Ghetto Fiction, Part One: History

If the gangstas permit, I would like to describe "ghetto fiction."

Because it's a little tricky to get past the current usages of the term ghetto, I'm going to spread my findings over tomorrow and Wednesday. Thanks for your patience.

Let's assume that "ghetto" describes a world within a world, whether it's tragic, pathetic, cool, or not. The point is that the ghetto is within, not outside.

Not long after the New World was discovered (to be far away), the Venetians let the Jews come in from the hinterlands and (forced them to) live in the ghetto (1516).

This incorporation of the outsider within the community was presumably a practical matter, useful for businessmen to have some Jews close at hand. (There were plenty of Jews looking for a place to stay after being expelled from Spain in, oh the irony, 1492, the year of the ultimate conquest of the Moors.)

The ghetto was a radical transformation of the structure of society. Hadrian and the Chinese, for example, had built walls to keep the bad guys on the far side. Castles and, at the extreme, The Forbidden City, defined and occupied the center and excluded everyone but the elite.

But the ghetto was a self-contained world within the everyday world.

The rub comes from the fact that one is never quite sure where the boundaries of this embedded alt.reality really are. The traditional ghetto had walls, and the gates were shut at night, and the perimeter patrolled, but denizens of both worlds intermingled during the day, existed in the same spacetime.

Napoleon, a realist or a modernist or an egalitarian, whatever you want to call him, abolished the ghetto, and the Jews began to assimilate (again, for a while). Meanwhile, the Jews of the western parts of the Russian Empire had been confined to an infinitely larger ghetto, the Pale of Settlement, which lasted until WWI.

(The Pale in Ireland was the opposite of a ghetto; it was a beachhead established in the 13th century by the English to secure their invasion, not unlike the Green Zone in Baghdad.)

In the great literary tradition of other worlds--mostly dystopias--the other world is alien, set far beyond our normal orbit: Lilliput, Wonderland, Erewhon, Flatland...

(Or a strange visitor from afar visits us and finds us strange.)

The ghetto, for all its encapsulization within society, is a way of excluding, a way of cleansing, a way of being monochromatic without having to kill or expel The Other.

I would say something about the Suppression of the Jesuits (an elitist ghetto), but I don't want to digress.

Tomorrow—Ghetto Fiction, Part Two: Precursors