Ghetto

A Ghetto is a area where people from a specific racial or 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 specifically to the Venetian Ghetto in Venice, where Jews were required to live; it derives from the Venetian gheto (slag from Latin GLĬTTU[M] cfr. Italian ghetta (slags)), and referred to the area of the Cannaregio sestiere, the site selected for the Ghetto Nuovo where an iron foundry cooled the slags (campo gheto). It was later applied to neighborhoods in other cities where Jews were required to live. The corresponding German term was Judengasse; in Moroccan Arabic ghettos were called mellah. The term now commonly labels any poverty-stricken urban area.

Jewish ghettos in Europe

13th–19th centuries

The first ghettos appeared in Italy, Germany, Spain and Portugal, in the 16th century, between 1557 and 1593, but some authors use the same word to indicate the destination towns to which the Roman Empire deported Jews from the first to the fourth centuries CE.

The term ghetto comes from Venice's Ghetto, founded by the Venetian Republic on March 29, 1516. Cannaregio, the tiny island designated for the ghetto lay adjacent to an iron foundry (campo gheto, the area where slags (Italian ghetta) were cooled), hence the name. Other etymologies suggested for the word derive from "getto," the Italian term for casting), the Griko Ghetonia (Γειτονία, neighborhood), the Italian borghetto for "small neighborhood" or the Hebrew word get (Hebrew: גט), literally a "bill of divorce." From the example of the Venice Ghetto the name then transferred to Jewish neighborhoods. In Castile, they were called Judería and in Majorca and Catalonia, call. At the Ghetto's founding in 1516, there were no more than a few hundred Jews in Venice. Although there is evidence indicating the presence of Jews in the Venetian area dating back to the first few centuries A.D., during the 15th and early 16th centuries (until 1516), no Jew was alowed to live anywhere in the city of Venice for more than 15 days per year; so most of them lived in Venice's possessions on the terrafirma. At its maximum, the population of the Ghetto reached 3,000. In exchange for their loss of freedom, the Jews were granted the right to practice their religion openly within the ghetto walls. Non-Jews were not allowed to live in this ghetto, nor were Jews allowed to leave without permission and without articles of clothing which identified them as Jews: in Venice these were the yellow hat and the yellow circle stitched onto a Jew's coat (the color yellow was considered humiliating, as it was associated with prostitutes). The gates were locked at night, and the Jewish community was forced to pay the salaries of the patrolmen who guarded the gates and patroled the canals that surrounded the Ghetto. The Ghetto was abolished in 1797, after the fall of the Republic of Venice to Napoleon.

In 1555 Pope Paul IV created the Roman Ghetto and issued papal bull Cum nimis absurdum, forcing Jews to live in a specified area. The area of Rome chosen for the ghetto was the most undesirable quarter of the city, owing to constant flooding by the Tiber River. At the time of its founding, the four-block area was designated to contain roughly 2,000 inhabitants. However, over the years, the Jewish community grew, which caused severe overcrowding. Since the area could not expand horizontally (the ghetto was surrounded by high walls), the Jews built vertical additions to their houses, which blocked the sun from reaching the already dank and narrow streets. Life in the Roman Ghetto was one of crushing poverty, due to the severe restrictions placed upon the professions that Jews were allowed to perform. This was the last of the original ghettos to be abolished in Western Europe; not until 1870, when the kingdom of Italy conquered Rome from the Pope, was the Ghetto finally opened, with the walls themselves being torn down in 1888. Due to the three hundred plus years of isolation from the rest of the city, the Jews of the Roman Ghetto developed their own dialect, known as Giudeo-romanesco, which differs from the dialect of the rest of the city in its preservation of 16th-century dialectical forms and its liberal use of romanized Hebrew words.

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 in Italy, being Livorno and Pisa). In medieval Central Europe ghettos existed in Prague, Frankfurt am Main, Mainz and elsewhere.

The character of ghettos has varied through times. In some cases, the ghetto was a Jewish quarter with a relatively affluent population (for instance the Jewish ghetto in Venice). In other cases, ghettos were places of terrible poverty and lack of access to the basic essentials for healthy living, such as clean water.

Since Jews could not acquire land outside the ghetto or own their own houses inside the ghetto, during periods of population growth, ghettos had 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 and from the outside at night and during Christmas, Pesach, and Easter Week . Often ghetto residents had to have a pass to go outside of the bounds of the ghetto.

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, ghettos made somewhat less restrictive under Pope Pius IX (who relaxed many restrictions on Jews, but maintained others). They were completely abolished after the Papal States were overthrown in 1870. The Nazis re-instituted Jewish ghettos before and during World War II in Eastern Europe.

Famous ghettos include:

Second World War

Main article: Ghettos in occupied Europe 1939 - 1944

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Ghettos established by the Nazis in which Jews were confined, and later shipped to concentration camps.

During World War II ghettos were established by the Nazis to confine Jews into tightly packed areas of the cities of Eastern Europe. Starting in 1939, the Nazis began to systematically move Polish Jews into designated areas of large Polish cities. The first large ghetto at Tuliszkow was established in December 1939 or January 1940, followed by the Łódź Ghetto in April 1940 and the Warsaw Ghetto in October 1940, with many other ghettos established throughout 1940 and 1941. The Ghettos were walled off, and any Jew found leaving them was shot. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of these Ghettos, with 380,000 people and the Łódź Ghetto, the second largest, holding about 160,000,

The situation in the ghettos was brutal. In Warsaw, 30% of the population were forced to live in 2.4% of the city's 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, between 12 and 30 to each small room. The Jews were not allowed out of the ghetto, so they had to rely on food supplied by the Nazis: in Warsaw this was 253 calories per Jew, compared to 669 calories per Pole and 2,613 calories per German. With crowded living conditions, starvation diets, and little sanitation (in the Łódź Ghetto 95% of apartments had no sanitation, piped water or sewers) hundreds of thousands of Jews died of disease and starvation.

In 1942, the Nazis began Operation Reinhard, the 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 the Warsaw Ghetto alone to Treblinka over the course of 52 days. In some of the Ghettos the local resistance organisations started Ghetto uprisings, none were successful, and the Jewish populations of the ghettos were almost entirely killed.

List of Nazi era ghettos

List of Ghettos from deathcamps.org

South 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

The Irish immigrants of the 19th century were the first ethnic group to form ghettos in America’s cities. 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 the 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 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 Murray 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. Moreover, rates of children born to unmarried white women have now risen to the 40 percent level in the United States, and these white women do not live in ghettos.

William Julius Wilson argues in The Truly Disadvantaged that easy access to welfare had little effect on women's decisions on childbearing. Wilson instead argues 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). The recent riots in France largely originated within these areas.

Ghettos in the Czech Republic

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Chánov

A few ghettos have appeared in the Czech Republic. These RASTA 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", Tupac Shakur's "Trapped", 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.

In the United States, the word "ghetto" is sometimes used as an adjective to describe a certain way of dressing, speaking, and behaving. "Ghetto" constitutes a subculture of the modern day pop culture, especially among teenagers in urban centers. The ghetto subculture is associated with hip-hop music and a rebellious attitude.

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