J.Kalik Jews and Slavs in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Channel: Denis Dorum
Date: 2012-10-31

Open meeting of the Institute of Advanced Studies Research Group
"Cultural Archaeology of Jews and Slavs: Medieval and Early Modern Judeo-Slavic Interaction and Cross Fertilization"

co-sponsored by the 
Department of Russian and East European Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Judith Kalik: "Cultural Archaeology of Jews and Slavs: Medieval and Early Modern Judeo-Slavic Interaction and Cross Fertilization" and name of lecture: "

Jews and Slavs in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth : Focal Points of Interaction" - lecture was given on 20.07.2011

The cultural interaction between Jews and Slavs took place in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the most intensive form and continued for the most prolonged period. The segregation between Jews and Christians preached by the Church and supported by the Jewish halakha was never implemented in Poland-Lithuania to the extent it was practiced in other countries. In spite of this promising background, the evidence of cultural interaction between the Jews and Slavs in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is much less intensive than it might be expected. The reason for this is not a success of the policy of segregation, as it is usually supposed, but the nature of the focal points of this interaction. The problem is that the cultural interaction took the most intensive form on lower, illiterate layers of the society, and left only indirect evidence. I would like to identify three most important focal points of the Jewish-Christian very close, intimate mutual acquaintance and mutual influence: Christian servants dwelling in Jews houses (mainly women: cooks, maids, wet-nurses, and governesses), Jewish rural leaseholders, inn-, tavern-, and shop-keepers living in a narrow microcosm of a village together with the local peasants, and urban Jews converted to Christianity and Christians converted to Judaism for variety of reasons, but mostly on the background of sexual attraction and marriage.