It was a cold Jan­u­ary after­noon when I first came to the Ghet­to. I got there much lat­er than I had hoped. I had spent much of the day else­where and had lost track of time. It was already begin­ning to get dark. The cam­po seemed desert­ed. Shut­ters were closed and, apart from the tin­kling of water in the wells, there was hard­ly a sound. There were no street­lights, bare­ly even the glim­mer of a lamp. But in the branch­es of the trees, thou­sands of tiny lights were shining.

Hav­ing noth­ing else to do, I wan­dered idly across the square. On a wall oppo­site, I spot­ted an impos­ing bronze plaque. It was hard to make out in the gloom. Squint­ing, I could just see the image of a train, pulling what looked like trucks. Hun­dreds of peo­ple — and around them, sol­diers with guns. I caught my breath — a sharp intake of icy air. Behind the plaque, in a large, irreg­u­lar recess set with a met­al grille, there was an inscrip­tion with names. Not far off, there was anoth­er with a date. I picked out the num­bers slow­ly. Decem­ber 5, 1943. I stopped. Decem­ber 5. My birthday.

Just then, I heard a sound com­ing from my right. A gen­tle song, joy­ful and defi­ant. Turn­ing, I saw a light in a ground-floor win­dow and a small group of men dressed in black, shawls pulled up, nod­ding their heads in prayer. Then it struck me. It was Fri­day. The Sab­bath was begin­ning. Some­thing stabbed at my heart. With­out know­ing why, I burst into tears.

It was in that moment that my fas­ci­na­tion for the Venet­ian Ghet­to began. Although I did not real­ize it at the time, I had glimpsed—felt—the essence of its past. To most of us, the word ​“ghet­to” will be famil­iar. We know the trag­ic sto­ry of the War­saw Ghet­to, the Łódź Ghet­to, and the hor­rors that fol­lowed. We have heard it used of the ​“impris­oned cities” of Black Amer­i­cans, in parts of Harlem and Chica­go, Brownsville and Detroit. We have seen it reimag­ined in poems and songs. But it was there, in an out­‑of‑the-way cor­ner of Cannare­gio, that the ghet­to — and its benight­ed his­to­ry — was born.

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What makes the Venet­ian Ghet­to so his­tor­i­cal­ly impor­tant is not its orig­i­nal­i­ty per se. It was cer­tain­ly not the first time Jews had been con­fined to a sep­a­rate quar­ter. By the time it was estab­lished, on March 29, 1516, the prac­tice of seg­re­ga­tion was already a dis­tress­ing­ly famil­iar part of Euro­pean life. From at least the thir­teenth cen­tu­ry, Jews in cities through­out the con­ti­nent had lived in spec­i­fied neigh­bor­hoods, cut off from sur­round­ing areas by bar­ri­ers and iron gates. Some, like the vicus iude­o­rum in Cologne, were pure­ly vol­un­tary; in oth­ers, res­i­den­cy was only light­ly enforced. But in Prague, Frank­furt am Main, Mar­seilles, and at least a dozen oth­er cities, Jews were forced to live in areas that were ​“oblig­a­tory, sep­a­rate, and enclosed” — just as in Venice. 

Rather, the sig­nif­i­cance of the Venet­ian Ghet­to lies in its name — or what that name has come to rep­re­sent. After all, it was in Venice that the word ​“ghet­to” was coined. At root, of course, the term had noth­ing to do with Jews, let alone seg­re­ga­tion. Derived from the verb gettare, mean­ing ​“to cast,” it was orig­i­nal­ly the name of the munic­i­pal cop­per foundry (geto). It was just by chance that, when the Venet­ian gov­ern­ment decid­ed to con­fine the city’s Jews, it chose to house them on the island next door — which, hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly served as the foundry’s dump­ing ground, was known as the geto nuo­vo. The name stuck — and before long, it came to describe not just the island but the insti­tu­tion of Jew­ish seg­re­ga­tion itself.

This marked a turn­ing point. Until then, Jew­ish quar­ters through­out Europe had been known by a dizzy­ing array of names. Yet none had suc­ceed­ed in encap­su­lat­ing a clear, gen­er­al­iz­able con­cep­tion of seg­re­ga­tion. Either they described a geo­graph­i­cal area too nar­row to be applied else­where — a street (Juden­straße), an alley (Juden­gasse), a square (Juden­platz) — or they were so vague that it was impos­si­ble to know exact­ly what type of con­fine­ment they entailed (Jud­ería, Juiv­er­ie). The word ghet­to cut through the con­fu­sion. Since it was a metonym, rather than just a geo­graph­i­cal mark­er, it could be used of Jew­ish quar­ters any­where — not just those on sites of for­mer foundries. Yet because the Ghet­to Nuo­vo also hap­pened to be sep­a­rat­ed from the city around it more com­plete­ly than any oth­er Jew­ish quar­ter in Europe (ringed as it was by high walls, and sur­round­ed on all sides by water), there could be no doubt about the type of seg­re­ga­tion it described.

