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Ghetto
In the Jewish diaspora, a Jewish quarter is the area of a
city traditionally inhabited by Jews. Jewish quarters, like
the Jewish ghettos in Europe, were often the outgrowths of
segregated ghettos instituted by the surrounding Christian
authorities or in World War Two, the Nazis. A Yiddish term
for a Jewish quarter or neighborhood is "Di yiddishe gas"
(Yiddish: די ייִדדישע גאַס ), or "The Jewish street". Many
European and Middle Eastern cities once had a historical
Jewish quarter and some still have it.
Jewish ghettos in Europe existed because Jews were viewed as
alien due to being a cultural minority and due to their
non-Christian beliefs in a Renaissance Christian
environment. As a result, Jews were placed under strict
regulations throughout many European cities. The character
of ghettos has varied through times. In some cases, the
ghetto was a Jewish quarter with a relatively affluent
population (for instance the Jewish ghetto in Venice). In
other cases, ghettos were places of terrible poverty and
during periods of population growth, ghettos (as that of
Rome), had narrow streets and tall, crowded houses.
Residents had their own justice system.
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Around the ghetto stood walls that, during pogroms, were
closed from inside to protect the community, but from the
outside during Christmas, Pesach, and Easter Week to prevent
the Jews from leaving during those times. Starting in the
early second millennium Jews became an asset for rulers who
regarded them as a reliable and steady source of taxes and
fees. They often went through great lengths to have them
settle in their realm, offering protected settlements and
endowing them with special "privileges". A first such ghetto
was documented by bishop Rüdiger Huzmann of Speyer in 1084.
A mellah (Arabic ملاح, probably from the word ملح, Arabic
for "salt") is a walled Jewish quarter of a city in Morocco,
an analogue of the European ghetto. Jewish populations were
confined to mellahs in Morocco beginning from the 15th
century and especially since the early 19th century. In
cities, a mellah was surrounded by a wall with a fortified
gateway. Usually, the Jewish quarter was situated near the
royal palace or the residence of the governor, in order to
protect its inhabitants from recurring riots. In contrast,
rural mellahs were separate villages inhabited solely by the
Jews.
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During World War II, ghettos in occupied Europe 1939-1944
were established by the Nazis to confine Jews and sometimes
Gypsies into tightly packed areas of the cities of Eastern
Europe, turning them into de-facto concentration camps and
death camps in the Holocaust. Though the common usage is
ghetto, the Nazis most often referred to these areas in
documents and signage at their entrances as Judischer
Wohnbezirk or Wohngebiet der Juden (German); both translate
as Jewish Quarter.
These Nazi ghettos used to concentrate Jews before
extermination sometimes coincided with traditional Jewish
ghettos and Jewish quarters, but not always. Expediency was
the key factor for the Nazis in the Final Solution. Nazi
ghettos as stepping stones on the road to the extermination
of European Jewry existed for varying amounts of time,
usually the function of the number of Jews who remained to
be killed but also because of the employment of Jews as
slave labor by the Wehrmacht and other German institutions,
until Heinrich Himmler's decree issued on June 21, 1943,
ordering the dissolution of all ghettos in the East and
their transformation into concentration camps.
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