ABSTRACT
In some cities the houses of prostitution were transferred to the ghetto, because the ghetto was a fitting place for an institution of ill repute. When, with the beginning of the Crusades, the church became militant, there set in a period of active oppression of which the ghetto regulations were the culmination, but which, in some instances, notably in Spain and Poland, took the form of wholesale slaughter and expulsion. By the fifteenth century the ghetto had become the legal dwelling place of the Jews. Even when calamities such as fires and epidemics visited the ghetto and often destroyed it or great portions of its inhabitants, the conditions of their settlement were not improved. It is necessary to view a typical ghetto concretely to appreciate the fact that when active persecution ceased for the time being, the life within the ghetto walls was as rich and as human as in the world outside.
