Ghetto
A ghetto is an area where people from a specific ethnic background or united in a given culture or religion live as a group, voluntarily or involuntarily, in milder or stricter seclusion. The word historically referred to restricted housing zones where Jews were required to live. The life in ghetto invariably featured four specific attributes (in various degrees of combination and severity) of which the first three were: "social ostracism," "economic hardship," "legal arbitrariness from the side of authorities." The last one, "security," have taken different meaning in different historical eras and geographical locations. In any case, the term ghetto now commonly labels any poverty-stricken or specific, by sociology defined, urban minority area whose population life differs, because of the above attributes, from the rest of the society.
The original ghetto was formed by the Jewish immigrants to Venice in 14th century, who settled in the place where former iron foundry (getto) used to be. Other suggested etymologies include the Greek Ghetonia ("neighborhood"), Italian borghetto for "small neighborhood" or the Hebrew word get, literally a "bill of divorce."
Jewish Ghettos in Europe
13th–19th Centuries
The first ghettos appeared in Italy, Germany, Spain, and Portugal, in the 13th century. Pope Pius V recommended that all the bordering states should set up ghettos, and at the beginning of the 17th century all the main towns had one (with exception of Livorno and Pisa. In medieval Central Europe ghettos existed in Paris , Frankfurt , Mainz, Prague, and even further East,in Poland and Russia. The treatment of Jews there was more arbitrary and "harsher" as the authorities very often left the ghettos open to the pogroms from the side of, sometimes even more impoverished, non-ghetto savages.
The character of ghettos varied too. There were times in which a ghetto featured relative affluence (for instance in Venice in 16th century in Prague in 15th century).In other times, even the same ghettos, having lost political concessions or (as in Prague) money trade privileges, became impoverished. It also explains various circumstances in which ghettos were established in various cities. While some ( e.g. Venice ) were established after negotiations between the city and the Jews, into others (e.g.Frankfurt ), the Jews were compelled to move by a city ordinance .
Since Jews could not acquire land outside the ghetto, the ghettos landscape was transformed into narrow streets and tall, crowded houses. Around the ghetto stood walls that during pogroms were closed from the inside ( during Easter Week ) and from the outside ( during Christmas ).Social ostracism often resulted in that the ghetto residents needed passes to go outside the ghetto bounds. They were socially isolated, although not necessarily culturally and cognitively (they have their own school system based on synagogues), they keep setting up their own communal authority to improve security, and the segregation sometimes benefited both sides.
Venetian Ghetto
The Venetian Ghetto was the area of Venice in which Jewish people were required to live under the government of Venetian Republic.
Restrictions on their movement and permitted trades varied, but money-lending, running pawnshops, dealing in second hand goods and tailoring were common occupations. In 1516, they were moved to the area known as the Ghetto Nuovo. Surrounded by canals, the area was only linked to the rest of the city by two bridges, which were closed at night and during certain Christian festivals, when all Jews were required to stay in the Ghetto.
In 1541, the quarter was enlarged to cover the neighboring Ghetto Vecchio, and in 1633, the Ghetto Nuovissimo was also added.
Due to population density, buildings rose to six or more stories. The area is still home to five synagogues connected by a secret corridor. They are known for their interiors, the oldest ( Schola Grande Tedesca ) dating from 1528. The Scola Spagnola contains the Museum of Hebrew Art.
Roman Ghetto
The Roman Ghetto was located in the area close to the river Tiber and the Theater of Marcellus, in Rome, Italy.
Papal decree Cum nimis absurdum, promulgated by Pope Paul IV in 1555 segregated the Jews in a walled quarter with gates that were locked at night, and subjected them to various restrictions (e.g.limits to the allowed professions), and degradations (e.g. compulsory Catholic sermons on the Jewish shabbat) although to a lesser degree than in other European countries. The district lacked a well and flooded every winter.
