508 years ago a “ghetto” was an enclosed place where European Jews were once relegated to live.
The term, derived from the Italian word “gettare” refers to the casting of metal, was first used in Venice in 1516, when authorities required Jews to move to the island of Carregio (the Ghetto Nuovo, new ghetto), across an area where an old copper foundry was located (the Ghetto Vecchio, old ghetto) to protect them from anti-jewish persecution.
The ghetto in Venice was enclosed by a wall and gates that were locked at night.
Jews had to observe a curfew, and were required to wear yellow hats and badges to distinguish themselves, a practice that the Nazis would later adapt in the 20th century.
The ghetto in Venice was crowded, and therefore it was necessary to add new floors onto existing buildings, leading to the first model of skyscrapers in Europe.
While the 1516 law creating the ghetto limited Jews’ freedom of mobility, to some degree it was less severe than policies elsewhere in Europe, where Jews were often forced to leave altogether.
Inside the confines of the ghetto, Jews had the autonomy to govern themselves and to sustain their own social, religious and educational institutions.
Though the term “ghetto” was first used in Venice, this was not the first instance of Jews being forced into segregated quarters.
Compulsory segregation of Jews was common in medieval Europe, and these Jewish areas were later referred to as ghettos.
The Lateran Councils (Elders and Leaders of The Roman Catholic Church) of 1179 and 1215 advocated for the segregation of Jews.
The law was only the first of the three “infamous bulls” – according to Attilio Milano’s definition – which significantly embittered the lives of the Jews and contributed to the spread of hatred and violence in Italy.
In the span of a few decades, first Hebraeorum gens sola (1569) and then Caeca et obdurata (1593) decreed the final expulsion of the Jews from the whole territory of the Church, with the exceptions of Rome, Ancona, and Avignon.
A ghetto-like community existed in 1262 in Prague, and by the 1400s became more common in other European cities.
In 1460 the Judengasse (“Jews’ Alley”) in Frankfurt was established.
In 1555, Pope Paul IV issued the “Cum nimis absurdum” proclamation, which required the Jews of Rome to live in separate quarters and also severely restricted their rights, including what businesses they could engage in.
The purpose of this edict was to encourage conversion to Catholicism, an act that would serve as a ticket out of the ghetto.
The appearance of what may be called the “community” dates back to September 20, 1554, when a group of thirteen Jews asked (through a written document) for recognition of the borders of the Jewish cemetery, adjacent the field of a Christian cemetery.
The importance of the document lies not only in the information it gives about the position of the Jewish cemetery and the request to respect the burial place, but even more in the identification of the thirteen Jews – Laudadio di Isacco, Guglielmo di Diodato, Mosè di Ventura, Angelo di Raffaele, Isacco di Moscione, Emanuele di Aleuccio, Vitale di Raffaele, Prospero di Guglielmo, Samuele di Diodato, Salomone di Bonanno, Mosè di Samuele, Zaccaria di Mosè di Matassa, and Mosè di Piccione – as representatives of the Universitas hebraeorum of Civitanova Marche in the presence of the notary Giacomo Angelini.
The signature of the act in the synagogue (sinagoga dictorum hebraeorum in quarterio portae pauli) is also important.
One of the first requests made by the Jews to the municipal authorities “as soon as they settled in any one place was for permission to gather in prayer and hold their religious services,” i.e. the establishment of a synagogue.
When the money lender Angelo di Aleuccio da Recanati was summoned to open a bank in Civitanova in 1476, it was probable that the synagogue did not exist, and it was possibly only opened after the establishment and arrival of other Jewish families.
In such cases, when the Jewish presence was very limited in the territory “and it was therefore impossible to establish a synagogue in the official sense, Jews were still granted the right to choose a place where they could pray.”
This does not show up in the condotta found in the communal archives of Civitanova Marche.
Reading the document, it is only possible to understand that Angelo asked the municipal council to grant him some privileges to dwell safely in the city.
Besides the economic terms and conditions of his business, the condotta allows him, his family, and his future descendants to keep and observe the Jewish faith and to avoid lending money or doing other business on Saturdays or other Jewish holidays.
Moreover, the Jews were protected from the harassments that they usually suffered from Christians on Good Friday.
The requirement for Jews not to leave their houses during Holy Week (especially Good Friday) was very old.
