ABSTRACT
The voluntary segregation of the Jews in ghettos had much in common with the segregation of Negroes and immigrants in modern cities, and was identical in many respects with the development of Bohemian and Hobohemian quarters in the urban community of today. The ghetto was not, as sometimes mistakenly is believed, the arbitrary creation of the authorities, designed to deal with an alien people. Though the era of the ghetto proper begins with the sixteenth century, numerous records are extant of the seclusion of Jews in special quarters several centuries earlier. Through the instrumentality of the ghetto—the voluntary ghetto—there gradually developed that social distance which effectually isolated the Jew from the remainder of the population. The voluntary ghetto marked, however, merely the beginning of a long process of isolation which did not reach its fullest development until the voluntary ghetto had been superseded by the compulsory ghetto.