When Napoleonic forces occupied Rome, the Ghetto was legally abolished (in 1808 ), but it was reinstated as soon as the Papacy regained control. In 1848, during the brief revolution, the Ghetto was abolished once more, again temporarily. The Jews had to petition annually for permission to live there, and were disabled from owning any property even in the Ghetto. They paid a yearly tax for the privilege; formality and tax survived until 1850.They had to swear yearly loyalty to the Pope by the Arch of Titus (it celebrates the Roman sack of Jerusalem ).
Pope Leo XIII was less intransigent than Pius IX, and the city of Rome was able to tear down the Ghetto's walls in 1888 and demolish some houses, before the area was reconstructed around the new Synagogue.
Eventually, Jewish ghettos were progressively abolished in 19th century following the ideals of the French Revolution. It started in Western European countries with tolerant governments (such as Napoleon's France, or the United Kingdom ), which incited industrious Jews to immigrate. They were completely abolished after the Papal States were overthrown in 1870, in which year the last ghetto in Western Europe was abolished, and the walls were physically torn down in 1888. In Russia, however, the Jewish Pale continued to exist until 1917.
Second World War
The Nazis re-instituted Jewish ghettos in Eastern Europe before and during World War II. In the introduction mentioned attributes now changed dramatically. The notion of Jews as a decadent race had been long established in the German society. It was started by philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte in 19th century and corroborated by Nietzsche and other proponents of the Prussian-cum-German superiority, such as Richard Wagner. With Hitler and his Jewish-hating camarilla in power, the "security and state control over Jews" was given clear priority as their social and economic hardship became a norm and legality nonexistent. Ostensibly to save German Jews against the chauvinistic German-Nazi society, the ghettos, in which Jews were confined and later shipped to concentration camps, were newly reestablished by the Nazis. This had become the official state policy, especially when it appeared to be also a source of substantial enrichment of those in power, as the Jewish property was being expropriated. Same policy was installed in all countries under the Third Reich's control with most of the Jews confined into tightly packed areas of the cities in the Eastern Europe. Some of the most notorious ghettos were in Warsaw, Lublin, Lodz, Tuliszhkow, Radom, Opole, Kielce, Bialystok, and Krakow (all of which on the Polish territory) with Riga, Vilno, Vitebsk, Pinsk, Lvov, Smolensk in Russia and in Budapest (Hungary). There, the social, economic, and legal disproportions ceased to exist, all being supplanted by state control over life and death of every single German and European Jew.
Starting in 1939, the Nazi regime began moving Polish Jews into designated ghettos in Tuliszkow (in December 1939), in Lodz (in April 1940), in Warsaw (in October 1940), and into many other ghettos throughout 1940 and 1941. The ghettos were walled off (just like in the medieval times) except now, any Jew found leaving was shot.
The situation in the ghettos was brutal. As the Jews were not allowed out of the ghetto, they had to rely on food supplied by the Nazis. In Warsaw, this constituted 253 calories per Jew per day, compared to 669 calories per Pole and 2,613 calories per German. With crowded living conditions, starvation diets, and little sanitation (in the Lodz Ghetto full 95% of apartments had no sanitation, piped water or sewers), hundreds of thousands of Jews died of disease and starvation. In 1942, the Nazi government began Operation Reinhard, which meant systematic deportation to extermination camps during the Holocaust. The authorities deported Jews from everywhere in Europe to the ghettos of the East or directly to the extermination camps. In some of the ghettos local resistance organizations started uprisings. None were successful and the Jewish population of the ghettos were almost entirely annihilated.
Warsaw Ghetto
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the Jewish ghettos in World War II. In the three years of its existence, starvation, disease and deportations to concentration camps and extermination camps dropped the population of the ghetto from an estimated 450,000 to 37,000.
Although planning to isolate the Jewish population of Warsaw from the beginning, there were conflicting interests among the German government (Civilian administration, the Wehrmacht, and the SS) and so the Jewish council was able to delay the establishment by one year.
The Warsaw Ghetto was finally ready (on October 16, 1940) to receive about 380,000 people, about 30% of the population of Warsaw despite of its 2.4% size. Nazis then closed off the Warsaw Ghetto from the outside world on November 16th that year, building a wall.
