Review: Ghetto: The History of a Word - The Jewish Chronicle

Ghetto: The History of a Word by Daniel Schwartz (Harvard University Press, £28.95)

It is one of history’s ironies that, in order to create the first ghetto it was Christians who had to be expelled. In 1516, the Venetian authorities forced them out of the Ghetto Nuovo, an island on the northern outskirts of the city, in order to herd together the Jews of Venice in one controllable location.

The Venetian verb gettare — “to throw, pour, cast” and referring to the copper foundry that had been on the island — is at the root of a word, a concept, an experience, a memory, a metaphor, a state of mind, that has resonated since then through Jewish history. And beyond Jewish history.

For, as Daniel Schwartz shows in his authoritative survey of how this most malleable of words was understood in different ways over the centuries, by the first half of the 20th century it had become a sociological concept used in America to describe densely-packed immigrant neighbourhoods of various ethnicities (Italian, Chinese, Polish, etc.) and, from the 1960s onwards, migrated further away from Jewish experience and memory to become attached to the deprived realities of African-American, inner-city life.

One of the strengths of Schwartz’s text is how he illuminates, at each stage of Jewish diaspora experience, some of the innate tensions (and scholarly debates) surrounding the experience of Jewish segregation and enclosure.

There were voluntary Jewish quarters in European cities both before and long after 1516: areas where Jews chose (or, nowadays, choose) to congregate together for emotional, spiritual or (with the use of the eruv) religious reasons.

So, if Jews self-segregate, can they be said to live in a “ghetto”? Or is it only when such areas are externally imposed and compulsory that the word “ghetto” is apt?

When Israel Zangwill wrote Children of the Ghetto (1892), nostalgia-tinged portraits of the culture and impoverished lives of London’s East End Jews — which became a best-seller in both the UK and America — he described the “voluntary formation” of these communities, a benign understanding of “ghetto” taken up across the Atlantic by the Belarusian-born novelist Abraham Cahan, whose 1896 novel Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto became a classic of immigrant literature with the teeming “ghetto” of the Lower East Side seen as a transitional site towards modernity.

Far from benign, however, is the tragic context in which contemporary Jews are perhaps most accustomed to think of this word: the 1,140 ghettoes established in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, which had little in common with their earlier incarnations.

Yet, even here, as Schwartz illustrates in this rich and nuanced work, there was no unanimity over the role of forced Jewish enclosure. Some Nazi officials saw it as a means of slowly eradicating Jews through starvation and disease; others saw it as an opportunity to exploit Jewish slave labour for the benefit of the Nazi war economy.

What they all agreed upon though — another dark historical irony — was that the word “ghetto” was banned.

Too many pejorative connotations had rendered the term unusable, unsayable, for their pre-genocidal sites.

Howard Cooper is a rabbi and psychotherapist.