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The mellah -

A mellah, a walled segregated Jewish quarter of a city in Morocco, is one of the earliest references to a legally enforced area for a minority group. In the late 13th century, Moroccan Jews across the land were being transferred to mellahs in large numbers.

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Venice Ghetto -

Forced segregation of Jews spread across Europe in the 14th century. The term ghetto is derived from the Jewish ghetto in Venice—after the Venetian word ghèto, meaning "foundry," as there was one near the site of that city's ghetto in 1516.

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Prague Judenstadt -

There was no legal transition from Prague's Jewish Quarter to the ghetto, which became known as the Prague Judenstadt. From 1522 to 1541, numbers swelled as Jews expelled from elsewhere across Europe were placed within its confines.

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Frankfurt Ghetto -

One of the earliest ghettos in Germany was located in Frankfurt am Mein. Established in 1462, it functioned until 1811.

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Roman Ghetto -

The Roman Ghetto was established in 1555 and was controlled by the papacy until the capture of Rome in 1870. The city's Jewish community is today one of the oldest in the world.

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Pale of Settlement -

The Pale of Settlement was a territory within the borders of czarist Russia wherein the residence of Jews was legally authorized. It existed from 1791 to 1917. Pictured is a map of Western Russia showing the distribution of Jewish residents.

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American ghettos -

The influx of European immigrants to the United States in the 19th century saw the establishment of ethnic enclaves in cities like New York, Chicago, and Detroit. Pictured is the East Side Ghetto of New York's Jewish Quarter.

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From ethnic enclave to ghetto -

The term ghetto has a deep cultural meaning in the United States, associated as it is with an urban environment, racial segregation, and crime and poverty.

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East Harlem -

German and Irish immigrants unable to find affordable housing in Lower Manhattan gravitated towards Harlem, where wood-built properties quickly sprang up. Pictured in 1888 at 98th Street and Fifth Avenue in East Harlem is an immigrant community on undeveloped land.

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Little Italy -

Meanwhile in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Lower Manhattan's Mulberry Street became the hub of Italian-American culture and history, though the neighborhood was also known for its hardened street gangs.

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Maxwell Street, Chicago -

Chicago's historic Maxwell Street began life in the mid-19th century as a busy gateway neighborhood for Germans, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Russians, African Americans, and Mexicans. Beginning in the 1880s, Eastern European Jews became the dominant ethnic group in the district.

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East End, London -

Across the Atlantic in England, London's East End became a magnet for Jews fleeing poverty and persecution in Eastern Europe. Between 1881 and 1914, around two million Jews arrived in the British capital. Today, the East End is also home to a significant British Bangladeshi populace.

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Life in a ghetto -

Customarily, those living in a ghetto were granted autonomy, with their own religious, judicial, charitable, and recreational institutions.

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Crowded, unsanitary conditions -

By definition, a ghetto was an often cramped neighborhood. Expansion of boundaries was rarely granted. Congestion and unsanitary conditions were commonplace, and narrow streets and tall, overcrowded houses constituted an ever-present fire hazard.

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Shanghai Ghetto -

The latter half of the 19th century witnessed many ghettos across Western Europe permanently abolished. Elsewhere in the world, however, the ghetto was being used as an instrument of conflict. The Second Sino-Japanese War, which broke out in 1937, saw occupying Japanese forces round up Chinese civilians into ghettos in several major cities including Shanghai. On this map, the black ink outline denotes the location of the Shanghai Ghetto. The conflict between the Chinese and the Empire of Japan is often regarded as the beginning of World War II in Asia.

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Second World War -

In 1939, the Second World War in Europe broke out. After invading Poland, German occupation authorities established the first ghetto in Poland, in Piotrków Trybunalski in October of that year. Pictured is a German motorized unit passing the village of Szczecow, near Piotrków Trybunalski.

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Krakow Ghetto -

More ghettos followed. Here, Jewish civilians in Krakow are forced to build a brick wall, forming a ghetto for the Jewish community.

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Warsaw Ghetto -

History's most infamous ghetto was created in Warsaw, the largest of the Nazi ghettos during the Second World War. Over 380,000 Jews were sealed within its 3-meter- (8-ft-) high walls.

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Appalling conditions -

Conditions inside the ghetto were dreadful. Over 80,000 Jews died as a result of overcrowding, disease, and starvation. In July 1942, the deportations to concentration camps began.

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Warsaw Ghetto Uprising -

In April 1943, a heroic act of Jewish resistance took place that became known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It began when the ghetto refused to surrender to SS troops as they rounded up the population for transportation to the Majdanek and Treblinka death camps. A total of 13,000 people were killed in the biggest single revolt by Jews during the Second World War.

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Racial segregation -

By the 20th century in the United States, the Jim Crow laws that had enforced racial segregation since 1877 were widely manifested across Southern states by evidence such as this, a drinking fountain marked with a "colored" sign.

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Worlds apart -

This sign reads: "We cater to white trade only." Residential segregation, educational segregation, social segregation, and employment segregation were strictly enforced.

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Redlining -

In the 1930s, redlining—shorthand for the discriminatory practice of denying services (typically financial) to residents of certain areas based on their race or ethnicity—effectively bared black residents from buying homes. This resulted in a large increase in residential racial segregation and urban decay in the United States throughout the 1930s and 1940s.

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Color-coded segregation -

The term redlining has its origins in the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), a federal government sponsored program created in 1933 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. HOLC used color-coded maps ranking the loan worthiness of neighborhoods in more than 200 cities and towns across the United States. This effectively restricted poorer ethic minorities from applying for a home loan, with black citizens especially affected.

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Rise of black ghettos -

Redlining contributed to the residential racial segregation that shaped the way the United States looks today. It also resulted in urban decay and a spike in crime and poverty. Pictured in 1952 are young African-American children playing in an unidentified slum neighborhood of Chicago.

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Poor neighborhoods -

This image taken in the 1940s shows neighbors sweeping the front stoops of their row houses along a narrow cobblestone street in a poor black Baltimore neighborhood.

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"Peace line" -

An ironic example of a modern-day ghetto of sorts was the one created during the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and early '70s. Peace lines or peace walls were built in Belfast to separate predominantly republican and nationalist Catholic neighborhoods from pro-loyalist and unionist Protestant neighborhoods.

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Venice Ghetto today -

The Venice Ghetto, arguably the world's first organized ghetto, still serves as a center for the city's Jewish community, its place in history marked by a memorial stone. The ghetto's main square is a popular tourist haunt.

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Warsaw Ghetto Heroes Monument -

In Warsaw, the city commemorates the ghetto uprising of 1943 with a grand monument dedicated to those who lost their lives during the rebellion.

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The Krakow Ghetto Memorial -

Also in Poland, the Krakow Ghetto Memorial serves a similar function. It stands on a site where Jews were deported to the camps, the cobblestone square set with a series of steel chairs– each representing a thousand souls.

Sources: (Britannica) (Liberation Route Europe) (Jewish Virtual Library) (Holocaust Encyclopedia) (Yad Vashem) (The New York Times)

See also: Where to commemorate International Holocaust Day

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