Just as European Jews were being emancipated and ghettos in their original form—compulsory, enclosed spaces designed to segregate—were being dismantled, use of the word ghetto surged in Europe and spread around the globe. Tracing the curious path of this loaded word from its first use in sixteenth-century Venice to the present turns out to be more than an adventure in linguistics.

Few words are as ideologically charged as ghetto. Its early uses centered on two cities: Venice, where it referred to the segregation of the Jews in 1516, and Rome, where the ghetto survived until the fall of the Papal States in 1870, long after it had ceased to exist elsewhere.

Ghetto: The History of a Word offers a fascinating account of the changing nuances of this slippery term, from its coinage to the present day. It details how the ghetto emerged as an ambivalent metaphor for “premodern” Judaism in the nineteenth century and how it was later revived to refer to everything from densely populated Jewish immigrant enclaves in modern cities to the hypersegregated holding pens of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. We see how this ever-evolving word traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, settled into New York’s Lower East Side and Chicago’s Near West Side, then came to be more closely associated with African Americans than with Jews.

Chronicling this sinuous transatlantic odyssey, Daniel B. Schwartz reveals how the history of ghettos is tied up with the struggle and argument over the meaning of a word. Paradoxically, the term ghetto came to loom larger in discourse about Jews when Jews were no longer required to live in legal ghettos. At a time when the Jewish associations have been largely eclipsed, Ghetto retrieves the history of a disturbingly resilient word.

"From its first use in 15th century Venice to its echoes in cities such as New York and Chicago, Schwartz traces the word’s path to modernity while highlighting its Jewish past—etymology that is often overlooked." - Boston Globe

"A thorough etymological, historical, literary, and cultural analysis of an ever-evolving word. Through his all-encompassing approach, Schwartz explores how the term gained substantial emotional weight by showcasing works of literature, news papers’ opinion pieces, poems and journal entries." - Jerusalem Post

"[An] authoritative survey of how this most malleable of words was understood in different ways over the centuries…[A] rich and nuanced work." - Jewish Chronicle

"[An] eminently readable, accessible and eye-opening history." - Forward

"Impressive…The merit of Ghetto, with its nuanced and sophisticated treatment, is making order out of the slippery history of the word…Accessible, elegant in style, and engaging throughout, Ghetto demonstrates definitively how central the concept has been to Jewish self-perception. It is the kind of rewarding study that both academic and lay readers will reach for." - Journal of Modern History

"The merit of Ghetto, with its nuanced and sophisticated treatment, is making order out of the slippery history of the word, highlighting existing ties between the term’s disparate resonances while also forging new ones through that very excavation…Accessible, elegant in style, and engaging throughout, Ghetto demonstrates definitively how central the concept has been to Jewish self-perception. It is the kind of rewarding study that both academic and lay readers will reach for." - Journal of Modern History

"A welcome addition to historians and urbanists alike by providing new insights into conceptions of the term and in so doing, emphasizing the power of language when describing complex phenomena such as segregation." - LSE Review of Books

"Schwartz’s elaborate, multilingual exploration of the Jewish relationship to the ghetto is a triumphant success—emphatically demonstrating that the story of the ghetto is also a story of Jewish agency, and of Jewish philosophical and historical conversation." - In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies

"An interesting and informative study of a word’s travels through centuries of historical, political, and sociological developments that kept affecting and changing its meaning." - Mosaic

"Charts the development of the term ghetto from its medieval Italian roots through its modern variations…An informative, readable book that illuminates both historical contexts and the evolving use of language." - Choice