Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Historiography and Popular Understandings
- 2 Ghetto: The Source of the Term and the Phenomenon in the Early Modern Age
- 3 Ghetto and Ghettoization as Cultural Concepts in the Modern Age
- 4 The Nazis' Anti-Jewish Policy in the 1930s in Germany and the Question of Jewish Residential Districts
- 5 First References to the Term “Ghetto” in the Ideological Discourse of the Makers of Anti-Jewish Policy in the Third Reich (1933–1938)
- 6 The Semantic Turning Point in the Meaning of “Ghetto”: Peter-Heinz Seraphim and Das Judentum im osteuropäischen Raum
- 7 The Invasion of Poland and the Emergence of the “Classic” Ghettos
- 8 Methodological Interlude: The Term “Ghettoization” and Its Use During the Holocaust Itself and in Later Scholarship
- 9 Would the Idea Spread to Other Places? Amsterdam 1941, the Only Attempt to Establish a Ghetto West of Poland
- 10 Ghettos During the Final Solution, 1941–1943: The Territories Occupied in Operation Barbarossa
- 11 Ghettos During the Final Solution Outside the Occupied Soviet Union: Poland, Theresienstadt, Amsterdam, Transnistria, Salonika, and Hungary
- 12 Summary and Conclusions
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Ghetto and Ghettoization as Cultural Concepts in the Modern Age
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Historiography and Popular Understandings
- 2 Ghetto: The Source of the Term and the Phenomenon in the Early Modern Age
- 3 Ghetto and Ghettoization as Cultural Concepts in the Modern Age
- 4 The Nazis' Anti-Jewish Policy in the 1930s in Germany and the Question of Jewish Residential Districts
- 5 First References to the Term “Ghetto” in the Ideological Discourse of the Makers of Anti-Jewish Policy in the Third Reich (1933–1938)
- 6 The Semantic Turning Point in the Meaning of “Ghetto”: Peter-Heinz Seraphim and Das Judentum im osteuropäischen Raum
- 7 The Invasion of Poland and the Emergence of the “Classic” Ghettos
- 8 Methodological Interlude: The Term “Ghettoization” and Its Use During the Holocaust Itself and in Later Scholarship
- 9 Would the Idea Spread to Other Places? Amsterdam 1941, the Only Attempt to Establish a Ghetto West of Poland
- 10 Ghettos During the Final Solution, 1941–1943: The Territories Occupied in Operation Barbarossa
- 11 Ghettos During the Final Solution Outside the Occupied Soviet Union: Poland, Theresienstadt, Amsterdam, Transnistria, Salonika, and Hungary
- 12 Summary and Conclusions
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
…the fanatic bigotry which built the ghettos, was the most active means in God's Hands to keep us afar from the lack of culture of the Middle Ages and in confined circles to nurse the sense of family life and family happiness and the sense of communal life in us.
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, commentary on Genesis 45:11 (1867)The common people have not, and indeed cannot have, any historic comprehension. They do not know that the sins of the Middle Ages are now being visited on the nations of Europe. We are what the Ghetto made us.…When civilized nations awoke to the inhumanity of discriminatory legislation and enfranchised us, our enfranchisement came too late. It was no longer possible to remove our disabilities in our old homes. For we had, curiously enough, developed while in the Ghetto into a bourgeois people, and we stepped out of it only to enter into fierce competition with the middle classes.
Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat, chapter 2 (trans. Sylvie D'Avigdor) (1896)The ghetto had been abolished long before, but nevertheless there still existed an invisible wall which separated the [Jewish] quarter from the rest of the city. Many Polish children spoke about it with fear, and their parents spoke about it with contempt.
Bernard Singer, Moje Nalewki (1959, referring to the interwar period)Even though it is not yet totally clear how the term ghetto spread from Italy throughout the European cultural sphere, its dissemination certainly took place during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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- The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos during the Holocaust , pp. 25 - 30Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011