The formal enactment of Ghetto as legal dwelling place of the Jews were abolished towards the middle of the 19th century in most countries but Jews themselves opposed. They knew that demolishing the Ghetto wall meant that they were wiping out a separate community life.

But just as the Ghetto arose before the legal decree forced them into separate areas it also persisted after these decrees had been annulled. The formal abolition of the Ghetto and citizenship did to the Jews what the Emancipation Proclamation did for the Afro-Americans. Slavery was more than a legal relationship and the Ghetto was more than a statute. It was an institution and when the real walls were pulled down there existed the invisible wall.

Wirth argues that even in cities with a handful Jews the ecological factor would operate—they would be drawn together and become an organized community. Wirth quotes Israel Cohen on Jewish immigrants:
To a large extent the modern Ghetto is necessitated by the precepts and practices of orthodox Judaism, by the need of dwelling within easy reach of the synagogue, the schoolroom, and the ritual bath, the kosher butcher shop and the kosher diary. But even for those who are indifferent to religious observances and ritual practices, residence in the Ghetto is necessitated by social and economic circumstances. Ignorance of the language of the new country, of its labour conditions, and of its general habits and ways of thought, as well as the natural timidity of a fugitive from a land of persecution, compels the immigrant Jew to settle in the colony of his co-religionists. Among them he is perfectly at home; he finds the path of employment comparatively smooth, and if his efforts to attain it be delayed, he is helped in the interval by charity from a dozen hands (from Jewish Life in Modern Times).