In 1943, the word ‘ghetto’ was used to describe restricted areas—walled o= areas— where Jews were forced to live in Nazi Germany. Today, Twitter users use the word ‘ghetto’ about 20 times per minute as a descriptive adjective, a fact which has made many cultural commentators speak out. As you read, take notes on how the word “ghetto” has evolved over time. [1] The word "ghetto" is an etymological mystery. Is it from the Hebrew get, or bill of divorce? From the Venetian ghèto, or foundry? From the Yiddish gehektes, "enclosed"? From Latin Giudaicetum, for "Jewish"? From the Italian borghetto, "little town"? From the Old French guect, "guard"? In his etymology column for the Oxford University Press, Anatoly Liberman took a look at each of these possibilities. He considered ever more improbable origins — Latin for "ribbon"? German for "street"? Latin for "to throw"? — before declaring the word a stubborn mystery. "Warsaw Ghetto Uprising" by Unknown is in the public domain. But whatever the root language, the word's original meaning was clear: "the quarter in a city, chieQy in Italy, to which the Jews were restricted," as the OED1 puts it. In the 16th and 17th centuries, cities like Venice, Frankfurt, Prague and Rome forcibly segregated their Jewish populations, often walling them oS and submitting them to onerous2 restrictions. By the late 19th century, these ghettos had been steadily dismantled. But instead of vanishing from history, ghettos reappeared — with a purpose more ominous3 than segregation — under Nazi Germany. German forces established ghettos in over a thousand cities across Europe. They were isolated, strictly controlled and resource-deprived — but unlike the ghettos of history, they weren't meant to last. [5] Reviving the Jewish ghetto made genocide a much simpler project. As the Holocaust proceeded, ghettos were emptied by the trainload. The prisoners of the enormous Warsaw ghetto which at one point held 400,000 Jews, famously fought their deportation to death camps. They were outnumbered and undersupplied, but some managed to die on their own terms; thousands of Jews were killed within the walls of the ghetto, rather than in the camps.
