The article introduces key concepts related to research into the historical notions of privacy, provides a brief historiographical overview, and discusses methodological tools that allow the researcher to examine privacy in primary sources. The second part discusses examples of the Jewish lived experience in the early modern period that were not only shaped by Jewish legal discourses but by the specific living conditions of an ethno-religious minority. The article offers some suggestions as to how privacy could have been understood in early modern Jewish communities and how individuals may have negotiated it in regards to the concepts of home, intimacy, gender, and notions of secrecy.

* This article has been written within the framework of IDUB – Initiative for Excellence – Research University at the University of Łódź.

This article is a study of how the Amsterdam Sephardi congregation organized its educational system starting in the early 1600s. On 25 May 1616, the two existing congregations at the time, Bet Jacob [House of Jacob] and Neve Salom [Dwellings of Peace], founded the “Hebra Kedosa Talmud Torah” [Holy Confraternity Talmud Torah], an institution that was to fund the education of male children and youth. On that day, the lay congregational leaders elected two interim officers to organize the festivities two days later on Shavuot, the Jewish festival traditionally associated with the initiation of children in the study of the Torah. The newly formed school educated male children as young as five years old and consisted of six grades, starting with the teaching of the Hebrew alphabet, and ending with the Talmud. In 1637, the congregation founded the “Ets Haim” [Tree of Life] confraternity to provide stipends to older, deserving, and talented students, so that they remained in school. A third stage took place in 1639 when the three congregations united into one under the name “Kahal Kadosh Talmud Torah,” and the merged school consisted of seven grades. The author argues that this educational system was a blending of attributes from the Jewish medieval tradition and the Iberian Jesuit system which emphasized the character formation of its students that the lay founders of the Sephardi congregation had experienced while they were living as conversos in Spain or Portugal.

Public and Private in Jewish Egodocuments of Amsterdam (ca. 1680–1830)

The present article deals with egodocuments, written by Jews in Amsterdam, in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. It traces the development in this type of sources and assesses how the authors depicted various notions and aspects of privacy in them. The privacy aspects did not only pertain to the individuals, but also to the Jewish community as a whole and its relationship with the local population in Amsterdam as well as the state authorities. These findings have been placed in the historical and political context.

This article challenges the assumptions about what spaces were actually private in the late early modern colonial world. Centered on a case of adultery amongst the Sephardic Jewish community of Curaçao in the late eighteenth century, this piece looks at the entangled lives of enslaved people, Dutch colonial officials, free people of color, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Gossip, private information transition, and the architecture and town planning of Willemstad, Curaçao, are integral to this story of community norms, legal systems, and colonial spaces.

How private were Jewish letters in the early modern period? This article discusses Jewish epistolary culture and notions of privacy by examining an extraordinary cache of Jewish letters that were mostly written on a single day— 22 November 1619—in a single city, Prague, and sent to a single destination, Vienna. The letters never arrived and ended up in the archives where they were preserved for posterity. These letters allow us a glimpse into the lives of ordinary Jews in politically tumultuous times in which privacy and confidentiality could never be taken for granted. This article pays particular attention to gendered communication and privacy. It has been argued that in epistolary culture women are afforded a voice and speak for themselves. The evidence suggests that collaborative forms of writing that involved more than one writer were still common in early seventeenth-century Jewish correspondence, indicating zones of “privileged confidentiality” within larger family networks.

Sociotopography of the Jewish Settlement in Warsaw in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

In the second half of the eighteenth century, there was a rapid influx of Jews to Warsaw, even though at that time the de non tolerandis Iudaeis law was still in force. In 1778, there were over 3,500 Jews in Warsaw, and by 1792 the number increased to 7,000. At that time, they constituted over seven percent of the entire population of the city. Jews lived in different parts of Warsaw, but they began to form enclaves that were centers of both economic and religious life. The activity of the Warsaw Jews was dominated by two fields: trade and crafts. In the 1790s, they accounted for thirty percent of commercial operations. Responding to the needs of the Warsaw market, Jews started producing clothes. About thirty percent of the tailors working in Warsaw were Jewish. Despite numerous restrictions and bans, Jewish self-government institutions began to emerge in Warsaw, and religious life developed. These changes were conducive, if not to legalization, then to the slow acceptance of the Jewish presence in Warsaw. In this way, at the end of the eighteenth century, not only the largest Jewish community in Europe began to emerge in Warsaw, but also an important center of Jewish social, cultural, and religious life.

Reprezentacje Zagłady w kulturze polskiej (1939–2019), red. Sławomir Buryła, Dorota Krawczyńska, Jacek Leociak, t. 1: Problematyka Zagłady w filmie i teatrze, ss. 795; t. 2: Problematyka Zagłady w sztukach wizualnych i popkulturze, ss. 672, Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, Warszawa 2021.

Ewa Koźmińska-Frejlak, Po Zagładzie. Praktyki asymilacyjne ocalałych jako strategie zadomawiania się w Polsce (1944/45–1950), Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, Warszawa 2022, ss. 565.

Agnieszka Witkowska-Krych, Dziecko wobec Zagłady. Instytucjonalna opieka nad sierotami w getcie warszawskim, Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, Warszawa 2022, ss. 528, il.

Tomasz M. Jankowski, Demography of a Shtetl: The Case of Piotrków Trybunalski, Brill, Leiden–Boston 2022, ss. 238 („Studia Judaeoslavica”, Vol. 14).