As you might have gathered from our blog’s title, the Code Switch team is kind of obsessed with the ways we speak to each other. Each week in “Word Watch,” we’ll dig into language that tells us something about the way race is lived in America today. (Interested in contributing? Holler at this form.)
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.
But whatever the root language, the word’s original meaning was clear: “the quarter in a city, chiefly in Italy, to which the Jews were restricted,” as the OED puts it. In the 16th and 17th centuries, cities like Venice, Frankfurt, Prague and Rome forcibly segregated their Jewish populations, often walling them off and submitting them to onerous restrictions.
By the late 19th century, these ghettos had been steadily dismantled. But instead of vanishing from history, ghettos reappeared — with a purpose more ominous 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.
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.