The Ghetto

by Louis Wirth

When The Ghetto first appeared seventy years ago, Bruno Lasker in the New York Times called it "the most informing general account of the cultural background and psychological development of the American Jew." Arguably, the book still occupies this special niche in ethnic studies. Hasia Diner's extensive new introduction, in itself an important contribution to the history of sociological ideas, points out that The Ghetto "stands in a class by itself as a piece of scholarship of the early twentieth century." That judgment stands. The Ghetto traces back to the medieval era the Jewish immigrant colonies that have virtually disappeared from our modern cities―to be replaced by other ghettoes. Analytical as well as historical, Wirth's book lays bare the rich inner life hidden behind the drab exterior of the ghetto. The book describes the significant physical, social, and psychic influences of ghetto life upon the Jews. Wirth demonstrates that the economic life of the modern Jew still reflects the impress of the social isolation of ghetto life; at first self-imposed, later formalized, and finally imposed by others through a variety of extralegal mechanisms. He presents a faithful picture of an environment now largely vanished and illustrates a sociological method in so doing. In his foreword to the book, Robert E. Park reminds us that the city is not merely an artifact but an organism. Its growth is often uncontrolled and undesigned. The forms it tends to assume are those which represent and correspond to the functions that it is called upon to perform. The Ghetto will be important to scholars in Jewish studies, the history of sociology, American ethnic history, and social history. This volume is the second in a series of studies in ethnicity edited by Ronald H. Bayor of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction, History, Race

376 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1928

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is cited so much in contemporary studies of the American ghetto I was rather astonished to find it looks at the history of the Jewish almost exclusively -- but many of the key ideas about ethnic minorities in cities clearly emerge directly from this, as they were meant to by Wirth, and built upon by others of the incredibly influential Chicago School.

While we are concerned mainly with the Jew and the Jewish ghetto in the following pages, and have drawn our material from the history of this one institution, the processes that go on, the motives that are at work, and the consequences that follow are intended to throw light on a much broader subject--on human nature and on culture (10).

This is fascinating in that it was written in 1928, before the Holocaust, before Israel. I was more worried that it was written before the rise of an identity politics that questioned the more essentializing aspects of such studies of 'The Jew', and while this does fall into some uncomfortably large brushstrokes and blind spots, the book's strength is that it quotes extended passages from a number of original sources. This isn't my subject so I have little idea if there are significant absences--the experience of Jews in non-Christian countries might be one--but it makes for a very interesting and thought-provoking read even today.

While noting the existence of mob violence and persecution, particularly after 1097, Wirth sees the initial groupings of Jews in European cities as 'voluntary ghettos', simply by seeking each other out and the needs of worship and diet. Later formalized into walled and gated areas, there follows a quite terrible history that I was only very dimly aware of.

The ghetto arose, in the first instance, out of body of practices and needs of the Jewish population. Gradually it became an established institution without the Jews themselves being aware of the invisible walls that they were building around their community. Only when it became formally recognized and sanctioned by law, or rather, decreed by law, however, did it become an object of resentment because it was a symbol of subjugation

.
I'm not sure I believe this interpretation as he writes of intense overcrowding and terrible slum conditions, mass pogroms and expulsions, the Jewish population forced to live a precarious life in a limited number of marginal occupations. Wirth gives enough detail to see the outlines of their position as constant scapegoat for exploitation, poverty and financial crisis, standing between the special patronage of the monarchy/ aristocracy and the desperation of the masses, though sadly he doesn't link this to further development of capitalism or a broader politics or development of the city in terms of both its funding and urban form. There are some interesting questions here.

Chapters entitled 'The Jewish Type' and 'The Jewish Mind' raise eyebrows today of course, but some of the other concepts in here still seem to be with us. Perhaps the most pervasive is the underlying idea here that there is a natural cycle for neighborhoods as well as for their residents. The natural movement of residential neighbourhood to slum to semi-industrial or industrial area (and the corresponding strategies of landlords and the sinking then rising of land values). The concentric rings of the city, moving from the central business district and the slums to the second ring of workingmen's homes. The opposition to Jewish neighbors they encountered from the Germans and the Irish: 'They had given up Halstead Street without much of a struggle; but on Kedzie Avenue and on Douglas Park Boulevard, where they had built new homes, they determined to make a stand (247).
The comparisons between how he is here writing about Jewish communities and how African-Americans are elsewhere described are striking, and very possibly intentional. Earlier he writes:

The increase in numbers of American Jews created a "Jewish problem." Of this problem the earlier Jewish immigrants, who stood on the brink of assimilation, were keenly conscious (149).

