The Ghetto: A Very Short Introduction

For three hundred years the ghetto defined Jewish culture in the late medieval and early modern period in Western Europe. In the nineteenth-century it was a free-floating concept which travelled to Eastern Europe and the United States. Eastern European ghettos, which enabled genocide, were crudely rehabilitated by the Nazis during World War Two as if they were part of a benign medieval tradition. In the United States, the word ghetto was routinely applied to endemic black ghettoization which has lasted from 1920 until the present. Outside of America the ghetto has been universalized as the incarnation of class difference, or colonialism, or apartheid, and has been applied to segregated cities and countries throughout the world.

In this Very Short Introduction Bryan Cheyette unpicks the extraordinarily complex layers of contrasting meanings that have accrued over five hundred years to ghettos, considering their different settings across the globe. He considers core questions of why and when urban, racial, and colonial ghettos have appeared, and who they contain. Exploring their various identities, he shows how different ghettos interrelate, or are contrasted, across time and space, or even in the same place.

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This overview of the changing meaning of the ghetto across the globe and through time is highly recommended for readers new to the subject, as well as for those who wish to deepen their knowledge through its excellent bibliography. -- Laura Vaughan, LSE Review of Books

Bryan Cheyette has vigorously met the challenge of looking at ghettos in history and literature from 16th-century Italy to present-day America. -- David Abulafia, Jewish Renaissance

Bryan Cheyette demonstrates in his deftly written historical and literary survey of the multiple ways in which this term (in the ghetto) has been used over the centuries ... one of the strengths of this short book is the way in which Cheyette illuminates the ways in which, in every historical period, the understanding of what it meant to live in a ghetto was a dynamic, shifting phenomenon. -- Howard Cooper, Jewish Chronicle