The word “ghetto” was first used in 1516 in Venice, Italy, to refer to the segregated neighborhood of the city’s Jewish inhabitants, who were required by law to reside within a few small blocks. The Venetian Ghetto was located in the same area as the city’s old copper foundry and, as a result, it is generally acknowledged that the term “ghetto” derived from the Venetian verb gettare, meaning to throw or to cast. In the 15th and 16th centuries, authorities in several other major European cities such as Rome, Frankfurt, and Prague ordered the creation of ghettos for their local Jewish populations, often walling them off and subjecting them to a series of laws or restrictions. Other cities, such as Vilna, Lithuania, had historic Jewish quarters dating from the Middle Ages, where the local Jewish population voluntarily concentrated and established their own neighborhoods.
By the 19th century, however, “ghetto” had become synonymous for Jewish residential areas throughout Europe, although they encompassed many different forms of spaces “ranging from courtyards and streets to city quarters up to villages and towns, of which most were not compulsory.”
During World War II, the word “ghetto” was appropriated to describe designated sections of Nazi-controlled cities where German authorities concentrated local Jewish populations. Historians trace the origin of the so-called Nazi “ghetto policy” to a meeting on November 12, 1938, when Hermann Göring broached the idea of erecting sealed-off ghettos to completely exclude Jews from German society. At the time, key personnel, most notably Reinhard Heydrich, opposed this idea, believing ghettos would become epicenters for crime and epidemics. About a year later, however, Heydrich and others began calling for the segregation of Warsaw’s Jewish population, although the term “concentrated cities” was initially used to refer to these confined areas instead of the word “ghetto.”