Words, as Lud­wig Wittgen­stein famous­ly observed, are deeds, and to endow them with clar­i­ty is to lend them a spe­cial pow­er. Over the years that fol­lowed, the con­cept of a ghet­to quick­ly spread. Fol­low­ing the pro­mul­ga­tion of Pope Paul IV’s bull Cum nimis absur­dum in 1555, Jews in cities through­out the Ital­ian penin­su­la were con­fined to areas increas­ing­ly iden­ti­fied as ghet­tos. As ear­ly as 1562, the Jew­ish quar­ter in Rome was referred to as a ghet­to. In 1571, the Medici fam­i­ly estab­lished a ded­i­cat­ed ghet­to in Flo­rence. And a rash of oth­ers fol­lowed. Ghet­tos were estab­lished in Miran­dola in 1602, Pad­ua in 1603, Man­tua in 1612, Fer­rara in 1624 — and dozens of oth­er cities, con­tin­u­ing right until the dawn of the French Revolution.

“Ghet­to” was far from a sim­ple term, how­ev­er; and the fur­ther it spread, the more com­plex, even con­tra­dic­to­ry, its asso­ci­a­tions became. Although for states­men and prelates it con­tin­ued to denote a site of Jew­ish seg­re­ga­tion, it could also evoke a set of eco­nom­ic rela­tions, a com­mer­cial arrange­ment, even a reli­gious rap­proche­ment. For Jews them­selves, it was equal­ly nuanced. It was under­stand­ably seen as a form of exclu­sion, mar­gin­al­iza­tion, and oppres­sion; but it could also entail tan­gi­ble ben­e­fits, over­lap­ping with the con­cept of a holy com­mu­ni­ty (Kehilla Kedosha) and rein­forc­ing a keen­ly felt sense of dis­tinc­tive­ness. At every lev­el, and in every place, it inter­sect­ed with con­cepts of pow­er and place, faith and finance, exclu­sion and admis­sion; was shaped by notions of gen­der and dis­ease; and served as a mir­ror to the soci­eties from which it sprang.

Fol­low­ing the Napoleon­ic inva­sions, Jew­ish seg­re­ga­tion in Italy was pro­gres­sive­ly abol­ished. But far from cur­tail­ing the ghet­to, this only broad­ened its scope — both geo­graph­i­cal­ly and con­cep­tu­al­ly. Now unteth­ered from Venice, the word ghet­to moved first to Ger­many, where it came to sig­ni­fy the clus­ter­ing of Jews in a giv­en space, or even a cul­ture of Jew­ish par­tic­u­lar­ism. Either one of these two mean­ings could be under­stood neg­a­tive­ly, as a rejec­tion of the total­iz­ing mis­sion of the emer­gent nation-state, or pos­i­tive­ly, as an affir­ma­tion of iden­ti­ty. A few decades lat­er, in the Unit­ed States, amid the great waves of immi­gra­tion that marked the Gild­ed Age, the ghet­to then shed its pure­ly Jew­ish con­no­ta­tions. Used to describe the liv­ing con­di­tions of any minor­i­ty group, it became a short­hand for vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, pover­ty, and pow­er­less­ness — a bit­ing coun­ter­point to the wealth and priv­i­lege of the Gild­ed Age. And after the Nazis’ inva­sion of Poland in Sep­tem­ber 1939, it came to be applied to sites of appalling con­fine­ment and even­tu­al geno­cide. Even today, it con­tin­ues to evolve. Just as, in Den­mark, the offi­cial clas­si­fi­ca­tion of migrant com­mu­ni­ties as ghet­tos reflects a delib­er­ate effort to stig­ma­tize, so the reap­pro­pri­a­tion of the word by rap artists and fash­ion icons sig­nals an attempt to reclaim lost agency and restore self-respect.

No one could claim that the Venet­ian Ghet­to was the mod­el, or even the pro­to­type, for these incar­na­tions, of course. There was no straight line lead­ing from the quays of Cannare­gio to the streets of War­saw. The evo­lu­tion of the con­cept has been too stut­ter­ing, and its asso­ci­a­tions too dif­fer­ent to admit so sim­plis­tic a read­ing. No mat­ter how hard you look, it is impos­si­ble to find the fate of Holo­caust vic­tims fore­shad­owed in the delib­er­a­tions of the Venet­ian Sen­ate on a spring day more than four hun­dred years before. Just as nature abhors a vac­u­um, so his­to­ry scorns any hint of inevitabil­i­ty. Each ghet­to is born for its own time and against its own con­text — a fact of which its pro­tag­o­nists have some­times been keen­ly aware. There is cer­tain­ly no lack of tes­ti­monies to how great­ly the con­cept has changed over the cen­turies, or how remote cer­tain ghet­tos are from their Venet­ian antecedent. Yet each ghet­to is nev­er­the­less a branch fork­ing from the same trunk — and it is in Venice that we must seek their com­mon root.