In early 1942, the Nazis decided to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The first phase was to eliminate the Jews of Poland. After the construction of extermination camps was completed in July 1942, the wholesale liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto was to begin.
On January 18, 1943, armed resistance started with the second expulsion of the Jews. It had some initial success which followed by the three months of fighting and getting ready for the final struggle. The final battle started on the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943. During the fighting approximately 7,000 of the Jewish partisans were killed and 6,000 were burnt alive or gassed in bunkers. The remaining 50,000 people were sent to German concentration camps.
Lodz Ghetto
The Lodz Ghetto was the second-largest ghetto (after the Warsaw Ghetto) established for Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. Situated in the town of Lódz with 672,000 inhabitants and originally intended as a temporary gathering point for Jews, the ghetto was transformed into a major industrial center, providing much needed supplies for Nazi Germany and especially for the German Army. It meant to transform Jewish population (reduced from 233,000 to about 164,000) into a slave labor force. Over the coming years, Jews from Central Europe and as far away as Luxembourg were deported to the ghetto, and there was also a small Roma population that was resettled there.
Even though the work was essential to the ghetto's survival and despite the Third Reich's Armaments Minister Albert Speer advocated the ghetto's continued existence as a source of cheap labour, in the summer of 1944 came the final order to start gradual liquidation of the remaining population and by late August, the ghetto was eliminated (as the last in Europe).
The peculiar situation of the Lódz Ghetto (i.e. conviction that productivity would ensure survival and brutal Nazi administration) prevented any manifestations of armed resistance, such as in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. However, defensive resistance in the ghetto managed to save many Jews from final transports and helped others to do the same.
Krakow Ghetto
The Jewish ghetto in Kraków (Cracow) was one of the five main ghettos created by the Nazis in the General Government (occupied, but unannexed areas of Poland), during their occupation of Poland during World War II. Before the war, Kraków was an influential cultural center for the 60,000-80,000 Jews that resided there. However, in May 1940, Nazis announced that Kraków should become the "cleanest" city in the General Government and ordered a massive deportation of Jews from the city. Of the more than 68,000 Jews in Kraków only 15,000 workers and their families (all crammed into 30 streets, 320 residential buildings, and 3,167 rooms) were permitted to remain due to the policy of separation of "able workers" from those who would later be exterminated.
The armed underground resistance in the ghetto had some success but, unlike in Warsaw, their efforts did not lead to a general uprising before the ghetto was liquidated.
From May 30, 1942 onward, the Nazis implemented systematic deportations from the ghetto to surrounding concentration camps. Thousands of Jews were transported over the succeeding months.The final 'liquidation' of the ghetto came in March 13-March 14, 1943 when 8,000 Jews, deemed able to work, were transported to the Kraków-Płaszów labor camp. Any remaining were killed or sent to die in Auschwitz.
Post-War Ghettos in the World
South African & African Ghettos
In South Africa, The Group Areas Act (27 April 1950) barred people of particular races from various urban areas. One of the most notorious “black ghettos” was Soweto, a mostly black urban area to the south west of Johannesburg. During the apartheid regime, Soweto was constructed for the specific purpose of housing African people who were then living in areas designated by the government for white settlement, such as the multi-racial area called Sophiatown. Today, Soweto is among the poorest parts of Johannesburg. However, there have been recent signs of economic improvement and Soweto has become a center of nightlife.
There are other "ghettos" in South Africa, such as KwaMashu in Durban in the KZN province. The resettlements (comparable to forced deportations in Poland) into specific, "ghetto-like," areas were quite common elsewhere in Africa, especially along the Zambezi River. Before the Kariba Dam was constructed in 1956, whole tribes were forcibly moved into economically inhospitable inland areas. There, just as in Soweto, the economic and social degradation was supposed to be quickly outweighed by over-all economic boom while the “security” aspect was always practically negligible. It was the combination of the state governments’ wasteful management and neglect that prolonged the unnecessary suffering for several decades.
