Ghetto: The History of a Word by Daniel B. Schwartz (review)

Reviewed by: Ghetto: The History of a Word by Daniel B. Schwartz Murray Baumgarten Daniel B. Schwartz. Ghetto: The History of a Word. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. 266 pp. doi:10.1017/S036400942000029X Transformative changes of the last five hundred years mark the history of the ghetto—the word and the physical enclosure of the Jews that it names—from its invention in Venice in 1516 to the present, which Daniel B. Schwartz charts in this excellent and important book. His thorough account of the shifts, extensions, and changes in phrasing and meaning maps the genealogy of the word in this succinct historical narrative. The carefully deployed research ranges through Italian, Yiddish, German, Russian, Hebrew, and English sources and articulates the parameters of ghetto studies. The narrative traces the strata of successive redefinitions of the ghetto, as they are generated by theological, economic, political, military, genocidal, and racist decisions that have, in its five-hundred-year history, become embedded in this word. Ghetto: The History of a Word begins in Venice as the "compulsory Jewish quarter" for Jews to live in (25), and the reader learns how, elaborated throughout Italy over the next five decades, and Europe over the next five hundred years, it significantly changed its meanings [End Page 446] as it stigmatized and stereotyped the Jews, and was then in the United States extended to African Americans. From Venice, Schwartz takes us to Rome, where in 1555 Pope Paul IV gave the ghetto a severe Christian inflection. By 1562 the word is generalized: now it refers not to a Venetian sequestration of Jews in the Canareggio district, with rules and regulations intended to control the resident Jews and make them offer small loans to the poorer classes. In Rome, rather, the ghetto came to define a compulsory Jewish quarter in a generic sense, and this meaning spread throughout Italy. While "Christians may not have been permitted to live in the [Venice] ghetto, it was hardly off-limits to them," as it would become in Rome (37). Indeed, Christians came to the ghetto "to borrow on pledges, buy strazzaria [used clothing], or cut deals with wholesale merchants … [and] even came to observe Sabbath services in synagogue and to listen to the Italian-language sermons"—an early example of "ghetto tourism" (37). By contrast, "The Roman Ghetto sought to hem in Jews physically and economically as never before," yet "still assigned them a place, however narrow and stigmatized, within the city" (37). (Fast-forward to the Nazi ghetto, which was exclusive to Jews, there transformed into subhuman alien slave laborers.) In Rome, the ghetto became a Christian weapon: "The popes viewed the ghetto as more than simply a device for striking an equilibrium between acceptance and expulsion" (34). For "Jews had lived in Rome from before the establishment of the Roman Empire," and thus, "unlike in Venice, the creation of the ghetto in Rome could not be conceptually linked to the construction of a community" (34). The word remains the same, but now its meaning has changed: "If the Venetian Ghetto represented a move in the direction of greater (if still hedged) inclusion, the Roman Ghetto was just the opposite" (34–35). Rather than offering Jews protection in return for financial services, as the Venice ghetto had, "the papal ghetto was a punishment of sorts, one (albeit major) component of a concerted assault on Jewish life designed to make Jews thoroughly miserable and reduce them to penury" (35). In the latter half of the sixteenth century, papal ghettoization was part of a policy intended to accelerate Jewish conversion to Christianity through harsh discipline. Rather than diluting its stigma, the generalization of the word sharpened its anti-Jewish purposes. Even in liberal Piedmont, which in 1848 led the way for Jewish emancipation, the ghetto dated to 1679, and the Jews had been branded with the ghetto stereotype. Free now to move throughout the realm, the Jews thanked the king publicly in plaques in synagogues in smaller towns, as they continued to struggle with the definition of aliens that had been imposed on them. In The Influence of the Ghetto on the State (1782), the Mantuan nobleman and political economist...

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.