Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the Spread of an Idea - Hardcover

Duneier, Mitchell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374161801 ISBN 13: 9780374161804

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2016

Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book of 2016
Winner of the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize

On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto—a closed quarter named for the copper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck.

In this sweeping and original account, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot comprehend the entanglements of race, poverty, and place in America today without recalling the ghettos of Europe, as well as earlier efforts to understand the problems of the American city.

Ghetto is the story of the scholars and activists who tried to achieve that understanding. As Duneier shows, their efforts to wrestle with race and poverty cannot be divorced from their individual biographies, which often included direct encounters with prejudice and discrimination in the academy and elsewhere. Using new and forgotten sources, Duneier introduces us to Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, graduate students whose conception of the South Side of Chicago established a new paradigm for thinking about Northern racism and poverty in the 1940s. We learn how the psychologist Kenneth Clark subsequently linked Harlem’s slum conditions with the persistence of black powerlessness, and we follow the controversy over Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on the black family. We see how the sociologist William Julius Wilson redefined the debate about urban America as middle-class African Americans increasingly escaped the ghetto and the country retreated from racially specific remedies. And we trace the education reformer Geoffrey Canada’s efforts to transform the lives of inner-city children with ambitious interventions, even as other reformers sought to help families escape their neighborhoods altogether.

Duneier offers a clear-eyed assessment of the thinkers and doers who have shaped American ideas about urban poverty—and the ghetto. The result is a valuable new estimation of an age-old concept.

About this title

About the Author

Mitchell Duneier is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and the author of the award-winning urban ethnographies Slim’s Table and Sidewalk.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Ghetto

The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea

By Mitchell Duneier

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2016 Mitchell Duneier
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-374-16180-4

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Preface, 
1. A Nazi Deception, 
2. Chicago, 1944: Horace Cayton, 
3. Harlem, 1965: Kenneth Clark, 
4. Chicago, 1987: William Julius Wilson, 
5. Harlem, 2004: Geoffrey Canada, 
6. The Forgotten Ghetto, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Acknowledgments, 
Index, 
Photographs, 
Also by Mitchell Duneier, 
A Note About the Author, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

A NAZI DECEPTION

While W.E.B. Du Bois was studying philosophy at the University of Berlin in the final decade of the nineteenth century, he believed — as do many Americans even today — that racial troubles in the United States were both the most serious in the world and utterly unique. As he later recalled, "Race problems at the time were to me purely problems of color, and principally of slavery in the United States and near-slavery in Africa." Much to his surprise, a fellow student, a Pole from Kraków, scoffed at the narrowness of his view: "You know nothing, really nothing, about real race problems."

Du Bois therefore decided to tour Europe in 1893, to observe social conditions for himself in various countries. From Germany he traveled to Switzerland and Italy, stopping in Venice and Vienna, then making his way from Budapest to a small town in Galicia (currently part of Ukraine). Here a taxi driver asked him whether he would be willing to stop unter die Juden. A bit confused by the question, Du Bois agreed, and thus they drove to a small Jewish hotel. There he saw for the first time large numbers of Jews living in a wholly Jewish quarter, as though the early modern ghetto had disappeared in name only. Du Bois continued on to Kraków. Although the idea of a "Jewish problem" gradually grew in his mind, he could not learn much from either Polish students or their professors, all of whom seemed oblivious to it.

Upon returning to Germany, he began to sense the problem everywhere, but as in Poland, it was rarely discussed. Several minor incidents, however, drew his attention. One time, while visiting a German town with one of his classmates, Du Bois noticed that people were acting strangely toward the two of them. He assumed this was due to his being black until his friend quietly told him, "They think I may be a Jew. It's not you they object to, it's me." Du Bois was shocked. He hadn't realized that his friend's dark hair roused suspicions that he was Jewish.

Du Bois returned to the United States bent on investigating the problem of race. His first great work, The Philadelphia Negro (1899) — the book that established his reputation and helped pioneer what was arguably "the first scientific school of American sociology" — was a study of the black sections of the Seventh Ward of that city. In it he never referred to the "ghetto," a term that was used by those who knew it to refer to early modern dense Jewish neighborhoods. Nearly twenty years later, in 1917, on the heels of a summer race riot in East St. Louis, Illinois, Du Bois drew a link between blacks and Jews: "Russia has abolished the ghetto — shall we restore it?" Yet it was only decades later that Du Bois fully grasped the magnitude of the Jewish problem. After World War II, in 1949, Du Bois made a consequential trip to Poland, this time visiting the zone that during the war had been called the Warsaw ghetto. For this great intellectual of race, who had witnessed race riots in Atlanta and the marching of the Ku Klux Klan through the South, to see total annihilation in the name of racial purity was a transformative experience.

