Ghettos and Ghettoization–History and Historiography

This chapter presents the basic features of the complicated phenomenon of Jewish ghettos under the Nazi regime. It deals with it both from the Nazi general and local policy regarding the ghettos (the external perspective) and the Jewish life and society within the ghettos (the internal perspective). Based on scholarly literature of the last decades, on the general phenomenon as well as on individual cases, the chapter draws the complicated outlines of this phenomenon. Major elements of the life in the ghettos, which were discussed in various contexts of research literature, are examined. The basic features of the ghetto phenomenon as depicted in the introduction of the Yad Vashem Encyclopedia are worth examining at length as they relate to the discussion about the “place” of ghettos in historians’ interpretations of the processes toward the “Final Solution.”