Yes.
The centres of high culture from centuries ago were also centres of traffic and trade, they were not pleasant "liveable" cities, indeed, they typically had huge slums. The origin of the word ghetto is a neighbourhood in Venice. Today, it's UNESCO World Heritage at all, and probably on the list of places you like to visit (and, incidentally, smaller than a Walmart) -- but 500 years ago, it was a prison for jews.
Whatever future generations will recognise as high culture of our present day is very hard to predict, and I'm not at all certain that they will consider the absence of car infrastructure a key feature. Silicon Valley, being ground zero of the information revolution, certainly has a decent claim, and it's nothing if not cars all over.
Medieval cities had separate Jewish areas due to Jewish demand, not gentile demand.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/appeal-launch...
Here ( http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/16524... ) is a discussion of a history of Yiddish (the original work being in Yiddish, I think it's forgivable to read a discussion instead):
> Nineteenth-century Jewish activists, demanding rights of citizenship, created the story that the Jews had been locked in ghettos since the Middle Ages
> For Weinreich, based on both the linguistic and historical evidence, there could be no doubt that up until the 18th century “the Jews wanted to be by themselves. … Separate residence (strange as this may appear in the light of present Jewish and general conceptions of rights) was part of the privileges granted the Jews at their own request” so they could worship together; provide for their own slaughterhouse, bathhouse, cemetery, and social halls; study together; run their own rabbinic courts; supervise tax collection; and when necessary, protect themselves from attacks.
> Archeology supports this part of Weinreich’s argument. Befuddled tour guides in Prague struggle to explain why, given the expectation of exclusion of Jews, the city’s famous Jewish quarter, Josefov, is so central to the old town. (One misguided explanation is that the Jews were given land near the river that was too marshy for the other city inhabitants, prone to flooding and disease-bearing miasmas.) But Prague’s Josefov is not an isolated case—it is typical. Weinreich’s point is that exclusion could also be exclusivity; restrictions also came with designated privileges. In Trier, Mainz, Aachen, Cologne, Worms, and more than 100 medieval towns in Central Europe, the Jewish district was both a central and a prime location, close to the economic heart of the city. The German Bishop Rüdiger, granting a charter of the city of Speyer in 1084 wrote, “I thought that I would increase the glory of our city a thousandfold if I were to include Jews.”
Oh, and btw: since you chose to mention Prague, the historical Josefov was one of two ghettos. Still typical?
In other words, my remark on "alternate reality" seems to have been spot-on.
Because that sentence is from a separate part of the article and refers to an entirely different point. I'll outline the structure for you:
> Weinreich’s first innovation in the History was to argue, against apparent common sense and abundant personal experience, that Yiddish was formed not through isolation but through constant interaction combined with a chosen separateness.
> Archeology supports this part of Weinreich’s argument.
> Weinreich’s second argument is equally counterintuitive. Though in some places Yiddish and German were mutually understandable, he assiduously argued that they are different languages. But Weinreich deployed his formidable linguistic artillery to argue, contrariwise, that despite significant variations in spoken and written Yiddish across the expanse of Europe (western Yiddish, more purely German; eastern Yiddish, heavily Slavic; southern Yiddish, with influence from Hungary and the Balkans), Yiddish forms one language and shares one cultural sphere and worldview, quite distinct from the surrounding culture. In short, Yiddish and German are different, but all Yiddish is one.
> Once he demonstrated that Yiddish is an independent language, Weinreich explained how it came to be, first as an altered language formed among medieval Jewish trading settlements in the French–German borderland along the Rhine valley. Weinreich deduced from traces left in early Yiddish that these first Jewish immigrants to the heart of Europe spoke a Romance language, having left Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek behind when they left the eastern Mediterranean, although Hebrew and Aramaic were still languages of study. But early on (in the 10th or 11th century) these Jews from Rhineland France, presumably through contact with Jewish settlements in southern Germany, converted from old Judeo-French to western Yiddish, which was more purely German with some elements of Latin or early French. In subsequent centuries—when, exactly, is a source of considerable debate—this language moved east with Jewish emigrants, settlers, and refugees, either in the 12th century (after the Crusades and persecutions) or in the 14th or 15th. There it picked up a significant cargo of Slavic vocabulary and expressions and became the Yiddish more familiar today: eastern Yiddish.
> Yet the historical, demographic, and geographical evidence does not support this entirely logical and neat story line—a fact to which Weinreich himself gives evidence in his notes. Yiddish blossomed in printed books from the 16th century onward, but Weinreich argues that Yiddish began in the 10th century in the Rhineland—though there are little more than a dozen extant texts in Yiddish from before 1400. Many of these early traces of Yiddish are only a few lines long and, aside from the marginal glosses of the Talmudic scholar Rashi (c. 1100) from the Champagne region, the early texts do not congregate in the “right” geographic area.
The claim that the historical evidence does not support the idea that Yiddish originated in tenth-century France is quite different from the claim that the historical evidence does not support the idea that segregation was a privilege given to eleventh-century Jews at their own request. You want the sentence you quoted to mean the latter of those, but an honest reader would have to admit that it means the former.
