Ghetto

A ghetto is an 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, Italy, where Jews were required to live; it derives from the Venetian gheto (slag from Latin GLĬTTU[M] cfr. Italian ghetto (slag)), and referred to the area of the Cannaregio sestiere, the site selected for the Ghetto Nuovo where a foundry cooled the slag (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, though the news media created new terms like rural ghetto to describe mobile home parks, farm labor housing tracts and Indian reservations to indicate the poorest areas in the U.S. aren't inside a major city. In the United States, urban neighborhoods where Hispanic immigrants settled in the late 20th century barrios are said comparable to ghettos, because most immigrants form a culturally isolated enclave and may choose to remain there or associate with their own group.

"Ghetto" is also used figuratively to indicate geographic areas with a concentration of any type of person, with or without poverty (e.g. gay ghetto) or for non-geographic categories (e.g. "sci fi ghetto" [1]); some consider this misappropriation of language offensive[2]. Many people in the U.S. and Europe strongly dislike ther term ghetto to have racist, elitist and culturally insensitive overtones; and the mention of such a word to describe a working-class ethnic community is a generalization or an insult. They suggest alternative words like inner city and economically disadvantaged areas, not just have to do with political correctness.

Jewish ghettos in Europe

13th–19th centuries

While the word ghetto was never applied to a Jewish quarter prior to 1516, compulsory, segregated and enclosed Jewish quarters had existed prior to 1516. For example, the Jewish quarter of Frankfurt was established in 1462 before the term ghetto had been coined. Therefore, to say that the first ghetto was established in Venice in 1516 is correct in a technical, linguistic sense but is misleading in a wider context. To apply the term ghetto to an area prior to 1516 is anachronistic, while to state that the first ghetto was established in 1516 is somewhat of a misrepresentation.

The Judengasse was an area of Frankfurt am Main designated as a Jewish quarter from its creation in 1462 until its dissolution at the end of the 18th century. The city council limited expansion in the Judengasse, resulting in steadily increasing overcrowding. The original area of about a dozen houses with around 100 inhabitants, grew to almost 200 houses and some 3,000 inhabitants. The plots originally quite generous were successively divided, increasing the number of plots but reducing the size. In the process many houses were replaced by two or more houses which were often divided in turn. Most being very narrow and long. The smallest house, the Rote Hase, was only about one and a half meters wide.

The term ghetto comes from Venice's Ghetto, founded by the Venetian Republic on March 29, 1516. The island known as ghetto nuovo (the new ghetto) in the Cannaregio district which was designated for the Jewish segregation, lay across the canal from ghetto vecchio (the old ghetto), twenty dwellings of which would later also become part of the Jewish ghetto linked by a bridge. Both sites had previously housed metal casting foundries. hence the name ghetto. Other etymologies suggested for the word derive from "getto," the Italian term for casting), the Griko Ghetonia (Γειτονία, neighbourhood), the Italian borghetto for "small neighbourhood" or the Hebrew word get (Hebrew: �'ט), literally a "bill of divorce." From the example of the Venice Ghetto the name then transferred to Jewish neighbourhoods. 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 allowed 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 colour 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 patrolled the canals that surrounded the Ghetto. The Ghetto was abolished in 1797, after the fall of the Republic of Venice to Napoleon.

To place Venetian provisions requiring groups in the city to live in compulsory quarters in historical context, it should be noted that: Merchants from the Germanic lands were required to reside in a special building known as the 'Fondaco dei Tedeschi'. Prostitutes and pimps were confined to certain houses and were required to be recognizable through the wearing of yellow items of clothing, a step reminiscent of the Jewish badge which had been introduced in 1397 and replaced by a hat in 1497. The Moslem Ottoman Turkish merchants in Venice requested from the Venetian government, for the convenience of their trade, a place of their own similar to the Jews. The Venetian government subsequently required the Turkish merchants to live in a certain building which was carefully isolated from its surroundings, this building became known as the Fondaco dei Turchi. Girolamo Querini, commented in 1528 that the Greek Orthodox Christians in Venice, were severely restricted.

