Microhistories of (economic) coexistence. Jews and Christians in the town of Sluck in the 17th Century (Maria Cieśla) Seminar

Talk Information

Microhistories of (economic) coexistence. Jews and Christians in the town of Sluck in the 17th Century (Maria Cieśla)

In my talk, I will ask the question about the importance of Jewish economic activity in everyday Christian-Jewish interactions. I am interested in the social dimension of Jewish economic activity in the context of Christian-Jewish relations. The following questions will be asked: To what extent did the economic domination of the Jews cause a deepening of Christian-Jewish relations? Did the Jewish economic activity cause the creation of shared Jewish-Christian non-economic social spaces? What was the significance of anti-Jewish economic stereotypes in everyday Jewish-Christian encounters? I am using microhistory as a research method and focusing on single actors and their activities. I will present a case study of the town of Sluck in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, in the 17th Century. Sluck hosted one of the most important Jewish communities in the early modern Polish–Lithuania Commonwealth.

About the Speaker

Maria Cieśla, Ph.D., studied history at the University of Warsaw. In 2010 she earned her PhD in Jewish History from the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History: Polish Academy of Sciences, and since 2011 she has been working as an assistant professor at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History: Polish Academy of Sciences. She was a postdoc research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in YIVO New York, and at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. Her research interests are focused on the social history of the Jews in the early modern period and Jewish-Christian coexistence.