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. However,since the life in ghetto invariably featured four specific attributes ( in various degrees of combination and severity ): "social ostracism","economic hardship","legal arbitrariness", and "security",the term now commonly labels any powerty-stricken or specific,by sociology defined,urban minority area.

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. It is worth noticing that the gated ghettos in Venice and in other European cities,was an affluent part of the town inhabited by merchants and moneylenders.Non-Jews were not allowed to live in this ghetto, nor were Jews allowed to leave,and the gates were locked at night.The attributes of social ostracism and security had probably played a combined role in this fact, as money lenders were certainly reaching the elites of the society which,in turn,wanted to have them under control.It also explains various ways in which ghettos were established in various cities. While the ghetto in Venice was officially established in 1516 after a long negotiations between the city and the Jews,to one of the infamous ghettos ( the one of Frankfurt ) were Jews simply compelled to move by a city ordinance of 1460 .

In 1555 Pope Paul IV created the Roman Ghetto and issued papal bull Cum nimis absurdum,forcing Jews to live in a specified area. According to historian Owen Chadwick, the Roman Ghetto "...had two objectives:to protect Christians from too close an association with persons of a different religion,and to protect the Jews from mobs or hooligans..." The ghetto was welcome to some Jews because it protected the small community from the drain which must follow from assimilation to the majority and enabled special religious customs to be observed without interference.

Much later on,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 the only exceptions being Livorno and Pisa; both in Italy ).In medieval Central Europe ghettos existed in Paris ,Frankfurt ,Mainz,Prague,and even further East, such as in Poland and Russia.There,however,the treatment of Jews was more arbitrary and "harsher" as the authotities very often withdrew the legal protection and left the ghettos open to the pogroms from the side of,sometimes even more impoverished,non-ghetto population.

The character of ghettos has varied through the ( good and bad ) times. There were time periods in wchich the 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.

Since Jews could not acquire land outside the ghetto, during periods of population growth,the ghettos landscape was transformed into narrow streets and tall, crowded houses. Residents had their own justice system. Around the ghetto stood walls that during pogroms were closed from the inside during Easter Week and from the outside during Christmas or Pesach.An attribute of social ostracism often resulted in that the ghetto residents needed passes to go outside of the bounds of the ghetto.They were socially isolated,although not necessarily culturally and cognitively ( they have their ownschool system based on synagogues ),sometimes they have to set up their own communal authority,and they were definitely kept in segregation which they sometimes needed and which,sometimes,benefited both sides.

Eventually,Jewish ghettos were progressively abolished, and their walls demolished in the 19th century,following the ideals of the French Revolution.Furthermore,some Western European countries with tolerant governments (such as Napoleon's France,or the United Kingdom) incited industrious Jews to immigrate.In the Papal States,the life in ghettos was made somewhat less restrictive under Pope Pius IX.They were completely abolished when the kingdom of Italy was established in 1861 and 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 before and during the World War II in Eastern Europe.The above mentioned four attributes now changed drastically.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 Nazi camarilla (who all pathologically hated Jews ) in power the "security and state control" was given clear priority as 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 German goverment.This had become the official state policy,especially when it appeared to be also a source of substantial enrichment of the Nazi government as the Jewish property was,generally,expropriated.This policy was extended to all countries under the Third Reich influence with most of the Jews confined into tightly packed areas of the cities in the Eastern Europe.Some of the most notorious ghettos were set up in Warsaw,Lublin,Lodz,Tuliszhkow,Radom,Opole,Kielce,and Krakow ( all of which on the Polish territory ) with Riga,Vilno,Vitebsk,Bialystok,Pinsk,Lvov,Smolensk in Russia and in Budapest (Hungary).As we said above,the social,economic,and legal attributes ceased to exist,all being supplanted by state control over life and death of every single German and European Jew.

