I first saw a Judería when walking in the streets of Segovia, a small Spanish city just a couple of hours outside of Madrid. Though not a Jewish “ghetto” in being so tightly sealed as the Jewish areas of Venice or Rome, it delimited the section of the city in which Jews could settle.

“Why,” I thought to myself, “would anyone want to live here?” The streets were narrow, the shops tightly packed. I could just imagine how readily disease must have spread — especially when there was no plumbing and sewage flowed down inlets in the streets. It must have smelled, lacked adequate living space, and been prone to attack by those who were not so fond of Jews. Who could possibly have wanted such a life?

The answer, implicit in the fact that Jews lived (relatively) voluntarily in Segovia’s Judería for many centuries, is that even the cramped not-quite-ghetto was far better than the alternatives: homelessness or helplessness.

The Jews, until their Emancipation during the French Revolution, were conceived of as something akin to serfs on royal land — residents of countries without leave to live freely in them in perpetuity. Often uprooted, they became the archetypical homeless of Medieval, Renaissance, and even Enlightenment Europe. As one Medieval English ballad, “Gernutus the Jew of Venice” (page 38 of this edition), said of the ethereal archetype of a Jew,

….His life was like a barrow hog,
That liveth many a day,
Yet never once doth any good
Until men will him slay.

Or like a filthy heap of dung
That lieth in a hoard;
Which never can do any good
Till it be spread abroad….

This ballad reinforces the idea that the Jews were a landless people, able to be evicted at any time not only from their homes but also from the entire countries in which they resided.

The Jewish historical experience of itinerancy provides important lessons on homelessness. The first is in the profound suffering that homelessness causes. As the protagonist in Michael Chabon’s bestselling novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union damningly puts it, “‘My homeland is in my hat. It’s in my ex-wife’s tote bag'” (368). It was difficult to plan for the future, much less a future home, when Jews could be expelled from the very cities in which they wanted to live. Their lives, by necessity, had to be made portable.

Further, this sense of perpetual homelessness was part of a broader cycle of violence against Jews. Demeaning Jews enabled perpetrators to feel less guilty for their actions and reinforced the notion that Jews were somehow lesser creatures.

In the modern context, these two lessons maintain a high degree of applicability. Those made homeless are traumatized by the experience and may lose the very hope of regaining their footing. Further, injustices may be carried out against the homeless due to the perception that they are somehow lesser human beings. If Jewish history teaches us something about homelessness it is that it can be endured — but with a sense of trauma and uprootedness that endures still longer.

Due to the profound consequence of its absence, Jewish history — as much as its legal system — teaches that housing is a fundamental human need. Housing provides a sense of stability and permanence, whose lack is felt by anyone who experiences it. Communities therefore have an obligation to support those who lack it and treat them with the dignity of which their homelessness might otherwise strip them.

This article was originally published for Social Action Ministries.