I don't dispute that living in a separated community has its advantages, I don't claim that ghettoes were prisons; in fact, distancing themselves from other, um, "tribes" is even supported by the Law. I'm just deeply incredulous at the claim "we don't want to live outside at all, make it a law of the land:" there are plenty of exceptions in the town statutes saying "want a house outside of the ghetto? Pay up!"; that doesn't quite look as inside influence.
Phrased as "chosen separatenes", this is still a far cry from "separate Jewish areas due to Jewish demand, not gentile demand" - to the first part I could mostly agree, to the second, not at all (and there's plenty of textual sources spanning the entire medieval and early modern period for that). I would agree that in a situation of "live in a ghetto or not here at all" (a threat which manifested itself pretty often), the mutual support in a separated community would be welcome.
In this view, legislation saying that the Jews must live in the Jewish quarter is basically analogous to legislation prohibiting incest -- it's not passed because people would be violating it otherwise, but because people feel that it reflects the proper order of the world, and it passes easily because there is no group that feels threatened by its passage.
Maybe they should have felt threatened, since the situation often persisted long after the point where it was a net benefit to the Jews, but it's hard to blame the communities of 1040 for not anticipating the problems of 1940.
You are cherry-picking facts in the extreme - the "problems of the 1940s" (you mean othe holocaust? What newspeak!) did not just pop out of nowhere, pogroms as ruler-sanctioned way of making a quick buck were a time-honoured tradition spanning the Middle Ages.
They draw that protection from the fact that they live in a cohesive group in a well-defined (though not, as far as I know, legally set) region. They are welcome to leave, but they would lose the special legal status that the Amish enjoy, and they would then be basically unable to practice their traditional lifestyle.
Are they being kept in a ghetto? Is it by our demand or theirs? Is it reasonable, if we give them their own laws, that we restrict that to a well-defined area?
> I'm looking at a handful of such comments (which call for Jewish presence as cash cows, mostly) across multiple centuries, and an avalanche of comments, texts and laws saying "get them outta here. okay, maybe let them stay this year if they pay more."
How often were they actually expelled?
> What newspeak!
The numbers are quite approximate, but the orders of magnitude are definitely correct.
Several of the Florences that would be laid end-to-end to get to Atlanta as the crow flies appear to be going in places that have virtually nothing there and could actually go there. I can't tell from Google maps if perhaps that's all swampland or something, but a lot of it isn't utilized, regardless of the reason.
If you want to make the point that cities should be more walkable or whatever, this is a terrible hook to do so with, because the existence of large interchanges has nothing to do with the cities not being more walkable. These large interchanges, in general, do not exist in downtown areas, and if you still complain about them it starts to sound more like you have no idea how large the world is. It comes off less like trenchant criticism and more like Puritan-style "those damned car owners are having fun and they should be stopped!".
[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.8901712,-84.462566,3749m/dat...
#: Main Highway ##: Main Highway [Even]##: Loop [Odd]##: Spur
One of the great things about the interstate system.
I am saddened by your comment here. The US has such a wealth of diversity in its cities, towns, and country-sides to offer that I can't possibly understand how one could dismiss everything in the country so categorically. Yes, even Atlanta, a city that I find is terrible to visit, but great to live.
Warning: "like to visit" != "like to live in"
I now live in the countryside, but in a quaint village in a country with only quaint villages.
So, my point is that I think that car-friendly and people-friendly are exclusive. I was careful to say it was my opinion, as I guess that everyone who agrees with the article will upvote-and-move-on and those who come to comments will be doing so to disagree with it ;)
Venice is particularly interesting: it has a massive carpark where residents leave their cars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury is another. I have never been to Poundbury, but it seems from what I've read like the kind of place I'd like to live.
My favorite commutes have been walking commutes, but I haven't had a job where I could do that in years, and I bought a house which isn't within walking distance of any jobs I'd want so that won't happen for the foreseeable future. Unless the walk from my bedroom to my home office counts as a "commute".
Furthermore, pedestrian-friendly is nice if you manage to sleep in a nice accommodation at a walkable distance from your centers of interest: this is usually the case when you visit a town as a tourist, but not so easy when you leave there.
However, for all the roadbuilding of the past 30+ years, the city remains well walkable, in a loose sense: the dense public transit network (a dirt-cheap yearly pass, trains running separate from all other traffic, semi-separated light rail, and an auxillary bus network) allows me to move about easily: walk a bit, hop on, ride a few stops, walk a bit again. This way, anything is within my "walking" distance. So, even though I'm not living in the city center, I can get there within half an hour (or in half an hour by car, hunting for parking spots included).
This, I believe, is the crucial part: walking by itself is okay for short distances, but needs efficient public transport on longer trips: "we'll just buy a bus or two" doesn't cut it.
(So, yes, it's easy even when living here: walking is not a tourist attraction, it's a mode of transport; and I even see a lot of tourists on the metro, "doing as the Romans do": using public transport as an extension of their legs.)
For example, in London only half of families have a car, and very few have two: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-ar...
When I lived in London, and later Stockholm and Malmö, I didn't have nor need a car. Sweden was particularly pedestrian-friendly.
Empirically, all the towns and cities I like to visit are the non-high-rise pedestrian ones. They don't have to be old, but it helps.
My visits to the US have given me a very jaded view of what constitutes culture in the US. Small towns with small roads can be nice in the evenings, and that's about it.