The Ghetto in Zionist Imagery: Dialectics of a Jewish Space

The lecture aims to discuss the ideological meaning of the “Ghetto” in Zionist thought. I will examine and compare different case-studies taken from the writings of the main Zionist thinkers and from Zionist newspapers to shed light on the dialectic narratives which surrounded that symbolic space in the Jewish nationalist imagery. On the one hand, indeed, the Ghetto was the metaphor of a past made of segregation and repression which Zionism, as a movement of cultural rejuvenation and national independence, aimed to overcome. On the other hand, however, Zionist scholars as Salo Baron and Cecil Roth reconsidered the Ghetto as the emblem of pre-assimilation Jewish history, when cultural awareness and religious attachment were strong among the Jews. The analysis of these two conflicting tales of the Ghetto in Zionist thought will serve as a prism to reflect on the coexistence, the reciprocity and the clashes between divergent narratives within a form of nationalism.