The Immigrant Jew: Louis Wirth’s The Ghetto

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 22: Sociological and Social Theory

Abstract

In 1926, at the peak of Chicago sociology, Jewish immigrant Louis Wirth defended his doctoral dissertation on the Jewish immigrant district in Chicago. Published two years later as a book, The Ghetto became one of the classic works of the Chicago sociology of migration. Wirth had immigrated into the United States from Germany at age 14, first settling with relatives in Nebraska, and then finding his way to the University of Chicago. This paper revisits The Ghetto and examines the tension between Chicago’s analytical framework and Wirth’s own immigrant and Jewish experience. Though this tension takes multiple forms, the paper focuses on the book’s structure. The book is split almost evenly between an account of the Jewish ghetto in Europe and an account of the Jewish ghetto in Chicago. Despite Wirth’s attempt to bring these two accounts into the same framework, the two do not come together clearly, either as historical narrative or theoretical model. The paper analyzes the discontinuities between the European and American chapters, and it discusses the reasons why this structure still served Wirth’s purposes. The paper argues that preceding the Chicago study with the history of the European ghetto helped Wirth complicate the Chicago view of assimilation without questioning it explicitly. The story of The Ghetto sheds light on the biographical origins of migration scholarship.

Author

• Nicolas Eilbaum, Stony Brook University