Ghetto: The History of a Word. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. 266 pp

Ghetto: The History of a Word begins in Venice as the “compulsory Jewish quarter” for Jews to live in (25), and the reader learns how, elaborated throughout Italy over the next five decades, and Europe over the next five hundred years, it significantly changed its meanings as it stigmatized and stereotyped the Jews, and was then in the United States extended to African Americans. (Fast-forward to the Nazi ghetto, which was exclusive to Jews, there transformed into subhuman alien slave laborers.) In Rome, the ghetto became a Christian weapon: “The popes viewed the ghetto as more than simply a device for striking an equilibrium between acceptance and expulsion” (34). Free now to move throughout the realm, the Jews thanked the king publicly in plaques in synagogues in smaller towns, as they continued to struggle with the definition of aliens that had been imposed on them.