Ghetto: The History of a Word

In The Ghetto

In 1969, Elvis Presley recorded one of the many songs for which he is remembered. The song presented a short, moving portrait of life in a black ghetto in a large American city. It began:

"As the snow flies
On a cold and gray Chicago mornin'
A poor little baby child is born
In the ghetto
And his mama cries".

Daniel Schwartz' new book, "Ghetto: The History of a Word" explores the African American ghetto that Presley captured eloquently but goes back to a basic question about ghettos. This question can best be described in one of the many stories Schwartz tells. In the 1880s, a then young Jewish immigrant, Abe Cahan, went to the editor of the "New York Sun" to try to sell a story he had written. The editor was impressed and promised to publish the work. As Cahan was about to leave, the editor asked him a question: "Pardon me. You use a word about which I must ask. What is a ghetto?"

This revealing story has many points. The word "ghetto" did not enjoy wide currency in the United States in the 1880s, and Cahan used it to refer to the large, growing Jewish settlement on New York City's Lower East Side rather than to an African American ghetto. Most basically, the editor's question "What is a ghetto?" is the focus of Schwartz' book. He explores how the concept of "the ghetto" has changed over time. For most of its history the word "ghetto" has applied to Jewish settlements of varying kinds, and Schwartz discusses the impact of the changes and expansions of the word's meaning and use upon Jewish self-understanding including the relationship of Jewish people to the society of which they are a part.

This book is not the first in which Schwartz has used ambiguous, shifting concepts to explain the different ways in which Jewish people have responded to modernity. In 2013, Schwartz, Associate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at George Washington University, wrote a study of Jewish responses to the philosophy of Spinoza: "The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image." Schwartz traced many shifting word usages in his study of Spinoza, Most importantly he discussed different ways of understanding "secularism" and how it applies to Spinoza's thought. He also discussed different ways of understanding what it means to be Jewish as evidenced in different responses to the person of Spinoza. Schwartz perceptively titled one of the chapters of his book "Ex-Jew, Eternal Jew" to capture seemingly diametrically opposed ways of understanding Spinoza. I read and reviewed Schwartz' 2013 study of Spinoza on this site, and Schwartz kindly sent me a review copy of his new book on the Ghetto.

As it was with the study of Spinoza, so it is with this study of different and changing understandings of the nature of the ghetto. Schwartz traces the changing use of the word "ghetto" over the centuries and the changing responses it has evoked. These responses have been largely negative but with time have evoked some positive responses and some sense of nostalgia. The study is not merely of changing word use and responses to a concept. Schwartz offers a study of Jewish communities over the ages to which the term "ghetto" has been applied and then shows how the term moved to include African American communities. There is a difference between examining the use of the word "ghetto" and examining the history of various communities, Jewish and African American, to which the word has been applied. In places, Schwartz' study is difficult due to the way he combines these two questions.

The book examines segregated Jewish communities from ancient and medieval times, but its story really begins in 1516 when Venice legally created a segregated Jewish area of residence and called in a ghetto. The term probably initially referred to an old copper refinery on the site to which the Jews were ordered to live; although other explanations for the term have been offered. Schwartz also studies a ghetto established in Rome by the Papacy some years after the Venetian Ghetto. These Italian segregated communities established by law, with walls, badges, and limitations on entrance and exit form the basis of the early understanding of the term "ghetto". In subsequent chapters of his book, Schwartz shows different communities with both similarities to and differences from the Italian ghetto to discuss the nature of these communities and the many changes in the reference and meaning of the word "ghetto". Thus, in detailed and learned chapters of the book, Schwartz discusses the emancipation of the ghettos wrought by the French Revolution and its aftermath, the transformation of the understanding of the ghetto through Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, the Americanization of the ghetto through Jewish immigration to the Lower East Side in New York City, the West Side of Chicago, and elsewhere, the harshness of the Nazi re-creation of ghettos prior to the Holocaust, and the shift in emphasis of the concept of "ghetto" following WW II from Jewish communities to African American communities of the type that Elvis captured in song.

Schwartz's study shows how Jews have struggled with modernity and with an understanding of themselves through the shifting nature of the concept of the ghetto, just as his earlier book showed differences in understanding Judaism and modernity though a study of responses to Spinoza. This book has the same strengths as Schwartz' earlier book. I enjoyed its wonderful erudition and the close and detailed readings Schwartz gives of literary, historical, and sociological writers, familiar and unfamiliar in exploring the ghetto and its history. The earliest such figure is Philo of Alexandria who, together with Spinoza, I admire greatly. Among many other writers, Schwartz discusses Berthold Auerbach, and his novel about Spinoza, the French Jewish opera composer Fromental Halevy, the German novelist Leopold Kompert, the famous English-American author Israel Zangwill, who helped coin the phrase "the melting pot", Abraham Cahan, mentioned earlier, the non-Jewish writer Hutchins Hapgood whose study of the New York City ghetto, "The Spirit of the Ghetto; Studies of the Jewish Quarter of New York" once was well-known, the Jewish writer on the Holocaust, Marie Syrkin, the novelist Jo Sinclair, the novelist and essayist James Baldwin, and many others. The works of these writers forms an integral part of Schwarz' study of the changing understanding of the ghetto. They were fascinating in their own right as many times in my reading of the book I needed to pause to try to learn a bit more about some of the people Schwartz discusses.

The study is open-ended and lacks a firm conclusion, as is appropriate for a shifting term. Schwartz writes:

"The word 'ghetto' has traveled a long distance to this moment of remembrance and reflection. It would be fair to say that it only emerged as a pan-European signifier at the very instant that it came to serve in nineteenth century ghetto literature as ... a site of memory. As a literary and imagined space, the 'ghetto' has been laced with recollections of times past from its inception. Yet the word has undergone numerous resurrections, each time seemingly in defiance of the assumed course of modernity out of the ghetto. The demise of the Venetian Ghetto, like that of the other early modern ghettos, was only the beginning of a semantic odyssey that continues to the present. Today, when the term 'ghetto' has been universalized and its formerly dominant Jewish associations muted, there is value in retracing the sinuous road the word had voyaged to get to this point. Only by understanding the winding journey of the word 'ghetto' within the Jewish experience can we begin to understand the complications that have attended its journey beyond it."

Schwartz study will appeal to readers interested in Jewish history and in the relationship of Jewish history to the broader world. The book is demanding to read. It includes detaile