Ghetto

In modern English, a ghetto is a neighborhood where members of certain minority groups live, usually in poverty. Ghettos have existed since the 1500s in Europe, where walled neighborhoods were built to segregate Jewish people from the rest of the population. One of the most famous historical uses of ghettos was the system established by the Nazis for segregating European Jews during World War II (1939–1945). In the twenty-first-century United States, the word ghetto carries racial and socioeconomic connotations.

History of Ghettos

The exact etymology of the term ghetto is uncertain. This is mostly because ghetto can be linked to many different, yet equally plausible, origin words. For instance, the term may have come from the Yiddish word gehektes, meaning "enclosed," or the Italian word borghetto, meaning "little town." It also may have come from the Latin Giudaicetum, meaning "Jewish." Regardless of the true origin of ghetto, the word's Jewish connection is an important part of its history, as it was first used in relation to Jewish people.

The first recorded use of the term ghetto was in sixteenth-century Italy, principally in the city of Venice. The city's Jewish population was walled off from the rest of the community into an impoverished neighborhood called a ghetto. This was the only section of the city where Jewish people were allowed to live. The walled ghetto was accessible only by a few gates, which were bolted shut at night. Inside their ghetto, the Jewish people were forced to obey burdensome laws to which the Italian majority was not subject.

Venice's Jewish ghetto was established in 1516, and over the next two centuries, governments across Europe began decreeing that similar ghettos be created for Jewish people in other large European cities, including Frankfurt, Prague, and Rome.

World War II

As cultural attitudes modernized, the Jewish ghettos were gradually disassembled. Most of them were gone by the late nineteenth century. The rise of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany in the 1930s saw these ghettos return to Europe but under different circumstances.

This time, simply segregating the Jewish people was only one purpose of the ghettos. The Nazis practiced an extreme form of antisemitism, or hatred against Jewish people. They believed the Jews to be a blight on Europe and sought to eliminate them. Therefore, as Germany began expanding across Europe in the late 1930s—which led to the start of World War II—the Nazis began forcing Jewish people out of their homes and into walled-off ghettos.

Unlike in previous centuries, these ghettos were not meant to be permanent neighborhoods but were temporary holding centers for Jewish people while the Nazis planned what they would do with them. The first World War II–era Jewish ghetto was established at Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland, in October 1939. The Nazi ghetto system eventually grew to include more than one thousand ghettos throughout Europe.

Life inside the ghettos was difficult for the Jewish people. They were essentially prisoners inside the neighborhood walls. One of the major problems with ghetto living was overcrowding. In Poland's Warsaw ghetto, more than 400,000 Jewish people were forced into a neighborhood that measured just 1.3 square miles (3.4 square kilometers). It was common for several families to inhabit one apartment.

Inside the ghettos, people were not provided with adequate plumbing, and human waste and garbage were thrown into the streets. This fostered the spread of disease, which was aggravated by the close quarters of the tenement houses. The Nazis allowed the Jewish people to buy only small amounts of bread and potatoes. Consequently, people became malnourished and then more easily fell victim to illness. Tens of thousands of Jewish people died in the ghettos of disease or starvation.

Children suffered greatly under ghetto conditions. After their parents died of poor health, many children became orphans, and they were forced to beg in the streets for food. Many children froze to death in the winter, as the ghettos lacked heating fuel. Other children survived by smuggling food into the ghettos through small holes in the walls.

Eventually, the Nazis moved the Jewish people from the ghettos to concentration camps, where many were executed or worked to death. This became known as the Holocaust, the mass killing of millions of European Jews. After World War II ended in 1945, Jewish ghettos throughout Europe were dismantled.

Modern Ghettos

In the twenty-first century, low-income inner-city neighborhoods housing ethnic or racial minorities are commonly referred to as ghettos. Since the 1960s and 1970s, the term has often been used to describe a poverty-stricken African American neighborhood. In those decades, ghetto usually referred to the urban poverty affecting minority populations in large cities such as New York, Detroit, and Chicago.

Modern sociologists have attempted to identify the origins of these racial ghettos. The US Supreme Court once referred to this kind of racial segregation as de facto. This term suggests that segregation in America's cities was not created by any law but rather was an unintended consequence that resulted from several factors of the time, including White populations moving out of the inner cities and African Americans being unable to leave indigent neighborhoods due to lower incomes.

Some historians argue that racial segregation in American neighborhoods was created by federal policies, particularly President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal of the 1930s. This program destroyed existing integrated housing in American neighborhoods and established segregated housing in the same areas. Before the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) deemed them unconstitutional, racially exclusionary covenants that excluded individuals from living in particular neighborhoods based on race or ethnicity were commonly included in property deeds or homeowners’ association rules in the United States. From this perspective, the government's policies against low-income African Americans in the mid and late twentieth century created the racially marginalized ghettos of contemporary America. Additionally, the portrayal of Black Americans in the media perpetuated a stereotype that connected Black people with violent, bleak neighborhoods, as described in psychologist Kenneth Clark’s Dark Ghetto (1965). Author Ralph Ellison condemned the use of the word ghetto in reference to the city of Harlem as “one of the most damaging misuses of a concept that has ever come about” in American history.

Bibliography

Di Nepi, Serena. Surviving the Ghetto: Toward a Social History of the Jewish Community in 16th-Century Rome. Translated by Paul M. Rosenberg, English ed., Brill, 2021.

Domonoske, Camila. "Segregated from Its History, How 'Ghetto' Lost Its Meaning." NPR, 27 Apr. 2014, www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/27/306829915/segregated-from-its-history-how-ghetto-lost-its-meaning. Accessed 1 Jan. 2025.

"Ghettos." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 4 Dec. 2019, encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/ghettos. Accessed 1 Jan. 2025.

"Historian Says Don't 'Sanitize' How Our Government Created Ghettos." NRP, 14 May 2015, www.npr.org/2015/05/14/406699264/historian-says-dont-sanitize-how-our-government-created-the-ghettos. Accessed 1 Jan. 2025.

"How American Segregation Changed the Meaning of 'Ghetto.'" Time Magazine, 24 Sept. 2019, time.com/5684505/ghetto-word-history. Accessed 1 Jan. 2025.

"Life in the Ghettos." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/life-in-the-ghettos. Accessed 1 Jan. 2025.

"Nazi Germany and the Establishment of Ghettos." National WWII Museum, 19 Oct. 2023, www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/nazi-germany-and-establishment-ghettos. Accessed 1 Jan. 2025.

Warren, Roland L. Politics and African-American Ghettos. Taylor and Francis, 2017.