Confinement within a ghetto made the whole group liable for one member’s crime

Evidence

The ghetto also made Jews an easy target. In his autobiography, Life ofjudah, Rabbi Leon Modena described how in the first half of the seventeenth century, when one Jew was found guilty of a crime, all Jews suffered and the whole of the ghetto would be subjected to scrutiny (Cohen, 1988). Nor did the existence of the ghetto stop the Venetians from threatening the Jews with expulsion, which they did from time to time throughout the sixteenth century. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2373

Categorization

• XREF: Evokes the collective-punishment logic of colonial and racial policing — one offender’s act triggering scrutiny of an entire community.