Ghetto confinement simultaneously reduced and enabled Christian-Jewish cultural exchange

Evidence

Jacob Katz (1961) has argued that the social exclusiveness of life in the Jewish ghetto led to Jewish indifference to conditions outside the ghetto that was reflected in a decline in Jewish polemics against Christianity. But one should beware overstating the case. The stability of the ghetto also allowed for contact between Jewish and Christian cultures. Jews had access to Christian learning as well as to developments in science. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2375

Categorization

• QUESTION: The passage gestures at a counterintuitive mechanism — how could physical isolation both foster indifference and enable contact? Worth following up on Katz’s argument.