Concept in Definition ABC

Although the term is currently used generalizing it to any establishment, generally, a town, city, or part of it, in which an ethnic minority lives or citizens who have been marginalized -or, occasionally, have self-marginalized-, the origin of the word ghetto It relates directly to Jewish communities, and the sadly best known are those created by the Nazis during World War II.

Originally, the word ghetto referred to a neighborhood or part of the city in which the Jewish community lived, separated from the Christian by a more or less permeable physical barriers, and that was forged in Venice at the beginning of the century XVI.

At that time, there was a significant increase in the population Jewish, because many of those who came to the city (one of the most important in Europe at that time) were Jewish refugees who escaped from Spain, from where they had been expelled.

The etymology of the word ghetto probably emanates from the Italian word borgo, what does it mean

town, more specifically from its diminutive, borghetto, taking only its final part.

However, the Venetian idea was not something original, since in an imposed way, the communities Jews had already been forced to reside in different neighborhoods from the rest of the population Christian.

Thus, for example, in Catalonia medieval, the Jewish neighborhoods of the cities were called call, a name that still persists, for example, in the toponymy of Gerona, although the only link that remains of that neighborhood with the Jewish population is the Jewish museum of the city, some preserved remains of the past, and the influx of tourists who are looking for precisely some reminiscence of this past Jewish.

What differentiates the ghetto from the neighborhoods in which Jews settled or were forced to do so? The modern pejorative connotation and being physically enclosed in some way, separate from the Christian community.

This is the case of Gerona, a city in which the ghetto had its own doors that closed at a certain time, in which would come to be a curfew that forced any member of the Jewish community to be inside when the time came for shut down.

Other discrimination with the Jews it was that they could be owned by someone, like a kind of slaves with a certain margin from Liberty although, for example, they were forbidden to leave the ghetto without asking permission from their lord.

In Catalonia, some Jewish communities were considered a property of the crown.

This isolation and belonging to a feudal lord did not save the Jewish communities from Christian religious fundamentalism, which materialized, for example, in assaults on the Jewries (Spanish name of call) of Barcelona and Mallorca in 1391.

From Italy, the concept of the ghetto passed to the rest of Europe, and ghettos are documented in Germany or France. It will not be until the French Revolution that these are abolished.

The ideals of enlightenment, equality between the people, and the secularism of the state, led to the beginning to stop considering the Jews as "different", a strange entity within society, to be considered as an integral part of it, without differentiation from gentiles or Christians.

The word ghetto would only regain validity in the most terrible way possible in the middle of the 20th century.

The concept of the ghetto was recovered by the Nazis during World War II, who created ghettos throughout Eastern Europe as they conquered it.

In these ghettos they were crowded, in a space of land much smaller than the one they really needed to live, and with subhuman living conditions, a large number of people who had not committed no crime, but that in the eyes of the white supremacists they were inferior by the mere fact of having a certain percentage of Jewish blood, according to the racial laws that they themselves had dictated.

Although it is very easy to simplify the violence Attributing it to the Germans, the truth is that populations from all over Europe participated in the repressive Nazi system in the form of volunteers, even those who were faced with the German invasion, but who gave vent to their anti-Jewish hatred, as is the case of Poland or Lithuania between others.

The German ghetto system was the first step to the subsequent extermination of Jewish communities.

From there, the survivors were destined for concentration and labor camps and, finally, death camps.

After the war, the use of the term ghetto began to spread as a form of pejorative contempt for neighborhoods in which a certain ethnic or nationality predominated, or very poor neighborhoods.

Thus, neighborhoods in which there was a high concentration of gypsies in Europe, or immigrant communities or ethnic groups in the United States who settled in the same neighborhood in the cities, were disparagingly called ghettos.

A good example of this is Little Italy in New York, or Chinatown in San Francisco, and although the ethnic issue has nothing to do with it, the difference economic among the inhabitants of the Brazilian favelas and those who live in the rest of the neighborhoods, mean that these can also be considered a ghetto.

Photos: Fotolia - Bumble Dee / Stefania Loriga

Ghetto Issues