Ghettos in the United States
In the United States, between the abolition of slavery and the passing of the civil rights laws of the 1960s, discriminatory notions (sometimes codified in law) often forced urban African Americans to live in specific neighborhoods, which became known as "ghettos". Due to segregation laws, in existence in many US states until the Civil Rights Movement and the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, African-Americans of all economic levels had to live in ghettos such as Bronzeville in Chicago and Harlem in New York City. In 1960s enacted civil rights laws allowed wealthier African Americans to emigrate to formerly all-white areas. The result of this was that the economic bases of many ghettos collapsed, leaving them to be zones of below-average wealth, poorly-maintained housing, and high crime. By the 1970's, the Robert Taylor Homes, located in Chicago's Bronzeville, was home to the poorest and third-poorest census tracts in the United States.
The formation of the ghetto and the black underclass forms one of most controversial issues in sociology. One of the earliest studies of the modern phenomenon of ghetto formation was Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 work The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, usually simply referred to as the Moynihan Report. The Report pointed out that black welfare cases and unemployment were beginning to "disaggregate," that is, the number of black welfare cases were rising while employment was falling. The Report also pointed out that a quarter of all black children were born to unmarried women, that the percentage was rising and described the ghetto as a "tangle of pathologies," predicting, at the same time, that conditions would worsen, despite the Great Society.
In the 1980s began a revival of all "ghetto-encompassing" questions, as well as the development of new theories on why the ghetto emerged. Charles Murray argues in Losing Ground that Great Society liberalism created the hopeless poor. Murray claims that the eligibility of single women for welfare encouraged women to have babies out of wedlock, and that welfare discouraged all from working. Murray concluded his book with a call for the abolition of welfare. On the other hand, William Julius Wilson argues, in The Truly Disadvantaged, that easy access to welfare had little effect on women's decisions on childbearing. Wilson instead claims that the flight of low-skilled manufacturing jobs to the suburbs and the South left blacks economically isolated in the ghetto due to this "spatial mismatch". Wilson thus explains the high percentage of out-of-wedlock births by the lack of "marriageable" (i.e. employed single) men.
Yet another theory of ghetto formation is offered by Roger Waldinger in Still the Promised City? detailing a mismatch between the wages which blacks desire and the wages which low-skilled jobs actually pay. In looking at New York City, Waldinger points out that new immigrants living in similar “ghettos” (Koreans, Chinese, Pakistanis, Dominicans, etc.) often do better than American-born blacks. Waldinger also noticed that southern-born and Caribbean-born blacks have higher incomes than northern-born blacks. Waldinger argues that immigrant groups benefit by establishing nepotistic niches for themselves, and use niches for mutual help, something blacks have in most cases been unable to do. Waldinger also says that even though hotels and restaurants may offer very low wages, they still outclass wages in Mexico, rural China, or Africa; thus, immigrants readily accept them. In contrast, unskilled northern-born blacks, who hope to do something better than their parents, disdain these jobs and may often wind up working outside the legitimate economy.
Thus, despite the atempts to improve social and economic conditions, from the above studies it follows that social ostracism and economic hardship still generally hold in post-1964 American ghettos, just as the legal arbitrariness has practically disappeared. In so far the security, apart from addressing the alarmingly high crime rate (as the notion of "bettering the parents.... outside the legitimate economy" suggests) there has not been any state intrusion in the ghetto life whatsoever. This constitutes the specific "American way" of ghetto life, differing from the other cases discussed in this article.
While the American “melting pot” has, more or less, pushed the question of ethnic origin, different cultures and religion of individual strata of society from the all-important attributes to a lower importance&mdaash; although some of it returned as “ethnic profiling” after 9/11—quite different situations developed in Europe.
European Ghettos
Applying the definitional elements proposed in the introduction, there are ghettos in most (if not all) of the industrialized European countries at this moment. There are, of course, no more Jewish ghettos. The problem in Europe now concerns visible minorities (i.e. recent, and second, if not third, generation immigrants).
