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Concept
Ghetto
Summary
A ghetto is a part of a city in which members of a minority group live, especially as a result of political, social, legal, environmental or economic pressure. Ghettos are often known for being more impoverished than other areas of the city. Versions of the ghetto appear across the world, each with their own names, classifications, and groupings of people.The term was originally used for the Venetian Ghetto in Venice, Italy, as early as 1516, to describe the part of the city where Jewish people were restricted to live and thus segregated from other people. However, early societies may have formed their own versions of the same structure; words resembling ghetto in meaning appear in Hebrew, Yiddish, Italian, Germanic, Old French, and Latin. During the Holocaust, more than 1,000 Nazi ghettos were established to hold the Jewish populations of Europe, with the goal of exploiting and killing European Jews as part of the Final Solution of Nazi Germany.
The term ghetto acquired deep cultural meaning in the United States, especially in the context of segregation and civil rights; as such, it has been widely used in the country to refer to poor neighborhoods. It is also used in some European countries such as Romania and Slovenia to refer to poor neighborhoods.
The word ghetto comes from the Jewish area of Venice, the Venetian Ghetto in Cannaregio (1516–1797). By 1899, the term had been extended to crowded urban quarters of other minority groups.
The etymology of the word is unknown. Anatoly Liberman has written a long article disproving all of the etymologies listed here:
One theory of the word tries to trace it to a special use of the Venetian ghèto, meaning 'foundry' (there was one near the site of that city's ghetto when it was founded in 1516).
According to various other theories it comes from:
the Hebrew get or ghet ('divorce document', 'deed of separation')
the Yiddish gehektes ('enclosed')
the Late Latin Giudaicetum ('Jewish enclave')
the Italian borghetto ('little town, small section of a town'; diminutive of borgo, a word of Germanic origin; see borough)
the Old French guect ('guard')
Another possibility is from the Italian Egitto ('Egypt', from Latin: Aegyptus), possibly in memory of the exile of the Israelites in Egypt.
Official source
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