THE IDEA AND HISTORY OF THE GHETTO

Mitchell Duneier, Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea ( New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016) (From the book jacket: "On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto--a closed quarter named for the cooper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck." "In this sweeping and original account, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot comprehend the entanglements of race, poverty, and place in America today without recalling the ghettos of Europe, as well as earlier efforts to understand the problems of the American city." "Ghetto is the story of the scholars and activists who tried to achieve that understanding. . . ." From the text: "Hitler's came that he was reviving the ghetto of the Middle Ages was completely misleading. The Nazii ghetto was something entirely new" "First, the nazi ghetto illustrated that it was now possible to control a segregated population with absolute efficiency. [] Second, this efficiency made it possible for the Nazi ghettos to introduce as compete segregation as the world had ever seen. While the earlier ghettos had allowed relatively easy passage of people and merchandise during the daytime, many of the Nazi ghettos fenced in their inhabitants day and night. Only those who obtained the rare exit permit were allowed to pass through the gates, others who tried to do so were shot. [] Third, in earlier centuries religion had justified the segregation of Jews. A defining component of Nazi ghetto logic was, by contrast, race. [] Fourth, as in the earlier enforced ghetto, so too in the Nazi ghetto, problems fed on each other in a vicious cycle. This time the results were qualitatively different. Both qualified German physicians and ideological Nazis claimed that the Jews were carriers of disease who required quarantine. [] The purported probability that they would spend the illness was an important reason to have them ghettoized. [] Fifth, the Nazi ghettos were sites of continuous violence and brutality. Residents were forced to watch their fellow citizens die in mass executions, or to participate themselves in stoning fellow Jewish rule-breakers who were later buried in mass graves. To remain alive, to engage in self-preservation was the only imperative. . . ." Id. at 18-21. "On October 9, 1944, Virginia Dobbins brought a house on a white block just outside of Chicago's black neighborhoods. A few days later, when she arrived with her belongings, she found the neighbors removing the plumbing. 'We don't want a riot here,' the people next door explained. 'So we're tearing the house down. We don't want no trouble.' Mrs. Dobbins went to the Eighteenth District police station and pleaded for protection. The officer refused, explaining that while he could send a police car to check the house, he had no special order from the commissioner to guard it. The house was then torched and flooded by neighbors, leaving it in shambles." Id. at 26. Also, see Khalil Gibran Muhammad, "A People Apart," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/17/2016.).