500 Years Later The Mysterious Origin of the Word ‘Ghetto’

A seven-branched menorah on a building in the Venetian ghetto. Credit: John W. Schulze, Flickr Creative Commons

For anyone who walks through the remains of the Warsaw or Krakow ghettos on the March of the Living, the word “ghetto” carries enormous weight. But the word – and the idea – are far older than the Holocaust. They go back to Venice, in 1516.

The first ghetto: Venice, 1516

Jews in medieval Europe often lived close together by choice, near a synagogue, a kosher butcher and a mikveh. What Venice created in 1516 was different. Jews were required to live in one walled district. Its gates were locked at night and guarded, and a curfew was enforced.

The model spread to other Italian cities, and over the 16th and 17th centuries to much of Europe. The word itself appears in a papal bull of 1562, borrowing the name already used for the Jewish quarter of Venice.

The main square of the Venetian ghetto, once a walled district where Jews were forced to live. Credit: Moshe Gilad

Where does the word come from?

No one knows for certain. The main theories:

• Getto, Italian for “foundry.” The Venetian ghetto was built on the site of an old foundry. This is the most commonly cited explanation, but it has a problem: getto is pronounced with a soft “g,” and “ghetto” with a hard one.
• Borghetto, Italian for “little town.” Perhaps the most plausible, though the word was a general one, not specific to Jews.
• Get, the Hebrew word for a bill of divorce. It is hard to see how a term for divorce papers would come to mean a Jewish district.

The Nazis bring the ghetto back

With the Enlightenment in the 18th and 19th centuries, European states gradually gave Jews equal rights, and the ghetto walls came down. By the early 20th century, ghettos seemed to belong to the past.

The Nazis revived them. Weeks after invading Poland in September 1939, they set up the first Nazi ghetto, in Piotrków Trybunalski, in October 1939. Hundreds more followed across occupied Poland and Eastern Europe.

These ghettos were not neighborhoods but holding pens. They were sealed, overcrowded and starved. In the Warsaw Ghetto, an average of seven people lived in each room, and tens of thousands died of hunger and disease. From 1942, the Nazis began liquidating the ghettos, deporting their residents to death camps where most were murdered.

Laundry hanging in the Venice ghetto. Credit: Bryan Ledgard, Flickr

A word that changed meaning

After the war, “ghetto” lived on in English with a new meaning: a poor urban neighborhood where a minority group is concentrated. The broader use is often traced to the British Jewish writer Israel Zangwill and his 1892 novel Children of the Ghetto. Over time it entered everyday slang, often with no connection to its Jewish history.

On the March of the Living, students stand where the ghettos of Warsaw, Krakow and Lodz once stood, and learn what the word really meant for the Jews forced to live – and die – behind those walls.

Adapted from an article first published in Haaretz.

Read survivor stories from the March of the Living