In France, the poorer banlieues, or suburbs, especially those of Paris, house an impoverished population largely of North African Muslim and Black African origin in large medium- and high-rise building developments known as Cités. They were built in the 1960s and 1970s in the industrial suburbs to the north and east of Paris, especially in the Seine-St-Denis area, and in other French cities like Villeurbanne near Lyon. They are similar in style and have similar problems to the large inner-city urban renewal projects in the U.S., such as Cabrini Green in Chicago. Though most of the young were born in France, and (like many of those who weren't) are citizens, this North-African and African population is routinely discriminated against in the job market, as well as by the police. The recent riots in France largely originated within the ghettos as a reaction to legal discrimination and chauvinistic attitudes of the French society that feels the minorities in ghettos are becoming a threat to its secularism. Thus, although the generally poor economic situation drives home the social hardship, it is mostly the state legal and security attributes that incited the unrests in the society. On the other hand, most of the recent African immigrants (from Ivory Cost, Dakar, etc.) prefer living in the French ghettos because of complete legal breakdown and chaos in their home countries. They feel that even biased but functioning legal system is better than none.
In Germany, the, so called, “post-war economic miracle” happened with considerable help from Turkish immigrants. They came, officially invited in, to boost much needed labor force in heavy machinery sectors and, as in France, they settled in ghettos. They did not seem to mind and certainly their social, economic and over-all life dramatically improved; as long as the “economic miracle” lasted, of course. With increasing unemployment in the machinery sector and other industries, the state had to step in and, to preempt riots, offered the Turkish families reasonable settlements if they returned to their homeland.
Roma Problem : Czech Republic & Slovakia
Roma, with their basically nomadic way of life and their reluctance to stay and try to assimilate in any one country (even if we refrain from the absence of common language, let alone any European one, and any marketable skills) have been causing problems for all Eastern & Central European bureaucracies for centuries. Their nomadic way of life kept saving them from being put into ghettos (or worse still, concentration camps) until after the WWII. Then, the East European (ostensibly socialist) states were forced to do something. They categorized the Roma as a "social group" or "problem" and thus legitimized intrusive state intervention to deal with the problem.
Another aspect of the redefinition of Roma identity was the transformation of ethnic and cultural differences into social deviance. Roma children who did not speak the host language very well were treated as mentally deficient and put into special classes within which they could advance only to the fourth grade. Young Roma thus became increasingly alienated and isolated from the host society, experiencing an enforced "social retardation" which led to withdrawal, aggression, and other forms of antisocial behavior. Perhaps the most radical instance of such intervention was the policy of social sterilization adopted by the Slovak government between 1980 and 1990 to curb what it called "unhealthy high fertility rates" among the Roma. Since the 1989 revolutions in those countries, harassment and prejudice towards the Roma of Eastern Europe have intensified along with a sharp decrease in economic status.
A 1991 Times Mirror survey found that Europeans in overwhelming numbers expressed contempt for Roma. The survey found the similar negative attitude in 59% of Germans, 91% of Czechoslovaks, 71% of Bulgarians, 79% of Hungarians, and 50% of Spaniards. 1994 Bulgarian statistics indicate levels of prejudice against Roma which are higher than against blacks in the United States south in the 1950's (Kanev 1995). The difference from “standard racism” exhibited elsewhere, the Roma problems are not solely in the racism displayed towards them, but in their long-standing historical and sociological isolation.
This is just a preamble to what is going on in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and other Eastern European countries. A few Roma ghettos had appeared in the Czech Republic within the last ten years and the trend continues. These ghettos are inhabited by Roma who move there, both voluntarily or involuntarily (municipalities often try to forcibly relocate them from other areas). Majority of the people is unemployed and uneducated, crime rate is high. As ghetto appears, non-Roma people move away. Most infamous ghetto in the Czech Republic is Chánov (part of city Most). Other city with neighborhoods slowly transforming into ghettos is, for example, Karviná. In the case of Roma, there are virtually all four attributes of their hardship at play. Legally very tentative, social and economic hardships on the rise, and state relocating them into ghettos, allegedly to protect them from chauvinistic attitudes of the society, in reality not knowing what to do with them.
