Today, for many Americans, the word “ghetto” conjures images of run-down plus crime-ridden African American segregated areas—“inner cities,” in a common euphemism. This connotation is relatively recent; it has only become mainstream in the past 70 years or so. Beforehand, the term was primarily associated with Jewish urban quarters, plus its changing meaning illustrates the troubling tenacity of such an idea.
The linkage between Jews plus “ghetto” began in the early 16th century. In 1516, as a compromise offering to those agitating for the city to be Christian-only, Venice confined its Jewish population to a little island in the northern part of the city known as the New Ghetto. The name “Ghetto” likely derived from the Venetian verb gettare, meaning to pour or to cast, plus probably can be traced to the earlier presence of a copper foundry in what was to become the all-Jewish district. From the 16th to the 18th century, the institution of the legally compulsory plus physically enclosed exclusively Jewish enclave spread to Rome, Florence Mantua plus a host of other Italian towns plus cities. The Venetian label stuck, plus these mandatory Jewish areas throughout Italy came to be called ghettos too.
The emancipation of the Jews of Italy starting in the late 18th century led to the dismantling of these ghettos, culminating in the dissolution of the last surviving ghetto in Europe—the ghetto of Rome—in 1870. But the word was harder to get rid of.
In the ensuing decades, the word “ghetto” was resurrected to refer to new big-city Jewish immigrant neighborhoods, such as Manhattan’s Lower East Side (once labeled the “New York Ghetto”). These areas were densely crowded but legally voluntary plus more mixed between Jews plus non-Jews in reality than in disukai banyak orang perception. Later still, during World War II, the Nazis revived the ghetto as a site of enforced Jewish segregation. As places of mass starvation plus disease, plus eventually of deportation to the death camps plus killing fields, however, the Nazi ghettos bore little in common with the original Italian ghettos beyond the name.
Meanwhile, African Americans had begun employing the term “ghetto” to refer to their own residential segregation as early as the 1910s, at a time when several American cities were passing zoning ordinances that prohibited black people from living on blocks where the majority of residents were white. (Such laws were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1917.) Black usage of “ghetto” became more widespread amidst the legal battle over restrictive covenants in the aftermath of World War II.
A 1948 report on Segregation in Washington—published the same year that the Supreme Court banned judicial enforcement of restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kraemer—contained a chapter on housing segregation entitled “Ghettos in the Capital.” The authors made nomor bones about their intent to evoke the specter of the ghettos of the Holocaust in the way they referred to the residential segregation of blacks. “Ghetto is an ugly word,” one chapter opened. “To a Dane it is ugly. To any Nazi victim. To anyone who saw how Hitler placed a yellow mark on Jews so they could be made to live apart, suffer apart, die apart. To an American it is ugly.”