As though the visibility of a people is the problem, not the xenophobic attitudes of those they are moving amongst. And then:

Within fifteen years these areas have become overwhelmingly Jewish, and have reproduced--though in a modified form--the general outlines of the ghetto atmosphere.
Long before this transition is completed, however, a new exodus has begun. The plans of those who fled from the ghetto in order to obtain status as human beings--as persons rather than as Jews--have been frustrated by the seminal plans of others. Unwittingly the deserters from the ghetto have become the founders of a new ghetto. Scarcely does this consciousness begin to dawn upon them when the flight is resumed...(255)

Interestingly, however, he notes that Jewish settlements are scattered, one of the

'outstanding characteristics...is their separateness and discontinuity...This is one of the most striking indications of the fundamental motive of local migrations: flight from the familiar, escape into anonymity. The Jew stays in a given area apparently just long enough to become conscious of his status as a Jew. Scarcely does he get a glimpse of the freer world that looms in the distance when he becomes irritated by the presence of his fellow-Jews, more Jewish than himself...' (255-56).

I think more than a few people would take issue with that interpretation. As they might with the below:

The rise and decline of the ghetto seems to be a cyclical movement. As the Jew emerges from the ghetto and takes on the character of humanity in the outside world, the ghetto declines. But as this freedom is restricted, generally as a result of too massed or hasty an advance, distance between Jews and non-Jews arise; and the retreat to the ghetto sets in (279)

This contains that most liberal of formulations heard so often during the Civil Rights movement that 'too massed or too hasty an advance' will cause backlash (blaming this backlash on the victims of it rather than the victimizers), as well as signifying a fairly terrifying idea of the ghetto as a natural thing. In the concluding chapter he writes:

Whether it be the treatment of the Czechs in the Austrian Empire of the Hapsburgs, or Fiume in the Italian Irredenta, or the British in India, or the whites in the cities of China, or the Chinese in San Francisco, fundamentally the problem is the same, because the human nature aspects of the situations are akin to those of the ghetto (282)

To me this shows a fairly shocking misunderstanding of the very different power relations in these different examples, the different kinds of racialization (and demonization) that is occurring, the ways that some are profiting on multiple levels from these various racial and spatial hierarchies. He then compares such segregation to that of 'vice-areas, of bright-light centers, of bohemias and hobohemias (!!) in modern cities' (284). He writes:

This specialization of interests and cultural types is at bottom a phase of the elementary process of the division of labor. Each area in the city is suited for some one function better than for any other. Land values, rentals, accessibility, and the attitude of its inhabitants and owners determine, in the last analysis, what type of area it shall become. The more fundamental of these factors is probably that of economic values, for the sentiments of the people tend ultimately to bow before this criterion which is the expression of the competitive process. Ultimately a city plan or any artificial regulation will be successful only to the extent to which it takes account of these factors...(285)

Thus the market creates a natural allotment of activities (and races) across the city that planners should respect without worrying too much about, as they are just the way of things. Wirth cites the similarities of 'the Negro' to that of 'the Jew' in this, as well as the natural replacing of one immigrant group by another in certain neighborhoods serving as a gateway to prosperity and assimilation to the wider (and more prosperous) city. It doesn't ring any bells for him when he quotes Robert E. Park as saying "When he is no longer seen, anti-Semitism declines. For race prejudice is a function of visibility. the races of high visibility, to speak in naval parlance, are the natural and inevitable objects of race prejudice. (286)"

As just an aside not at all noted by Wirth is this quote showing just how much immigrants internalized the prejudice and racism against Native Americans:

...and for the last four or five years we have congregated where a few years before nothing was heard but the howling of wild beasts and the more hideous cry of savage men' (139 - letter to the Elders of the Jewish Congregation ay Charleston from the Hebrew Congregation in Cincinnati, July 3, 1825).

Fairly depressing. But this made me laugh a spart of a description of the offerings of a typical Jewish bakery:

...and a kind of doughnut known as beigel for Shabboth (224).

[Simone]

a must read for understanding contemporary urban studies