Cultural Life and the Ghetto
It is often said that great art is born out of suffering. So it is not necessarily a coincidence that great artists lived and still live in the ghetto. Ghettos often became known as vibrant cultural centers, for example the late 19th century Paris, or Harlem ( in New York) in the 1920s and 1930s. Artists such as Bob Marley, Ice Cube, John Lee Hooker, Cab Calloway, and Tupac Shakur were born and raised in ghettos, and much of their music comes from their own suffering, experiences and life in the ghetto or their own experiences with desegregation, eg. Bob Marley's "No Woman, No Cry", John Lee Hooker's "Rent Blues", Ice Cube's "3 Strikes You In", Eminem's "8 Mile" and Calloway's "Minnie The Moocher".
As this is certainly true of the post-WWII ghettos, the culture (and sometimes a world-class cultural events happened in the Nazi-run ghettos during the war. Apart from the standard printing activity , usually in three languages ( Yiddish language, Polish, and Hebrew ), religious activities (including a church for Jews who had converted to Catholicism), and lectures, concerts, theater, and art exhibits. Movie director Roman Polanski, a survivor of the ghetto, recalls his experience in his memoirs Roman. In many cases, the artists and performers were prominent figures in Polish cultural life during the war. In the Theresienstadt Ghetto (in the former Czechoslovak Republic ), the inhabitants succeeded to put together an extremely good symphonic orchestra under Karel Ancerl, a world-renown conductor who,in 60s and 70s, conducted most of the famous orchestras all around the world, The Czech Filharmonic Orchestra and the Toronto Symphonic Orchestra among them.
Finally, the best example of ghetto culture . It is acknowledged that the renaissance, actually the literary historians even say the golden era, of the Czech & Slovak literature of post-war period was happening during 70s - 80s in Czechoslovakia under the brutal Communist regime. There, for several hundred intellectuals ( writers , scientists and artists ), who signed on the anti-communist proclamation “Chartist Movement,” the Czech State Security Police ( modelled after the infamous Russian KGB ) made the literal "hell-on-Earth". They were kicked out of work, forbidden to publish or exhibit, shadowed by agents for 24 hours, day after day (and hence ostracized by the general public because of the non-stop police presence), and virtually forced to meet only each other. Hence, all the definitional prerogatives of a classic ghetto[1], they actually coined the term themselves, were there. And yet, the best works by, for instance, writer Ludvik Vaculik, playwrights Pavel Kohout, and ( former Czech president ) Vaclav Havel, scientist Prof. Vaclav Cerny and many others, were done during the “ghetto period.” And, to stress again, this ghetto had all four attributes in full force: total social and economic depression, no legal rights whatsoever ( actually the police could imprisoned anybody anytime; even without the trial ), and total control of their every movement, and that of the rest of the population, all the time.
Conclusion
The occasional eruption of artistic flourish notwithstanding, the most important feature of ghettos is the cold and inhuman logic behind their creation. In each case the purpose was to move a minority, deemed troublesome to the authorities, within barbed-wire walls, real or virtual. Then, everything possible, even killing them, was done to prevent those inside the ghetto from emerging back into the general society. The magnitude of moral reprehensibility for such inhumane, and eventually murderous, acts never entered the minds of the perpetrators.
External links
- Kraków Ghetto history
- About Kraków Ghetto in Polish with valuable historical photos
- Schindler's Krakow - modern-day photographs
- Overview of Lodz ghetto's history
- A treatment of ghetto-culture and living conditions at wwww.urbanology.org
- Venetian Ghetto map and history
- Roman Ghetto described
- Warsaw Ghetto Liquidation
- Documents and information about the Warsaw Ghetto from the Jewish Virtual Library
- Czech Ghetto for intelligentsia under Communist regime
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