* * *

By the time that Adolf Hitler consolidated his power in 1933, the concept of Jewish segregation already had a long and complicated history. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Jews in France and England and the German lands (there was no unified "Germany" until 1870) still lived in semi-voluntary Jewish quarters for reasons of safety as well as communal activity and self-help. They created these neighborhoods near synagogues, and often in the center of towns and near the cathedral, as in Paris. Yet though the synagogue lay at the center of their social existence, the quarters in which Jews lived were hardly cut off from the surrounding city. Medieval Jews had substantial freedom to come and go as they pleased. They were aware of doings in other communities spread throughout the area we call Western and Central Europe. They traveled and had regular contact with Jewish travelers. Some also read local and vernacular literature, and the elite knew Latin and even canon law, the law of the Church.

Nonetheless, Jewish life became increasingly difficult. The First Crusade of 1096 brought great slaughter in the Rhineland, and lay rulers were often exploitative. Thanks too to the Church's growing fears for the purity of the individual Christian, restrictions increased. "Excessive contact" with Jews on the social level — such as sharing a common table or sexual relations — was considered polluting. The severity of Jewish existence under increasingly restrictive rulers and an increasingly hostile populace did not mean Jewish culture was moribund. Jewish life, especially religious and intellectual life, knew periods of true flowering. Moreover, Jewish quarters were almost never obligatory or enclosed until the fifteenth century. The first notable case of obligatory segregation was in Frankfurt am Main. In Barcelona, Jews were also enclosed toward the end of the fifteenth century.

These enclosures were deemed insufficient, however, by those who worried that contact with Jews could lead Christians religiously astray. In 1492, in the now-united Spanish Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, the joint monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella decreed the expulsion of all Jews who had not yet converted to Christianity. They noted in their decree that enclosed urban quarters had not prevented contact between Jews and Christians, and that the kingdoms' remaining Jews could entice converts back to Judaism — therefore expulsion was the only way to remedy the situation. By that time, Jews had already been expelled from England (in 1290) and from France (in stages between 1306 and 1394). Jews in the German lands suffered great massacres during the fourteenth century, and by the fifteenth were scattered in many small towns. A closed quarter was an impracticality.

Meanwhile, the rulers of Poland welcomed Jewish migrants to help build up the country, despite the objections of the Church. The Jewish population also grew in Italy — mainly due to the entrance of those expelled from north of the Alps into the Italian center and north. For these Jews, the closed residential pattern would be instituted beginning with Venice in 1516.

Although some Jews resided in the city of Venice in the fifteenth century, they possessed no legal status and could not engage in moneylending, which was forbidden. The situation changed in 1509, as Jews living on the adjacent Venetian mainland were among the many refugees who fled across the lagoon to the city of Venice in the face of the invading armies of the League of Cambrai. Although the Venetian government ordered the refugees to go back home after it retook the captured areas, many Jews remained in the city. Eventually, in 1513, the government granted two wealthy Jews, originally from the mainland settlement of Mestre, a five-year charter permitting them to engage in moneylending in the city itself. Presumably the city leaders realized that they could provide the hard-pressed treasury with annual payments while also assisting the needy native poor, whose numbers had been swelled by the war. Some Jews were also authorized to sell strazzaria — literally, rags, but, by extension, secondhand clothing and other used items.

