Beginning with the Egyptian bondage and continuing through the Assyrian deportation, the Babylonian captivity, and the great Diaspora, Jewish people have found themselves living among Gentiles of many nationalities (see Judaism, Development of). Originating from the Latin word for "nations," "Gentile" simply means any nonJewish person.
Frequently, especially in Europe beginning in the Middle Ages, Gentiles established Jewish-only quarters of the city called ghettos. This was not a new concept. Way back in the time of the Exodus, Jewish people were confined to the "land of Goshen" while building bricks for the Egyptians. Although the term is now used in a more generic sense, it often was the custom to wall in the Jewish ghetto at night and to completely lock it off during Christian Holy Days to prevent mixing between Christians and Jews.
Even under these harsh and demeaning circumstances, Jewish leaders attempted to run their communities according to Talmudic law, providing for the especially poor and fostering Jewish study and scholarship.
Among the most notorious ghettos were those established by the Nazis during World War II. One such ghetto was established in 1940, when the Nazis ordered all the Jews in Warsaw, Poland, to gather in a certain part of the city, then erected a tenfoot wall to seal off the area. An article published by the Public Broadcasting System describes the conditions: More than 400,000 Jews lived there, near starvation; 10 percent of the population died from disease by the end of the first year. Deportations of "non-productive" inhabitants began in 1942, and 300,000 Jews were deported that year, most of them to Treblinka death camp. In April of 1943, when the Nazis moved to liquidate the ghetto, the remaining inhabitants began their desperate, and hopeless, resistance. Shortly before his death in battle, resistance leader Mordecai Anielewicz wrote, "My life's dream has been realized. I have lived to see Jewish defense in the ghetto rally its greatness and glory."
a part of the city set aside as a residential area for Jews. The designation “ghetto” appeared in the 16th century (apparently from Italian ghetta—the cannon workshop around which the Jewish quarter of Venice, set up in 1516, was situated). However, ghettos existed in many medieval European cities prior to that date (the best-known ghettos were in Frankfurt am Main, Prague, Venice, and Rome).
The settling of Jews in ghettos originally was in keeping with the corporate order characteristic of the Middle Ages, when every professional or religious group lived in isolation, but in the 14th and 15th centuries it became compulsory. Residents of the ghetto were forbidden to leave it at night (the ghetto gates were locked for the night). Life within the ghetto was regulated by the wealthy upper-class members of the Jewish community and by the rabbinate. A legacy of the Middle Ages, the ghettos disappeared in the first half of the 19th century (the Roman ghetto was permanently abolished only in 1870). There were no ghettos in tsarist Russia. Only in a few cities annexed to its territory when Poland was partitioned (late 18th century) was there a restriction on the right of Jews to live outside streets assigned to them; this restriction was ended in 1862.
During World War II (1939-45), in a number of Eastern European cities under fascist German occupation, the Nazis created ghettos that were essentially huge concentration camps in which the Jewish population was destroyed. The armed uprisings of the prisoners of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 and the Białystok ghetto in August 1943 were part of the national liberation struggle of Poland’s antifascist forces.
The term “ghetto” is sometimes used to designate a section of the city inhabited by national minorities that are subject to discrimination (for example, Harlem, “Negro ghetto” in New York).
S. IA. BOROVOI