The ghetto was not first a place. It was a doctrine. This dossier traces the charge of collective guilt for the death of Jesus, which the primary texts do not support and the Church itself repudiated in 1965, from the one Gospel verse that carries it into the canon law of perpetual servitude, and then into the gated quarters it built, Venice, Rome, Frankfurt, and the Italian states, across four centuries to emancipation, and marks the twentieth-century rupture that borrowed the word for a different thing entirely.