On the basis of Church canons, municipal and local authorities ordered them “to keep their windows and doors closed on Good Friday and not to leave their homes during Holy Week for whatever reason.”
It is very likely that the Jews mostly dwelled in the area near the synagogue in the neighbourhood of Porta S. Paolo, as Guglielmo/Benjamin also noted in his chronicle.
Following the account, in 1558 they were ordered to “leave their houses next to the synagogue, which had been the house of prayer since the earliest days, and to dwell by the rubbish dump.”
The ghetto made a clear distinction to the wider society between those who were accepted” and those who were not.
Though anti-Semitism was alive and well in the centuries that preceded this papal order, until 1555 the Jews of Rome had enjoyed freedom of movement.
Under the papal order, they were relocated to a crowded and unsanitary area that regularly was flooded by the Tiber River.
While the ghetto was a place of squalor, the rest of the city was being built up with magnificent churches.
This contrast allowed the authorities to highlight the differences between Jews and Christians, making it seem as though the destitute living conditions of the ghetto were the natural consequences of denying the divinity of Christ.
Though the ghetto was designed to segregate Jews, who were seen as a threat to Catholicism, it did not stop Jews and Christians from maintaining social and economic interactions; indeed Christians were allowed to enter the Roman ghetto during the day.
In the 18th century, as part of a broader effort to spread liberty and equality, Napoleon sought to liberate the Jews from the ghettos of Italy.
In one instance, in Padua, the French emperor even declared that the street where the Jews lived be renamed in order to remove the word “ghetto.”
Nevertheless, the Jewish ghetto in Rome was hard to eliminate.
Even though the gates were taken down in 1848 (due to protests by Roman citizens allied with Jews), the ghetto did not officially cease to exist until 1870, when Italy was unified and became a modern nation state.
This period of Jewish emancipation (beginning in the late 18th century, continuing through the early 20th century) led to the dismantling of ghettos across Europe.
Though by the 20th century Jews were no longer forced to live in ghettos, many continued to live in segregated quarters, in cities throughout Europe and the United States, including Warsaw, Prague, Frankfurt, the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the West Side of Chicago.
Writers in the 20th century described many of these neighborhoods as slums, filled with poverty, violence, and iniquity.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, cities like Venice, Frankfurt, Prague and Rome forcibly segregated their Jewish citizens.
By the late 19th century, these ghettos had been steadily dismantled.
But instead of vanishing from history, ghettos reappeared — with a purpose more ominous than segregation — under Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
German forces established ghettos in over a thousand cities across Europe.
They were isolated, strictly controlled and resource-deprived — but unlike the ghettos of history, they weren’t meant to last.
Reviving the Jewish ghetto made genocide a much simpler project.
As the Holocaust proceeded, ghettos were emptied by the trainload.
The prisoners of the enormous Warsaw (Poland) ghetto, which at one point held 400,000 Jews, famously fought their deportation to death camps.
They were outnumbered and undersupplied, but some managed to die on their own terms; thousands of Jews were killed within the walls of the ghetto, rather than in the camps.
Jewish ghettos were finally abolished after the end of World War II.
But the word lived on, redefined as a poor, urban black community.
The term “ghetto” eventually was reappropriated to refer to poor, urban African-American neighborhoods, but was later deemed offensive, now often euphemized by the term “inner city.”
The Rise of The Rothschilds
In the 1760′s, a Jewish-German called Mayer Amschel Rothschild and his 5 male children decided to create a banking business.
Rothschild worked with German aristocrats and managed their monies for them.
This gave him some social privileges such as living at court or outside of the Jewish ghettos, while being able to spread their influence over much more than just a small ghetto.
When the French revolution kicked off in 1789, it led to the overthrow of the French monarchy but benefited the Rothschild banking empire tremendously.
The Austrians during the French revolution asked Rothschild to help equip the Austrian army with guns, uniforms and other aids.
Rothschild, realising he could make more money from other countries rather than the Austrians, sent his 5 sons to live in the grandest cites of Europe, such as Paris, Vienna, London and Frankfurt, to embark on an financial expansion for the Rothschild banking industry world wide (or European wide, because back then Europe was considered the world.)
With Rothschild’s 5 sons now in the most important places in Europe (at that time) led to the first bank to be in another country.
