Description

This is a linguistic-cultural study of the emergence of Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust. This study traces the origins and uses of the term 'ghetto' in European and Nazi discourse and examines the establishment of and the discourse on ghettos from 1939 to 1944. Drawing new conclusions, the book impacts on understanding of the anti-Jewish policies of Nazi Germany. This study traces the origins and uses of the term 'ghetto' in European and Nazi discourse and examines the establishment of and the discourse on ghettos from 1939 to 1944. Drawing new conclusions, the book impacts on understanding of the anti-Jewish policies of Nazi Germany. This book is a linguistic-cultural study of the emergence of the Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust. It traces the origins and uses of the term 'ghetto' in European discourse from the sixteenth century to the Nazi regime. It examines with a magnifying glass both the actual establishment of and the discourse of the Nazis and their allies on ghettos from 1939 to 1944. With conclusions that oppose all existing explanations and cursory examinations of the ghetto, the book impacts overall understanding of the anti-Jewish policies of Nazi Germany. Introduction; 1. Historiography and popular understandings; 2. 'Ghetto': the source of the term and the phenomenon in the early modern era; 3. 'Ghetto' and 'ghettoization' as cultural concepts in the modern age; 4. The Nazis' anti-Jewish policy in the 1930s and the question of Jewish residential districts; 5. First references to the term 'ghetto' in the discourse of the makers of anti-Jewish policies in the Third Reich (1933–8); 6. The semantic turning point in the meaning of 'ghetto': Peter-Heinz Seraphim and Das Judentum in osteuropäischen Raum (1938); 7. The invasion of Poland and the emergence of the 'classic' ghettos; 8. Methodological interlude: the term 'ghettoization' and its use during the Holocaust itself and later scholarship; 9. Would the idea spread to other places? Amsterdam 1941, the only attempt to establish a ghetto west of Poland; 10. Ghettos during the final solution, 1941–3: the territories occupied in Operation Barbarossa; 11. Ghettos during the final solution outside the occupied Soviet Union: Poland, Theresienstadt, Amsterdam, Transnistria, Salonika and Hungary; Summary and conclusion. “This profound, insightful, and surprising book proves the extraordinary value of asking the right questions. Michman’s reassessment of the ghettos unsettles key assumptions about the Holocaust: about the role of antisemitism; links between ghettoization and mass murder; differences across Europe; and relations between the German leadership and the people who implemented anti-Jewish measures on the ground. Ghettos, Michman shows, were enormously significant, but they were neither uniform nor an inevitable step toward annihilation. Everyone interested in the Shoah, how it occurred, and how it has been understood, should read this book.” —Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto “Within a tight compass and with startling clarity, Dan Michman succeeds in shattering one misconception after another about the ‘ghettos’. They were not a uniform phenomenon and were not a prequel to the genocide. They were not even necessary for it. Yet, he shows how they were rooted in traditional anti-semitism and, especially, the German phobia towards East European Jews. His forensic analysis of how the concept evolved and how it was applied in increasingly violent situations will