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:
* Josefov, Prague
* Le Marais, Paris
* Roman Ghetto
* Venice Ghetto

Second World War

Main article: Ghettos in occupied Europe 1939 - 1944

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

* The Nazi Ghettos
* Będzin Ghetto
* Białystok Ghetto
* Budapest Ghetto
* Cluj Ghetto
* Częstochowa Ghetto
* Kraków Ghetto
* Łachwa Ghetto
* Łódź Ghetto
* Lwów Ghetto
* Marcinkance Ghetto
* Mińsk Mazowiecki Ghetto
* Piotrków Trybunalski Ghetto
* Pińsk Ghetto
* Riga Ghetto
* Sosnowiec Ghetto
* Theresienstadt Ghetto
* Warsaw Ghetto
* Wilno Ghetto
* 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 improvement and Soweto has become a centre for nightlife and tourist excursions.There are other ghetto parts of South Africa like KwaMashu in Durban in the KZN province and Crossroads near Cape Town, as well as numerous squatter camps in and around the larger centres.

United States

The Irish immigrants of the 19th century were the first ethnic group to form ghettos in America's cities, followed by Italians and Poles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Because there was no official housing segregation against "white" European immigrants, the second--or third generation families are able to relocate to better housing in the suburbs after World War II. Other ethnic ghettos are the Lower East Side in Manhattan, New York was predominantly Jewish until the 1950's, and Spanish Harlem also in Manhattan, New York home to a large Puerto Rican community dated back to the 1930's. Chinatowns, where most Chinese immigrants settled from the 1850's onward in New York city, San Francisco and other major cities originated as racially segregated enclaves. However, most Chinese Americans no longer reside in those urban sections, but Asian immigration since the 1970s repopulated "Chinatowns".
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, Puerto Ricans, 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. But both of these examples need to be extrapolated for veracity. According to the United States Census Bureau, among Hispanic populations in the U.S., Puerto Ricans are the poorest(which is an oddity because they are the only Latino group who has a born citizenship into the United States, therefore having no immigration problems that hinder other Hispanic sub-groups) and in the Southwest U.S., Mexican Americans had historical low-income urban areas known as barrios such as Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas struggled with issues of crime, drugs, youth gangs and family breakdown. Waldingers second point is considered specious, because in the North and South US, blacks are more liklely to be employed in the public sector than the private sector. So one can infer that if blacks in the South have higher incomes it could be due to more expansive military installations and civil service jobs. 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."

Post-WWII France

There are also 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 Département 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). Social issues that inhabitants of French ghettos must deal with regularly, including racism and police brutality, were famously highlighted in the 1996 film La Haine. Although there has been civil unrest (sometimes resulting in rioting) in these ghettos for decades, many people outside of France were not fully aware of the situation until the more internationally publicised 2005 riots, which largely originated within these areas.

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom has a few ghettos in many of its large cities. These include Hackney in east London, Brixton in South-west London, and Handsworth in Birmingham. Improvements have been made to these areas and several others; but these areas still have high crime rates and many run-down buildings. Most of these ghettos contain mostly Black British people, immigrants, British Asian (e.g Pakistani and Indian) and Somali.

Czech Republic

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

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, The Fugees, John Lee Hooker, Tupac Shakur, Nina Simone, and Cab Calloway 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", 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 a picture of how the ghetto really works.

In the United States, the word "ghetto" is often glorified in popular culture and sometimes used as an adjective to describe a certain way of dressing, speaking, and behaving. In common lingo, it may also be used as an alternative to explain a place that is "poorly maintained".

See also

*African Americans
*Angered
*Bantustan
*Cultural assimilation
*Cultural geography
*Da' Hood
*Gay ghetto
*Ghetto uprising
*Group Areas Act
*Hip-hop music
*Jewish history
*Jim Crow laws
*Latinos
*Mellah
*Pass Law
*Poverty
*Racial segregation
*Second-class citizen
*Separate but equal
*Shanty town
*Wigger

External links

* Official web site of the Jewish Ghetto of Venice
* United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Personal Histories - Ghettos
* A treatment of ghetto-culture and living conditions at wwww.urbanology.org
* Initiative to wipe off Czech ghettos
* Ghettos and Ghetto List