Russell Scott Valentino
Taking the Traghetto to the Ghetto; or, Performing Jewish Culture in Venice
Like empathy, ghetto seems to be a word that has been with us for so long that it's difficult to imagine a time without it. It's a false impression on both accounts, yet another instance of present associations impinging upon, or better overwhelming, past - what shall I say - absence, ignorance, meaninglessness. The word empathy simply did not exist in English before 1903, while ghetto did not have the associations it would later acquire. Initially, a toponym (I repeat, with its own meaning, initially unrelated to the Jews), but subsequently attached to the Jews in the minds of Europeans of the late sixteenth century such that, very quickly, by the time of the formation of the Ghetto of Rome, or better yet for our purposes, of the "Newest Ghetto" in Venice (the shiny one I noted above), to which new arrivals were consigned after the Old Ghetto too had become over crowded, the combination was no longer arbitrary or figurative: a ghetto had become an enclosed space inside an urban territory for Jews.
But English seems to have been oddly negligent of this term and this association for much of its history. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a scant three definitions, with not quite a page and a half of examples, none from Shakespeare, or Milton, or Byron, or Tennyson, or Browning, or Melville, or Austen, or Dickens, or Dickenson. This is worth pondering. In all its exhaustive thoroughness, the OED lists only four examples of English usage between 1611 and 1887, none from an author I've ever heard of. My suspicion, which others are welcome to refute, is that usage in French, German, and other west European languages paralleled English in this, and that one would be hard pressed to find the word used by contemporaries in any language other than Italian (and now I've grown quite curious about its frequency in Italian). The linguist Max Weinreich noted that the term was not used to designate the local Jewish living quarters anywhere in Central and Eastern Europe before at least the nineteenth century.
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