Ghetto is a keyword in modern Jewish history but also in European and American history, a very loaded word fraught with many conflicting and changing meanings. In his new book, the historian Daniel Schwartz explores the genealogy of this word and takes the reader on a fascinating journey through modern Jewish history.

The first chapter is dedicated to the period from 1516 and the establishment of the Venetian ghetto to the late eighteenth century. By following the transformations of the word and the realities it denoted, Schwartz tells a gripping tale about the complex relations between Jews and Christians in Italy and central Europe in the early modern era. The second chapter focuses on the nineteenth century, at which time the word ghetto became a negative symbol of the pre-emancipatory era, expressing a political perception of the past rather than denoting a specific urban reality. The third chapter considers the migration of the word to the English-speaking world—to Britain and especially the United States, where poor urban spaces inhabited by large numbers of East European Jewish immigrants were called ghettos. The fourth chapter tells the story of the Nazi ghettos, and the final chapter focuses on postwar America, where the word ghetto journeyed beyond the confines of Jewish history and came to signify poor and densely populated African American neighborhoods. As such, it absorbed all of the racial tensions inherent to American society, as well as the charged relations between Jewish and Black communities.

Ghetto is an outstanding work in the field of the history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte), imbued with the spirit of Reinhart Koselleck. Drawing upon many different sources in the various languages at his command, Schwartz tells a nuanced and complex story of Jewish modernity. By using the methodology of Begriffsgeschichte, he manages to break through the historiographical wall separating early-modern, modern, and contemporary Jewish histories to provide a longue durée history of the Jews. Despite the complexity of the subject matter, the book is written in a clear and straightforward style and is a pleasure to read. Once picked up, it is hard to put down. It is an ambitious research project in the most positive sense of the word. Schwartz proves that the linguistic turn, if taken seriously and applied appropriately, can produce excellent results in Jewish studies as well.

It is very hard to summarize the wealth of ideas contained in this book. I will confine myself to two examples that illustrate how the methodology of Begriffsgeschichte illuminates issues of continuity and discontinuity in Jewish history.

The establishment of the ghetto in Venice in 1516 was a compromise between those who wished to expel the Jews from the city and those who sought to have them remain. In this sense, the ghetto was an inclusionary institution. Thirty-nine years later (1555), the Rome ghetto was created, with an entirely different intention: humiliation. In this case, it served an exclusionary purpose. Forty-five years later (1600), the Jews of Verona were also confined to a ghetto—an event they viewed as a salvation, which they celebrated with prayers of thanksgiving for many years to come. We thus have three ghettos, all established in Italy in the sixteenth century, but while the signifier is the same in all cases, the signified are very different. Moreover, the “ghetto,” asserts Schwartz, was established almost exclusively in Italy, whereas “most European Jews in the early modern period lived in mixed communities” (47). Hence “the age of the Ghetto” is, to a large extent, a retroactive fictitious construction.

The second example touches on the Nazi ghetto. Here Schwartz offers an illuminating account of how German and East European Jews struggled to make sense of the extreme circumstances into which they had been cast. They attempted to utilize the old concept of the ghetto to make sense of their harsh new realty. Such analogies often allowed them to draw hopeful, optimistic conclusions. Schwartz shows, however, that these historical analogies were only useful up to a point, after which it became clear to everyone that the Nazi ghetto was a new, murderous phenomenon, without precedent in Jewish history.

Also worth noting is the book's theoretical thesis, spelled out in the epigraph—a quote from Joan Wallach Scott's Gender and the Politics of History (1988): “Those who would codify the meaning of words fight a losing battle, for words like the ideas and things they are meant to signify have a history.” Although this thesis may seem like common sense in the early twenty-first century, the meanings it encapsulates are, in fact, quite dramatic. David Engel's work on the concept of antisemitism also adopts a linguistic approach and shows how the word antisemitism has lost its analytical edge due to the many different meanings it bears; he therefore argues against its use in scholarly writing. What Schwartz demonstrates, however, is that keywords in Jewish history (as in any other history) will always have multiple meanings because they all have histories. Avoiding them for this reason is tantamount to renouncing language altogether. On the other hand, if we cannot agree on the meaning of words, how can we communicate? This is, of course, an age-old dilemma, but Schwartz's book highlights its urgency in the context of contemporary Jewish historiography. It is not merely a theoretical question, but one with far-reaching ramifications, if we think, for example, of the meaning of words like Zion and Zionism.

This brings me to my final point, which is also my main criticism of the book. As noted previously, the book investigates the transformations that the word ghetto has undergone throughout modern Jewish history. One crucial chapter of that history, however, is almost entirely missing: Zionism and the State of Israel. Schwartz dedicates a few pages (81–84) to Theodor Herzl (and Max Nordau), and a few more (197–200), in his conclusion, to the political uses of the word ghetto in the Israeli context, but that is all. One would not expect such an ambitious attempt to portray modern Jewish history by following the transformations of one of its keywords to ignore the Hebrew language. Schwartz admirably refers to German, Italian, English, French, and even some Yiddish sources (although I also find the paucity of Yiddish sources problematic; the voice of eastern European Jewry—with the exception of the Nazi ghettos—is insufficiently represented), but not to Hebrew.

This may not be a coincidence. In the introduction, Schwartz quotes the postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty on subaltern studies and immediately suggests, following a number of Jewish writers, that Jewish history should be placed “at the very center of European and American history by making Jews paradigmatic of the encounter with modernity” (6–7). This seems to be precisely where Schwartz wishes to position modern Jewish history: as the history of a subaltern group that has posed the greatest challenge to modern Western history and, as such, should indeed be located at the very heart of that history. In short, he approaches Jewish history from the “ghetto” perspective as a diasporic history.

The part of Jewish history that entails political sovereignty could not easily be integrated into this scheme. It is a history in which the (Zionist) Jews are hegemonic and the ones who, physically or metaphorically, created ghettos for others. The areas to which the remaining Palestinian population in cities like Lydda Ramla and Jaffa were confined, behind barbed wire, were called ghettos, both by local Jews (including officials and army officers) and by Arabs. The Gaza Strip, which has been under siege since 2007, is often called the biggest ghetto in history. Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) and Mizrahi (Jews of Middle Eastern origin) neighborhoods are also often referred to as ghettos. For David Ben Gurion, “ghetto” signified a despised exilic mentality (the “ghetto mentality”), and, after the Holocaust, symbolized the contempt that Israelis felt toward the Jews who had “gone like sheep to slaughter.” It is precisely this perception that Joshua Sobol's famous play Ghetto (1983) addresses. In Israeli Hebrew, the word geto appears to have been used, at least until the 1990s, to refer to all of the “others” of hegemonic Zionism. This part of modern Jewish history seems not to fit into Schwartz's diasporic scheme.

Nevertheless, this is an outstanding, original, and broad study that brilliantly exemplifies how cultural and linguistic history can contribute to a better longue durée understanding of modern Jewish history. It is a book that does not shy away from confronting some of the most fundamental issues and challenges faced by scholars of modern Jewish history today.