5. The ghetto in America

How did the ‘city within a city’ concept move from early modern Venice to Harlem? ‘The ghetto in America’ looks at Chicago and New York after the African-American Great Migration of 1916 transformed the cities of the north. In prosperous times, the ghetto could be a place of entrepreneurship, culture, and social advancement—qualities seen as ‘ghetto fabulous’. In lean times, already vulnerable inhabitants had little access to loans or housing. Mid-20th-century African-American writers argued about whether they lived in a ‘ghetto’ or not, as some feared that the term limited the life chances of those who were already impoverished and segregated. Music ‘from the ghetto’—the rap of the 1980s and 1990s—blurred the lines between hedonism and dissent, making the ghetto a symbol of both injustice and transgression.

4. Nazism and the ghetto

‘Nazism and the ghetto’ describes how the idea of the ghetto persisted alongside actual segregation during the Holocaust, with persecuted Jews seeing historic ghettos as part of their experience of an unprecedented genocide. The Łódź Ghetto included a powerful workforce under the leadership of Chaim Rumkowski which contributed to the German economy. The Warsaw Ghetto, which was larger, more diffuse, and dependent on a black market, became a site of uprising and revolt. The Nazis exploited the multiple meanings of ‘ghetto’ to portray Theresienstadt, a ‘model’ ghetto, as particularly benign for an international audience. There were many hundreds of Nazi ghettos during the war—some large, some small, some short-lived, and some lasting for years. All of them contributed to the Holocaust.

3. Ghettos of the imagination

With the destruction of ghetto gates by Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, actual ghettos were replaced by imagined ones. ‘Ghettos of the imagination’ explores 19th-century ghetto literature. This literature crossed borders—for example, the exportation of British writer Israel Zangwill’s bestselling fiction to America. Late 19th-century America saw a huge influx of Eastern European refugees fleeing pogroms, leading to the establishment of large urban Jewish communities in its cities. Early French and German ghetto literature portrayed the ghetto as romantic and culturally rich, and associated it with the past. By the end of the 19th century, the free-floating ghetto had moved to the present, across to America, and from Western Europe to Eastern Europe.

2. The Age of the Ghetto

‘The Age of the Ghetto’ originated in Italy in the mid-16th century and ended around the time of the French Revolution. Italian city-states, reluctant to sacrifice their economic interests, chose the compromise of enclosure over the expulsion or conversion of Jewish inhabitants. The word ‘ghetto’ evolved from the name of a specific Venetian district to a term adopted by Jews throughout Italy, incorporating the Hebrew ‘ghet’ meaning ‘bill of divorce’. Ghettos, which were often vibrant religious and cultural communities, eventually became overcrowded and unsafe. Over 300 years the ghetto was incorporated into major cities such as Rome and Florence. The Age of the Ghetto, as it was called, looked back to medieval religious prejudice and forward to modern maritime economics and urban planning.

1. Why ghetto?

‘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?

6. The global ghetto

‘The global ghetto’ reminds us to beware the temptation of removing the concept of ‘ghetto’ from its place-specific roots. The recent appropriation of ‘ghetto style’ and hip-hop by young black South Africans in townships illustrates this duality—how ghetto crosses borders and is also located in specific places and signs. The rural Eastern and Central Europeans, who were subjects of ghetto literature, would have seen themselves as living not in ghettos but shtetls. The difference lies in whether the term ‘ghetto’ is imposed on a powerless population, or consciously adopted as a form of cultural expression and a badge of power.