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, it now commonly labels any poverty-stricken urban area.

Jewish ghettos in Europe

13th–19th centuries

The first ghettos appeared in Germany, Spain and Portugal, in the 13th century, 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.

Related Topics:
Germany - Spain - Portugal - 13th century - Roman Empire

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The term ghetto comes from Venice's Ghetto in the 14th century. Before the designation of this part of the city for the Jews it was an iron foundry (getto), hence the name. Other etymologies suggested for the word include the Griko Ghetonia (Γειτονία, neighborhood), the Italian borghetto for "small neighborhood" or the Hebrew word get, 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, call. It is worth noticing that the gated Jewish quarter in Venice (the Ghetto), 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/

Related Topics:
Venice's Ghetto - 14th century - Griko - Italian - Hebrew - Castile - Judería - Majorca - Call

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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 objects--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...for three or four decades of the nineteenth century this was not a black mark to the papal government--Vienna, Prague, Venince--and further East, in Russia and Poland, their treatment could be rougher" (Chadwick, Owen/A History of the Popes 1830-1914/Oxford University Press/2003/p.128-129). This was the last of the original ghettos to be abolished in Western Europe, when the kingdom of Italy was established in 1861 and overthrew the last of the Papal States in 1870, with the walls themselves physically being torn down in 1888.

Related Topics:
1555 - Pope Paul IV - Roman Ghetto - Cum nimis absurdum - Papal States

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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.

Related Topics:
Pope Pius V - Italy - Livorno - Pisa - Prague - Frankfurt am Main - Mainz

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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 have connoted impoverishment.

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Since Jews could not acquire land outside 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 during Easter Week and from the outside during Christmas or Pesach. Often ghetto residents had to have a pass to go outside of the bounds of the ghetto.

Related Topics:
Pogrom - Easter Week - Christmas - Pesach

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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.

Related Topics:
French Revolution - Napoleon - France - United Kingdom - Papal States - Pope Pius IX - 1870 - Nazi - World War II

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Famous ghettos include:

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• Josefov, Prague
• Le Marais, Paris
• Roman Ghetto
• Venice Ghetto

Second World War

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 Lodz 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 ?ód? Ghetto, the second largest, holding about 160,000,

Related Topics:
World War II - Nazi - Lodz Ghetto - Warsaw Ghetto - ?ód? Ghetto

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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 Lodz Ghetto 95% of apartments had no sanitation, piped water or sewers) hundreds of thousands of Jews died of disease and starvation.

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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.

Related Topics:
Operation Reinhard - Extermination camp - The Holocaust - Treblinka - Ghetto uprisings

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• List of Ghettos from deathcamps.org

Nazi-era ghettos on Wikipedia include:

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• Warsaw Ghetto
• Lodz Ghetto
• Kraków Ghetto
• Theresienstadt Ghetto
• Budapest ghetto
• Cluj Ghetto

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