Ghetto

To control heresy, the Roman Catholic Church tried at times to separate Jews from Christians. Separation became a widespread policy from 1300 to 1600, when England, France, Spain, and Portugal expelled Jews, and many German and Italian cities enacted strict controls on those who were allowed to remain. Venice first permitted Jews to residence in 1513 and in 1516 required them to settle in the ghetto nuovo, the "new foundry" district, which it encouraged Christians to leave. The city later allowed Jewish settlement in other districts, the ghetto vecchio and the nuovissimo ghetto.

In 1555, as part of Counter-Reformation policy, Pope Paul IV (reigned 1555–1559) restricted Jewish residence in papal territories to segregated quarters, which by 1562 were called "ghettos." Through the eighteenth century they were established in western and central Europe. "Ghetto" conventionally evoked a forbidding image of impoverished Jews who lived locked behind walls from dusk to dawn in crowded, narrow streets, under their own authorities. During the French revolutionary wars, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) abolished ghettos and granted citizenship to Jews; this became permanent during the nineteenth century. The last ghetto, in Rome, was abolished in 1870.