1. Why ghetto?

Abstract

‘Why ghetto?’ traces the idea of the ghetto to medieval and early modern Western and Central Europe. Before there were ghettos, there were Jewish quarters. Larger Jewish quarters were part of a region’s economic life and were the model for early modern ghettos. In the 16th century, with most Jews in Western Europe expelled, ghetto living became compulsory in many northern and central Italian urban areas. By the 17th century, the word ‘ghetto’ shifted from a noun to an adjective and was used in most official Italian documents. During the Holocaust, the Nazis used earlier ideas of the medieval ghetto to hide their policies of forced segregation and racial genocide. Twentieth-century African-Americans in northern cities adopted the language of the ghetto to describe their neighbourhoods which, due to racist housing associations and discriminatory local authorities, remained segregated for most of the 20th century. Does the idea of the ghetto mean the same thing for today’s African-Americans as it did for earlier Jewish communities?