The etymology of the word
ghetto has long been debated. Several solutions have been offered. The very first use of the word has been traced back to 1516 to the Jewish area of Venice. There, residents will proudly tell you that
ghèto meant 'foundry'. The problem is that it seems strange to name an area after one foundry and not 'foundries', because there must have been more than one.
Other suggestions are that the word originates from the Yiddish
gehektes ('enclosed'), from the Italian
borghetto ('little town') or from the Old French
guect ('guard'). All these suggestions eventually fail, mostly because of phonetics.
Southern Germany isn't far removed from northern Italy. There, we can find the term
Jüdische Gass(e) or 'Jewish Street'. Yiddish
gas means
‘street’. In the German language one often finds the switch from 'ss' to English to 't' (
strasse to 'street',
wasser to 'water',
scheisse to 'shit', and more).
Gasse therefore also is rather similar to English 'gate' and Dutch
gat ('hole', 'opening'). The trail seems to turn cold here, as the Etymology Dictionary claims that it is of 'of unknown origin'.
But in the Dutch language we find several words that describe a
steeg ('alley'). In the southernmost province of Limburg a
steeg is called a
gats. That changes to
gas in the city of Nijmegen, and finally to
steiger in Enkhuizen in the north. Both
steeg ('alley') and
steiger ('jetty') are related to
stijgen or 'to rise up'.
In English we discover that 'jetty' ('pier') also once had the meaning of 'a passage between two houses' in central and northern England.
And there we have it: the word
ghetto simply means '(a series of small) alleys' in the sense of a medina quarter (Arabic:
city), a distinct section of a city still found in a number of North African and southern European medieval cities. A medina is typically walled, with many narrow and maze-like streets.
During my research for this article I found a
text by Anatoly Liberman that seemed to have traveled much the same route as I did.
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