Rothschild bank lending to governments to finance war operations over several centuries provided the Rothschild family with ample opportunity to accumulate bonds and build additional wealth in a range of different industries.
But in 1811, after almost a couple decades working with the European top governments, the original Rothschild, Mayer Amschel Rothschild died but luckily, he has given his 5 sons strict instructions on how he wants his bank to be run so that the bank won’t collapse after his death.
He also told his sons to get married within the family tree so that his line of descents will run the banks.
Which is one of the reasons Rothschild is still a family bank after all this time, and also the reason why Rothschild family tree is so massive.
After Rothschild’s death, one of his sons, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, became the most successful.
He was also much more generous than the others because he made many charities, and funded many schools such as the Jews’ Free School in London.
Furthermore, he ran public libraries, orphanages, hospitals, homes for the elderly and special funds allocated for the purpose of education.
Educational efforts in Austria, France and Israel were also made possible through Rothschild’s generosity.
In addition to money to support education, the family gave an estimated 60,000 pieces of artwork to numerous organizations.
The Rothschild family expanded the creation of social housing in the cities of London and Paris, and the Rothschild Foundation was created to further these efforts.
Sadly in the early 20th century, the Rothschild empire was hit hard.
The world wars, the political mayhem, and family problems diminished the family fortune over the next 100 years.
The Naples branch of the bank had closed in 1863 and a lack of male heirs led to the closing of the Frankfurt branch in 1901.
Unbelievable!!
When the Nazis took Austria in 1938, the Rothschild bank in Austria fell completely.
The Vichy government in France expropriated Rothschild Bordeaux properties during the war and the Nazis confiscated millions of dollars’ worth of art, jewels and precious objects from the Austrian branch of the family.
Indeed! Their Rothschild palaces, a collection of vast palaces in Vienna built and owned by the family, were confiscated, plundered and destroyed by the Nazis.
The palaces were famous for their sheer size and for their huge collections of paintings, armour, tapestries and statues (some of which were restored to the Rothschilds by the Austrian government in 1999).
All family members escaped the Holocaust, some of them moving to the United States, and returning to Europe only after the war.
In 1998/9, the government of Austria agreed to return to the Rothschild family some 250 art treasures looted by the Nazis and absorbed into state museums after the war.
Some were placed at Christie’s in London for auction in 1999.
Louis Nathaniel de Rothschild was arrested at the airport at Aspern and taken into custody by the Nazis because he was a distinguished member of the Jewish oligarchy.
He was released only after lengthy negotiations between the family and the Nazis and upon payment of $21,000,000, believed to have been the largest ransom payment in history for any individual!!
While imprisoned he was visited by Heinrich Himmler.
Rothschild apparently impressed the SS leader, who subsequently ordered that Rothschild’s prison conditions be improved with better furniture and sanitation facilities.
Despite appeals from Queen Mary of the United Kingdom and possibly the Duke of Windsor, Rothschild was held in Vienna’s Hotel Metropole while the German government attempted to expropriate his business concerns.
He was imprisoned at least through July 1938, and his property placed under control of a German “commissioner”.
Felix Somary, in his memoirs, recalls that, soon before the Anschluss, he phoned to the baron repeatedly, in a desperate attempt to convince him to leave Austria.
The day before the Anschluss, Louis’s brother Alphons and his wife were visiting him in Switzerland, wanting to go back into Austria; he persuaded them to remain there, and to get his children Francesca de Rothschild and Heidi de Rothschild away from Austria to Netherlands.
Finally allowed to leave Austria, Louis survived the Holocaust and Second World War.
All of the Rothschild possessions were plundered and subsequently “Aryanised”.
The city-palace of the family was destroyed after the war.
The baron never received most of his former belongings back, since most of the paintings were taken over by the Austrian state, which did not allow the paintings to leave the country.
Over the years, palatial Rothschild estates were gradually donated to the British and French governments and to other organisations and universities, since the Rothschild’s didn’t really need them any more, and also because they were wasting the Rothschild savings.
After the fall of Nazi Germany, only three banks remained under ownership of the Rothschild’s.
These were the London and Paris branches, and a new Swiss bank founded by Baron Edmond Adolphe de Rothschild, who died in the 1970s.
Luckily for the Rothschild’s, in 1982, Francois Mitterrand’s socialist government dealt with the Paris bank fatal blow, nationalising it and renaming it Compagnie Européenne de Banc.
