varied uses of the word "ghetto" have created a blurring of the Jewish historical experience, especially when employed loosely in phrases such as "the age of the ghetto," "out of the ghetto," and "ghetto mentality." Actually, the word can be used in its original sense of a compulsory, segregated, and enclosed Jewish quarter only in connection with the Jewish experience in Italy and a few places in the Germanic lands, and not at all with that in Poland-Russia. If it is to be used in its original sense in connection with Eastern Europe, then it must be asserted that the age of the ghetto arrived there only after the Nazi invasions of World War II. However, there was a basic difference: unlike ghettos of earlier days, which were designed to provide Jews with clearly defined permanent space in Christian society, twentieth-century ghettos constituted merely temporary stages on the planned road to total liquidation.

Finally, to a great extent because of the negative connotations of the word "ghetto," the nature of Jewish life in the ghetto is often misunderstood. The establishment of ghettos did not lead to the breaking off of Jewish contacts with the outside world on any level. Additionally, from the internal Jewish perspective many evaluations of the ghetto's alleged impact upon the life of the Jews and their mentality require substantial revision. In general, the decisive element determining the nature of Jewish life was not so much whether or not Jews were required to live in a ghetto, but rather the nature of the surrounding environment and whether it constituted an attractive stimulus to Jewish thought and offered a desirable supplement to traditional Jewish genres of intellectual activity. In all places, Jewish life must be examined in the context of the external environment, and developments, especially those subjectively evaluated as undesirable, should not be attributed solely to the alleged impact of the ghetto.

See also Jews and Judaism ; Jews, Attitudes toward ; Jews, Expulsion of (Spain; Portugal) ; Venice .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bonfil, Robert. Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy. Translated by Anthony Oldcorn. Berkeley, 1994.

Calabi, Donatella. "Les quartiers Juifs en Italie entre 15e et 17e siècle. Quelques hypotheses de travail." Annales 52 (1997) 4: 777–797.

Ravid, Benjamin. "From Geographic Realia to Historiographical Symbol: The Odyssey of the Word Ghetto. " In Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, edited by David Ruderman, pp. 373–385. New York, 1992.

Benjamin C. I. Ravid