GHETTO

An enclave within a city or on its outskirts to which the Jews were confined by law. During the Middle Ages most Jews in any city lived by themselves in a special quarter (known in English as Jewry, in German as Judengasse ), to which no legal restrictions were attached. But beginning with the counter reformation of the 16th century and lasting well into the 19th century, the ghetto in the strict sense, in which all the Jews of a city were compelled to live and in which no Christian could reside, was a well-established institution throughout southern and central Europe. Rome, Prague, and Frankfurt am Main were some of the cities that had important ghettoes.

Usually located in the worst section of a town, a ghetto often suffered serious epidemics, and its surrounding walls severely limited the living room of its inhabitants. Egress was prohibited after sunset, and its gates were closed on Sundays. Yet religious activities flourished under the stimulus of segregated adversity. Self-contained economically and culturally, the ghetto was largely autonomous, having its own councils and its own courts, in both the secular and the rabbinical spheres.

The derivation of the term is uncertain. It is generally derived from the Italian word getto (with a soft "g"), meaning foundry, since the term was first used of the ghetto of Venice (founded in 1516), which was near the city's foundry; yet in the Venetian dialect the word would be zetto. Less likely are the derivations from Italian borghetto (little suburb) or the Hebrew get (with a hard "g"— bill of divorce).

Bibliography: l. wirth, The Ghetto (Chicago 1928; pa.1956). g. kisch, The Jews in Medieval Germany (Chicago 1949). h. lehmann and r. po-chia hsia, In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, England 1995). a. lewin, A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto (Oxford 1988). d. a. sierakowiak, ed., k. turowski, kamil, tr. The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lódz Ghetto (Oxford 1996). a. toaff, The Ghetto of Rome in the 16th Century: Ethnical and Social Conflicts (Ramat-Gan, Israel 1984). y. zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Berkeley 1993).

[r. krinsky]