Edmond Rothschild and Francois Mitterrand’s were actually relatives, so the Rothschilds helped Francois Mitterrand’s new socialist government, and ended up creating the Rothschild & Cie Banque, which became France’s second largest merchant bank.
Today, Rothschild, after the family wealth has been divided among many descendants and heirs throughout the years competing with each other, Rothschild holdings span a number of industries, including financial services, real estate, mining, energy and charitable work.
The family also owns more than a dozen wineries in North America, Europe, South America, South Africa and Australia.
Most family members are employed by corporations directly or are invested in operations that generate family wealth.
The remarkable success of the family has largely been due to a strong interest in cooperation, being entrepreneurs, and the practice of smart business principles.
The estate of Nathan Rothschild was intimately tied to the other fortunes of the family and became part of the collective wealth each Rothschild passed to the next generation.
Rothschild descendants continue to finance global business operations and contribute to scholarly, humanitarian, cultural and business endeavors.
Descendants have married into royalty and other affluent families, including the Rockefellers and, most recently, the Hiltons, when James Rothschild wed Nicky Hilton.
Currently, the family’s entire net worth is believed to be a staggering $400 billion, with some estimates reaching $1 trillion.
Ancient Land of The Jews
More than 100 years ago, on November 2, 1917, Britain’s then-foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote a letter addressed to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a figurehead of the British Jewish community.
The letter was short – just 67 words – but its contents had a seismic effect on Palestine that is still felt to this day.
It committed the British government to “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and to facilitating “the achievement of this object”. The letter is known as the Balfour Declaration.
In essence, a European power promised the Zionist movement a country where Palestinian Arab natives made up more than 90 percent of the population.
A British Mandate was created in 1923 and lasted until 1948.
During that period, the British facilitated mass Jewish immigration – many of the new residents were fleeing Nazism in Europe – and they also faced protests and strikes. Palestinians were alarmed by their country’s changing demographics and British confiscation of their lands to be handed over to Jewish settlers.
The word Palestine derives from Philistia, the name given by Greek writers to the land of the Philistines, who in the 12th century bce occupied a small pocket of land on the southern coast, between modern Tel Aviv–Yafo and Gaza.
The first clear use of the term Palestine to refer to the entire area between Phoenicia and Egypt was in 5th century BCE ancient Greece, when Herodotus wrote of a “district of Syria, called Palaistinê” (Ancient Greek: Συρίη ἡ Παλαιστίνη καλεομένη) in The Histories, which included the Judean mountains and the Jordan.
While the State of Israel was established on 15 May 1948 and admitted to the United Nations, a Palestinian State was not established.
The remaining territories of pre-1948 Palestine, the West Bank – including East Jerusalem- and Gaza Strip, were administered from 1948 till 1967 by Jordan and Egypt, respectively.
Scholars believe the name “Palestine” originally comes from the word “Philistia,” which refers to the Philistines who occupied part of the region in the 12th century B.C.
Throughout history, Palestine has been ruled by numerous groups, including the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Fatimids, Seljuk Turks, Crusaders, Egyptians and Mamelukes.
From about 1517 to 1917, the Ottoman Empire ruled much of the region.
When World War I ended in 1918, the British took control of Palestine. The League of Nations issued a British mandate for Palestine—a document that gave Britain administrative control over the region, and included provisions for establishing a Jewish national homeland in Palestine—which went into effect in 1923.
The Partition of Palestine and The Creation of a New Home for The “Ghetto Jews” of Post World War II
In 1947, after more than two decades of British rule, the United Nations proposed a plan to partition Palestine into two sections: An independent Jewish state and An independent Arab state.
The city of Jerusalem, which was claimed as a capital by both Jews and Palestinian Arabs, was to be an international territory with a special status.
Jewish leaders accepted the plan, but many Palestinian Arabs—some of whom had been actively fighting British and Jewish interests in the region since the 1920s—vehemently opposed it.
Arab groups argued that they represented the majority of the population in certain regions and should be granted more territory. They began to form volunteer armies throughout Palestine.
Israel Becomes a State
In May 1948, less than a year after the Partition Plan for Palestine was introduced, Britain withdrew from Palestine and Israel declared itself an independent state, implying a willingness to implement the Partition Plan.