Many Venetians, and especially members of the clergy, who prided themselves on having "a most Catholic city," were greatly bothered by the phenomenon of newly arrived Jews living throughout Venice. Consequently, in 1516, the Senate passed legislation requiring all Jews residing throughout the city, as well as any who were to come in the future, to reside together on the island in Cannaregio, which was already known as the Ghetto Nuovo (the New Ghetto) because of its association with the municipal copper foundry previously located across the canal in the Ghetto Vecchio (the Old Ghetto). (Il ghetto or getto is derived from gettare, which means "the pouring or casting of metal.") To prevent Jews from going around the city at night, gates were erected on the side of the Ghetto Nuovo facing the Ghetto Vecchio, where a small wooden footbridge crossed the canal, and also at its other end. Christian guards were to open these two gates at sunrise when the Marangona bell sounded, and close them at sunset — though the closing hour was slightly extended to one hour after dark in summer and two in winter; only Jewish doctors, and later merchants, were routinely allowed outside after curfew. Permission to remain outside the gates was occasionally granted upon special request to other individuals, but almost never — with the exception primarily of a few doctors — was a Jew authorized to stay outside all night.

The Venice ghetto created a completely Jewish space within a much larger Christian polity. The space had little regulation from the outside — the Jews could both govern it and call it their own. It allowed for a certain flourishing. Although the Jews tried to avoid moving to the ghetto, which severely restricted their physical freedom, the institution represented a compromise that legitimized but carefully controlled their presence in the city.

However, the establishment of the ghetto did not ensure the continued residence of the Jews in Venice, for that privilege was based on the five-year charter of 1513. After its expiration, the Senate debated its renewal, with sharp differences of opinion as to what to do with the Jews. Ultimately, socioeconomic raison d'état triumphed over traditional religious hostility, and the charter of the Jewish moneylenders was renewed eventually after 1548 for regular five-year periods. Jews thus remained in the city behind ghetto walls and subject to numerous restrictions until the end of the Venetian Republic centuries later.

* * *

Within a relatively short time, "ghetto" came to define the enclosed Jewish residential areas in Venice, Rome, and elsewhere. "Isolation in space," writes Richard Sennett, "now became part of the problem defining what it meant to 'be Jewish.'" One informative source on this period is the largely forgotten book The Ghetto and the Jews of Rome, written by Ferdinand Gregorovius, a nineteenth-century medieval historian and Polish-born German resident of Italy. His book traces Roman Jews back seventeen centuries to the reign of the emperor Titus, who had conquered and destroyed Jerusalem and brought Jewish prisoners to Rome as slaves. Although Titus despised the Jews, he granted them the right to practice their religion, which they did, on and off, until Christianity became the official state religion in the late fourth century. As Gregorovius put it, to "ancient Roman contempt there was now added the new hatred for the enemies of Christ."

For Jews, things did indeed take a turn for the worse under the Church. Gregorovius describes the various forms of humiliation that they suffered even before being forced to move into the ghetto in the sixteenth century. Pope Paul II (1464–71), for example, began making Jews run Carnival races, which continued as an annual event until 1668. Although Carnival fell in the winter, the team of eight or twelve young Jewish racers were stripped down to their loincloths and force-fed beforehand "so as to make the race more difficult for them and at the same time more amusing for the spectators."

At papal inaugurations and coronations, Jews were required to stand by the side of the road and wait for the procession. Once it reached them, they handed the newly elected pope the scroll of the Law. After reading several words, he would customarily proclaim, "We confirm the Law, but condemn the Jewish people and their interpretation." "Thereupon," Gregorovius writes, "he rode on, and the Jews returned to their homes, either crushed to despair or quickened with hope, according as they fearsomely read the expression in the eyes of the pope."

Such belittlement undergirded and justified the new age of ghettos that would follow. In 1555, Paul IV issued the infamous bull "Cum nimis absurdum," which, among other things, stated that "all Jews should live solely in one and the same place, or if that is not possible, in two or three or as many as are necessary, which are to be contiguous and separated completely from the dwellings of Christians." After centuries of identifying themselves as Romans and enjoying relative freedom of movement, the city's Jews were forcibly relocated from the neighborhood of Trastevere to a small strip of land on the other side of the Tiber, where they were packed into a few dark and narrow streets that were regularly inundated by the flooding river. Two and eventually three gates were built into the ghetto walls, which stretched from the Ponte Fabricio to the Portico d'Ottavia, an ancient structure that had come to be used as a fish market. The walls that once offered Romans protection now became an instrument of imprisonment.

