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"Ghetto!" The German is expected to feel the deepest sympathy for the "poor" Jews: for the eternally persecuted and oppressed Jews, who have been crammed together in filthy Jewish quarters, narrow Jewish alleys, leading a life unworthy of human beings, defenseless and at the mercy of the whims and mockery of Christians.
Indeed, the life of the Jews in the 15th to 18th century was by no means enviable; but due to their own fault. For two and a half millennia, they have always lived as foreigners among other peoples and have had the stubborn will to remain foreigners. For two and a half millennia, their ghetto life has been as voluntary as their dispersal. The ghetto was something similar to today's foreign districts in the cities of China. I recall for antiquity once more Alexandria, Antioch, Rome. In the early Middle Ages, there was no ghetto compulsion anywhere; rather, the religious community and the professional guild brought the Jews together. The first walled ghetto in Germany, the Jewish quarter in Speyer (1084), was a privilege. Only towards the end of the Middle Ages did ghetto compulsion arise from voluntary separation, and even then the segregation was not strict; numerous exceptions are known, e.g., for court Jews and doctors.
This was still acknowledged by the Jew Rathenau: "In close connection with each other, in strict isolation from the outside: thus they live in a semi-voluntary, invisible ghetto, not a living part of the people, but a foreign organism within its body."
What were the conditions in the 15th to 18th century? The states of Western and Central Europe had exercised their undeniable right to expel foreigners. Instead of settling in the East, where there was plenty of space, and dedicating themselves to agriculture or a trade, the Jews behaved like people who want to enter a park where a sign at the entrance reads "Entry for strangers prohibited." They want to remain "strangers," but do not want to be treated as "strangers."
