There was no reason to limit Jews to ghettos in the Middle Ages except to cause harm (in sense 2).
Er, this looks like a great example of not looking things up. Having everyone in a market dominant minority live in a walled part of town is great when the uneducated rabble decides it’s time to kill them all and take their things, because you can just shut the gates and man the walls. Consider the Jewish ghettoes in Morocco:
Usually, the Jewish quarter was situated near the royal palace or the residence of the governor, in order to protect its inhabitants from recurring riots.
When you tell people to look things up, be sure you first looked it up correctly yourself. That link says that ghettoes were used to protect Jews in the manner you describe. It does not say that that is why ghettoes were created.
Since I lost karma for that, I’d better elaborate. Your specific quoted line shows that protection was the reason for the ghetto’s placement, given that they were going to have one. It does not say that protection was the reason for having a ghetto.
Your own link says that “Jewish ghettoes in Europe existed because Jews were viewed as alien due to their non-Christian beliefs in a Christian environment”. The only mentionthat is anything like what you claim is halfway down the page, has no reference, does not name the location of the ghetto, and neither 1) says whether Jews could live only there or 2) if so, gives a reason for why they were prevented from living anywhere else.
That link says that ghettoes were used to protect Jews in the manner you describe. It does not say that that is why ghettoes were created.
It seems to me that we should separate the claim that the actual historical motivation of creating ghettoes was to cause harm to Jews, and the claim that there was no reason to make them besides causing harm to Jews. If there is one reason that Jews benefit from living separately from Christians or Muslims, then we can’t make the second argument.
But I don’t think we can make the first argument, because we can’t generalize across all Jewish quarters. In some cities, the rulers had to establish an exclusive zone for Jews in order to attract the Jews to move in, which suggests to me that this is a thing that Jews actively wanted. It makes sense that they would: notice that a function of many Jewish religious practices is to exclude outsiders and make it more likely for Jews to marry other Jews. Given the fact that Jews were on average wealthier than the local population and wealth played a part in how many of your grandchildren would survive to reproductive age, that’s not just raw ingroup preference. (Indeed, Jews moving from a city where a Jew-hating ruler had set up a ghetto to keep them separate might ask a Jew-loving ruler to set them up a ghetto, because they noticed all the good things that a ghetto got them and thought they were worth the costs.)
As for whether or not people voluntarily choose to segregate themselves, consider, say, Chinatowns in the US. Many might have been caused by soft (or hard) restrictions on where Asians could live, but I imagine that most residents stay in them now because they prefer living around people with the same culture, having access to a Chinese-language newspaper, and so on.
Notice what I said: to limit Jews to ghettoes. Voluntary segregation and creating Jewish areas to attract Jews does not limit Jews to ghettoes. In general, creating ghettoes to benefit Jews is not a reason to limit them to ghettoes. Furthermore, since I was using ghettoes as a counterexample, even if I had not phrased it that way voluntary segregation still wouldn’t count, because in order to have a counterexample it only need be true that some ghettoes were created to harm Jews, even if others were not.
The word “generally” in there is another of those things which makes a statement true and trivial at the same time. For one thing, it depends on how you count the fences (When you have a fence about not being a gay male and another about not being a lesbian, does that count as one or two fences?)
A more reasonable interpretation is to take “generally” as a qualifier for how wide the support is for the fence rather than for how common such fences are among the population of all fences—that is, there aren’t fences with wide support, the majority of whose supporters wish to cause harm. “Mandatory ghettoes” are indeed a counterexample to the statement when read that way.
Er, this looks like a great example of not looking things up. Having everyone in a market dominant minority live in a walled part of town is great when the uneducated rabble decides it’s time to kill them all and take their things, because you can just shut the gates and man the walls. Consider the Jewish ghettoes in Morocco:
When you tell people to look things up, be sure you first looked it up correctly yourself. That link says that ghettoes were used to protect Jews in the manner you describe. It does not say that that is why ghettoes were created.
Since I lost karma for that, I’d better elaborate. Your specific quoted line shows that protection was the reason for the ghetto’s placement, given that they were going to have one. It does not say that protection was the reason for having a ghetto.
Your own link says that “Jewish ghettoes in Europe existed because Jews were viewed as alien due to their non-Christian beliefs in a Christian environment”. The only mentionthat is anything like what you claim is halfway down the page, has no reference, does not name the location of the ghetto, and neither 1) says whether Jews could live only there or 2) if so, gives a reason for why they were prevented from living anywhere else.
It seems to me that we should separate the claim that the actual historical motivation of creating ghettoes was to cause harm to Jews, and the claim that there was no reason to make them besides causing harm to Jews. If there is one reason that Jews benefit from living separately from Christians or Muslims, then we can’t make the second argument.
But I don’t think we can make the first argument, because we can’t generalize across all Jewish quarters. In some cities, the rulers had to establish an exclusive zone for Jews in order to attract the Jews to move in, which suggests to me that this is a thing that Jews actively wanted. It makes sense that they would: notice that a function of many Jewish religious practices is to exclude outsiders and make it more likely for Jews to marry other Jews. Given the fact that Jews were on average wealthier than the local population and wealth played a part in how many of your grandchildren would survive to reproductive age, that’s not just raw ingroup preference. (Indeed, Jews moving from a city where a Jew-hating ruler had set up a ghetto to keep them separate might ask a Jew-loving ruler to set them up a ghetto, because they noticed all the good things that a ghetto got them and thought they were worth the costs.)
As for whether or not people voluntarily choose to segregate themselves, consider, say, Chinatowns in the US. Many might have been caused by soft (or hard) restrictions on where Asians could live, but I imagine that most residents stay in them now because they prefer living around people with the same culture, having access to a Chinese-language newspaper, and so on.
Notice what I said: to limit Jews to ghettoes. Voluntary segregation and creating Jewish areas to attract Jews does not limit Jews to ghettoes. In general, creating ghettoes to benefit Jews is not a reason to limit them to ghettoes. Furthermore, since I was using ghettoes as a counterexample, even if I had not phrased it that way voluntary segregation still wouldn’t count, because in order to have a counterexample it only need be true that some ghettoes were created to harm Jews, even if others were not.
Azathoth123 said that people generally don’t build fences to gratuitously cause harm, not that they never ever do.
The word “generally” in there is another of those things which makes a statement true and trivial at the same time. For one thing, it depends on how you count the fences (When you have a fence about not being a gay male and another about not being a lesbian, does that count as one or two fences?)
A more reasonable interpretation is to take “generally” as a qualifier for how wide the support is for the fence rather than for how common such fences are among the population of all fences—that is, there aren’t fences with wide support, the majority of whose supporters wish to cause harm. “Mandatory ghettoes” are indeed a counterexample to the statement when read that way.