Almost immediately, neighboring Arab armies moved in to prevent the establishment of the Israeli state.
The 1948 Arab-Israeli War that ensued involved Israel and five Arab nations—Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon.
At the end of the war in July 1949, Israel controlled more than two-thirds of the former British Mandate, while Jordan took control of the West Bank and Egypt took control of the Gaza Strip.
The 1948 conflict opened a new chapter in the struggle between Jews and Palestinian Arabs, which now became a regional contest involving nation-states and a tangle of diplomatic, political and economic interests.
Ancient Owners
When Jesus was born, Palestine was ruled by the Romans.
The Romans knew that whoever controlled Palestine had control of all the roads in and out of those areas.
The Romans invaded the land of Palestine in 63BC.
The Roman army marched into Jerusalem and took over the city.
Archaeological work in the area suggests that the city was inhabited as far back as 4000BC.
Its earliest known name may be Jebusite, the translation of a Canaanite town. Together with the later arriving Philistines, they are believed to be the earliest known ancestors to present day Palestinians.
The History of Jerusalem during the Kingdom of Jerusalem began with the siege of the city in 1099 as part of the First Crusade.
This resulted in Jerusalem being conquered by Christian forces, after it had been under Muslim rule for nearly 450 years.
It became the capital of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, until it was again conquered by the Ayyubids under Saladin in 1187.
For the next forty years, a series of Christian campaigns, including the Third and Fifth Crusades, attempted in vain to retake the city, until Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II led the Sixth Crusade and successfully negotiated its return in 1229.
In 1244, the city was taken by Khwarazmian troops.
After 1260 the Ayyubid realm that included Jerusalem was taken over by the Mamluks of Egypt and the city was gradually rebuilt during the later 13th century, while the shrinking coastal Crusader state was gradually defeated until its final demise in 1291.
modern Jews originate and descend from the Israelites, while the Islamic periods of the city’s history are important to Palestinian nationalists, whose discourse suggests that modern Palestinians descend from all the different peoples who have lived in the region.
As a result, both sides claim the history of the city has been politicized by the other in order to strengthen their relative claims to the city.
Creation of HAMAS
HAMAS was formed in late 1987 at the beginning of the first Palestinian intifada (uprising).
Its roots are in the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Hamas says it is a freedom-fighting movement trying to free Palestinians from occupation and reclaim large parts of Israel.
Its tactics are divisive among Palestinians and those who support establishing a Palestinian state because of its use of violence.
1987 – Hamas is created at the start of the first Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Two years later, Hamas carries out its first attacks on Israeli military targets, including the kidnap and murder of two Israeli soldiers.
1993 – After years of violence, the first Oslo Accord, aimed at establishing peace between Israel and the Palestinians, is signed.
Hamas opposes the peace process, and seeks to derail it with bus bombings and gun attacks in Israel.
2000 – Israel and the Palestinians fail to reach a final agreement in the peace process at a summit in the United States in July 2000.
Two months later, Palestinian protests over a visit by Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon to Al-Aqsa mosque compound in East Jerusalem – known to Jews as Temple Mount, because it was the site of ancient Jewish temples, and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary – develop into a Second Intifada.
2001-02 – Hamas carries out a series of suicide bombings in Israel, including killing 21 Israelis outside a Tel Aviv disco in June 2001, and 30 Jewish celebrants at a Passover seder dinner in Netanya in March 2022.
Four months later, Hamas’s military commander Salah Shehadeh is killed in an Israeli air strike, and Israel starts a siege of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
March-April 2004 – Israeli air strikes kill Hamas co-founder and spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and co-founder and political leader Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, in Gaza within a month of each other.
The Hamas leadership goes into hiding and the identity of Rantissi’s successor is kept secret.
Aug. 15, 2005 – Israeli forces start a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, captured from Egypt in the 1967 Middle East war, abandoning settlements and leaving the densely populated enclave under the control of the Palestinian Authority.
Jan. 25, 2006 – Hamas wins a majority of seats in a Palestinian legislative election. Israel and United States cut off aid to Palestinians because Hamas refuses to renounce violence and recognise Israel.
June 25, 2006 – Hamas militants capture Israeli conscript Gilad Shalit in a cross-border raid, prompting Israeli air strikes and incursions.
Shalit is finally freed over five years later in a prisoner exchange.