ancient cities

Today, the Museo Communita Ebraica in Campo
Ghetto Nuevo offers tours of the ghetto, with visits
to three of the historic synagogues. There is a
guided tour in the footsteps of Shylock (to connect
us back to The Merchant of Venice). The ghetto
remains a tourist destination, somewhat off the
beaten path even though it is very near the train
station; and there is an official tourist map available
in English, Japanese, and other languages at
the Venetian tourist offices.
The Ghetto in the United States
Given the usual narrative concerning the influence
of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, one
might expect that the beginning point for discussion
of the ghetto in American cities would be the
publication of Louis Wirth’s classic study, The
Ghetto. But although ghetto was used by African
American scholars to describe segregated neighborhoods
as far back as the 1890s, it was not commonly
used in the social sciences to refer to black
settlement patterns for another quarter century.
Early References
References to the ghetto were commonplace in
Jewish popular culture from the late nineteenth
century onward. Children of the Ghetto (1892) by
the British journalist Israel Zangwell (1864–1926)
was dramatized and performed in England and
America (he also published a series of biographical
studies titled Dreamers of the Ghetto,
1898). Abraham Cahan (1860–1951), the Russian
American journalist, immigrated to New York in
1882 and published Yekl: A Tale of the New York
Ghetto (1898). This work presents the ghetto both
as a historic entity and contemporary place and
refers to the continuity of “ghetto culture” from
the old world in New York’s Lower East Side.
During the same period, African American
scholars used ghetto to describe urban neighborhoods
with significant Black populations. In The
Black North: A Social Study, W. E. B. Du Bois
describes the growth of the Black population in
Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, which he says was a
residential area for 50 years before African
Americans were forced into “a ghetto bordering
the Delaware River.” The ghetto here refers to an
area of first settlement.
Ghetto
311
Louis Wirth’s classic study of the Chicago
ghetto, completed under the direction of Robert
Park, was published first as an article in
the American Journal of Sociology (this was
common for the Chicago School studies) and
appeared as a book a year later in 1928. Wirth
gives a historical overview of the Jewish ghetto
in Frankfurt and other European cities before
describing the Chicago ghetto, where he traces
the movement of the Chicago ghetto from the
Maxwell Street neighborhood (the area of first
settlement known as the ghetto) into North
Lawndale (called “Deutschland” because this
was the area of second settlement for German
Jews) and notes that already there was a movement
out of this area into the north side neighborhoods.
(This was not the first discussion of
the Maxwell Street ghetto, as the area is
described by Manuel Zeublin in The Chicago
Ghetto, published in 1895.)
Robert Park’s race relations cycle provided
the theoretical narrative; according to Park,
the first stage of contact would be followed by
competition, then accommodation, and finally
assimilation. For Wirth, the Chicago ghetto was
similar to other ethnic enclaves, an area where
first-generation immigrants live and over time
become assimilated to the mores of the larger
society. Wirth’s description of the assimilation
of Jewish immigrants in The Ghetto would
serve as a model for the acculturation of other
ethnic—and later racial—groups. Although his
work is cited in many of the Chicago School
studies, it is important to note that in these
studies the ghetto is used strictly to refer to
the Jewish ghetto, not to other poverty neighborhoods
(these remain slums), not to other
ethnic neighborhoods (these remain Little Italy
and the like), and not to African American areas
(this will remain the Black Belt in the Chicago
School literature). St. Clair Drake and Horace
Cayton’s classic work Black Metropolis (1945)
presents a study of Bronzeville, as the south
side Chicago had become known. The term
ghetto is used in only one section (it does not
appear in the index), and it is used as a geographical
reference to describe the poorest area
of Bronzeville. Clearly, the ghetto was located
within Bronzeville, but Bronzeville itself was
not a ghetto.