Table Of ContentThe Ghetto
The Ghetto
By
LOUIS WIRTH
WOODCUT' ILLUSTRATIONS
BY TODROS GELLER
THE. ·UNIVERSITY OF c:HIC:AGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON
THE UNIVERSITY OF Cm:cAGO PREss, CmcAco 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London W.C.l
© I928, I956 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved
Published I928. Tenth Impression I969. Printed in the United
States of America
TO MARY
FOREWORD
The ghetto seems to have been originally a place in
Venice, a quarter of the city in which the first Jewish settle
ment was located. It became, in the course of time, an in
stitution recognized in custom and defined in law. It be
came, in short, not merely the place in which Jews lived,
but the place in which they were compelled to live. The
walls of that ghetto have long since crumbled, but the ghost
of the ancient institution lingers. It is still a place of refuge
for the masses of the Jewish people and still imposes upon
them, for good and for ill, something of the ancient isolation.
Meanwhile other alien peoples have come among us who
have sought, or had imposed upon them, the same sort of
isolation. Our great cities tum out, upon examination, to
be a mosaic of segregated peoples-differing in race, in cul
ture, or merely in cult-each seeking to preserve its peculiar
cultural forms and to maintain its individual and unique
conceptions of life. Every one of these segregated groups
inevitably seeks, in order to maintain the integrity of its
own group life, to impose upon its member some kind of
moral isolation. So far as segregation becomes for them a
means to that end, every people and every cultural group
may be said to create and maintain its own ghetto. In this
way the ghetto becomes the physical symbol for that sort
of moral isolation which the "assimilationists,11 so called,
are seeking tq, break down.
It is in this sense that the word is used in this volume.
"Ghetto," as it is here conceived, is no longer a term that
is limited in its application to the Jewish people. It has come
\'11
FOREWORD
VIII
into use in recent times as a common noun-a term which
applies to any segregated racial or cultural group. The
ghetto, as it is here conceived, owes its existence, not to
legal enactment, but to the fact that it meets a need and
performs a social function. The ghetto is, in short, one of
the so-called "natural areas" of the city.
The casual observer, looking over this vast complex,
the modern metropolitan city, is likely to see it as a mere
congeries of physical structures, institutions, and peoples
contiguous in space, bound together in some sort of mechani
cal fashion, but in no sense a whole consisting of organically
related parts. This impression :finds an indire!=t expression
in the familiar statement "God made the country, but man
made the town." Nowhere else, in fact, is the order which
exists so manifestly the order imposed by man's intelligence
and design; nowhere else has man shown himself more com
pletely the master of the world in which he lives.
On the other hand, nothing is more certain, as recent
studies of the urban community have shown, than the fact
that the city as it exists is very largely the product of tenden
cies of which we have as yet little knowledge and less con
trol. Under the influence of these forces, and within the
limitation which geography and historical accident impose,
the city is steadily assuming a form that is not conventional
merely, hut typical. In short, the city is not merely an
artefact, but an organism. Its growth is, fundamentally and
as a whole, natural, i.e., uncontrolled and undesigned. The
forms it tends to assume are those which represent and cor
respond to the functions that it is called upon to perform.
What have been called the "r.atur.al areas of the city"
are simply those regions whose locations, character, and
functions have been determined by the same forces which
FOREWORD
lX
have determined the character and functions of the city as
a whole. The ghetto is one of those natural areas. The his
torical ghetto, with which this study is mainly concerned,
is merely the one most striking example of a type. It is in
the history of the Jews, in the Diaspora, that we have ac
cess to a body of facts which exhibit in convincing detail
the moral and cultural consequences of that isolation which
the ghetto enforced; consequences that touch both those
who live within and those who live without the pale. The
history of the ghetto is, in large measure, the history, since
the dispersion, of the Jewish people.
The ghetto has been the center of all that may be de
scribed as sectarian and provincial of Jewish life. It has put
its imprint, not only upon the manners of the Jew, but upon
his character. It is the interaction of this culture of the
ghetto and that of the larger gentile community outside,
involving the more or less complete participation of Jews
in both worlds, that is the source of most that is problematic
and enigmatic in the situation of the Jew of today, as of
yesterday. And so it has turned out that this attempt to
investigate, in its more fundamental and permanent aspects,
one of the typical local areas of the Chicago urban com
munity has led to the exploration of one of the most funda
mental problems in sociology, and in doing this it has thrown
a new light upon one of the puzzling and tragic situations
in history.
ROBERT E. PARK
PREFACE
This study was made possible through a research fellow
ship granted by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial
Fund and administered by the Local Community Research
Committee of the University of Chicago. It originated in
an investigation of the ghetto district of Chicago. The at
tempt to understand the life in that area, however, soon led
to a redefinition of the subject into the form in which it is
now presented. Having started with the study of a geo
graphical area, I found myself, quite unwittingly, examin
ing the natural history of an institution and the psychology
of a people.
Much of what I have written is probably tract:able to
sources which I have forgotten, or is the echo of what I have
read and read into the writings of others. There are nu
merous obligations, however, of which I am keenly con
scious. My debt to such writers as David Philipson, Israel
Abrahams, and Israel Cohen is greater than the numerous
citations from their writings indicate. To Professor Ernest
W. Burgess, at whose suggestion the study was begun, to
Professor Ellsworth Faris, and to Professor Robert E. Park,
my teachers and former colleagues in the Department of
Sociology of the University of Chicago, I wish to express
my gratitude for their aid, encouragement, and guidance.
Without the constant interest and inspiration of Professor
Park this work would not have been the pleasant adventure
which it was.
LOUIS WIRTH
XI
CONTENTS
CKAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION I
II. THE ORIGIN OF THE GHETTO I I
III. THE GHETTO BECOMES AN INSTITUTION 29
IV. FRANKFORT: A TYPICAL GHETTO 4I
V. THE JEWISH TYPE 63
VI. THE JEWISH MIND 75
VII. THE GHETTO IN DISSOLUTiON 97
VIII. THE JEWS IN AMERICA . I3I
IX. ORIGINS OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN CHICAGO I53
X. THE JEWISH COMMUNITY AND THE GHETTO I7I
XI. THE CHICAGO GHETTO . I95
XII. THE vANISHING GHETTO 24I
XIII. THE RETURN TO THE GHETTO 263
XIV. THE SOCIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE GHETTO 282
INDEX OF AUTHORS 293
SUBJECT INDEX 295
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