The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos during the Holocaust (review)

One formula for writing an important historical work is to demonstrate that far too much has been taken for granted in a particular subject. This is precisely what Dan Michman, Chief Historian at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and Professor at Bar-Ilan University, does in this insightful and carefully researched book on Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust. Michman’s remarkable accomplishment is to shatter a bit of received wisdom, and in the process to deepen our knowledge of a significant sphere of Holocaust history. And he does all this through the painstaking sifting of documentary evidence, little of which appears to be brand new, but to which historians simply have not paid enough attention.

Holocaust historians, in their treatment of Jewish “ghettoization” in Germanoccupied territories in Eastern Europe, have taken as a point of departure Reinhard Heydrich’s well-known Schnellbrief of September 21, 1939. From this piece of evidence, they have assumed a German program in Poland—later extended to parts of the occupied Soviet Union—to confine Jews to ghettos as a preliminary step on the road to the “Final Solution.” While careful scholars such as Christopher Browning have a more nuanced view of the significance of this document, acknowledging an important role for local initiative by German occupation authorities, many have mistakenly taken Heydrich’s message for the start of a well-coordinated, coherent policy—an “administrative measure,” as Raul Hilberg wrote, “a control mechanism” that, together with the establishment of Judenräte, constituted a well-orchestrated preliminary campaign to deal with the Jews of Eastern Europe. Yet Michman makes it clear that this document cannot withstand the weight that it has been asked to carry. The Schnellbrief only once mentions a “ghetto,” and this en passant; it refers to “concentration points,” but these are not necessarily “ghettos”—and certainly not all the ghettos either, as they evolved or as they later appeared in various places over time. “German documents of the period that were written by officials involved in setting up ghettos,” writes Michman, “propose varying reasons and explanations for their establishment and need—which shows that the officials themselves were not sure about the origins of the idea and its precise purposes” (3).

So what was the idea, where did it come from, and what were its purposes in various situations? To answer these questions Michman looks comparatively at the creation of ghettos in Poland and elsewhere, placing their formation into various geographical, chronological, political, and administrative contexts. Importantly, he undertakes what he calls a “cultural, linguistic and semantic approach” (3), one that requires a near exhaustive sifting through the documentary source material to evaluate just what the Nazi authorities actually meant by “ghettos” at various points in time. But before embarking on this inquiry, Michman introduces what he claims to be a key personality in his story: a leading “expert” on Jewish ghettos from the University of Königsberg, Professor Peter-Heinz Seraphim, author of the highly influential Das Judentum im osteuropäischen Raum, published in 1938. According to Michman, Seraphim broke new ground in the Nazi understanding of “ghettos” by presenting them as a focal point of Jewish malevolence, one that reflected the Nazis’ particularly obsessive antisemitism: “After the publication of Seraphim’s book,” he writes, “‘ghetto’ no longer meant the mental separation of Jews, nor even a separate Jewish residential quarter, as in the Middle Ages and early Modern Age . . . but (according to Heydrich on November 12 [1938]) ‘a completely segregated district with only Jews,’ where ‘we would have no control’ and ‘the Jew gets together with the whole of his Jewish tribe . . .’” (58–60). According to Michman, Seraphim’s understanding of ghettos caught on, and was a moving force in ghetto formation. The Germans’ motivations, he writes, “were psychological rather than bureaucratic” (146); seeing masses of Jews as an existential threat, the German occupiers sought to deal with them, at least temporarily, by jamming them into...