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
6 - The Semantic Turning Point in the Meaning of “Ghetto”: Peter-Heinz Seraphim and Das Judentum im osteuropäischen Raum
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 ghetto is at the same time the basis from which the Jewish expansion stems. From here, overpopulation and social misery push the Jews into the non-Jewish sectors of the economic and cultural life of the host countries. It is in the ghetto that the threads, not only of Jewish economic life, but also of the entire urban economic fabric, are woven together. This is where the merchants live, from the peddlers and rag-sellers through the middle-sized and large merchants and the exporters; this is the place from which the Jewish artisan who has been proletarianized finds his way to the factory; this is where the Jews' religious and political leaders are raised; this is where the Jewish essence is molded in its specific form, as it is found in Eastern Europe, in order to exert from here, from the business centers, an influence on the surroundings and on the nations among whom the Jews live.
Peter-Heinz Seraphim, Das Judentum im osteuropäischen Raum (1938)A dramatic change in how the term “ghetto” was understood can be discerned in the book by Peter-Heinz Seraphim, Das Judentum im osteuropäischen Raum (Jewry in the Territory of Eastern Europe), published in the autumn of 1938. The Jews of Eastern Europe (the Ostjuden) attracted the attention of scholars who worked in two disciplines – Eastern European studies (Ostforschung, in Nazi jargon), which had developed since 1936, and study of the Jews (Judenforschung), which developed in tandem with it.
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- The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos during the Holocaust , pp. 45 - 60Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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