Introduction

This chapter helps the readers to understand some of the details of the cultural life of a group that has a long history. The history of the Jews for the past one thousand years furnishes an opportunity to study the ways in which the culture of a group reacts upon the character of a people, and conversely, the mutations that take place in a culture as a result of the changing experiences of a people. The story of the Jews for this period is the story of the ghetto. As the sympathetic historians tell the story of the ghetto it is an amazing record of the tragedies and the adventures of a people. The ghetto represents a study in human nature. The hostilities and outbreaks of violence with which ghetto history is replete represent the friction and the conflicts to which the living together of diverse cultural groups gives rise.