Ghetto Times: Premodern, Early Modern, and Modern

• In Event: Race, Place, and Rupture in 20th Century Jewish Social Thought

Abstract

This paper argues for a reconsideration of the relationship between Jews, the ghetto, and modernity. Since the nineteenth century, the ghetto has figured for Jews as the ultimate “before” to modernity’s “now” or “after.” In this master narrative, premodern Judaism became identified with ghetto times (independent of whether a particular Jewry lived in an actual ghetto) and modern Judaism with an exit from the ghetto, as a consequence of both emancipation and assimilation. The title alone of the most influential study of the project and process of emancipation written in the last half century, Jacob Katz’s OUT OF THE GHETTO (1973), speaks to the staying power of this schema. In recent decades, as Jewish studies has grown more specialized, scholars have challenged this image of the ghetto. Historians of Italian Jews, for example, have liberated the ghetto concept from the emancipatory narrative, by painting a more complex picture of the institution in its original context and periodizing the ghetto as an EARLY MODERN rather than PREMODERN phenomenon. Despite this, the general consensus remains that the ghetto is primarily of significance to Jewish history before emancipation. In this paper, I contend that the ghetto must also be regarded as a constituent element of Jewish modernity of the last two centuries. The basis for this argument is a genealogical exploration of the term itself. “Ghetto,” I show, only emerged as a keyword or basic concept for Jews outside Italy AFTER emancipation, when, far from receding into the past, the term gained a centrality in Jewish consciousness that, paradoxically, it had never enjoyed in the so-called Age of Ghettos. By highlighting the critical role the ghetto has played in the spatial imaginary of modern Judaism, as one of its chief foils and counter-concepts—its “pre” par excellence—this paper will argue for rethinking the periodization of the ghetto in Jewish history. More generally, it will advocate for the value of studying the Jewish experience of modernity through the prism of its keywords, its essential concepts, and its foundational myths and metaphors.

author

• Daniel B. Schwartz, The George Washington University