For instance,starting in 1939,the Nazi regime began systematically move Polish Jews into designated areas of large Polish cities mentioned above.The first large ghetto at Tuliszkow was established in December 1939,followed by the Lodz ghetto in April 1940 and the Warsaw ghetto in October 1940 with many other ghettos following throughout 1940 and 1941.The ghettos were walled off ( just like in the mediaval times ) except now,any Jew found leaving was shot.The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of them all with 380,000 people while the Lodz Ghetto,second largest, was holding about 160,000 ihnabitants.The situation in the ghettos was brutal.In Warsaw ,30% of the population were forced to live in 2.4% of the city area, a density of 9.2 people per room.In the ghetto of Odrzywol,700 people lived in an area previously occupied by 5 families making the density between 12 and 30 people per each room.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 ( and 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 sratvation.In 1942 the Nazi government began Operation Reinhard ( Heydrich,the author of the "Final Solution of the European Jewish Problem" ) 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.Almost 300,000 people were deported from Warsaw Ghetto alone over the course of 52 days.In some of the ghettos ( Warsaw's was the most important and largest;it lasted almost two months ) the local resistance orhaniztions started uprisings.None were successful and the Jewish population of the ghettos were almpost entirely annihilated.

Post-War Ghettos in the World

South African & African Ghettos The Group Areas Act (27 April 1950) barred people of particular races from various urban areas.

Soweto is 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 improval and Soweto has become a centre for nightlife. There are other ghetto parts of South Africa like KwaMashu in Durban in the KZN province.

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 mores (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. 1960s civil rights laws allowed wealthier African Americans to emigrate to formerly all-white areas, the result of which was that the economic bases of many ghettos collapsed, leaving them 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 Moynihan Report pointed out that black welfare cases and unemployment were beginning to "disaggregate," that is, the number of black welfare cases were rising while unemployment was falling. The Moynihan Report also pointed out that a quarter of all black children were born to unmarried women and that the percentage was rising. The Moynihan report described the ghetto as a "tangle of pathologies" and predicted that conditions would worsen, not improve, despite the Great Society.

Though it was a descriptive essay, and not a theoretical one, the Moynihan Report met howls of protest. The expression "Blaming the Victim" was coined as criticism.

In The Promised Land, Nicholas Lemann says of the Moynihan Report.

Today the Moynihan Report stands as probably the most refuted document in American history (though of course its dire predictions about the poor black family all came true). . . the practical effect of the controversy over it was exactly the opposite of what Moynihan intended - all public discussions in mainstream liberal circles of issues like the state of the black family and the culture of poverty simply ceased. (177)

For almost two decades after the Moynihan Report, there was little discussion of family conditions in the ghetto. The 1980s began to see a revival of this sociological question, 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.

Losing Ground has met with a broad chorus of liberal criticism. Losing Ground's opponents point out that in the 1970s, when the real amounts of welfare checks decreased, out-of-wedlock births increased. Critics also point out that illegitimacy rose just as much in low benefit states like Mississippi, where work undoubtedly paid better than welfare, as it did in high benefit states like Illinois and New York. Critics also say that Murry missed the fact that although the percentage of blacks born out of wedlock increased in the 60s and 70s, the percentage of black women having babies out of wedlock decreased.

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—the "spatial mismatch". Wilson explains the high percentage of out-of-wedlock births as due to the lack of marriageable—i.e., employed—men for mothers to marry.

Roger Waldinger offers a third, and less well known, theory of ghetto formation: detailing a mismatch between the wages which blacks desire and the wages which low-skilled jobs actually pay. The argument mainly appears in Waldinger's book, adapted from his Harvard PhD thesis, Still the Promised City?

In looking at New York City, Waldinger points out that new immigrants—Koreans, Pakistanis, Dominicans, etc—often do better than American-born blacks. Waldinger also notices 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, in hope of something better, and may often wind up working outside the legitimate economy altogether. Waldinger's theory has not become as well-known as the theories of Murray or Wilson, and he is also criticized for "blaming the victim."

