元来キリスト教支配下の中世ヨーロッパの都市制度の下、法律により他の住民から隔離されたユダヤ人居住区を指したゲットー。ナチス・ドイツが復活させたほか、1920年代から今日まで米国のアフリカ系アメリカ人の居住区、それ以外ではマイノリティや貧困層の密集居住地がそう呼ばれています。複雑に折り重なり対照的な意味合い包含する「ゲットー」を考察すべく、500年の歴史を振り返り、さまざまな時代と地域のゲットーを取り上げ、その相関や対比を求めながら、なぜ、そしていつこうした隔離政策が現れたのかを探ります。
　　

• Covers the varying histories of different kinds of ghettos - urban, racial, and colonial
• Considers the identity of the people in ghettos, and why and how ghetto communities are formed
• Analyses the appearance of ghettos in popular culture
• Shows how both the experience of ghettoization and the memory of ghettos impacts people living in them

    
For three hundred years the ghetto defined Jewish culture in the late medieval and early modern period in Western Europe. In the nineteenth-century it was a free-floating concept which travelled to Eastern Europe and the United States. Eastern European "ghettos", which enabled genocide, were crudely rehabilitated by the Nazis during World War Two as if they were part of a benign medieval tradition. In the United States, the word ghetto was routinely applied to endemic black ghettoization which has lasted from 1920 until the present. Outside of America "the ghetto" has been universalized as the incarnation of class difference, or colonialism, or apartheid, and has been applied to segregated cities and countries throughout the world.
    
In this Very Short Introduction Bryan Cheyette unpicks the extraordinarily complex layers of contrasting meanings that have accrued over five hundred years to ghettos, considering their different settings across the globe. He considers core questions of why and when urban, racial, and colonial ghettos have appeared, and who they contain. Exploring their various identities, he shows how different ghettos interrelate, or are contrasted, across time and space, or even in the same place.