Jewish ghettos in Europe

Around the ghetto stood walls that, during pogroms, were closed from inside to protect the community, but from the outside during Christmas, Pesach, and Easter Week to prevent the Jews from leaving at those times.

However, in the course of World War II the Third Reich created a totally new Jewish ghetto-system for the purpose of persecution, terror, and exploitation of Jews, mostly in Eastern Europe.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives, "The Germans established at least 1,000 ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone.

"[2] The ghetto system began in Renaissance Italy in July 1555 with Pope Paul IV's issuing of the Cum nimis absurdum.

As a result of the Cum nimis absurdum regulations and the increasing complexity of the early modern economy, the role of Jews as money lenders became more difficult and less profitable.

This as well as the fact that ghettos were often located at the town commercial centers drove Jews away from money lending and towards the role of second-hand merchants.

In this role, Jews were forbidden from selling anything considered vital to life such as food or other high value commodities, so they gravitated towards reselling secondhand goods in the form of pawn shops.

[4] Some scholars, however, have argued that this shift in papal policy inadvertently ended up improving some aspects of the Jewish experience relative to the medieval period.

Jewish historian Robert Bonfil has argued that the formation of ghettos acted as a sort of middle ground between acceptance and expulsion by the Christian authorities.

Following the formation of the ghetto system, there was a sharp decline in incidents such as pogroms, forced expulsion, and accusation of ritual murder that were common during the medieval period.

[5] During World War II, the new category of Nazi ghettos was formed by the Third Reich in order to confine Jews into tightly packed areas of the cities of Eastern and Central Europe.

The authorities deported Jews from everywhere in Europe to the ghettos of the East, or directly to the extermination camps designed and operated in Poland by Nazi Germans.

From its creation to its dissolution at the end of the 18th century, the city councils limited expansion in the Judengasse, resulting in a steady increase in population to the point of overcrowding.

Jewish settlement during the Middle Ages all across the town, but since 1360 following a number of pogroms concentrating on the Judengasse (Jew's Row), running parallel to the main street.

[15] At the beginning of World War II, nearly a quarter of the pre-war Polish areas were annexed by Nazi Germany and placed directly under German civil administration,[16] in violation of international law (in particular, the Hague Convention IV 1907).

After the expulsion of the Jews from the Kingdom of Naples in 1541, these neighborhoods lost their distinctive Jewish character, and now only traces of evidence remain of the original inhabitants.

Polish monarchs of the Piast dynasty invited the Jews to the country awarding them rights of status and total religious tolerance.

The World War II ghetto-system had been imposed by Nazi Germany roughly between October 1939 and July 1942 in order to confine Poland's Jewish population of 3.5 million for the purpose of persecution, terror, and exploitation.

All of southeast Europe – Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Greece – had fewer Jews than the original four districts of the General Government.

The liquidation of WWII ghettos across Poland was closely connected with the formation of highly secretive killing centers built by various German companies including I.A.

[42] Jews from Eastern Poland (areas now in Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine) were killed using guns rather than in gas chambers, see Ponary massacre, Janowska concentration camp.

The first group of 425 Jewish men were assembled at the Jonas Daniel Meijer Square and sent to concentration camps at Buchenwald and Mauthausen, which resulted in mass demonstrations among gentiles, organized by the Dutch Workers Party.