Ghettos in post-WWII France

There are allegedly "ghettos" in modern France. The poorer banlieues, or suburbs, of France, 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 1960's and 1970's in the industrial suburbs to the north and east of Paris, especially in the department of Seine-St-Denis (also known from its departmental code as "le 93" or "le 9-3"), and in other French cities like Villeurbanne near Lyon. They are similar in style and have similar problems as the large inner-city urban renewal projects in the US (like 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. (There are, however, affluent banlieues around Paris as well, such as the department of Hauts-de-Seine to the west.) The recent riots in France largely originated within the ghettos.

Ghettos in the Czech Republic

A few ghettos have appeared in the Czech Republic. These ghettos are mainly inhabited by Roma who move there both voluntarily or involuntarily (municipalities often try to relocate them from other areas). The majority of the people are unemployed and uneducated, and the crime rate is high. As a ghetto begins to appear non-Roma people move away. The most infamous ghetto in the Czech Republic is Chánov (part of the city of Most). Other cities with neighborhoods slowly transforming into ghettos include Karviná.

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 the 1920s and 1930s. Artists such as Bob Marley, Ice Cube, Naughty By Nature, The Fugees, John Lee Hooker, Nina Simone, 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", Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddamn", John Lee Hooker's "Rent Blues", Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five's "The Message", Ice Cube's "3 Strikes You In", Eminem's "8 Mile" and Calloway's "Minnie The Moocher". The 1970s sitcom Good Times was modeled after life in the Cabrini-Green housing projects in Chicago. The show portrays a ghetto family that always triumphs over adversity and it has been criticized for painting too rosy of a picture of how the ghetto really works.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Rome: A Let's Go City Guide, Matthew W. Mahan (editor), Macmillan, Cambridge, MA, 2004. ISBN 1-4050-3329-0, page 104.
• Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Houghton Mifflin, 1998, trade paperback, ISBN 0395901308, hardcover, 1994, 277 pages, ISBN 0395601991
• Martin Gray, For Those I Loved, Little Brown Company, 1984, hardcover, ISBN 0316325767, 351 pages
• Graf, Malvina (1989). The Kraków Ghetto and the Plaszów Camp Remembered. Tallahassee: The Florida State University Press. ISBN 0813009057
• Polanski, Roman. (1984). Roman. New York: William Morrow and Company. ISBN 0688026214
• Katz, Alfred. (1970). Poland's Ghettos at War. New York: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0829001956
• Weiner, Rebecca. Virtual Jewish History Tour

Further reading

• Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides, Łódź Ghetto : A Community History Told in Diaries, Journals, and Documents, Viking, 1989. ISBN 0670829838
• Rings, Werner, Life with the Enemy: Collaboration and Resistance in Hitler's Europe, 1939-1945 (trans. J. Maxwell Brownjohn). Doubleday & Co., 1982. ISBN 0385170823
• Trunk, Isaiah, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation. The University of Nebraska Press, 1986. ISBN 080329428X
• Michal Ungar, The Last Ghetto: Life in the Łódź Ghetto 1940-1944, Yad Vashem, 1995. ISBN 9653080458

External links

• Kraków Ghetto history
• About Kraków Ghetto in Polish with valuable historical photos
• Schindler's List - reproduction of the original list of people protected by Oskar Schindler
• Schindler's Krakow - modern-day photographs
• Overview of the ghetto's history
• Full text of Rumkowski's "Give Me Your Children" speech
• A treatment of ghetto-culture and living conditions at wwww.urbanology.org
• Initiative to wipe off Czech ghettos
• Satellite image from Google Maps (Campo di Ghetto Nuovo is the large square in the centre)
• Ghetto map and history
• Roman Ghetto described
• October 18: Jews of Rome Deported to Auschwitz
• Liliana Picciotto Fargion. Il Libro della Memoria. Gli Ebrei deportati dall'Italia (1943-1945). Milan: Mursia, 1991
• Warsaw Ghetto Liquidation
• Documents and information about the Warsaw Ghetto from the Jewish Virtual Library

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