What prompted Paul IV to segregate the Jews in this way? To some extent his decision can be attributed to the chronic and habitual anti-Judaism prevalent across Europe. The official aim of the edict was to press Jews into conversion so that they could be saved from eternal damnation. In his book on the Roman ghetto in the sixteenth century, Kenneth Stow shows that the measure made it clear to Jews that as long as they stuck to their ways and remained different (in faith), they would not be permitted to participate in society at large. The Roman ghetto thus placed its residents in a kind of "social and spatial limbo." Not many Jews converted, so the measure primarily created a mechanism that differentiated "us," those outside the ghetto, from "them," the Jews.

For Jews whose families had lived freely in Rome for as long as anyone could remember, and whose ancestors had arrived before the spread of Christianity, this was a shattering blow. Stow shows that they had always considered themselves integral residents of Rome. Legally, they were citizens, with nearly full rights, though some rights were granted exclusively to Christians, such as permission to hold high office. On a more basic level, the Jews were anything but aliens or foreigners: they shared language and food with others; they spoke and wrote Italian and generally behaved in the manner of other Roman residents.

Stow shows that at first Jews could hardly have imagined that their residential separation would last for centuries. Only after the ghetto was enlarged in 1589 did they begin to grasp that this was their long-term fate and begin referring to the enclosed area as nostro ghet — "our ghetto" — punning on the word get, Hebrew for "bill of divorce." And about the divorce, they were correct.

The decree also came in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, which had shattered Western Europe's religious unity and placed the pope on the defensive. The Roman ghetto was established as the papacy was anxiously presenting its city as the "New Jerusalem." As the exclusive and divinely sanctioned capital of Christianity, Rome replaced the Jewish metropolis of the Old Testament and served as a preview of the Heavenly Jerusalem and/or Paradise. As pope after pope constructed magnificent churches and ornate fountains and piazzas, and poured money into the construction of the huge, marble-bedecked Basilica of St. Peter's, the enclosure of the city's approximately three thousand to four thousand Jews in a tiny, squalid strip along the Tiber made the city's new constructions that much more spectacular. Indeed, the Jewish residential zone, not far from key ancient ruins such as the Theater of Marcellus, as well as newly constructed churches, was highly visible to tourists and pilgrims. Bereft of new construction, the ghetto offered visual proof of the difference between old and new, Jews and Christians, damned and saved. Its existence enabled ecclesiastical officials to point out the immediate and stark contrast between the physical environment of those who embraced the "true" faith and those who rejected it. The squalor of the ghetto was viewed not as the direct consequence of discrimination and forced overpopulation, but as the natural state and deserved fate of those who had betrayed Christ. If "the perfect symmetry, proportion, and classical order of the new St. Peter's projected an image of Catholic unity, godliness and power," Irina Oryshkevich explains, "... then the patched quality of the [ghetto] ... denoted its users' ... moral crookedness and spiritual myopia."

Although the ghetto removed Jews physically from the rest of the city, daily contact with the outside world continued in Rome, just as it had in Venice. During the day, when the gates were open, Christians were free to enter the ghetto, while Jews could leave to work outside. By the third decade of the ghetto's existence, however, Jews began to experience a strong sense of spatial separation. Some may, in fact, have come to perceive the ghetto as a holy precinct, its barriers recalling the walls of ancient Jerusalem, the Holy City. All the same, culturally speaking, the Jews never stopped being Romans, speaking Italian — if a noticeably Judeo-Romanesco variant — on a daily basis, and writing it in a more formal mode. Moreover, many continued to be knowledgeable, if not always up-to-date, regarding general Italian culture.

The ghetto was always a mixed bag. Separation, while creating disadvantages for the Jews, also created conditions in which their institutional life could continue and even blossom. For Gregorovius, the fascinating thing about the Jews in Rome was that they had survived at all while the great civilization of ancient Rome, which had conquered Jerusalem, had fallen fourteen hundred years earlier.

After centuries of separation, a prime problem for Jewish ghetto residents was that the restrictions imposed on them undercut their livelihoods. By the decree of "Cum nimis absurdum," they were no longer permitted to deal in new merchandise. The fifty or so Jewish banks (really small-scale pawnbroking shops) in Rome were eventually dissolved by papal order. These measures impoverished banking families, who, deprived of funds, sometimes converted to Catholicism. Of the approximately thirty-six hundred Jews who remained in the Roman ghetto by 1843, some nineteen hundred eked out a living by selling or repairing old clothes.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0374161801
• ISBN 13: 9780374161804
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 292