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Few words are as ideologically charged as "ghetto." It was initially synonymous with two cities: Venice, where the word was first used in conjunction with the segregation of the Jews in 1516, and Rome, where the ghetto survived as a compulsory institution until the fall of the Papal States in 1870, long after it had ceased to exist elsewhere. Ghetto: The History of a Word offers a fascinating account of the changing nuances of this slippery word, from its coinage to the present day. It details how the ghetto emerged as an ambivalent metaphor for "premodern" Judaism in the nineteenth century and how it was later revived to refer to everything from densely populated Jewish immigrant enclaves in modern cities to the hyper-segregated holding pens of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. We see how this ever-malleable word traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, with pit stops on New York's Lower East Side and Chicago's Near West Side until it came to be more closely associated with African Americans than Jews. Chronicling this sinuous trans-Atlantic odyssey, Daniel B. Schwartz reveals the history of ghettos to be part of a larger story of struggle and argument over the meaning of a name. Paradoxically, the word "ghetto" came to loom larger in discourse about Jews when Jews no longer were required to live in legal ghettos. At a time when the Jewish associations have been largely eclipsed, Ghetto retrieves the history of a dangerously resilient word.--

Intro -- Contents -- Foreword -- Introduction -- I. Early Sephardic Responses -- 1. The Sephardic Community of Amsterdam, The Writ of Excommunication against Baruch Spinoza -- 2. Isaac Orobio de Castro, A Philosophical Disputation -- 3. Hakham Zevi Ashkenazi, Responsum No. 18 -- II. Breaking the Taboo -- 4. Moses Mendelssohn, Second Dialogue -- 5. Moses Mendelssohn, On the Curtailment of Jewish Juridical Autonomy -- 6. Moses Mendelssohn, Judaism as Revealed Legislation -- 7. Moses Mendelssohn, Morning Hours, Chaps. 13-14 -- 8. Moses Mendelssohn, From To Lessing's Friends -- 9. Solomon Maimon, Autobiography -- 10. Saul Ascher, Leviathan, Book 2, Chapter 6 -- 11. Mordechai Gumpel Schnaber-Levison, The Thirteen Principles of Torah, 19a-b -- III. From Heretic to Hero -- 12. Heinrich Heine, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany -- 13. Berthold Auerbach, Spinoza: A Novel -- 14. Meir HaLevi Letteris, The Life of the Sage and Scholar Baruch de Spinoza, z"l -- 15. Salomon Rubin, The New Guide to the Perplexed -- 16. Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem -- 17. Micha Josef Berdichevsky, The Day's Labors and Musings: Selection of Diaries -- 18. Melekh Ravitch, A Poetical Essay in Four Cycles: The Man, the Work, the Spider, Incense -- 19. David Ben-Gurion, Let Us Rectify the Injustice -- 20. Haim Slovès, Boruch of Amsterdam, Act 3, Scene 2 -- 21. Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew -- 22. Rebecca N. Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity -- IV. Through the Lens of Wissenschaft -- 23. Manuel Joël, On the Genesis of Spinoza's Philosophy -- 24. Jakob Freudenthal, The Life of Spinoza -- 25. Carl Gebhardt, Spinoza/Judaism and Baroque -- 26. Jakob Klatzkin, The Misunderstood One -- 27. Harry Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Processes of His Reasoning -- V. Contra Spinoza.

"Pioneering biblical critic, theorist of democracy, and legendary conflater of God and nature, Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was excommunicated by the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam in 1656 for his "horrible heresies" and "monstrous deeds." Yet, over the past three centuries, Spinoza's rupture with traditional Jewish beliefs and practices has elevated him to a prominent place in genealogies of Jewish modernity. The First Modern Jew provides a riveting look at how Spinoza went from being one of Judaism's most notorious outcasts to one of its most celebrated, if still highly controversial, cultural icons, and a powerful and protean symbol of the first modern secular Jew. Ranging from Amsterdam to Palestine and back again to Europe, the book chronicles Spinoza's posthumous odyssey from marginalized heretic to hero, the exemplar of a whole host of Jewish identities, including cosmopolitan, nationalist, reformist, and rejectionist. Daniel Schwartz shows that in fashioning Spinoza into "the first modern Jew," generations of Jewish intellectuals -German liberals, East European maskilim, secular Zionists, and Yiddishists- have projected their own dilemmas of identity onto him, reshaping the Amsterdam thinker in their own image. The many afterlives of Spinoza are a kind of looking glass into the struggles of Jewish writers over where to draw the boundaries of Jewishness and whether a secular Jewish identity is indeed possible. Cumulatively, these afterlives offer a kaleidoscopic view of modern Jewish culture and a vivid history of an obsession with Spinoza that continues to this day."--Jacket

Few fields are as riddled with terminological indecision as "German Jewish thought." One cannot invoke this sphere without immediately bumping up against essential questions of definition. Should membership within its bounds be reserved for those who wrote, primarily, as Jews for Jews, even if in a non-Jewish language? Or should its borders be expanded substantially to include Jewish contributions to secular German thought—or, perhaps more aptly put, secular thought in German, in order not to exclude the vast number of Central European Jewish innovators who wrote in the language? If one takes the latter route, the problems only proliferate, for the question then ensues, what makes any of these supposed Jewish contributionsJewish? How is the Jewishness of a particular work, school of thought, or sensibility to be gauged and assessed? How does one avoid the risk of reading too much in—or too little? How does one steer clear of reducing Jewishness to some stable core or essence, without relying on a notion so broad and diffuse as to be effectively meaningless? And always lurking is the question whether, in imputing Jewishness to a cultural product or outlook, one has betrayed its creator, who would have recoiled at being labeled a "Jewish" author or artist. These problems are not peculiar to German Jewish intellectual history. They arise wherever and whenever Jews have been disproportionately prominent in the shaping of secular culture—for instance, in the writing of the "New York intellectuals" in the postwar United States. But the role of authors and artists of German Jewish background proved especially pronounced even after many, like Hannah Arendt or Leo Strauss, emigrated to escape the Nazis. In their new environments, they remained active participants in intellectual life, and the question remains whether they were carrying on the tradition of German Jewish thought.